Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are so many broken promises here to choose from but so little time to speak. It is very regrettable that there isn't more time. For the enjoyment of the chamber I'll focus on a couple that are known to me in some level of detail.

In the 2019 election there was a policy statement by the Labor Party that it would turn off refundable offsets and thereby, effectively, destroy franking credits for many retirees. This was an agenda put forward by Mr Bowen, now Minister Bowen. He said, famously, in a radio interview in Sydney that if people didn't like that policy they should vote for the coalition. That's what people did in 2019. This time, they've come back and tried to attack franking again.

Franking is a policy that the Treasury probably doesn't like. I'm sure Treasury's advice to the government is that they should try to damage franking, much to the chagrin of former prime minister Paul Keating. But rather than being upfront with the Australian people and saying, 'We want to stuff franking,' the Labor Party said they wouldn't touch franking. The quotes are really quite good. On 4 March 2022 Mr Albanese said in Perth that they were not touching them, when referring to franking credits. Just two weeks later he said, 'Labor won't have any changes to the franking credits regime.' The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, told Queenslanders, when it came to tax: 'We won't be doing franking credits. We won't be doing them. I couldn't be clearer than that.' He's certainly doing them. He's doing them over. What we're seeing now is a very sneaky and underhanded way of taking on franking credits. Rather than remove the ability of the funds to receive them, they're trying to turn them off from the corporate end and are thereby trapping $86 billion in credits that are on balance sheets today.

The explanatory memorandum is very interesting. It says that if any entity has never previously made a distribution, then the entity will not have a practice of making distributions. That is the key test in this bill, that it will effectively stuff franking by removing the ability of a company to pay a franked dividend when it has raised capital—at any point in the past, possibly. The link between a company raising equity and then paying a distribution is going to be there in the bill. Therefore, the whole franking system is, frankly, at risk. This will have very serious consequences for Australia as a competitive jurisdiction. People will be less likely to invest in Australian companies. It will be harder for Australian companies to raise equity, and Australian companies will be more reliant on debt as a result of this change. The political point here is that the government should have been upfront and said, 'We are going to change franking.' Instead, they wrapped themselves in these promises. It's very disappointing.

The other, broader promise they made was not to touch super. Hilariously, there's a gentleman in the House named Mr Stephen Jones. He's the Assistant Treasurer. He gave an address to the SMSF Association. He said:

Anthony Albanese wanted me to deliver a particular message to everyone in the sector today. And it's about stability and certainty.

…   …   …

We want you to have peace of mind in your retirement. We want to make the case that your nest egg, your retirement savings are always going to be safer under Labor …

There you go. You couldn't make it up. That's a good quote, isn't it?

All the government has done since the election is move the goal posts. Clearly, there has been an agenda to try and feather the nests of their favourite rent-seekers, but this substantial tax change is really going to be a significant change to the system over the long term, because over the long term it's going to be younger Australians who will pay a much higher level of tax.

Yesterday we heard in this chamber that 10 per cent of people will be hit by the tax over the long term, and that in the short term it will be about 100,000 people. The point is that if you've gone to an election saying you won't change the tax settings on super and your promises last less than a year, it shows breaking promises is part of your DNA. Whether it's in this policy area or on climate or on a range of other things across the board, the government has shown itself to be very unreliable when it comes to making promises and keeping them.