Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor's promotion of its ugly politics of envy seems to know no bounds. Jealousy and envy motivates Labor's policy settings these days, and that undermines the virtues on which our nation's success was built. Indeed, as Australia's great Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies opined in his Forgotten People speech:

If the motto is to be, "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you don't die, the State will look after you; but if you don't eat, drink and be merry, and save, we shall take your savings from you", then the whole business of life will become foundationless.

Wasn't he so right? And what he has shown is exactly what the Australian Labor Party are seeking to descend Australian society into.

The simple fact is that there are many hundreds of thousands of men and women right around Australia that have scrimped and saved to ensure that they are self-reliant in retirement. And what are the Labor Party seeking to do? Deny them the benefits and the rewards of that thrift and that self-reliance. We, in the coalition, want to build this nation by encouraging the virtues of thrift, savings and self-reliance, but Labor today seeks to tear down those virtues with scant regard for the actual consequences.

Senator Ketter suggested that the Labor policy on tax credits in relation to the shareholdings of pensioners and superannuants was responsible and well considered, and that the facts were on the table. Let me put one fact on the table. I wonder who said this: 'We will now complete the implementation of the imputation system by allowing excess credits to be funded to resident Australian shareholders, complying superannuation funds and registered charitable organisations.' Further on, it continues: 'Many thousands of pensioners who have modest investments in public companies currently obtain no tax benefit from the franked dividends they receive. The full value of these credits will now flow through to the pensioner shareholders.' That was the Australian Labor Party policy, in a bipartisan way, only 20 years ago. Men and women around Australia, on that basis—