Senator FERGUSON (3:08 PM) —Once again we hear Senator Lundy big on words and very little on substance. I presume this is the same Senator Lundy who is the shadow spokesperson for—what do they call it?

Senator Patterson —IT.

Senator FERGUSON —Yes, IT—new technology and all of those wonderful things that young Australians are now using to educate themselves. This same Senator Lundy supports a 32 per cent tax on much of the educational requirements of young people in Australia. This is the sort of taxation system that Senator Lundy wants to support, one that actually taxes people who want to use all of the latest technology to try to meet their educational requirements.

Senator Lundy —They don't pay tax on services.

Senator FERGUSON —Oh! Senator Lundy lives in the past. She claims to talk about new technology and the wonderful advantages it has for our community and for the young people in our community, yet she is prepared to tax those people to the hilt. What we will have in relation to books is a new tax—a GST—which will not be 10 per cent because, as we all know, there is nothing in any of today's society that will increase in price by 10 per cent once all the ramifications of a goods and services tax are put in place.

Senator Lundy then said she could quantify how much book sales were going to drop by, but she did not mention how much they were going to drop by. She just said that she knows there will be this enormous impact on booksellers and authors in Australia but then never said a thing about how much it would be. That is typical of the Labor Party's attitude to taxation. If you have no policy of your own, all you can do is to try to criticise a government that is trying to put in place a much fairer taxation system for the whole of Australia.

Not once did Senator Lundy mention the extra disposable income people will have in order to purchase books. In all of the arguments that Senator Lundy and the Labor Party have put forward, they have only ever talked about one side of the ledger. They have never talked about the income tax cuts and the increases in compensation for those on welfare and low incomes, or the extra income they are going to have to actually purchase the things that may rise slightly in price as a result of the introduction of a goods and services tax.

The Democrats understand it because they have actually gone into the process of trying to understand it. They did not come to this debate with a predetermined position, saying, `Whatever the government does, we will oppose it. In relation to the goods and services tax, it does not matter if it is better for the country; we will oppose it because we think that we can actually hoodwink the Australian community into thinking that it is bad for them.' Senator Lundy got her result of all of those actions at the last election. The Labor Party did not win government and, because they did not win government, they are now going to see this government, through its negotiations with the Democrats, introduce a new taxation system for the whole of Australia which is going to benefit all Australians.

The research that has been done over the past week, which was published in the newspaper I think this morning, shows that no Australians will be worse off. You cannot say that about the Labor Party's tax policy for two reasons. Firstly, they do not have one. Secondly, if they carried on with the taxation arrangements that they had in place for the 13 years they were in government, there would be Australians who were worse off.

Senator Lundy gets up and cries crocodile tears about what is happening in relation to books, but she ought to put it into the whole perspective of what is happening with taxation reform. Do not just single out one small item; look at taxation reform and look at what it is going to do for the whole of the Australian community, not just one small sector. As I said before, if Senator Lundy took into account all of the benefits that are going to flow from the extra disposable income, she would find that books are going to be just as affordable after a GST is introduced as they are now.

When you talk about other countries where there maybe has been some effect on the purchase of some items, have a look at the compensation that those countries have offered to the average taxpayer in situations where they have introduced a GST. In many cases, no compensation was offered. The Labor Party never offered compensation either whenever they increased the wholesale sales tax. They never offered compensation so that people could actually have more purchasing power when it came to purchasing those items. (Time expired)