Chris Ketter (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion that the Senate take note of the answers Senator Cormann gave to the questions I asked him. On the general issue of the quality of the economic leadership of this government, I think any objective observer of material put before the parliament today and of the responses we received would form the view that, instead of the quality of economic leadership improving since Prime Minister Turnbull took the top office, it has deteriorated quite alarmingly, to the extent that we now have a shambolic approach in the very important area of tax reform. The first question I put to the Minister for Finance related to the disparity between his response on bracket creep and that of the Treasurer. The Treasurer identified bracket creep as a job killer and a growth killer, so one could be forgiven for forming the view that this was the government's top priority. But nobody sent the memo to the Minister for Finance, because his response on the issue of bracket creep was that it is not the problem it has been in the past, or words that effect. The minister's response to my question was to divert and say I was not quoting him completely, and he made the comment that there was a drag on growth with respect to bracket creep. The fact remains that we have a Minister for Finance and a Treasurer singing from two different hymn sheets, highlighting the fact that the economic leadership being provided is appalling.

My first supplementary question went to the issue of whether or not it had been only since last September that they had started looking at issues like superannuation and the GST. We see a government and a Treasurer basically trying to indicate that nothing has been done for the past 2½ years on issues such as tax reform, but we know that in September of last year the most senior bureaucrats identified that one of Mr Turnbull's first acts after becoming Prime Minister was to halt the release of the green paper, which had been expected within the next six weeks, pending a full rethink of tax reform. They were told at that point to put everything on ice. A reset on tax reform was taking place, according to one senior executive. This is after the fact that we had a reform process in place.

At least the former Treasurer put out a press release in March 2015 identifying what on the surface appeared to be an understandable process that would be followed, including a conversation with the nation on tax reform which would involve a green paper and a white paper following the discussion paper. We were all taken in by that because major corporations, industry bodies and interest groups then spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting taxation advice and legal advice to make submissions to Canberra for the white paper. The Business Council of Australia submission went to 75 pages, and the process cost Australian industry hundreds of millions of dollars, and there is speculation about how much mining companies and banks spent preparing their submissions. The Tax White Paper Taskforce had more than 700 public submissions uploaded to its website from companies such as ANZ, BHP Billiton and British American Tobacco. We were all involved in a journey only to find that, with the assent of the Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, to his new role, we had the pin being pulled on it and instead of the economic leadership that Mr Turnbull promised at the time, in September, we have an absolute descent into a shambolic situation.

Senator Cormann talked about the fact that the budget was on an improving trajectory, but we have a doubling of the deficit. So, we have a very poor quality of economic leadership on display here.