Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Election Commitments and Other Measures) Bill 2011. Through this bill the Gillard Labor government is seeking to legislate to give effect to some of its election commitments. One assumes that these are commitments it is happy to uphold, unlike the fraud the Prime Minister perpetrated on the Australian people when she, together with her government alliance partner the Greens, announced a carbon tax, a massive assault on Australian families and their household budgets. I was of the view that the faceless men of the Labor Party wielded the power, but in this new paradigm it seems that it is not them at all; it is the Greens.

When the Prime Minister lost her majority and lost her legitimacy after the 2010 election, Australians might have been forgiven for thinking that she would have the integrity to stand by her promise not to introduce a carbon tax, but she chose not to. The Prime Minister chose to betray the Australian people. She chose to put her alliance with the Greens before the interests of the Australian people. It is a decision for which she will be held accountable. It is a decision for which she will be judged by all Australians.

This bill seeks to amend the Social Security Act 1991, the Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986, the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999, the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) (Administration) Act 1999, the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999. In seeking to amend the Social Security Act 1991 and the Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986 the bill seeks to give effect to proposed changes to the work bonus to exempt the first $250 per fortnight of employment income from the income test and introduce an employment income concession bank to enable pensioners to accrue any unused amounts of the $250 fortnight exemption, to a maximum of $6,500, whilst also offsetting future assessable employment income.

The bill seeks also to increase incentives for age pension recipients and veterans’ affairs income support pensioners to work by enabling them to keep more of their pension when they are working. The coalition raised the issue of pensioners who worked in various seasonal employments, for example, as Santas and school exam supervisors. They were having their pensions cut or reduced as a result of the short-term income that they were receiving. There was a well-known case here in Canberra where a man who, like many others in the Christmas season, worked for a few weeks in a department store receiving income as a Santa Claus, holding children on his knee and having photographs taken with these young children. Because of that increase in income over a short time, he was then penalised in his pension as a result of that short-term work. Surely in this country an incentive for people to work even on a seasonal basis, on a part-time basis or on a temporary basis, ought to be encouraged rather than discouraged by legislation.

The Gillard government has finally acted, but pensioners should be wary. They should be wary of a government that launched a solar panel rebate scheme and then decreed that any rebate pensioners received from selling additional electricity generated by their solar panels back into the grid was income and thus impacted on their pension. The government approach is to tend to give on one hand but to claw back on the other. The Labor-Greens carbon tax will also hit pensioners. There will be higher electricity prices, higher grocery prices and higher petrol prices, which, of course, flow through into the prices of almost every good and service in Australia.

The coalition welcomes the changes to work bonus—changes it called for and changes which it proposed. The amendments to the family tax benefit part A were taken from the recommendations of the Henry review, which argued that family payments should be the main focus of assistance for children aged up to 18 years or until the completion of secondary school in the year a person turns 18. The proposed amendments will raise the payment rates for each eligible child aged 16 to 19 so that they are the same as for those aged 13 to 15. These amendments will have flow-on effect in rent assistance as the increased rates for older children will make them eligible to be considered a ‘rent assistance child’. Currently, rent assistance cannot be claimed in respect of children aged 16 and over.

The bill will position FTB A. as the primary form of assistance offered to young people undertaking secondary education or the vocational equivalent. The proposed measures are also intended to ensure that families are not put in a position of attempting to calculate which payment is best for them. I had hoped that this bill might reverse the contempt this government has shown for rural and regional students, but I will return to that later.

It seems that it is more important for Labor to tinker with programs that have failed rather than to try and help students in need. The latest program failure is the matched savings scheme. This scheme was introduced by Labor in 2009. The scheme matches dollar-for-dollar savings up to $500 for persons on compulsory income management. At present the matched savings scheme starts automatically for all who start a money management program. This change will shift the onus onto the individual to claim the MSS. The matched savings scheme is nothing more than a Labor smokes-and-mirrors policy. The program has been a total policy failure. On 16 March, the Australian newspaper reported on just how much of a failure this program has been. Patricia Karvelas reported:

Only one person has received the full $500 available under the Gillard government’s $53 million matched savings scheme for welfare recipients launched last July.

Only one. A $53 million program and only one recipient, according to the report in the Australian.

Indeed, Maree O’Halloran, President of the National Welfare Rights Network, said the scheme seemed to be ‘untried, untested and unpopular’. She went on:

The revelation of a next-to-zero take up comes as no surprise to Welfare Rights. The scheme is both complex and misguided. It fails to recognise the reality of such low levels of payments and the proven levels of deprivation that social security recipients experience.

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Even among the most thrifty and frugal there is limited capacity to save.

It is disappointing that rather than tackling the problems with the program, the government, in this legislation, is now merely tinkering around the edges.

The Prime Minister let the cat out of the bag last week. She said the Greens were extremists. On this side of the parliament we have always known that, but the question for the Prime Minister is: if the Greens are extremists, why has she formed an alliance with them? Why has she formed government with them? Why is she allowing the leader of the Greens to call the shots?

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