Tuesday, 10 May 2022

Budget 2022–23

Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (14:40): Over the next few weeks Victorians are going to hear the phrase ‘record investment’ until their ears bleed. Record investment is the government’s way of selling rising costs as a good thing. Every time you hear that phrase remember that record investment really means record costs, and record costs mean record debt and record tax. In the last two years the government has maxed out the credit cards and put hundreds of thousands of Victorians out of work. We have big new government debt and have destroyed the means of paying for it. Ongoing COVID isolation requirements and work mandates continue to slow our recovery.

The Treasurer claims we will be in surplus within four years despite massive spending increases. This will only be possible if the government plans huge tax increases or uses runaway inflation to swallow the debt. This prediction of surplus comes from the same government that does not realise that budget deficits running the money printer cause inflation. Victorians should expect the weight of the government to become unbearable over the next four years. The state tax take is set to rise almost 30 per cent from the prepandemic level.

Now, some will say, ‘It’s only money’, but it is not only money. The economy is a manifestation of all the individual striving and choices and dreams in our society. When you spend years working and saving and it gets wiped out, then it is not ‘only money’. To those who have lost big during the pandemic: you are never going to get those years back, and there is only more pain to come. That is the real record of this budget and of this government.