MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator McGRATH (Queensland) (16:56): I move: That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency: The Albanese Labor Government's proposed 30 per cent trust tax, which threatens to slug small and family businesses, farmers and hardworking Australians with up to $13.3 billion in restructuring costs, punishing the very people who take risks, create jobs and drive our economy, while Labor continues to pile more taxes, costs and uncertainty onto Australian businesses.
I'm going to read out the motion so everybody knows what we're talking about here and why it is important. It is: The Albanese Labor Government's proposed 30 per cent trust tax, which threatens to slug small and family businesses, farmers and hardworking Australians with up to $13.3 billion in restructuring costs, punishing the very people who take risks, create jobs and drive our economy, while Labor continues to pile more taxes, costs and uncertainty onto Australian businesses.
What we have seen with this Labor government since the budget has been a war declared upon business, but not just any type of business—a war on small businesses, the men and women who make sure that Australia grows the food that we eat. It is also an attack on the small businesses that we see on the main streets, in the suburbs and on the highways and other roads that bind this country together.
And what do we hear from the Labor Party? We hear nothing. We hear the political equivalent of a 'nyeah': 'Oh, only a small number of people have trusts.
It doesn't really matter. Farmers aren't workers. People who run small businesses aren't workers.' What we've seen here is another version of Labor's class warfare, because they do not understand business.
They do not understand small business, because when you look at them—and I'd encourage people to not look at them, because you won't sleep for a month of Mondays—you see that they are all union officials. They're all union barons. They've all got the nice soft hands because they've never done a day's manual labour in their lives.
They go around working sites. They put on their nice shiny hats with the CFMEU or AWU stickers on them. They turn up and they pretend that they're the workers' friends.
They're not the workers' friends, and they're not the friends of small business or of Australia. They don't understand how Australia operates, because they see Australia through a bubble—a bubble of their own union stranglehold on intellectual thought, which is a drought within the modern Labor Party. They don't realise that tax money comes from people who have worked hard.
It is not the Labor Party's money. It's not the government's money. It is money that belongs to the taxpayers of Australia, and what the Labor Party want to do with the taxpayers' money is continue with all their boondoggles.
You wonder why we've got $1 trillion worth of debt? Well, just look at the Labor Party. I'm one of those people who grew up under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
Remember Paul Keating with his $96 billion worth of debt that Mr Howard and Mr Costello paid off? There was money in the bank when, sadly, we lost the 2007 election. What are the Labor Party going to give to Australians, apart from a bunch of tax rises?
They're going to give a trillion dollars worth of debt. This is the modern Labor Party, the so-called workers' friend. They're not a friend of the workers and they're not a friend of small business, because fundamentally they just don't understand small business.
If you ask the Labor Party, 'Where does your food come from?' they say, 'Oh, the fridge.' They don't understand that it actually comes from the farmers who get up before dawn and go to sleep late at night. This is where your food comes from. We are a country that grows three times the amount of food that we need.
We export the food, but to this mob they just see farmers as a big fat dairy cow that they can milk like this to get the tax out of them, to fund their projects and all their boondoggles and things like that. And good luck to Hansard with putting 'this' in! Just say that the senator gestured like he was milking a cow!
And then there come the small businesses. Senator McGRATH: That was an irrelevant point of order, and that's what we expect from this Labor Party: they are irrelevant when it comes to the country. They can't run the country properly and they can't do points of order properly either.
I want to go back to this urgency motion before someone gets me on relevance. It's going to cost small businesses across this country $13.3 billion in terms of restructuring because of the decisions made by you, because you don't understand how businesses operate, and it's a shame upon you. If we did not have businesses, they could not employ people.
If people don't have jobs, it means they do not believe and do not join in the Australian dream, and that's what we want Australians to do, because the Australian dream is all about people like Senator Jonno Duniam, who is living the Australian dream. He's leaving this chamber, he's going out into the big wide world and we are going to miss him. We're going to miss his eloquence.
We're going to miss everything about him. I encourage people to support this urgency motion. Debate interrupted.