MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (17:49): In speaking on this motion from Senator Dean Smith, I make the general point that we have a massive problem here facing charities as a result of these new taxes. But it's not just the charities, of course; it's also small businesses and anyone who wants to see Australia's wicked housing problem solved. More than 300,000 small businesses are using a trust at the moment to run their own affairs in order to minimise their compliance burden for succession planning and for a whole lot of business reasons.
They'll now face higher taxes. This government has gone out of its way to make life hard for small business, principally because Labor doesn't understand that small businesses are just people. If the person who runs a small business doesn't go to work, there is no business.
And so the way that they set up their affairs is to minimise their administrative burden. We don't want to have a country where people are disincentivised to engage in small business. All this is going to do is make it much harder for people to run a small business, which is going to hurt the lifeblood of our future creativity.
Then we have this housing disaster. We see the government having put in place the OECD's broadest and deepest taxes on income and capital gains. This is smashing housing, and so no-one should be surprised when they see in the paper today that rents are going to go up by 30 per cent.
This is exactly what happens when you reduce the supply of something. This is a government which has a deliberate design feature to cut housing supply—it's in their own budget papers—by 35,000. So the cuts apply there.
Then they come along and do a deal with the Greens to stop self-managed funds from borrowing to invest in property, thereby cutting off another stream of new housing. Now, because Dr Chalmers doesn't bother to do any proper analysis, he said, 'Oh, that will stop 4,000 houses from being built.' Why, in a housing crisis, you'd want to have one less house is beyond me, let alone 4,000 fewer houses.
But, in fact, the 4,000 number is actually wrong. It's much more like 16,000 transactions a year. We have a government that hates Australians.
I think a lot of people would say: 'Why does the government hate me? What have I done wrong?' The answer is nothing, but we are stuck with these people for another 18 months. But it is a very strange thing to see these deliberate design features suppressing housing supply through taxes, cutting and banning people from building new houses.
Thirty per cent of a pre-sale in many apartment buildings will be supplied by a self-managed super fund, so a lot of those buildings now won't go up. I make the point again: this tax reform was a shambles. If Dr Chalmers were the CFO of a company, he would have walked the plank a long time ago.
He's had two tax policies. They've both failed. Unrealised gains collapsed on him last year.
He's come back this year with the capital gains tax—the world's highest capital gains tax—and it's collapsed in bits and pieces. We've seen the widows tax and the SMSF thing. I mean, this whole thing has been an absolute shambles.
When you look at the housing quagmire, you've just got to say to yourself, 'Well, we're going through this period of insanity when the government is trying to suppress supply.' That's why there are fewer houses and that's why rents are going up. If you look at the budget papers, they say rents go up by two bucks a week. It's not two bucks a week; it's going to be 200 bucks a week in Sydney.
Rents will go up $200 a week because of these guys putting out this tax policy. They worked through it with their marketers and their focus groups. They think they're so smart, so slick at politics.
They thought this was going to be a very popular thing. I think what they're finding out, in fact, is that when the rubber hits the road, the new taxes cut supply, increase rents, make everyone's life harder and ensnare small business in layers and layers and layers of regulation—more than you can shake a stick at. The charities and everyone else are just afterthoughts, just roadkill.
Charities, small businesses, houses, people who care about housing—the government don't care. They fiddle around with these things, and they're going to fiddle around with it again this week, but the fundamental point is that these taxes are totally wrongheaded. They're wrong for Australia.
They are aspiration killers. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Colbeck ): The time for the discussion has expired.