Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

It is really quite interesting that after question time, when you have the opportunity to get up and take notice the questions that are asked by those opposite, there seems to be an underlying theme in the response, and that is: what about responsible fiscal management? Like everybody else in Australia, I would like to be spending more money on things like education, health and a lot of other things that we would like to have as our way of life. I notice that Senator Bilyk in her contribution was chastising the Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, about his innovation agenda.

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

It is economics 101. Senator Bilyk, let's start with this: if we have an agenda in this country and a policy platform by the government that creates jobs and creates growth in the economy, the next thing that flows from that is obviously higher revenues that come back to the government. It is those revenues that allow us to be able to afford the highest levels of education and health and all of the other things that Australians like to think should be part of the basket of activities that they can expect to come from their government.

What you see instead is the misinformation, scaremongering and carry-on that went on over the last few minutes about education funding. Let's not forget that it was the promise of the government of which I am a member that said it would honour the Gonski funding to 2018. What those on the other side fail to mention in their contribution in this place is the fact there were two states and a territory that did not have any funding under Gonski. Whilst we continue to honour our undertaking for education funding, we have also had to find an additional amount of money to fund the two states and one territory that were not funded under the model that they proposed prior to the election.

The cynics amongst us might suggest that they never expected to win the election, and so they thought they would go out with all these grandiose, unfunded promises and to hell with it. Unfortunately for them, they did not win government—fortunate for the country they did not as well—but the fact of the matter is that, if you go out with unfunded promises and you want to be a responsible fiscal manager, sometimes you actually have to go back and say to the Australian public, 'We cannot actually afford to honour all of these extreme increases in budget.' We are not talking about cuts in budget, we are talking about extreme increases in budgets. You also need to remember that, when you talk about cutting funding, just because you do not honour some unfunded commitment by an opposition, it does not necessarily mean that you are cutting funding. I think we need to be very careful that we get our nomenclature correct.

The same issue arises with the scaremongering and false information that we are getting in the debate about GST, which is another of the questions asked by the opposition of the government today. I do not understand why this opposition is so scared about having a mature debate about a tax system. The best thing we can possibly deliver for this country is a fit for purpose taxation regime. We have a tax regime that has been in place for 30 or 40 years, and many things have changed in that time. The marketplace does not look the same as it did when many of the current tax measures were introduced. Who would have imagined 30 years ago, 20 years ago or even 10 years ago the size of the internet economy and online sales? To refuse to have a mature debate and to just go completely hysterical about the GST is once again showing the irresponsible behaviour of those opposite.

I also say quite clearly: there has been no announcement and there is no policy of the government which is running in the Australian economy at the moment—that is, the Turnbull coalition government—to increase the GST. There is no proposal to increase the GST. So I do not know how any opposition can manage to get itself so totally overexercised in having a discussion around a whole heap of matters that are really important for the ongoing prosperity of this country that it would seek to derail a sensible debate about tax reform, hysterically scoring political points about the GST.

A renewed taxation system that allows for growth and for opportunities which generate jobs is going to be extraordinarily good for the country. We have also promised that there will be no net increase in the amount of tax. So I really do not know what those opposite are going on about.