Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters) Share this | Hansard source

No, it's not rubbish. Senator Bilyk can say that it's rubbish all she likes but, when it came to Labor's housing tax, every analyst pointed out that higher rents would have been the outcome. SQM, who I think did some of the numbers, went city by city on what we would see in increases in rents. We saw them across the board. Under Labor's policy, rents in Perth would have gone up by $73 a week. In Brisbane, it was $91 a week. In Darwin, we would have had $15 extra a week. In Melbourne, it was $65 extra a week. It would have been $50 a week extra in Sydney, $56 a week extra in Adelaide and $44 a week extra in Hobart. In Canberra, it was around $56 extra a week. The prescription of the Labor Party was higher taxes on income, higher taxes on capital such as housing and higher taxes on those who had saved for their retirements. That doesn't help middle-income earners. It doesn't help people get out of poverty. All it does is crush their aspiration. It sees less jobs. Every time the Labor Party is in government there are fewer jobs, a slower economy and higher taxes, and ordinary Australians do it tough.

We're not going to be lectured to by the Labor Party. Wages growth is starting to pick up. It's starting to pick up through a range of factors which we've been working on. There is more work to do, but the prescription of $387 billion in higher taxes— (Time expired)