Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

GDP per capita has gone negative in the last quarter. Labour productivity has gone backwards: minus 4.6 per cent in the last year! It has never happened before, but he thinks it is funny! He thinks it's funny that Australians can't pay their bills. He thinks it's funny that Labor has broken its promise on bringing down energy prices by $275. He thinks it is funny that the Prime Minister promised cheaper mortgages, and no Australian is seeing cheaper mortgages. In fact, we read today that we're going to see, in the next three months, 150,000 Australian households going over the mortgage cliff. That's $95 billion, and the member opposite thinks it's funny. Is this what the Labor Party stands for? If that is true, it's very, very sad.

Now, back to the important issues in this bill. The last-minute changes to this bill show that this Labor government does not know how to work with business, does not know how to manage the economy and is pursuing the wrong priorities. Changes to the multinational tax arrangements in this bill do not make up for Labor's attack on aspirational Australians—those hardworking Australians who are trying to get ahead and don't want to become the working poor. They don't want to become the working poor. The changes to multinational tax arrangements in this bill do not make up for Labor's year of inaction on dealing with the issues it promised it was going to deal with. Australians deserve a government that doesn't think these issues are funny and that doesn't want to bury them in a wellbeing report that uses data from three years ago. Australians want a government that takes these issues seriously, doesn't make jokes about them and gets on with the job.

That's what we want to see. We won't oppose this legislation, but do not apologise for holding this government to account on its broken promises on tax, on its failure to take action on productivity—in fact, allowing it to go into an unprecedented reversal on their watch—and on its failure to make aspirational Australians the centrepiece of its focus.

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