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

Senator COLLINS (New South Wales—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (18:12): I rise to talk about the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026. I tell you what, I'm pretty surprised to see the Greens up and ready with such formed speeches after only just striking such a dirty deal with the government to get this bill through. It's very telling to hear that their perspective of the government's budget that was passed just last month was that it was not ambitious enough.

What that says to me is that they wanted more tax on the Australian people. They got that today in this dirty deal that was done. It's not one but 12 bills.

I've just counted. This set of bills—this budget—is a tax on Australian dreams. It's a tax on aspiration, it's a tax on confidence, it's a tax on vision, and it's a tax on the blood, sweat and tears that Australian people put into their businesses, their investments and their trying to get ahead grow this economy for the rest of Australia.

No-one voted for these new taxes. This wasn't taken to the election, even though the Prime Minister promised at least 50 times before the last election that he would not introduce them. 'My word is my bond,' he said. 'I rule out changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax.' This budget is in bad faith for the Australian people. The Prime Minister has broken his contract that he took to the election.

These new taxes are designed to manage the decline of the Australian economy. They will not grow it. And we now have a death tax, a tax on family savings, and a tax on renters, first home buyers and any young Australians who are just trying to get ahead, even though this was supposed to improve intergenerational inequality.

Well, we all know—and the Australian people know—that it's only going to make it worse. I spent last week on the Central Coast, where there are 29,000 small-to-medium businesses. There's about a $20 billion economy there on the Central Coast.

It's thriving. But I spent all day talking to businesses, and they are concerned—they are deeply troubled—by this budget that's been handed down by the government, about what it's going to do to what they've built over the years. A very familiar story that we heard from these businesses is that these people started from nothing, that they started the business out of their family home, out of their garage, out of their spare bedroom, and they built it up to have one, two, five, 10 or 50 employees, passing it down through generations.

Now all of a sudden they've got another shareholder. Well, they didn't vote for that. We've heard about the backflips and the carve outs that the Australian Prime Minister has done over the past couple of days.

There's one for 'innovative small businesses', and they can't even tell us what an 'innovative small business' is, because they don't understand small business. They don't understand what they're doing. They don't understand the details of their own policy.

Quite frankly, the small business operators here have been telling me it's too late, that they're looking overseas already. They're looking to Dubai, Hong Kong, the United States, Singapore, New Zealand and Canada—anywhere but Australia. What a disaster that is.

We will have the highest taxing government in Australian history. I'll just take it back again to what the Greens said before, that the budget that was handed down was not ambitious enough; there's not enough tax in it for the Australian people. We've got a big-spending government.

It's got some very big bills. It's got an interest bill that is $80,000 a minute. Somebody's got to pay for that, and it's the Australian people.

And the taxes that they will raise from this budget—we've got $50 billion of higher taxes, $273 billion in taxes that Australians didn't vote for over the next nine years, and most of that money will be going towards paying off $80,000 a minute. It won't be going to defence spending; we know that for sure. The coalition opposes schedules 1 and 2, and we support schedules 3 and 4.

But if the coalition wins government we will be repealing these bad taxes. Our plan is for lower taxes, lower inflation and an economy that backs entrepreneurs, backs small business, backs self-starters and backs people who are willing to take risk, because we believe that if you risk then you should be rewarded. Schedule 1 introduces changes to the capital gains tax regime.

We will be opposing that. Schedule two introduces changes to the negative gearing regime. We will be opposing that.

Schedule 3 introduces the working Australians tax offset, and schedule 4 introduces a $1,000 standard deduction for work related expenses. We heard before about the housing from the Greens and the HAFF, the Housing Australia Future Fund. There's $10 billion that's gone into that HAFF housing project.

We heard that about 1,000 homes that have been built. But no-one can tell me whether any of those homes have gone to the vulnerable women and children that they've been promised to. Four thousand homes under the HAFF were supposed to go to vulnerable women and children, and nobody in the government is tracking it.

Nobody seems to care. It's a disaster of a policy. This budget puts new taxes on homes.

My colleague Senator Bragg is always asking the good questions: Why, if you want more of housing, would you put a tax on it? How does that get more supply? Well, the simple answer is that it doesn't.

He's very wise, Senator Bragg. The government's own budget papers say that 35,000 fewer homes will be built as a consequence of their new taxes. The government's own budget papers say that—35,000 fewer homes.

Yet we have 90,000 more people than planned arriving in the next two years. How do we expect to house these people? What is the government going to do about that?

We have an overshoot of 90,000 people. That means higher demand, lower supply and higher prices. We've also got changes to negative gearing which will bring down investment, which will raise rental prices.

Independent experts have suggested that rents could rise by up to $160 a week in Sydney. That's up $160 a week because, when you drive investment out of the rental market—it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work it out—prices are going to go up and supply will go down. When you've got real wages declining and you've got higher tax and you've got Australians taking home less, it's a recipe for a perfect storm.

We heard the Greens today talking about the cost of living and how people are turning up at the supermarkets and having to make some very extreme choices about the things that they can and can't buy, yet their dirty deal is only going to make it worse. It's a shame. We in the coalition back small business.

We back vision. We back hope. We back consistency and clarity for the economy.

We back Australians who believe in themselves, Australians who back themselves, Australians that aspire to have a roof over their heads. But, as a result of these changes, in the past month, when speaking to real estate agents, they're saying that the auction clearance—nobody's even doing auctions anymore. There's no point.

Nobody's turning up. There's no confidence in the housing market. They're looking at the housing market like it's back in the global financial crisis already, and these bills have not even been passed.

They're absolutely ripping the rug out from under Australians and the housing market. It's a shame. What we need is more supply.

What we need is more infrastructure. What we need is more builders in the country bringing on that supply. Of course the labour unions have a stronghold over who comes into this country.

I'll tell you: dog walkers are not going to build us more houses. So here we are with a budget that doesn't bring intergenerational equality or fairness. It's intergenerational fraud, and there is absolute outrage from the Australian people.

I had a roundtable with some startup companies just last week in Sydney. They are despairing. They have built these companies from nothing.

They put everything into it, waking up at two or three o'clock in the morning for years on end. Families were throwing everything into it. I know all about it.

My dad built his business from scratch. My husband and I had a business when I was raising my kids. My brother built a business.

I know what it is to throw everything into these things and to then have the government come back and say that they want half of it. Well, that's just not fair and that's just not on, so the coalition will never back that. The coalition will repeal these bad taxes because the government have done none of the work, they've taken none of the risk and they want nearly half of it.

Small-business owners are the self-starters of our nation. They sacrifice holidays. They work weekends.

They do everything to put themselves in a position to get ahead, and here we have the government's answer to that. The government's answer to the fact that they've run out of money is to come after yours. The Treasurer is doubling the tax rate on small businesses when they go to sell, and he's raised the threshold to $10 million for a small business.

He's raise the threshold for small business. The effect that that's going to have is it will be a tax on ambition. Small business will want to stop growing once they reach that threshold.

That's never going to be a good idea. We want to grow this economy. The government needs to step back and give the businesses the freedom they need to excel.

The rules of the economy are rigged against self-starters. They've got the compliance burden of industrial relations law, tax law. I've seen the size of the tax law book—the summary growing and growing and growing.

We've got regulatory laws. (Time expired)