Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026, Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026

Mr HOGAN (Page—Deputy Manager of Opposition Business) (20:33): I commend the previous speaker, the member for Mitchell, for his contribution, because he made some interesting observations. He made some very astute observations—before I get into some of the mechanics of this budget from the Labor Party, about some of the greatly damaging things that it will do to our economy.

They're not damaging things that will be noticed next week, next month or maybe even next year. But the very damaging psychological things that it will do to people's behaviour over the next three to five years will be very obvious. What the member was alluding to, and this is what this budget demonstrates, is a philosophy and an ideology from those opposite about how they think the economy, the world and government should work.

Their overarching ideology and philosophy is that big government is better. Big government is better. Higher taxes are better.

They believe that because they believe that government knows best—that people need to be told. People need to be directed. People need to be pointed in the right direction.

So big government, big bureaucracy, lots of legislation, lots of regulation and lots of rules is how they think. Understand that—they don't hide it. This government is doing it with this budget.

This is going to change behaviour in this country, as people are saying and as business people are saying. They saw it straightaway last week. You saw on social media people at a grassroots level, and what was their overarching comment on the budget?

Their overarching take straightaway was, 'Okay, you want us to take the risk, but you want the Albanese Labor government to take the reward.' That is the overarching philosophy and theme that business in this country gets. Now, before I go into some of the mechanics of what's in the bill and to support what I've just said, I have to start again, though, by saying how shocking the deceit of this budget is.

It is one thing to go to an election and then bring things in. You could probably point to a lot of examples where a government has gone to an election, not mentioned something and then done it in the next budget. That's probably not as unusual as it should be.

But the deceit here is almost unparalleled. These are radical reforms. Sorry, these are radical tax increases.

No-one is saying they're not. These are radical tax increases. But the shame on all those opposite, the shame on every member of the government, is that the Prime Minister himself said 50-odd times that he wouldn't do this.

This had been in a previous Labor budget. Sorry—some of these measures had been put in a previous Labor government's election campaign. It was the 2019 election campaign when Bill Shorten was the leader.

And some of these things were put into their election manifesto. Again, because it's their socialist manifesto, it's high taxes and 'we know best; we want more of your money because we know how to spend it better than you do.' That was all there, and the Australian public said no. The Prime Minister was purposely asked about this, because they'd previously been part of the Labor government's campaign and policy.

He was asked quite reasonably many times and over 50 times said, 'No, no.' You can see the vision. I'm sure you've seen some of the vision, Deputy Speaker, where he's almost getting annoyed. 'Well, how dare you ask me this again? I've told you no.

I've said no, we're not going to do that.' He is rolling his eyes as he gets asked the question again. 'How many times do I have to say no?' And the first budget after the election he does it. I have to mention that because every member of the Labor Party should hang their head in shame on that alone because of the deceit of it, the absolute deceit. I certainly don't think that's lost on the vast majority of the Australian public either.

Let's now go into some of the mechanics of this. Again, the member for Mitchell raised some good points about how business works. And I go, 'Why do they think this is a good idea?' I thought that surely they would understand that when you start a business and you're throwing all your money into the business and rolling up the door and you've got a skill—you might be a mechanic, you might be a hairdresser or you might be whatever.

You've developed a skill. You might be providing a service, and you've developed some skills, and you want to have a punt on your own. You put your own money on the line.

Many times you sort of forego income for yourself and need to pay your staff first to make sure your business is up and running. So you get a sort of a cellular understanding of work in private enterprise, and you understand the importance of keeping customers happy. You've got to make money because you've got bills and people's salaries to pay.

You understand that when you've done that, when you've worked in that, and that's important. It's important because you understand the psychology of that. You understand how people think when they do that.

Again, I make the point that, very disappointingly, neither the Treasurer nor the Prime Minister has ever worked in that environment. Never has either of them done that. Never has either of them ever put their own money into starting a business, working on a business or trying to build a business with a skill they had.

Neither the Prime Minister or the Treasurer has done that. With both of them in the important roles that they have for the economic growth and the economic future of our country and the budget that they've just done, I shouldn't be surprised that they think higher taxes are good. I think they shouldn't be surprised that they think government knows best.

I think I shouldn't be surprised they want more government regulations and more government legislation to make things more difficult for business, because they've never worked in one. Both of them have worked solely within the political structure of the Labor Party, whether it be for Labor ministers at state level or Labor ministers at federal level. I think the Prime Minister was the general secretary of the party structure for a period.

So all they know as a practical working environment is politics. All they know as a practical thing is the workings of a federal or state parliament and government. There are skills that you learn in that, but none of them are to do with business; none of them are to do with running a business and the importance of what you need to know to run a business.

It's a bad culture, an unhealthy culture, within the Labor Party and within the cabinet of the Labor Party that not many of them have done this and understand that, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they're making decisions that are really damaging to the psychology of businesspeople in this country. The thing I keep hearing from many people is Labor want people to take the risk but want their government to take the rewards of it.

I'll just go into a few mechanics of this that surprised me—maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I was sitting in the budget lock-up, and someone came up to me and said, 'Kevin, read this.' It was page 158 of Budget Paper No. 1—and remember that Treasury wrote this. We've just been talking about all of the tax changes, and that page said that, because of the tax changes that were going to be announced in the budget, there will be 35,000 fewer homes built over the next 10 years than otherwise would have been.

The budget paper itself said that: because of the changes announced in the budget, there will be 35,000 fewer homes built in Australia over the next 10 years. And we have a housing crisis. I'm quoting that.

That's not my analysis. That's not me saying that. That is Treasury saying that.

You have a government that say: 'We need to tax more. We need to make things more difficult for business, and we are going to now do other tax policies that mean fewer homes are going to be built in this country.' When you ask the government specific questions around that, they just go into hyperbole, don't answer the question and talk double-gooky stuff. But these questions are really serious questions.

Why would you bring down a budget that Treasury's analysis says will mean fewer homes are going to be built than if you don't make these changes? It's also with trusts. I speak to a lot of small businesses, and these are the people who forgo salary and are trying to build a business.

There are close to 400,000 trusts that are owned and operated by small businesses in Australia. It's an important part of the way they're structured. Again, they thought it was okay to structure like that.

The Prime Minister, a year ago, promised them there wouldn't be changes made to that, but there you go. That's enough on that, really. I've been speaking about the negatives of the government's budget for a couple of weeks now, but, to finish off, I want to say a couple of positive things about the budget-in-reply speech.

We do know how business works. We do know how capital is raised. We do know how economies become more prosperous.

Everyone opposite would think, the higher the tax rate goes, the more tax you raise. That's actually not even necessarily an economic truth, and there are lots of examples of that. I'll give an example.

In the eighties, Ireland were going broke under the philosophy that this government has because they had high taxes, a lot of red tape and a lot of government spending and were going into debt and collecting less tax. They did something quite radical and bold: they lowered the company tax rate from about 60 per cent to 11 per cent. Do you know what was happening in three years?

They were collecting more tax at 11 per cent than they were at 60 because of course everyone went, 'Let's have a go.' There's a thing called the Laffer curve, and I'm sure the minister opposite would know about the Laffer curve. When you tax a thing too highly, you actually get less of it, and, sometimes, when you lower tax, you get more of the thing because of the way behaviour changes around that.

But, again, our prime minister doesn't understand that, and our treasurer doesn't understand that, because not only have they never started their own business or worked for their own business and employed other people; they've never actually even worked in private enterprise. So they have no understanding about that. But Labor have a slogan.

I'll give credit to the Labor Party for one thing: they're good at politics, they're good at focus grouping and they're good at messaging. They say things like 'earn more and keep more of what you earn'. Well, we have a policy that people will earn more and keep more of what they earn, and it actually would be a policy result.

Everything they do results in the opposite of that, but we have a policy that will mean you actually do earn more and keep more of what you earn, and that is our tax-back guarantee. Deputy Speaker Freelander, I know you'd be very aware of this. We know that bracket creep and inflation are running rampant in this country right now.

Because of the mismanagement by the government, people go into higher tax brackets. We know we have a progressive tax system. The more you earn, the higher the rate of the personal income tax level.

Indexing that to make sure that you don't go into the higher tax brackets means people will keep more of their money and not go into the higher tax bracket. I commend that policy. It's not a slogan for us.

We actually want people to earn more, and we want them to keep more of what they earn. Our tax-back guarantee will do that. We've also made the policy that we will repeal these three tax increases.

It's not tax reform. I love it when Labor talk about tax reform. Tax reform to them means tax increases.

We will repeal those three tax increases because we back people in Australia who want to have a go. We want to have an environment for people to have a go in Australia and start their own business working in private enterprise. We want them to do well, because then there is a healthy base to collect government taxes from to make sure that we have the important services that we want.

They made a number of changes too on AR laws with the EPBC Act last year as well on the last day of sitting. I always say to people when I'm doing interviews on this that no-one will notice this tomorrow. No-one will notice this next week.

No-one may even notice some of these changes next year. But, with the perfect storm of Labor's lack of understanding of the economy—and because neither of the two senior people in the government have ever worked in or understood private enterprise—they have made a number of decisions over the last three or four years that I unfortunately think are going to accumulate in businesses in our economy really struggling within three to five years.

If we were a closed thing, you might say, 'Well, you still have to survive, and you'll still survive because you just have to do stuff.' But we live in a global economy. I can tell you right now, when we talk about capital gains taxes, that our neighbours New Zealand and Singapore—I had a look at their figures the other day—are moving in exactly the opposite direction.

They respect people who are investing capital. They respect people who are investing, and they are lowering capital gains taxes because they want to attract that. They want more of that.

It's like the example I gave with Ireland just a little while ago. I'm not surprised. I certainly understand the Prime Minister's history of only ever working for Labor Party ministers or in the Labor Party infrastructure.

The Treasurer is the same. They have just been creatures and products of the Australian Labor Party and never worked in the real world and private enterprise. They've grown up with an ideology of big government and big taxes.

Anyone who's having a punt or making money is bad. How dare you make money because you've had a crack and want to invest it in your business or invest it in other businesses. They don't like people like that.

They want to punish people like that. As those people are telling me, the Albanese Labor government want them to take the risk and the government to take the reward. Shame on them.