Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak on this government's Treasury Laws Amendment (Enterprise Tax Plan) Bill 2016. This is about supporting small businesses and it is a key plank of the government's plan for jobs and growth, ratified and mandated by the Australian people at last year's election.

I stand here in this parliament from Australia's small business middle class, partially and significantly as a result of the economic plan that this government took to the last election and at which I was elected to pursue this exact economic plan. I thought it would be helpful to start my speech today in support of the government's enterprise tax plan bill with a couple of quotes. Firstly:

Any student of Australian business and economic history    since the mid-80s knows that part of Australia's success was derived through the reduction in the company tax rate.

That is what the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, said in March 2012 when he was in government. Another quote:

Cutting the company income tax rate increases domestic productivity and domestic investment. More capital means higher productivity and economic growth and leads to more jobs and higher wages.

That is another quote from the Leader of the Opposition in August 2011.

… for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

That quote is not from the opposition leader; that one was Churchill. And you probably have to go back as far as Churchill to find the last Labor leader who did not aspire to cut the company tax rate. Maybe not quite as far as Churchill's time possibly but certainly back many, many decades. It was until very, very recently a bipartisan position in Australia's parliament was that we all aspired to cut Australia's corporate tax rate to keep us internationally competitive.

The current shadow Treasurer, Chris Bowen, knows it. He said:

… Keating knew that the corporate tax rate needed to be cut to make Australia competitive, that capital and investment would flow to tax-competitive nations and that this was an important job-creation move. Today capital is even more mobile than it was then and it is important that our corporate tax rate is more competitive.

And I could keep throwing quotes out there: Rudd, Gillard, Rudd again, Latham, Crean, Beazley, Keating, Hawke—and the list goes on. They all agreed. Even the member for Lilley promised to cut the corporate tax rate, although I must say that he promised it around the same time as he promised this country three surpluses, and they never quite eventuated either. The point is that some of the most eloquent arguments for this bill have been made consistently by the Labor Party for years. The Labor Party is walking away from that longstanding legacy. Why?

I think it is important for us to reflect on the motives of an opposition leader who would say one thing when he was a minister with serious responsibility and another when in opposition and digging for votes. I think it is important for us to reflect on the significance—what it really means—when one of Australia's two major political parties crab walks away from what was a longstanding bipartisan principle. They are walking away from a key plank—a bipartisan key plank—of Australia's longstanding economic plan. They are walking towards populism and the sort of class warfare that was supposed to be eradicated when the Labor Party reformed itself back in the eighties to make itself fit for office again.

I have paid very close attention to the language of Labor members opposite when they have mentioned tax recently. The catchcry is '$50 billion of handouts to big business and multinationals'. They are the words they use. I think the opposition leader rolled it out today in question time, just a few hours ago, and I think I heard the member for Rankin use those phrases in his speech just before this. It is definitely time to bust Labor's lines here. I want to break this silly phrase down word by word and expose Labor's mistruths. Consider the first word: 'handouts'. Tax cuts are not handouts. It is not a handout to let hardworking small business owners keep more of their own hard-earned money. It is not a handout. It is their own money. Secondly, it is not $50 billion. What is going on is that Labor is trying to add up the first 10 years of budget impacts, in which case the accurate figure would be around $48 billion. Hey, what is $2 billion between friends in the Labor party these days!

Can I mention in passing the despair I feel at how easily the word 'billion' rolls off the tongues of Labor politicians today. When I first started paying attention to politics about two decades ago, there would be an audible hush and amazement when government programs involved amounts of a billion dollars or more. Now, thanks to the terrible legacy bequeathed by those Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, Labor does not even blink at the idea of a billion dollars here or $2 billion dollars there—as they are misrepresenting in this case. In fact, I fear sometimes that they have made the punters out there as numb to the significance of a billion dollars as Labor are themselves. But the point is that it is not $50 billion. That is just plain wrong. If you want to go around adding up 10 years of budgetary impacts then I would like to talk about this government's actual record recently in the space of multinational tax avoidance. The member for Rankin mentioned it. He should have been embarrassed to do so, because when they were in government they did nothing about multinational tax avoidance. The first steps that we took to address multinational tax avoidance have achieved in this year $2 billion of tax clawed back from multinational companies that would not have otherwise have paid it. Let's talk about how much that will possibly amount to over the next 10 years. It is just plain wrong.

We are proposing that small businesses and small businesses only get to keep $1.6 billion of their own money in this financial year, $2.3 billion of their own money in 2017-18, $2.5 billion in 2018-19 and $2.8 billion in 2019-20. And over 10 years, as I said, it would add up to around $48 billion, certainly not $50 billion.

Thirdly, I am very proud to say, given my background in small business, our tax cuts here are going first and foremost predominantly to small businesses. Not to big businesses or to multinationals. They are only going to small businesses this year, next year and for the whole of this term of parliament. And, yes, it is true that we want to legislate a longer-term plan to let the entire economy benefit from tax cuts. Over time we would seek to bring medium and then big businesses into the fold too—after all, that used to be the bipartisan aspiration in this place.

Let me tell you that the people of Brisbane who work or want to work in medium and big businesses deserve more hours, more jobs    and more opportunities too. And, of course, it goes without saying that over the term of this enterprise tax plan, we would like to see many of our small businesses become medium and big businesses.

But if Labor does not like that, it is easy: there are two elections between now and when any tax cuts would be passed on to big businesses.

If they are so sure of their new-found position then over the next seven years then they should make it a policy position in their next election campaign, or the one after that. And if the Australian people judged it a winner they would win an election and they would get to make the change before a single taxable dollar was kept to the benefit of any big business or multinational. They should not just get in the road of delivering these tax cuts right here and right now, which are going immediately and predominantly to small businesses.

Or alternatively—and I am speaking speculatively here—if Labor wanted to make a genuine policy contribution, I would respect that. If they think there is a case for withholding tax cuts to particular companies or industries that they hate, then they should give us a detailed policy proposal that includes their hit-list of companies. Maybe they could make a stab of justifying it on the basis of, I don't know, regulatory protections or a lack of exposure to international competition. That would at least be an attempt at real policy, rather than this. Anything more sophisticated, I suppose, than just yelling, 'Trickle-down economics!' because that phrase is actually incredibly misleading in this case. It is not trickle-down economics to give tax cuts directly to small businesses. Allowing hundreds of thousands of small business operators around the country to pay a little less tax on their own money is precisely the opposite of 'trickle-down', because it is starting with the hardworking small business owners, who are not at the top. They are the very base of our economy.

Britain has a tax cut right now of 20 per cent, with a target of 17 per cent in three years. Canada's corporate tax rate now sits at 15 per cent, Singapore taxes its businesses at 17½ per cent and the US, as we all know, is planning to reduce company tax drastically, down to 15 per cent. We have to remain competitive, and lowering our company tax rate to 25 per cent is, in all honesty, barely keeping up with the pace of the world.

I am proud to try to keep Australia competitive in a global and competitive new world. I am proud to support tax cuts for the 30,000 small businesses in Brisbane. I am proud to be fighting for a tax cut for Naples Pizzeria and Brewmasters in Grange, just down the road from my house; for Rose & Edward Espresso just down in Maygar Street in the other direction; for Soul Hair down on Days Road; and for CPR Insurance, Thai Chada, Fruition Tuition, the Grange Vet and the Wholesomeness Juice Bar nearby.

These businesses and the businesses just like them on Kedron Brook Road in Wilston will be the ones that offer the jobs we so critically need in our area, if we can support them to grow—including, I might add, jobs for the kids in Windsor and Wilston State Schools as they grow and ultimately enter the workforce in coming years. And this suburban story is repeated, street by street, suburb by suburb, right across Brisbane and all across Australia. Newmarket, Ashgrove, Alderley, Park Road, Eagle Junction, Racecourse Road, the Valley, and of course in the CBD—collectively, small businesses are the biggest source of jobs and opportunities for Australians. I have said it before in this place, and I will say it again: if every small business could be encouraged to employ a single additional worker tomorrow, our unemployment rate would be zero—zero!—meaning that the majority of young jobseekers, mature-aged Australians, Indigenous Australians and the disabled who are looking for work would find the dignity that they want and deserve.

Our Enterprise Tax Plan is one of the key planks of our economic plan. It is needed to unlock the power of our local small businesses. It is not about handouts: this is their own money. It is not $50 billion. And everything in our budget and in this term of parliament is going to small business; not a single dollar is going to medium or big businesses.

Labor is perpetrating a giant fraud here, with their use of sensationalist language, and it is just plain wrong. I am calling them out on it today. The opposition leader is damned by his own very eloquent words arguing for this policy. The shadow Treasurer is also damned by his own elegant words and the book he wrote on this topic. And Labor's position is damned by what was the consistent bipartisan position of former Labor leaders, stretching back for decades. They need to support this bill for all the reasons they so eloquently outlined before they were overtaken by populism. Thank you.

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