Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tempting as it is to take the bait on that last contribution, I will steer well clear of it. I just hope that those remarks receive sufficient publicity so that the electors of Australia can pass judgement on them at the time of the next election.

What I do want to put on the record is a comment from an article by the esteemed Saul Eslake, where he quotes Machiavelli:

… there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; …

That really is a summation of where we are in this tax debate. Really, the Turnbull government cannot put a foot forward, they cannot put a foot backwards, without stepping in some quite smelly manure. They are unable to put up a coherent policy in respect of tax, so we may well ask, 'Why is that?'

The answer goes back to the 2014 budget, when they attacked the Australian population with the Best Day of My Life, the cigars and the glass of wine, the feet on the balcony. They celebrated all night long, and then when the media and the electors of Australia got hold of that budget, the government realised that there was not going to be much joy forthcoming. So they got in a bunker and they tried to sell it. The Hon. Joe Hockey turned out not to be a very good salesman. Apart from suggesting that poor people do not drive cars, he careened into every possible corner of the building, blundering his way to oblivion, and is now our esteemed ambassador in Washington.

And we know what happened to the Hon. Tony Abbott. We know now that we had a tremendous period of hope, I suppose, in the Australian population after the formation of the new look government, so to speak: a new Treasurer, a new Prime Minister. The general population that I spoke to were interested. They were thinking: 'There's a new order. No-one liked Tony. The Hon. Tony Abbott is gone and things are looking up.' People used to talk to me in the street about the 'new government'. There was not a new government; they were just rearranging the deckchairs. Quite clearly the government are blundering their way through this whole period of government.

They had a budget in 2015 that no-one can remember. No-one is talking about what happened in the 2015 budget. Now we are trying to prise—it is like prising open a coffin—from them what is in the 2016 budget. No-one seems to know. The Treasurer does a Press Club address and then goes to his local friendly talkback host, who tears strips off him, tears him to pieces on the radio: 'That was a lot of drivel. They were just words. What are you actually going to do?'

This has been going on now for quite some time, and people are getting a sense that not only are the deckchairs being rearranged on this grand ship of state but it is also probably a bit rudderless. The government are really trying to work out, as Machiavelli said, 'Where can I go to find someone I'm not going to upset?' The reality is that that is not the job of government, it is not the job of a Treasurer and it is not the job of a Prime Minister. Their role is not to please everyone in society or every section of society. The Greens can waffle on about their grand plan of not spending on defence and the like, but governments do have clear, straightforward priorities; defence of the nation is one of them. If the Hon. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sticks to his guns and gets every dollar that can be spent in Australia, I do agree that is an area of great public policy. It certainly should be our policy, and we would attempt to do that.

However, what we have is one party that have actually put out what could be called a courageous piece of policy in respect of negative gearing. I know that there are people on the other side who think they can electorally seek advantage from the position of the Labor Party, and they think in their electorate it is a vote winner. Well taxation policy and Treasury policy, if it is only going to be viewed through the prism of what is electorally popular, we are not going to be a very good country. I do not think Paul Keating or any of the great reformers before him actually thought it down to, 'Will this win me votes in this seat?' They had a vision for the country—they had a vision of fairness, a vision of change—and they knew there would be some cost in that. What is bereft in this government is that vision. They are only looking for electoral advantage at every spot. That makes them tentative—they look tentative, they are acting tentative—and so who knows what is going to come out of the 2016 budget? We are not even getting the seasoned leaks that we used to get. We used to get leaks. They had a bit of a dash at the GST. They worked out it was electoral poison, so they ran away from it at 100 miles an hour. They lost their ability to prosecute an argument and a case.

If you look at where you can increase revenue—once you go away from the PAYE taxpayers at $195-odd billion or the corporate taxpayers at $71 billion, then you come back to sales tax and GST at $60-odd billion; the rest of the money that comes in is in very small buckets—you have to go over three or four years to get reasonable, respectable sized savings. If you own up to the fact that PAYE taxpayers are carrying their share of the burden—and through bracket creep they will carry a little bit more of their share of the burden—and if you accept the economic policy that that will be a drag on GDP, then you could probably mount an argument that we need to do something about bracket creep. It is straightforward, it is economics, it would be popular, but are they going to put up that in the budget? We simply do not know.

We know that they are likely to reduce their major supporters' tax rates, and they are not doing a whole lot about conquering the worldwide global problem of transfer pricing and international tax avoidance. The Apples of the world have got it worked out, and it is perfectly legal: no tax in California, you do your R&D there; 12½ per cent or whatever in Ireland, that is where your headquarters are; the Cayman Islands are where you base the stuff that is sold out of Australia. Make no money in Australia, transfer to the Cayman, back to Ireland—they have got it all worked out perfectly. But that is not helping our situation here, where we all have lots of these things, these gadgets. They should be taxed appropriately. There is no look in that corner. So what are they going to do? I am waiting with great interest to see this set of budget papers, to see what they are actually going to match their rhetoric with. I do not know if there are any hats left that you can pull a rabbit out of. You really do have to take tough decisions, hard decisions. They will not please everybody, and they are very unlikely to be easy to win. You need to prosecute those. We do not see a great deal of that at the moment.

In the last couple of minutes that I have, I would like to put on the record that there is one easy free kick for any government—that is, scrutinise the expenditure. Anybody who follows a number of the committees' work around this parliament would realise that there is a lot of money expended through various departments. One small example of this is that approximately $98.3 million was allocated in the 2015 budget for expanding the diplomatic footprint of Australia. It is a very noble goal. We should be touting around the world Australia's wares in terms of trade and credentials in terms of being a good international citizen. But when you see figures of up to $10,000 a square metre to fit out an office for 14 people, you have to wonder whether that is a good use of taxpayers' money. You have to wonder what level of delegation allows people to spend enormous amounts of taxpayers' money. It does not meet the pub test. As I said to the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 'Do you just wave this by your desk? Does it just get delegated? Who actually signs off on the fact that you are paying $18,000 a week, $72,000 a month and $860,000 a year? And then you are going to spend another $7 million fitting it out for 13 people!' The people of Australia, the taxpayers of Australia, do not like profligate spending. That is one area this government could have a look at. (Time expired)