Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The problem with the Turnbull government's plan to increase the GST is that it will push up the price of everything. If the Liberals increase the GST to 15 per cent, that will put even more pressure on households already finding it hard to make ends meet. That is why Labor will fight any attempts to increase the GST and to expand it to cover health, education, childcare fees and fresh food. Under the Liberals' plan for the increase to the GST, every single Australian would pay more. For families already struggling to keep their heads above water, that means their childcare fees, school fees, doctors' fees, electricity bills, gas bills, groceries and all other bills—which are already hard to pay—will go up. It will cost you more every time you go to the supermarket. It will cost you more every time you visit the doctor. It will cost you more every time your kids need new schoolbooks and uniforms, and every time the bill for school fees comes in.

Households are already finding it hard to make ends meet. Consumer group Choice has published research on the households who are doing it particularly tough. Renters and families with kids are included in the people who are feeling the squeeze. More than a third of the families in my electorate of Griffith have kids under 15, and nearly half the homes in my electorate are rentals. A GST on rent, child care, school fees and food, along with every other bill, will make it even harder for people to make ends meet.

Older Australians are under pressure too. With this government's attacks on retirement incomes—cutting the low-income superannuation contribution, freezing superannuation contributions, trying to cut the indexation of the pension and cutting the part pension by agreement with the Greens party—it is pretty clear that people over 50 should be very concerned about a tax increase that would increase the price of everything. A recent survey from the FiftyUp Club suggested nearly two-thirds of over-50s suffer stress in paying household bills.

Mr McCormack interjecting—

I care about the over-50s, Parliamentary Secretary—perhaps you ought to as well. Upping the GST would add to the stress that the over-50s already suffer. The GST is a regressive tax. That means raising it, or expanding it to cover things like food, education and health care, will hurt the families who can least afford it.

People on low and middle incomes will lose out with a higher or broader GST, compared with people on high incomes. The Australian Council of Social Service has released modelling indicating that, if the GST were increased to pay for personal income tax cuts, that would leave 64 per cent of people worse off. But people in the highest income households would actually be better off.

What would Menzies think? Here is a government that is from a party that used to care about the middle class. But this idea of upping the GST to make middle-class households pay more to fund tax cuts for the rich certainly would not have found favour with the party that Menzies founded, and it is certainly not something that ought to be supported in this parliament now. Asking middle-class households to pay for tax cuts for others is unjust. It fails the fairness test.

Putting a handbrake on spending fails the economic management test, too. Australia's small businesses, which create nearly half of all private sector jobs, rely on people spending money. Putting up prices at a time when wages growth is so slow that it is at record lows—the lowest wages growth we have had in this country since the wage price index began being kept in the 1990s—will be bad for this nation's small business owners, bad for their employees and bad for consumers. That is why Labor will not support Mr Turnbull's plans to raise the GST, because it will push up the price of everything and hurt the very families who can least afford it.

Deputy Speaker, I do not know what it is like in your household at Christmas, but I tell you what: in most households across Australia, people are thinking about prices right now. Think about this Christmas as being the last one without a 15 per cent GST on all the presents you have to buy for all your family members, the last Christmas without a GST on the fresh food that you buy to make Christmas lunch and the last Christmas where you are not looking at a return-to-school season with a 15 per cent GST on books, on pencils, on rulers—on all the things that kids need every year to go back to school. And, frankly, axing the schoolkids bonus is not going to help with that either. Think about this being the last Christmas that households are facing without having that 15 per cent GST on everything, which is exactly what those opposite want, what the Turnbull government wants. Why do you think this government is cutting $80 billion to the states' funding for health and education over the next decade? It is to put the pressure on the states in respect of the GST.

Despite the Prime Minister's cute games, saying, 'We don't have a plan,' or should that be, 'We don't have a plan but it's an excellent discussion—good idea, good idea,' and despite the Prime Minister's attempts to play coy on this, everyone in Australia knows that if this government gets its way then we will be paying more for everything every day of the week. It is wrong, and we will fight it every step of the way.

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