ADJOURNMENT

Senator BROCKMAN (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (19:40): Let me paint a picture for you. This picture is of a family. Let's say they've got two children.

They might be a farming family. They might own a small business. They have chosen, for very legitimate reasons, to structure their assets in a family trust.

They've also chosen to have another child. If you have a family trust, Labor is now going to tax you for having another child. The days each of our children are born are the best days of our lives.

Holding the child for the first time—nothing else comes close. Labor is literally going to make this moment a taxable event. If you have two children in a family trust and you seek to add a third, it becomes a taxable event and not just a taxable event, a taxable event at 47 per cent.

How did we get here? A trillion dollars of debt, an addiction to spending that Labor simply cannot kick—we all know that, when Labor run out of money, they come after yours. First were the death tax and a widows tax.

Now there's one for choosing to have another child. They call it reform. We all know what it is.

It is a birth tax. Did the Australian people vote for this? Would the Australian people ever vote for this?

I don't think so, and I think you know the answer too. Regional Australia cannot afford to lose working holiday makers. Labor has lost control of our immigration system to the degree where, to have a pretence of bringing the net overseas migration rate down, they have stopped processing working holiday visas.

Think about who these people are. These are young people from all around the world who want to come to Australia to have the experience of their life and, to help fund it, to do a bit of work, often in regional and remote Australia. Those workers are vital to farms in regional and remote Australia.

Farms don't employ 20 people all year round, or very few of them do. Farmers employ a few people—four, five or six—during the harvest and during seeding, which is perfect for working holiday makers. How about all the pubs and hotels in the north of Western Australia—again, you go in there and you hear the German accents, the Irish accents.

You hear accents from all around the world. That's part of what makes it special, but it's also what makes those businesses run. It is also what makes those businesses able to provide the services they do in remote and regional Australia.

Labor, because they have failed to get the migration system to a sustainable level, are using a trick of arithmetic—pausing the processing of these working holiday visas—to make it look like the net overseas migration rate is coming down. Well, what a joke that is. Everyone will see through that in a matter of seconds.

We want young people to come to Australia on working holiday visas. We want young people to have the time of their lives and help regional and remote businesses when they do it, and we want the soft power that that develops for Australia right around the world when those people go home, as they do, and talk about the amazing experiences they have in regional Australia.

Shame on Labor. Senate adjourned at 19:45