MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator HUME (Victoria—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (16:09): If you really want to get up the Labor Party's nose, you only need to use one word, and that is 'mean'. If you call the Labor Party mean, they will squeal. They squeal every time.

But that's exactly what the widows tax is. It is mean. It's a mean tax.

It's a tricky tax. And don't for a second be fooled into thinking that it wasn't entirely deliberate. The widows tax imposed by Labor was no accident.

There were plenty of chances for the Labor Party to fix it six weeks ago, when the Senate was sitting, when the original taxation legislation was being passed. But they chose not to. It wasn't an oversight; it was a deliberate act, and it was a mean, tricky act.

More importantly, it was a failure of basic moral reasoning. But the Labor Party persisted. It's a tax that catches people at their most vulnerable.

Don't for a second let Labor fool you into believing that these tax increases are reform. They're not reform; they are tax increases. Labor's tax increases were supposed to grandfather existing investment properties, protecting them from changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax if they were bought before budget night.

However, what this tax does is ensure that, if one owner dies or a couple divorces, the property is transferred to the other owner, and Labor treats that as a change in ownership, and that grandfathering—that protection—disappears. That's what this tax does. It was intentional.

It wasn't an oversight. They had a choice, and they chose to inflict it upon the most vulnerable. The extraordinary thing is that Labor clearly know that this is a problem.

They know it's a problem because now they're saying that they're going to deal with it. They're going to deal with it by attaching it to another bill and then consulting on it. Yet every single other senator In this chamber is willing to change this now.

They realise it's a problem. Labor has chosen to pass the bill with the widows tax still in it. Senator Cox was incorrect.

There is a widows tax. It's no-one's imagination. It is there, and it is a divorcee tax and a tax on survivors of domestic violence.

It's been deliberately chosen by the Labor government. Labor had six weeks to produce a bill to remove this tax, and they've chosen not to. Instead, they've chosen to delay.

They've put out an exposure draft, sent it out for consultation and bundled it with legislation that deals with trusts and other tax changes that they know that the coalition won't support. They've done this because they're doubling down on being mean and tricky. In the meantime, they're playing politics with people's lives—with women's lives.

It's disgusting. It's an extraordinary way to deal with a problem that's affecting people who are grieving or going through a divorce, and it raises a very, very simple question for government: if there's no rush then why was there so much of a rush to impose it in the first place? Now Australians are simply being told: 'Oh, don't worry.

Trust us. We're going to fix this. Don't worry about it.' But how out of touch can you be?

Australians don't rely on a law that might pass; they rely on laws that have passed, and you have passed a widows tax—a mean and tricky widows tax. Australians operate on what the law says today, not what the law might say tomorrow. A widow refinancing an investment property cannot simply say to her bank: 'Don't worry.

The government say they're going to fix this eventually, so you don't need to worry about me.' It doesn't work that way. So the law needs to be fixed. It needs to be fixed immediately, and we will help this Senate chamber to fix it immediately.

I'd like to acknowledge Senator David Pocock's work on this issue. Just recently, he was contacted by a 44-year-old victim of domestic violence who was unable to secure financing for an investment property that she co-owned with her former partner and was due to receive as part of her divorce settlement. But she can't, because of the uncertainty that Labor created from its tax increases.

So the coalition will work with Senator Pocock and the crossbench to remove this terrible tax, because we agree that it should not exist. Labor says there's no rush. Well, there should be a rush.

They should be rushing to fix this right now because, for Australians that are caught up in this mess, it's not a theoretical problem; it's a real problem. It's their lives. Australians shouldn't be punished by a tax system simply because their spouse has died.

They shouldn't be punished by a tax system if they're escaping domestic violence or experiencing divorce. So Labor should stop delaying. It's hard to imagine a clearer example of a policy failing the people that Labor claim to protect.

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