Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Family Measures) Bill 2015. I advise the House that I must be getting old—I must be getting old because I am about to launch into an 'In my day' tirade. When I was young, family life was reasonably simple. When I was young, it was a reasonably simple thing to raise a family. It was reasonably simple to do anything. Most pushbikes did not have brakes. You did not have to wear boots or helmets or pads to play cricket. You went to school barefoot, and away you went. It was so simple.

Families have become so complicated in our lives, and there is no greater measure of the complication in which we see our lives than this bill. Can I go through these points. We acknowledge the role of parents in the primary care of their children and maintain a range of programs and payments to support them. Is that necessary to say? Do we really have to be in that space? Currently, the government spends a substantial amount of money in three main areas of family support each year: around $20 billion on family tax benefit, around $6 billion in childcare benefit and childcare rebate and around $2 billion in paid parental leave. If I had a pin board behind me, we could, with red woollen thread, connect the dots and show how complicated this map actually gets—and we wonder why we are afraid of reform in this country.

The government's commitment to supporting parents in caring for their children, however, must be balanced with the responsibility to ensure that family assistance and social security payments are well targeted and sustainable into the future. The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Family Measures) Bill 2015—this bill—contains two measures that are designed to assist with the necessary task of budget repair required to get us back on a steady path to surplus and ensure that government support for families can be maintained into the future. This is the whole thing. Basically, from the Whitlam government all the way forward, we have been driving down the road as parliaments, as governments and as oppositions throwing money out of the window at everyone and wondering why we are not getting the results we should.

The government will reduce the number of weeks that FTB part A can generally be paid when a family is overseas from 56 weeks to six weeks—known as portability. Currently, FTB part A recipients who are overseas can receive their usual rate of payment for six weeks and then a base rate for a further 50 weeks. Strengthening family tax benefit residence requirements will better ensure family assistance payments are targeted to those families who have a stronger residence connection to Australia. Isn't it amazing that we should have such a concern that our tax dollar will be spent in Australia? I think that is a wonderful thing and it is a great goal that we should have as a government to ensure that the tax dollar is being spent inside Australia. Importantly, this change will not affect individuals who are members of the Australian Defence Force or Australian Federal Police deployed overseas—thank goodness we have that common sense. The Secretary of the Department of Social Services will retain discretion to increase the six-week time frame up to three years. Family tax benefit recipients who stay overseas for more than six weeks will have their payment stopped. If an individual stops being eligible for FTB under the amended portability rules and returns to Australia within 13 weeks of the end of their portability period, then FTB will be restarted where appropriate without a new claim.

This is where, as members of parliament, we sit in our electorate offices and people come to us, trying to work their way through the social security system. It is so convoluted. The poor staff sitting over at Centrelink have to try and work these things out. Surely, we can just get down to something that is basically simple.

This measure will align the portability rules for FTB part A with those of FTB part B and most income support payments. It is expected to save Australian taxpayers over $40 million over the forward estimates. That is $10 million a year—all this work to save $10 million a year. When we are trying to bring down the budget deficit from $40 billion, we are bringing in this thing for $40 million over a four-year period. All this work; all this convolution; all this, 'The party of the first part shall now be called the party of the first part'—it should drive everyone in this place crazy.

It ensures our family assistance payment system meets its objective of helping families to raise their children in Australia, whilst noting that overseas business may arise from time to time. The government will also cease the payment of the large family supplement—this is a new one—from 1 July 2016. The supplement is a component of family tax benefit part A, another thing we have to try to fix up, and is currently paid at a rate of $324.85 per year, or $12.46 per fortnight, for the fourth and each subsequent FTB child in the family.

The estimated number of families that will be affected by cessation of the large family supplement in 2015-16 is 383,000. Evidence from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling in 2002, 2007 and 2013 consistently found that each additional child in a family costs less than a first child. In 2010, the Henry tax review—and I could go on with this, but can I tell you that I believe the minister is trying to do his utmost here. I believe the minister has really got a big job in front of him. When you consider what our social security bill is—how much we spend on social security—it just beggars belief that we are trying to save $40 million and it beggars belief that we have to work so hard to get $40 million worth of savings across four years in a budget of over $160 billion.

The problem we have is that we have come to this thing where we have complicated the lives of Australians. We have put in all these things just to give money away. For the life of me, I just do not understand why we don't just line up everyone and give them cash. Surely we are better than this. Have we become a society of people just on the make? Is it always what we can get out of something that drives us? Surely, at some stage in our lives, it should be about what we deserve?

This is the whole thing about families and what the government can do. In my city of Townsville we are seeing society break down completely in parts of our community. Where we used to see youth crime as that thing that 15-18 year olds would do—a bit of break and enter or a bit of car theft and that sort of thing; not that I am trying to diminish the responsibility or the tragedy around that—we are now seeing nine- to 11-year-olds stealing cars and participating in youth crime and becoming part of the system. We see police turn up to pick up the 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds and take them off. They see the other three or four children there and their cousins there, and we are not allowed to say anything. We can come up with a system that is so convoluted in handing money out all over the place but we cannot get to the families where there are real problems. This is the problem we have as a society, I think. We have to ask: what is important? What is important is trying to keep the family together and make it the responsibility of the family to keep themselves together.

What on earth is a nine-year-old doing out and about town stealing cars at one o'clock in the morning? I do not care what colour the skin is; the fact that they are out of the place at one o'clock in the morning completely beggars belief. What we have to do is try and instil this thing where people are responsible for themselves. I think this whole social security stuff—the minister is at the table there and I know he has a massive job to do but we have to try and unscramble the egg here. At some stage personal responsibility must play a part in this. At some stage we must be accepting responsibility that our children are out; whether they can afford the best pair of Nike boots or not to go to football should be a matter of what is in our wallet not what is in Centrelink.

My son plays soccer and he wanted to get that brand new pair of Neymar boots with the soft tops all the way to the top—290 bucks! Two hundred and ninety dollars for a pair of football boots for a boy whose feet are growing exponentially every month! But there are kids out there who have these shoes, and it should be their right, but we are complicating our lives here. If we do not get to the stage where we can have the conversation around this—that we are spending $160-billion-plus every year on handing money out the window back to taxpayers, back to people who do not pay tax, back to people who have never participated in raising taxes, back to people who have hidden their money, back to people who have got so convoluted in this that we want to make sure that we can do these things.

So, as a member of the government, I back this thing; anything that saves us anything along the way is fantastic. But we have to participate in reform in this place at some stage. At some stage we have to stand up here and be part of a government or part of a parliament that is going to sit there and be responsible for what we are doing. We have become the society that no longer sees the big picture; all we see is what is coming into our accounts. We must make sure and we have to be better than this.

So I stand here and I back these bills. But, if we are not up for reform here, we should all have a really good look at ourselves and what we are doing in this place. If we are not prepared to make the hard decisions here and if we are prepared to trumpet ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for $40 million worth of savings over four years when we are spending $160 billion, we have a long way to go—a long way to go as a parliament, a long way to go as a government and an even further way to go if we think this matters to families. I thank the House.

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