Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker, it's a wonderful electorate and you're welcome any time.

The way I see it, there three issues. One is integrity in politics, and I think we need to quarantine that and discuss it in and of itself. The next issue is tax reform. The third is the cost-of-living crisis, who has created it and exacerbated it, and what options there are to deal with it at its root cause. On integrity in politics, the Prime Minister had broken his promise, and he promised Australians they could trust him to keep his promise because, as he said, 'My word is my bond.' If the Prime Minister can mislead Australian so blatantly on this issue, can anyone ever believe anything he's going to say again? When we have our lead-up to the next election, what's his word worth it if it is no longer his bond? He didn't need to break this promise; he chose to.

It's really disappointed to see the debate in this place around tax reform. I think the late Bob Hawke would be appalled at what he is seeing. I don't think Paul Keating would be impressed either, and certainly John Howard and Peter Costello wouldn't be impressed, because those were people who focused on tax reform at its core and as a mechanism to improve the Australian economy, increase productivity and create better living standards overall for people—not the sort of tacky redistribution we're seeing here. Keating was very focused on reforming the economy overall, with more productivity and a focus on growth. And Howard did change his position on the GST, but he had the courage to take that position to an election and let the people decide. I think that was a courageous move. People in the end decided that they did want some form of consumption tax, because the ministers could then explain what it was all about, and the voters voted for it.

What do we want from our tax system? We want fairness. We want to reward workers and force government to cut its cloth, and that hasn't been happening for a number of decades. Both sides are to blame, quite frankly, for that. We really need governments that are focused on efficiency. They could look at the private sector for ways to do that. We want incentive. We want to encourage aspiration. We want to be in the global pool of talent and make sure that the message we're putting out there is that Australia is a place where you can come and get rewarded for the extra work you do—for doing that extra shift, for getting that extra certificate, for getting your apprenticeship, for going to university and trying to find a way to move into those higher income brackets—without having the bracket creep steal the money away from you as you work harder to get it. We really want productivity, and that's to encourage business activity, profitability and employment.

I notice that the government is saying, 'Well, when circumstances change, we must change with them.' That claim can be expressed in many ways. That means you can bend to any whim, promises don't mean anything, and our commitment is our commitment until it isn't our commitment anymore. I believe this is a political response from the government, not a cost-of-living response. The cost-of-living issues have been with us for a while. Admittedly, they have been getting worse and worse since mid-2022. I've seen that in my electorate of Nicholls. The government seems to have been incredibly distracted by the cost-of-living crisis and, from what I can see, to have only woken up to it over the summer of 2023-24. The government has been distracted by a number of issues over the past year and a bit.

There was an opportunity to advantage low and middle income earners, and it could have been done last year. This is something that's been completely missed in the debate, in my view. The low and middle income tax offset was put in place by the coalition to help people on low and middle incomes, hence the name. It was a response to some challenges that were happening during the pandemic, and it was a temporary response for what we hoped would be a temporary problem. That's what responsible governments do. The Albanese government could have extended that if they wanted. They could have limited it to a desired income threshold. But the government allowed it to lapse, so low and middle income families, with the cost-of-living pressures ramping up, got a rude shock at tax time last year when they went to get their tax returns: they discovered they were $1,500 out of pocket.

Even with additional tax relief under this legislation, a farmer or factory worker in my electorate earning $70,000 will still be worse off than they were when this government took office, because they were getting the low and middle income tax offset. I sit here in question time and I listen to all these ministers get up and talk about their portfolios and say, 'Such and such is getting $800 of tax back that they wouldn't have gotten under the coalition.' It's simply not true, because they were getting $1,500 extra under the low and middle income tax offset when the coalition was in government. There is every likelihood that, had the coalition been re-elected, that might have been extended—if the cost-of-living crisis were as bad; I believe it wouldn't have been as bad under the coalition policies.

As I said, I don't believe this is about tax reform or fairness or the future of Australia's economy. I think it's about political expediency and it's populism over pragmatism.

See this speech in context