Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on this matter of incredible public importance. I feel that these are rushed reforms, because they were off the table a year ago. A year ago, for the 50th time—'It's off the table.' All of a sudden, once they'd won the election, they were back on the table. I suspect they were on the table all along. But I want to talk about what it means to create a capital gain in a business. I'll use the example of farms, but it applies to all sorts of business. Creating a capital gain requires risk on the part of a business owner. It requires labour, and it requires significant investment.

Today, when the member for Gippsland, the shadow agriculture minister, asked the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry about whether there would be exemptions for farmers, the minister gave an answer to say that, yes, there will be exemptions. But here's the truth: there are holes in this policy that, as one expert said, you could drive a header through.

Even though capital gains, specifically, might be exempted for primary productions, a lot of these farms are set up with trusts. They don't operate as a simple entity; they have a trust that owns the land and another that runs the business. The operating trust will pay the rent to the landholding trust. And that's standard. That's the way farming businesses work. Farming is hard enough, so I think they're allowed to use some advantages in the tax system to run a successful business that benefits Australia. But, under this government's approach, that rent is not considered primary production income. It means that the farm pays rent to itself, and that rent is now hit with a 30 per cent minimum tax. What are the arrangements for? Perhaps the agriculture minister can come in and clear this up and explain it during question time. What are the arrangements for business—for farming businesses? The way it stands at the moment is that, from 2027 onwards, this Labor government is slugging farming businesses on their capital gains.

Monique is a dairy farmer in my electorate. She's doing a lot of really hard work. On her behalf, I say to the Labor government: if you want to slug her heaps of capital gains tax 10 years after 2027, you go out there and drive around at three o'clock in the morning and pull calves out of a cow. You get up and milk the cows—and then again at 3.30 in the afternoon. You take the risk: you sit with your back manager and go build a barn, not knowing whether that risk is going to pay off. You do all the hard work: you build a rotary dairy and take the risk on that investment and then work it for 10 years. They're taking a massive risk and working very hard, and they don't need a government to come and treat them as a cash register because they've spent too much. And that is exactly what's happening.

Matt's an orchardist in my electorate. He's going to have a capital gain, I hope, over the next 10 years. But if you, the government, want to take all of the money from his capital gain as a result—or a huge proportion of it—then you go out and plant the trees. You take the risk that there might be a hailstorm and that, for two years, you will not get a crop at all. So, then, you spend the money and take the risk on putting hail netting up, which is a huge investment—you have to sit there and talk with your bank manager. Can I really do this? Well, you have to. There might be a hailstorm that will limit your income for two years. The Treasurer should go out and help put up that hail net. The Prime Minister should go and pick a bit of this fruit to understand what it's like to work really hard and take a risk in regional Australia.

The fact is that these are big, big reforms, and when you've got a big reform you have to have the courage and decency to take it to an election, and, unlike John Howard in 1998 and, to his great credit, the former member for Maribyrnong before the 2019 election, they did not have the courage and decency to take this to an election. That's the way democracy should work—you have an idea, you take it to an election and you get a mandate; you sell it, people who don't agree with you criticise it, and the Australian people make their minds up. But they weren't given the chance to do that.

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