David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion. I acknowledge the comments that the previous speaker made, but if people cast their memories back—and some people speaking today weren't here when the original stage 3 tax cuts and the amended stage 3 tax cuts were announced in the last Morrison government—what wasn't acknowledged is that the low- and middle-income tax offsets, which amounted to $1,500 in the 2021-22 tax year, vanished in the first Labor budget. Lots of people came to me saying that they had put their tax return in and they were short by up to $1,500. Then they brought in tax cuts, which are now lauded, but people are still $1,500 worse off. These tax cuts are also coming at a time of stubborn inflation, which is eating away the value. They're coming with higher government spending, which is driving inflation. A lot of the jobs growth is in NDIS employment and in government related industries where it's only paid by tax dollars, rather than getting investment by people working hard and knowing that they'll keep more of it.

The original stage 3 tax cuts were far better than this. They followed on stage 1 and stage 2 that did address the low-income tax burden of people in Australia. I have one of the largest electorates with the lowest average income in the country. We don't have a high average income in my electorate; we have a lot of pensioners. Compared to the average urban city electorate, I have over 48,000 pensioners in my electorate, and we are very sensitive to how much tax we pay. But we also have people who are aspirational, who are trying to work hard and not lose all their money paying tax. We were getting rid of the whole 32 per cent tax rate, up to $200,000. That meant people who were working hard, who were happy to do overtime, to take on more responsibility, to work harder and to work longer hours were finally going to get ahead, whereas nothing in this addresses the fact that we have inflation and we have bracket creep. It hasn't addressed the fundamental structural reform. It's a one-off sugar hit that will evaporate in a couple of years—that's what people don't realise. Our tax reform passage was structurally changing the tax rates so that middle-30s tax rate would vanish until you got up to $200,000.

What else is happening at the moment? This inflation is driving up the cost of living: vegetables are up, processed goods are up, gas is up. Gas is a critical source of energy in the Australian economy, and this government is talking up gas, but, in effect, slowing down gas and shrinking it. As a result we have major shortages in the electricity market and in the manufacturing market; 44 per cent of manufacturing in this country, hey presto, relies on gas. You've got one side of the government saying, 'We want to make things in Australia.' The other side, with the environment driven focus on gas and anti-fossil-fuel policies, is shutting down manufacturing. They're quite schizoid. They don't fully understand the drivers of how manufacturing happens in this country. We are great at heavy smelting, but even that is going to become marginal and go offshore. Look at what has happened with the nickel industry in Western Australia. It's just shut down because Indonesia and places in Asia are buying our high-calorific content black coal, building more coal plants than you can poke a stick at, and driving the cost of electricity down as a result of it. Yet we are starving our manufacturing sector of gas. We need more exploration and more fuels opened up so that we can keep it here onshore and get our manufacturers relief. They're paying higher electricity prices, which is the other driver for manufacturing, and gas is essential in so many things—also for fertiliser. If we don't have gas, we don't make fertiliser in this country. If we have to import gas to make fertiliser and make plastics and all those other things—and it's very expensive at the moment. We could have bountiful, cheap gas making stuff in Australia again, but these tax cuts— (Time expired)

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