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

The Social Security and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (2009 Budget Measures) Bill 2009 deals with two measures from last night’s budget. The first aspect of this bill is the provision for an ongoing lump sum payment of $600 a year for people on carer allowance and on carer payment. This provision regularises payments that were made since 2004 under the Howard government. In the case of those payments, it was a $600 annual lump sum for people on carer allowance and a $1,000 lump sum for people on carer payment. The second aspect of this bill is to suspend for three years the indexation of the income thresholds for people accessing family tax benefits. It is a straight savings measure.

The opposition certainly does not begrudge carers their money. Carers are the unsung heroes of our society. Many of them do it very tough indeed and that money will certainly be welcome, although, as I said, it is largely a continuation of measures that have been included in budgets since 2004. As well, the opposition recognises the need for some savings in these circumstances and certainly the opposition does not intend to oppose this bill.

It is worth observing the context in which this bill has been presented to the House. For weeks we have been hearing from government ministers, from the Prime Minister down, about the tough decisions that were going to be in last night’s budget. The only really tough decision in last night’s budget was the cuts to the private health insurance rebate. I have to say that they are cuts which I think this government will live to regret—first, because the private health insurance rebate is a very good way of getting more money overall into our health system and, second, because the private health insurance rebate has been very important in taking the pressure off public hospitals. It is highly likely that, as a result of the cuts announced last night, there will be more people clambering to join the already very long public hospital waiting lists.

Members opposite have always hated private health insurance. I stood at the dispatch box on the other side of this House day after day prior to November 2007 and predicted that the private health insurance rebate would be cut, would be means tested and would be abolished. Day after day members of the then opposition, led by the Deputy Prime Minister, would stand up and absolutely deny any intention to cut the private health insurance rebate, but of course they have. This is an absolute crystal clear case of a broken promise. They have been caught red-handed breaking an important promise. A press release dated 26 September 2007 from the then shadow minister for health states:

On many occasions for many months, Federal Labor has made it crystal clear that we are committed to retaining all of the existing Private Health Insurance rebates … The Liberals continue to try to scare people into thinking Labor will take away the rebates.

This is absolutely untrue.

The untruth was not coming from the then government; the untruth was coming from the then opposition. The world now knows that this is a government which does not keep its promises. This is a government which says with a straight face one thing while all along intending to do something else. We learn from George Megalogenis in the Australian today that in fact the government wanted to do this last year. They were a bit scared of doing it last year, but now, under the impact of the so-called global financial crisis, they have summoned up the courage to implement it. All along their true belief was that this was bad policy. That was a belief that they did not have the courage to put into words prior to the last election.

That was, in fact, the only hard cut in this budget. It was the only cut that involved taking away from people something that they already have. All of the other spending cuts in this budget involve stopping people from getting something that they do not already have now. There is the change to the family tax benefit thresholds, which is the subject of this legislation. It will stop some future claimants from accessing the family tax benefit to which they might otherwise be entitled. There are the changes to the pension taper rates. Again, this is only for new pension claimants. There are the changes to the superannuation contribution rules. Again, it is only for future contributions to superannuation. Of course, then there is the change to the age pension eligibility age. That lift in the official retirement age will not even begin until 2017, which is three elections off, and it will not actually be completed until 2023, 14 years into the future, when almost none of us will still be sitting in this parliament.

What we saw last night was actually well anticipated by George Megalogenis in the Australian a few weeks ago when he forecast what he thought would be ‘a horror handout budget’. There was a lot of talk about the horror in the weeks leading up to the budget, but last night all the Treasurer could bring himself to talk about was the additional benefits that he was going to give. In fact, the one thing that never escaped his lips in his 30-minute address was the fact that there was a $58 billion deficit attached to the goodies that he was giving out.

What we have is a government that is very brave to spend. It is so courageous when it comes to handing out the money that other people have accumulated and handing out the money which has been borrowed at the expense of the future taxpayers of this country. It is very courageous when it comes to spending, but it is extremely timid when it comes to cutting, which is why so many of these cuts are soft cuts and why so many of them are scheduled to start well into the future. Yet, the regrettable truth is that a $200 billion plus forecast reduction in the revenue over the forward estimates period means that there must be cuts, there must be higher taxes or there must, as there inevitably will be, higher interest rates in the future.

This is a budget which is based on utterly unrealistic assumptions. Last night the Treasurer told us that the budget would return to surplus by the 2015-16 financial year—shades of former Treasurer Paul Keating saying that the budget would ‘whirr back into surplus’. That was the former Prime Minister in his ‘Captain Wacky’ days, a memorable phrase of which I am reminded by the presence of the parliamentary secretary across the table.

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