A senior Labor minister has accused the Coalition of racking up a \u201chalf a trillion dollar\u201d budget black hole but was unable to explain how she had arrived at the figure.<\/p>\n
NDIS Minister Jenny McAllister claimed the opposition had made \u201clike half a trillion dollars of unfunded promises\u201d that would \u201cblow a hole in the budget\u201d.<\/p>\n
But when questioned by Sky News about how the government calculated the figure, Ms McAllister conceded she did not know.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Coalition needs to make a decision about how they approach questions of tax and reform generally,\u201d Ms McAllister said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the last few months, they’ve essentially created like half a trillion dollars of unfunded promises that would blow a hole in the budget.<\/p>\n
\u201cAngus Taylor has not explained how he will pay for those expenditure items that he has outlined.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, when pressed to explain how she had arrived at the $500 billion figure, Ms McAllister admitted she could not explain the calculation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not have each of those in front of me,\u201d she said, before going on to say the details were made available by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.<\/p>\n
Mr Chalmers has not released documents explaining the figure, but The Sunday Telegraph reported government modelling claimed the commitments would cost $544.4 billion over nine years.<\/p>\n
The modelling claimed that tax indexation would cost $212 billion over nine years, reversing CGT and negative gearing would cost $43.1 billion and defence promises would cost $93.5 billion.<\/p>\n
There was also a $18 billion price tag on superannuation concessions and a $30 billion commitment to the inland rail.<\/p>\n
Ms McAllister said the half a trillion-dollar figure was comprised of the plan to index tax brackets<\/a>, increase defence spending<\/a> and some other changes around super.<\/p>\n The Coalition has promised to index tax brackets at an estimated budget cost of $22.5 billion over four years, and has also pledged to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP.<\/p>\n The proposed tax plan, announced by Opposition Leader Angus Taylor in his budget reply speech, would index income tax brackets to inflation in a bid to end bracket creep.<\/p>\n Under the proposal, the bottom two tax brackets would be indexed from 2028-29, with the top two following from 2031-32, at an estimated cost of $22.5 billion.<\/p>\n Labor has disputed the costing, saying it would cost more like $35 billion over four years, $12.5 billion more than the Coalition\u2019s estimate.<\/p>\n The Coalition has indicated it would help fund the plan by cutting government spending in some areas, potentially including health and education.<\/p>\n Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has said the Coalition\u2019s policy would be funded through savings from corporate welfare, housing and net zero bureaucracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A senior Labor minister has accused the Coalition of racking up a \u201chalf a trillion dollar\u201d budget black…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[16169,64,8931,63,36974,99,27305,164,98748,1788,343702],"class_list":["post-706460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-albanese-government","tag-au","tag-auspol","tag-australia","tag-australian-politics","tag-business","tag-coalition","tag-economy","tag-jenny-mcallister","tag-labor","tag-ndis-minister"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}