Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I'm still talking about how we're expending public money, which is explicitly related to how we raise public money as well. But that is the situation we face. We are in bizarro world under this Labor government. We are in a bizarro world where we're watching the Prime Minister publicly ridiculing the Treasurer. We're in a bizarro world where we have had taxes introduced. They promised they wouldn't until after they got elected. They got away with it twice, but I can assure you that they aren't going to get away with it again. More importantly, we've ended up in a situation where we have public money being expended to the most extraordinary things, and the only response from Labor members opposite is to turn around and say, 'This is the most disgraceful, outrageous thing I've ever seen.'

Their response is, 'On relevance'—how is handing money to organised crime not relevant? If it isn't relevant in this chamber, where is it relevant? Where is public trust? Where is public integrity, if you are literally having independent corruption watchdogs calling this out? I can't figure it out. Perhaps that's why there's a decline in the institutional settings of this country. But I'm hoping we're going to end it, and we are going to end it, because we're going to end it by making sure there's an election of a coalition government so that we can make sure we don't have these sorts of laws that betray public trust and seek to abuse public money again. In addition to that, I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes that:

(1) Opposition and community pressure forced the Government to abandon:

(a) the taxation of unrealised gains; and

(b) indexation of the $3 million threshold;

(2) the Government cannot be trusted with tax reform;

(3) the Government has a spending problem, not a revenue problem;

(4) this is the first tax that Australia did not vote for that the Government has tried to ram through;

(5) the Government's new tax introduces new risks, including removal of the death tax exemption, and impacts on surviving spouses and total and permanent disability benefit recipients;

(6) increases to the Low-Income Superannuation Tax Offset (LISTO) are welcome, but modest, but do not address immediate cost of living pressures; and

(7) this change is the beginning of the Government's high tax, high spending agenda to pour more debt petrol on the inflation fire".

See this speech in context