Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. You are just the one to come up with a tall poppy comment. What I am telling you is that these people create jobs for people in your state of Queensland. People with the lowest level of skills typically gain employment in horse racing because they would have grave difficulty getting other sorts of work—and to the best of my knowledge they have made the mistake of voting Labor over the years. Labor does not care. Labor does not understand that, when you shrink a high-level resource industry, it hurts some bloke who mucks out boxes in a stable. The evidence is there in black and white. When those people who offer their horses for sale get less for them through lack of competition, they will go back to their studs, to their racing operations, look at their balance sheet and say, ‘I’ve got to put a couple of people off.’ It is not by choice. It is not because they are nasty little businessmen who ring up women after dark and order them to work and leave their kids behind. If you have met one of those men, tell me, and I’ll argue with them. I know a lot of small business people. I was one of them myself—in the shift-work industry—and my wife would have murdered me if I had even thought of doing that. She would have said, ‘I’ll go and mind their kids,’ if it was a desperate situation. Small business is not like that.

But coming back to the member for Petrie: not every small businessman—not even the Deputy Prime Minister’s favourite tradies—gets a tax reduction from this budget because they are not all incorporated. And they are not likely to be incorporated, so will not get one. What is it? Something like 20 per cent of small businesses are incorporated. So all of the others will go on paying tax in the way they are paying it now. But be they incorporated or not incorporated—and the member for Petrie mentioned this—they will be hit with another three per cent of payroll to contribute to the superannuation funds in this country, and those funds do not have a very good record of administering them.

Let me come back to the issue that astounds me most in this debate: the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the finance minister getting up there and saying, ‘The Australian people are being robbed’. I have just given all the reasons that they are not doing too badly out of mining. The proposition is that the Rudd government need the money, and their record of managing it is outrageously bad! There are the laptop computers. There is the Building the Education Revolution. Everything is a revolution; everything is a reform. But in the end it comes back to wasted money and taxation. If the Australian people had their druthers, would they give the money to the Prime Minister or would they give it to BHP to manage on their behalf? I would like to run a referendum on that, and I would like to run the book on the outcome.

The claim that you do people a favour by raising taxes is stupid. Historically, in the Pilbara, the then WA state government under Charles Court said to the miners, ‘When it comes to the infrastructure, you’ve got to build it.’ They built all their own railway lines. They have typically built all their own ports, and have been happy to do so, particularly if they get a tax deduction for writing off those assets. So why does the government have to tax them because it says it can build things better or make better choices? The BER is proof that that does not work. In the paper the other day they compared a $400,000 or $500,000 house of substance—four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a TV room et cetera—which cost half the price of a school canteen. I am building a house now myself, and it will be about 400 grand. But I see in my electorate $1.9 million being spent on putting new benches and a bit of copper pipe into science labs. I know what all of those things cost—I am a frustrated builder; I have been doing it for years; it is my hobby—and I just watch this waste. Then the government say, ‘Give us more money from the mining sector and we’ll spend it better’. There is no evidence that that would ever happen, and it is just so silly. All of those at the top should have done the NAPLAN test to prove that they at least got basic arithmetic. (Time expired)

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