Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That's a good segue into taking note, because, despite all of those overtures about, 'We're not going to do it; there's no spare bedroom tax,' we still didn't actually get a no from the government; we didn't get it ruled out. I note that Senator Wong did not do that. I didn't have it, I must say, and it has been reported, so, whatever the postulation from the other side is, it was actually reported, and we have not had it ruled out. And it wasn't on my bingo card, I have to say. I know that this government loves to spend—we know that. We know they love to get their claws into your money—we know that as well. But I didn't see this one coming. Perhaps it was just a thought bubble, but, once again, it was not ruled out. However, what we did hear from the Treasurer was that the tax system is—I think he used the word 'imperfect' and skewed in favour of the older generations, which should be alarming language for any of the Australians who have saved for their retirement. We heard that language coming from that side of the chamber in a different era many times before, with the potential for grabs on superannuation, negative gearing—you name it.

This, after all, is a high-spending socialist government, and we know the old adage. I think it was Margaret Thatcher who said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. So I thought to myself that we could come up with a couple of suggestions of things that might be considered at the next—what did we call it? The Economic Reform Roundtable was the language used. What about, for example, a pet tax? Australians love pets, and you could put on a sliding scale for pets. Pets produce carbon, so we don't like that. That's bad apparently. You could put on a sliding scale. It also achieves the other socialist goal of creating a miserable world, so that is something that could be considered.

What about a protest tax? We've seen that comfortably. Of course, you would have to be careful. You wouldn't want to tax Extinction Rebellion protests—just the ones where they take the Aussie flag. I thought about, possibly, an ambition levy, because nothing upsets socialists more than personal ambition, and taxing it would achieve the two-fold goal of knocking off people's hopes and dreams while also pumping money into the coffers. I think there could perhaps be conversation licensing fees. You could snuff out free speech—they love that! They are all into that at the moment. You could make yourself a nice little clip on the way through and consider a range of taxes on non-state-approved discussions on things like how proud we are of our country and history and give yourself a nice 25 per cent on top of that.

The point is that they're going to have to find ways to do it, because they're spending your money like it is going out of fashion. They are going to have to get creative. So they can laugh all they want about a spare bedroom tax. It's going to be something ludicrous.

Question agreed to.