Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Over the last six years of Labor, whenever they ran into trouble with spending—which was always—their instinct was always to run for another tax grab, one after the other. More taxes mean lower growth and fewer jobs. That is the reality of it.

Now, all of us are in favour of making sure that multinational companies pay their fair share of tax in Australia, and our government has legislated to significantly tighten and significantly improve the thin capitalisation rules, for example. But when we came into government what did we find? That Labor talks a lot about strengthening our tax policy framework but they do not do a lot—there were 96 unlegislated tax measures which they had announced but which had not been legislated, including a proposal to tighten tax arrangements for multinationals. That was not legislated. When we came into government we were told by Treasury it was unimplementable. This latest thought bubble, we are advised, would hurt the economy and cost jobs because it would prevent legitimate business activity. (Time expired)