John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to talk at length to the Tax Laws Amendment (2012 Measures No. 6) Bill 2012, but of course I cannot. I follow on from Senator Boyce talking about people earning $85,000, such as schoolteachers and police officers. These are the wealthy? This is simply amazing. It takes me back to John Laws when he constantly said, 'You don't make the poor rich by making the rich poor.' That is something that the Labor government and the Greens have never learnt. They rob the people who are successful—the ones who invest, the ones who run large businesses that started off as small businesses and grew.

I would like to speak at length to this because of the tax treatment of native title benefits. Schedule 1 deals with changes to the tax treatment of native title benefits. It seeks to clarify such benefits uniformly as non-assessable, non-exempt income so that they are not subject to income tax or capital gains tax in the hands of the beneficiary or recipient taxpayer or taxpayers.

There are many things I would like to say here. I would like to go on about the failed minerals resource rent tax that my colleague Senator Cormann mentioned. I was on a committee with him. Amazingly, the government said, 'We're going to get $3 billion back to $2 billion,' and then they spent the money before they got it, did not get it and then wondered why their books were in such a shambles. I do not know how many hundreds of times over the last 18 months we have been promised by Prime Minister Gillard and Treasurer Swan that there would be a surplus this year. What a farce. There is now a turnaround of about $21 billion. The Australian Labor Party do not know what the word 'surplus' means. They do not understand money management.

I would like to talk on many things, but the guillotine will drop at 6.30 and I have to leave some room for my colleague Senator McKenzie, who desperately wants to say some words. All I can say is that the guillotine is well oiled, you are going to put it to use, and you do not care about the debate or the amendments in this place. It is contempt of the Senate. Fifty-odd pieces of legislation will be guillotined this week—nearly twice as many in a week as the Howard government guillotined over three years when they actually had control of the Senate. I cannot say any more; I have to sit down. To the Labor Party and the Greens: thank you for the guillotine and stopping debate on these very important issues!