Senate debates
Tuesday, 12 September 2023
Answers to Questions on Notice
Productivity Commission
3:03 pm
Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source
I move:
That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Public Service, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Women (Senator Gallagher) to a question without notice asked by Senator Hume today relating to the Productivity Commission.
It was a very straightforward question from Senator Hume about the new appointment to the chair of the Productivity Commission and what the Treasurer examined before making that very important appointment. The Productivity Commission is a very important policy organ of the Australian government. Its advice over many decades has been treated with a great level of interest and has often been acted upon by Australian governments of both persuasions, particularly in regard to improvements to the economic efficiency of our nation.
Senator Hume's question raised the issue of the support for inheritance taxes by Treasurer Chalmers's appointment to the Productivity Commission. But this isn't the only policy area where the new chair of the Productivity Commission has made forays into the public domain. Another one was highlighted by my good friend and colleague Senator O'Sullivan in the West Australian just this past weekend. The new chair of the Productivity Commission has, in the very recent past—in fact, just a few months ago—written that one of the ways the Labor government can 'repair the budget' is to scrap the GST arrangements that have seen a floor being put in place for Western Australia—so, not just support for an inheritance tax by Labor's hand-picked chair of the Productivity Commission but also support for scrapping the GST deal that's put a floor in place for Western Australian GST arrangements.
Let me quote to you from an article authored by the new chair of the Productivity Commission. This was on 11 April 2023—as I said, just a few months ago:
Our report identifies a further $15 billion a year of savings measures, including undoing Western Australia's special GST funding deal …
Now, describing it as a special GST funding deal is I think an insult to every Western Australian. This was putting in place a floor below which no state could fall, at a time when Western Australia was in danger of receiving literally cents in the dollar of the GST revenues that were collected in our state. So, that arrangement was put in place on the back of serious work done by the then Productivity Commission. They did a review into it. The model that was chosen by the government at the time wasn't exactly what the Productivity Commission put forward. The government did choose to go down a slightly different path. But it was the review by the Productivity Commission that brought the issue to light.
Now we have a hand-picked chair of the Productivity Commission—Labor's hand-picked chair, Treasurer Chalmers's hand-picked chair—who, as Senator Hume has highlighted, supports not only an inheritance tax but also a scrapping of the GST arrangement, hard fought for by Western Australian senators, Western Australian members of parliament—on this side of the chamber, at least. When those opposite said it couldn't be done—politically impossible—it was hard fought for by members of this side of the chamber, Liberal members, Liberal senators. And now it's a savings measure. Now it's a way for the Labor government to achieve budget repair.
I would have thought that the Treasurer would actually have looked at these things, looked at poor policy prescriptions such as inheritance taxes, such as scrapping the GST arrangements that introduced a modicum of fairness into the system. I would note that all the floor means is that Australia gets back 70c or 75c in the dollar, instead of getting under 10c in the dollar. Think about that. As a wage earner, if you got 70 per cent of your pay packet instead of 100 per cent, you'd be a bit upset, I think. This hand-picked chair of the Productivity Commission is more of a reflection on the Treasurer and his priorities than we should all feel comfortable with.
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