Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I feel bad for detaining the member for Moncrieff, who I know will be wanting to rush to the Great Hall and hear the member for Fairfax, Clive Palmer, blowing up another one of the Abbott government's agendas; but, because of the gag on this bill, I was prevented from speaking on it earlier, and I really could not miss the chance to have my say on this bill. This is one of those bills that goes to the heart of the absolute substancelessness of this government.

I have a very simple question for the member for Moncrieff: if this bill is such good policy, as those opposite are insisting, why didn't you tell the Australian people about it before the last election? Before the last election it was a very different message coming from those opposite. I can remember hearing the then Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister, telling Australians: 'What you'll get under us are tax cuts without new taxes. There should be no new tax collection without an election.' The government's Real solutions policy pamphlet, which was mailed to every constituent in my electorate during the last election campaign, read: 'We pledge to the families of Australia that we will never make your lives harder by imposing unnecessary new taxes.' In one interview, when asked if lower taxes was a promise, the then Leader of the Opposition responded, 'This is my whole reason for being in politics—in this parliament.' Indeed, the then Leader of the Opposition gave more than 80 speeches about tax in this place in the last parliament but never once said that he would be increasing them.

Yet in the government's first budget we see a swath of tax hikes: increases to income tax, a new tax on visits to your GP and the increases to the petrol tax that we see in the bills before this House. Those provisions must have been in the sealed section of the Real solutions policy pamphlet—the lift-out section of the pamphlet with the obscene bits in it that aren't fit for public consumption! I must have missed that section. It would have to have been a bulky one to contain all the nasties that were included in this recent budget—all the nasties that had to be hidden away from the Australian people before the last election. The sealed section would have had to include the new $7 tax on visits to the GP, the $80 billion in cuts to health and education and the plans to Americanise our higher education system through massively increased student fees and student debt costs.

But there is a little bit of familiarity. It was before my time but seeing all of the opposition leader's promises about honesty and about no new taxes it did remind me of another previous opposition leader. We have pretty well established that Tony Abbott is no John Howard. Those opposite are quickly realising that Tony Abbott is more extreme, more out of touch than John Howard ever was, much to their detriment. But he is doing a pretty good Malcolm Fraser impression at the moment. Before the 1975 election Malcolm Fraser said:

I can promise you honesty and integrity in Government—

You can hear the echoes from the then opposition leader—

I'd like to have a Government which people can trust.

…   …   …   

We will reduce the tax burden. We will put an end to Labor's tax rip-off.

…   …   …   

The Government will bring taxes down further—not increase them.

We all know what happened next. In 1978 Malcolm Fraser introduced the petrol taxation that Tony Abbott, his progeny some 30 years later, is now increasing.

People ask, 'Why is the Labor Party opposing this bill?' Those opposite ask why aren't we supporting this excellent policy. I can tell you that this excellent policy is far from it for my constituents. This is a regressive tax that slugs the hardest those with no choice but to use their cars. It is a regressive tax introduced without any broader tax reform to curb these regressive impacts. I ask the minister in this respect: has the government undertaken modelling of the cumulative impact of this tax hike on working families wend combined with the GP tax, the cuts to family payments and the cuts to child care support? Why has the government not sought to engage in a substantive holistic tax reform process before slugging working families with this procession of new taxes? The cumulative effect of these taxes on my constituents in a working class electorate not like my own is a cost of living catastrophe for working families. This is a particularly shameful outcome, given that before the last election the opposition leader told Australians that he would:

… offer real solutions that will help the forgotten families of Australia with cost of living pressures.

I ask the minister: why have you forgotten the cost of living pressures of the families of Australia less than 12 months into your government? I further ask the minister why funding raised from this tax isn't being spent on infrastructure projects that would actually ease congestion on our roads—projects to take commuters off our roads and allow them to catch public transport; projects like the Melbourne metro rail tunnel that would increase the peak hour capacity of the rail network in my electorate by tens of thousands of commuters and yet has had $3 billion in Commonwealth funding slashed from it in the recent federal budget. I ask the minister: why is the government trying to gull Australians by setting up a road funding account that incidentally does not even guarantee increased road spending, at the same time that it is ripping billions out of commuter rail infrastructure? Why are road commuters more equal than rail commuters? Labor understands that our major cities need a mix of infrastructure investment in both road and rail to maximise the efficiency of our urban transport networks. The government is no better than the Greens in their ideological obsession in this matter.(Time expired)

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