Mr CAMERON THOMPSON (12:21 PM) —I listened with some interest to the previous address. Of course those members opposite intend to keep the GST. I thought we were talking about fuel excise today. Indeed, that is the main topic I want to discuss in the debate on the Excise Tariff Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2001. While the member opposite carries on about the GST, his whole intention is to keep it and to add more and more paperwork and to create more and more complexity for business. That is the whole rationale of the ALP in everything they have ever run about. We have had all kinds of inquiries being conducted by the ALP, not in an effort to get to the bottom of serious issues like fuel or the business activity statement but with the intention of creating more and more media comment, more and more confusion in the minds of ordinary people.

Despite the obvious evidence of the statistics that were released yesterday and a range of good economic data reflecting the genuine activity out there in the business community in Australia, they are determined to talk the Australian economy down. And that is why they have a business activity statement inquiry: so that they can walk around and convince as many people as they possibly can that the sky really is falling in and that things really are grim. It really does show, when at the end of it all they intend to keep the GST, just how hypocritical they can get. They intend to plumb new depths of hypocrisy. They want to go as far down that tube as they possibly can. All the evidence shows that it really is starting to wear thin on the average punter out there. People are starting to see that, really, the world has not come to an end. There have been some changes, indeed, and they have been significant changes—and nowhere more than in our treatment of, for example, fuel issues.

I would like to get back to the excise issue and start by talking about the thing that members opposite called a boondoggle. When they were trumpeting on about fuel changes earlier in the year, they were upset over the provision by the Howard government of $1.6 billion—including $1.2 billion to local councils and $400 million to national highways Australia-wide—to go into improved roads for Australians. I have to say I am very thankful for that decision: without that `boondoggle'—as members opposite were determined to call it—I would not have received a total of $94 million to go into the road corridor between the Ipswich Motorway and the Warrigo Highway in my electorate. I can tell you that will have a massive impact in that area. The huge pile-ups on the Ipswich Motorway yesterday only go to demonstrate just how very important that money will be. The Labor Party would have denied us that money. They would not have allocated that money. They would not have had it. They said it was a boondoggle; yet we have people being dragged off to hospital and their cars being shunted onto railway tracks in these pile-ups on a section of highway that is in desperate need of repair. Of course, repaired it will be—because of the allocation under the Roads to Recovery program.

What members opposite were trying to say at that time was that there should have been a change in fuel tax allocation instead. Their argument for that—and I thought it was a bizarre type of argument for the ALP to run, because they were arguing it on behalf of the oil companies—was that, because the coalition government was only prepared to give 6.7c a litre on the price of fuel and the cost of the change was 8.2c or around that—6.7c versus 8.2c, or something like that—a difference of 1.5c, they wanted the government to give oil companies something that no other person in business in the whole of Australia had, and that was the full return of the GST, so that they would be the only businesses expected not to make a saving under the GST. That was the whole argument of the Labor Party. Their view was that, unlike every other business in Australia, the oil companies should have got a special deal; they should not have been expected to make the savings that clearly were there for every other Australian business. The oil companies—the ALP's friends—were the ones that had to get a special deal.

People out there were not happy, just as people all over the world were not happy, about the rises that happened in oil prices as a result of the OPEC price changes. They were not happy about those changes but they would have been much more unhappy if we had gone down the Labor Party path and had cuddled up to the oil companies. If the oil companies were the sole beneficiaries of a complete exoneration in relation to the need to find those benefits that were being produced by the GST, they would, under the Labor Party, be the only ones given a free ride, the only ones given entree, the only ones with a red carpet laid out before them: `If this is what you want, this is what the Labor Party will do for you.' Obviously, that would not have been acceptable to ordinary people if it had been followed; and it is a joke now for members opposite to hark back to that or to consider that in any way at all.

On another tack, I would like to go back to the issue of this bill in relation to CPI increases. I would like to recall those CPI increases that were such a flavour of the day under the Labor Party. We saw some quite significant increases in fuel excise—driven by the CPI that was so favoured by the Labor Party and was introduced by them. I listened to what the member for Dunkley said, and he talked about an increase, over the Labor Party's time in government, of 29c per litre. In fact, it was bigger than that: it was a 30.2c per litre increase. You can only come up with a 29c per litre increase if you take the now common unleaded fuel excise price versus the old leaded fuel price. If you take the constant—that is, the leaded—it is in fact an over 30.2c per litre increase that the Labor Party manipulated while they were in government, thanks to the CPI and other ingenious little activities that they conducted to try to ramp up prices as much as they possibly could.

One of things that have been talked about a lot was the l-a-w tax cuts that Labor offered when they were trying to sneak their way back into power in 1993. In fact, we saw changes there: they said they were going to do the tax cuts but, instead, they went in the opposite direction. What we got was an increase, in fuel excise alone, from 26.154c per litre in 1992 to 31.750c per litre in 1994. What is that? That is 5½c per litre that the Labor Party ramped up when they told everybody prior to that election that they were going to give them tax cuts: 5c per litre, something that to the average motorist today would be a huge increase to face—and in those days, given the effect of inflation over that time, even more so. What a thing to inflict upon people—a 5c increase when you had actually promised them a price drop! It smacks of typical ALP arrogance.

Let us look at the CPI increases and talk about them alone. There were 23 CPI increases conducted by the ALP during their time in government over 13 years. If we look at a period in which there was nothing other than CPI increases under the ALP—between December 1987 and August 1993—the fuel price went up by almost 6c a litre over five years, thanks to their constant ratcheting it up through the CPI. This was a lazy government that did not want to come to people every year and say, `Hey, guys, we are going to put up your fuel tax.' They preferred to have it happening automatically, with somebody out in the back room jacking it up, jacking it up, jacking it up, and the price going up and up and motorists suffering as a result.

It is really cute for them now to come here and criticise us, particularly when what we are doing is wiping that out. It is great news for people to see that abolished. In that period not only did they introduce 23 CPI rises but they whacked people over the head with 14 other rises for things like l-a-w—`We promised you a cut, but we're going to ramp it up instead.' Some other comments they made included, `Offset lost revenue'—that would be interesting; I wonder what that was—`Increase in excise' and `Raise revenue'. Those were the sorts of comments that described their increases—raising revenue was what they were all about.

I did a very interesting calculation. One of the significant changes that has occurred in the interim between those dark old days of Labor government and today has been the High Court ruling that meant that the Commonwealth now collects fuel taxes on behalf of the states. In those days the states had their own taxes. So, at the time that Labor went out of power, not only did we have a tax on leaded petrol of 35.610c a litre but on top of that we had individual state taxes on fuel all around Australia. The fact is that, if you take off the impact of that, there is less excise being collected today by the Commonwealth than at the time when Labor was in power.

You have to remember that every cent of the GST collections goes to the states. It does not go to the Commonwealth; it goes directly to the states. You also must remember that states did have their own fuel taxes back in the bad old ALP days. There is no doubt, particularly in the light of this decision to get rid of fuel indexation, that when it comes to fuel, motorists in Australia are so much better off with the policies of the coalition government than they ever could possibly have been when they were confronted with continued ratcheting up of fuel prices under the ALP and the other stunts that they conducted in that time.

I said earlier that one of the things that the Labor Party wanted to do was to ensure that the oil companies and not the motorists got the full benefit of 1.5c a litre. What happened in the end was that the Howard government gave 1.5c a litre to the motorist. That was what we were about. At the time that this was going on, when the ALP were trying to confuse the argument, another strange argument emerged from the opposition. The member for Hotham quoted the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, as saying:

In fact, he made a big mistake, because actually he was quoting Tony Blair. So he was quoting the Prime Minister of the wrong country. This serves to underline the fact that this is an international problem. It is something that is going on worldwide. But what is the man who is supposed to be the shadow Treasurer of Australia doing? He is so out of it, he is so completely lost in this debate, that he quotes the Prime Minister of another country altogether. What a joke! What a pathetic performance from the man who would be Treasurer. There he is quoting:

and he did not even know who `me' was. He is quoting the wrong `me'. He is quoting a guy from another country. They have made total monkeys out of themselves in this whole debate.

This is a big budgetary step that the government has taken on. The cost to the budget of the abolition of excise and customs duty indexation for fuel is $150 million in 2001-02, $425 million in 2002-03, $785 million in 2003-04 and $1.135 billion in 2004-05. Other calculations have been done on it, and I note, for example, that in the Age on 2 March 2001 the Director of Access Economics, Chris Richardson, calculated that by 2004-05 the scrapping of indexation and the 1.5c a litre cut would cost the budget up to $2 billion. What that serves to illustrate is the extent of the constraint that will be applied to future governments by this change. Whereas the Labor Party were happy instead to have people in the back room jacking up the tax, providing more and more money into their system and just tickling the taxpayer and dragging money out of them—and that would just go on and ramp up as time went by—the coalition government has opted for a system where the only way you will be able to get those kinds of increases is if you are prepared to front up on budget night and articulate them and say that that is what you are doing.

I think that is very good because that is a real pressure that will apply to governments: they will have to think twice before they go down the track of increasing fuel excise in the future. That is something that motorists in particular will pay this government some credit for; it is something that will pay off over the years to come. Heaven forbid, if there were to be a Labor government, they would have to be prepared, as the member for Dunkley pointed out, to either front up and state the extent of their intended tax rises or to go back to those kinds of dirty tricks of sitting in the back room and cooking up some indexation as time goes by.

In the time remaining to me, I want to make another point that relates to this. It is the point that I spoke about earlier on, the fact that there is now a federal fuel tax that is distributed to the states to replace those old existing taxes that were at the state level. In Queensland, the state that I am from, we did not have a fuel tax, and at the time when this national tax came in it was immediately returned to the motorists in Queensland by the then Borbidge state government. Lo and behold, we now have a Labor government in Queensland and—wouldn't you believe it—what happened the other day? We had Premier Beattie trying to take that money for his own purposes!

Mr Horne —The other day? It was before the Queensland election.

Mr CAMERON THOMPSON —That is right: it was before the Queensland election. He was trying to take it for himself. He was trying to take it for government purposes and not return it to the motorist. He was trying to put it into the coffers, to put it into consolidated revenue, to spend it on a footbridge. He needed to run the footbridge across the Brisbane River, the footbridge which is turning into an absolute disaster. He needed it for those kinds of profligate policies of the Labor government. He needed to keep those taxpayers being ripped off in the way that the federal Labor government used to do so readily. What happened? He got sussed out by the Commonwealth, and I am quite pleased that in the end he rolled over and he agreed to keep returning that money to the motorist, as he should.

But we have a different situation, for example, in New South Wales. We have the New South Wales government being paid $707 million which it receives from that tax payment. Out of the money collected now by the Commonwealth, it receives $707 million but only returns $47 million to the poor punters who are motorists in that state. So it pockets $660 million, and it has the capacity to return to the motorists of New South Wales a tax cut of 7.2c a litre. Where is it? It is not going to happen: Bob Carr is not going to return it. He is on that Labor agenda of trying to ramp up those taxes as much as possible, in particular fuel taxes.

In Victoria we have something like $507 million being collected but only $38 million being returned to the motorists in that state, those poor long-suffering motorists. The Premier could also provide to motorists in Victoria 6.6c a litre by way of a tax cut. Where is it? He prefers to be like Peter Beattie—he prefers to pocket it. But, unlike Mr Beattie, he has not seen the light. He has not given up; he has not been drawn back kicking and screaming to support motorists, so he is not providing a 6.6c a litre cut. I am very pleased to welcome this Excise Tariff Amendment Bill and the other changes that have been introduced by the coalition government. (Time expired)