Dr WEBSTER (Mallee) (15:41): With the greatest respect to my colleague the member for Gippsland, I think the text of this motion might be a little too kind to the Albanese Labor government. Labor's budget is worse than broken promises and toxic taxes. It exposes the 25 May election as a hoax, a sham. Small businesses and farmers are the primary victims of Labor's election hoax. You see, since federation, the Nationals and Liberals have been the natural parties of government in coalition. That is a statistical fact. The Prime Minister knows it because he and his Labor colleagues covet the mantle of Labor being the natural party of government. Labor, on the other hand, are a fraud on the Australian people, taking a policy platform to the May 2025 election that had nothing to do with the real policy platform of socialism that we, small businesses and farmers have seen in the May budget.

Labor's shock budget hits capital gains, negative gearing and trusts in ways they promised fervently before the election they would not do. I think it was 50 times. How many times do you need to be told, media? Labor have done more than rewrite the electoral playbook—they have thrown it out, burnt it on a pyre of all their other broken promises. Labor went to an election with a policy platform that was a complete fabrication, and small-business owners, farmers, self-funded retirees and young Australians are feeling the brunt.

Let me focus on regional Australians. Take, for instance, Rewiring the Nation. We saw the factual gymnastics before the budget that climate related spending would reduce, yet spending in net zero continues at speed in the budget papers and the cost of transmission line projects keeps going up and up. Consequently, so will every Australian's power bill—everybody in this chamber, everybody across Australia. This is one big reason communities like Mallee don't want transmission lines, yet Labor would prefer foisting transmission lines and associated energy eyesores in coalition electorates rather than their own. I know that may shock this side of the House, but it just appears to be the facts. The recent renewable energy zone—so-called—issued by the Victorian Labor government, recently fastidiously went out of its way to exclude the federal electorates of Bendigo and Ballarat. I wonder why that would be! It is plain as the nose on your face—another sham. Meanwhile, they're ripping the funding for Mallee communities out of the budget papers. It is shameful. But the other big reasons these projects are blowing out, these 'big builds', as they're called in Victoria, is Labor's cosy relationship with the CFMEU. Labor's plan to be the natural party of government is because they would be the only form of government possible, a bit like China—eliminate all the competition, tell fairytales at elections and in budgets, portray your opponents as holding positions they actually don't and blabber nonsense in the House in front of TV cameras on social media and hoodwink the electorate. It's called gaslighting the good people of Australia.

In Prime Minister Albanese's natural-party-of-government dystopia, unions have their fingers in all the pies. Nothing progresses without their say so and a heavy amount of government subsidies to boot. Small businesses will go by the wayside because the union movement perceives small businesses as enemies—they won't unionise a small-business workforce. It's much easier to crush small businesses and have big, unionised business take its place and get a sweetheart union deal that supports the Labor Party all the way to the bank. Sorry, I mean all the way to the election.

Take the construction code, for instance, making it hard for aspiring homeowners and small businesses alike to establish and grow. The construction code now runs to 2,000 pages. We on this side of the house have pledged to slash it back to 200 pages. That is called cutting red tape. Consider Labor's $77 billion tax grab, which they claim in large part is to help young people buy a house. What a load of terminological inexactitude.

‍