Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The very fact that we are here debating the Tax Laws Amendment (Temporary Flood and Cyclone Reconstruction Levy) Bill 2011 and the Income Tax Rates Amendment (Temporary Flood and Cyclone Reconstruction Levy) Bill 2011 is a testament to the incompetence of this Labor government. We should not even be here debating it. If this government were competent, it would still have most, if not all, of the surplus funding of $22 billion which it inherited from the last Liberal coalition government led by Mr Howard. If it were competent to manage those funds, we would not even be having this discussion. Do we support Queenslanders, Victorians, New South Welshmen, Western Australians, Tasmanians and New Zealanders in their natural disasters? Of course we do. We always have and we always will, so do not hide behind that curtain of protection by appealing to the goodwill of Australians.

Why do we need a levy? As Dorothea Mackellar said in her poem a hundred years ago and others have said repeatedly, we are a land of drought and flooding rains. We always have been a land of natural disasters and we always will be. Some of them I will draw attention to this evening. What would any responsible family, any responsible household, any responsible business do? They would always save for a rainy day. Labor governments do not know how to save for rainy days, but they were handed a surplus of $22 billion when they came into government and one would have thought they would have been capable of keeping this budget in surplus for that purpose.

I have sat here this evening and today and listened to the nonsense that has been put forward about Howard-Costello governments always calling for levies when the need arose—a levy on gun control, a levy on dairying and a levy on Ansett. Why did the Howard-Costello government have to do that? There were two reasons. One was that that government inherited a $96 billion debt from the last Labor government and it spent through until 2007 repaying that debt. For those who are not aware, the average interest bill alone whilst they were paying down that principal was in excess of $5 billion a year. That was one of the two reasons they had to do it. The second reason was that they were very active in prudently managing the economy and in effecting cuts where it was necessary. It was only after their efforts to repay debt and after their efforts to prune the budget that they may have had to go to a levy. I will remind this chamber that it did not even go to a vote when Mr Howard called for the levy on guns as a result of those shocking events in 1996 in Tasmania. The circumstances here today could not be more profoundly different. Labor did not inherit a $96 billion debt; it inherited a $22 billion surplus. We have seen little if any evidence of this government being willing to cut its cloth so that it could make these savings on its own.

What are the funding alternatives in an event such as this? There are three: the first is to find alternative cuts or deferrals, the second is to add to loans and the third is a levy. Which one did the government rush to? I return to the alternative of funding cuts or deferrals and remind Senator Carol Brown, if I may—through you, Madam Acting Deputy President—that the coalition offered to work cooperatively with this Labor government to try and find those extra cuts in the budget. What was the reaction? As usual it was one of rejection.

If I could return for one moment to when the global financial crisis first hit, who was the person who first suggested that there be some limited level of underwriting of deposits by the banks? It was Malcolm Turnbull. The figure he suggested was $100,000. He was laughed at and was rejected by this Treasurer, who knows very little about economics, who only days later not only accepted—