I really don't know where to start with this, because there's quite a quantum of material and a very short time, 15 minutes, to discuss it. The prospective prime minister of Australia at the last election—when you give a warrant that you are not going to do something, you should stick to your word. It is fundamental to people and business. 'If I can't trust you, I don't deal with you.' As you grow up, that's probably one of the fundamental laws your father will teach you. If you don't trust someone, don't go into business with them. You'll always end up in tears. And this government went to the last election saying they weren't going to do precisely what we're about to vote on.

As an accountant, this causes all sorts of problems. Accountants have this desire to trust the government and to trust what they say, and when people pay us fees we give them the best advice we can in the belief that the government keeps their word. We don't particularly want to make money because the government, in an erratic and dishonest way, changes what they had given a warrant that they would not do. Our job as accountants is to minimise your tax. That is what you're paid to do. You would be an accountant in a job for a very, very short time if you said, 'What I'm going to do today for you, Mr and Mrs Smith, is make you pay as much tax as I possibly can.' They expect you to understand the tax law and, as you apply it, to try and minimise the tax. As Kerry Packer said, 'I've seen how you spend it down here, and I don't intend to give you any more.'

Let's go through a couple of things here. You set up a discretionary trust. 'Discretionary' means that you have the capacity, at the discretion of the trustee, to distribute the money to those who need it or in the most appropriate way to minimise tax. That's been in place for a long while. Then you have a bucket company at the end, and if there's anything left over you put it into the bucket company. This is not evil. Australia has some of the highest tax rates around, so it would make sense to try and mitigate that. Australia does not have the tax rates of Singapore or of the United States. We have a very high tax rate. So, especially in a discretionary trust, when you have a number of family members in a business, then you have the discretion to give it to those people in that family business in a form—as they're all part of the business and all beneficiaries of the business, they'll pay tax—that's most effective. I do note that farming sections have been noted in here as not being in it. But I have a concern, because yet again that's a warrant, and I can't trust warrants.

I want to go through the two issues that really concern me. These changes that the government has brought about have really hurt small business. I had a group of small-business people from the western suburbs of Sydney over in the Senate side of the building, in a committee room, the other day. They are furious. They are working to try and get ahead. They have staff. They don't really take home much. They invest back into their business. They've set up a trust, and now it has been changed. Not only that; they have to pay a tax rate that is far in excess of what they were paying before. These are people who, when they go well, employ more people. That is what a government is supposed to do.

But it's not only that; we have this noxious position that if—I'll give you a business that I was talking to. It was a husband-and-wife boilermaker in the mining industry—I know you're very aware of that—in the Hunter Valley. They started providing mining parts. He would fit them. He was fitter. He would go out and fit him. She would wrap them. They worked in their backyard. They started in the garden shed. It's tradesperson and his wife. That is a typical form of business in so many areas. They both, at the start of their career, work for nothing. They work for nothing. They just work to cover the costs. They start small. Then it starts to grow. The mine realises—the evil coal mines! Oh, don't we hate the evil coal mines! The evil coal mines that support so much of Australia start to say, 'Well, these people are good at their job.' They start getting repeat business, and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger. Next minute, they've got 10 employees, then they've got 20, 30, 40 employees.

I went to this business and talked to them. By the time I got there, they had a chief financial officer. He looks pretty flash. He reminded me of my previous jobs in cost accounting. I said, 'Who owns the business?' and he pointed to a person I thought was just a regular worker at the back. He was sitting at the back of the room amongst all the other labourers, blue-collar workers. There are none of them any more over there on that side; they're all gone. Now, if he sells that business under this law, the Treasurer of Australia, on behalf of the worst management we've ever seen, takes 47 per cent of their winnings. They took all the risks, and Jim, the Treasurer, takes the money. That's a very bad deal. That is a very bad deal because, if they'd gone broke, they weren't going to be paid 47 per cent. They'd just lose their shirt, lose their house and probably lose their marriage. That's the pressure, and that's the reality. That's how it works.

The success of this crazy policy is—you'll see it in the housing market. The housing market in some areas, especially in the cities, is getting smashed. But does that mean that people—people rent. People rent because they can't afford a house. That's why they rent. What's happening now, perversely, is that the housing stock that's there is going down, and people who are renting are still renting, but it's becoming harder. So what the investor does, because they don't—there's another section. They don't have negative gearing. Guess how they make up for it. They put up the rents. They put up the rents to cover their loss. It's just crazy.

I just want to go to another thing. They're saying, 'For entrepreneurial areas, we're going to have an exemption, so you can get a form of capital gains tax exemption.' I'm going to give you an example. I declare I have an interest in this. In my area, we had—in the past it was a big tin-mining area. Tin was once worth a lot of money, then it went into a glut, and it fell out of favour and disappeared. Now, because of all the electronics and data centres and other things coming back in, it's actually starting to kick along a bit. It's starting to kick off. We have an opportunity in a place called Emmaville, around Glen Innes, to employ 300 people at a company called First Tin. It's in my electorate. I have an interest in it. I do have shares. I have declared it. I have shares in it. Here's the perverse thing: if this is going to invest in an Australian mining precinct—it's a foreign company, but I can buy shares in it. If I were from England, my capital gains tax, if those shares make money, would be 18c on the dollar. If I were a larger taxpayer, I think would be 24c. Don't quote me on that. It would be about there. If I were from New Zealand, it would be zero. But, if I'm an Australian investing in Australia and I sell my shares—guess what. It's 47c. So guess what happens. The foreigners invest in Australia, and the Australians don't. Can't they see this? This is like a big sign that says, 'We want foreign ownership.' That's what you'll get.

Now I'll go back to the accountancy side of me. I've got someone walking down out in western Queensland.

You trip over—whoops! Oh my gosh, you just found gold. You just found gold, and you think, 'Hang on, I might have a crack at this.' I would be advising you not to. I would say, first of all, the regulatory burden you're about to take on will make it near impossible for you to get ahead, and you're going to take a huge risk, and you might come unstuck. The overburden might be too much. You might come unstuck, and you'll do your shirt, and there's just no point doing it if they're going to take 47 per cent at the end. Who would go to the races and say, 'If I win, they take 47 per cent off me.' I just won't go to the races. There's no point. The odds are ridiculous.

What happens then is the people who are willing to invest, to take risk and to develop Australia don't do so. They don't take the risk. What you're likely to do—and this is not financial advice, for all those watching you or not. What I'm giving you now is not financial advice. You should go and see your registered financial planner and get proper advice. But what I might do is say, 'I can either take risk in that new mining precinct or take risk in that business, and, if I lose, I just lose my shirt, and, if I win, the Treasurer takes 47 per cent,' or I just go and invest in the National Australia Bank or BHP. I get my dividend from retained earnings and I get my franking credit, and there you go. It's a no-brainer. Go into the established business that's making a profit. Get the dividend, get your franking credit—you're alright! But that means we become a dumb country. We literally pop the balloon of entrepreneurial flair, and we say to the people, 'If you are willing to take the risk, we're going to kick you,' in a figurative way.

How do people get around this, if they think, 'No, I still want to have a crack at Australia. I still think it's worth it. I love the place'? They do two things: either they don't, or they move overseas. All of a sudden, you go to a party, and you're talking to people, and they all seem to have Australian accents, but they tell you that they're living in Singapore, apparently, or New Zealand. The ones that are doing well live in Monaco, because they've moved out of here, because our tax rate is crazy, and the price of taking risk is insane. If you go to London and set up, you can invest back in Australia as a pom and get a vastly better tax rate than if you were an Australian investing in Australia. Riddle me that. How do we get something so perverse? Because don't have people on the front bench of the government who have been in business.

In fact, in the Labor Party on the front bench, we don't have any labourers. Why that's important is you get a sense of common sense in people being outside, working in the sun, getting skin cancers, having hands that actually look like they've done manual work. They're less likely to get carried away with the garbage. Look at the savings in this—I don't know what it's about. I pointed out today during question time, if you want a saving, I'll give you a big one—$8.7 billion a year on the climate change department. That is something, in a few years time, they'll say about Australia, 'This is for real. I'm not joking. Australia used to have a whole department to change the climate. It really did. They invested $8.7 billion a year to change the climate,' and people say, 'Oh, that's crazy,' and he says, 'No, it's true. It's true. It's really happened. They were completely off their head,' and they will say, 'Did it change climate?' Of course not. Of course it didn't. It's just that's what happens when you've got ex-student unionists with a chip on their shoulder. Those are the sort of crazy policies you get up—climate change department and $8.7 billion.

And why that's important is—they're doing all this garbage because they've run out of dough. They run out of money, and they're desperately trying to work out—oh gosh, panic, panic, panic bills are rolling over. We're at HAFF per cent now, a bit over five per cent. Got to find money, need money, and the Treasurer was going, 'Where's the money?' It's in super funds, $4.5 trillion in super funds, so we'll tax them. We'll start a little bit and then we'll go—where else can we find money? Other family businesses, those outrageous people in commerce making the sacrifices—tax them when they sell. Tax them. What about houses? 'Oh, people put aside a bit of money and buy an investment house. We'll tax them.' They said, 'Hang on, why don't you just get rid of your climate change department?' 'Oh no, no, no, we can't do that, because that's enlightened. We can waste money on 5,700 employees in the climate change department.' What? I don't know what the hell they do down there. I should go and have a look. I suppose they're busily at their desk changing the clouds. But this goes to show the perverse nature and the confusion of this government. In the Intergenerational report, it says you're going to have 40 years of deficits in front of you. You're over $1 trillion in debt. One trillion seconds is 31,700 years. If you get this wrong, if you don't get your economic act together, you are going to go broke.