Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased that I have this opportunity to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Budget Repair) Bill 2015. I am going to move away from the notes and the facts of this for a moment to address the cries that we have just heard from the other side—and what a tired voice that is. The shadow minister who took a brutal axe to single mother payments not that long ago now stands in here and tries to preach to those of us who have tried to clean up the mess of the previous Labor government that left our nation's finances in such a state that—and anyone who is not aware of this should be made aware—it is costing us $100 million every day just to pay the interest bill on the debt that was accrued through those six long, hard years of Labor. Let me repeat that: that is $100 million every day. When you wake up, folks, every morning when the alarm bell goes off—kerching!—the taxpayers of Australia have to borrow $100 million just to pay the debt that was accrued by that lot on the opposite side.

Let's put this in perspective. When that lot over there took the Treasury benches in 2007, the budgets going forward—that is not just the budget of the time but the projected budgets going forward—under Howard and Costello were in surplus. Whether you liked that government or not, whether you liked the initiatives of that government over a 13-year period or not, the fact of the matter is that this country was living within its means, as I would expect people to do in their households and as I would teach my children to do. But in a short, six-year period, a dark part of the country's history, we have gone to a situation where we have to borrow so much money to balance the books each and every year that every day when the alarm clock goes off—kerching!—$100 million has to be borrowed to pay just the interest on the loan.

People know how their house loan works. It is hard enough paying the interest, let alone slightly chewing the capital away, on the statement that they receive each and every month. These are the facts of the matter. Those opposite can cry crocodile tears all they like, but the reality is that somebody, some government, some day, somewhere has to stand up to the truth of the matter. We cannot continue to live the way we are living. We cannot continue to put the future of our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren into jeopardy. That is what we are doing, and I am not going to be a part of it.

I am not going to stand here for one moment and say that the decisions that have to be made by the executive government of this country are not going to be hard. They are. It is no different to decisions in someone's household. When major changes come up in your finances, you need to make changes. You need to make a difference in the way you spend your money, the way you go and earn your money and the way in which you may in fact choose to borrow money.

The reality—newsflash, folks!—is that the government of Australia cannot do everything for everyone. If you think that can go on, you are living in cloud cuckoo land. It cannot happen. It is taxpayers' money. Out here in the bowels of parliament we do not have a printing press that prints $50 and $100 notes every day. It does not happen. The money that this government have at our disposal to spend is the Australian people's money. They elected us to spend it on their behalf. It is their hard-earned money. They wake up every day and go and earn it. They come home and try to pay the bills, to give a good life to their children and to build a future for their families. It is their money that we are spending. The reality is that we are spending a hell of a lot more than their money. We are borrowing $100 million every day to clean up Labor's mess and pay down the debt that was accrued in just a very short period of time.

That is the context in which this bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Budget Repair) Bill 2015, appears in this chamber. Those who were listening on radio, here in the chamber today or in their offices, would have thought from the cries of the shadow minister that we were going to cut the pensions of everybody the minute they stepped over the line out of this country for more than six weeks. That is not true. It makes for a very good sound grab, but let's get to the facts of this matter.

The reality for disabled support pensioners is that there is no real change. We are talking about age pensioners in this context. We all know that you do not receive an age pension until you are 65. In some cases now it is 66, 67 and 67½. Let's just think about this. The bill says that if you have been working and living in this country for 35 years, whether you started from overseas or not, this will not affect you. The six-week limit on being overseas does not exist for those people. The example of the shadow minister was of a person who arrived here in the early 1970s from, I think, Greece. I do not get it. What a terrible example to give. There is no doubt that that person has been working in this country for more than 35 years. If he and his wife want to go back and see family in Athens or wherever, this does not apply to them. It does not apply. People should push the pause button on their recording and go back and listen to what the shadow minister said. She tried to give the impression that we were going to cut the pensions of those who want to leave the country to see a sick mama and papa. That is just a wrong interpretation of this bill. If 65 is the pension age and you have been here 35 years, even if you were born in some other country, even if you arrived at the ripe old age of 30 you would still be eligible to go out of this country over and above six weeks and collect your pension. Those are the facts for everybody to consider.

If you have not been here 35 years, there is a proportional reduction. That is a fact. If you have been here only 30 years, your pension will not be taken away from you if you choose to go and live with family overseas in Europe or America for two or three months. Your pension may be reduced—that is true. But do not listen to this garbage that is coming from the other side with crocodile tears that we are cutting away the pensions of everybody. These are pure scare tactics. Those opposite are masters of them. They go to a special school for Labor politicians in their early days to learn the scare-tactics strategy for being an opposition member of parliament and a Labor member of parliament. These are the facts and they are what should be put on the table.

Those opposite have done nothing but oppose every effort of this government to get the budget back in the black. Are all the initiatives that have been placed on the table loved by the people of Australia? Of course they are not. Governments are not here to be loved by everyone. Governments have a mandate to do what they said they would do. We said to each and every one of the Australian voters, 'We want to come in and clean up the mess.' What I have come to determine is that, whilst they gave us that mandate and everyone cheered us on to do that, what some people actually meant was: 'Clean up the mess, do the difficult things, make the hard choices and make the changes, but just don't do them to me. Do them to my neighbour; do them to my footy mates, do them to my work mates, but do not do them to me.' It is a 'not in my backyard' sort of scenario. Well, it does not work that way. We are a nation. We are a family. We have to fix this problem together. We have to all take some of the burden, and we need to get the job done.

In this bill, there are a number of initiatives that will save hundreds of millions of dollars over the forward estimates. Whilst, to the average Joe Public, that sounds like a lot of money, the reality is that the savings in this bill alone—I have not done the sums; I am thinking off the top of my head—will probably save seven days of interest a year, if that. So there are still 358 days to go. Get it in context, folks. Here are the facts. Let us face the facts. Let us face the reality that we have a job to do.

The deficits of the Labor governments over those years totalled $191 billion. That is how much they spent, more than they earned, over six years. There was an extra $123 billion on top of that which they projected to spend more than they earned, and they gave us that as a beautiful inheritance on the day that we arrived here in September 2013. What a lovely inheritance to have! When that black briefcase was opened by the Treasury officials to give the dark news to Mr Hockey and Mr Abbott, I reckon that, as the little clips on it unlocked, it would have exploded in their faces. There was the truth: $191 billion more had been spent that we knew of, but 'Here, Mr Abbott; here, Mr Hockey, happy Christmas!' We had also inherited $123 billion in projected deficits. You think that we had a job ahead of us? Well, you got it right.

Every time we come into this place to bring about changes to the budget, to bring about a healthier response to the budget, they say no. They always say no. They are not interested in fixing up their mess. They are like the people that set fire to their rental property: they torched it, they trashed it and then they ran away, only to discover that the neighbours came to help save it. The fire brigade, the police and the emergency services turned up to get this thing under control, and they came back and shot everyone that was trying to put out the fire. That is pretty well what it is. That was not in my notes, but it had to be said, because the previous speaker just cried crocodile tears for 27 minutes and made no sense at all.

It is true that a couple of measures will no longer be part of government policy: the pensioner education supplement, which was introduced 30 years ago, with the aim of assisting the long-term unemployed to adapt their skills to rejoin the workforce; and the education entry payment, which is over 20 years old. Folks, we have lots of other programs in place that now provide that support. These payments are hangovers from 20 and 30 years ago, and there are savings in here across the forward estimates of $500 million that can go towards paying off the debt that I referred to earlier in my speech.

The job of government is not to please everyone; it is to do what the public would expect us to do—to live within our means. Imagine if every family in Australia continued, day in, day out—not giving a stuff—to spend and spend and spend, and borrow and borrow and borrow. I hear some of you saying, 'We are probably doing it too much anyway,' and there could be some truth in that, but imagine if everyone had that attitude. The government of the country should not have that attitude. It should have an attitude of far better stewardship than that. I like to think that that is what this government is putting its attention and its priorities into. Whether you like it or not, the initiatives in this bill are part of the solution, the greater strategy, to get the budget back under control.

There are a number of funding mechanisms that are now available to people when it comes to their educational outcomes. They are often collectively known as HECS. Every year, the government provides $3,500 million under HECS programs to assist people of any age to undertake further educational qualifications. So do not for one moment, those who are listening to this contribution, think that there will be nothing left for people as they strive to build on their educational qualifications.

One of the other initiatives in this bill, which I will wrap up on, is the portability of pensions. Whilst we are placing a new condition of just six weeks on people as they leave the country, I am concerned that there are some inconsistencies in relation to those that we are making this change for—in some cases, former prime ministers of the country. Let me put it straight. I have a little difficulty in accepting that we may have a bit of work to do here, but apparently it is all right, because former prime ministers are funded under a taxpayer pensioner scheme. But, as I read the paper at the moment, Mr Rudd, for example, has spent most of the last 12 months out of the country, on the speakers circuit, in advertising for Hillary Clinton, with Julia Gillard, who is now a so-called adjunct professor at some university. I would like to see some consistency—

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