Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

He's only got one speed, the old Treasurer, and it's not a very edifying one. Under a Labor government businesses will have access to the Australian Investment Guarantee, which will mean that they can write off 20 per cent of their investments in their first year, over and above existing depreciation, which is tax relief on the condition of investment. We say to Australian businesses: 'We'll work with you. We'll provide you with tax relief. We want to make that tax relief conditional on investment, when it comes to the Australian Investment Guarantee.'

The other difference between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party is that this is very much plan C for the Liberal Party, because their plan A was to give big businesses a tax cut. They're doing the small and medium-sized enterprise tax cuts only because they failed to get their big business tax cut through. Why did they fail to get them through? Because of opposition from this side of the House and, most particularly, this side of the Senate. The then Treasurer, now Prime Minister, said that this was his great economic plan. He brought down the budget and said: 'It's not like all those other budgets that treasurers like Peter Costello, Wayne Swan and Paul Keating used to bring down. This one is different. This one is a plan, unlike all those other budgets.' I'm not sure of the logic that went into that statement. But that was his big plan, his plan A, his only plan. His one-point economic plan was big business tax cuts—$17 billion to the banks, with 60 per cent of it going offshore. Having failed to get that through, they have now moved to this plan. We all know that if they ever get the opportunity to implement plan A—to return to their original intention and come back to plan A—they will do so. But, at this stage, the Labor Party and other parties have succeeded in blocking that plan.

The other key point of difference is that the government has thrown out any semblance of or attempt at fiscal credibility and any attempt at showing that they are compliant with their own budget rules. The member for Rankin and I have put in place budget rules for the Labor Party, as is our job, and we will comply with them. We don't hold the government to those budget rules. They are rules that apply to us. We just ask the government to comply with their own budget rules. That's all we ask: for the government to actually comply with what they have said is their approach to the budget. This has been a rolling farce and they can't even get their alibi straight. I grant the new Treasurer some leeway, a bit of slack, because he is new to the job. I accept that he is the third Treasurer I have faced and it will take him a bit of time to get into the swing of things. I won't hold him to account for everything he says in his first couple of days, but he came out and said, 'We don't need to offset new spending and tax reductions, because the economy is growing and we are going to pay for it out of growth.' Maybe he wasn't aware of the budget rules, which are printed in the budget papers, saying:

Then we had the finance minister come out and say that the budget rules still applied. He said, 'I don't know where all this speculation comes from.' Well, it comes from the Treasurer, who has basically thrown the rule out. Then—my personal favourite—the Prime Minister went on Insiders and said that we have rules but 'there are exceptions to the rules and the government reserves the right to exercise that discretion, but they are the rules'—that is: we have rules but we will choose when we break them! We've seen those rules broken with these tax cuts. I accept that there can be a debate about whether rule 1 applies, because it is a tax cut and not spending, but there is no debate about rule 2, that overall impacts in the shifts in receipts and payments in the economy will be banked as an improvement to the budget bottom line. Well, it is not improving the budget bottom line. It is going to these tax cuts. So the Liberal Party is exposed on the point of fiscal credibility.

Mr Wallace interjecting—

Mr Tim Wilson interjecting—

Statler and Waldorf have woken up at the back there. TheMuppet Show act 2 is here. There they are, Statler and Waldorf, joking away. They have come alive. Welcome to The Muppet Show. It is good to see you, Statler and Waldorf. The fact of the matter is that the Labor Party's budget rules show that we will have bigger budget surpluses over the forward estimates and over the medium term as well. We can do that because of the tough decisions we have taken, including the decision we took to delay the Australian Investment Guarantee by a year—

Mr Wallace interjecting—

Mr Tim Wilson interjecting—

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