Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I appreciate you bringing some decorum back to this chamber. It is an embarrassment for the Labor Party that they would come into this parliament and talk about penalty rates but not mention a word about how those workers got $300 million ripped off—the workers that they say they represent.

But with that crooked rotten deal they did with the shop and distributive workers' union, the SDA, they also put a lot of smaller businesses at a competitive disadvantage. So we had the big employers—Woolworths and Coles, the big chain stores—paying a lower rate of pay and these small businesses being forced under the awards to pay higher rates. You wonder why we have some distortions in our economy! You wonder why people worry about who the Labor Party truly represents! Do they stand for the actual workers, or do they stand for the union bosses? In this debate, that question has been answered.

One thing that the member for Wakefield seems not to understand is that the size of the economy can grow and contract, and the private sector will only employ someone if the value that they add is at least equal to the cost of their wage. If, in the tourism and hospitality sector, we set the penalty rates so high, they can actually act as a penalty and become a discouragement to employment. So instead of workers actually having money, as the member talks about, to cover their everyday costs of living, they simply do not have a job because the businesses have closed because of the level the penalty rates were set at in some of these industries. That is what needs to be addressed, and that is what the Fair Work Commission is looking at.

I would also like to comment on some of the comments by the member for Lilley, who was formerly the Treasurer of this country for six years. Is it any wonder, from hearing that speech, why our economy suffered for those six years. The member for Lilley seems to think that, if you reduce the corporate tax rate, it is simply a handout. I would ask the member for Lilley to go back through the records for the last 30 years and look at what happened when the Hawke and Howard governments reduced company taxes. It was not a handout to big business. What happened when they reduced that corporate tax rate? It was around 49 per cent in the mid-1980s. When they reduced the corporate tax rate, do you know what happened? We actually got more corporate tax paid! That has been the effect every single time that we have reduced the corporate tax rate. When we have reduced the tax rate, more tax has been paid because people have been prepared to take a risk with their money. That is something the other side simply does not understand.

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