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

The arrogance of the government comes through again. This may have been discussed at the committee hearing, but I was not at the committee hearing. In fact the majority of senators were not. The rules of Senate debate provide that this is the time when senators can question the minister. In fact one of the questions I just asked was in relation to the floods happening now at Bega on the South Coast of New South Wales and at Burketown up on the Gulf of Carpentaria. They are happening now; they were not happening when the committee met. How could these questions possibly have been answered then? We see this arrogance when the government is dealing with legitimate questions of the Senate—and we are paid to be here on behalf of the people of Australia to ask these questions.

The importance of the question seems to have escaped the minister. We are supposed to be collecting $1.8 billion through this new Labor government tax. But the more people who are exempted from it, and exempted for appropriate reasons, the fewer people will be left in Australia to pay the tax. In fact, horribly as it has turned out, in the last few months there are not many parts of Australia that have not been disaster declared. We might end up finding that there are only 100,000 individual Australian taxpayers who are going to pay this levy, in which case it is not going to raise the $1.8 billion that this government seeks. It may well be that we have been through this whole exercise, this lengthy debate, to recover a pittance of the money that the federal government is expecting.

The minister has now agreed to take my questions on notice—that is great; we will get the answers to them long after the legislation is dealt with by the Senate. That is a great deal of help. I asked him these questions last night, so why could he not have taken them on notice then? He has a department of 3,000 people who surely could have got the answer for him within a couple of hours. But here is the arrogance of the Gillard government.

I would like to know what the government is likely to collect. I know how departments work, and they would have made an assessment. Sure, they do not have all the facts, but they would have had to have made an assessment to brief the minister and say, ‘Look, if you are exempting these people and, given the number of areas that have been declared disaster areas, that will take out X number of Australians and that means only Y Australians will pay, so what chance have we got of collecting the $1.8 billion that the government seems to need?’ As I read the legislation, if there is another disaster, heaven forbid, up until 30 June 2012, the people affected will be exempt too. It may—heaven forbid, as I say—end up that nobody in Australia is paying this levy. It is typical of the government’s shoddy legislation and of the shoddy way that the Gillard government treats the parliament and the Australian people.

In the expectation that the minister, true to the form he has shown to date, will not answer the questions I have raised, I want to make some other remarks before the bills proceed. I remind senators that this is legislation to impose yet another new Gillard Labor government tax. It is absolutely unprecedented in the history of an Australian parliament. Never before have we imposed a special tax to pay for recovery from any natural disaster. Never before has it happened. We have had cyclones, we have had floods, we have had droughts, we have had earthquakes through the whole of our history, but never before have we ever paid a separate tax for the recovery. It has been paid for by governments of the day, Liberal, Labor, Callithumpian or whatever, out of the normal taxation revenue of government.

This government collects something like $350 billion every year in tax. Surely, out of that $350 billion this government collects from taxpayers, they could have found $1.8 billion. We did not have to have another new tax for what started off being a single disaster, the Queensland flood. It just demonstrates that this government’s answer to any issue, any calamity or any policy question is: ‘Let’s impose another new tax.’ The government has already announced that we will be having a mining tax later this year and now we will have the flood tax—all new taxes. And we are going to have a carbon tax as well, a carbon tax from a Prime Minister who solemnly swore before the last election:

… there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

So what faith can you put in any promises made by Ms Gillard and her ministers? That is what this bill is about—imposing a whole new tax on the Australian public.

I am going to try one more time and ask the minister why it is that this tax is only being paid by individual taxpayers. If it came out of the general revenue, out of the $350 billion collected each year, then BHP, Rio Tinto, Xstrata, Coles and Woolworths would all pay their share of the tax. And that seems fair in Australia—companies pay tax and individuals pay tax. But this tax, for some reason which nobody can explain to me—I have asked and asked and asked—is not being levied on these big multinational companies, these giants of Australian industry. It is only being levied on individuals. So I repeat: the butcher and the baker will have to pay the tax from their hard earned income, but Coles and Woolworths, with whom they compete, will not have to pay the tax. Coles and Woolworths get off scot-free. What is it about Coles and Woolworths that makes the Labor Party not want those companies to pay their fair share? Xstrata, BHP, and Rio Tinto are all very big investors in Australia. I am very grateful they are here, these multinational companies, and I am pleased that they make good profits, but why are they being let off scot-free? What is it between the Labor Party and those multinationals that they are allowed to escape this disaster recovery levy or tax without putting in a cent? Individuals—the people in here, the attendants, senators, people listening to this broadcast—have to pay the tax, but Coles and Woolies, BHP, Xstrata and Rio Tinto do not pay a cent. Tell me the sense of that.

I simply cannot believe it. I can believe the Greens would vote for that—because they are an absolute policy vacuum. But I am absolutely amazed that the Independents have fallen for this. What rationale do you have for charging individuals and not the corporate giants? When I have asked Senator Sherry this before, he has not answered the question. All he has done is get up and say, ‘Your government put a levy on containers.’ Yes, they did. ‘They put a levy on milk bottle sales.’ Yes, they did. ‘They put a levy on pounds of sugar.’ Yes, they did. ‘They put an Ansett levy on airfares.’ Yes, they did that—but everybody paid that, whether a corporate giant or a little person using the airline or using a container. Mind you, there were not too many ordinary Australians using containers. Those levies were across the board. This levy, which could easily have been imposed on everyone through the general taxation regime, is not being imposed on the corporate giants. How does that make sense? If only someone could explain to me what the policy rationale for that is. That is why the coalition is totally opposed to this new tax of the Labor government. The Labor government is addicted to taxing and addicted to spending.

This all comes about because a state Labor government, regrettably the Labor government in my home state of Queensland, was so bad at financial management that it is broke and it cannot pay for the recovery. Senator Xenophon very skilfully extracted, during the course of this debate, the admission that the Queensland government could not pay the $50 million to $55 million needed for an insurance premium. So they went uninsured and, as a result of that, the Queensland government cannot afford to do what governments are supposed to do. But their mates in the federal Labor Party have come in and whacked this tax on individual taxpayers—not on the corporate giants but on individual taxpayers—and we have to fork out.

I hope that the people of Australia understand that this tax is unnecessary. Reconstruction should have been paid for out of general revenue. This is a new tax, but it is not a tax like other taxes, which are levied across the board, including on corporate Australia—the big guys. It is only going on the individual Australians who earn more than $50,000. You do not have to be in a very highly paid job these days to get $50,000. Those individual Australians have to pay this new tax of the Gillard Labor government because the Gillard government is simply incapable of managing money. So I ask the minister yet again what that is all about.

I repeat my question: what were the department’s estimates of who would be exempted from this and did they take into account the floods happening as we speak in two parts of Australia and—I hope this does not happen—the other disasters that could well happen between now and 30 June 2012? As I say, I hope further disasters do not happen, but it could well be that not one Australian is paying the tax. This is, again, typical of the incompetence and stupidity of this Labor government that cannot be trusted with money.