James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Infamous—thank you, Senator Scarr—notorious schemes of those on the Left, who think that they can make people happier by taxing them more, taking their money off them and giving it to other people. We say: no, you should have that money. You should have that money in your purse or in your wallet. You should have that money because it is your money. You can spend it on buying a car—often it will be second hand—and you can spend it on buying that new TV if you wish, because that is what a society is about. It is about ensuring that the individual and their family, in whatever colour or make it comes in, has power over their own destiny, without that ugly hand of the state intervening in there.

That's why we are so proud on this side of the chamber—so proud—that we were able to vote for tax cuts. One of the premier elements of the Governor-General's speech, when he came here at the opening of parliament, was our tax plan. It's a tax plan that didn't just start with tax cuts on 1 July, a mere month ago; it's a plan that takes tax cuts for the next few years. Sadly, one of the big complaints that people level at politicians is that we're too short-term, that we focus on tomorrow, on the headline, on our re-election. This is a party and a government—the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Country Liberal Party, the Liberal-National Party, this coalition of the Centre Right—that took to the election on May 18 a long-term plan for tax cuts, because we wanted to show to the people that we trusted them and that this is what we thought they should be doing with their money.

You know what the people did? They wandered into those polling booths in the pre-poll period. They didn't say much. I remember Bribie Island. Bribie Island was on fire, because they wandered in and they were cranky with those on the Left. They couldn't understand why any political party would want to raise taxes and take away their money. They couldn't understand why self-funded retirees—in some cases pensioners—were going to have their savings effectively taken away from them. They couldn't understand why people who had worked hard all their lives, with calluses on their hands, who had given up so much for themselves, for their family and for their community, were going to be punished by a political party for doing the right thing.

That is a sad reflection upon the Labor Party. And I'm a little bit of two minds on this, but I probably don't want the Labor Party to learn the lessons from this last election, because if you don't learn the lessons from the last election you'll repeat them at the next election—and I hope you do repeat those mistakes at the next election, because then more quiet Australians will understand that with Scott Morrison and Michael McCormack we have a government of humility, of seriousness, who want to take politics off the front page of the newspapers and put it on page 4 or 6 or 10 or 11 and let people get on with it.