Page 538 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 February 1993
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Under this Federal Labor Government thousands upon thousands of jobs have been lost. We have not stopped there, though. They are three representatives of Canberra. What about Senator Nick Bolkus, the Minister for Administrative Services? What has he done? He has cut 5,000 jobs from the Department of Administrative Services, with 2,300 more to go. There have been 7,000 redundancies and retrenchments in the Public Service in the last four years, and 34,000 jobs have been lost in government business enterprises in the last three years. Here we have Labor politicians standing up in this house, smiling at us when they talk to us, and saying how concerned they are about the unemployed. What humbug!
Ms Follett mentioned new businesses. She said, "Oh, haven't we done wonderful things with new businesses". She has not gone out and had a look at the high-tech industry, because the Queensland Labor Government has been in this town recently trying to poach our high-tech industries. What lollies are these governments trying to poach our industries with? It is with reductions in payroll tax, with free rents for five years and with other inducements. Ms Follett stood up in this house and said, "We should not be inducing anybody to do anything". What we are saying is: If you are really fair dinkum about getting jobs going in this country and in this Territory in particular, do not let one of your colleagues from Queensland rustle into town and pinch some of the high-tech industries.
Payroll tax is something that has been mentioned here a lot. From time to time we hear people opposite talk about GSTs and "frightback", or whatever Mr Berry calls it, but we should ram this down the throats of those opposite time and time again. Let us have a look again at what some of the Labor people have said about taxes. I have picked some former Premiers, current Premiers, people who would be Premiers. Bob Carr was mentioned before. What did Bob Carr say about payroll tax? Let us take a quote from Bob Carr's budget reply speech on 26 September 1991. He said:
If there is any tax relief the priority must be payroll tax.
That was not anybody opposite here saying that; that was Bob Carr. So the Leader of the Opposition in New South Wales realised the potential of job creation in the abolition of payroll tax. But let us have another one - Tom Burns, the Deputy Premier of Queensland. What did he say? On 17 September 1986 he said, and this is a quote from Queensland Hansard, page 1530:
It is absolutely incredible that any Government would allow payroll tax to become its major source of revenue.
What is the major source of revenue for the ACT Government? Payroll tax. That was Tom Burns, the Deputy Premier of Queensland. There is more and more. We all remember Carmen Lawrence. She was Premier of Western Australia up till about a month or so ago. In her last budget before she was booted out of office she actually reduced the level of payroll tax in Western Australia. And there are other things. Of course, the lulu of the lot was Mr Paul Keating, the man that wants another 10 years. As far back as 1977 he said that a reduction in payroll tax according to Labor Party policy at the time would create 200,000 jobs. What does this Government do? It actually puts more taxes onto business so that they cannot employ more.
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