Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

A very fair point. I should withdraw the word ‘secret’ and say it was provided privately, because that is what has occurred. When we ask for this information it is not available and is not offered to us, but when they are desperate to get the vote of Independents they are willing to give them private briefings and provide them with more information than they are willing to provide to this Senate chamber. The unfortunate thing for Senator Xenophon—and it is disappointing, because I thought one of his roles in this place was to try to keep the government honest—is that he has been told by the government that it is going to cost $400 million and he says, ‘I’m going to accept that at face value.’ That is his right. He is a new senator in this place. I reckon that in a few months time he will learn by bitter experience not to take that sort of information at face value—because, if you were to take this whole luxury car tax proposal at face value, the government says it is to fight inflation. That is the only reason given for it—to fight inflation—yet they themselves now acknowledge that it will be inflationary, albeit negligibly so. I concede and accept that, but there is no way that you can make out the argument that this is somehow anti-inflationary. So I say to Senator Xenophon and other Independents: just because the government says something, do not accept it at face value; question, probe and see whether the substance matches the spin. In relation to this legislation, clearly the inflationary imperative does not exist, because we around this chamber are now all agreed that, in fact, this proposal will be inflationary.

But the thing that disturbed me is that the email, if I heard it correctly as read by Senator Xenophon, said that Treasury could not confirm the FCAI calculations but—and this is where the bureaucratic language is so wonderful unless you are willing to probe and question—nor were they willing to deny it. So we have one set of evidence put before the Australian people by the motor vehicle interests in this country; Treasury says it cannot confirm it, but nor can it deny it. As a result we are left with only one lot of information in the public domain, and that is from the FCAI. If Treasury cannot confirm this information from the FCAI, I simply pose a question, and it is not a rhetorical question: how can we accept this $400 million figure? It sounds very round to me. Why isn’t it $401 million or $399 million? There is just the very convenient figure of $400 million being thrown up by Treasury for an Independent senator to accept at face value. The FCAI information would suggest that that figure might be wrong. The government say, ‘We can’t confirm the figure,’ but they are not gutsy enough to deny it, because they know that if they were to make such an allegation then they would be brought to account.

What we have now is Treasury saying that the luxury component of vehicles has somehow increased and that therefore it is appropriate that the luxury car tax threshold captures more and more vehicles. I hope there is somebody in Treasury who actually enjoys an increased standard of living. That is what we are on about: we actually want people to enjoy an increased standard of living. One day having refrigerators was, in fact, a luxury; today most people accept it as standard and required. Once upon a time televisions were seen as a luxury; now, I think, most people accept that they are standard.