Matter of Public Importance: Tax Cuts
Senator Grogan: We started with a robust and definitive no from the Liberal and National parties when this policy was first introduced. They said no to the Albanese Labor government's tax cuts, which apply to every single working Australian. Then we skipped through a very unedifying performance on Monday, which lacked adherence to Senate rules and even to some forms of reality, shifting the focus of those opposite from the reality of the substance of this tax cut issue that we're debating here to a banal conversation about which public servant took what phone call at which time. This showed an abject sense of desperation. Now, in a desperate bid to find another front and another way to argue out anything but the content or substance of the changes here—the Albanese Labor government tax cuts that give every Australian worker or taxpayer a tax cut—they're now here scaremongering about the things that we're not doing.
It seems rather curious to me when we're talking about a mob that lectures about trust and integrity yet was embroiled in scandals just about every single day of its nine years in government, with a Prime Minister who tried to become some clandestine one-man cabinet, which was not only unlawful but unprecedented and disrespectful to not only the Australian people but his entire party. We'll just skip past that: 'Oh, that doesn't matter. We'll forget that.' It was a government that constantly obfuscated. Let's go to robodebt. Let's go to sports rorts. And you want to sit there and lecture us about integrity. I don't think so.
The constant infighting doesn't appear to have changed that much. If you want to have a look at that, we've got some screenings on Monday nights at the moment. Just bring your own popcorn, because Nemesis is—
Senator Hughes: I want to watch The Killing Season.
Senator GROGAN: Yes, you can watch that too, because that's also there.
What the Albanese Labor government tax cuts are doing is delivering a better, more progressive tax system. The plan returns bracket creep for all taxpayers. We're dropping two tax rates, lifting two thresholds and essentially giving everyone a tax cut. The coalition's plan was legislated five years ago, and the world was a very different place, before the once-in-100-year pandemic, persistent inflation, higher interest rates, two conflicts and global uncertainty. Australians have been under sustained, increased pressure. As the circumstances changed that radically in five years, it would be a very blind and deaf government that didn't respond to those changes, and we are neither. So we have responded, and the tax cuts that we are bringing in will make a fundamental difference to the cost-of-living pressures that people are facing every single day in this country.
Those opposite are now in a situation where they're going to vote for these Albanese Labor government tax cuts. Why? Because it's the right thing to do. If you genuinely believed it wasn't, you would have kept up the fight against them, but you haven't. You're now just going off down rabbit holes about any old thing you can grab hold of. Where we are now is a situation where the policy settings are right, they reflect the national interest and they are responsive to the economic circumstances that we are facing. We are the party of lower tax. We are the party of a better, fairer tax system. That is what the Labor government is doing.