Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Where does one begin after the address from the member for Fenner? That random, long dissertation and rant really had nothing of substance to it beyond the broad commentary and political narrative of an opposition that has never had any economic credibility—not ever; not even under him, and he used to be a professor in these things. He was seeking not even to remotely address the fundamental issue in the legislation, yet he has made an amendment to the bill, which I am sure will be just another pointless exercise in trying to drag members of parliament into this place for the purpose of his own ego, to show to other members that he is capable of moving these things. He can sit and swivel around in the chair that one day, he dreams, he might sit in more permanently.

When it comes down to it, this legislation is actually quite constructive. It's designed to try and help deal with things in a black economy. It's pretty straightforward. I don't even know why it's not just going through on the voices rather than the charade that's being put forward by the opposition. What we're trying to do is increase compliance with the law—and not just the practical application of the law but the spirit of the law. We actually don't think that people should be engaging in aspects of the black economy and deducting things unless it's necessary or appropriate under schedule 1 of the bill; dealing with tax reportability, particularly around domestic freight, in schedule 2 of the bill; and, of course, the matter which I spoke about earlier this morning, related to the collection of tobacco excise.

What we have in this country are thousands of law-abiding taxpayers and citizens. Every day, they wake up, brush their teeth and go off to work. They are on a PAYG system for the most part. They pay their tax. They're in small business. They make their reporting through their BAS, their annual returns and their company reports. And they carry the weight of this country. They're the ones who actually do the right thing. They're the people we should be backing. But we should be making sure that the people who don't do that, who wake up every day with their nefarious agenda of minimising tax—it's not just about minimising taxation, because invariably minimising taxation comes off the back of doing other illegal activity as well, though you can do it without engaging in illegal activity—or finding pathways or loopholes to try to keep more money in their pocket. By the way, I do understand that; I'm a small-tax person—big time. But everybody has to share the obligation of carrying the burden of supporting the structure to keep our country strong, safe and united and to provide support for those people who can't support themselves.

This bill, like all the other measures about the black economy, is designed to cut any loophole or any pathway where somebody can seek to undermine that degree of responsibility they have not just to themselves, not just to their country but to their fellow citizens. That's what this bill is about. It's not about grand political posturing by the opposition or the member for Fenner, because he wants to be able to get up and talk about how apparently there's some sort of problem in this government because it inherited a disastrous budgetary circumstance and the opposition has stopped pretty much any attempt to repair it. That's a thing they forget and don't like to draw people's attention to. Every time we try to reduce spending or reduce the debt, they get in the way, but then they sit on the side of this chamber and crow with their moral authority, the farcical basis of any economic credibility that this opposition has, and then use it to perpetuate the myths and the ideas that, if they were to come to government after the next election, somehow magically they would do away with their habit since the foundation of the modern Labor Party, which is that there is nothing that they're afraid to spend money on, there is no set of fiscal rules they're not prepared to break and there is no sense of responsibility to the Australian people that they're not prepared to trade off.

They're suddenly going to become model citizens, model custodians of the Commonwealth, adhering to tight fiscal rules in the same way that they farcically deceived the Australian people when Kevin Rudd promised in 2007, in the election lead-up, that he was an economic conservative. He only went on then to trash the inheritance that he got—trash it completely. We were one of the few countries in the entire world that had not just a budget surplus but cash in the bank. They then went on and spent more money and then legislated even more spending, stopped at every single point, any opportunity to bring the budget back and then had the temerity to sit on the other side of this chamber and lecture people about fiscal prudence, as we heard from the member for Fenner—

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