Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The Governor of the Reserve Bank has said:

The crisis really is in real wage growth.

When there is a crisis in real wage growth, with real wages going backwards, why in just 11 days time is the Prime Minister giving millionaires a tax cut at the same time as supporting a pay cut for ordinary workers? How come on 1 July millionaires get more take-home pay and 700,000 ordinary workers get less take-home pay?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Low wages growth is an issue—it is. We are very aware of it. That is why we are supporting Australian business. The Labor Party used to know. In fact, I am amazed the member for McMahon stood up and asked that question. He actually wrote a book about it. He wrote a book in which he said the way to deliver higher wages for Australians is to cut Australian business taxes. He said company tax should be 25 per cent. He could see the light then. It was all so clear, but now it has been clouded. I am not sure whether the Leader of the Opposition has come across his vision and clouded his clarity of thought when he recognised that, if you want to get higher wages, you need more investment. You need business to have confidence to invest and employ, and the proven way of doing that is to lower business taxes. It is what he recommended, it is what Paul Keating did, it is what the Leader of the Opposition used to recommend.

Labor used to understand that you need to get business moving in order to get wages moving, and yet every policy they have is calculated to put a brake on investment and on business. There is not one pro-business measure in their whole policy. They are going to roll back the tax cuts for small and medium businesses that have already been legislated and they certainly would not give any more. They have been opposed to the incentives that business need. We recognise that Australian business needs confidence; it needs the confidence to invest. Labor used to know it; they have forgotten it now. All they have to offer Australian business is higher taxes and higher debt. What a double that is: higher taxes and even more debt to put onto the shoulders of children and grandchildren and generations to come. Labor has forgotten about business, and it has forgotten about the companies, large and small, that employ nearly 90 per cent of Australians. Until they remember that, until they back business as they should, Australian workers will be let down by the so-called party of the workers.