I too rise to speak on the State Taxation and Mental Health Acts Amendment Bill 2021. I stand here with my speech prepared, but I want to start by casting my mind back to listening to the member for Caulfield’s contribution about Labor’s hatred or envy of people and wanting to tax them out of existence. These are conversations I grew up with as a young girl, with my dad telling me all about these types of people—these types of beliefs, this type of fearmongering and what side of politics that really sits on. I remember he said to me, ‘Darling, you shouldn’t be worried about tax. Tax is not a dirty word’. Whether you want to call it a levy here or a tax, I really do not care. You should never be ashamed to pay your fair share of tax, because every single person in this house knows that paying a fair share of tax goes towards the things that we, as people in a society, need to have a great life, to use.

I think about out in Tarneit and the cuts that those opposite would probably think about making to our Big Build infrastructure—construction that is going on around this great state of ours. I think about the cuts that they would like to make to our community to save money, tax people less. No-one likes being taxed. Like I said, ‘tax’ is not a dirty word, because for people in my community it is Big Build projects and infrastructure that is changing lives. It is actually making people’s lives better. And this stuff does not come cheap. A new train station might be around $80 million to $100 million, and in my electorate we are going to have three train stations; at the moment we have one. You are going to need money for that, and that will come through things like tax. It is how we fund these things.

Day after day over the past couple of years I have talked to people in my community—on street stalls, at train stations, taking my kids out to the local park—and there is always one person, at least one, that comes up to talk to me about mental health. It is usually a mum with a child, and sometimes that child is an adult and living with their parents and they cannot get the help that they need, the mental health expertise. They cannot get a bed, they cannot see a psychiatrist or a psychologist, they cannot get in to speak to someone, but they do know that they need help. This bill makes changes to our tax system, yes it does, but that is to accompany the investments that our government has made in this year’s budget, and we have made extraordinary strides forward and announcements on rebuilding this state’s broken mental health system.

I think by now all Victorians know that when it comes to mental health this government, our government, the Andrews Labor government, is determined to deliver lasting positive changes. As the member for Mordialloc quite clearly pointed out, and I know it has been said again and again today, the cost of not doing anything to tackle mental health in this state, to fix the system that we know is broken—we say that openly—is catastrophic, whether that is an economic cost or the loss of human life.

A key measure of this bill does introduce the new mental health levy, which will fund our government’s landmark investment into mental health reform. This mental health reform will change lives. It will enable people to get the help that they need and they deserve. This was a key recommendation from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System and, as the Premier made clear when the findings were released, our government is not going to shy away from making the necessary and sometimes tough decisions, tough choices, in order to fix our mental health system. The royal commission confirmed what so many people—whether they are the people I have spoken to over the last couple of years or others around Victoria—have known for years: that the system has been broken. It is not working. It is overburdened, it is understaffed and it is failing thousands of Victorians who need help. They need our help. That is why you are in government: to help people.

Well, we have put a line in the sand and we have said ‘No more’. That is why we have committed to a $3.8 billion package. It is an unprecedented spend, it is a lot of money, and it is going to cost a lot of money to rebuild our mental health system because we are going to rebuild it from the ground up.

Now, this levy is expected to raise $387 million this financial year, and it is soon going to rise up to $882 million in the coming years. As part of this levy, businesses with a national payroll of $10 million and over per annum will pay a rate of 0.5 per cent, whilst businesses with a national payroll of over $100 million will pay an additional 0.5 per cent on Victorian wages over the threshold. The businesses we are talking about are big ones. Because of the purpose of this levy, the bill specifies that every single cent—and this is really important, because you can raise money through levies or taxes but it is about where you spend them that is so important, and you can see that every day out in Tarneit on our roads, our rails, our schools, our health care—will be reinvested back into our mental health system. The chances are that if you yourself do not have mental health problems, you will know someone who has mental health problems or, sadly, you will have a child who will have mental health problems. At some time in their life they will struggle.

It needs to be made clear through the discussions that have happened in this place today that this is not a tax on small business. This is not economic vandalism by any means. This is not Labor reaching into your back pocket, as we heard the member for Caulfield outrageously suggest. The businesses that are targeted by this levy will be some of the biggest corporations that operate in Victoria. Now, I am sure there is a conversation to be had about whether those businesses have suffered or not through COVID, but I am also sure there is another conversation to be had that the staff of those businesses have also had their mental health impacted during COVID and need help. They deserve help.

Now, to support small and medium businesses to continue to recover strongly from this pandemic, this bill also, importantly, brings forward increases to the payroll tax-free threshold. These changes had been flagged by our government as early as 2016, with the threshold changing from $550 000 a year to $675 000 last year. This bill will bring forward next year’s increase, which means as of July the new threshold will be $700 000. This is going to benefit at least 500 businesses that will no longer be liable for payroll tax, and it will save them up to $28 million a year. A further 42 000 businesses in Victoria will also see a smaller tax burden in 2021. On top of this, regional businesses will also benefit with a decrease in the payroll tax rate that halves the regional rate to 1.2125 per cent, a quarter of the base rate. Now, this will benefit up to 4000 regional businesses and save them up to $30 million a year.

Another big change in the bill relates to stamp duty and high-value properties. As a result, properties worth more than $2 million will be subject to a stamp duty premium of at least $110 000 plus 6.5 per cent of the dutiable value exceeding $2 million. Now, this is going to affect less than 4 per cent of property transactions. There are not many properties out in my local patch that are 2 million bucks and above. On top of this, only 6 per cent of Victorians are actually liable for land tax, which means that this will only really affect 0.6 per cent of Victorians. What this change means is that someone on average will be paying an additional $8000 a year on a $3 million property that they do not live in. Now, you can call me crazy, but I do not know a lot of people in Tarneit or in my community that have a $3 million investment property that they do not live in.

We have heard a lot today about tax and about tax being a dirty word. The cost of not doing anything about our mental health system and being able to afford to fix the system from the ground up is so much more catastrophic— (Time expired)