Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is broadly about the bill. Everything I do is about the bill! Schedule 1—Removing Tax Impediments to Certain Business Restructures—was first announced by Labor in 2011-12. Labor had 92 unenacted tax and superannuation measures. Schedule 2 is the Managed Investment Trust Withholding Regime for Foreign Pension Funds. So, once again, it is a fairly dry bit of gear. It was announced by the previous government but not legislated. On schedule 3, initiatives were first announced in 2011 by the previous government, by the then Prime Minister, and the President of the United States. Once again, it was announced by the previous government and not enacted.

Fuel indexation measures, as announced in the 2014 budget, are ours; this is what we will do. The one difference in our legislation in relation to fuel indexation measures is that we have legislated that the money will have to go to roads. It has to go to roads. Again, as a young bloke, the one thing I hated when fuel indexation came in was that the money went into general revenue and never roads. And I think that is the one thing that people have been saying: 'Well, at least it's going to roads.'

We went to the election with four key promises, four key things we wanted to do. We said we would axe the carbon and mining taxes, and we have done that. We said we would stop the boats, and we had only one successful boat this year. We said we would build the roads to the 21st century, and to a large extent we have that underway. Greg Hunt, as Minister for the Environment, has announced over $800 billion worth of environmental approvals to get this economy going. And the fourth pillar was to fix the budget. That is where I go back to my analogy about the two football stories. Andrew Leigh, the member for Fraser, is a very clever guy. He understands economics. He understands budgets, and he knows they have to balance. He knows that budgets contain two sides: they contain income and they contain outgoings. If you do not get enough income and you do not check your outgoings you will end up in deficit. If you have too much income and not enough outgoings you will stall your economy. It is a balancing act.

We are going on with all this palaver about who said what before an election. But when the facts change, people should change their minds. I will go back to the first real example I saw—the 1983 election. I was watching the Bob Hawke Australian Story, and Barry Cassidy was standing at the front of Old Parliament House saying, 'Bob Hawke was elected to bring the nation together.' Well, that is not right. In 1983 Bob Hawke was elected to increase pensions, to increase the number of university spaces, to get higher wages for absolutely everyone and to improve unemployment benefits. But when he got in he saw that the economy under Fraser was not as good as it should have been, and he junked the lot. So, when the circumstances changed, he changed that: the floating of the dollar, one of the greatest things that this country every had—no doubt the member for Fraser was well and truly in favour of the floating of the dollar, because what we had before was the creeping peg, or the crawling peg, and it was that arbitrary thing that everyone had to do. Keating made the decision to float the dollar, and we supported it. But did he take it to an election? No, he did not, because he was faced with a set of circumstances where he had to act. And then we go to HECS.

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