Senator EGGLESTON (3:19 PM) —Goodness me, if any Liberals go to Benalla, one thing they certainly will not be hearing from Senator Conroy or any of his colleagues is anything about the new tax package or Labor's plans to roll back the $12 billion in tax cuts which have been offered to the Australian people. That is one thing that Labor does not want to talk about. Labor has lost itself completely on what to do about the tax package.

Let us have a look at some of the comments that have been made in the press about where Labor stand on the tax package. On 21 February the Australian said:

Of course, that is a pretty hard thing for Kim Beazley to do because they really do not have any tax policy. They know that somehow or other they have to say a few things, but none of them add up. The one thing they have not done is exclude the possibility of not going through with the $12 billion worth of tax cuts which will put so much more money into average Australian households.

On 21 February 2000, in the Courier-Mail again Kim Beazley was targeted. The Courier-Mail had this to say:

That is something the Labor Party do not like talking about. They never provide the details. Beazley says, `We will roll back the GST,' as though the GST is something evil. The GST will be very beneficial to all sorts of average families in this country because they will be paying a lot less for consumer goods and they will be getting the benefit of the $12 billion in tax cuts which this package includes.

The Labor people in Benalla next weekend will not be talking about Labor raising income taxes, they will not be talking about cuts in federal services and they will not be talking about the need to have a return to the enormous deficits which characterised the Hawke-Keating governments.

Channel Nine's Today presenter Tracy Grimshaw said to the opposition leader Kim Beazley on 23 February this year:

Of course the message in both those instances is that, although the Labor Party say they do not like the policies—the GST, the health care rebate—they are going to keep both of them because they know that they are both beneficial to the Australian economy. Again, anyone listening to what the Labor politicians say in the streets of Benalla this weekend will not hear anything about the details of their plans to roll back the GST or end the rebate on health insurance, because they know that both of these policies are needed. They know that the GST is needed because Australia had a situation where the direct taxation system was failing. It was known by the Labor Party that we had to go to an indirect system. The Labor Party are so terribly sad that the Liberal coalition government has introduced something they knew had to happen. They also knew that there had to be a shift in the balance back to private health insurance to overcome the problems created by the unholy mess that Medicare has created in terms of overcrowded public hospitals. (Time expired)