Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Australian Greens (Senator Di Natale) today relating to the 2015-16 Budget.

I cannot help sometimes feeling cynical about politics, and I have been here for only three years. But I do say to many Australians: if you were not cynical about Australian politics yesterday, before the budget last night, you would be today. This is a government whose key plank of their budget for 2015 is a small business incentives package, $5.5 billion to help small business in this country—which I wholeheartedly agree with—after taking away $5.4 billion only 12 months ago from the very same sector.

I remember standing up here when we were debating the mining tax last year and saying, 'I bet my bottom dollar, London to a brick, that this government brings back almost the same package, dressed up, rebranded under the Liberal brand.' Well, that is what we got last night. And I must say, with one or two exceptions, I am incredibly disillusioned that the mainstream media has not even commented on this. There are all these stories out there about what a great small business package this is that the government has been delivering for small business. The best you could say is that we are back to square one. The instant asset write-off: $20,000 only for two years. I am concerned that that is going to lead to rorting, and it is going to have to have very strict conditions on it to stop sole traders, partnerships and even proprietary limited companies from overspending or spending frivolously over those two-year periods.

And there are no loss carry back provisions as were in the previous mining and carbon packages. And that is the most important part of this, to me. That is, the small business package, under Labor and the Greens, which was brought in around the mineral resource rent tax package and the carbon package funded a package to small business from revenue raising by taxing the big end of town through superprofits and through polluting companies. So, tax the bads, tax the superprofits on resources that are owned by all Australians—that is economics 101—and change taxes on effort. In this case I do support a tax cut to small business. The Greens have been leading on this issue for small business. At the last election we wanted to see a two per cent tax cut to small business, but we wanted to see it funded by revenue-raising measures from the big end of town, and, sadly, we lost that. When Tony Abbott brought the axe down on the mining tax, when he brought the axe down on the carbon package and on the big polluters, he brought the axe down on small business in this country. And what we have given them is nothing but uncertainty and cynical politics in the last two years.

Senator Cormann, in his response to Senator Di Natale, did say something that I totally agreed with. That is, he acknowledged that the Greens do have an economic plan. I will leave Labor to speak for themselves, but we do have an economic plan. We are very clearly led on how we can raise revenue in this country. We have talked about abolishing tax breaks for the big mining companies—$10 billion. We have talked about a coal levy—$2.3 billion. We have talked about taxing discretionary trusts—$3.6 billion. We have talked about a millionaire's tax—$637 million. We have talked about removing super concessions—tens of billions of dollars. We have talked about removing negative gearing and a progressive tax on super—the hard stuff that needs to be done in this country. If we are truly going to have a fair tax system and if we do want to pay for small business, if we do want to pay for hospitals and if we do want to look after the sick and the elderly in this country, we have to make hard decisions. That is the strategy of the Greens, and we will continue to lead on that. We will continue to put our ideas out into the public.

But I want to pick up very quickly on one thing that I think I heard Senator Cormann say, and that is that the GDP growth assumptions in this budget will be underpinned by the free trade deals this government has signed. I intend to go away and have a closer look at the transcript, but I can tell you from the last estimates that I asked Treasury why they did not forecast free trade deals, and they basically shrugged their shoulders. They do not incorporate FTAs into their growth assumptions. I then asked DFAT why they do not share information with Treasury so that they can model these free trade deals, and DFAT more or less said, 'Well, there are probably no economic benefits'—because we have gone so far down this supposed trade liberalisation road. So, don't go claiming that your free trade deals—spruiking that you put $25 million into the budget—are somehow going to underpin phoney and overly optimistic growth forecasts. We need real revenue-raising— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.