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

You tell us. You have said the cuts are going to occur. You have said you have the money to make those cuts. If those cuts are a lower priority than meeting the needs of the people in the flood affected parts of Australia, why aren’t you implementing those cuts now? To respond to Senator Lundy’s interjection, we have not wiped our hands of the responsibility of determining what sorts of cuts ought to be made. The coalition have done quite an extraordinary thing from opposition. Not only have we rejected the government’s plans; we have actually said what we would do instead. We have said, ‘Here’s where we’d make cuts in order to achieve the same objective.’ As a responsible opposition, we believe that we should offer alternatives, and we have and we have generated some debate about that. Some people do not like the things that we have said we are going to do, but we have put our hands on our hearts and said, ‘We won’t just expect the government to achieve miracles; we’ll make our own alternative proposals.’

The Leader of the Opposition has made quite a extraordinary and, as far as I can recall, unprecedented commitment—that is, that he will sit down with the Prime Minister, if she is so minded, and work through bipartisan options for savings to avoid having to impose this tax. What more of a gift could the Prime Minister possibly ask for than an offer from the Leader of the Opposition to share the pain of making any particular decisions about cuts in spending in order to achieve the objective she says is most important? But this has been swept away in the government’s rhetoric that it is their way or the highway—only their levy and their spending cuts can work. Of course that is a nonsense.

The other important point is that this new tax does not fall equitably on the shoulders of the Australian community. The government say that it is exempting certain people—the people who are already disaster affected—from the imposition of the tax. They say that the definition of those people are those who have received the Australian government disaster recovery payment. But that is a most imperfect test of those who have been affected by the recent natural disasters. It is problematic because it applies to people who were affected in certain ways—they suffered injury, a family member was killed, they suffered loss of power to their homes for a certain period of time et cetera. They are exempted. But we know, and Senator Furner would know, that there are many, many people in Queensland who were directly affected by these floods, who do not fall within one of those categories, who are not entitled to receive the disaster recovery payment—for example, businesses that simply cannot operate any longer because their business lost their customer base, could not get their goods to market because of cut roads, experienced interruptions to their supply chain or lost productivity because people could not get to work. Some businesses are absolutely on their knees in places like Queensland, but they are not eligible either as a business or as individuals for the disaster recovery payment. Those struggling businesses and the families who depend on them will be paying this levy. They are meeting extra costs by virtue of what has occurred, they are struggling to meet the consequences of these disasters, yet they are being hit with a flood tax. That is not equitable. It would be avoided if the government found other ways of meeting this cost such as through cuts to spending.

It is bad enough that they impose further cost-of-living pressures on people who are struggling with rising fuel, food and power costs; it is worse to impose those costs on people who have been hit so hard by natural disasters. Of course, we know that these cost of living pressures are becoming very severe for many people in the Australian community—in fact, almost everybody. We have seen rising power prices made worse by the prospect of a carbon tax. We have seen rising fuel prices to be made worse by the imposition of a carbon tax on fuel. We have seen rising food prices to be made worse by a carbon tax. We have seen rising interest rates due to Labor’s wasteful spending. We see a rising margin between the RBA cash rate and the cost of borrowing for small business due to Labor’s wasteful spending. Now, on top of all this—on top of sharp increases in the cost of living—we see the real possibility of a flood tax hitting every dollar that many taxpayers earn. That is an unfair imposition in the current circumstances, particularly from a government that said in 2007, when it was campaigning for election, that it would do something about the cost-of-living pressures on Australians. I do not so much mind if the government have virtually given up on that promise and are now doing nothing to achieve that particular objective. Of course things like GROCERYchoice have gone out the window—another broken promise. They have done nothing to make that commitment real. That is bad enough. But, now, they are actually adding to cost-of-living pressures by imposing new taxes. This is the party that said that it would not increase the net tax burden on Australians, as I recall. That is two promises broken in one fell swoop. To do that to the Australian community is unconscionable.

I remember Mr Rudd’s assurances in 2007 that he was a ‘fiscal conservative’ and that he wore that badge with pride. Yet in four years Labor have taken a budget position that was $20 billion in surplus with cash in the bank and turned it into a budget that is $41 billion in deficit with net debt of over $100 billion—to the point where when disaster hits this nation they do not have the resources to pay the debt back without going back to the Australian people and reaching into their pockets yet again.

This week we have been reminded that the latest Prime Minister made the election eve commitment that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led, yet now this parliament is facing the prospect of debating just such a tax in the coming weeks and months. The fact is that in the imposition of this new flood tax we see a pattern of behaviour of Labor governments over decades reinforced. They are not able to manage spending, they are not able to reduce debt and deliver surpluses and, when pressure comes along, as it inevitably does, the first thing they look to is to increase the level of taxation on the Australian people.

I want to make a couple of comments about other contributions to this debate. Senator Ludlam in his speech suggested that climate change is loading the dice in favour of more frequent natural disasters and that therefore a levy like this is an appropriate way of responding to it. Assuming that we accept his logic, what Senator Ludlam was arguing for in that circumstance was not a one-off, temporary levy but a permanent levy. Again, on this side of the chamber we would say the best permanent response to natural disasters is to have a strong budget in surplus with minimal or no debt.

Senator Polly told us that not one person had complained to her about the flood levy. I would respectfully invite Senator Polly to come around to my office and have a look at my inbox—and, I am sure, the inbox of most senators on this side of the chamber—and she will see a very different picture of what the Australian community is going through as it contemplates this tax.