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

What is this debate all about? What is this parliament all about when we have a legitimate request of the minister to confirm that some bushfire victims in Western Australia will not pay the tax and the minister just sits there? I think he was asleep. Perhaps he did not hear the question. Perhaps I could get Senator Cormann to repeat the question. By confirmation to this parliament, I would certainly like to know if the Prime Minister has said that a group of individuals in Western Australia will be exempt.

In this committee stage of the debate it is intended that we go through the provisions of the act. We have a look at what the words say and we can be satisfied that those words do encompass what the media releases have said will happen. Clause 4.10 of this bill says that you must pay extra income tax for the 2011-12 financial year if you are an individual. I emphasis that if you are an individual—if you are a blood-sucking multinational company that Senator Brown talks about then you do not have to pay—and your income exceeds a certain amount then you have to pay a levy. But it says that that subsection:

… does not apply if you are a member of a class of individuals specified in a legislative instrument made by the Minister for the purposes of this subsection.

Then it goes on to qualify that a little bit by saying:

The Minister may only specify a class of individuals for the purposes of subsection (2) if the Minister is satisfied that the class was affected by a natural disaster—

between certain dates.

Senator Cormann has told us about a newspaper from his home state of Western Australia that put the pressure on the Prime Minister and got a commitment that these fire victims in Western Australia would be excluded. I am not sure why we cannot get the same commitment here in the Parliament of Australia. Whilst fortuitously the drought in most parts of Australia has dissipated, and that is fortunate, I understand there are still some parts of Australia—