Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in this debate on the Tax Laws Amendment (Temporary Flood Reconstruction Levy) Bill 2011 and related bill to indicate that I think this legislation is a serious mistake and there are viable and appropriate alternatives. I want to start by comprehensively rejecting the assertion from Senator Polley, one made in this debate by other speakers from the other side of this chamber, that somehow opposing the government’s flood levy legislation is equivalent to saying that we are not in favour of assisting the disaster affected people of Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia. That is a false dichotomy. It is not sustainable and it says a lot about the weakness of the government’s case—that it needs to so comprehensively misrepresent what the coalition is saying about this and that it would simply parrot the line, ‘We’re doing something about the disasters in Queensland and elsewhere and the coalition is trying to stop us, and therefore the coalition does not support action to assist hard-hit communities’. That is, of course, untrue.

The point that the coalition makes in this debate is that assistance must be provided to people who have been hit hard and that those people deserve the compassion and support of the rest of the Australian community, compassion and support which was very much evident during the life of the previous government when natural disasters such as Cyclone Larry led to fulsome and very responsible measures to deal with the sorts of losses involved. But we do not believe that the response of this government is the appropriate one to take. Sometimes in these debates about millions if not billions of dollars, it is easy to lose some perspective. The government insists that this levy, to raise $1.8 billion, is absolutely necessary to fund the reconstruction of infrastructure in disaster affected areas. It insists that the particular balance which the government has achieved—that is, $1.8 billion in a new tax and the rest of the estimated $5.6 billion cost of reconstruction from cuts to or deferment of government programs—cannot come from anywhere else except from that which the government has proposed.

I want to put some perspective into this debate by reminding those opposite in particular of some of the other figures that are confronting the Australian community at the moment. There is $1 billion, not the cost of the Home Insulation Program but the cost of fixing the disaster which the Home Insulation Program has evolved into. The Home Insulation Program cost $2.45 billion all up and it still leaves thousands and thousands of Australian homeowners uncertain about whether their homes are safe after the government’s inept hand of interference. So there is a billion dollars wasted by this government. There is $2 billion at least—the figure could be as high as $8 billion—wasted under the government’s $16 billion failed school halls program, with much of that money yet to be rolled out and, presumably, more waste to be executed.

There is $672 million—over a third of the amount proposed to be raised by this flood levy—for the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program, or SIHIP, a program that spent $45 million on consultants before any concrete was poured and has handed over to date only 134 houses over three years—a disaster of a program that continues to waste the money of Australian taxpayers. There is $275 million on the Green Loans Program—so badly managed that it has now been aborted by the Gillard government, in the process wrecking the careers of assessors who paid thousands of dollars to become accredited only to find they had no market to serve because of the government’s ineptitude.

This government has a seemingly endless capacity to waste enormous amounts of taxpayers’ money. It still has on its books huge amounts of spending which could be avoided or deferred in order to avoid placing a burden on the shoulders of Australian taxpayers. That is the point that the coalition is making in this debate. It is not that we wish to see any stinting in the level of support by the Australian community for those affected by disasters such as floods. We think that the burden placed on the Australian community should not be added to by the imposition of new taxes to deal with crises or problems that come along from time to time—because there will always be another good reason to put on another tax and, sadly, there will always be another disaster or natural problem and there will always be some sort of financial challenge. We know that these things are experienced by governments all the time everywhere in the world for all sorts of reasons.

On this side of the chamber, we believe that the best response to those crises is to have a well-managed budget, a budget that operates in surplus with minimal or no debt so that there is fat in the system to marshal resources to deal with problems as they arise. Given a Commonwealth budget of some $300 billion—a budget that the opposition have shown to be filled with wasteful programs and padded with fat—when the government gets handed a $5.6 billion bill, we say that it does not need to stick its hand in taxpayers’ pockets to deal with that problem. What makes the government’s claim that it needs this levy even more disingenuous is the fact that the government itself has admitted it does not need to raise all of this money through extra taxes. It admits that there are other amounts it can save within the budget. At the National Press Club when the Prime Minister announced her new flood tax, she was asked, ‘What if the bill is higher than $5.6 billion?’ The answer was: ‘We won’t impose a higher levy; we’ll find money elsewhere in the budget. We’ll make cuts.’

The question remains, a question completely unanswered in this debate by members on that side of the chamber: where exactly are those cuts and why are not they making them now as an alternative to raising that $1.8 billion levy on the Australian community?