Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

In listening to that diatribe of nothingness, I cannot help but think that the government has given up even trying to defend its great big supertax on mining. In fact—dare I say it—the great big ‘super’ tax is well named because it is indeed a tax on people’s super. The government’s contrivance is to say that taxing our most important export earning sector is somehow going to help employers find an additional three per cent for the superannuation guarantee charge—which is in fact going be borne by employees, who will have to forego an increase in take-home pay. It is an absolute nonsense. What are they trying to say—that they are going to hypothecate the tax, that it is going to be absolutely dedicated to some purpose? Of course it is not. It is going to consolidated revenue, just like any other tax that they impose.

This tax is simply designed to try and make up for the fact that they have plunged this country into debt and deficit. They were left an inheritance by the previous government of no debt—we paid off their last $96 billion. We had money in the bank. We left them with no deficit—we left them with a surplus. That was the situation when the great financial crisis came upon us from overseas. That is what saved us from going into two quarters of negative growth, a technical—

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