Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If the Labor Party ever make it back into government again, we won't just see debt and incompetence from them; we will see a government controlled by union thugs. We will see a raft of policies that will cripple our economy and undo our good work. We know that Labor is planning to introduce $150 billion worth of taxes—that's what a Labor government would deliver to the Australian people. A Shorten Labor government would mean economic destruction for our nation, and this will hurt our businesses. It will hurt hardworking Australians. It will hurt families. Let's take a quick look: increasing taxes on small businesses and failing to implement the remainder of our enterprise tax plan—$65 million; scrapping negative gearing—$32 billion; increasing capital gains tax—$13 billion; family trusts tax—$15 billion; increasing income taxes—$22 billion; and secret superannuation taxes—$20 billion. This is what a Labor government would deliver, and we cannot do that to the Australian people—to hardworking Australians and to our businesses who keep this nation going and growing. It seems that Labor want to prevent Australian businesses from employing Australians. They want to stall economic growth and opportunity. They want to stop hardworking Australians from getting ahead—from providing for their families and from being able to afford to give back to their community, which is the very thing that keeps our nation and our social fabric strong.

In comparison, we are leading the way on economic management, and we have a very proud record. We have a great record on reducing Labor's unprecedented debt, delivering Liberal reforms to help small businesses, and producing good public policy designed to stimulate the economy and to create the jobs that hardworking Australians need. Let's look at how many jobs we've created—700,000 jobs since we came to government. Over 240,000 jobs were created in the 2016-17 financial year, and almost 75 per cent of these were full-time. So not only are we working hard on economic reform, but we are dealing with the underemployment crisis that the Labor Party left us with.

We're doing a number of things for small business tax reform, including cutting taxes for small and medium businesses, increasing the tax discount rate for unincorporated businesses, and increasing the small business annual turnover threshold for both incorporated and unincorporated businesses to $10 million, amongst many other things.

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