Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Assistant Treasurer interjects. I would be interested to know this: the new government has built up a store of great political capital, and what is it going to do with it? The former government understood that, when you are a popular government, you use some of your political capital to do the things that are necessary, to make the tough but necessary decisions to improve Australia. And tax reform, of course, was one of those very important initiatives that the former government took that this government would never have the wit or the courage to take.

The tax cuts that we are discussing in this bill today build on the tax-cutting record of the Howard government from the year 2000. The coalition made these cuts in the budgets of 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 and, of course, in our final budget in office, 2007-08. The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook for 2007-08 noted that the cumulative effects of the coalition policy, as well as of the tax cuts that we are discussing in this bill, encouraged about 300,000 extra people into the workforce. That is a very impressive record and it is one of the reasons why we managed to create 2.2 million jobs during the coalition’s time in office. This happened because of the coalition’s effective stewardship of the economy for the past 11 years. The tax cuts, the increases in employment and the paying off of Labor’s debt could not have been afforded without the government taking the tough but necessary decisions. These tax-cutting efforts conform to what is a fundamental principle of liberalism—that is, when the government takes what it needs to fund services for the Australian people, it returns those services—

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