Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. In conclusion, I think it's important to say this. In the vote that will happen very shortly, the opposition's attempt to remove schedule 5 and schedule 4 from the bill will most likely be defeated. That means that this Senate chamber will have legislated the Prime Minister's broken promise—a promise that he and the Treasurer made on five occasions—and, as a consequence, $550 million will be raised from superannuation tax receipts and personal income tax receipts. That's not just any broken promise; that is a very significant broken promise. I make this point: it was given on five occasions, yet there was hardly a heartbeat between the election in May 2022 and the Treasury's decision in September 2022 to release the consultation paper. It's hard to imagine that the original plan was not always to break that election commitment.

Not once in the deliberations this afternoon have the government said, 'Things changed so dramatically for us that we had to review all of our election commitments.' You've not said that, not once. I think the conclusion that Australian electors might come to, which is that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer always had it in mind to break this election commitment, is true. It wasn't an election commitment that was given in good faith and had to be broken as a result of significantly changed circumstances—not at all. This commitment, given in January 2021 and on 30 March 2021, 15 September 2021, 17 January 2022 and 4 March 2022, was always going to be broken.