Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

Let me remind Senator Kemp, as a former Assistant Treasurer, of the comments of Mr Brough, who was recently promoted to cabinet. His comments about the suggestion of his own colleague Senator Minchin, the finance minister, to abolish the 15 per cent contributions tax on super in one hit was to label such an idea as a tax cut for the rich and unaffordable. So we had the then Assistant Treasurer, Mr Brough, bagging his own finance minister, Senator Minchin, about his idea to do away with the 15 per cent contributions tax on superannuation in one hit.

Of course, on this tax debate, we have had the input of the National Party. We had Mr Vaile—and this was at the time when Senator McGauran defected from the National Party to the Liberal Party—coming out publicly saying, ‘The National Party is going to have a very clear and different tax policy from the Liberal Party.’ We have not seen it yet. In fact, I do not think we have ever seen one. It has been 10 long years in opposition for us, but it is has been 20 or 30 long years since we have seen a tax policy from the National Party. But even the National Party has attempted to buy into this tax debate.

With this tax debate raging all around the Treasurer, what could the Treasurer do? He needed to short-circuit the public debate until the budget. The way he has chosen to short-circuit the public debate is by announcing this review into international tax comparisons. That is what the Treasurer has announced. What I find interesting about this is that you do not need to have a new review or inquiry into international tax comparisons. All you have to do is to go to the website of the OECD—the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development—and pull off a number of their reports. All the data, all the information and all the study material that you need with respect to international tax comparison is currently on the OECD website. So what we have is the Treasurer, Mr Costello, buying time through to the next budget by announcing a comparison which will come up with tables of international tax levels. It is all there on the OECD website. We do not need a special study in order to access that information. It is there.

As I said, it is just cover for the Treasurer, Mr Costello, to short-circuit the current debate. He knows he has looked a bit tardy and tatty and largely irrelevant in the context of the current tax debate. He has even been outflanked by Senator Minchin with that very grand call by Senator Minchin to abolish the 15 per cent super contributions tax in one hit. I referred earlier to the comments by then Assistant Treasurer Mr Brough.