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

I want to support the comments made by my colleague in relation to this motion to avoid the normal processes of the Senate and deal with the bill without giving it appropriate scrutiny. It is certainly a bill that requires scrutiny. As Senator Cormann has quite rightly pointed out, this is another backflip by a government that does not know what it is doing. A former Labor government, the Rudd Labor government, reduced the tax from 15 per cent to 7½ per cent amid great fanfare that it was reducing taxes. Not two years later, the Gillard Labor government is now reinstating the 15 per cent, doubling the tax, as part of their insatiable appetite for new taxes on the Australian people.

If ever there were a bill needing proper scrutiny by the Senate Economics Legislation Committee, it is this bill. For that reason I urge the Senate not to support this motion but to vote against the motion so that it can go through the normal—

Debate interrupted.