Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Nothing. All the member for Pearce has done is bake in WA state budget deficits for nearly a decade, and this is the guy touted to be the next Liberal federal Treasurer. Well, geez. God help us. Bringing us back to the present, if the GST had been fixed by the government in its last budget, WA would have been more than $3 billion better off. That would have paid for the Perth Stadium twice over. It would mean that, thanks to the strict budget management of the McGowan WA Labor government, the WA state budget could, instead, be in surplus already. But the GST should not be a political issue between us. This is not something the leader of the Senate should be writing to me about, pleading with me to agree with. It would be funny if it weren't farcical.

My WA Labor colleagues and I all received letters from the Leader of the Government in the Senate, the Minister for Finance, as a fellow Western Australian, imploring us to support his, the Treasurer's and the now Prime Minister's changes to the GST distribution. If you told me a little while ago that I would receive a letter from one of the most senior Liberal ministers in the country, asking me to support what was already Labor policy, I would have laughed at you, yet that's exactly what we all received. Western Australian Liberals have ignored WA too long. They've taken WA for granted for too long, and they have not been fighting for a fair go for WA. Now that they've realised that WA exists, they are in damage control trying to fix it. Well, I'm glad that the WA Liberals have finally joined Team WA, even if it is only for their own politically expedient reasons. We don't need to go to the next election with the GST issue still hanging over our heads. This issue needs to be fixed and will be fixed for all Western Australians as soon as possible. This GST legislation is a start in getting a fair go for WA and a fair go for all Australians. I proudly commend this bill to the House.

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