Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (Temporary Flood Reconstruction Levy) Bill 2011 and the related bill, because the Gillard government’s flood levy goes to the heart of Labor’s economic mismanagement.

Labor treasurers all seem to work from the same manual. Chapter 1 calls for a new tax every time the public starts to get concerned about the budget. The only difference between this and other Labor taxes is that the Prime Minister will try to sell this one as a mateship tax. Australians are always willing to help out a mate in trouble, but we help because it is the right thing to do, not because a politician has made mateship mandatory.

Queensland must be rebuilt; eastern Australia must be rebuilt. The Commonwealth has a role to play in this very important reconstruction task. However, the Gillard government’s decision to partly fund the reconstruction through a new tax is the action of a lazy and irresponsible government.

Australians pay tax with the expectation that the government will carefully manage the national budget, just as millions of Australians right around the country carefully manage their household budgets. When unexpected expenses pop up for Australian families, they have to re-evaluate their budgets and cut down on unnecessary expenses until things are back on track. It is no different at a national level.

The natural disasters in Queensland and on the east coast of Australia have certainly put pressure on the federal budget. But instead of cutting back on expenses, the first option for this government—the first part out of the Labor management book—was to introduce a new tax. Even before the Prime Minister had released any details of savings measures, and before Cyclone Yasi had hit in North Queensland, the Prime Minister was already out talking about a new levy.

The Leader of the Opposition even offered to work with the government in a bipartisan way to find the spending cuts necessary to rebuild Queensland and eastern Australia without the need for a new tax. What happened to this offer? It was rejected by this government. The government has announced some savings measures; however, many of the programs cut by the government were already well known as inefficient and wasteful. In many respects, the government was using the opportunity to get rid of some deadwood policies. So they were hardly tough decisions. And in the past few days we have seen that the government has even reversed some of these cuts in order to secure support from the Greens and the independents. The Australian public is entitled to ask what other deals the government has done in order to secure the future of this new tax.

By contrast, the coalition have made tough calls. We have outlined more than $2 billion in savings over the forward estimates which would eliminate the need for this new tax. We have made the difficult decisions. Some of our proposed cuts have been unpopular, but we have demonstrated that we can make hard decisions, unlike this government. If the government was serious about finding savings to pay for rebuilding Queensland, the first place it would look would be the National Broadband Network—a $50 billion white elephant that we cannot afford; a program that could be delivered more efficiently and effectively at a lower cost without the huge levels of waste that are going to be paid for by the Australian taxpayer. Queenslanders who are driving on washed-out roads, across damaged bridges and through devastated towns are more concerned about getting those problems addressed first before we look at increasing the speed that we can download videos. They want things fixed. On the other hand, the government is searching for a political fix.

It is interesting to note that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics heard that introducing a new tax to pay for disaster reconstruction is the least preferred policy response. Professor Warwick McKibbin told the committee:

I think that in the case of a disaster it is almost uniformly accepted by economists, in principle, that a tax is not the best way to fund it.

I will repeat that: ‘a tax is not the best way to fund it’.

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