David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Another issue that's been floated by GetUp! is that we should be taxing the business use of fuel. I can only assume they're referring to the fuel excise rebate, which is justified because most of the business use in agriculture, mining and other things isn't on public roads; it's on a mine site or it's on a farm, and that's why the discount or the rebate on the excise is there. If the proposal is to tax petrol and diesel use for small businesses, that would really be a big tax grab, because, again, the principal of costs incurred by a business in earning income is netted off against their income. It is a deductible expense. That would go right to the heart of tax practice since the federation has existed.

But that is all a giant tax grab, and we in this legislation are proposing to bring forward the tax cuts for small and medium businesses that have less than $50 million turnover to 25 per cent by 2021. The reason we've been able to do that is that we have grown the economic pie. The other side seems to look at a fixed pie and they slice up where it all goes, but we have grown the economy. That's why we've got over a million new employment positions out of the economy: we've made the settings right for the economy to grow. We have had increasing company tax receipts because of our anti-avoidance legislation and auditing by the tax office.

We've also empowered small business. We have cut their tax rates. The biggest growth in tax income and the biggest growth in employment have been in the small business space. So it's not like we're going to reduce our income from small business. I think we will get more tax income by cutting the rate, because it empowers business owners to work harder and invest in their business, like the instant asset write-off that we did and the tax treatment changes that we did in agriculture, in the ag white paper. The same principle applies. We understand how tax modifies decisions. Every government needs to raise taxes, but we try to make them as small as possible to let everyone flourish and to let employment grow and business grow.

I am so pleased that it's people on our side who are arguing the case for this and are putting up the legislation for this, and I'm very scared by the $200 billion tax grab, because everyone will suffer under that. There won't be the growth that we've seen. It's like death by a thousand cuts. They're pinching bits from here. Like I said, they want to get rid of capital gains tax. That's a really negative step, a backwards step. You have to allow people to aspire to get ahead. Most people who invest are mum-and-dad investors, perhaps investing in property. Even if they just quarantined people who've already negatively geared, when they sell that property the value of it will be reduced. You can already see the property market reducing—

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