Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a confession to make and I would confess my sins in a church, but Lambie in a church and worrying about the ceiling falling in, it is a bit too much. I've made a mistake. In the first days of the last parliament I was asked to vote on the Morrison government's tax cuts stages 1, 2 and 3 all together in a bunch, no splitting, no picking and choosing—all or nothing, 1, 2, and 3. In case you missed it, I supported the package. I want to run through why. This is what I said in my speech on my tax cut bill before the vote happened:

If the economy gets worse between now and then, as this has, it takes a week to change the tax rates. If, in six years time, the economy can't handle a huge tax cut, then people expect their politicians to say so, be up-front and be honest. If the risk is too big to justify, people will understand rolling it back or putting it on hold for the time being.

The only way you can think that the worst bits of this tax bill are permanent is if you believe that nobody in this place can do the right thing and the responsible thing. I'm not prepared to give up on the possibility that parliament can show a little bit of guts and do the right thing when the time is right. I'm not prepared to walk away from tax cuts for low-income workers starting next week simply because we don't know if we'll be able to afford tax cuts for everybody else five years from now. If we can't afford it then, we don't go ahead; it is that simple.

I look back at those words now and I think how optimistic I was. On the other hand I say how bloody naive I was. But I sincerely thought at the time that there's no way a government would barrel through with a tax cut that the budget could not afford. Fast forward five years, and look what we have. Look where we are: a government barrelling through with a tax cut the budget can't afford. It's not even a tax cut they like. They agree it's bad for the budget, they agree it's bad for the economy and yet they're still doing it. They say it's not their policy, but when you're given the chance to change something and you decide to keep things the way they are, then your policy is to keep things the way they are.

This is not complicated. If Labor put a bill into the Senate today to delay or amend those stage 3 tax cuts it would pass without even breaking a sweat—easy job, no worries. But you know what? They won't, and I think that's really bad policy. So why are they insisting on inflicting bad policy on the Australian public and the Australian economy? What's the point? This puts the budget further into the red. We're told we can't afford anything, because Labor's got a budget mess to clean up. It's like a garbage bag has split and fallen all over the floor of your kitchen and you're wiping down the bag—fair go. Don't forget this is the government that started this parliament saying we had to cut crossbench staff by 75 per cent to save $3 million a year, but they are going to plough through with a tax cut that is going to cost $3 million an hour—arrgh, you've got to be kidding me.

But look, I said I made a mistake, and I did. The mistake wasn't backing the tax cuts; the mistake was believing that five years into the future we'd have a government with a bit of guts that'd show some courage. It's this Labor government that has been handed the keys to stop the cuts coming through, and they're too goddamn scared to take them out of their jeans pocket—fair go. You don't get to say that, just because the other team legislated them, somehow you're completely helpless to do anything about it, because that's rubbish. When Labor won the election they wanted to be more ambitious on climate change, so they increased the emissions reduction target. The previous government didn't want a royal commission into robodebt; Labor did, so they called one. The previous government didn't want to increase the skilled migration target; Labor did, so guess what, they changed it—hip, hip, hooray.

They changed things because they wanted things to change. You wanted things to change. They're not changing stage 3 tax cuts, because they don't want things to change, not because they can't. I want every Australian person out there to know it's not because they can't; it's because they do not have the will. They don't want to. They're too frightened to. They don't have the guts to. Three months in, they don't want to remove those stage 3 tax cuts, because they don't have the courage. They know that is the best thing forward for this country in the economic climate we're in right now, but they lack the guts, three months in. I can tell you now, if you're not going to change the stage 3 tax cuts, because you don't want things to change, that's a decision for the Labor Party, but you wear it.