Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today we are in this position because the Labor Party has essentially put us in this position. The revenue of this country was decimated by the previous government. They talk about ambushes et cetera, but it was actually announced in the 2014 budget that we were seeking to increase the excise revenue. But the Labor Party and the crossbench have sought to deny us this. We are trying to repair a broken economy that was left to us. We gave them an economy that was in pristine condition. It had no government debt. It had money in the bank. It was considered to be 'the wonder Down Under'. We then inherited a debt heading towards half a billion dollars. We want to fix this, and we are headed towards doing that. What is the alternative if you are continually blocked in your attempts to repair the economy? You have to find another way to do it. This is what we are doing.

The Labor Party continues to talk about cost-of-living pressures. I will go to that in a moment. When the Labor Party last had a real leader in Bob Hawke this is what he did, in conjunction with his Treasurer, Paul Keating. It was the Labor government that first introduced fuel indexation in 1983, recognising that:

By adjusting excises for inflation each half year … the real value of the tax does not change.

That is what Paul Keating as Treasurer said in the Hansard of 10 May 1984. The coalition, like the Hawke and Keating government, recognises that by a reintroducing the biennial indexation of fuel excise to the CPI the real value of the excise will not be increased. This is an opposition that do not understand the economy and are doing all they can to wreck it.

Let's talk about honesty and pre-election promises. Do you remember the many occasions we heard, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead'? On and on they droned. Then what did they do after the election? They brought in a carbon tax which put up people's power prices by about 10 per cent a year and something like $550 each. Worse than that, as the member for O'Connor reminds me, not only did they increase the price of power and introduce an economy-wide tax through the carbon tax—this is their form—but on 1 July this year that carbon tax, besides going up, was going to hit the diesel fuel of those driving vehicles over 4.5 tonnes. It was going to increase by 6.5c a litre. They were going to increase the price of fuel this year if they were the government. The price of diesel would have gone up by 6.5c a litre if they had have been the government in July 2014.

This is canned hypocrisy at its worst. These are people who said they wanted to increase the cost of alcopops because they wanted to improve the health of young people. Trying to improve the health of young people by putting up the price of alcopop drinks did just the opposite, because they went off and bought bottles of vodka and drank them almost straight. Those opposite got a diminished revenue from alcopops. It was not about health; it was about revenue. They had to get that legislation through this place furtively.

On cost-of-living pressures, it was the opposition Treasury spokesman who brought in Fuelwatch. Then he had Grocery Watch, but let's take a look at Fuelwatch. It was going to cost over $20 million a year to administer it just to watch the price of fuel go up. What sort of exercise is that? They were bringing in an institution that was going to cost millions of dollars to watch the price of fuel go up.

We have a solution with these funds of, as has been said in this place, less than 40c per week. It will be dedicated to road infrastructure. We are desperate in this country for real road infrastructure. We have an infrastructure Prime Minister who is committed to spending, as we heard from the member for Paterson, $8 billion a year on real roads and infrastructure. This is where the money is going to go. We want to repair the budget; they want to wreck the budget. We are not going to let them. We are going to make sure that we can deliver for the Australian people on this issue.

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