Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on this proposed legislation, which is basically a tax on productivity. It's a tax on productivity, and it is a tax on working-class Australians. Yet again, it's another one of these costs that will be passed through the economy. It's an attack on the building sector, because many tradies use utes. I'll be honest here; I'm not against making utes smaller so they fit in car parking spots. I'm not against that at all. But when it comes to taxing utes and those vehicles that carry loads and do the lifting, I have said many times in this chamber that we need to get back on the tools in this country. We need to stop the paper shuffling, the wallowing in self-pity, the indoctrination and all of this stuff and actually get back out there building houses and more factories, and this idea will only make that harder. Why? Because it's an increased tax, and it's increased regulation.

What's annoying about this is that the Labor Party and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, and the Prime Minister won't actually release the modelling that will show how much extra it will cost for tradies to go about and do their job. I don't know what's happened to the Labor Party. They used to be the party for the working class, yet we've seen over the last few decades that they've forgotten about their original base, the working-class Australians, who are migrating in droves. We saw that originally under the Howard battlers. They never forgot what Hawke and Keating did to them with the Button plan in 1985, and we're seeing this trend—the migration of working-class Australians over to the Liberal party—because we get it. We know that there is no substitute for productivity in this country and that this tax, which is basically what this proposed legislation is, is only going to make it harder for hardworking Australians, like our tradies, to go out there. God knows, we need them. We don't want any more people going to university and coming out brainwashed and broke when they're 22. We need more hardworking tradies in this country, and I fear that this proposed legislation will destroy hardworking Australians.

Question agreed to.