Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I want to ask Senator Fielding a question. If I understand the request correctly, it allows for one vehicle per year for a primary producer, as defined in the tax act, to be exempt from this luxury vehicle tax. I did ask this question of Senator Conroy earlier on when you were not here, Senator Fielding. I would be interested to know why in the tourism industry it is, as I understand the amendment, unlimited so you could buy 10 tourist vehicles. If it is a good business decision to do that then that is the right way to do it. That is good for the tourism industry because it addresses the concerns we have and the concerns Senator Fielding has as well. But why is it only one vehicle per year for primary producers?

I understand that Senator Fielding has many things to do and may not have been listening to my arguments before. Perhaps it is different in Victoria, which is a smaller state and the farms there are not quite as big and the scale of farming production is not quite the same. But certainly in the north-west of Queensland there are huge properties. I was there just recently. It is not unusual to have five Toyotas with all the additions—the winch, the bullbar, the spotlights and the things that do take it up into the luxury car category. There could be five on a property. I was on a property where I saw about a dozen and only half of them would have been in. I suppose these properties could buy one a year for the next 25 years, but by the time it got to that the first one would be a heap of metal falling apart.

I give this as a real example: you have a vehicle that is used on the property but you also have a similar vehicle used by mum to take the kids into school. If you live in Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane the school is in the next suburb, or you take your child down to the bus stop and they get public transport. In places up in remote Australia, mothers drive their children 50 kilometres to get them to school, drive back home and come back in the afternoon and pick them up. I can give the exact case of Georgetown in Queensland. The state government will not put on a bus service, so mothers up on the Gilbert River have to drive their kids 30 or 40 kilometres twice a day every day. You would not put them in a Holden or Falcon; you would put them in a decent four-wheel drive with air conditioning—