Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think all senators and all Australians would welcome any attempt to simplify the tax laws. I listened with interest to Senator Murray’s very learned contribution to the debate on the Tax Laws Amendment (Repeal of Inoperative Provisions) Bill 2006 and I have to say that I agree with almost everything he said, and I think most would agree.

This is an attempt by this government to in a small way simplify the tax laws, but I think it is a little rich of the Labor Party to be moving second reading amendments to call, as I understand it, for more simplification when one might recall that, since we have been in government, the Labor Party has been a cause for proliferation of complex tax legislation. I need only to go back to the GST debate to indicate that a simple taxing arrangement under the goods and services tax was knocked off by the combination of the Labor Party and the Democrats. I concede that the Democrats allowed the principles of the bill to come in, but in doing so the government had to allow for a lot of exemptions from the simple scheme, which made that piece of legislation far more complex than it needed to be. It is no use rehashing that debate at the moment, but suffice it to say that, had the Labor Party supported that simple taxing measure in those days, at least one piece of legislation would have been simple. Even in those days the Labor Party—