Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This year, as I said, we are still looking at a deficit of $37 billion. Yet we still have members of the opposition whingeing and complaining when we try to do the hard yards, making the cuts we need to bring this budget back to deficit.

During this debate the member for Jagajaga said that Labor's proposed tobacco excise increases are responsible. I would like to see smoking rates in this country reduced to zero. But Labor's proposal to raise $47 billion by increasing the tobacco excise means that Labor plans to slug smokers with a tax of another $20,000 per smoker—that is, $20,000 extra tax paid by the smokers of this country. That is Labor's grand proposal. They borrow tax, borrow some more and spend. Do they not have any understanding of—if you try to put an extra $20,000 tax onto smokers of this country—what that will do to the black market for cigarettes? Have they given any thought to that? Obviously not, from what we have heard from members of the opposition.

Onto the measures of this bill. Firstly, it addresses the portability. This shows how generous we are with our social security and welfare payments in this country. Even after this, you can take your family on holiday overseas and you will still receive the family tax benefit for up to six weeks. This is even the cut after this bill. The primary purpose of our family assistance payments should be to assist Australian families raising their kids in Australia. Yet we have portability that allows parents to take their children overseas and obtain this for six weeks.

If we do not make these cuts now, the cuts we will need to make in years to come will be much harsher. Already, we are paying—every single year—$13 billion in interest on Labor's reckless and wasteful spending and the debt it incurred. I look around my electorate and see the things we need to do as a government. And to think that $13 billion, this year, has to come out of government revenue and simply go to paying the interest. It should make us all sick. But that is what we have to do.

The important thing to note in this bill about portability is that it does not affect our Australian Defence Force or our Australian Federal Police deployed overseas. They are exempt from this. Also, the Secretary of the Department of Social Services retains discretion to increase the six-week time frame for up to three years. Where there are circumstances of family illness or tragedy, the secretary has discretion to extend it.

The second change made to this legislation is to cease the large family supplement. Let me make it very clear so there is no misunderstanding what this is. Everyone will still receive a per child family tax benefit payment. But there was an additional payment for a family that had a fourth and subsequent child. That is being removed. If you look at the cost base, for a family, for each child a family has the cost reduces. In fact, the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling found that this is exactly the case: for each additional child, the costs become less. They found that on average the second child costs 83 per cent of the first child. The third child costs 69 per cent of the first and so on. There are almost economies of scale, if you would like to say so, for the number of kids you have. I am sure that when you get to a certain number diseconomies of scale may well cut in.

These are, simply, small targeted measures that we need to take. We would rather not take them. I am sure that everyone here who sits in this parliament would not like to make any particular cut whatsoever, because we know there are people who would be affected by them. But if we are to do our jobs as members of parliament—when it comes time for us to step aside from this House and look back at the work we have done, we want to be able to say that we fought to try to balance the budget, that we did not leave future generations with that debt from our spending. We still have a long way to go.

These are just two small measures: changes to the portability of the family tax benefit, a saving of $42 billion over the forward estimates; and the cessation of the large family supplement, a saving of $177 billion. They are very significant amounts of money but only a small drop in the bucket of what we need to do to get this budget back to balance. It is something we all need to work on and take responsibility for without the harping, whingeing, whining and misleading statements from the opposition. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

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