Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today is a hallmark day for me. I have spent my three years in this place endeavouring to expose the Labor Party and the Greens and a couple of others for their hatred of the bush and farmers. And what you have just done today—we have seen you do before in 2011—with the legislation on the backpacker tax is right up there with the suspension of the live cattle trade. You see if it does not play out over Christmas. You have just put thousands of farms, small producers, people in the service industries and people in the beef industry in a terrible position because you know—and we do not want this fraud to go without being exposed—full well that 10.5 per cent taxation is not on the table. It has never been on the table. It was not on the table today and it will not be on the table in the future. This bill is going to come back to this place at 15c and it will have to lay on the table until our farmers in their thousands have called you—and I will devote my entire Christmas break to stirring this up—until you have had hundreds and hundreds of calls each, as they share with you what their Christmas is like when their fruit remains on the trees, when their small crops remain in the fields, when processing cannot occur and the service industries cannot operate and when all of those resorts up and down our coast and in your states cannot operate. I notice a lot of you do not come from my place, and to the few that do, I will tie this stinking, rotten, dead kangaroo around your throats in Queensland. I will make sure that every Queenslander knows that senators from Queensland supported this legislation to send these businesses to the wall at 32½c.

And do you know what the insidious thing is? That your defence to this has been that somehow this was the government's backpacker tax. Well, you know full well that the greatest treasurer ever to live, Mr Swan, introduced this in 2012 with the support of the Greens. This is the Greens-Labor coalition backpacker tax—make no mistake about it. To use the words of Mr Keating: 'It is law. L-A-W.' This is not something to be fiddled around the edges with; this is the current tax rate for foreign nationals. And what the Greens would have us do—let me just concentrate there for a moment—is put them in a position where the foreign nationals can come into this country, just come in from I do not know where—Syria, Iraq, New Zealand, where if you like. What one of the speakers for the Greens did the other day was, when you get to that question for tax purposes, mark off that you are a resident. The Greens promoted fraud in a speech the other day. We found out why: because the speaker has these backpackers working on his grape farm and two of them are living at Mum's.