A word in your ear, Bill: if they ask about birthday cakes, keep your answers Shorten sweet

IT's a taxing time for the Assistant Treasurer, who walks right into the Hewson trap.

ABC1's Q&A on Monday:

Mark Smith: If I buy a birthday cake from a cake shop after a carbon tax has been introduced, do I pay more or less for that birthday cake?

Bill Shorten: Well, I don't know how many candles you'll have on your cake. In terms of the system, we haven't said what is going to be in and not in. To be fair, they haven't said what the design will be yet. I do accept the need to speed up my answers. OK, the simple thing on cost of living is this: there's no way you can implement a price on carbon for free so it will lead to a cost and that's, I think, the point you are making.

Nine Network, March 3, 1993:

Mike Willesee: If I buy a birthday cake from a cake shop and GST is in place do I pay more or less for that birthday cake?

John Hewson:Well, it will depend whether cakes today in that shop are subject to sales tax, or they're not -- firstly. And they may have a sales tax on them. Let's assume that they don't have a sales tax on them, then that birthday cake is going to be sales tax free. Then of course you wouldn't pay -- it would be exempt, would, sorry -- there would be no GST on it under our system. If it was one with a sales tax today it would attract the GST, and then the difference would be the difference between the two taxes whatever the sales tax rate is on birthday cakes, how it's decorated, because there will be sales tax perhaps on some of the decorations as well, and then of course the price, the price will reflect that accordingly.

Rollback, a concise history. Kim Beazley on the Nine Network, September 5, 1999:

We opposed the government, right down the line on the GST. And we don't shy away from that and we're going to go into devising policies for roll-back of that at the next election.

Wayne Swan, February 17, 2000: ONE of the reasons the Labor Party is so emphatically opposed to the GST and why we will roll it back is the savage reduction in the living standards of Australian families and Australian pensioners.

Kim Beazley, March 6, 2000:

I sensibly have taken the view that, after announcing that, in principle, we're committed to rollback and not rollback just immediately . . . certainly rollback immediately . . . but over time.

Peter Costello, April 12, 2000:

Rollback, Mr Speaker, is the policy which now dare not speak its name. You will never hear rollback coming from the leader of the opposition because rollback on income tax means roll up; on spending, it means roll out the barrel; on unions, it means roll over.

Tony Abbott yesterday:

Reporter: How will you keep your promise to roll back Labor's carbon tax?

Abbott: I want to make it crystal clear that we aren't going to change it; we're going to scrap it.

You be the judge. Bob Brown on ABC1's The 7.30 Report on Monday:

Heather Ewart: Your deputy has implied that you're insisting on petrol being in.

Brown: No, The Australian wrote it up that way on Saturday. Christine Milne has made it clear that it is Greens policy to have a price on petrol. But she was not insisting and the reports to that effect are quite wrong. I heard what she had to say. It was very clear that she was putting a very accommodating and sensible point of view.

The Weekend Australian on Saturday:

She said while negotiations on the details of the carbon price package had yet to begin, the point of putting a price signal on carbon into the economy was to "drive changes in behaviour". "That is why we think transport should be in, and we think the price signal in transport should start to drive that transformation," she said, adding that funds from the carbon tax could be used to improve public transport in Sydney and Melbourne, the fast train proposed for the eastern states and electric cars.

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