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

I was just inspired to say a few words on this. I was going to speak on this—I read the bill's digest a few days—but I was distracted over the weekend and didn't have time to prepare considered comments with quotes from history, like a whole undergraduate political or economic lecture, such as someone wrote for the member for Mackellar, which was lovely. I would just remind the House of a few key points. Firstly, this was a Labor initiative. Despite the rhetoric we have just heard, this was actually initiated by the member for McMahon when he was a minister in the Labor government. I was listening, but I didn't hear the previous speaker thank the Labor Party for this sensible, modest reform. It's exactly the kind of reform you do if you want to grow investment in the country and see more funds flow into Australia for our fast-growing and well-managed funds management sector.

I can't help but reflect on some of the nonsense we heard from the Prime Minister at question time. He is a little obsessed with Paul Keating. He's a little jealous, of course. We know what Paul Keating said about him. Keating said, 'He's a fizzer,' like a big red firecracker that goes off and then there's nothing. We heard in question time that little lecture from the Prime Minister, where somehow Labor had abandoned its history of company tax cuts when Paul Keating cut the company tax rate from 49 to 39 and then some years later again from 39 to 33—I haven't got the exact figures in front of me. What the Prime Minister and the government neglect to tell us is that those cuts, particularly the big one from 49 to 39, were not just put on the nation's debt. They didn't just back the truck up to the ATM and hand out cash to big business. The Labor Party made a sensible taxation and economic reform, because they slashed the headline rate by expanding the base.

I'm not an economist, as I would be the first here to admit, but I do know enough about economic reform and the concepts of efficiency to say that any sensible economist would say, 'You're much better off to reduce the taxation rate through reforming an existing tax.' The Labor Party didn't lose revenue and didn't give away billions of dollars to the big end of town. They reformed the taxation system. This, as we've heard, is one of the factors—

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