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

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. As the member for Goldstein, I say: this is about trust. This is a debate about recognition of and respect for what Australians voted for. At the last election, they faced a choice. The coalition put forward a plan to improve Australia. The Labor opposition put forward a radical plan to change Australia. What we know is that Australians endorsed this government's plan to cut taxes, to put more money in people's hip pockets, to reward effort and to encourage investment in the Australian economy, because we know that average Australians living out their lives make better decisions about their interests than we do.

Their alternative was not to cut taxes, which is apparently their new narrative. Their alternative was to impose $387 billion, under the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition, onto just about everybody in the Australian community. It didn't seem to matter who you were, whether you were retirees, investors or workers; everybody was going to get hit. When you went through the list of the Australians who were ignored by their policy platform to hit people with more taxes, there was virtually no-one left. In fact, it probably almost filled the opposition benches.

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019 before the parliament now is about honouring the trust we took to the Australian people. It's about recognising and understanding that we want to cut taxes because we want to create, exactly as the member for Melbourne outlined that we should be calling this parliament to do, the type of country we want to be—the type of country where we recognise that the benefits of this package aren't just for the 10 million Australians who will get tax relief today if this bill is passed. It is about the 25 million Australians who aspire to better who will get benefits through other types of tax cuts or through the jobs, growth and opportunity that sits at the heart of this piece of legislation.

What we now have from the opposition is complete confusion about their policy agenda. We don't know what they stand for and we don't know what they seek to achieve. They seem to want to bring certain tax cuts forward with scant regard for things like the budget surplus and without any proper consideration of the impact. Our plan is balanced. Our plan is managed. Our plan is designed to make sure that we deliver sustainable outcomes for the Australian community by introducing tax cuts today and continuing them on as we need to pull the levers to make sure that Australia's economy can go from strength to strength.

The choice and the focus now for the opposition is quite straightforward: it's what they want to vote for. I realise they had big debates within the Australian Labor Party that they had to have. They had to decide what it was that led them to lose the election. They had to decide whether their tax agenda was such a significant hindrance to their capacity to go on and form government and was why people didn't vote for them. I understand that the Leader of the Opposition wants to keep this discussion live because it helps him avoid having those conversations and the division that will follow as a consequence. So they have a choice: they can vote for themselves or they can vote for the Australian people.

That's what this tax package is focused on: how we can make sure that, yes, we give to low- and middle-income earners in last year's financial year when people are sitting around this weekend doing their tax returns $1,080 off if they are a single or more than $2,000 off if they're a couple. It's about whether Australians can plan a future for their investment and their time and energy to get future tax cuts if they work hard and save. That is the choice, and it is about time the opposition honoured the commitment that the Australian people gave to us, including the people in their electorates who voted against them—because we should never forget those people as well. Let's face it: there is all this confusion in the policy agendas that the Labor Party now seem to be running. They are now in favour of taxes, but they were against them. They now seem to want what they used to call 'the top end of town' to have higher tax cuts as well. I apologise to Dinah Washington for butchering her song, but what a difference an election makes.

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