Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw, Mr Speaker. But, through you, Mr Speaker, he cannot run or hide from the fact that the shadow Treasurer, on this matter, has had more faces even than the Leader of the Opposition. They're all around; they look in every direction—every single direction!

What the shadow Treasurer is seeking to do to the Australian economy is to tax it within an inch of its life—more than $200 billion in higher taxes. And I've only talked about the ones they've announced so far. I notice today that the shadow Treasurer is out there quoting Per Capita research; The cost of privilege, it's called. He basically says that a person owning an investment property—one in five police officers and 38,000 nurses—is engaged in some sort of tax rorting. If a retiree is simply getting a tax refund because of the dividend imputation system, then apparently this is a big rort. The insult from the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer is to treat these Australians with contempt and tell them that they're somehow cheating the tax system. But what he doesn't refer to in the Per Capita research today is that that research that he's referring to, which is apparently the cost of these great privileges and loopholes, includes an estimate of the cost of the CGT exemption for family homes. And, as he goes around and quotes research from the Grattan Institute when it comes to the issue of their retirees tax, let's not forget that it's the Grattan Institute themselves that want to include the family home in the assets test for the pension and also to apply capital gains tax to the family home. This Leader of the Opposition is off the leash on tax.

See this speech in context