Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

My remarks on the Passenger Movement Charge Amendment Bill 2008 follow on from those of Senator Macdonald, who is a very loyal Queenslander. He is from North Queensland and he is expressing concern at what is happening there with the downturn in the tourism industry. Yesterday, by chance, I rang a North Queenslander, a person who owns a trawler. We were discussing prawns and so forth. I said to him, ‘Well, how are things going in North Queensland?’ He said: ‘Terrible. The prawners are in trouble because of the high dollar and the price of fuel. The sugarcane industry is in huge trouble because of the value of the dollar and the price of fuel; with every tonne of sugar they produce, they lose $30.’ Then he got on to the tourist industry. He said, ‘Well, if you think primary industry is hurting in North Queensland, the tourist industry is in diabolical trouble.’ He then said, ‘So generally in North Queensland it’s a pretty sad story for the sugarcane industry, the tourist industry, the prawning industry and other industries that use fuel.’

A government should be taking these things into consideration. The tourism industry is a competitive one. The tourism industry in North Queensland has competitors, and the competition is fierce. The tourism industry is one the largest employers in Australia and never more so than in North Queensland. Anyone travelling around that area and staying in a hotel will see various little people movers coming around in the mornings. Some will take people out for white water rafting, some will take people out to the reef and some will take people up into the tablelands. The whole of Cairns, the whole of North Queensland, is built on the tourism industry. When I first went up there in the sixties, it was basically a sugar town and a town that serviced the stations west of Cairns. That has all disappeared in the last 30 years. It is tourism, tourism, tourism. These are the people who are going to get hurt. You do not kick a person when he is down, and this passenger movement tax is actually kicking the tourism industry when it is lying on the ground.

We were told that the Labor government have put $4 million in. The federal government matched it with another $4 million for an advertising campaign. That will help, and it is welcome, but what Australia needs and what North Queensland needs is those tourist planes coming in, one after another, from Japan and from overseas more generally. That is not happening now, and consequently North Queensland is in diabolical trouble.

The Labor Party find it difficult. They cannot help themselves. It seems to me that, when they go to Labor Party school, the first thing they learn is tax: ‘You must tax. Anything that moves, you tax it. If it doesn’t move, you still tax it.’ We have found out just in these short six months of government that, so far, Labor have ordered $2.9 billion of tax increases. This is just another tax increase that the Labor government have put forward. What is the Minister for Tourism doing? Why wouldn’t Mr Turnour, the member for Leichhardt in North Queensland, argue fiercely that this is an imposition on his electorate and get in there and defend the reason for not putting on a passenger movement tax?

Cairns is just a microcosm of all of Australia. Australia depends on the tourist industry. Tourism is one of the biggest industries, one of the biggest employers, in Australia. This is going to impact not only in North Queensland but right throughout Australia at a time when tourism is suffering because of the high dollar. Surely you people over there can understand these things. Surely the government must understand that tourism equals a high rate of employment. What is going to affect tourism? It is the dollar. How do we offset that when the planes have stopped coming in? ‘Oh, we’ll tax it more. We’ll just hit it with another tax and another tax.’ The effect is that there is less and less tourism coming in and higher and higher taxes. It is just unbelievable that people could think in those sorts of terms.

Another example of the taxation—and we cut this one off at the pass—was the road user charge. No wonder the National Party stood up and argued very strongly against that, because the effect of the diesel charge was going to see excise go from 19.63c a litre to 21c a litre, and the government also proposed that the excise be indexed on an annual road cost adjustment. In other words, Labor was supporting an indexation of fuel at a time when Australia is totally worried about the increasing cost of fuel. That is most important to the National Party, because every time fuel goes up the price of groceries goes up. It does not only go up as it goes up in the metropolitan areas, in the cities; that increase is multiplied many times by the time that groceries, sheets of iron, station equipment, farming equipment and so forth are transported out to the west. The multiplication of that increases so that people bear a much heavier burden from the price of products that go out.

We have seen a $2.9 billion increase in taxation—the taxation grab—in Queensland. Who is going to pay this tax? It will be the people who come in, but inadvertently it will be the people in the tourism industry who lose their jobs, lose their businesses and lose their employees. I do not think the Labor Party have thought through the ramifications of this taxation. We have seen that time and time again. Since the Labor Party have come into power, we have seen the legislation that goes through here.

Just last night was a great example of absolute, total confusion reigning in the Labor Party. Two hundred thousand workers were reduced in salary—the most deserving workers in Australia, the charity workers. Two hundred thousand of them were going to lose $50 a week. I understood this, because it started to happen about a month ago, when people started to ring my office and say, ‘I’ve got a letter from the department saying that my benefits are going to be reduced.’ I sprang into action, started to make inquiries and issued press releases, but it did not register with the government. It just continued to roll on, until last night the panic button was hit, and we had to come in here and put through legislation that would reverse the incompetence of the Labor Party. There does not seem to be any thought in the process about what is going to happen. We see 200,000 charity workers slugged $50 a week, then we all get on the pumps last night and bail like crazy to bail them out so that they get their—