David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak for the millions of silent, hardworking Australians who have been taxed up to the eyeballs and have had enough. So much talk in this place is about fairness towards one group or another that claims it has special needs. But there can be few things less fair than taking money off hard working people and then squandering it.

On Tuesday night the government announced that in the coming year, it would take $370 billion in tax—the equivalent of more than $15,000 from every man, woman and child. It does this because it believes it can spend this money more wisely than the people and businesses from whom the money was taken, who would otherwise have kept it in their own pockets and spent it as they saw fit.

In most cases, the government is wrong. Australians who pay tax have worked to make themselves employable. They get out of their beds early every day, or they work shifts, and many of them commute for many hours every week. At this time of the year, a lot leave home in the dark and return in the dark. They work using their wits, their energy and their ingenuity.

While it is true that work provides dignity and many other benefits, for most people it is also exhausting. The vast majority of people do not work for the fun of it, or for the joy of being told where to be and what to do. They do it so they can have money to provide for themselves and their families, and to enjoy life outside of work.

But they also work because they believe their productivity will be justly rewarded, and in the hope their superannuation will provide them with a comfortable retirement. It seems to me that nearly everybody in this parliament is working, in one way or another, to make it harder for them. Every dollar the government takes from people should be spent in a way that matches, as far as possible, how those people would choose to spend it themselves if they were handing it out.

But their money is not spent like that. It is spent on welfare for people who are not poor and should not get it—like high-income families getting subsidies for up to 85 per cent of their childcare costs. It is spent on pork-barrelling for regions—like funding for a flagpole in Bathurst. It is spent on social engineering—like the continued Commonwealth funding of school chaplains. It is spent on policies that do not help anyone—like paying millions to telcos so they can store our metadata, and paying public servants to tie foreign investors up with red tape.

Ask any public servant and they will tell you stories about waste—about having too many people with too little to do; about ridiculously expensive coffee machines; about walls being built and removed and built again to fulfil budget allocations; about people paid to work from home who do not do any work. Australia has 1.9 million public sector employees. When did we agree that Australia could not function unless its governments employed a rough equivalent of the population of Perth? In fact, the only truly legitimate expectations of governments should be to provide a sound legal system, personal and property security, and a safety net for the genuinely disadvantaged. Instead, we spend millions that we take from people as tax and give back as handouts, and more millions on spin doctors and advertisements to tell us why all of this is a good thing—like $25 million on ads telling us about free trade agreements.

This budget ramps up spending on programs to encourage the long-term unemployed into work, while maintaining minimum wage and unfair dismissal laws that keep them out of jobs. This waste of taxpayers' money is bad enough, but what the government takes from Australians is, apparently, not enough. We are told there is no option but to put us deeper into debt.

This means we are not only taking from hardworking Australians but borrowing money for things they never wanted, and leaving the debt to their kids. Net debt will be higher than it has ever been in the last half century, apart from the last year of Keating's reckless prime-ministership. There will be $11,000 of net liabilities for every Australian: man, woman, and child. Now that is what I call unfair.

If you were to listen to the squawkers and the bleaters, you might believe that at all stages of our life cycle we are dependent on government. You might think that when people have a baby they should be given money; that they should be given money to let someone else look after their child, whether they are staying at home or not; that they should use other people's money to pay for their child's education, from early learning right through to university; that they should not have to pay when they see a doctor, or when they buy medicine; that they should retire at the same age their grandparents did and live out their retirement on other people's money. And if that baby becomes Prime Minister one day, he or she will expect to have a state funeral funded by other people's money, which is then reported on breathlessly by taxpayer funded reporters.

Of course, as history has taught us, all of this will fall in a heap when there is no more wealth to share. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher put it very well when she said: 'The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.' I believe we should stop listening to the tweeters, the rent seekers, the greedy people making claims about 'social justice', and corporate beggars in suits who beat a path to our doors demanding ever larger sums of money. They would have us believe that nearly everybody is a victim. No amount of generosity with other people's money ever stops their complaining. They should be ignored. Far too many politicians of all stripes have become responsive to the squeaky wheels while taking for granted the people who drive the economic engine of this country. I do not believe that the millions of Australians who create wealth are really as outraged by spending restraint as the squawkers would have us believe. Australian taxpayers are generous but they are not stupid.

Anybody who is committed to genuine fairness should be committed to getting off the backs of people who pay for it all. We have the power to do this by reducing spending and then cutting taxes. We should also be committed to protecting superannuation for people who have earned their retirement and not shifting the goal posts, because that is not fair either. By their very nature, people who do the work are not whingers, because they are focused on their jobs. But they desperately need people willing to stand up for them here. On their behalf, I am here to say: enough.