Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

No, the National Party is not like that—not when it comes to ‘ripping all this money out of Australia and sending the profits overseas’ and ‘Why aren’t they paying their fair share; we have to have a mining superprofits tax to make sure those corporate Bs pay their share.’ Why is it, Minister, that with this recovery of my state of Queensland, and of New South Wales and Victoria and I guess Western Australia with the fires, it is only individuals—read ‘small business men and women and wage earners—who are picking up the bill? With these great social engineers in the Labor Party and the Greens who do not want the poor people to pay, only the rich people, why are we having this tax only on individuals and not on those ‘big multinational money grabbing companies that send all Australia’s profits overseas’? Why is this happening in this way? I am seriously interested to hear the excuse from the minister. I would love to have heard Senator Brown try and bumble his way through an answer to that.

Senator Xenophon has very clearly and actively and aggressively pointed out that this tax is not all about rebuilding Queensland. Queensland will be rebuilt, I can assure you. It has been rebuilt after every cyclone that has hit that state in the last 150 years. After all the floods and the droughts we have had in Queensland in the last 150 years, Queensland has been rebuilt and it will be rebuilt again following the most recent floods and the cyclone. We need a levy because the Queensland state Labor government is so incompetent, so bereft of any financial management skills at all, that it is broke. Quite clearly, my state government is broke. How is it going to pay for this rebuilding? It picks up the phone to its Labor mates in Canberra and says it cannot afford to pay for it itself so let us have a levy. Queensland have not been sensible enough, like South Australia and other states, to take out insurance. Do you know why they did not take out insurance? They could not afford the premium. I think Senator Xenophon, through the committee system, has shown—or did I read it in the paper?—that the premium is $50-$55 million. They could not afford it so they winged it, knowing that when things went bad their mates in the Labor Party in Canberra would come to their rescue.

But their mates in the Labor Party in Canberra are not coming to the rescue out of the general revenue; they are going to impose a special levy—not on the money grabbing multinational companies that send all their profits overseas but on individuals, Australians, who cannot send their profits overseas even if they want to. If you are a decent government worried about social equity, wouldn’t you say to the Australian public, ‘Look, the progressive taxation system that has been so important in Australia over many years has got out of kilter a bit and the poor people are paying too much and the rich people are not paying enough.’ Wouldn’t you think you would say, ‘Let’s adjust the tax system, let’s make it more progressive.’ But, no, the Labor Party will not do that, because they are dishonest and they know there would be a voter backlash against them. So rather than doing the taxation reform that perhaps they think needs to be done, they approach it in a different way. If they did it out of general revenue, then the really big earners in Australia—those ‘money grabbing multinationals who send all of their profits overseas’—would have paid a fair bit towards the cost of rebuilding Queensland. Those people on $200 million or $300 million a year income would have paid a lot towards the cost had it come from general revenue, because we have this progressive taxation system. But, no, we are not doing that. We are introducing this special flood levy.

Again, as I pointed out in my speech on the second reading, we have a flood or a drought or a cyclone every year. Are we going to have a flood, drought or cyclone levy every year? This is why I have predicted, as I did in my speech on the second reading, that this flood levy will become a permanent part of the Australian taxation system while Labor is in power, because they simply cannot be trusted with money—they cannot manage money, they cannot manage taxation and that is why, when anything happens, they bung on a new tax.

It is a long preamble to my question, but I want to get from the minister the understanding, the policy reason as to why only individuals are paying for the rebuilding of my state of Queensland—not companies, not the multinationals which are ripping the profits out of Australia and sending them overseas. Why are they getting a free ride when it comes to rebuilding my state, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia? What is the policy rationale for doing that? Now do not get up and say, Minister, that you have a Medicare levy and that is how it works there, so this is how it will work here. This is supposed to be all about rebuilding my state and others after massive floods because my state government was too incompetent to have money aside to do it themselves.