Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, no, I mean that, I do. But, actually, as a safety net: I do not believe the Treasury is so incompetent that they wouldn't have briefed you with the detail at least. So you've got it somewhere. We have to believe you have this somewhere. It might be in the dispatch box over there. Maybe it's in a filing cabinet, who knows? The Prime Minister might be hiding it under the mattress at home. The other possibility is you're just unwilling, obstinate and disrespectful and it's another one of your silly tactics and stunts: 'We'll get Labor to vote against the tax cut bill. That'll be good on TV. We won't tell them what's in it—we'll just get them to vote—and then we'll say, "They don't like tax cuts."' That's entirely possible, and it's part of the political tactic. But my belief is you're deliberately hiding the information, because if the detail comes out then the tax plan will be exposed for the con that it appears to be.

This is the government's latest plan, and the word 'latest' is important. We can't forget that until a few weeks ago the government's personal tax plan was to increase taxes on everyone earning between about $21,000 and $180,000. Indeed, in the last budget the only people in the country to get a tax cut were those earning over $180,000. They've had quite a few tax plans. They were going to jack up the GST. That didn't last long. Then there was that brilliant moment of state based income taxes. That was good. They went in 1942; let's bring them back. There are company tax cuts of $80 billion. I know, I said the number '80'. It's a number the Prime Minister just cannot bring himself to say in here. What's the cost of the company tax cuts, legislated and unlegislated, over the 10 years? We think the answer is 80 when you glue it together, but the Prime Minister just can't bring himself to say it—80 seems to be the hardest word. This is the latest tax plan; we'll see how long it lasts. We'll have to count them in dog years for them to have any credibility in a temporal sense, really.

So on 1 July, apparently, this bill will see the introduction of a low- and middle-income tax offset—a non-refundable tax offset—of up to $530 a year for taxpayers earning up to $125,000 and an increase in the top threshold of the 32.5 per cent personal income tax bracket from $87,000 to $90,000. We're good with that—a bipartisan moment, hurrah! Let's do it. We could split this bill and vote on it today. Lock it in, Eddie. Give us certainty. We've been upfront from the start, since budget night, when you announced this. We said, 'Yep, we'll back that. Bring the legislation in and we'll vote on it and move on. It's costed, it's clear, it's fair, it's affordable and it's in the forward estimates. We can understand what we're dealing with.' The government could do that today.

As for the rest of the plan—a plan that costs $13 billion over four years and $140 billion over the medium term and that has a whole lot of complex measures—we want to examine it. As I said, that's our scrutiny role. The alternative, of course, is putting forward alternatives for people to choose from. We've said—Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, said in the budget reply speech—that Labor will deliver bigger, better and fairer tax cuts. If we're doing three-word slogans, that's our three-word slogan. You had 'lower, fairer, simpler'—we'll touch on 'fairer' in a moment. We will deliver bigger, better, fairer tax cuts for $10 million working Australians. In this instance, size does matter. The difference is clear, and Australians can decide what to do with it.

Labor's tax refund for working Australians increases the tax cuts currently being offered under the government's tax offset proposal. As I said, we'll support the measures that begin on 1 July this year, and a Labor government will deliver bigger tax cuts from 1 July 2019, and they'll be permanent, so that anyone earning less than $125,000 a year will get a bigger tax cut under Labor than under the Liberals. Indeed, more than four million people will be better off by $398 a year compared to the Liberals. Our proposal has been costed by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office and our policy has a budget impact of $5.8 billion over the forward estimates. It's affordable. It's the latest in Labor's series of reforms to tax and proposals which we've outlined. You could never accuse us of being a small-target opposition or of not doing our job of putting forward policy. You might not agree with it—we hear a load of nonsense; indeed, we see deliberate mistruths in the newsletters sent to electors by those opposite—but you couldn't accuse us of not putting forward an alternative plan.

There are a range of problems with the government's tax plans. We know that. We haven't been given the full picture by the government—they simply won't tell us—but it is possible now, from a lot of the advice we've commissioned and the independent external analysis that's been published in the days and weeks since the budget, to start to figure out a lot of stuff from it.

Let's have a look at the word 'fairness'. We say ours is fairer; they say theirs is fairer. The government MPs keep saying: 'It's fair, it's fair. Trust us, we're Liberals. It's fair, it's fair.' What does fairness look like to a Liberal? It's a sit-down, shock-horror moment: early indications are, from the independent commentators and analysis that has been done, that once the government's three-stage package is in place it will deliver larger benefits to those on higher incomes. I know, right? Shocking! From the mob who brought a two per cent tax cut for people earning over $180,000, $80 billion for multinationals and big companies, and company tax cuts, who would have thought? When the government's plan is fully implemented, a worker on $42,000 in this country will be on exactly the same tax rate as an executive earning $200,000. This is in a country that has a proud tradition of egalitarianism, fairness and proper funding of public services—that those who can afford to pay the most contribute a bit more towards our society.

The Grattan Institute has said that once the three-stage plan is complete $15 billion of the annual $25 billion cost to the plan will result from collecting less tax from the top 20 per cent of income earners. To be fair, the proposed tax offset for low- and middle-income earners in 2018-19 is progressive. More money goes to lower-income earners—we'd vote for that. But by 2024-25 the tax cuts mean that higher-income earners gain $7,225 a year, while those earning $50,000 to $90,000 gain $540 a year and those earning $30,000 gain $200 a year. It's not just income; it's also the gender impact. They won't tell us what the gender impact of this is, but the Australia Institute has done some analysis in the last week or so and concluded that two-thirds of the benefit of the government's proposed tax changes go to men, because men dominate the ranks of high-income earners. For every $1 in tax cuts for women, men get $2. Is that fair or unfair? Well, when you've only got about 20 per cent of your parliamentary representation being women, and last weekend you knocked off a woman in Queensland, the member for Ryan, treated shamefully—I think that means that, going into the next election, the LNP in Queensland will have two out of 21 held seats contested by women—I suppose that's a better outcome, isn't it? You would probably think that is fair.

At a time when the government should be locking in strong surpluses, devoting more of this revenue towards structural budget repair to protect the nation from further shocks and repairing the balance sheet post GFC as we enter into uncertain economic times, they've chosen to chuck $140 billion at a tax plan that they won't release the details for. Overwhelmingly, we know from independent analysis that more of the benefit will go to high-income earners, and we're being asked to just wave this through. Well, to my mind, that's not what parliamentarians should be doing. It's not what an opposition's job of scrutiny should be. If the House is not able to deal with this—funnily enough, we don't have the numbers in the House—then I hope that the Senate will be able to pull this to pieces and figure out what the real impact is, because none of us are able to honestly report to our electorates.

See this speech in context