MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Senator BROCKMAN (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (16:09): There is a lot of misinformation being spoken in this place, and I think the biggest lot at the moment is the phrase 'tax reform', because this budget was not reform. It was a tax grab, straight and simple, and that is all it was. It's not just the $77 billion in increased taxes; if you include bracket creep over the future, you're looking at around $300 billion in tax that this Labor government will take out of the pockets of Australian small business and Australian wage earners.
There is no reform. There is simply a big tax grab. Why is this widow's tax so revealing of this Labor government?
It's because they had no clue that this was an unintended consequence—I hope it was an unintended consequence—of their tax changes. I will never call them tax reform. But the tax change affects couples in our community who literally did everything right.
They did what they were supposed to do. They bought a modest investment property years ago, declared every dollar of it and played every cent that they were owed. And then, sadly, under the tax law that Labor passed, if one of them passed, on the day of that death, that grief was going to come with a tax bill.
That is the law they actually passed through this parliament. They say, 'Oh, we're going to go back and fix it,' but the point is they didn't know what they were doing when they put that measure in a budget. They didn't know what they were doing when they put that legislation through this parliament.
They couldn't even take the time to stop, craft an amendment and pass it in this place. Last week, when the bill went through, they couldn't even take that time. They had to rush these tax changes through parliament for one reason and one reason alone, and that is because they are addicted.
They are addicted to spending, and they are addicted to taking more and more money from Australians. Let me give you another example of this and one close to my heart. That is the rebasing of all assets in this country.
I'll give you an example of—as I say, it's close to my heart—a family farm that's been in a family for a long period of time. All the assets within that family's farming operation will effectively have to be revalued as at 30 June 2027. There are two different valuation methods you can choose, but the fact is, in order to know which valuation method will be advantageous to your business, you have to explore both, which means you have to get a valuation.
This is going to be in and of itself an extraordinary, deadweight loss to the Australian economy. The valuation industry will do very well out of it, but it will be an extraordinary cost to every farming family, every small-business person and pretty much everyone in Australia who has some sort of asset base. What this does, and the reason I raise a farming family, is make intergenerational succession extraordinarily difficult.
That's because the rebasing and the triggering of capital gains tax events really leaves farming families in an extraordinarily difficult position, where they may have to find tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxation due to asset revaluations of a farming property that has been in a family potentially for generations. They now will have to find cash to pay a tax bill on because of the rebasing and because of changes of ownership with death and succession.
Even with the fix the government has announced, this still is a death tax budget. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Polley ): The time for that debate has expired.