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Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Page: 11740

Ms OWENS (Parramatta) (16:27): I congratulate the member for Forde—not that I agreed with all of the suggestions he put forward but he did actually put some positive ideas forward in his speech. I have to say that listening to the opposition talking about the tax forum over the last few days and today I have not seen much positivity. I have seen quite considerable negativity, as we have come to expect from the opposition. It has highlighted for me what was so special about the tax forum. It was like two days of a patch of blue, two days of sucking in clean air and walking out at the end of it lighter than air because we had two days of some of the smartest people in the country in a room cooperating and talking positively not about themselves now but about what we need to do to make sure that Australia is a prosperous and secure nation in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years and 40 years.

All of us in this House know that we can get stuck in the media spin cycle and get stuck in very short-term issues in this place if we do not work very hard at looking for the long term. This was for me a wonderful opportunity to listen to people whose focus absolutely was on the long-term good of the nation. There were some wonderful examples of that. I should say that in my more cynical moments I think partly it was so positive because the opposition was not there and if they had come in they might have brought their negativity with them. But perhaps I should take some of the positivity from those two days and bring it into this place as well. In the spirit of positiveness and cooperation I will move on.

There were some announcements made at the end by the Treasurer that took some of those ideas raised at the forum and moved them forward. The business tax working group will develop ideas about the tax treatment of losses and ways to fund any changes from business tax and then look at the longer-term business tax reform ideas. The session for the states was particularly interesting and very productive. We had admissions from quite a few of the state representatives that there are taxes at state level that one would call bad. There was talk about harmonisation across states, there was talk about simplification and there was talk about extensive programs through COAG. Again, there was an incredibly interesting and positive discussion about the future, and a recognition that sometimes the simplest tax system for the user is not necessarily the system that the collector wants. But again, there was very open dialogue about that contradiction in the way we put our tax system together, and the need to address it in a very real way. There were even those almost utopian ideas of taking all the land based taxes—insurances, stamp duty, land tax, council rates and capital gains—and trying to find a way to make one harmonised simple system. That is utopia for the user—probably not achievable in my lifetime but certainly a great indicator that people are looking to the future and are prepared to talk absolutely about the way it should be in a perfect world. We should all do that much more often. Sometimes we cannot get there but sometimes we can get a lot closer.

There was also quite a bit of discussion about personal tax. The government's first priority in the personal tax arena is to build on the tripling of the tax-free threshold by increasing the threshold to $21,000 as the budget allows. The first part of that, the increase to $18,000, is part of the clean energy future package, which passed the House of Representatives today. So part of that is now on its way, and a very good thing it is too.

There was a range of other outcomes, from looking at small business complexity to superannuation during the drawdown phrase, not-for-profit concessions, improved tax system governance, and a new centre for excellence in research into the tax and transfer systems. It was really clear from the tone of the discussion through those two days that many people took with them the sense of commitment to the future out into their own constituency. I have no doubt that over the next few years we will see extraordinary contributions from that tax forum flowing through our tax system.