Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to follow the member for Mallee. He has obviously forgotten about the op-ed piece he wrote last year dealing with negative gearing and the fact that it seemed to be detrimental to areas of our communities. The Sydney Morning Herald has really belled the cat with a headline saying that the Turnbull government has abandoned serious tax reform. We are put in this place for one reason: to make sure that we provide for our communities. In taking $80 billion off health and education, this government needed to find revenue from somewhere. They had the idea of raising the GST until they were persuaded by what they say was a scare campaign but the truth is that they were persuaded by the community that this was a bad way to go. They then wanted to talk about negative gearing.

They want to come out and criticise Labor's policies. They have the Prime Minister come out and say they are going to drive house prices down. They have the Assistant Treasurer come out the very next day and say that they are going to drive house prices up for everybody. This is a government in confusion. It is a government that has lost its way and that has a Treasurer who has not got a clue, and they are preparing to go for another budget. We saw what their budget efforts were in 2014. We saw how they wanted to slug pensioners, how they wanted to slug schoolkids, how they took money out of health and education— (Time expired)

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