Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State (House)) Share this | Hansard source

What an absurd interruption that is! I'm talking about company tax. If you don't understand that this bill is about company tax, you should go back to your office and have a read of it. That's just pathetic behaviour, and you should be above it. Stop wasting the time of this parliament with such childish and petty interventions. Anyway, back to the substance of the bill, which the government should be proud of. It's their bill; given I'm giving a speech about supporting the legislation, you'd think you wouldn't want to interrupt that, but I don't think we should judge you by normal standards, by the sounds of that intervention.

Anyway, back to the issue. We think that businesses deserve tax relief in this country, and it needs to be targeted. It shouldn't be the $80 billion gift to multinationals, of which $17 billion will go to the big banks. It should be stuff like what is in this bill. It should be the instant asset write-off for small businesses. It should be the Australian investment guarantee that we've proposed. That's how we get maximum bang for the buck when it comes to tax relief for businesses in this country.

I don't propose to deal with the bill in any detail in terms of its specific contents. As other speakers have said, the main aspect of the bill is that it will extend the government's accelerated depreciation measure for small businesses for a further 12 months, to 30 June 2019. The measure applies for businesses with a turnover of up to $10 million. It means they can immediately deduct those smallish capital purchases. As the member for Forrest rightly said, it might be an investment in a fridge or something like that if you're a cafe. You can imagine all the capital needs of genuinely small businesses. A lot of stuff that they need to conduct their business is under $20,000, and this allows them to write it off.

As I said before, we support it. We are the authors of this policy and we're pleased to see it extended. We were terribly disappointed when there were cuts made to this initiative in the 2014 budget. We made the point at the time that the government should reverse course on that, and we are pleased that they did. Whether it was a humiliating backdown or not is a matter for the political argy-bargy of this building. It probably was a humiliating backdown—there have been a few of those—but we're pleased to see the outcome will be what we called for at the time. If only the government would see the light when it comes to their $80 billion tax giveaway to multinationals and big banks as well. If they were able to swallow their pride on that, like they swallowed their pride on this measure, then the budget would be better off and we'd get more bang for the buck for our tax relief for Australian businesses.

As I said before, when you lay out the alternative tax proposals of that side and this side, really the main difference is the targeting towards smaller businesses and targeting towards investment onshore in Australia. It makes very little sense to give so many billions of dollars to foreign multinationals and the big banks at a time when we've got record and growing debt in this country.

It also makes no sense to give a tax cut of that magnitude or that nature to multinationals and the banks when, at the same time, while the government can find $80 billion for those purposes, they say they can't find $17 billion for schools; they can't find $715 million for hospitals; they can't find $3.8 billion for universities; they have $270 million in new cuts to TAFE in the most recent budget; they're taking the pensioner energy supplement off Australian seniors; and they say they can't afford to give $14 a fortnight to pensioners in this country to help them deal with energy costs—the list goes on and on and on—but they can give $17 billion to the banks. Really what I'm saying is that there is a series of warped priorities in their budget and in their approach to public policy when it comes to company tax.

As I alluded to a moment ago, it's not like we have billions of dollars lying around in the budget. The net debt in this country was $175 billion when the government changed hands in September 2013 and it's now $350 billion.

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