Transcript No. 2000/71

TRANSCRIPT

Treasurer

(Inaudible)

TREASURER:

Things are going reasonably well and I pay tribute to all of the small businesses of

Australia who’ve made this change and done a lot of work in getting ready for the

system and this will give Australia a much better tax system and at the end of the day it

will be strengthening our economy and creating more jobs.

JOURNALIST:

What do you say about the ALP’s response, or lack of, so far?

TREASURER:

Well you know for the last two years Kim Beazley has been telling us that there would

be riots in the streets, that there would be punch ups at the cash registers, this would

be a nightmare, that people would be much worse off. We’ve moved through the change,

it goes well, it’s pretty uneventful. He’s been telling us for the last two

years, Mr Beazley, that he’s opposed to GST and now he wants to keep it. But he

can’t tell you which parts he wants to keep and which parts he doesn’t, because

he knows that whenever he starts to play with the details he’s going to make things

more complicated. Mr Beazley is going on national television tonight. The very least he

can do is he can say what proportion of the GST he is going to roll back and how he’s

going to fund it. They’re two questions for tonight. What proportion is it going to

be, 50 per cent? Is it going to be a third? Because once he announces that, then we can

ask him how he is going to fund it. And the reason he won’t announce that tonight, of

course, is that he knows that the way he intends to fund his so called roll back is by

jacking up income tax rates. That’s what he’s really about. The Labor Party is

really about increasing income taxes. At the end of the day, this whole argument has been

an argument from Labor about increasing income taxes.

ENDS