Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Taxation: we glance down at our tax receipts, we glance down at our payslips when they arrive and we all have a slight momentary pause, a hesitation, at the amount of tax we are paying—particularly with this government in charge, because we're concerned about whether our tax dollars are going to good places. But we all pay our taxes, because we understand that, in a Western society, they are necessary.

However, when governments enact tax changes, certain principles should always be held in the forefront of policymakers' minds, principles such as: taxation changes need to be fair, they need to be transparent, they need to ensure a tax rate as low as possible to deliver only essential services, and they should never ever be retrospective in nature. Labor's super tax fails all these tests. It was brought in, announced, at a time when it was never taken to an election; in fact, Labor had promised to make no changes to taxation arrangements on superannuation. Also, perhaps most egregiously, it has not been indexed, so it will, over time, grow to encompass a huge percentage of Australia's taxpaying population.

Worst of all, it is retrospective in nature. Let me explain why, and I'll give you two real examples. These are not hypotheticals; these are people I have spoken to. The first one is a farmer who, under the tax rules as they applied in the past, made the very legal—perhaps sensible, some would say—decision to put part of their farmland into a self-managed super fund. Farmland has grown in value over the decades. So, a parcel of farmland that may have been worth $600,000, $700,000 or $800,000 when it was put into a self-managed super fund is now worth well in excess of the $3 million super tax threshold imposed by this Labor government. What does that farmer now have to do in order to satisfy this Labor government's voracious appetite for tax? They will either have to expend their cash reserves within that super fund or sell part of the family farm—quite literally. That is not fair. That is retrospective tax in action.

Let me give you a second example, a gentleman I met just a couple of weeks ago—again, with a parcel of land quite legitimately put into a self-managed super fund, residential land earning a certain income. That land happened to be re-zoned, taking the value of that land from, again, a few hundred thousand dollars to many millions of dollars. 'What a great windfall!' people will say; absolutely—except the income from that land in the self-managed super fund hasn't changed; merely the valuation of that land has changed. What was the cash income from that particular property paying for? It was paying the pension to the retiree. Yet the income from that property is now going to have to be used to pay Labor's unfair retrospective superannuation tax.

This tax is a disgrace. It should never have seen the light of day, and it should be opposed at every opportunity.