Joe Bullock (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of Senator Moore, I move:

That the Senate notes the Abbott Government's petrol tax ambush and its negative impact on cost pressures facing Australian households and businesses.

I am aware of an amendment about to be moved by Senator Lazarus with respect to this motion. It is now just over a year since the Australian people accepted the word of the then opposition leader and voted to put the grown-ups back in charge and elected the 'no surprises, no excuses government' you could trust. The Liberals said you could trust them. They ran a unity ticket with Labor on the Gonski reforms. They promised no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no changes to pensions, no adverse changes to superannuation and no new taxes.

Mr Abbott told the Australian people at his campaign launch in August last year that Australians were:

… sick of nasty surprises and lame excuses from people that you have trusted with your future.

Amen to that! Just 12 months later this government has established a remarkable record. It is a record of broken promises that is possibly unequalled—a record of nasty surprises and lame excuses. Gonski has gone. Education has been cut. Health has been cut. Pensioners who rely on the government—and many of them put their faith in this government—have been betrayed by this government. This has ensured that their standard of living will fall relative to the rest of the community by decoupling increases to the pension from increases in wages. This government vies with Brutus for inflicting the unkindest cut of all on a most vulnerable section of the community who have no alternative other than to accept what they are offered by this heartless government.

I have already questioned Senator Abetz on the adverse change to the superannuation entitlements of Australian workers entailed by the freezing of their superannuation contributions for seven years—not six years as Senator Cormann lamely claimed in mitigation—and delaying the increase to 12 per cent until 2025. Senator Abetz's excuse for breaking this promise to the working people of Australia was:

… sometimes it is worthwhile to say no pay increase to protect jobs.

The government has broken its promise to the workers of Australia and told them to be thankful that they have a job—thankful, indeed, that they do not work in the vehicle industry, which this government has dispatched from our shores. What a lame excuse!

The list of broken promises goes on and on, and today it is our turn to examine the wreckage of the no new taxes promise and, in particular, the new tax on petrol. It is a new tax on practically every Australian household and small business. The current petrol tax regime is a legacy of Australia's second longest serving Prime Minister, John Howard. Mr Howard may not have experienced the love affair with the Australian people enjoyed by the great Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, but at least he could take their political temperature. In 2001 he stood out against the ideologues in his own party and made a decision on petrol which arguably saved his government. In 2001 John Howard abolished the automatic half-yearly excise indexation, and this is what he said on 1 March of that year:

Now that is an enormous structural change in the area of fuel taxation and, I mean, for those who adopt a lazy approach to raising revenue this will not be welcome. But for those who believe that greater disciplines can be put on government it will be welcome.

I do not for a moment accept the continuing negative commentary of the government that the Australian economy is in crisis—at least it was not in September last year when Labor left office. Although, with the progressive shutting down of Australia's manufacturing industry encouraged by this government and the associated steady rising of the unemployment rate, the economic chickens of this government may soon be coming home to roost. Nevertheless, if we were in a crisis, we would not expect the government of grown-ups to take the 'lazy approach to raising revenue' or to eschew the 'greater disciplines that can be put on government', as advocated by Mr Howard.

The Prime Minister should follow in the footsteps of his mentor, Mr Howard, and scrap this new tax on everything. Mr Howard was a big enough man to admit that he had been wrong in advocating fuel excise indexation. He said:

Let me make it clear that I was plainly wrong in not understanding some of the concerns held by the Australian people about the price of petrol, and I acknowledge that.

This government needs to follow the example of Mr Howard, acknowledge the interests of Australian people, admit that they were plainly wrong, abandon the lazy approach to raising revenue and scrap this tax. Mr Howard sought, through his actions, to bind future governments. He said that his decision would impose what motorists would see as a very welcome discipline on future governments. How disappointed Mr Howard will be to see that it is a coalition government which is abandoning the discipline which he sought to impose. While I would not claim that Mr Howard always acted in the interests of working people, particularly in his later, politically disastrous Work Choices years, there was a time when his understanding of working people—of Howard's battlers—won him elections. He understood the sensitivity of working people to petrol prices and legislated accordingly.

What is the level of understanding shown by this government? I was reminded of Michael Keaton's character in the movie Multiplicity when the current Treasurer Mr Hockey, like Peter Costello's dimwitted clone, claimed that his new tax was progressive because the poorest people either do not have cars or, if they do, do not drive them very far. If Mr Hockey had ever visited the outer suburbs of a major city, he may have been surprised to find large numbers of low-income families living there. He may also have discovered, as Professor Currie found in his 2008 research with respect to Melbourne, that the average car trip in the outer suburbs is 16.4 kilometres, whereas, in the inner suburbs, home to the more high-income families, the average car trip is only 6.4 kilometres. He may also have found that the outer suburbs are particularly ill-served by public transport. What this means for working people, Professor Currie found, was that 90 per cent of workers in outer suburbs use their cars to get to work, compared to just 65 per cent across Melbourne as a whole. For low-income outer-suburban families, you need a car to have a job.

And what of the unemployed? Having relatively prospered throughout the global financial crisis, as a result of the bold initiatives by Labor's courageous and underrated Treasurer Wayne Swan, Australia's unemployment rate is now somewhere over six per cent. I cannot be exactly sure, because of the crisis in the ABS overseen by this government. Our unemployment rate is now higher than the United States', for the first time in years. The unemployed are told to apply for more jobs. Petrol stations report an increasing number of motorists putting a minimum $5 petrol purchase in their cars. Like everyone else, these people would love to fill 'er up, but just cannot afford to do so. The $5 just gets them to their next job interview. Tell these people that an extra petrol tax is insignificant and does not matter. It does matter.

The government's senators have shown a liking for quoting the ABC's FactCheck when it suits them. This is what FactCheck said about the impact of the new petrol tax:

High income Australians spend more in absolute dollar terms on fuel, so will pay more fuel tax than lower income households.

However, as a proportion of gross income and weekly spending, fuel bills hit lower income families harder.

Census data and research from independent experts shows that people on lower incomes have enough cars and drive far enough to feel the impact of raising the fuel tax more than those on higher incomes.

So this new tax, this lazy approach to raising revenue, will hit low-income families hard. In this regard, it is like the new 15 per cent tax on superannuation contributions for workers earning less than $37,000 a year. It hits low-income earners. It is like the new proposed goods and services tax on food, which is part of the Prime Minister's 'mature debate' on the GST. It hits low-income earners hard. It is like the proposed lift in the rate of GST from 10 per cent to 12 per cent. The GST hits hardest those who spend the greatest part of their income. Low-income earners tend to spend the lot. A higher GST hits low-income earners hard. It is like the $7 GP tax. It hits low-income earners hard. All of these new taxes hit low-income earners. 'No new taxes'? What a joke!

Senator Cormann says that the new petrol tax is not a new tax at all; it is merely adjusting the rate of an existing tax. What a pathetic excuse! The government might just as well claim that, when it said, 'No cuts to health, no cuts to education, no change to pension arrangements, no adverse changes to superannuation, no surprises, no excuses, no cuts to the ABC and no new taxes,' the word 'no' was merely an inadvertent typographical error—as claimed by Mr Abetz today in answer to a question. Those excuses are just as lame as their current excuses.

When John Howard scrapped the indexation of the fuel excise, he said:

… what that means is that if a future government of whatever stripe wants to increase the excise on petrol that government will have to pass a bill to increase it.

This current government has tried to sneak around that requirement, but what Labor says on behalf of the working people of Australia is: don't do it.