David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

People in communities across the country have been calling for the stage 3 tax cuts to be redesigned since before the election. People knew this was a bad idea. And this has only got worse. We've seen a large proportion of people who would have benefited from these stage 3 tax cuts actually now saying, 'This is not the right direction for Australia.' The majority of Australians have a strong sense of fairness and believe in looking after each other. Reflecting what Australians believe and what we've been hearing from our communities, the crossbench have consistently called for a redesign of these cuts. We've been calling for the cuts to be made more equitable since before the government started saying, 'Our position on stage 3 has not changed.' I applaud the government for doing the right thing in the end, and I applaud both the major parties, Labor and the coalition, for capitulating to the crossbench on this issue—for capitulating to Australians on tax reform, on changes that do not make sense for our circumstances and do not make sense for the future that Australians want.

We've seen Independents in this place speaking up on behalf of communities across the country, who expect more from politicians. We've heard much about how the economic conditions in Australia have changed since the original tax package was designed. It's only right that it be redesigned. With high inflation, high interest rates and housing affordability at record-breaking lows, cost-of-living pressures are pushing ordinary Australians to breaking point. The Albanese government had a decision to make: should it do what's right by our community and redesign the cuts, or should it protect its interests as a party and avoid the backlash that we're hearing from the opposition about breaking a promise? This is a promise that shouldn't have been made in the first place, but, because we're in a country where talking about tax reform is taboo and tax reform is seen as a wedge politics issue, we are in this situation.

I acknowledge that when it comes to personal income tax we do need to have a conversation around bracket creep, and I acknowledge Senator Roberts's and Senator Babet's attempts to do that with their amendments. But, as Senator Roberts has said, we need to fix the tax system. Tinkering at the edges won't have a lasting impact, and it isn't what people want and need from politicians. Senator McGrath talked about the burden that Australian taxpayers carry when it comes to tax. I think Australians recognise that paying tax in a country like Australia allows us to have the services we have. Access to health and education—although clearly much more needs be done in those areas—are part of the social contract of being part of a community, being part of a society, being a citizen of a country.

We are so reliant on personal income tax because we're not willing to talk about the other areas that we absolutely should be taxing. I hope that today marks some sort of turning point, the beginning of actually being able to talk about tax reform in this place. To do what's in the best interests of Australians, today and into the future, we need to debate and make informed decisions about things like the petroleum resource rent tax. The last time I checked with Treasury at estimates, offshore LNG projects still hadn't paid a cent of the petroleum resource rent tax, despite them pulling in billions and billions of dollars from selling our gas, from exporting Australians' gas. We are getting totally dudded as a country when it comes to the sale of our resources. Once we sell them and ship them offshore, they are gone. As Richard Dennis pointed out at the Press Club a few weeks ago, we're now in a situation where this year Australia will receive more from HECS than from the petroleum resource rent tax. How can we think that that's acceptable—that we're shipping Australian resources offshore and getting nothing for them?

It doesn't have to be like this. We've seen many countries do it better. People often talk about Norway. They're sitting on a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund now. They recognised that what lay beneath the North Sea belonged to Norwegians, and they were going to tax it. They were not just going to spend it, but they were going to hold it in trust for the future. Yes, Norway, like Australia, desperately needs to stop exploring and stop opening up new fossil fuel projects, but they've got a legacy from their oil reserves. What do we have here? A couple of big gas companies that seem to have full state capture of this parliament. We see legislation come through here that is basically written by them, for them. We've got to do better for Australians. We've got to do better for Australians today and for Australians in the future, those who aren't even born yet. What kind of legacy are we leaving for them?

The journalist Paul Cleary wrote a great book called TrillionDollar Baby: How Norway Beat the Oil Giants and Won a Lasting Fortune. It's well worth a read. It tells the story of how Norway came to that position. You saw all the usual arguments that get put up here in Australia: 'Investors won't come; sovereign risk; they'll go elsewhere.' All of these things happened there. And they looked them in the eye and said: 'Sure, you can go elsewhere, but, if you want to come and take our resources, you're going to pay Norwegians for those resources. You can still make a profit, but we are going to clip the ticket on our own resources.' It's no surprise that, when the Norwegian government said that—I think it was the Labour government in power at the time—the oil companies went straight to the opposition, to the Conservative Party, and they, to their credit, said: 'We also think this is Norwegians' oil, and we're going to back this in.' And here we are in 2024, and they have a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund.

And what are we up to here in Australia? Almost a trillion dollars in debt. We have very, very different outcomes, and yet we still aren't hearing the major parties willing to talk about the kind of tax reform that takes the burden off taxpayers. We hear so much about tax cuts. If you want to do that and still have services, you have to tax someone. The money is going to have to come from somewhere for that, for climate adaptation, for disaster relief. Should hardworking Australians also front that up? Will we have to have some sort of disaster levy on hardworking Australians who are struggling just to keep the lights on and food on their table at the moment? Or are we going to have the guts to tax the fossil fuel companies, who are making extraordinary profits?

We've heard the crossbench talk about some sort of windfall profit tax over the last 18 months. The major parties don't want to hear about it. There are resources, and then there is a tax system that shapes the decisions that we make as people, as communities—things like the capital gains tax discount on investment properties, being able to negatively gear investment properties. The whole conversation seems to be: 'You can't touch it. You can either have the system as it is or you scrap the whole thing, and it's a disaster.' Why can't we have the debate about how we can allow people to invest in new housing stock but not in existing stock? How do we start to turn this ship around? What I'm hearing from Australians, from the people I represent, is that it's not working. As with the stage 3 tax cuts, even people who have benefited from it and continue to benefit from it are saying: 'I've got kids, I've got nieces and nephews, I've got grandkids. What kind of future are we leaving them?' So I would urge the major parties to have another look at this and actually talk to the people we are here representing. We've seen the changes proposed, and the modelling. There are tens of billions of dollars of savings, but at the same time there are a lot of people in our community who won't even be touched by these tax cuts who are currently on things like JobSeeker, Austudy and Abstudy. We should be looking at them and investing in our communities with that saving. It's a real opportunity for us as a country.

This multipartisan support for a change to the tax system and to tax bands is an opportunity to continue this conversation. Yes, there are politics in it—we've seen that over the last few weeks—but we're here to represent Australians. We're not here to represent the fossil fuel industry. We should be standing up to them and taxing them, getting a return on our resources so we can potentially give some people relief, as Senator McGrath was talking about. Until we do that, it seems impossible. You have expectation of services when it comes to health and education, and some dire need to invest more in them. On the other hand we have politicians who just want to talk about tax cuts. It's going to have to come from somewhere.