John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are getting a bit of a reaction! I must have touched a nerve. Let us look at your record of budgets and tax and income and expenditure. The last time you delivered a budget surplus, Senator Dastyari was six years old. There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

Let us have a look at the record. I want to take you to fuel excise. When the Hawke-Keating government was elected in 1983, the tax on fuel was 6.3c a litre. When they left in 1996, that had grown to 34c a litre—6.3c to 34c. It was the Howard government that froze that excise at 38c. It grew from 34c to 38c and then it was frozen in 1999-2000. Yes, we want to bring indexation back now to fix our roads. That is why I support it—to fix our roads.

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

Mr Rudd promised no new taxes. I wonder if Senator Bilyk can remember the luxury car tax. Do you remember the luxury car tax? There were to be no new taxes! That did a great job for Holden, didn't it? That really helped Holden get on their feet! Because someone worked hard and could afford an up-market car—let's tax that! Then there was the alcopops tax. That was going to solve all the problems of binge drinking.

Then Prime Minister Rudd, I think it was—it was hard to keep track of the Prime Minister in the previous government; it was hard to know who was Prime Minister at any time—gave us the superprofits tax. That was going to generate all the revenue. Then Prime Minister Gillard was going to solve all the problems with that tax by bringing in a minerals resource rent tax. She did exactly that. She spent $16 billion, but the tax did not raise any money—a total of about $300 million over the years. Then there was the carbon tax, the carbon tax we were never going to have. It did absolutely nothing to reduce CO2 emissions in Australia.

I do not think there would be one senator in this chamber who would not agree that, if you make money in this country, you should pay the tax in this country. That is fair. Life is about fairness and that is a fair way to be. We are well aware of the issue. My colleague Senator Heffernan has been pushing this barrow for a fair while, I can assure you. If you make the money here, you pay the tax here. We know about Google—why they are set up in Ireland—and we know about many of those other big companies, such as Apple. We know they are avoiding paying their share of tax.

But I want to point out Labor's record on tax reform. It really is embarrassing. Do you remember former Prime Minister Rudd holding his 2020 summit? He invited the talented and the opinionated. He got out the butcher's paper and came up with his thought bubble on tax reform—the Henry tax review. We heard all about the Henry tax review. So important was the Henry review that Labor did not release it until just before the budget in 2010—even though it had been given to Treasurer Wayne Swan in December 2009. Why was it not made public? What were they hiding? This is their history on tax reform. What came out of the Henry tax review? As I said, the resource super profits tax, which was expected to raise $49.5 billion over five years. Yes—$49.5 billion—an academic's tax with little thought for practical consequences. In July 2010, the resource super profits tax proposal was replaced with the minerals resource rent tax—another complex tax, and I have mentioned the figures on that. The original MRRT estimate was that it would raise $10.5 billion in its first two years to July 2014. In fact, just $340 million was raised in net terms in that period—less than $20 per Australian.