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

Correct. Hear, hear! And we give Paul Keating a 'Hear, hear!' for his understanding that if you lower the rate of corporate tax you encourage investment, you attract foreign capital, you grow the economy and, at the end of the day, government gets more resources and not less. Paul Keating understood that. Peter Costello understood that. The current treasurer, the member for Cook my good friend, Scott Morrison, understands that. In fact, I would say every member of the coalition understands that. If you can get that rate of corporate tax down it does not cost the economy money. It is not a giveaway to big business. It actually creates jobs, grows the economy and, ultimately, provides more resources for government to pay for—our schools, our hospitals, our roads, our kids with disabilities, our aged care—all the things that all of us want to see more resources put into. That is what we get.

The real threat to that is that Australian companies are paying 30 per cent currently—and we are reducing that; we have reduced that to 28½ per cent for very small businesses with turnover, not profit, of $2 million, which in many cases can be a single-man operation. A sole trader working under a company structure can have $2 million turnover. We have been able to bring that back to 28½ per cent, but we have the other side threatening to increase the rate of corporate tax for all companies back to 30 per cent. How are we expecting our Australian companies to compete on a level playing field if they are competing against a company from the UK that has a corporate tax rate of 20 per cent? How are we going to expect our Australian companies to compete against businesses from the United State if President Trump sticks with his promise and reduces the US corporate tax rate to 15 per cent? They are hamstrung. We are tying their hands and we are putting lead in the saddles of Australian companies, the very people that we expect to go out there in the international marketplace and win business for this nation.

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