Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I can happily again run through the numbers that are there on the page—the numbers identifying what the change in the rate of increase in pensions means in budget terms. We have been through that.

The former Treasurer is so proud of his work his ALP website does not even mention he was the former Treasurer. It is quite bizarre. It talks about 'non-this' and 'non-that'. He seems to have been a non-Treasurer, according to his own published material. Putting the Labor Party website—and the non-ness we are seeing from Labor—to one side, the adjustment in the rate of increase, the twice annual rate of increase, to those pension payments are clearly there on page 203 of Budget Paper No. 2. The numbers are there.

The shadow Treasurer then went on to talk about what the household impact was and I quite reasonably pointed to there being other influences on the net household impact that Labor wants to ignore. The Labor way is to look at important issues and the strategy for our nation through a straw. All they want to look at is the little microspot at the end of the straw. They do not want to take into account the other changes, the other measures, the action we are taking to remove cost-of-living pressures by repealing Labor's pernicious carbon tax—which is going up again on 1 July.

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