David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (More Competition, Better Prices) Bill 2022. The opposition will be supporting this bill, which has some sensible provisions in relation to unfair contract terms. I will come to those in a moment, but perhaps the most significant thing to note, in the context of last night's budget, is the absolutely extraordinary failure of this bill to meet the government's forecast of how much it was going to raise. Let's have a look at that. Before the election—and this is a bit of a theme: before the election and after the election, we find very different things are said, and we've got a few examples we'll go through. But let's start with this bill. Before the election, the Labor Party said that its changes to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 would raise $557 million in its first four years. That is quite a lot of money, and no doubt it would be adding to the budget revenue line. But now the budget has come out, and the thing about budgets is that Treasury has got go through numbers and it's got to make sure that the forecasts are accurate. It doesn't just accept press releases at face value. What does Treasury say? Well, Treasury says it's actually not $557 million, not $510 million, not $457 million, not $357 million, not $257 million and not $157 million. It's actually $63 million that this legislation will raise. So it was $557 million before the election and it is $63 million after the election. It doesn't take a graduate of MIT to realise that that's a lot less. It's $500 million, or about 89 per cent, less than the government forecast it would raise. That's pretty bad. The only worse example I can think of is the Rudd-Gillard government's miss on the mining tax revenue, which from memory was greater than 95 per cent. But 89 per cent is extremely bad, even though 95 per cent is even worse.

But it's not really surprising, because it comes in the context of very similar discrepancies between what the government said, as the opposition, before the election and then what has actually happened after the election. Of course, the most famous example of this is the solemn promise the opposition delivered so many times, and which was of such relevance to millions of people around Australia. This was a very compelling promise that the government took to the last election. That was that the average household would save $275 on electricity bills. That's a really significant thing for people—$275 for the average household. It was said 97 times. It was actually said as recently as a couple of days before the election, when now Prime Minister Albanese went to the National Press Club—and it's one of the real centrepieces of that speech to the National Press Club. He said, 'We will reduce electricity prices, energy prices, by $275 for the average household.' And he'd said it many times before. There is a very colourful YouTube video featuring the member for McMahon that goes back to December 2021, and there were 97 times in between—$275, not ambiguous, and it wasn't qualified. It wasn't like, 'Hey, maybe we'll do $275.' It was 'we will'. Very clear.

What did we learn last night? We learned last night that electricity prices are going to go up by 50 per cent or more. We learned that gas prices are going to go up by 40 per cent. These are extraordinary increases in what is, for most households, one of the very biggest elements of the household budget. So there is just an extraordinary discrepancy. This bill in relation to the competition law is of a piece with the government's record as it pertains to energy as well—just a shocking failure there.

Real wages was another one. You will recall before the election lots of discussion about how the then opposition and now government would get real wages moving. Real wages were going to go up. The member for Watson was very forward leaning in his comments about that. That's not going to happen. It's in their own budget. Don't take my word for it; it's in the budget. Real wages are going to go down under this government.

So let's get real here. We need to make a very clear distinction between things that were said before the election and things that were said afterwards. Again, the source is not me; the source is the now government of Australia. Real wages are going down under this government; energy prices are going up massively. Both of those are in complete contrast with what was said before the election.

The other one we need to talk about—and there are a few—is this very sneaky new tax for investors. Numerous people in my electorate raised this with me in recent weeks, because they saw this coming. We now see in the budget $555 million in additional taxes for people, and it's related to franking credits, but it's effectively a penalty tax for people who have saved—often older people, retirees, people who have worked hard and put some money aside for their retirement. What does this government do? Bang: $555 million, thanks very much. And, again, there was nothing about that before the election. In fact, to the contrary, before the election, what we heard was that there wouldn't be any disruption to taxes on investors and superannuation. Well, that's turned out not to be true, because there is in fact a new tax of some $555 million.

Another one—and they add up, one after the other—is that, before the election, the government said they were going to raise $1.9 billion through cracking down on multinational tax avoidance. I think the vast majority of people would support sensible measures that were supposed to be cracking down on tax avoidance. The problem is, once again, the election is over, and now it's reality. So Treasury go through and they get the talking points—maybe six or seven bullet points on a piece of paper; that's the usual way these things go for the Labor Party—and they say, 'Actually, we're going to have to do a bit more work on this.' When they do that, it's like, 'Oh, gee, sorry, it's not $1.9 billion; it's $950 million'—so pretty much exactly half, a billion dollars less than they said, and that's a billion dollars that Australia won't have that the government said they would have before the election.

Then we have the fact that spending is rising and tax is rising. The budget basically says there is an extra $142 billion in tax to be collected, and the cap that our government had in place in terms of tax as a proportion of the economy—that's gone. Any sort of notion about a constraint on how much tax there should be in the system is gone under this government. We're going to come back to that in a minute, because I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot more from this government about tax in the next budget, if not before.

We've also seen that all of the different changes that this government has presided over in terms of the cost of living are going to add up to about $2,000 in extra costs for the average family by Christmas. Going back to before the election, maybe I missed it, but I don't recall the now Prime Minister, the now Treasurer or, frankly, any member of the then opposition saying: 'You know what we're going to do? We're going to have $2,000 of additional costs for households by Christmas'. I suspect that would not have been particularly well received, which is probably why it wasn't said. But that's what's happening. How is it happening? It's happening because of the impact of rising inflation under this government, the impact of rising energy prices and the impact of rising interest rates, all of which this government said it would take action to address. It said interest rates would be lower under it, and that has not proven to be the case. It adds up to cost for average families. That's why management matters. What we've seen from the government is a whole bunch of things it was going to do before the election and then very different outcomes after the election.

I want to turn to the provisions of the bill. We do support it. We are very disappointed but not surprised that it raises 89 per cent less than they said it would, but there are important provisions around making unfair contract terms unlawful, giving the courts power to impose additional penalties, increasing some of the penalties that protect small businesses against unfair contract thresholds, and making remedies more flexible so that a court can impose remedies that are most suited to the particular situation. It also improves clarity around standard form contracts so that everyone who's going into a contractual situation—particularly small businesses, who are often at a disadvantage when negotiating with big businesses—is aware of what the standard form contract terms are, and that they willingly go into variations of those terms. These are sensible things and we will support them. It's just a shame that the financial impact of this is half a billion dollars worse than the Labor Party said it would be.

You've got to ask the question: if costs keep going up and up, if the spending of the government keeps going up, if deficits under this government go up—obviously, it's benefitting from the high commodity prices and other structural benefits provided by the previous government at the moment, but under this government they say deficits will go up and up towards the end of the four-year period—what are they going to do next? I'll give you a tip: more taxes. We've got another budget coming up in May. It is not that far away—six or seven months. You might have heard the Treasurer talking about the national conversation. He's big on conversations, this guy, and he wants to have a national conversation about the budget. It's probably not a bad thing. I think it's very important that represented in that national conversation are the millions of Australians who aren't going to get their $275 energy reduction. It's very important that represented in that national conversation are the millions of Australians who aren't going to get real-wage increases, despite being promised that by this government. And it's very important that also represented in this conversation are the very large number of Australians—anyone earning $45,000 or more—who benefit from the legislated stage 3 tax cuts.

We know what they're going to do, they're not going to stick to the legislated stage 3 tax cuts. They obviously contemplated getting rid of those in this budget, but I think it is a very fair assumption that there's going to be change there. Should that occur, it would be a massive broken promise. There's no precedent for it—except there is. It was in the 1990s when then Prime Minister Keating repealed tax reductions that were already l-a-w law, and that's precisely what this government is contemplating doing. I'm sure the Treasurer will get lots of photos of himself—one day he'll be jogging, one day he'll be staring in a contemplative fashion out the window. There'll be lots of interesting shots of the Treasurer as part of that national conversation. But the last sentence from the Treasurer in that national conversation is going to be, 'Here are your new taxes.' That's where this is headed. Should that occur, that will be a complete abrogation of responsibility and a complete backflip on what was promised before the election.

I think it's also quite likely not only that the government will move away from the legislated stage 3 tax cuts which they supported wholeheartedly before the election—going back to that theme of before the election and after the election, we're seeing a pattern here—but that it won't stop at the stage 3 tax cuts. I think we'll start to see more academic documents and think tanks calling for other taxes and other increases, and I'm sure that the government will create an environment which is very supportive of those sorts of calls for increased taxes, because that's what this government wants to do and it's what Labor always does, because it always gets the numbers wrong. That's why management matters. It matters to be competent. They get the numbers wrong every time and, as a consequence, what do they do? They say, 'Give us more money,' and they say that to the average Australian. That's wrong. We will always fight against that. We support this bill but are very concerned about the direction of this government.

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