Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Wasn't it great to see the Treasurer in the House here five minutes ago legislating a fairer GST deal that leaves every state around Australia better off, including, incidentally, Queensland by about half a billion dollars. It's an historic and landmark outcome that no other government has been able to land in the 20 years since the GST debate was first had here in Australia.

Our government is relentlessly focused on delivering on our plan for a stronger economy, and a big part of that is supporting small businesses, which are the real backbone of our economy and provide so many of the opportunities and so much of the prosperity we need to provide in Australia for the next generation. That's why, in addition to the GST deal that the Treasurer just passed, over the past week we have legislated to ensure that small and family businesses get their promised tax relief sooner and have their burdens lightened. On top of that we have ratified another trade agreement, this one covering 10 other countries across the Pacific, which will unlock even more opportunities for thousands of Australian farmers and businesses and which is forecast to contribute billions of additional dollars of economic benefits to Australia—and that boils down to jobs and prosperity for local families. It's all about lightening the burden on small businesses so that they can unlock their potential.

Our focus on a stronger economy stands in stark contrast to the alternative plan that's beginning to be offered to Australians by the opposition, which essentially involves slapping $200 billion worth of new taxes onto workers through their income tax, onto electricity, onto housing, onto savings, onto investments and, perhaps worst and most unfair of all, onto retirement. I found out today that about 6,500 people in my electorate of Brisbane could be impacted by Labor's retirement tax. It's a disgrace that the alternative plan starting to be put forward by the opposition simply boils down to more tax, more tax, more tax and more tax. It's no way to run a $1.7 trillion economy and it's not how you foster the environment we need to see where small businesses have the incentives they need to create the opportunities and the prosperities that we need street to street and suburb by suburb right across Australia.

The Reserve Bank governor spoke to the House economics committee just a few weeks back and talked about how Australia has a pretty good set of economic numbers emerging in front of it right now. We're on track for a balanced budget a year early, in 2019-20. The last budget update showed that the deficit has shrunk to its smallest size in a decade—now at 0.6 per cent of GDP.

Australia is now one of only 10 countries around the world with a AAA credit rating from the three leading agencies, and economic growth is back to running well over three per cent. That makes it the fastest rate since the height of the mining boom and higher than any of the G7 countries out there around the world which we like to compare our performance to.

Our unemployment rate continues to fall fast. It was great to see the jobs data come out just last week which showed it back down to five per cent. A big part of that's because we've seen those 1,100,000 jobs that have been created now under our government coming in at the rate of more than a thousand jobs a day on average over the past year, and it's a clear sign that our plan for a stronger economy is working.

While the opposition have that sad history, I suppose, of welshing on tax cuts that they promise, our government over the past week have been delivering tax relief—not just the income tax relief that we were talking about some months ago; this is to those small and medium-sized businesses that I'm talking about. We're delivering that tax relief five years early by fast-tracking the promised tax cuts.

They are now legislated, so businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million per annum will face a tax rate of just 25 per cent, 25c in the dollar, in 2021-22. That's five years ahead of schedule. That will benefit about 3.3 million small businesses across Australia and the nearly seven million Australian workers that they employ. Just bringing that back down to the local perspective: there are over 30,000 small businesses that will qualify in my electorate of Brisbane. And that fast-tracked tax relief obviously comes on top of the extension of the $20,000 instant asset write-off that we announced in the budget.

Bringing that all together: it's those small businesses that employ more than half the Australian workforce. We know that helping them by lightening their burden means that they can invest, and they can create new jobs and opportunities and the prosperity we need to see.