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

I rise to speak on the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2015 Measures No. 4) Bill 2015. Whilst rejecting the amendment, I would like to make a couple of points. I will not take the House's time unduly. I would like to concentrate on the same thing the member for Bowman was talking about in relation to superannuation. When I was a kid the idea was that you got a job in one firm and you tried to stay there. Your mum was always telling you to go and get a job for one particular firm and you would stay in there your entire life as you moved up the ladder, because all those middle management jobs were there and you could promote yourself. That would have meant that any for savings you had you would only ever have had to have one bank account and one superannuation account.

As the eighties came along, we found that those middle management jobs kept on disappearing. It meant that, to get to where you wanted to go, you had to continually change employers. When I was doing this in the 1980s and 1990s, I was well and truly a grown-up and able to take care of my own affairs, and still I ended up with superannuation accounts all over the place. I worked a couple of part-time jobs and that sort of thing during my early married life, and I did a couple of things when I started as an auctioneer, doing a bit of weekend work and that sort of thing. I still ended up with all these little superannuation accounts all over the place, and I was in my 30s and reasonably intelligent when it came to these sorts of things. So, when a 15-year-old is coming through and paying into superannuation, there are all these sorts of things that we have to do. You end up with this hodgepodge of accounts and that sort of thing. I think the more we can do to get into that space the better off we will be. The more we can do to simplify it for the end user the better off we will be. The more we can do to simplify the amount of work that a person has to do to take care of their superannuation the better off we will be.

I would like to briefly talk to the House about taxation in general. We are in a situation at the moment where taxes are gathered so that we can pay for services. I have just had a patio put on at my house, so I have spent some extra money. I am not going to keep on spending that, but I have to pay that money back before I can get in there. When a government spends money, it is okay. I believe that there is such a thing as good debt and that it is okay to go into deficit if you are chasing a particular outcome which, in the long term, will pay dividends back to the taxpayer. If you do not have a return on that investment, if you are not able to employ more people and gather more taxes by increased turnaround, you will never get that money back, so what you then have to do is look at measures by which we can claw that money back to get into surplus. If you can get into surplus, you can start paying that money back, and if you can pay that money back then you can start doing stuff that can actually build the community.

These are measures that we have to take, rightly or wrongly and no matter which way we come from. No matter how anyone comes into this place, I think everyone comes into this place with the interests of their own community and the interests of the nation in mind. What we must do is recognise that there are some severe challenges in front of us at the moment and severe headwinds when it comes to trying to balance these books. You cannot just keep on wishing for a system 30. You cannot keep on just taking a system 8 out and hoping that you will pay off all your debts, because it does not work that way. What we have to do is start spending less than we get in, and as a nation we are not prepared to do that.

We have a taxation white paper out at the moment. 'Lower, simpler, fairer' is what we are talking about with taxes: lower taxes, simpler methodology and fairer to everyone concerned. I asked a couple of my friends at home whether they thought that was the right title for a taxation white paper. We were standing around having a beer, and they said, 'It doesn't really matter, because people want to pay no tax, they want more services and they never want to pay it back, and they want someone else to pay.' So that is where the electorate seems to be at the moment, until we as a parliament can turn it around and say, 'Look, we've got to get this thing back into order, because the end result if we don't is disorder and chaos.'

So what we must do is make sure that we get these measures through. These measures here are only $400-odd million worth of repairing the budget, but, when you say 'only $400 million', it is a massive amount of money. None of us here would have to work again if we had that sort of money. But what we must do is start the work together, and we must start the work by building those little bricks and putting those little things in there that we can do. These are sensible measures. These are simplifying our tax measures. These are making it easier for everyone to get around, and at the end of the day those sorts of things must be supported. I back this bill and the Assistant Treasurer, who brought it forward, and I thank the House.

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