Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I absolutely welcome the opportunity to reply to the rants from the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer. We read in the Financial Review today that ‘Abbott drops attack-dog demeanour’. Well, the ‘mad monk’ is out of the box today, and of course the shadow Treasurer is just completely out of control. What is that all about? The embarrassment of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition who has breached national security. That is why we have got this motion right at the end of question time. If it had so much substance, why didn’t we hear from them yesterday? Why didn’t we hear from them earlier in question time? They are so embarrassed by their pathetic performance in this House that they have to resort to these sorts of desperate tactics.

But I certainly welcome the opportunity to reply to any number of those distortions that were contained in the contributions by both the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer. The first one that I warmly welcome the chance to talk about is this notion of the headline company tax rate and the effective tax rate being paid by companies, because they have taken up the cudgels of the mining council and run with them, asserting that the effective tax rate that is being paid by mining companies is 27c in the dollar. That is just dead wrong—

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