Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to confess that I break out in a cold sweat every time I'm confronted with the Australian Labor Party and their coalition partners, the Greens, lecturing us on matters of the economy. I'm not anti-Labor. As I have said in this place before, I grew up in a Labor household in a Labor suburb and my parents were supporters of the Labor Party all their lives. But I very quickly learnt there are two things that the Labor Party have no idea about, and often the policies and programs they pursue combine the two. I don't intend to spend too much time on the Greens—I flicked on the TV before, and one of the Greens contributors was telling me about extinct birds and how somehow they had some impact on the financial management of the country—but what I do want to say is that the Labor Party cannot manage an economy and they know nothing about rural, regional and provincial Australia. They don't care about it. It's not their base. If you chopped down the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine, they would have no reason to leave anywhere with a postcode that ends in three zeros.

Let's look at both together. I was interested in the contribution just made by Senator Singh. If you follow its logic, all corporations are owned and occupied by millionaires. There are hundreds of thousands of corporate businesses in this country that are structured as proprietary limited enterprises for very sound and valid reasons, and they're going to miss out on corporate tax cuts because we have this class distinction happening—that is, if you happen to pay a corporate tax rate, somehow you are a millionaire and you can afford to pay more.