Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the member for Sydney needs to hear that many small business owners, including members of my own family, have worked for extended periods for less than the equivalent of the minimum wage. Labor have had a bad day here today and they have had a bad week. The one little problem with Labor trying to bring together all these disparate issues into one silly line in one silly MPI with one misleading theme is that on any of these topics the easiest way to undermine them is simply to point out what they themselves were saying a short while ago. On energy, on wage decisions and on tax they are damned by their own quotes, sometimes from only a couple of months ago, if not a couple of years.

This topic today is actually the perfect showcase for us to demonstrate issue by issue the sheer hypocrisy of today's Labor Party, which, I have to say, seem on occasion to be a shadow of their former selves. They say one thing out on the streets and they do the opposite here.

Mr Swan interjecting—

I will get to you, Member for Lilley. I had to hold my tongue earlier this week in the Federation Chamber when I heard the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, trying to explain why he was voting against tax cuts for medium and small businesses around Brisbane. Small businesses, he was saying, just needed to see higher demand. What he meant by that was demand driven, ultimately, by government spending. In other words, Labor believes that small businesses would be much better off today and tomorrow if only Labor were at the helm blowing all of the money. It was a Keynesian inspired delusion of the highest order, and it completely ignored the real problem of competitiveness in Australian businesses, which is the real underlying issue of so many of these topics we are talking about in the House today, because, of course, you do reach a point where Labor runs out of other people's money.

The highlights for me was when the member for Lilley actually invoked the concept of trickle-down economics. The irony appeared to escape him that he was simultaneously talking about how he wanted to sit, as Labor, on top of the economy raining borrowed money down from above, turning on the fire hose of borrowed money, spilling bucket loads of other people's money, but accusing others of trickle-down—versus our approach, this government's enterprise tax plan, aiming to let millions of small businesses each keep a little bit of what is ultimately their own money, which will drive economic growth and jobs from the base of the economy up. Letting small businesses keep a bit more of their own money is the opposite of trickle-down. Small businesses, after all, are the very base of our economy, not the top of it.

Cuts to company tax rates are exhibit 1 when it comes to Labor's hypocrisy. For decades, actually, Labor used to come in here and back tax cuts for businesses. It was the long-standing aspiration of Labor leaders, heading back the generations—

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