Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That's right—its job is changing the law, as it does and as we do, in this place every day. That $122 million could have been put towards having 1,900 new teachers in our schools or helping to educate our children. We could have trained 4½ thousand new nurses to care for the sick, the unwell and the aged. It could have provided 2,000 new beds to help address homelessness. Imagine what could be done if $65 billion could be found to address educational, health or societal needs.

The Prime Minister has also wasted the opportunity to connect this country with a first-rate NBN. Instead, he purchased, with taxpayers' money, more than 15,000 kilometres of copper—15 million metres of copper—for his second-rate, inferior and frustrating NBN. Today I invited the Prime Minister to come and visit Baldivis and its abysmal NBN and mobile reception communications black hole that he's formed. I perhaps said it in the wrong venue, which was question time. I'll be writing to him. I paid the price for that invitation and I got booted out, and that's fair enough. Nonetheless, I do urge him to visit and to speak to the people of Baldivis—and he can witness firsthand the kind of anger and frustration that I get to witness from people who are utterly confused and bamboozled and, quite frankly, angry about the money he's wasting on what is an outdated National Broadband Network before it's even been implemented.

So we're introducing more copper in a digital age. One might ask: what next? What next will this government attack or waste its money on so that it can fund a corporate tax cut? Well, how about we cut the bereavement allowance for the elderly—generally, the elderly? It's a short-term payment to help people meet the costs of bereavement and adjusting to becoming single. It's usually paid to a member of a longstanding elderly couple who has lost a loved one. It's not a great saving. It's a great amount of money for the people affected as they have to adjust very quickly to a single life. A single life is quite different from a life as a couple. It's even more different, again, when you have spent a long time with the same person and you find yourself in that situation. So, while you introduce a $65 billion corporate tax cut, you'll take a bereavement allowance away from those depending on a social safety net. It begs the question: what are the priorities of this government? Well, I guess we know.

Further from home, I'll talk briefly about foreign aid. The Prime Minister now holds the dubious honour of being responsible for the lowest level of aid spending as a share of gross national income in 60 years. By slashing our foreign aid budget—by cutting programs that alleviate pain and poverty for the world's poorest and that improve their health and therefore improve the health of Australians—the Prime Minister can hold his head high, should he so choose, that we are now 17th out of 28 countries in the OECD's aid rankings.

So all this pain; these cuts to wages, programs and services, the income tax rises, are for what? Are they really the government's answer to flat wages growth, and triggers to drive investment? They may be this government's misguided answer, but experience tells us another story. Only a few years ago, we had the biggest investment boom Australia has seen, with a headline corporate tax rate of 30 per cent. Assistant Governor of the Reserve Bank, Luci Ellis, has nullified the argument that you need this tax cut to drive investment. She has said:

When businesses make decisions about where to locate—the tax rate does presumably matter, but so does the business environment, the institutional framework, the rule of law, the macro-economic outlook and where the resources are.

There's a broader business environment to consider and those advantages haven't gone away.

Ms Ellis is right, those advantages have not gone away in Australia, and a corporate tax cut would do nothing, or at least very little, to improve business circumstances in Australia.

As I've said before, budgets are all about priorities. It's crystal clear that this government's priorities are at odds with what is just and fair and right. This government could not be more clear on where it stands, as it works to achieve big-business cuts, as high-income earners get a tax cut, as workers earning above $21,000 per annum get increased taxes, and as penalty rates are cut. Unlike this government, we in Labor have priorities which ensure that we deal with inequality in this country. This means funding our schools, and investing in infrastructure that will develop the jobs needed to keep people working in the future. This means a fairer tax system, levelling the playing field for first home buyers through reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax. And, as announced recently, our plan to impose a minimum 30 per cent tax on discretionary trusts to deal with the issue of income splitting is dealing with something that has been in the too-hard basket for far too long.

See this speech in context