Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs (Senator Scullion) and the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to income tax

Today I thought, after the first couple of questions, that we were going to go to an election on tax. We saw the government come in and they were agitated, they were excited, and there was a lot of backslapping and self-congratulating going on. I've never seen a question time in recent times start like that. But, of course, it all came to naught. After a couple of questions, they all started nodding off once again. They all had their heads down in their phones, or wherever they could hide from the answers that were being given to the questions, because they know, just like we know, that the tax system they want to introduce over the next six years is an unfair system. They know that it does not stack up to the proposals that the Labor Party is proposing to put before the Australian people. This will be one of the key battlegrounds in the forthcoming election. As I said, I thought that was going to be sooner rather than later but, no, 'sleepy hollow' started again. I think the election is still some time away.

Today we had Minister Cormann trying to justify the fact that the people in Malcolm Turnbull's electorate of Wentworth will be the biggest beneficiaries of the government's tax plan. The people of one of the richest electorates in this country, if not the richest, will gain most from this plan. And this is the other reason I thought we may be looking at an election: they started to throw the word 'aspirational' around; 'aspirations' were coming up again. And I thought, 'Yeah, you can hear an election coming on when the government starts talking about aspirational voters!'

But look at the context in which the term 'aspiration' was used. Minister Cormann was suggesting to us here that the reason the Australian public will accept their tax plan and the fact that the people in Wentworth are the biggest beneficiaries of their tax plan is that everyone's aspirational; everyone wants to be those people. And we're prepared to wait. Australians are prepared to wait until they become some of the richest people in Australia to get the benefits that those rich people are going to be delivered by this government. That's the argument he would have us accept. That is the argument they propose.

Either they think Australians are absolute mugs or they believe their own delusional rubbish. I think it's a mixture of both, to be honest. It's too tricky, it's too shifty and it's absolutely dishonest. It's a con. They know that they've built themselves a hole from which they will desperately try to get out, and they will do things like shifting the debate to a 'goanna's guts' debate. Now, I've never actually heard that term used before but, again, Minister Scullion, when talking about the tax plan, talked about a 'goanna's guts of a tax plan'. I have no idea what that is. It's the same sort of gobbledygook they talk to us about when they're talking about tax reform. It is hopeless. It is shifty. It is distraction.

What they ought to do is start acknowledging that the working people in this country who have average incomes need a tax cut. That's what the Labor Party is prepared to give them. We're prepared to back the first tranche of the government's very modest tax cuts for working people. When we're in government we will double that. But at this time, if that's all the government's prepared to give average income earners in this country, we're prepared to back that in. We're prepared to do that today, but we are not prepared to back in tax cuts over six years—two elections away—that deliver massive tax cuts to those who don't need them, to those at the big end of town, to those in the richest electorates. We're not prepared to do that when we need proper investments in our hospitals, in our schools, in our communities. That's what we want to do. We want to give benefits to average-working-wage Australians. They need a tax cut, and we want to give them that. We want to double what the government wants to give them, and we need to make the investments. If there are to be tax cuts in future for the people at the top end of town, that will be when the economy can afford it. But it will be after our investments in education and in the health system for all working Australians in this country.