Tax-vote deal for state
NEW Tasmanian Senator Steve Martin says he has secured a $47 million funding windfall for state projects in return for his yes vote on the Federal Government’s corporate tax cut package.
Senator Martin will back the $65 billion cuts, reducing the corporate tax rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent across all businesses, when the vote goes before the Senate this year.
The Government has secured 37 of the 39 votes it needs to pass the legislation through crossbenchers, despite opposition from Labor and the Greens.
Senator Martin said yesterday the funding pledge — from Finance Minister Matthias Cormann’s office during nego- tiations — would cover tourism, infrastructure, agriculture and export projects with details yet to be completed.
“We came up with a list of projects from talking to stakeholders and when the corporate tax cuts came up we saw that there was a great opportunity to be had,” Senator Martin said.
The Government also reconfirmed it would retain the Tasmanian Freight Equalisation Scheme in its current form — as announced on March 16 — with that deal worth just over $200 million.
Senator Martin said that took the total funding commitment to about $250 million and it was locked in “no matter the result of the Bill”.
However, that detail has been disputed by Senator Cormann’s office, which would say only that “most of that [was] contingent on the legislation passing”.
Senator Martin believes the funding will be included in the 2018 Budget.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said yesterday he was committed to getting the tax change passed in this Parliament.
“We started off the week with 33 votes supporting the second stage of the company tax cuts ... we have 37, which is still two short of what we need, but we are not giving up.”
Senator Martin’s play is reminiscent of a move in the 1990s by former Tasmanian independent senator Brian Harradine, who used his vote on the partial privatisation of Telstra to secure $350 million of communications and environmental funding for this state.