Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will be supporting Senator Xenophon on this. I am very surprised by Senator Abetz, because the opposition remains confident, I assume, that it is going to win the next election, by which time this is perfect because it will revert to the CPI just as Senator Abetz wants it to. In the event that were to happen, I trust we would not be back in here trying to change it; it will default to exactly what he just argued for, so it is a perfect situation that I thought the opposition would clearly support.

As Senator Xenophon rightly says, the amendment says basically that the government has got four years to address this issue of the indexation and do it through the Henry tax review, look at the whole thing. If we get the kind of tax review that I think most people are hoping for—a big picture and quite a sweeping change to the tax system—then four years hence, hopefully, the luxury car tax will be gone and instead we will have, as the Greens have suggested, a phased-in fuel efficiency tax across the whole fleet and so on.