Katie Allen (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer remind the House how the Morrison government's tax-cutting agenda will abolish an entire personal income tax bracket and how it has ensured small-business tax rates are now at 50-year lows? How do measures like these strengthen our economic recovery, and is the Treasurer aware of any alternative approaches?

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Manager of Opposition Business on a point of order?

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, as I referred to in the previous point of order, you previously ruled that questions on alternative policies were going to be allowed. This now doesn't refer to policy at all; it refers simply to approaches. I'm trying to work out how this could possibly be within the responsibility of the minister, which is all that we're allowed to ask in terms of questions.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm going to allow the question. It is in order. My view is that the issue of the question of alternative approaches is a reasonable question.

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Clearly, the Labor Party doesn't want to hear the truth about their own policies and their own approaches. I would like to thank the member for Higgins for her question and acknowledge her experience as a paediatrician, as a world-leading medical researcher and as someone who supports small business across her electorate. More than 25,000 small businesses in the electorate of Higgins are eligible for the expanded instant asset write-off, like a local Snap printing business, which was able to buy a new printer and support their four employees with the new business investment incentives that we've announced in recent budgets.

With COVID-19, Australia has encountered the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. We saw some forecasts last year saying that the unemployment rate could reach as high as 15 per cent. That's more than two million Australians who are unemployed. We know that the experience of previous recessions in the 1980s and the 1990s was of a scarring of the labour market. It took between eight and 10 years to get the unemployment rate back to where it was before those recessions. This time around, the experience of the Australian labour market and the experience of the Australian economy has been very different.

It took just over a year to get the unemployment rate back to where we were, and today the unemployment rate, at 5.2 per cent, is lower than it was when we came to government. We've seen today that payroll jobs are up, and we've seen that, across every state and territory in the Commonwealth, jobs are now higher than they were when we were going into the pandemic. One of the reasons for that is our policies to drive down taxes for families, by legislating to abolish a whole tax bracket—the 37c in the dollar tax bracket—and also putting in place a small-business tax cut, down to 25 per cent, which ensures that small businesses' taxes are now at their lowest in 50 years. This is helping to create jobs.

I'm asked: are there any alternative approaches? We know that those opposite, at the last election, took $387 billion of higher taxes. I know they're running around saying that their policies won't be identical to the last election, but I was surprised—or maybe not so surprised—to read on the front page of the Australian on 29 September the headline 'Jim Chalmers proposes Bill Shorten era family trusts tax hit'. That's a $27 billion hit on family businesses. They cry crocodile tears for small business. There's only one side of this House that supports small business, and that's the Liberals and Nationals in this coalition.