Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

On the Tax Laws Amendment (Repeal of Inoperative Provisions) Bill 2006 and banking, I can remember doing a doorknock on the Gold Coast to help the candidate of the party I was then in. The gentleman said, ‘I used to be an accountant; I would like you to come in and see why I am now not an accountant.’ He had a copy of the taxation act that applied some 15 years prior to that date and a copy of the current taxation act. The taxation act when he started working as an accountant some 20 years previously was less than three-quarters of an inch thick—smaller than the thickness of my little finger. The current act—and I am flying by memory here—appeared to be about a foot thick. The volumes of the act came to some 12 inches. He said, ‘Nobody can be familiar with that, and if we make a mistake we are liable now to criminal charges.’

The father of the English-speaking people, none other than Alfred the Great, when he wrote down the first laws in British history said, ‘I have not presumed to put down many laws in writing for I do not know what will be suitable for those that follow after me.’ That is very humble and simple. I mean—are the tax laws working now with this huge act compared with 20 or 30 years ago? Is the federal government reeling from a lack of income from taxation? Their tax take has more than doubled in the 12 years that they have been in office. They have hardly been badly served by the tax department; it has been a marvellous success story.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We are continuously told in this country how wonderfully well off we are. If you look at the internal economy, then I think the government would get about 80 per cent. They have done a good job and their Public Service has done a good job. But if you look at the outside world, you find that this country has nothing now that it can sell to the outside world. Look at sheep and wool, which was our biggest export item in 1990—nearly 10 per cent of the entire Australian export earnings. Sheep numbers have dropped clean in half following the deregulation of that industry. The beef industry, with moderately good prices, is down 26 per cent. Sugar is down 15 per cent. Dairying is down around 15 per cent. I do not know about wheat, but, of the big five, four of them are down dramatically. They are simply vanishing. They cannot compete against a 49 per cent average OECD subsidy, and they cannot compete against people who work for $8 or $9 a day. I think $8.50 is what a Filipino is paid for agricultural work in the Philippines, for example, from where they are trying to bring bananas at the present time.

We had manufacturing but we do not have manufacturing now. Under the free trade agreement our motor vehicle industry will naturally close down. We cannot possibly compete against the giant economies-of-scale plants in the United States. Even there they are sometimes moving out to cheap-labour countries. In countries like Japan they mobilise finance so as to be highly competitive on their assembly lines with state-of-the-art technology. We cannot afford to do that in a tiny home market of 20 million people. I do not think there is anyone in Australia who would see the motor vehicle industry as anything but doomed. And that is the last manufacturing that takes place in Australia now. I rang the Baxter boot company to buy a pair of boots—they make very good country boots—and they said, ‘By the way, Bob, we are moving out of manufacturing.’ I think they started in 1856, but they cannot any longer compete against competitors that have their boots made in China, so they will be closing down their manufacturing arm. It was about eight or nine months ago that I spoke to him.

So manufacturing is gone and agriculture is going. What exactly can this country produce? I happen to represent the biggest mining province on earth, for the sake of the better term, given the amount of mineral riches that are compressed into a small area in north-west Queensland. We were producing $5,000 million worth, but the price of metals has trebled so I suppose we would be producing about $10,000 million worth now. Australia’s exports in total were about $90,000 million last time I looked. We can process the minerals we are producing at the moment but we cannot process the output of extra mines that are coming on line—Lady Annie, Lady Loretta, Douglas River, Rocklands to name but a few. These are mines that are in the pipeline for development. But we have no electricity on the northern grid—we have run out of power. People are building small, extremely expensive gas-fired power stations in order to get by. That is the best they can do. But we have our friendly national competition policy! As the Treasurer told me in answer to a question, ‘If a mine wants a power station, then let a mine build a power station.’ With all due respect, that demonstrated his towering ignorance to the Parliament of Australia. Power stations of their very essence have to be multi-user facilities. No individual project, no matter how big, can warrant a power station. We built a power station at Gladstone. It was one of the biggest in the world at the time it was built. It had no customers.

The government is saying that their fiduciary and monetary settings are excellent, as is their approach to taxation. They say they have balanced the budget. If I could unilaterally double my income at the press of a button, I could balance my budget too. This government has more than doubled its income by massively increasing taxation receipts. When they came in they were collecting about $100,000 million a year. Now they are collecting way in excess of $200,000 million—I think the figure is about $230,000 million. They say that some of that is GST. It is, but then they are paying less money to the states—and I am not for one moment saying that the states are innocent in this massive spending spree by government.

So it looks good, but it is like the locomotive going along at 100 kilometres an hour. It is beautiful in the locomotive looking at the scenery going past. But someone up the front says, ‘We’re running out of diesel.’ You say, ‘It looks all right to me. We’re going along fine. We’re going along at 100 kilometres an hour.’ The diesel, as far as the economy is concerned, is finance, and if you keep borrowing at the rate of $60,000 million a year, there comes a time when you have to pay it back. All us who have been in business know that at some period in our lives we had great growth in our land values or something of that nature and we said ‘Jeez, this is Christmas. I am now worth $2 million.’ And we went out and spent the $2 million. While we were spending it, it was great fun, but of course the party was over when we had gone through the $2 million and we had no income. That is the situation for Australia. We do not produce anything that we can sell to the rest of the world.

To return to mining, we cannot process our metals. We are being reduced to a quarrying operation. The last three mines opened in North Queensland were owned by Indians. They did not have the electricity available to process the product. They put it in a ship and took it home to India to process; they were not going to take it to a port in Australia. Who really could blame them? I could not really attack them. I could attack the government. Gladstone was a power station built without any customers. It not only had an excess of capacity allowing for growth; its total capacity allowed for growth. That is the reason why Australia secured the aluminium industry. I am exaggerating a little bit, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, because you had an aluminium industry, albeit a very small one, down in Tasmania. But the big, massive-scale aluminium industry, which is the second-biggest export earner for Australia, was started by the Gladstone power station, which was built as an infrastructure item by the state government, with no customers. Now it would be the most flagrant breach of national competition policy. It could not happen today. If we rolled the clock back and we had had a national competition policy and the various other government policies then, there would be no aluminium industry in Australia today. I do not know how much of a coal industry we would have, either, because no individual mine had the money nor was it big enough to be able to build a railway line and a port at Gladstone. The government had to do that.

This place does not understand individual projects. They do not understand them at all. They do not understand the point of view of the businessman. There is hardly a single person on the whole front bench of the government who has ever been a businessman—who has ever backed his judgement with his own money. Bjelke-Petersen had a saying: if you have not backed your judgement with your own money, you should not be making decisions with other people’s money. I think the success of his government proved that adage to be very correct indeed.

Today we are discussing the collection of taxation and the abolition of a lot of excessive tax laws. I applaud the government for cutting back that foot-thick document maybe to about nine inches. Do we really need all of these laws? I always think it is the hallmark of socialist government that they feel they can pass all the laws and make you good. I have found laws to be the refuge of evil people. Give me the freedom of no laws any day over the restrictive practices of excessive law.

The collection of taxation in Australia has increased. I hope I have got the correct figure here, because even I am a bit staggered by this figure. One of the government reports said that the cost to government of collecting the GST is $500 million a year. I would have to emphasise to the House that I would question that, but that was the figure that was published in this particular government report. Undoubtedly, there is a huge cost in collecting GST; there is no doubt about that. Many thousands of public servants were employed in addition to those who were already employed when the GST came in.

Was this the optimal way to travel? Sir Leo Hielscher was a Queensland Treasurer. He was offered a World Bank position—a very great honour for Australia—which he rejected. He was twice offered a position with the Reserve Bank or the senior position in federal Treasury here in Canberra—I do not know which it was, but it was one of the two—and he rejected that also. I think he looked forward to retirement; he had been on the board of many Queensland businesses, and I do not think he wanted to leave Queensland, as a lot of senior public servants do not. But, whatever his reasons, he was a very distinguished treasurer, and one of the great architects of the juggernaut economy of Queensland. This juggernaut has carried government after government successfully into election victories because of the fat that was built in during that period under Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Leo Hielscher and many other luminaries.

When the then federal Treasurer, who I think may have been the current Prime Minister, was talking about GST originally, Bill Gunn, who was the Deputy Premier of Queensland—and I suppose he was running the state when Joh was going to Canberra—had me up. I used to be his right-hand man. He said, ‘What about this GST?’ I said, ‘Intelligent people are saying it’s a good idea.’ He said, ‘No, it’s a stupid idea.’ I said, ‘They’re finding it difficult to collect taxation.’ And he said, ‘No, financial transactions tax.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘One per cent. Every time you use your credit card or write a cheque, we take one per cent. The banks become the collectors and it costs us nothing; it costs the people of Queensland nothing. We just take one per cent.’ I said, ‘Won’t people work in cash?’ He said: ‘What are you going to do? Carry $1,000 around in your pocket to save $1?’ I said, ‘No, not likely.’ He said, ‘Well, there’s your answer.’

According to advice from the Parliamentary Library that I have taken over a period of years, it would appear that you would collect a lot more from one per cent than you do from 10 per cent GST. GST is terribly unfair to us people who live in country Australia. The cost of living in places like Normanton and Hughenden is 20, 30 and 40 per cent higher than the cost of living in Brisbane. GST is added to that, increasing dramatically the burden that we must carry. Of course, there is no relief for people in these towns who are on fixed incomes, retired or living on the pension. People say, ‘Yes, but the cost of housing’s cheap.’ You try building a house when the cost of a bag of concrete in Canberra is $6 and the cost in Cloncurry is $15—that was quoted to me over the phone today.

We would say that the GST is a grossly unfair tax. It falls heavily upon us people in country areas. One of the massive sources of revenue for the Australian government is the tax on petrol. Lucky you if you live in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane, where you have got commuter transportation systems. But outside the metropolitan areas, as you would be well aware, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, we do not have any commuter transportation systems. I say to my brother, who is a lecturer at the university: ‘When you go to work of a morning on the train, you get subsidised to the tune of 50 per cent. When I go to work in the morning in my motor car, I pay 100 per cent tax.’ This is because of the escalating price of fuel. That was true in the middle of last year but it is not so true now; it is about 30 per cent to 50 per cent. Whatever it is, it is no longer 100 per cent. But the tax was 100 per cent on the price of fuel. The price was about 70c, the tax was 28c and then the GST went on top of that.

People who live outside the metropolitan areas get hit three times under the tax arrangements as they now stand. Why implement the GST when you had available to you the financial transactions tax? As I said previously, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. At this stage, I have only a little knowledge on this and I need to get a lot of knowledge.

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