Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

To place it on the record, the opposition agrees with Senator Fielding: this government is not serious about addressing the challenge of alcohol abuse in the community. It is not serious about addressing binge drinking through effective measures. This government is only serious about one thing—that is, tax. It is tax, tax, tax. Why is it that, whenever there is a challenge, whenever there is a problem, the only thing the Labor government can come up with is a new tax or a tax hike? I note the comments made by Senators Siewert and Xenophon on having been able to extract a further $50 million out of the government. I guess from the government’s point of view $50 million for $1.6 billion is not a bad return. I draw the attention of the Senate to the fact that what Senator Xenophon describes as a significant step forward is a step well short of what the Senate agreed to only last night. The Senate last night passed a motion calling on the government:

… to appropriate all revenue collected as a result of the increased tax on ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages between 27 April 2008 and the date of commencement of these bills towards genuine measures to address binge drinking, including an alcohol abuse prevention, research, education, treatment and other measures package.

By 28 February 2009, that was $290 million. By the time this measure comes into effect, it will be in excess of $300 million—not $50 million. I remind the Senate that only last night we called on the government to appropriate all of the revenue it has collected so far and to demonstrate that this is not about tax, that this is not about increasing consolidated revenue and that this is not about propping up the pretence of a surplus that Labor was never going to be able to preserve. Labor has a history of what it describes as ‘temporary’ deficits. All Labor has got is a plan to get into deficit; it never has a plan to get out of deficit, which is why it pursues measures like this one. It pursues a tax grab on people it thinks it can target because politically it is going to get away with it, as long as the rhetoric, the propaganda and the spin are aggressive enough to pretend there is a case.

I place on record those comments on behalf of the opposition. Our position, you would not be surprised, remains unchanged. We think that this is a tax. It is a tax grab. It is not an effective way of addressing the issues the government says it wants to address. The government has never made any attempt to try and prove that it is an effective way to address the problem it has said it wants to address. In the absence of any evidence that a 70 per cent increase in the tax on RTDs is an effective measure to help reduce at-risk levels of consumption and alcohol abuse in the community, we will not support it.