Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The radical agenda of today's high-taxing, high-spending Labor Party is becoming clearer by the day. Labor's now unveiled this plan to abolish the tax concessions that so many retirees and pensioners rely on to make ends meet. It's one more area where Labor, sadly, is abandoning what used to be long-term bipartisan policy positions. Labor's radical plan to slug pensioners and retirees is just the latest in their, sadly, long list of tax hikes—capital gains tax, up; negative gearing, abolished; higher company taxes; higher personal income taxes; and now abolishing income tax credits for people with shares or super.

The hardest hit by this radical change will be pensioners and retirees on low incomes. Labor's radical tax plan will effectively force one million Australians to pay tax a second time on taxed company earnings. Of course, the Labor Party never saw a tax they didn't love, so to them double taxation is a double treat. At my mobile offices around Brisbane last week, I had so many constituents bail me up in the street to explain the negative impact this will have on their modest incomes. Many of them were pensioners and part pensioners. Bill Clinton's guiding mantra in the 1992 presidential campaign was, 'It's the economy, stupid.' Labor's appears to be shaping up as, 'Tax it, stupid.'