Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to start by congratulating the member for Bass for her emphatic victory at the federal election—a 5.8 per cent swing in northern Tasmania. I think that beats just about everyone else. Of course, our friends in Queensland did such a wonderful job. But they did have the help of Bob Brown—they must admit that! Bob went to Queensland. He left Tasmania. Maybe he should have stayed in Tassie. But what a tremendous victory for the member for Bass.

I would also like to congratulate her on her first motion. She understands the importance of tax cuts. It was a clear choice at the last election. The people of Bass had to decide on Labor's policy of $387 billion of initial taxes. They rejected it, and Labor lost that seat to the coalition in a landslide. Why? The simple reason, I'll argue, is that the Labor Party simply didn't understand that the policies of the coalition were merely allowing people to keep more of their own money. This is the great divide that we see in the House. We have seen in this debate that they've learnt nothing—three election losses in a row and they still have not learnt. Tax cuts are simply allowing people to keep more of their money that they own.

We know that on the Labor side they don't see it as money that people own. They see it as their money. We saw that during the election campaign. We saw that with the retirees tax and the theft of franking credits that was planned by the Labor Party. Labor didn't understand that that money was earned by the company and earned by the shareholders of that company. They saw it as a gift. They went around insulting self-funded retirees, telling them that this was a gift from government. I remember Senator Keneally gave some speech and said, 'It's our money!' It's not their money. It belongs to the shareholders of those businesses that earned that money.

We saw the same thing with Labor's negative gearing policy. They simply didn't understand that negative gearing is not some great lurk. It is a simple principle that your interest is an expense of the income that you earn and should rightfully be deducted when you calculate your tax. And we saw it on their attack on family trusts, where they wanted distributions from those trusts to be taxed at 30 per cent—not understanding how many small family businesses work and the legitimate reason that their funds are set up in trusts.

So this is the first step of this coalition government. It is to allow the citizens of this country to put more of the money that they earn into their pockets and to decide what they will spend it on. It's not just that. It's also creating the incentive for them to go out and earn more and create more wealth for this nation. When these tax cuts finally come through, 94 per cent of Australians will have a top marginal tax rate of 30 per cent. That means when they want to work a bit of extra overtime, or if they are a small business that wants to expand or take a risk, they know that if they earn a few extra dollars they can keep 70 per cent of it for themselves. Yet we saw under Labor's policies that the taxman would take half of it. It's not only the stimulus effect of allowing people to have more of their money. The true stimulatory effect is the incentive it creates for people to get out there and work and earn more money.

The public have spoken. They have rejected Labor's $387 billion of taxes. I would hope that, during this term of parliament, Labor could forget the idea that it is their money and understand that the taxes earned by the people of Australia firstly belongs to them. If they can understand that, maybe we may see the Labor Party be more competitive at the next election.

Again, I congratulate the member for Bass on her emphatic victory and for bringing this important motion to the House.

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