Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. But, if I deal with that, they will find some other reason to stop me exposing the Labor Party for what they are. The Labor Party as a group have no interest whatsoever in tax reform and have no interest in the truth. I am no new comer to GST debates and discussions. This is the third GST debate that I have been involved in. With the first one, I was the only senator here around when the Labor Party told all sorts of lies and made misrepresentations about John Hewson's 'Fightback' package. They succeeded then. I was around when the Labor Party took the same approach against John Howard's GST. That time it was taken to the people of Australia and the people Australia endorsed it. This is the third debate.

Despite what the Labor Party keep misrepresenting to the people of Australia, this is not a government plan. The only person who has a plan publicly for a 15 per cent GST is the Labor Premier of South Australia. He is the only politician who has talked about a 15 per cent plan for the Labor Party. The Labor Party are telling us all the detail of modelling for a 15 per cent rise. I do not know, but it seems to me that perhaps the Labor Party have a secret plan that they are doing work on, and that is why they know all this detail about the GST—because no-one on the coalition side in this parliament has ever spoken about the GST. I am sorry; there is one exception to this. Many months ago, when the Labor Party first raised this—abetted by the ABC—I said publicly that I would not be supporting a 15 per cent GST. I publicly said that I would write to the Treasurer and tell him that if it came forward in this parliament not to rely on my vote. That is not new news; that is something I mentioned at the time.

And why did I do that? As I said, I was around when the GST debate occurred in the 1998 election, when John Howard courageously took that proposal to the electorate. At that time, from John Howard down, right down to me, we all promised that it would only be a 10 per cent GST. The Labor Party at the time, first of all they told all sorts of mistruths about it, which you are hearing again now. They also said—again a complete fabrication—that it would only be 10 per cent for the while and then it would be increased to 15 per cent. And from John Howard down, we all swore in blood that it would never increase beyond 10 per cent—for all of the right reasons—and that is why I indicated my position to the Treasurer several months ago.

Anything the Labor Party say, the fabrications that come out from the Labor Party campaign unit, are not new to me. This happened in the GST era of John Howard. The Labor Party pilloried it. It was the worst thing that was going to happen; the world was going to come to an end if we had a 10 per cent GST. I remember all of those debates in this chamber. Of course, it went ahead because the Australian people agreed with it—agreed that the compensations were good; agreed that Australia needed a better and fairer tax system, which happened as a result of the 10 per cent GST—but Labor opposed it, foot and mouth, all the way through. And then Labor came to power, as happens in this country. The Labor Party became the government and, after all of their years of bagging the GST, what did they do about abolishing it? This was the tax that the Labor Party said was going to destroy the world, and yet when they got into power, did they do anything about getting rid of the GST? Of course not, because they understood that this was an essential part of a tax package for a modern country.

I remember—not quite the names, but I remember that during the 1998 campaign it was pointed out that there were only two countries in the world that did not have a value-added tax. One was Botswana and I think the other one might have been some central European country—perhaps Bulgaria, but I am not sure about that. But there were only two countries in the world that did not have a value-added tax, and yet the Labor Party said it was going to destroy Australia. As we know, during the time of the Howard government, with that great boost to the economy that followed from the 10 per cent GST and the tax cuts that occurred, the Australian economy went ahead in leaps and bounds.

I could not help but think that Senator Ludwig—when I talk about fabrications, Senator Ludwig had the hide to say all the tax cuts that were promised when the 10 per cent GST came in were not actually taken off by the Howard government. The reason why was most of the state governments at that time were run by the Australian Labor Party. They agreed that if we had a 10 per cent GST—and of course the GST goes straight to the states; it does not come to the Commonwealth—then all of the state Labor governments would get rid of payroll tax, tax on insurance levies, transaction taxes. They promised that a raft of state taxes would go when the states got their hands on the 10 per cent GST. We did our part of it; we got the 10 per cent GST that went to the states. But, as I said, at the time nearly every state government was a Labor government. So we gave them the 10 per cent, and what happened? Most of them reneged on their promises to reduce state taxes, which was part of the agreement. So for Senator Ludwig to get up and say the Commonwealth government did not remove all of the taxes it promised is wrong. Every tax that was within the power of the Commonwealth government to remove, like export taxes, import taxes—