Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The tax laws amendments were fundamentally crafted and conceived by the previous coalition government, and for those reasons I will be supporting all six schedules. The first three are significant improvements for the business community, and the remaining three are also modifications to the tax laws, which we support.

Of course the key event overnight, the release of the first Rudd government budget, is of great concern to those very businesses that are affected by this legislation, the Tax Laws Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008. They will be looking at legislation like this to see whether there really is any follow-on at all, any follow-up, any commitment and any heart for small business. For those who read the fine print, there is very, very little in it for the small business community. That is a surprise, because right now of course we are facing the abyss of unemployment, interest rates and inflation.

You only have to go back about 12 months to remember those fateful statements by Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd that the economy was on autopilot, that we were riding on the back of a mineral boom, that it was so easy to run an economy like Australia’s. Of course, now they have realised that it is not. The narrative that we are hearing at the moment about this economy being in diabolical stress and under crisis from the threat of inflation is just a softening up, with the reality being that there will be significant job losses faced in Australia over the next 12 months.

Let’s be honest about working families. There is nothing Robin Hood about losing a job, certainly not if we are talking 65,000 or 130,000 Australians. If you drill it down to a community like Redlands, you are looking at a thousand people who are in work at the moment being out of work by this time next year under this government’s watch. Last night was the first opportunity for a clear articulation of exactly what this government intends to do about it.

We have had a clear opportunity over the last three or four weeks of budget leaks—this new approach with federal budgets where you leak components of it to assess media reaction without actually providing any opportunity for a close, hard look at the detail. So, by the time we got to the budget last night, there was actually nothing left after we took away these authorised leaks.

A new government’s first budget is always that hallmark moment where you say, ‘Where are they heading?’ You take away the spin and you say, ‘What are they actually doing with the money? Is it an anti-inflationary budget? Is it cutting government spending?’ No, far from it. It was a spending budget, raising government spending by around $3 billion. You would not do that if your heart were in fighting inflation. Any of those cuts that were described last night have simply been matched and exceeded by further Labor spending. That is not the way to fight inflation at all.

The second point to look at is: exactly who were the losers? There is almost a sense that if you are not mates with the government then you lost out last night. The carers who dared stand up for their one-off payment still have not got the security of that being an ongoing payment. It is quite easy to say, ‘We are looking at revisiting and revising carer payments,’ but there is nothing to stop you putting it in those forward estimates. But of course it has not been done. It was a begrudging single payment to those that need it most: the carers.

You do not have to look too far to see that the veteran community got almost nothing out of last night, almost as punishment for not queuing up and revering the new Commonwealth government. Seniors have very little to show for it. And what about those genuinely living with disabilities? The Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services, who has just left the chamber, has almost nothing to show for it in the form of improved payments for a group that needs it most.

We appreciate that we have a Prime Minister who takes months and months—even years—to come up with a new idea. Looking at last night’s budget, can I find even a single idea that belongs to Kevin Rudd? I saw plenty of copy from the coalition government. Tax cuts were announced because the government committed to them. But those tax cuts delivered last night, courtesy of the hard work of former Treasurer, Peter Costello, were promised nearly 12 months ago. If the economy has shifted so much, where was the will from this new government to say: ‘If we are serious about fighting inflation we will pay some of those tax cuts into superannuation. We will actually do something genuine with that $30 billion to fight inflation’? But there was no heart, no courage; they were just meeting that obligation, which of course we support, being our own tax cuts.

Let’s go through the rest of the budget. Find for me in that budget one idea that we can sheet home as being Kevin Rudd’s idea. I saw a few Kim Beazley ideas. I saw plenty of coalition copy. But did we have a single idea from this person, our Prime Minister, in the budget last night? I saw a budget of almost nothing. I felt that you could just pop the numbers in and pop the numbers out. It could have been any government in the world releasing a budget in a surplus environment. I would like to see one idea from an individual who has predominantly feasted on the media around a 2020 Summit. He has had 12 months in opposition to get his ideas together, 12 years in opposition as a party to come up with some ideas, and what do we have? We have articulated root and branch tax reform. That was thought bubble No. 521. It got a headline for him. What is he talking about—root and branch tax reform?

We are going to have the future tax system reporting back to the government over the next 18 months to two years. Is this a government with vision? Where are the ideas on tax reform? Where was the tax policy at the last election? We are talking about a vacant approach to policy setting relying on consensus driven summiteering. The state governments will surely follow up with their own summits and will stack those seats at the summits and just listen to the ideas that we may choose to implement. This is a government without any idea at all on tax. To simply say, ‘We are matching what you are doing and we might add a dollar here or there’ is policy vacancy at its worst. We have had six months to deliver a budget that actually set a new direction for Australia. And all we have heard is the Robin Hood, the tough decision of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

For those 48,000 families involved, my recollection was that the baby bonus was effectively an incentive, not a welfare payment. Aren’t we confusing the two here? It was an incentive that we saw in a falling fertility rate to increase population. And Australia appears to be one of the few countries that can actually report a turnaround and an increase in fertility rates. The baby bonus was part of that suite. It did not act in isolation and I do not say that it had complete causation, but the baby bonus was an important part.

There are a lot of policies here that I think have been built more on ideology than on evidence. You saw the challenges yesterday. Lay down the evidence for your tax policy. Lay down your evidence for the means testing. There simply has been none laid out whatsoever. So that hope that we might be moving away from politics by ideology—the accusation laid upon this government when they took office late last year—is far from being played out, and the suspicion remains distinctly that this was a budget to punish those who had not supported the government.

This is a country obviously awash with money and it takes a certain brand of economic management to do it effectively. I am not saying that the textbooks on economics can tell us exactly how to manage a booming economy with all the threats of inflation. Of course it is a serious problem that requires addressing. But this situation is predominantly being politicised by a government desperate to sheet home any of the bad news to the decisions made years and years ago. I have always challenged that side of the House to say that from today they take responsibility for the outcomes of the Australian economy. They are still yet to do it. Perhaps it is a sign of an immature government, perhaps a sign of a government that simply runs on announcements with very little follow-up and very little detail.

We may talk about some of the groups affected by these tax laws amendments to get a picture of that, be they the apprentices or those running small businesses. They will feel the first pinch that we are already seeing in the southern states of the loss of jobs and the loss of strength in the economy. It will lead directly to the need for increased welfare and to the support required for Work for the Dole, which has also been diluted after last night’s budget.

History will recall the horrible reality that we have a new government with an opportunity to take the tough decisions, but it did not. Let us try to work out in a multiple-choice scenario whether we have (a) a government here prepared to take tough and unpopular decisions that are right for the long term or (b) the announcement effect of constant symbolism and tokenism and fiddling around the edges when in fact they have a wonderful mandate with their own state governments to make significant reform. I am not talking about just wiping away this year’s surplus by transferring it to universities. I would support many of these payments and seeing infrastructure issues being addressed particularly in bottleneck areas of the economy. But last night was an opportunity for the really big decisions that simply never came.

The horrible reality is that Australia is an economy that has weathered some extraordinary external stresses and has an internal stress at the moment and a government that is refusing to take responsibility for it. It is refusing to take responsibility on petrol prices. How many times do we have to hear about FuelWatch and the cop on the beat as we watch the fuel prices rise? Of course I do not hold the government responsible for crude oil prices and global fuel prices, but I hold them responsible for promising ordinary Australians that they would do something about it. If they know they have no control over it, why do they engage in that vacuous promise-making about making it easier for working families when the only formula they have is putting them out of work? How is that the Robin Hood philosophy in the end? When the three key markers of government success—inflation, unemployment and interest rates—are judged two years from now, you want to be very certain, members on the other side of this chamber, that you are in front on the ledger on at least two of those three markers. Right now two of them are slipping and, with the greatest respect, you appear to have no control over them whatsoever.

I do not like to make the analogy of a little bloke sitting in the cockpit of the 747 whose feet cannot touch the ground and with a sea of dials in front of him. The plane is on cruise control at the moment but there is that sense that the government do not know what touching any of those buttons or knobs will do and they are just hoping that the plane is going to stay level. There is that fearful moment when you think with your first budget that you have to touch a control and work out what happens and you realise that running an economy is far more difficult than you ever realised from the opposition benches.

Right down in Redlands where the tax laws amendments will be biting home, there will be a sense of sadness that investing in our schools has gone, that community water grants have effectively gone, that some of the really important programs that were delivering infrastructure where it is most needed have gone. The criticism already from my area is that in that wonderful opportunity to have an inspiring budget it really was visionless. Work for the Dole has been semidismantled. There is almost a sense that the government is doing as much as they can without getting any opprobrium from what is at the moment predominantly a fawning and sycophantic media, that it is effectively a case of: go ahead, do whatever you want while it is washing over us at the moment. You have free rein so, for something different, why not try something visionary and long term. You have got effectively no scrutiny at the moment. It is nothing less than fawning media approbation.

So why don’t you go right ahead and try something truly daring like making a long-term decision rather than just talking about these nebulous funds that are going to be delivering all the key infrastructure in the future. What have we got for the next 12 months? You have got a chance right now to plan for tomorrow. We have got feasibility and planning in the tens of millions. You had six months and every possible group to report back to you—and we have talked about the advisory groups and committees—but it almost seems that it has come to nothing. You had months to pull this together and years in opposition to pull together those in think tanks that were going to give you direction. But I truly have the sense of a Prime Minister devoid of any ideas whatsoever. It all sounds great on Sunrise, but is there one thing in that budget that could truly be laid on the table and you could say, ‘This is Kevin Rudd’s plan for the future’? There is more a sense of: how do I distribute the surplus without making things any worse for me than they are already?

The objective of cooling the economy obviously requires an anti-inflationary approach. But of all the reforms we have read about, you are taking with one hand and giving with the other. If you are going to introduce a ready-to-drink tax, if you are going to have excise tax for trucks and remove that support for those who are actually moving food around this country, and if you are going to introduce a luxury car tax, of course you will be pushing up prices. Some of the internal analysis shows that it could increase CPI by between 0.3 and 0.4 per cent. So why are you engaging in taxation measures that are making things more expensive in the phase where you are actually trying not to do that at all?

We can already see some of this Labor labour ideology coming through, attacking those who take responsibility for their own health insurance. Make no mistake here, people of all income levels pay for private health insurance for their own reasons. The great success of the coalition government was that they managed this blend of private and state funded service provision in health, education and child care. By moving the Medicare surcharge levy to $150,000, it is effectively saying, ‘We are a government that does not want to pay the 30 per cent rebate anymore but we lack the courage to remove it. We are a government that want to reward those who do not plan for their own health in the future and support the private health system and we are not going to support those who choose to take the burden off the public hospital system.’ I know that that is deeply ingrained Labor ideology that you have never managed to have the courage to articulate, but after writing a letter of comfort to the industry, you will simply achieve it by stealth.

What we really wanted in this budget was fiscal restraint—but you increased government spending. We wanted national saving—but all we heard about were nebulous funds. We wanted infrastructure bottlenecks addressed—but there was not that long-term commitment to anything except feasibility and planning. Most importantly of all, I think ordinary Australians, everyday Australians, wanted increased participation in the workforce. It is a simple request, that we get more Australians involved and engaged and fewer of them relying on state funded welfare. Well, we—the bad news is—are heading in exactly the reverse direction.

The symbolism we have seen trotted out over the apology for Indigenous affairs and the weak-hearted support for the intervention was horribly revealed last night when we saw a tiny mention—just three or four lines—for Indigenous Australia. Those commitments last night, for between $50 million and $60 million per year for the next four years, were chickenfeed. I can respect that there is still a review going on of the intervention and I can understand that those findings are yet to come back. But let’s be honest about the intervention. It is the first step in 35 years to set out positive social norms and reinforce them through a carrot-and-stick approach, and it would not have been that hard over the last six months to have had some supporting legislation encouraging states to join the intervention and to be putting the support where it is most required. We are not talking about building more schools or more homes. What we are talking about is stopping child abuse. That was the essence of the intervention, but there was no mention of that last night. I challenge the minister to explain whether she truly cares about the intervention or whether this is something that gets rolled out because it was an election commitment you had to make so that you got into government, and warmth in the embrace of this intervention is completely lacking.

This intervention will roll out over 12 months. It will be reviewed. Those who have had their health checks will get their follow-up. But the intervention was so much more than that. The intervention was reordering community social norms so that families could come together and say: ‘We regard attending school as something important. Looking after your home through tenancy agreements is something that should be supported. Having your kids checked out at a health centre is something that should be common, ordinary practice. Possession of pornographic DVDs in communities where there is one television on the verandah and the whole community gathers around is probably not going to be a good thing where child abuse is reported as endemic.’ That is just common sense for you and me in a community where we long ago understood ratings and classifications, but in Indigenous communities things work differently. So the intervention said, ‘For the moment, let’s have no pornographic DVDs, let’s not broadcast R18+ pornography into Indigenous communities and give them a chance to regather, reorder the positive social norms and have a hope that, for those who do not agree with those norms, their income could well be managed because, for the first time ever, there has been a tiny bit of a stick together with the carrot.’ But there is nothing coming from that side of the House; there is just a watch and wait. And that signal does percolate down to those working on the ground, to the public health officials and bureaucrats, that this is what we call a soft-pedalling government on the Indigenous intervention. The classic example was not only the legislation to which I just referred but your decision to extend CDEP, unreformed, for another 12 months. Here was the one opportunity to turn sit-down money into genuine work, and it was lost through the simple signal of extending CDEP for 12 months.

To conclude my remarks on this legislation, the businesses that will be affected by it will be seriously thinking in the next six months about whether they can employ more people. Unemployment has increased from 4.0 per cent earlier this year to 4.2 per cent. Much of that I put down to the collapse in small business confidence that occurred over the Christmas holidays. It is no coincidence that there was a change of government, but now we have unemployment at 4.2 per cent and rising and a government that is just starting to make those first little noises about: ‘We will have loss of jobs but a whole lot more if we don’t control inflation.’ Well, of course we have to control inflation, but there is no excuse for you on the other side of the chamber to be turning working families into non-working families. There is no excuse for cutting back hours for the very aspirational Australians who over the last 10 years have benefited from a strong economy. You have a responsibility here to look after those who need it most, and part of that is a job. As my colleague the member for O’Connor on this side of the chamber has so frequently said, it is one thing to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but you do not want to start paying the poor in unemployment benefits. Is that your plan? Because business will be left with that simple reality, that with an unfriendly government and with no chance to raise productivity and workforce participation, there may be no other future for Australian business. (Time expired)

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