Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

Maybe you should go and have a look at it. Maybe you should also be a little more careful about what you come in here and say. If you want a truth check about whether 84 per cent of Australians will be receiving a tax break, I think you'll find that that's actually not correct. As I said, we stand up for lower taxes, and we will never be a party that stands in the way of Australians keeping more of their hard-earned money in their pockets. That is why we negotiated with you, and you supported a very comprehensive three-stage tax process of which this was the last stage. Of course, because convenience, not consistency, comes past in the guise of a Dunkley by-election, you're prepared to trash a third of an integrated package just so that you can buy some votes in Dunkley.

The Australian public aren't that stupid. They will remember this—I was going to use the word 'lie', but I'm sure I'll have to retract it. They will remember that this government stared them down over a hundred times and told them that the tax breaks that hardworking, aspirational middle-class Australians were going to get will no longer be available to them. They will remember that, just like they remember Julia Gillard saying, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' They will forget about a tiny bit of money in their pocket as a result of this move today, but they will remember that they have been deceived.

Make no mistake; the amount of money that the average Australian family is likely to receive because of the tax breaks that are going to be delivered to them when this goes through will not even touch the sides in comparison to the damage you've done to the family budget since you have been in government. As the shadow Treasurer said, this is a bandaid on a bullet wound, but, if you've got the bandaid, you might as well use it.

You guys have trashed aspirational Australians. We know that every Australian family is worse off by multiple times what you're proposing to give back to them, because of the actions of your government. Your own Prime Minister was prepared to stand on national television and say that they'd run out of ideas, and so this was the last thing left, and that is to trash a promise that they had agreed to, they'd voted on and they took to two elections. You think it's okay to be convenient in the eyes of a Dunkley by-election. The Australian public won't forget your deceit.