Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Here we go again—'Would you roll back what we won't tell you we'll do?' Genius! Modelling shows a typical Australian family will be up to $5,000 worse off as a result of an increase to and broadening of the base of the GST. It hits those who can afford it least. They then talk about being able to fix it with compensation. People who are outside of the payment system are unable to receive compensation in that form. It is one thing if you have kids under 13 and you are still within the family tax benefit system, but if you have teenage kids and you are outside the payment system, how do you then get compensated? The member for Mitchell says that you do it with income tax, forgetting that Labor took a million people out of the income tax system. We tripled the tax-free threshold, taking it from $6,000 to $18,200 before you pay a dollar in tax. For people on modest incomes, whatever shifts they might think they are going to do, the capacity to deliver for lower and middle income families has largely been taken away by the shifts in the income tax scales. I do not doubt for one minute they would be able to find a way to compensate people at the top end, but for everybody else, particularly people under mortgage stress, people who would seemingly have high incomes but have very little disposable income, for them no compensation package will change the fact that every time they do the grocery shopping the bill is higher

Who would ever think that it was smart to put a price on fresh food? What are you trying to discourage? If you are going to put a price on carbon, you are trying to discourage pollution. If you are going to put a price on tobacco, you are trying to discourage the use of cigarettes. What sort of policy genius would think that was a good idea to increase the price of fresh food and, indeed, to do it by the full 15 per cent? Let's not forget that there is no longer a wholesale sales tax to remove, which, as the shadow Treasurer said, was there when John Howard introduced the 10 per cent GST. You removed the wholesale sales tax and, while we still opposed the GST at the time as regressive, you did not have the inflationary impact of the full 10 per cent. But when you do not have that to get rid of any more, the inflationary impact is the full increase. (Time expired)

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