Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The insertion of a new schedule 8 will provide tax receipts to individual taxpayers. It will require the ATO to accompany a notice of an assessment for an individual with a receipt showing how that tax was paid for a particular financial year and how that money was spent on the key categories of government expenditure. Importantly, it will also show the level of Australian government net debt. Why do those members opposite not support these amendments? The reason is that they do not want to let the Australian people in on the big secret that we are borrowing $100 million a day. They do not believe that it is Australian taxpayers who know how best to spend their money and they do not want to explain to the Australian people why a desperate Rudd government had to resort to a mining tax. They do not want to let the Australian people know why a desperate Gillard government wants to run to a carbon tax. They do not want to explain to the Australian people why they want to cut the health insurance rebate and they do not want to explain to the Australian people why they are not prepared to support independent and Catholic schools.

This should be no surprise because, if you look at this government’s record, remember that the member for Griffith, who has departed this chamber, went to the 2007 election promising to be a fiscal conservative but never stuck to his word. Instead, he wasted billions of dollars on the tragic pink batts program, $43 billion which the government plans to spend on the NBN, the catastrophic Green Loans scheme—and we all know about the BER scheme and the huge wastage that has taken place there. When you look at the government’s economic record and when you look at its economic team—the Prime Minister, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, the Treasurer and the Assistant Treasurer—they do not have any small business experience and they do not have the economic record to stand on. (Time expired)

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