Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

It's a bit of a misnomer to refer to this part of today's proceedings as taking note of answers, because I think the only thing that we got was non-answers to the questions asked by the coalition today. In circumstances where the budget is now in a complete shambles, the government are doing backflips to try and resolve the problems that they have themselves created by not properly designing the reforms that they wanted to bring in in the first place, which is not the first time we've seen Labor do this. Now they're trying to scramble to get things back in order and to try and recover some ground from what has been a terribly received budget and, quite frankly, a complete shambles of a budget.

I'm going to do something that's very unusual for someone from the coalition, and that's to quote the ABC, which said in an article last Friday:

Business has labelled Labor's budget tax overhaul a "freak show", saying its proposed changes are like an American celebrity who has had too much plastic surgery.

If the ABC is saying this about Labor's budget, what is the reality? We've seen this before. The article continues:

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) chief executive Andrew McKellar told the ABC's Insiders Podcast the changes were starting to get ugly.

…   …   …

Australian Industry Group CEO Innes Willox said the changes to Labor's cornerstone tax policy added complexity, uncertainty and retrospectivity into the tax system that would harm business.

We all know—and Labor knows this too—that, if you tax something more, you don't get more of it. I sat in this chamber during the last period when Labor were in government, when they started hiking up the taxation on tobacco. Now how's that going? That's a complete shambles. There's another thing that the Labor Party has lost control of completely. There was Kevin Rudd's war on alcopops, where they ratcheted up the tax on alcopops with the express intention of having less of them. And here we are—increasing tax and saying that we're going to get more housing when the budget papers say we're going to get less. That's on top of the fact that the Labor Party, despite the fact that they say that they're building more houses, are building 30,000 houses less per year—170,000 houses a year are being built in this country under Labor. Under the coalition, it was 200,000 houses per year. How can they stand there with a straight face and say we're getting more houses when the reality is we are getting less? That is how dishonest this government is.

This is a government that went to the election that said it would not make changes to capital gains tax—