Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

thank you, Member for Adelaide—if you say to those opposite, 'Can we find the money to properly fund the NDIS,' they say, 'No, that's impossible.' 'Can we properly find the money to fund child care?' 'No, that couldn't possibly be done.' But if you say, 'Can we give $7 billion to the big banks?' They say, 'Of course we can.' 'Can we give $50 billion to the big companies in this country?' 'Of course we can.' They can find $50 billion then, but they cannot find it when it comes to the things that we really care about in this country: a decent social safety net or looking after people with disability.

Even their own Treasury analysis of the tax cuts, and analysis that has been done by others, shows that the growth dividends from these tax cuts, despite being such a huge cost to the budget, will have a negligible impact on growth and a negligible impact on wages even some decades down the track. They are not worth the money that the government wants to spend on them. That is one of the reasons why people from the business community have started to come out and say: 'You know what? The company tax cut the government proposes is not the be-all and end-all for us.' Businesses make decisions on a whole range of issues: on infrastructure, on human capital, on the regulatory environment and on consumer confidence. All of these sorts of things matter, and it has been pleasing and it has been heartening to see elements of the business community make that point in recent weeks.

Those opposite like to claim that if we transfer this money to the bottom line of companies there will be some miraculous impact on jobs and on wages. They are failing to understand that we have got booming company profits at the moment. There are really high company profits—I think the last available data said it was a boost of about 20 per cent—at the same time that we have record low wages. That link between company profits and wages that are paid to people who do the work for these companies has been severed. We have record low wage growth and we have these extraordinarily high company profits, so the claim that somehow, if you transfer another $50 billion to the bottom line of these companies, it will have some kind of boom in wages or employment is a laughable claim. It should be dismissed.

Mr Howarth interjecting—

It is very tempting to take the interjection from the member for Petrie, but—

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