Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

They changed the date. It will probably be a price of around $26 upwards. It will probably be a similar arrangement in terms of compensation. It will be a big money-go-round—for no environmental benefit.

This is, of course, not the only broken promise. Over the last three years we have had a plethora of broken promises. Remember when, in the lead-up to the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd said that he would not change the private health insurance framework? So what did he do? He wanted to—and Labor still want to—do away with the tax rebate for millions of Australians taking additional responsibility for their private health insurance. Labor promised that they would not make any changes to superannuation. What did they do? They proceeded to halve the concessional contribution caps for superannuation, from $100,000 down to $50,000 and from $50,000 down to $25,000 for people older than 50 and younger than 50 respectively.

I finally got an answer back on it from Minister Shorten, having asked a question back in early December. The number of Australians hit with additional tax because they inadvertently breached concessional super contributions has more than doubled in the first year of the broken promise of the Gillard Labor government—more than double. This government is raising $142 million worth of additional taxes that they do not deserve. They are taxing people because they are breaching concessional contribution caps for superannuation that have been halved after they promised that they would not be. There are direct implications for people across Australia from Labor’s broken promise—$142 million in additional taxes for people with superannuation.

The most fundamental broken promise of all from my point of view—looking at our tax system and the economy—is the promise to hold a tax summit. The Henry tax review was supposed to be about root and branch reform of our tax system. It was supposed to be about delivering a fairer and simpler tax system. Of course, the only thing we ended up with is a multibillion dollar new tax which is manifestly less fair and more complex. The Henry review says we should replace state and territory royalties with a national profit based tax. Is that what the government did? No, it is not. It did not because it did not implement a related recommendation by the Henry tax review. It did not implement the related recommendation that the Australian government should negotiate with state and territory governments on how all of that would work.

You would think that if a national government wanted to replace state and territory revenues it would start off by having a conversation with state and territory governments. How can you be serious about simplifying the tax system or about genuine reform when you are looking at replacing state and territory revenues with a national revenue if you do not even talk to them? The government had a problem: it did not have time to talk to state and territory governments because it wanted to put those billions of dollars into the budget papers. It wanted to be able to claim the revenue so it could go to the election claiming the illusion of an early surplus. That is why it did not have the time to talk to state and territory governments. This was never about tax reform. It was only ever about a grab for cash in order to create the illusion of an early surplus.

In comes Prime Minister Gillard, who does a secret deal with the three taxpayers and designs a tax behind closed doors. That should never be allowed to stand as a precedent for how taxes are developed in this country. Then she made a promise to the Independents—another one: ‘We are going to let the sunshine in.’ The sunshine was going to come in; there was going to be a commitment. I watched the Prime Minister as she made her comments looking right down the barrel of the camera. She said, ‘There is going to be a new era of openness and transparency under the government I lead.’ We thought, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ because Kevin Rudd, when he was Prime Minister, was not going to give us any detail about the mining tax. He was not going to give us the commodity price assumptions and the production volume assumptions that were driving the mining tax revenue estimates—mining tax revenue estimates that keep bouncing around from $12 billion to $24 billion to $10½ billion to $7.4 billion to less than $5 billion.

Commodity price and production volume assumptions are critically important for us to be able to scrutinise this tax. The Prime Minister promised to be open and transparent. Have we got access to that information? No, we have not. It is information, incidentally, that the state government in Western Australia—whether it is Liberal or Labor—publishes as a matter of course in its budget papers. But this secretive government, this government which breaks promise after promise and this government which has delivered record deficits and record levels of debt and which has taken us from a strong financial position to a disastrous financial position is not open and transparent. This government is a secretive government, and secretive government makes for bad government.