Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

Plainly, the government did intend to cut these bonuses. Plainly, if there had been no such intention, the minister would have been out on that Friday morning issuing a blanket denial, but that is not what we got from the government. We got three days of weasel words, and even the following Monday, in the parliament, the Prime Minister could not bring himself to utter the simple declaration that ‘the bonuses are safe with this government’, because they might be safe this year, thanks to the efforts of the opposition, but they certainly are not safe for future years, because we had the minister in her statement criticise the very thing which this government has just done. She said that paying annual bonuses left carers and seniors with no financial security. I say there is a lot more financial security from an annual bonus that you know will be paid in good times than there is in the uncertainty and insecurity which is inherent in the kind of review that this minister is now spruiking. The carers and seniors of this country had more security under the Howard government than they ever had before and—I am confident although disappointed to say—than they will ever have in the future.

The minister went on to say, ‘We have paid the bonuses this year to give our carers and seniors assistance while we work with them to answer these questions.’ Carers bonuses have been paid now for four years; this is the fifth year that a carers and seniors bonus has been paid. If paying these bonuses was such a bad idea, why didn’t members opposite work out an alternative method of helping carers and seniors sometime before the election? Why didn’t they do a bit of thinking in those four years before the election? Why expose carers and seniors to the uncertainty of the pre-budget process and now to the uncertainty of this review? I put it to members opposite: basically, you can do two things—you can build substantial increases into ongoing payments, with all of the issues that that has for responsible economic management, or, economic circumstances permitting, you can pay generous bonuses. That is the basic choice you have got. It has always been thus. If there was something wrong with what the government was doing prior to the election, why didn’t they tell us then and why didn’t they tell us what their alternative was? They should not need yet another inquiry to give us the answers to these questions.

In the course of the minister’s statement, we had repeated what is now becoming a mantra for government ministers—that is, ‘We are addressing 11 years of coalition neglect.’ Things were so terrible under the Howard government that we increased employment by 2.2 million new jobs, we increased real wages by 21 per cent and we doubled the real net wealth per head of every person in this country, on average. That is how bad things were! Things were so terrible under the Howard government that we paid carers and seniors bonuses that were never paid before and we increased pensions to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings—that had never been put into legislation before. That is how bad things were under the Howard government!

Let us look at the actual results. According to the independent and authoritative National Centre for Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra, between 1996 and 2005 the real disposable income of the poorest 20 per cent in our society—the carers, the pensioners and the seniors—increased by 25 per cent. There was a 25 per cent real increase in the effective income of carers and pensioners. That is what the Howard government delivered and, because members opposite in the next breath will say, ‘Yes, but the rich did even better,’ I should point out that the top 20 per cent in terms of wealth in our society under the same NATSEM study had their real disposable income increased by just 19 per cent. So under the Howard government, sure, the rich got richer but the poor got richer by an even bigger percentage, which is probably the most outstanding result that any government could ever hope to deliver.

What does the future hold for the carers and the seniors of this country under the review which the minister has just reiterated today? I have a great deal of respect for the Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, but I am quite confident that the person who was pushing hardest for the slashing of these carers’ and seniors’ bonuses would have been Dr Ken Henry himself. I say to the pensioners and carers of this country: you cannot be confident of the result you want in a review that is chaired by the self-same person who was leading the push to see your bonuses scrapped this year. That is what they are facing, and I regret to say to them that they cannot trust this review and they cannot trust this government. What they can trust is the record of the coalition. We do not just talk; we deliver. When we were in government we consistently delivered a better standard of living to the carers and pensioners of this great country of ours, and that is what we will do next time we have a chance to occupy the Treasury bench.

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