James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

It would not be recycled paper. It would be coloured paper, probably imported from overseas. What the Greens and those on the left of Australian politics fail to realise is that, with all these promises they want to make—to make them feel good and to enable them to do lots of virtue-signalling—someone's got to pay for it, and it's the taxpayers of Australia who have got to pay for it. I, as a senator for Queensland, and the Liberal and National parties are on the side of the taxpayers, because we believe that taxpayers know best how their money should be spent. We believe in lowering taxes because we believe that the taxpayers, with that money in their pocket, their purse, their wallet or their hand, are better judges of how that money should be spent than bureaucrats or politicians in Canberra.

I will always support the lowering of taxes. We should lower taxes because it's good for the economy. It's good for families. It's good for jobs. But what disappoints me is that we have a prime minister in this country who has knowingly and repeatedly misled the Australian people in relation to the stage 3 tax cuts. What this debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024 and the associated legislation comes down to, in a way, is not the tax cuts themselves, as important as they are; it goes to the virtue of the Prime Minister of this country. The Prime Minister of this country promised Australians they could trust him. He said, 'My word is my bond.' That is what he said. He broke that bond. He broke that promise. That's not the only promise he has broken. We may recall that the Prime Minister and members of the Labor Party promised 97 times before the last election that they would cut your electricity bills by $275. Put your hands up if your power bill has gone down by $275. No-one is putting their hand up because power bills have not gone down by $275; they've gone up by 10, 15 or 20 per cent since Labor came into power.

What we've seen with this Prime Minister, whether it's the broken promise over power bills or the broken promise over stage 3 tax cuts, is a preparedness to do anything and say anything to save his political skin. These stage 3 tax cuts have not come ahead because Prime Minister Albanese, after spending almost 30 years in this place, has decided that he believes in lowering taxes and has joined the IPA or the HR Nicholls Society and decided that economic reform is something that would be great for Australians. What has happened is that there's a by-election being held in Victoria in the seat of Dunkley.