Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

let them put that up. Let them put that up so every company knows, so everyone out there in the public knows, that your plan, if elected to government, is to raise the company tax rates so you can spend more on foreign aid.

I would like to give one example of how much of our foreign aid budget does not actually achieve what is intended. The previous government, over its last three years, gave $416 million to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Much of that money went into financing a bridge. There was $160 million to build a bridge. That is all very nice and that is all very well, but I think the taxpayers of Australia should be asking: why can't the Socialist Republic of Vietnam fund their own bridges? If the Australian taxpayer is doing it, that simply leaves the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to spend money on other things. Since we were so generous in giving them $416 million, that freed up funds for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to buy 12 of the latest model Russian fighter jets last year for $460 million. We, the Australian taxpayer, may as well give the money to Putin's Russia to pay for those jets and let the Russians send those jets to the Vietnamese, because effectively that is what is happening. That is what is happening.

There is another point in the motion I would like to raise. The member for Newcastle talks about 'condemning the government for its lack of action on multinational tax avoidance'. They had six years in government. I would be very interested to hear what they did during their six years in government. Absolutely squat! In contrast, we currently have our Treasurer up in Cairns for the G20, leading the world and leading the OECD nations in tackling that problem. So what we should be doing is changing this motion to say that we condemn the lack of action of the previous government and congratulate our federal Treasurer for taking steps and leading the way on multinational tax avoidance.

The other thing I would quickly like to add is on poverty. What we need to understand is that yes, it is correct that extreme global poverty has been halved since 1990. But we need to understand that it has not been aid that has led to that decline. What it has been is the adoption of free market principles.

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