Mr GIBBONS —My question is directed to the Treasurer and I refer to the Treasurer's advice to a constituent that the GST on books can be avoided by buying over the Internet rather than buying from Australian booksellers. Isn't it true that a price comparison between amazon.com and major Australian booksellers for the top 10 selling books, which include titles such as Hannibal , Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and The Testament , shows that your GST will make buying from Amazon up to one-third cheaper than buying in Australia? How can the Australian book industry keep going under these circumstances?

Mr COSTELLO (Treasurer) —The presupposition of the question is entirely false again.

Opposition members interjecting—

Mr SPEAKER —Order! The Treasurer has the call.

Mr COSTELLO —As was comprehensively displayed last week, the one thing you can always trust about the Labor Party is if they do not have an argument they will always try a smear—always. They will make a false allegation in the belief that by repeating it people will come to think it is true. The rules that are to apply to the GST prima facie are those rules that apply to the wholesale sales tax—rules put in place by the Australian Labor Party; rules, if they were rules allowing tax avoidance, that would allow tax avoidance on CDs, that would allow the avoidance of tariffs on clothes—

Mr Crean —Oh, yeah!

Mr COSTELLO —They would be allowing avoidance on clothes. If the Australian Labor Party believe they should not open every parcel, is it not the case under Australian Labor Party rules that you could order clothes over the Internet without a tariff? They are the rules of the Australian Labor Party, the great defenders of tariffs. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition has spent three years telling Australia what it needed was tariffs and in the last eight months he has been saying that he is drying out—the born-again, redeemed alcoholic.

Mr Beazley —Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order. He has been given a specific question on books on which there is no wholesale sales tax. He has been presented with the fact that there is a one-third reduction on bestsellers if you put in place a GST but order through amazon.com. That's what he's got to answer.

Mr SPEAKER —I presume the Leader of the Opposition is raising a point of order on relevance?

Mr Beazley —Yes.

Mr SPEAKER —The chair was listening to both the question and the answer. I deem that, since the question dealt with the issue of imported goods, the Treasurer was being relevant in the comparisons he was making.

Mr COSTELLO —The import rules apply regardless of the nature of the item. They are the same rules. There is no import rule for books, another import rule for CDs and another import rule for jeans. The import rules apply to imports. As Kep Enderby famously once said in this House, most of our imports come from overseas. The rules in relation to imports apply to things from overseas, whether they be CDs, jeans or books, and they are subject to a de minimus rule. They are subject to a de minimus rule which the Deputy Leader of the Opposition recently described as sensible, as I saw in one radio interview. They are sensible for this reason: if you do not want to have a de minimus rule, you can start opening every parcel that comes into the country to see if it is a CD or to see if it is jeans, because if it is jeans there should be a tariff paid. But for years and years and years under Labor Party rules you operated a de minimus rule.

As for this argument that a six per cent rise in the price of books is suddenly going to drive people onto the Internet, the example I gave this House last week was the fine book by the member for Werriwa. A $25 book would go up $1.50, and the Australian Labor Party says that this is going to drive people onto the Internet—$1.50, or a six per cent increase. They are going to go onto the Internet and they are going to order in sea mail or airmail. I think most people would order airmail. How could you wait longer than four days to get the member for Werriwa's book? Under the Australian Labor Party rules, they will go airmail to avoid $1.50. I gave the example in the House that you can get the book, as I bought it, fair and square, for $24.95 in an Australian bookshop or you could go onto the Internet with priority airmail and can avoid $1.50 in GST and buy it for $93.70.

Even if you could buy cheaper overseas, your argument is this: that a six per cent increase is going to drive people onto the Internet. Let me throw down a challenge to the great micro-economic reformers of the Australian Labor Party who are now apparently worried about the price of overseas books sold in Australia. The biggest item in keeping Australian book prices high for overseas publications are the rules which prevent parallel importing. We all know that. If the Australian Labor Party were interested in the price of overseas books in Australia, they would have a policy on parallel importing, would they not? But what was their position on CDs? To oppose the abolition in relation to parallel importing. Why? To keep CD prices up in Australia.

Mr Swan —Oh, rubbish!

Mr COSTELLO —It was. That was the whole idea—to keep CD prices up in Australia because the argument was that it would then go to the Australian subsidiary of the multinational company and they would pay off the artist. That was your argument.

Mr McMullan —Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order, and it is of course a point of order on relevance. None of us here know what he has been smoking, but he is a long way off the point and it is time he came back to it.

Mr SPEAKER —The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. The Manager of Opposition Business knows that that is quite an inappropriate interjection to make.

Mr COSTELLO —We will take some interest in the Labor Party worrying about the price of books when we see the Labor Party take a position in relation to parallel importing. Until it does so, like all of its questions on tax, this is just sheer hypocrisy from a party which has no policy and can do nothing but nitpick and engage in negativity. As I said earlier, why would you have a party without a policy? Why would you bother running a party if it did not have a policy? It is nothing more than a jobs racket to keep these particular people employed.