Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise today to speak in response to the matter of public importance submitted to the Senate by our parliamentary colleague Senator Bernardi. Senator Bernardi is correct: this is a matter of public importance, and there is a pressing need for parliament to provide significant tax relief for Australian businesses. The only thing standing in the way of parliament doing just that is the obstinacy, the obstructiveness, the recalcitrance and the political self-interest of the Labor Party.

The verdict is in: company tax cuts create opportunities for Australian businesses to invest, to grow and to employ. The Turnbull coalition government has already delivered tax cuts to 3.2 million small and medium businesses, giving them the flex to grow their businesses and create more and better-paid jobs. And the results couldn't be clearer. More than 400,000 new jobs have been created in the past year alone, and 300,000 of those are full-time. There have been 15 consecutive months of jobs growth. That's the longest consecutive run of jobs growth on record. The participation rate is at its highest in seven years and, on average, 178,000 jobs were advertised each week in January alone. That's up 6.2 per cent. That's the strongest monthly increase in eight years. So the results are irrefutable: get the policy settings right and the economic benefits will follow.

Despite an economy disrupted by the transition from a reliance on the mining boom, the laws of supply and demand still apply. Continued jobs growth will eat into capacity in the economy and put upward pressures on wages. We have already seen above-average wages growth in the fastest-growing sectors of the economy, such as health care and education. And this is what the coalition are all about: more jobs and better-paying jobs for all Australians. But you must get the policy settings right.

Whether it be through crazy, snake-oil-salesman economic thinking, political expedience that panders to the Left-Green flank of the Labor Party, the politics of envy, the politics of grievance or just plain old belligerence and an inability to concede the obvious, the Labor Party has resisted time and time again the opportunity to step up, to do the right thing by the Australian people and to demonstrate that it cares about the prosperity of future generations. But it's not too late. Labor can still support the coalition's proposed second tranche of company tax cuts and give Australians the very best chance at a thriving economy, more jobs and better-paying jobs.

I hope that the better angels of the Labor Party will win this argument, but I fear that, with Mr Shorten at the helm, there is little hope of that. As the Prime Minister so rightly noted yesterday in the other place, the reality of it is this: the Leader of the Opposition hates business. And, since it is business and not government that is ultimately the best at creating jobs, joining the dots, one could rightly infer the Leader of the Opposition hates new jobs.

Prior to January the United States had the highest corporate tax rate of any country in the OECD. However, President Trump signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, slashing those corporate tax rates from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. When he did that, he showed the United States is indeed open for business. Meanwhile, however, Australia is languishing with the fourth-highest corporate tax rate in the OECD. The coalition government's enterprise tax plan will cut our corporate tax rate to 25 per cent for all businesses, making Australia more competitive with countries like the USA, like the UK and like Singapore. Without that second tranche of the enterprise tax plan, our international competitiveness will be put at risk. I note that Senator Ketter quoted the IMF World Economic Outlook, but he failed to mention that that same report identified a significant threat to Australian GDP as a result of the decreased competitiveness in the face of the US tax cuts. Treasury, however, have reported that the loss of GDP as a result of President Trump's tax cut could, in effect, be offset by the implementation of the government's enterprise tax plan.

Put simply, inertia is not an option. Our economy is under threat, but it is a threat that can be mitigated. Only the obstinacy of Labor stands in Australia's way. Even in the context of the opposition's rhetoric of inequality and fairness, this obstinacy is entirely unjustified. Recent economic research from Germany has demonstrated that not only does cutting corporate tax lead to jobs growth but those who are helped the most are those that stand to benefit the most: women, young workers and low-skilled workers. This, in turn, will help redress economic inequality, an issue about which the Labor Party purportedly cares so very deeply.

The fact is that even the opposition don't really need convincing of the benefits of company tax cuts because they already know. Professor Richard Holden, who is a go-to economist for the Labor Party, has stated the coalition enterprise tax plan is reform that 'deserves across-the-board political support when it comes before parliament again this year.' Furthermore, Professor Holden also asserted:

Cutting the Australian company tax rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent is not just good for business, and workers. It is also helps to redress economic inequality.

The opposition leader apes Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders with that class warfare rhetoric, asserting that the coalition's enterprise tax plan is nothing more than a gift to the top end of town. I don't want to insult Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders because, for all their radical socialist tendencies, at least they actually believe in what they say. It wasn't so long ago that Mr Shorten himself said:

Reducing the corporate tax rate … sees more capital flowing into our domestic economy, which will then flow on to workers in the form of higher wages—thereby improving standards of living.

Similarly, the shadow Treasurer, Chris Bowen, has also previously stated:

It's a Labor thing to have the ambition of reducing company tax, because it promotes investment, creates jobs and drives growth.

These are the very same people who now threaten small- and medium-sized businesses, telling them that a Shorten-led Labor government would legislate to reverse the first round of company tax cuts that they supported only last year.

What has changed for these new apostles of socialism? At which point did they divest their party of the legacy of Keating and Hawke and move so far to the left that they could make Lenin blush? This is the most anti-business, anti-growth, anti-jobs opposition we have seen since Whitlam. The parliament knows it, economists know it, the media commentators know it, the business community know it and the Australian people know it. We expect such economic nonsense from the Greens, who dwell on the fringe, but you are a party auditioning to govern. You have abandoned your tradition, you have abandoned your principles, you have abandoned Australian workers who want more jobs and better-paid jobs and, by denying our economy every opportunity to grow and flourish, you abandoned your chances of winning the election for years and years to come.

You can man the barricades all you like. You can man the barricades. You can storm the Winter Palace with your rhetoric, your politics of envy and your economics of snake oil, but Australians know the truth: it is Labor that stands in the way of cuts that will keep Australia competitive, that will grow the economy, that will allow—