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

Is that what it says or not? Give me an interpretation, Senator. As I indicated, I doubt that the minister would ever do that, but that is how sloppily this has been drawn up. Which is the class that can get out of this? The whole thing has been quite poorly done, as you would expect. It again demonstrates that the Labor Party can simply not be trusted with looking after money.

I have also heard the Greens raving about the fact that because the coalition says that this should be paid from the general revenue of government then that in some way means the coalition is attacking lower income families, whereas this levy goes only on what they think in their minds are wealthy families—those who earn $50,000 or more. If the Greens believe that our general taxation system is so bad that it impacts on the poor and lets the rich off, why don’t they do something about fixing the general taxation system? Why don’t they introduce a bill? Why don’t they convince their coalition partners in government, the Labor Party, that the whole tax system should be changed? Why should the people they refer to as ‘poor’ escape only flood levies? Why do they have to pay for what some call middle-class welfare? Senator Ludlam agrees, so why isn’t he doing something? Why is he supporting this particular flood levy that exempts so-called poor families and taxes so-called rich families when it is apparently okay if all the other expenditure of government burdens the so-called poor people in Australia? Come on—let us have a bit of truthfulness and honesty in this whole debate.

The other point I want to make is that I understood that the government had decided that it needed a certain amount of money and so was going to make a certain number of cuts to its bloated expenditure which even the Prime Minister indicated would be able to be cut. The government said: ‘We’ve got bloated expenditure in these areas. We’ll cut that to help with the recovery and in addition to that we’ll recover some additional money through this flood levy.’ I may be incorrect on this, but I think the figure they were looking to gather through additional taxation was $1.8 billion. The government said, ‘There will be $1.8 billion from additional taxation plus these savings and that will help us deal with the recovery.’

But, having said that, to get the votes necessary to get this $1.8 billion deal through the parliament the government then went out and said, ‘Of those savings we were going to make, we are actually going to pay the Greens $100 million to restore the Solar Flagships program.’ That is okay, but what happened to the $1.8 billion? The Greens demanded $100 million of it for the return of one of their pet projects. The Greens also demanded for their support for this flood levy another $264 million for the National Rental Affordability Scheme. It is probably a good idea but—hang on—we were collecting $1.8 billion and already Ms Gillard has paid out $100 million and $264 million just to get the votes to get the new tax through parliament.

Then she went to Mr Wilkie, who had a real issue with the fact that Ms Gillard was going to get $88 million in savings from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council fund to put into the Queensland flood recovery. But—hang on—to get Mr Wilkie’s pretty expensive vote, she said, ‘Okay, you can have $88 million for that.’ That is a total of $452 million that Ms Gillard paid out to get the votes to get the new tax through this parliament.

She promised Senator Fielding for his vote $500 million for Victoria. Senator Fielding, do you really think that the reconstruction effort from the Commonwealth taxpayer would have excluded Victoria? Do you seriously think that even Ms Gillard was going to say, ‘We are only going to spend the money we collect in Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales and not in Victoria’? Of course they were always going to spend it in Victoria as well. Well done to Senator Fielding, I guess, for getting a confirmation from this government that $500 million will be spent in his home state. I wonder if that perhaps makes people in New South Wales and Western Australia a little bit nervous that they will not get anything because their vote was not needed to get this through the parliament.

One wonders what sort of money the Labor Party will be throwing Senator Xenophon’s way to get his vote to support this. I know Senator Xenophon is an honourable man. I know he will not be bought off by any sorts of bribes or inducements. But I emphasise to Senator Xenophon the uselessness and futile nature of promises made by this government. We all remember Ms Gillard saying a few days before the last election with hand on heart, ‘I promise that there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.’ How much more of a promise could that be? What more could you say? I am sure many of the people of Australia foolishly, as it turned out, believed her. Yet here we are a few short months later with the Prime Minister introducing the tax she promised not to introduce.

Time unfortunately does not permit me to go through any more of the rather shallow, if I might say somewhat euphemistically, contributions made by Labor and Greens senators in this debate. But I come back to the point I made right at the beginning, that this is not about helping individual people in Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria who have suffered as a result of natural calamities. I have heard a lot of stories about people who have had interactions with those who suffered, and they are not on their own. Compassion and concern do not rest with Labor and the Greens. I have been up in the cyclone areas a number of times and in fact sat through the fringes of it. We do this every second or third year. It is a disaster, it is a huge impact on people’s lives, but it happens. We live in the north knowing that cyclones will come every couple of years. It is such a great place to live that cyclones, floods, even droughts, will not send us away, but we know that those natural calamities will come. The fact that people have been hurt and will suffer for many years to come is not a reason for a new tax which will make their recovery and their futures even more difficult.

My colleagues have at some length gone through the flaws in this bill where people who have suffered but not directly, people who have contributed an enormous amount in time and effort which is even greater than money, will be penalised again by this new flood tax. We perhaps have not heard the stories of many people who I have become aware of who did not really want the $1,000—in fact they had made a decision not to go and get it—but who then said, ‘Well, it is not the $1,000 we are concerned about; it is the fact that if you get the payment then you are not subject to this levy.’ That was their issue in doing that. A lot of people might have thought that. Those same people, I might say, got the $1,000, gave it away to someone else and continued on. But this sort of stupid legislation brings out all these anomalies, these inconsistencies.

I raise again that these bills that the government is asking us to support in the Senate—and I hope that Senator Xenophon and Senator Fielding have looked at this—indicate that the minister can exclude different classes of people from payment of the levy. One would assume that the minister would do the right thing, but why wasn’t the legislation drafted in such a way that might have addressed that issue? Perhaps we can take this up further in the committee stages of the debate. I am waiting for Senator Ludlam to tell me that I am wrong in the fact that only individuals pay this tax. I am waiting for him to tell me about the multinational profit-making companies that send all their profits overseas, as the Greens, as Senator Brown and Senator Milne, kept telling us about in their contributions. I am waiting for him to tell me if these bills do in fact address those issues. Perhaps it is in another piece of legislation that is not before me at the moment. But I look forward to that.

In the end result, these flood levy bills are not about raising money for individuals; they are about raising money for governments like my own state government, the Queensland government, which is broke through its own inefficiency, and bailing them out of a political problem. (Time expired)