Gerald Nash (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Earlier today, Fergus Finlay remarked that this budget can be compared to a bag of dolly mixtures, and I do not think he was referring to the introduction of the sugar tax. The impression has been given quite deliberately that there is, as Senator Burke said, a little bit of something for everyone in this package. However, when the Government tries to do something small for everyone to keep the bulk of people mollified, it ends up doing little for anyone. Sadly, just like the Government, this budget lacks a theme, a vision and any real ambition for our country.

Its measures are designed to keep Fine Gael in government and Fianna Fáil quiet. I am sure the Chairman will disagree with me, but Fianna Fáil must be wondering why it is bothering to keep the Government in office because it is hard to detect Fianna Fáil's fingerprints on this document. I suspect that at Fianna Fáil's Ard-Fheis this week its party leader, Deputy Micheál Martin, will have questions to answer from the Fianna Fáil faithful about its continued support for this Administration. As for the Independent Alliance, it is really difficult to know what it stands for now. I was unconvinced about it from the start, and into the second budget of this Administration, I am even more convinced that there is no point whatsoever to the Independent Alliance. How can anyone take it seriously? I cannot detect a single measure in the budget from the Independent Alliance. There is nothing whatsoever.

It was alluded to earlier that politics is about choices. It absolutely is. The annual budget process gives the Government of the day the opportunity to put a philosophical, political and economic shape on its message. After what could be described as a lost decade in terms of investment in our infrastructure and public services, my party was clear in the past two budgets that now, when limited resources are available, is not the time for tax cuts which are for most working people throughout the country not worth the price of a cup of coffee. However, the Government and Fianna Fáil chose to ignore that message and not to accept that argument, which is fair enough because in politics we make choices and decisions.

However, it worries me for the future when I see that the approximately €400 million to be used for the purpose of income tax and USC cuts, small and all as they are for low and middle income workers, is to be directly paid for by increasing the levy on commercial property transactions. Families throughout the country are still paying the price for the destruction of a tax-cutting economic model that was disproportionately built on what property transactions could raise during the 2000s. It has to be asked whether this Government and Fianna Fáil learned anything at all from the Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern eras.We cannot continue to depend on the expectation that we will have high levels of commercial property activity and to apply stamp duty levies and such to that to fund tax cuts and spending rises over the next few years. This is dangerous short-term thinking and ultimately those sums will not add up. To improve the standard of living of people who pay for everything, we can take a closer look at seriously taxing assets as is done in other mature, developed democracies, but this Government does not seem to have the courage to take that on. Most wealth, as the Minister of State knows, is held in assets. It is not generated from work or anything else. That is why I am concerned about how we identify resources for tax cuts and so on in very narrow policy areas. Most wealth is held in assets and is concentrated in the hands of relatively few individuals and organisations. I am not averse to cutting taxes for working people but I am averse to a system that refuses to learn the lessons of the recent past and that seems to think we can continue to fund tax cuts and improvements to public services through taxes on what is essentially property speculation.

While we are on the subject of tax cuts, those who depend on the State for their income will be angered to see that the €5 increase being provided to pensioners, carers, jobseekers and others receiving social welfare payments, which was promised by the Government today, actually amounts to as little as an average of €3.85 per week in 2018 because the introduction of those increases is only taking place towards the end of March. It will be 12 weeks into next year before pensioners, carers, jobseekers and people on disability payments will get that increase but, averaged out over the year, it will really mean an increase of €3.85 per week and not €5. Tax cuts will take effect in early January, which is fair enough if one agrees that is the approach which should be taken, but pensioners will have to wait until 26 March to see their benefits increase. It beggars belief. I think this is very unfair and it is also unreasonable and unfair to see a situation where we will only have a continuation of the 85% restoration of the Christmas bonus and that the Minister has decided not to continue on that trajectory of increasing the Christmas bonus as we have done as soon as resources became available in recent years. It was 25% in the first instance, then 75%, and 85% this year. I think we would all have preferred to see a full restoration of the Christmas bonus to help families through that difficult Christmas period, particularly for those who depend on the State for their income.

It is clear from this budget that Sláintecare, the signature and arguably only achievement of the do-nothing Dáil, has been effectively strangled at birth by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. There is little available in the budget today to fund the implementation, in any real meaningful way, of the plan, at least to a point where it would represent real progress. Instead we will, for example, spend €55 million a year on outsourcing the resolution of our hospital waiting lists to the private sector. We are not making any real, meaningful attempt to implement what was a set of cross-party solutions designed to resolve a massive social challenge in this country, funding the operation of a fully-resourced public health service.