Shadow Finance Minister James Paterson has accused Labor of preparing to rollout major tax hikes it never took to the last election while failing to offer any serious solutions to Australia’s worsening productivity and business investment problems.
Senator Paterson said the government’s recent Productivity Roundtable, hosted by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, produced either vague promises or damaging proposals with no electoral mandate.
“Look, I think the category of the ideas that came out of this fall into two buckets,” Senator Paterson told Sky News.
“There were generally good ideas with no specifics, like reducing red tape. We all agree with reducing red tape, but there’s no plan to actually reduce red tape coming out of the summit.
“Or there was actually quite bad ideas that the government doesn’t have a mandate for because they didn’t take it to the Australian people at the election.”
He took aim directly at the Treasurer for floating significant tax changes to address what the Coalition describes as a spending problem.
“Anthony Albanese only said last week the government would not make any tax changes that they didn’t take to the election and yet Jim Chalmers wasn’t able to make that same commitment at his press conference yesterday and is ominously talking about what sounds like quite significant tax changes to fix his spending problem,” he said.
“What we need in Canberra is some fiscal discipline and as my colleague Ted O’Brien has said, we need to reassert the fiscal rules that govern spending in Canberra.”
Senator Paterson said the concerns weren’t isolated to the opposition, with leading economic experts now echoing the call for tighter fiscal controls.
“You don’t have to rely on the opposition for that,” he said.
“Eminent commentators like Philip Lowe, the former RBA Governor, and Ken Henry, the former Treasury Secretary, are also calling for that kind of fiscal discipline.”
The Liberal frontbencher warned that business investment had fallen to dangerously low levels, and said the government was offering little in the way of real reform.
“We have a disastrously low level of business investment in this country, and it is contributing to the productivity problem we have, which is contributing to the lower living standards that Australians are experiencing right now,” he said.
“We went backwards by about a decade in Labor’s first term in office.”
When asked whether the Coalition would take a company tax cut to the next election, Senator Paterson pointed to the former Turnbull government’s efforts to lower the rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent – efforts that were ultimately blocked in the Senate.
“I don’t think the dynamics in the Senate have changed much since then,” he said.
“And many business leaders from the BCA on down have acknowledged that that’s not a very likely political prospect.
“But what they’ve also said that I agree with is that we have a disastrously low level of business investment in this country.”
Senator Paterson said after three days locked in talks with leading experts, the Treasurer had delivered no credible blueprint.
“It doesn’t appear like Jim Chalmers has any concrete ideas how to do that,” he said.