Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Pratt talked about flip-flops in Kmart. Senator Pratt is a dedicated senator, so I'm sure she wasn't doing online shopping during question time. Maybe she read some government briefs and saw the term 'flip-flop' there. It seems that it's almost part of every government brief that they can't stick to what they said before the last election. Maybe they were a bit confused when they came to government and so at the top of every brief it says, 'Make sure we flip-flop today, because we can't stick to the commitments we made in opposition.'

Let's go through some of the Labor government flip-flops, which Senator Pratt spoke about so eloquently. They promised to keep people safe, particularly in relation to border security. Well, we can all see what the government has done in that area. There's the infamous $275 cut to power bills. Every Australian knows that their power bills have soared over the last two years, so that was another nice flip-flop from the Labor Party. They promised—committed—that Australians were going to be better off. As Senator Birmingham clearly pointed out in his question to the minister, a family with a $750,000 mortgage has now seen costs increase by $22,000 dollars per annum. At the same time, what have we seen happen to income tax receipts? They've gone up 23 per cent under this Labor government. What is that caused by? That is caused by the insidious effects of inflation and bracket creep—inflation that I think this government actually wants to see stay a bit higher for a bit longer because, over time, it will deflate their debt.

There are other examples of flip-flops and broken promises. We've seen the stage 3 tax cuts, in relation to which the Prime Minister's word 'was his bond'. Of course, we know where that went. They promised cheaper mortgages. I've just talked about that. For a $750,000 mortgage held by an average Australian family, costs have increased by $22,000. They promised no increase in the tax burden, but that has gone up by 23 per cent. The Labor Party promised no changes to superannuation, but they've attacked self-managed super funds particularly. For the first time in Australia's history, unrealised capital gains are being taxed within a super fund. This is going to impact particularly on Australian farmers and small-business owners who have chosen to put part of their income generating asset—their farm or perhaps an office they work out of—into, as is quite legal and proper, their self-managed super fund. So, for the first time in Australia's history, if there is an uplift in the value of an asset to take individuals above the $3 million cap, suddenly an unrealised gain—a paper profit—is going to be taxed.

The flip-flops just keep on going. They promised that franking credits wouldn't be touched, and they promised that industrial relations bargaining wouldn't be industrywide. They said: 'No, we wouldn't go there. We wouldn't go back to pattern bargaining. We wouldn't go back to the bad old days of the seventies and eighties.' But of course, they do. As Senator Pratt acknowledged, they flip-flop. This is a government that made so many commitments before the last election that they have walked away from in government—commitments which the Australian people thought meant something and which the Australian people relied on in making their decision. Commitment after commitment after commitment has been walked away from by this Labor government. We will continue to hold them to account, and we will continue to tell the Australian people what this Labor government is doing to them.