Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Today we are talking about tax, and I personally am delighted because I care about this country, I care about the future for our kids and, if you care about those things, you need to care about tax because there are major issues with our tax system. For me, there are three that really stand out. Firstly, it is harder as a young person today to get ahead than it has been at the past, and I do not like that. Secondly, our companies are not growing their productivity as much as they could, which means we cannot pay and grow our services to this country as much as we can, and I do not like that. Finally, we need to deal with climate change in the cheapest way possible but our tax system stops us from doing that well, and, again, I do not like that.

Starting with intergenerational equity, a young person came to me and said, 'I have worked hard at school, at university. I have a great job, I have a $50,000 HECS debt and I don't think I am ever going to be able to get a home.' The truth is that young people today are having a harder time than previous generations and it is just not fair. If you look at the last 15 years, for a family headed by somebody over 65, their wealth increased over a decade by about 50 per cent. But for a family headed by a young person under the age of 35, their wealth pretty much did not move. I don't think that was the intention of the Australian people when they elected and supported the governments of the past, and supported their tax policies. But that is the system that we have, and it just isn't fair to young people. We're now seeing only 17 per cent of older generations—those over 65—paying any tax, while previously it was 27 per cent. Take two households living next door to each other: if you're retired, you're paying about half the amount of tax that you would be as the same household on the same amount of income, at around $100,000. I just don't think that's fair, and the tax system is important in addressing that.

Secondly, the tax system is important in addressing growth and productivity. Frankly, if we can keep our productivity growth up, if we can raise it from where it has been, we will have billions extra in our coffers and that will make a huge difference to the services we can provide. But we have falling direct foreign investment; we have low and not-growing R&D investment; we are a net capital exporter, where we're sending more money overseas than we're investing in Australian companies; and our corporate tax rate for medium and large companies is, frankly, not competitive with the rest of the OECD. That matters; we need to address that.

And, finally, there's climate. Climate change is an issue that, thankfully, this parliament has taken seriously and is taking real action on. However, our tax system is not underpinning that in the way that it should be. Certainly, things like the fuel tax credit and our failure to deal with the cost of carbon and how to price carbon effectively, mean that we're not doing everything we can to make that transition as cost effective, as efficient and as strong as we possibly can.

Those are the sorts of changes that I think we should contemplate in the tax system. Members of the government have argued that they're doing tax reform. To be honest, my beef is not to say, 'What you're doing here and there aren't important changes.' Some of them, I agree with, some of them, I don't. Some of them are issues on the margins for me. It's not to criticise that, because I know tax reform is hard. But the point I'm trying to make is that what they're doing is not enough. Frankly, that's a symptom of the last election, where the political wedging and the political culture in this place meant that it seemed the only thing anyone wanted to say about tax was absolutely nothing, if they could possibly get away with it. That's what we did in the last election; we cannot do that in the next election.

The coalition has said they're going to put tax on the agenda for the next election, and I think that's a very good thing. My point to the coalition is: make it worth it—address those massive issues that we're facing. Let's not have another sugar hit, which is just tax cuts, without actually having the reform that can help underpin change on the major issues that our country is facing. And to the Labor Party: build on what you've done. I know you're very proud of what you've done in this last change, but build on it so that we do address those major issues our country is facing. That's because you have not gone far enough if you care about those three big issues: intergenerational equity, productivity and effective climate action.

Finally, on the rule-in and rule-out: this is unhelpful. I sat through question time yesterday and heard about that rule-in, rule-out. If we're going to make a tax reform, we must do it together—as a coalition across the parliament.

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