Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

Your policy would have been a floparoo, buddy; that is a fact. I will give credit to the shadow minister for small business. Compared with other shadow ministers, he has actually put a couple of policies up on his website—like paying a proportion of the superannuation guarantee payments of small businesses for a period of about two years, and the carry-back of tax losses. The estimated cost of those two measures, on top of everything that we have done, is $6.2 billion. Here we have the coalition saying, ‘This is a big-spending government, they are spending too much, let’s add $6.2 billion to the bill!’

This opposition said that the government is taking more money in tax. The highest-taxing government in Australia’s history was the Liberal government, the coalition government, the Howard government of which the shadow minister for small business was a member. I went through the budget papers and they show that, in just about every year of this decade under the previous government, tax, as a share of GDP was at record levels. During the Hawke and Keating periods it was lower, so the coalition broke the record as the highest-taxing government in Australia’s history. Now they have the temerity to say, ‘You’re taking too much tax.’ Well you took a hell of a lot of tax and you took a hell of a lot of tax from small businesses. You know, this has been a day when the matter of hypocrisy has been raised once or twice.

We have a matter of public importance debate where the small business shadow minister comes and says, ‘Look, the government is spending too much.’ And what is the coalition doing right now in the Senate? It is blocking budget savings measures. So on the one hand they are saying we are spending too much, and when we have measures in the Senate designed to reduce government spending what does the coalition do? It opposes them. Hypocrisy, thy name is Liberal. That is the problem. You have the opposition leader with every possible position so that he can look back at the records and say ‘I had that position.’ Well he probably did have that position. He had every possible position. The stimulus is too much. The stimulus is too little. He said the stimulus is ineffective. It is not supporting jobs. Then you have the shadow Treasurer saying, ‘Well jobs after all were not the top priority.’ He was asked about that—remember they were running around saying, ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs.’ Then, when the first crack of light appeared and there was a suggestion of a possible interest rate rise, the shadow Treasurer said, ‘Well, it’s interest rates, it’s not jobs’, when he was asked. So is jobs the top priority? No, it is interest rates. They abandoned the Australian working people just like that. Why? Because there was an opportunity for them to switch their attack, to say it is all about interest rates. Okay, if you do not care about jobs let us talk about interest rates.

The previous Prime Minister of this country said in the 2004 election campaign, ‘We will keep interest rates at record lows.’ It was across the lectern. Do you know what he said when he was brought to account for that? He said, ‘I didn’t say that.’ What happened? Interest rates went up 10 times in succession under the coalition government. So if you are looking for a political party that is the party of high taxes, just go no further than the Liberal Party. If you are looking for a political party that has promised to keep interest rates at record lows—but they went up 10 times—go to the Liberal Party.

That is why I say, ‘Hypocrisy, thy name is Liberal,’ because you are always saying one thing out of one side of your mouth and something else out of the other side of your mouth. The fact is that this government has consistently supported small businesses. I thank the very many members of the government side who expressed a genuine interest in small business in their local communities by inviting me to their local communities and who had enough interest in small business to formulate a few questions about small business and come into this parliament and ask them. The only way the shadow minister for small business can get to the dispatch box is by either taking a point of order or having an MPI, because the chair of tactics, the member for O’Connor, Wilson Tuckey, will not give him a guernsey. That is the problem for you. Now you have had this debate and you have said we should be reducing taxes and we are the high-taxing government. But yours was the high-taxing government. Yours was the government that falsely promised that you would keep interest rates at record lows. You have had every possible position on economic stimulus. Hypocrisy, thy name is Liberal.

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