David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of Treasury Laws Amendment (Lower Taxes for Small and Medium Businesses) Bill because it is in our DNA to let hardworking small and medium enterprises keep more of the money that they earn. As you can see from the litany of speeches from the other side, they have an attitude problem. Honestly, the concepts of small businesses and large businesses are treated with contempt. All the proposals that I've seen coming out of the other side seem to work on the proviso that they're all operating a tax dodge and that reasonable costs incurred in earning your income in a business is somehow diddling the tax scheme. That is so wrong. It just demonstrates clearly how they misunderstand issues like revenue and turnover, as opposed to profit and tax on profit.

We have delivered many tax deductions already. For individuals, there is our low-income tax offset of $530 for each low-income earner, as a rebate, so that they're paying less tax. There is also our legislated reform to company tax for small and medium businesses with turnover of less than $50 million. They are not promises. They have been delivered from 1 July. Also, we have set in train this bit of legislation to bring forward by five years the proposed reduction in tax from 27.5 per cent down to 25 per cent. We have dragged the opposition kicking and screaming to it. I hear the member for Brand now saying they're going to support this legislation. But it's not what they say they will do; it's what they do. They have a track record of going after small and medium businesses. They have an attitude problem—that the government should keep all the money and then let us as individual taxpayers, and small and large businesses, keep a small bit. It's back to front. Their thinking is so odd.

This legislation will allow small and medium businesses, of which I have about 12,000 in Lyne electorate, to keep more of their profits. In fact, it will be $3.2 billion less tax over the forward estimates. We reduce taxes because we know that by reducing taxes on small businesses they will get a better return on their investment. It allows them to grow and to invest in their business, and growth of business leads to growth in employment. Unincorporated businesses—and I have many of those in Lyne electorate—such as sole traders, tradesmen or just small businesses, get a benefit from this. It brings forward to 2020-21 a 13 per cent reduction in their tax rate, and 16 per cent by 2021-22. It has been brought forward because we realise that a lot of these small businesses have neither the wherewithal nor the need to incorporate themselves. Labor puts tax up, we put tax down. It's a pretty clear delineation. You can rely on the coalition government to reduce the tax burden for small businesses.

Many policies have been announced by the other side. They have given the green light to remove the brakes on growth in taxes. In fact, they have announced policies that will mean $200 billion is raised from individuals and companies, like the small and medium businesses that are the engine room of regional Australian employment. They have ruled out putting limits, or the so-called speed limit, on tax growth. They want to repeal our personal income tax cuts that we've already legislated and delivered. They're on the record saying that they want to repeal that and make it less generous. They want to reintroduce the two per cent budget repair levy, which we said we would repeal when the situation was better, and we did that last year.

So many in parliament have come from family companies. They have left their family businesses and have brought their knowledge and experience down into parliament for the betterment of the nation. They know what small and family businesses are, because it's in their DNA. You only had to see the hands-up situation in the last fortnight of sitting. About 80 or 90 per cent of the people on this side have been involved in small businesses, whereas over the other side there were just three or four. I'm sure that if you go back through the family lineage, somewhere you'll find a parent or grandparent who has been in a small business, but it is in the DNA of the members on this side, because they've run businesses—as did you, Deputy Speaker Howarth, and other members here. They want to attack trusts. They don't understand that trust distributions then get taxed by the individual. It's almost like they need to do a basic 101 tax course. They are proposing a 30 per cent tax on all distributions out of trusts, so are they going to double-tax profits? It's so ridiculous, it's scary. Imagine that: you pay 30 per cent on distribution from the trust to individuals in the trust and then they have to pay tax again. It's crazy stuff, but it's more scary. It is actually scary.

That's where they are going to get the money to pay for all these promises. They are going to do the classic Labor Party phenomenon: tax and then spend it. Redistribute income from hardworking individuals that take a risk with their families' house and mortgage, run a small business, employ people, grow things, and deliver goods and services. And then what do they get for it? They get a proposal from the other side that says, 'No, we're going to get rid of these tax cuts and we're going to make it more difficult for you to keep the profit from your labours.'

There are many proxies that float ideas in the body politic and from which some other scary proposals have come. ALP proxies in GetUp!, Ben Oquist of the Australia Institute and the Grattan Institute are some of the people that float ideas. That gives you the way they're thinking on the other side. The Grattan Institute has proposed that the family home be used in the pension assets test. That would possibly lead to a lot of people being excluded from the pension. It sounds like it's a wealth redistribution tool, and that's probably what it is, but there are many people who've got an asset that they can't sell, because they've lived in it all their life, but, by virtue of population growth in the cities, they are now worth a whole lot more than when they started off in the fifties, sixties and 1970s. But they want to get a slice of that as well.

As I mentioned, a fellow—Ben Oquist from the Australia Institute—in March this year said:

All things being equal, surely people would prefer to be taxed when they were dead than when they're alive.

Connect the dots. What he's referring to is death duties. I fear that the other side want to bring back death duties by stealth.

The other thing is GetUp! and—

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