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

Absolutely. The fact of the matter is: Treasury gets it wrong every year. Every year, the budget is wrong. Six months later, we get supplementary estimates to fix it up. In the case of the budget of this government, it was going to have a $22 billion deficit and it turns out to be $43 billion. So anybody who thinks that they can get it down to a 20c margin, as I said, must believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.

This is a punitive, harsh and unfair tax. Because it attacks the disposable income of those on fixed incomes—pensioners, part-pensioners and self-funded retirees—it also has an enormous impact on the retail sector. Research that I had Access Economics do predicted that the silver market would go platinum because of the purchasing power of Australian seniors. When their spending power is diminished or fear is put into their hearts—and the fear comes from the rhetoric of the government, not the warning from the opposition; the government has said that you have got to be fearful because the world is going to come to an end because of climate change unless we have this tax. And yet this tax will not bring the emissions down one bit. In fact, they will be continuing to rise to 2020. So the whole nature of it is fallacious.

We hear the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency shriek and carry on. He is the one who said the seas were going to rise up and houses would fall into the sea. Where did he buy his house? Right on the seaside! The fear campaign and the fearmongering that has gone on in the name of the government, saying, 'Be fearful of climate change; this tax is the answer to it,' is nothing short of a good old furphy. The fact of the matter is it is a punitive tax which is meant to damage people—hence they use the term 'compensation'—and it damages seniors more than ever.

I notice the member for Braddon over there having a yawn. Of course, he would be very bored by the plight of seniors. He would be very bored at their plight and would not give a damn what happened to them. That is way the Labor Party is. You would remember during the 2010 election campaign the Prime Minister said in cabinet—and it was effectively leaked—'Why would we give anything to pensioners? They don't vote for us anyway.' That is the attitude that the government has towards senior Australians—to disparage them and to pretend to have their interests at heart with this ridiculous compensation package. The fact of the matter is that the damage to them will be far, far greater than any compensation that will be paid.

Then we have the flip-flopping that has gone on in the policy. It is $23 a tonne to start with. Then it will go to $29 a tonne and then to $37 a tonne. The government then came in and said: 'We'll get rid of the floor price. We'll tie it all to Europe. But we're not going to change our Treasury modelling. It's still going to come out at $29 a tonne.' That is despite the fact that in Europe it is around $6 a tonne. It is a con. The Australian people are being conned and they are being punished by having their precious electricity, which determines the standard of living that they enjoy, being taken away from them. They are being punished by a government that told an untruth before the election in order to attempt to win government. But win they did not.

The Prime Minister is there only because she stitched up two deals—one a deal she stitched up with the execution of Kevin Rudd and one a deal she stitched up with the Independents. The Independents are equally complicit in this perpetration of punishment of the people. We in the opposition need to be strong—which we are—and every day bring evidence. The Prime Minister denies that evidence daily. We have noticed that nothing is the Prime Minister's fault. It does not matter what happens, it was not her; it was Tony Abbott, it was the state government or it was somebody else! Even with the unemployment figures today that showed there had been a growth in unemployment, she boldly stood there and said, 'We've created more jobs.' But a rise in unemployment means more jobs disappeared than were created. But of course that is not her fault. She is only standing there. It has got to be somebody else's fault. The day will come when you can no longer call the gender card or the victim card. By pretending to be a victim, the Prime Minister has demeaned every woman in this parliament. We did not come here for it to be said that we cannot do the job and have to be treated differently; we on this side of the parliament came here to say that we are the best people for the job of representing the people and that the ideas that we have are the best ideas to take us into government. We do not wish to be treated as if we are somehow less able and victims of somebody's spiteful words. It is a pathetic thing to say. Could you imagine Angela Merkel making a speech like that or Maggie Thatcher making a speech like that? Of course not. The fact of the matter is: if you take leadership, you must exercise leadership. If you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. At the end of the day, what we are seeing here is a government which has no purposefulness in order to look after the interests of the people. It wants to punish the people. (Time expired)

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