Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech painted a stark picture of the country’s direction under the Albanese government.
Manufacturing insolvencies, bulk-billing rates, health spending and inflation were some of the issues Mr Dutton used to attack Labor’s record and spruik his own from when he was last in government as a minister.
But how closely did he stick to the facts? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
Manufacturing insolvencies
Mr Dutton lashed the government’s energy policies, attempting to tie them to an uptick in manufacturing insolvencies since Labor was elected.
“If energy is not affordable or reliable, more manufacturers will shut up shop or move offshore. That’s why there’s been a threefold increase in the number of manufacturers who have closed their doors over the last two years,” he said.
It’s a similar claim to one made by Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley earlier this year — which Fact Check found was not the full story.
At the time, insolvency figures released by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission showed there was indeed a threefold increase in the number of manufacturing insolvencies recorded in the first six months of 2023-24 compared to the same period in 2021-22, rising from 85 to 243.
Since Ms Ley made her claim, new data has been released. Manufacturing insolvencies have risen to 456 as of April 28 this year, which is around three times greater than the figure of 151 recorded in the 10 months to April in 2021.
But in highlighting these figures, Ms Ley and Mr Dutton failed to mention the effect of the pandemic and some of their own party’s policies.
Experts told Fact Check that much of the recent increase was due to the ending of pandemic-related measures that were helping businesses remain open, including JobKeeper payments and temporary insolvency protections.
These had helped push the number of manufacturing insolvencies down to a decade low in the financial years 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Since then, the Australian Taxation Office has embarked on a large-scale operation to collect unpaid taxes. Meanwhile, interest rates have also risen from pandemic-era lows, increasing business borrowing costs.
Experts said the insolvency figures cited by Ms Ley should not be viewed in isolation, noting several other measures that could be used to gauge the health of the sector.
At the end of 2022-23 there were 90,174 operating manufacturing businesses in Australia, up from 89,529 a year earlier, for example. Meanwhile, capital expenditure in the industry increased by 18.3 per cent over the year to December 2023.
On matters medical
Suggesting that “people’s health and wellbeing are suffering” under a cost-of-living crisis, Mr Dutton was also keen to contrast Labor’s record on health with his own as health minister, a role he held briefly between September 2013 and December 2014.
When it came to free GP visits, for example, Mr Dutton claimed he had “inherited a bulk-billing rate of 73 percent and increased it to 84 per cent”.
“When we left government, bulk-billing was 88.5 per cent,” Mr Dutton went on. “What Labor tried to hide in its budget is that bulk billing has decreased to 77 per cent — an 11 per cent drop.”
Not all of his figures quite stack up, however.
According to statistics published by the Department of Health and Aged Care, when Mr Dutton became health minister the rate of GP attendances bulk-billed over the previous 12 months was 82.5 per cent, not 73 per cent as he claimed.
That means the bulk-billing rate rose 1.5 percentage points, to 84 per cent, during his time in the role — far from the 11 percentage point increase he took credit for.
Still, Mr Dutton’s more recent numbers check out.
The latest data, released last week, shows that in the year to March 2024, 77.3 per cent of GP attendances were bulk-billed compared with 88.5 per cent when Labor was elected in May 2022.
Importantly, as experts have previously explained to Fact Check, the bulk-billing rate refers to the number of services bulk-billed rather than the number of people who received them.
Medicare statistics on the proportion of people who are bulk-billed for GP visits (“always”, “usually”, “sometimes” or “never”) support Mr Dutton’s broader point that the practice has decreased under Labor.
The data shows that in the year ending soon after Labor was elected, 2021-22, 65.8 per cent of people visiting the GP were always bulk-billed. A year later, that rate had fallen by 14.1 percentage points, to 51.7 per cent.
The proportion of patients never bulk-billed, meanwhile, rose by 6.3 percentage points, from 4.2 per cent to 10.5 per cent.
During Mr Dutton’s time as health minister, the proportion of people always bulk-billed remained more stable, increasing from 61.1 per cent in 2012-13 to 62.4 per cent in 2013-14, and then to 63.7 per cent in 2014-15.
While the Albanese government has tripled incentives for doctors to bulk-bill pensioners and concession card holders, GPs have called for more funding.
During his speech, Mr Dutton also spruiked his record on hospital funding, stating: “As a health minister, I increased hospital funding year-on-year.”
Indeed, data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, adjusted for inflation and population growth, shows that recurrent funding on public hospitals increased during Mr Dutton’s 15 month stint in the health portfolio.
In 2012-13, the last full year before the Coalition was elected, the federal government spent $846 per person on public hospitals. That figure increased to $852.3 in 2013-14 and to $883.3 in 2014-15.
In percentage terms, this equates to a 0.7 per cent increase from 2012-13 to 2013-14, and a 3.6 per cent increase the following year.
Experts previously told Fact Check that health funding typically increases year on year, with data showing just eight decreases in hospital funding during the nearly three decades before the Coalition came to power.
Notably, the spending figures don’t capture the full picture of Mr Dutton’s time as health minister, which included the Coalition’s plans to introduce a $7 co-payment for GP visits and cut the Medicare rebate for shorter visits by $20.
Both measures were ultimately scrapped, though this “barnacle clearing” occurred in the final weeks of Mr Dutton’s time in the portfolio and under his successor, Sussan Ley.
As for hospital funding, the Coalition’s 2014-15 budget, handed down by then-prime minister Tony Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey, represented a drop compared with projected funding under the previous Labor government.
Indeed, the budget papers stated that Commonwealth funding for hospitals had “reduced the incentive for States to be more efficient and accountable for their spending and delivery of services” and deemed such funding “unaffordable”.
“This Budget reduces growth in Commonwealth funding of these sectors over the medium-term, generating momentum for longer-term reforms to be considered,” the budget said.
Inflation here and elsewhere
Mr Dutton attacked the government over the cost of living, drawing unfavourable comparisons between Australia and other nations.
“On comparative inflation, Australia is worse than the US, Singapore, Germany, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, South Korea, Canada, France, and the entire Euro area,” he said.
Comparative data on inflation is published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental body whose 38 members are often used as a proxy for “developed countries”.
Its quarterly data for March 2024 shows Australia’s headline inflation rate, at 3.6 per cent over the preceding 12 months, is indeed above that of the OECD economies Mr Dutton mentioned.
(Singapore is not an OECD country and its data was not available from the organisation).
Another way to look at rising consumer prices is core inflation, a measure that removes food and energy price increases from the equation and one that Mr Dutton and Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor have previously used to criticise Labor.
According to the OECD, Australia’s core inflation, at 3.8 per cent, is above the rates recorded by most of the countries Mr Dutton mentioned, but below the USA’s.
And then there are other European countries that Mr Dutton did not mention, such as Sweden, Norway and Austria, which all fared worse than Australia on both measures.
Also absent from the comparison was the United Kingdom, which recorded higher headline and core inflation than Australia.
(The UK is a member of the OECD and the G7, which Mr Taylor has compared Australia with in the past.)
While Australia sits well below the OECD average, this figure is inflated by the inclusion of Türkiye, with runaway headline inflation of 66.8 per cent.
Looking at median values, the 37 other countries included in the data recorded lower headline inflation than Australia (3.1 per cent) but higher core inflation (4.1 per cent).
Has the government broken its promise on power bills?
Mr Dutton also referred to Labor’s oft-repeated pre-election pledge to reduce power bills.
“Electricity bills haven’t gone down by $275 as was pledged on 97 occasions — they’ve skyrocketed,” he said, referring to this as a broken promise.
Before the election, Labor did make a promise to cut power pills for households by $275. However, Mr Dutton failed to mention that Labor also gave itself a deadline of 2025, meaning the pledge cannot be called broken yet.
Fact Check has deemed the promise to be stalled, due to a forecast spike in energy prices, since the 2022-23 budget.
The latest report from the ACCC’s inquiry into the energy market shows the average annual cost to residential consumers was $1,434 in 2020-21, the most recent year for which data was available when Labor’s modelling was prepared.
Expressed in 2020-21 dollars, the annual cost fell to $1,313 in 2021-22 before rising to $1,328 in 2022-23.
In other words, there has been a net decrease of $106 since 2020-21, with an increase of $15 since Labor came to office in May 2022.
In the latest budget, Labor announced a $300 energy bill rebate for every household and $325 for small businesses for the 2024-25 financial year, though the impact of these measures will not show up in the data for some time.
Principal researchers: Matt Martino and Ellen McCutchan