Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. The most important thing here is that we must stand up for a bit of honesty and transparency and move away from a certain, dare I say it, deceitfulness where taxes are brought in under the guise of national security. You know what they always say about patriotism: it is the last refuge of a scoundrel. This charge is the tax of a scoundrel. The government says: ‘We must cover the costs of increased security measures but we can’t table them. The reason we can’t table them is that they don’t exist.’ This is in fact just another mechanism to collect money for the government.

This charge is a double whammy. There is a tipping point with charges. If you keep putting charges on, you will get to the point where they do make a difference: people make a decision not to come here. When they make a decision not to come here, they go somewhere else and enjoy their holidays in Hawaii or in Bali or wherever. It is an extremely competitive market. We have a big problem with the Japanese. They have started moving away from Australia, their former attraction. One might suggest that this has not been helped lately by the leading officer of this nation and his snub of Japan at the start of his exposure in that office. As the Japanese are moving away from the north, there is a huge hole emerging in the North Queensland economy. So, far from putting a tax on movement, we should be encouraging it. We should be making travel as affordable as possible and doing everything in our power to encourage people back to our nation. It just stands to reason that, the more affordable you make a destination, the more it will stimulate the economy and the more benefit you will get from the greater income stream into the nation by our being an affordable destination.

The Labor government has also been completely incapable of dealing with the fuel crisis. The price of fuel is also a huge inhibitor in the tourism industry of Northern Australia. The Labor government has come up with no real policy to deal with the fact that a fundamental underwriter of our economy, the price of fuel, is moving to a point where, without a shadow of a doubt, we will head into a recession. If we continue to put these downward pressures on the Australian dollar by making Australia less affordable to travellers from overseas, and if we start to get a devaluation in the Australian dollar, then the current indictment of the Australian motorist paying for fuel at $1.70 could easily blow out to $2.50 and $3.

Just think of it; the maths is quite simple. I remember locking the $1 in when the exchange rate was getting close to US50c. If that pressure were to continue, then the cost of fuel, which underpins the tourism industry, the agricultural industry and the mining industry, could take them to a tipping point where the underlying economy of those industries would become unviable and, of course, the economy would crash. I believe we would have a recession like we have never seen in living memory.

This is something that you would have thought the Labor Party would, during their 2020 Summit, have gone into bat for. That would have been something constructive to come out of the 2020 Summit—the idea of a new form of supply, a new mechanism to drive down the price of fuel by increasing supply. But instead we get other things, such as this bill before us today that does completely the opposite. This is in a market where we are trying to encourage people to come to our nation and to help underpin the economy—especially in the north; and I am talking about the remote north of Australia. The economy in the remote north has been created on the promise of a certain income stream from tourism. Now that that income stream from tourism has had a huge hole put in it, the whole financing capacity of that capital infrastructure has also got a major problem before it. Why would we bring forward a bill that is going to add to the problems? If this bill is truly for security measures—and we know it is not, because they cannot be tabled—why doesn’t it bring some transparency and honesty? Surely, after the alcopops fiasco, you would think that the government would realise that Australia was catching on to this idea that if you just bang on a tax and give it a romantic name, everybody will swallow it. Well, they are not anymore. It is interesting to see now that even Family First and a whole range of people are now awake to where the Labor government is on certain issues and how they try to weasel these taxes in.