Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Even before coming to office, Labor sought to rewrite our recent economic history. The reality is that the Labor Party, the new government, has inherited an economy that is the envy of most other developed countries, aptly described by the Economist as ‘the wonder down under’. We were able to achieve, thanks to the sound economic management of the Howard government, high economic growth, record lows in unemployment, inflation managed on average within the target band of two to three per cent, growing labour force participation and growing wealth. Real wages grew over the years of the Howard government by more than 22 per cent, whereas in fact in real terms they declined during the 13 years of the last Labor government.

Labor’s spin, or its addiction to spin, is not surprising. The Prime Minister’s MySpace website lists his favourite authors, and they are Robert Ludlum, Manning Clark and, most ominously, George Orwell. This bill is yet another brick in Labor’s Orwellian wall. The facts are that the Prime Minister opposed the coalition’s 2005 tax cuts. In 1999, he described the most significant tax reform since the Second World War, A New Tax System, with its centrepiece the GST, as a fundamental injustice and the date of its introduction as ‘Fundamental Injustice Day’. Labor have no vision for Australia’s tax system. They copied most of their policy from the coalition. If it was not for the coalition, we would not even be discussing tax cuts today. Labor now appear to have backed off granting any future tax cuts if or when revenue comes in at higher levels than anticipated.

The fact is that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer do not trust Australians with their own money and they would prefer to keep it stashed away in a Labor slush fund instead of returning it to Australian taxpayers. In his speech in Perth on 21 January this year, the Prime Minister said:

For over a decade, the past Government did not put forward a strategic vision for the tax system.

But on 19 September last year, when asked to name the tax rates and thresholds that applied to personal income, he said:

Well as of July 1, if you went through the four thresholds, I think the high threshold kicks in, I think at $175,000, and then I think it cascades down, down the spectrum.

Of course, no threshold of $175,000 exists. The top threshold rose to $150,000 on 1 July 2007. The Prime Minister, true to his MySpace website, has taken George Orwell’s slogan ‘Ignorance is strength’ very much to heart. Less than six months ago the man who is now our Prime Minister could not name a single rate or a single threshold in our personal income tax system. The one threshold he did name did not exist. All he could name was a brand of beer—Cascade. But ‘Mr Cascade’ happily claims that the coalition did not put forward a strategic vision for the tax system. How will Labor’s 81 bureaucracies and 119 reviews be able to make the tax system less complex, less costly and more efficient if the Prime Minister himself is completely ignorant of our system’s basic fiscal nuts and bolts? Who will tell the bureaucrats what to do? The Prime Minister, speaking last year, did not even know what the current tax system looks like. How on earth could he reform it?

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