Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, what a feeling! Senator Hurley, we have just heard a wonderful advert for Toyota and a great description of some of their vehicles on offer. You heard Senator Hurley speak about the four-cylinder Tarago and I know she lives on the Adelaide plains near where I grew up. It is pretty flat driving there but think of the four-cylinder Tarago going up those hills to Mount Barker fully laden. I am not sure that Senator Hurley’s description of the four-cylinder Tarago quite does justice to the arguments that the government has been putting in relation to the luxury car tax and its impact on working families and on so many others.

You get the impression that the government and Senator Hurley will not be content until we go to some kind of Flintstonesque sort of world where everybody has to use their feet to pedal the cars along. That seems to be the desire they have. I know we had the trial of the Priuses outside here but you get the impression that the government want us to go the Flintstone route. You can imagine the families in Adelaide with their zero-cylinder Toyota Taragos going up to Mount Barker and trying to pedal their way up the freeway. It would be quite amazing.

The Tax Laws Amendment (Luxury Car Tax) Bill 2008 really is just a plain, simple, old-fashioned tax slug. That is all we are talking about tonight. It is a $555 million tax slug over the forward estimates. It is a tax slug that hits at the much talked about and much lauded working families and at small businesses, at our tourism industry, at farmers and primary producers, at those who wish to be environmentally conscious and at parts of an Australian industry—an industry which Senator Hurley, Senator Bernardi and I represent which is important to our home state of South Australia.

It is remarkable to see the government going down this path. You can picture, back when the budget was being developed, the razor gang sitting there thinking that it was a bit too hard to curtail some of the things they wanted to spend money on which were not going to make a difference—Fuelwatch, grocery choice: some of those things that really wasted money. Of course to pay for those irrelevant promises they needed to put a few taxes up, so they looked around for the low-hanging fruit. They looked around for the easy targets, the things where they thought they could get away with an extra tax slug that people would not notice—condensate tax, ready to drink alcohol products and luxury car tax. They figured they could get away with all of those because they could find some other justification or hit particular interest groups. In the end they thought they could play on the politics of envy and that, because it is called a luxury car tax, people would say, ‘Oh well, I don’t drive a luxury car. I happen to only drive—’