Mr BURKE (Watson—Manager of Opposition Business) (15:40): That was spectacular—absolutely spectacular! Mr Hawke: Hear, hear! Stop there! Mr BURKE: He wants me to stop there; that will do! I love it when the member for Mitchell stands up and says 'What Labor has to do is tell the parliament how they will respond to get rid of the policy that we will not tell you we have.' That is his argument. There is a demand for Labor to say how they would subsequently respond without the government saying what they would do. The other thing that I love is when he refers to modelling that was done. There is something in common between the modelling he referred to and the modelling that is in the paper today. The modelling that he referred to was Labor wanting to model a Liberal Party proposal, and what is in the paper today is the Liberal Party wanting to model a Liberal Party proposal. That is what is in the paper today. All the times we have had Treasurers stand there looking back at Labor and saying, 'Oh, the only modelling that was ever done was when you were in government and you were trying to cost what we were talking about,' they were holding modelling of their own to prepare for their own proposal and not letting the Australian people know. It is no surprise that they did not want the Australian people to know, because if you expand the base and increase the rate of the GST you end up with something that households cannot afford, the budget cannot afford and the economy cannot afford. On household considerations, NATSEM modelling shows that people in the lowest 20 per cent of income brackets pay seven per cent more. People in the highest 20 per cent of income brackets pay just three per cent more. That is why they support it. It is right in line with the economics that the member for Mitchell has believed in all his political life—the magic of trickle-down economics, the whole concept that the more you earn the lower the percentage of your income you should pay in taxation. That is exactly what is delivered by the GST being expanded in its base and being increased in its rate. Mr Sukkar: Would you roll it back? Mr Burke: Here we go again—'Would you roll back what we won't tell you we'll do?' Genius! Modelling shows a typical Australian family will be up to $5,000 worse off as a result of an increase to and broadening of the base of the GST. It hits those who can afford it least. They then talk about being able to fix it with compensation. People who are outside of the payment system are unable to receive compensation in that form. It is one thing if you have kids under 13 and you are still within the family tax benefit system, but if you have teenage kids and you are outside the payment system, how do you then get compensated? The member for Mitchell says that you do it with income tax, forgetting that Labor took a million people out of the income tax system. We tripled the tax-free threshold, taking it from $6,000 to $18,200 before you pay a dollar in tax. For people on modest incomes, whatever shifts they might think they are going to do, the capacity to deliver for lower and middle income families has largely been taken away by the shifts in the income tax scales. I do not doubt for one minute they would be able to find a way to compensate people at the top end, but for everybody else, particularly people under mortgage stress, people who would seemingly have high incomes but have very little disposable income, for them no compensation package will change the fact that every time they do the grocery shopping the bill is higher Who would ever think that it was smart to put a price on fresh food? What are you trying to discourage? If you are going to put a price on carbon, you are trying to discourage pollution. If you are going to put a price on tobacco, you are trying to discourage the use of cigarettes. What sort of policy genius would think that was a good idea to increase the price of fresh food and, indeed, to do it by the full 15 per cent? Let's not forget that there is no longer a wholesale sales tax to remove, which, as the shadow Treasurer said, was there when John Howard introduced the 10 per cent GST. You removed the wholesale sales tax and, while we still opposed the GST at the time as regressive, you did not have the inflationary impact of the full 10 per cent. But when you do not have that to get rid of any more, the inflationary impact is the full increase. (Time expired)