Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

A progressive tax is when your tax rate is leveraged according to your income and your wealth, so income taxes are a progressive tax. A regressive tax is when rich people pay the same rate of tax as poor people, so a regressive tax is a GST, a goods and services tax. Any high school or first-year economics student would be able to tell you that. The Greens do not support regressive taxes.

This debate is not just about the impact that this tax is going to have on those Australians who can least afford to pay more of their disposable income—what little they do have—on goods and services in this country. It is also much bigger than that; it is about the debate we should be having on real tax reform. As soon as we go down the GST path there will not be any discussion on other tax options. The government has a green paper and a white paper to discuss tax reform, but all we hear about now is GST. It has become the political football. It has become the national conversation.