Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That this House censures the Prime Minister and the Government for its plans to cut the benefits received by 400,000 carers and more than 2 million seniors, in particular:

(a)

for failing to guarantee that the carers and seniors bonuses paid in the last Budget when the surplus was $12 billion will be paid in the forthcoming Budget when the surplus is expected to be much larger;

(b)

for failing to detail any alternative means to ensure that carers and pensioners will not be worse off as a result of the Budget, as promised; and

(c)

for leaving two and a half million Australians in a state of uncertainty over the future because this Government doesn’t understand how to manage the economy.

The Liberal and National parties in government built a strong economy for Australia. It was an economy of sustained and strong growth, an economy that delivered record low unemployment, an economy that delivered strong business confidence and investment. It was also a government that delivered surplus budgeting to Australia, which had been unknown when there was a change of government from the last Labor government in 1996. The Liberal and National parties in government built a strong economy so as to give Australians confidence—confid-ence in ourselves and confidence in our future—but it also built a strong economy to enable this nation to care for its weak, its vulnerable, its sick and its elderly.

In its last four budgets, the previous government delivered, amongst other things, a $1,600 lump sum cash payment—a carer payment and a carer allowance—to some 400,000 carers, at a cost of just under $400 million. Disability and carers support over 11½ years benefited from a 75 per cent real increase in funding under the previous coalition government. In 2005, Access Economics in its study of the contribution of Australia’s carers to this nation estimated that carers contribute 1.2 billion hours of care, which is equal to more than $30 billion of formal aged and disability care services.

So who are these carers, some 400,000 or so? They are men and women who are frequently faceless, who neither seek nor receive reward in any visible or public way for what they do every single day. They are men and women who are caring frequently for adult disabled children. They are caring for someone whom they love who is in desperate need of support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are men and women who have adult parents who are in desperate need, who have children of all ages, who frequently juggle a job—if they can find any time at all to do it. They live across a 24-hour cycle on anything from one to three or four hours of sleep, and they do so seven days a week, 365 days of the year. They are the unsung heroes of this nation. They are the real saints of Australian society.

When we talk about an Australian community, these are the men and women who give real meaning to what it is to be a community, who give effect to the thing that we describe colloquially as mateship—to put yourself out for someone else, to go the extra mile, to do the things that are important—and they do so with a limited amount of support and, under this newly elected government, even less confidence in their economic future. As I said to the Prime Minister last week, ‘For God’s sake, these are the real heroes of our nation. They are the real saints, and they deserve our strong support.’ So it was with a great sense of alarm that I saw, when the Australian arrived on Friday, a headline that said ‘Razor gang slices out compassion as carer bonus slashed’. There was a photograph of Mr Ashley Norman and his wife, Pat, in the outer suburbs of Mackay, whom I visited, and a cartoon of our Prime Minister letting a man in a wheelchair go down the side of a mountain.

I might point out to the House that the chairman of the razor gang, the chairman of the Expenditure Review Committee—according to the government’s own online directory of government services—is the Prime Minister. This is the man whose background as a public servant is now coming to the fore, the bureaucrat who in Queensland was responsible for the dismissal of so many working Australians, who went from being working families to workless families.

It is important for us to appreciate that the extent to which we reach out to and support carers and those whom they love and for whom they provide—the elderly and the frail—are the critical measures of a caring society and the critical measures of a caring government. The response to this headline and this story was not for the Prime Minister or any one of his ministers to come out and say, ‘No, it’s not true,’ to say instead that the lump sum payment is guaranteed. The Prime Minister may say that he has not got it in his budget for his so-called forward estimates, but I can sure as hell tell the Prime Minister that these 400,000 carers have got it in their budget.

When I went to Mackay on Saturday to visit the victims of flood, and to support and thank the carers, volunteers and emergency services, I went to see Mr Ashley Norman and his wife, Pat. They live in a modest, small dwelling in the outer suburbs of Mackay. Ashley Norman is 73 and he is dying. He is oxygen dependent, he takes 20 medications a day, he has had major heart surgery, he has had at least two significant heart attacks, his lung capacity is down to 35 per cent, he has an abdominal aortic aneurism which can rupture at any time, he has severe diabetes and he has peripheral neuropathy, which means he, for different reasons, but like our Prime Minister cannot feel what is going on in his extremities. His wife of 52 years, Pat, looks after him 24 hours a day—looks after him, as he described to me, ‘as a baby’. His wife of 52 years of marriage—that woman—gives him support 24 hours a day. ‘Without her,’ as he said to me, ‘Brendan, I would be dead. D-E-A-D.’ And as far as that $1,600 is concerned, it may not mean much to a Prime Minister or a minister of a government with the incomes that we collectively earn in this place, but it sure as hell means a lot to Ashley Norman and Pat, and it means a hell of a lot to the 400,000 carers throughout this country.

What has been the response of the Prime Minister? He said something publicly yesterday—it was not lunchtime on Friday; we had another issue involving care recently, and the problem was sorted by lunchtime. We did not have this one sorted by lunchtime on Friday. We did not have it sorted by Friday night. It was not sorted by Saturday, when we got up to a headline which said, ‘Now razor gang goes for seniors’. Instead the Prime Minister sent his ministers out to run some drivel about budget process. They sound like a bunch of bureaucrats being run by a bureaucrat. What does that mean to someone struggling with a husband dying from motor neurone disease? What does it mean to an adult who has an ageing mother with Parkinson’s disease, incontinent at three o’clock in the morning and who desperately needs to buy a new fridge? What does it mean to Ashley and Pat Norman and their family, who have not had a holiday for 20 years? What it means is that they cannot budget.

The government are going through the process—as they should—of budgeting for our nation’s finances. We just hope that they know what they are doing and that they get it right. But there are some things that rise above it. Whoever was the source of this story out of the razor gang chaired by the Prime Minister was trying to do something to protect people, because, unlike our Prime Minister and our new government, that person at least appears to appreciate what this means to everyday, fair dinkum Australians. I am talking about people who are struggling not only with grocery prices but struggling, if they can afford a 25-year old car like Pat Stafford’s, to be able to run it. These are people who are struggling not just with their credit cards; these are people, Prime Minister, who are literally struggling to survive, for whom life is a day-to-day struggle for survival.

The lump sum payments delivered by the previous government in the last four years were a consequence of the strong economy that had been delivered. They were a consequence of tough decisions made by the member for Higgins as Treasurer, the former member for Bennelong and everybody who was then sitting on the other side—decisions that were opposed by those who are now in government. When we were in government we said: ‘Right, who’s at the top of the list? Who are the people—now we’ve paid off the Labor government’s debt, now we’ve got interest rates down to a manageable level, now we’ve got lots more working families, because we have unemployment at a 30-year low—that we put at the top of that list?’ At the top of that list we put the Pat Staffords, the Ashley and Pat Normans, the men and women of this country who are the most deserving people and who are so desperately in need of financial support. We delivered to them a $1,600 lump sum payment. And we delivered it every year for four years.

So I say to the Prime Minister and the government: put aside your pride and embarrassment about being caught out on this; put aside the fact that the all-controlling Prime Minister would not allow his ministers to sort this out and end the grief and distress amongst Australia’s vulnerable carers, seniors, elderly and frail. I say to the Prime Minister—notwithstanding the fact that we feel so strongly about this that we are censoring the Prime Minister: just get up; for God’s sake, get up, stand in front of that microphone and say to the carers of this country, ‘I, the Prime Minister of Australia, believe in you and will deliver you a lump sum payment in the budget.’ It is not that hard. We were lectured and told it was not hard to do some other things, and we on this side have gone through a process of supporting things which we believe are in the nation’s best interests. This is not only in the nation’s best interests; this is in the interests of men and women who feel that they have no voice.

The reason why the carers have all been out and saying the things they have is not that they are political activists. They have differing political views. Some of those carers who received that $1,600 lump sum and the seniors and the elderly who received a $500 lump sum payment from the previous coalition government did not vote for us. That is not what this is about. This is about them. It is not about us. It is not about bureaucrats. What is it that the Labor Party does not get? It is now so occupied by former union officials, political apparatchiks and bureaucrats that it has lost sight of what government is about. The reason why the people in the gallery and the people watching this on television elect a government is that they expect men and women of decency who understand and care for them to stand between them and the bureaucrats that could otherwise run the country. That is why this is so important.

The Prime Minister said yesterday that these people will not be a cent worse off. He said it again today in the House, which is why we have had to move this motion of censure against the Prime Minister—a very, very serious thing. He said they will not be a cent worse off than they are. He has refused to guarantee the lump sum payment. For someone earning $250,000 a year, a lump sum payment of $1,600 would probably make them think: ‘What’s that? It’s my credit card payment or whatever.’ Can I just say to the Prime Minister, having spent much of my professional life, when I was practising medicine, working with these families—and sometimes I was with people at three o’clock in the morning who had not slept for 24 hours and who had not one but two severely autistic children—that a lump sum payment is everything. If you are hanging out for that lump sum payment, it is absolutely essential for your budgeting. It is the difference between sinking and swimming. That is why the coalition government and the Liberal and National parties delivered it. That is why it is so important—not for the political interest of the government but for the men and women that this censure motion and this debate are about—that this has to be delivered.

This morning I listened to AM. I also listened to Radio National and I listened to Fran Kelly interview Nell Brown. I hope the Prime Minister heard the interview. If the Prime Minister did not hear the interview, I ask him to get one of his many helpers to get the audio of the interview. Nell Brown has an adult daughter in her 20s. The daughter does not just have an intellectual disability; she also suffers from schizophrenia. Nell Brown was asked this question by Fran Kelly: ‘There has been some talk about stretching over the course of the year. Would that help?’

So the question is: would the $1,600 payment, instead of a lump sum, if it was about $30 a week parked into your payment, help? She is asked that question. This woman is not some sort of political activist. For God’s sake, she is trying to work a part-time job and look after her adult daughter. What did she say when she was asked whether it would help to spread it over the year—which would be the Prime Minister’s ‘she won’t be a cent worse off’ remark? I might add this was after five days—not on day one, not on day two; it took him five days to say anything. At the same time he was overseas. She said:

No, not at all.

She went on to say:

But when you actually get a lump of money put in your hand, well, if you are desperate for something, you can have it.

‘Desperate’—these are lives that are lived in quiet desperation, with limited support.

Imagine, Prime Minister, being in a situation where you have a child who has an intellectual disability, then compounded by developing schizophrenia in their young adult life. Then you would find out what the services run by the states are actually like and how poor they are—particularly in Queensland, as a result of a certain fellow known as ‘Dr Death’ in an earlier government up there. That is when you would find out just how lousy the services are. ‘Desperation’ is the word. These men and women are desperate every day, and they desperately need a lump sum payment, because, if you are struggling on $12,000 or $15,000 a year, there is a hell of a lot of difference between $30 a week and $1,600—as it has been under the Liberal-National coalition over the last four years.

That may not mean much to some people that earn high incomes. They may wonder what this is all about. My plea to the government and to the Prime Minister is: walk a mile in their shoes. You do not have to spend a week with them; just spend 24 hours with them. You have sent your members out to visit schools. We have had bread and circuses for the past 3½ months of this government. One of the little things they did was to send all of the Labor backbenchers out to visit schools—the education revolution. My challenge to the Prime Minister is: send them out to spend 24 hours with a carer and ask the carer whether the $1,600 lump sum payment is important to them. That is what you actually need to do, Prime Minister.

We believe Australians have been betrayed. We believe that Australia’s carers, her seniors, her frail, her elderly and the Ashley and Pat Normans of this world have been betrayed. It is absolutely essential that the Prime Minister not only redeem the confidence that they must have in the government of the day but redeem himself by coming to that dispatch box now and saying, ‘They will receive a $1,600 lump sum payment so they can get on with their lives and literally live those lives.’

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