Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

The reason I was making those points that I made was simply from the point of view that the whole of the Electoral Act can be circumvented by the use of credit cards if these matters are allowed to stand because there is no use of the powers by the AEC in the Electoral Act to uncover whether or not correct disclosures have or have not been made. There are statements in the AEC's report which, in a press release I put out recently, made it quite clear that the report raises more questions than it answers. At the end of the day, it is one we will be looking at when we have our hearing with the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and people will be under oath when answering questions. I think the chairman might choose to change the way he conducts that committee and administer the oath to witnesses in this case.

Mr Melham interjecting—

That is right. I always administered the oath. I note that when we come to looking at these appropriation bills that we hear from the government members in speaking to this issue that they cry out loud that they have returned the budget to surplus. I think the whole of the Australian people are coming to the realisation that in fact the surplus is a figment of their imagination. I would remind the House that of course the prediction from the last budget was that the deficit for this current year was to be $22 billion. The MYEFO account in fact raised it more to some $37 billion. By the time we got to the delivery of the current budget, the deficit for the current year was $44 billion. So much for the accuracy of prediction. But then, I have to say, Treasury always does get it wrong. In this case, we had the debate as we did on pushing out half a billion dollars in compensation payments—for the damage that the carbon tax is going to do to families—dressed up as an education bonus. Interestingly enough, I have had conversations with people who had abided by the previous scheme and kept their receipts and claimed them. They actually got more money back than they will get out of the cash splash, which the government has dressed up as an education bonus but requires no evidence of being spent on education at all. The important thing was for them to get the money out the door before 30 June so it became part of the $44 billion deficit and not in the next year which would have wiped out half a billion of the so-called $1.5 billion surplus. There are going to be many examples of that in the budget where expenditure has simply been pushed into the current financial year or extended out into the out years past this notional surplus of $1.5 billion. The Australian people are not silly. The Australian people know when they see a contrivance. The Australian people voice every day that they want an election—that is what they want. They did not elect a government at the last occasion. We won the primary vote and Ms Gillard, or the Prime Minister as she is today, stitched up a vote with the Independents in order that she could have power. That is not being elected prime minister. What we need is an election whereby we are not reliant on the vote of the member for Dobell.

I would point out that in question time, the Treasurer failed to answer the question as to why the caucus is allowed to be judge and jury but—and we hear this continually—the House, or the parliament itself, may not express a view, nor, indeed, even debate the statement by Mr Thomson, simply because the government is too embarrassed to stand up and have to defend the action of accepting his vote. So the question remains. Mr Thomson has been suspended from the caucus because he is not worthy of being in the caucus, but somehow he is worthy of his vote being taken in this House, and we are denied the right to debate his statement. I suspect his statement will continue to be debated for many, many days to come.

I would like to mention the way in which the budget has been drawn up and the impact that it will have on senior Australians. The carbon tax is the single most damaging thing that will impact on senior Australians, because it is a tax which will get into every nook and cranny of every aspect of everybody's life. It is a tax on electricity. Quite clearly, Senator Brown, when he was leading the Greens, wanted us all to live in a cave with a candle. But now we have Senator Milne—she would like us to do without the candle! The fact of the matter is that the difference in a civilised country, and in a civilised society, is electricity. We all depend upon it.

It is by placing a tax on coal that we see the tax on electricity, because 80 per cent of all electricity in this country is generated from coal fired power stations—the singularly cheapest way of producing power in the world, bar none. And we have enough in this country, that we know about, for 1,000 years. It gives us the one competitive edge that we can utilise in overseas trade: we have cheap power. To this very day, our single most voluminous elaborately transformed manufactures—ETM—is aluminium ingots, produced because we have cheap power with which to produce them.

What this government is doing is punishing the people, punishing our competitive advantage and punishing the way people live, whether it is every time you turn on a light, the street lighting, refrigeration or trucks. The Prime Minister says, 'You won't have to pay the tax on the family vehicle.' Yes, you will, because electricity is used to pump the petrol from the tank into your car tank and for the cash register to work. In every aspect of life this tax is compounding and cascading. So you pay tax on a tax on a tax.

Seniors are the people who are most likely to be on fixed incomes. They are the ones who are penalised most by this budget and by this carbon tax—the tax that the Labor Party now seems reluctant to refer to as a tax; it wants to use the word 'price'. There is no free coal in this country. It all has a price—a market price. This is a euphemism for the implementation of the tax. I can only say that this budget is one that is causing pain for people. It is dishonest in claiming a surplus and it must not be— (Time expired)

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