Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

They know where you live. That is quite right, the member for Braddon. They will come after you. And there is no statute of limitations there for the Australian Taxation Office to—rightly again—recover that taxable income. This is quite simple. Those on the other side seem to forget this: governments do not have money. Government only have money that has been raised in revenue from taxpayers, be that individuals or be that businesses. It is right, and it is proper.

In the measure before us, in respect of debt recovery—and the member for Corangamite touched on this—what has restricted the capacity of the Department of Social Services to recover the outstanding debt has been a six-year statute of limitations on those debts. To put it in perspective, the average social welfare debt is a quantum of only $2,357 per person. The average length of debt is just over three years. But there are outstanding debts which are over 30 years old. The greatest amount of debt is in excess of $300,000. An appropriate repayment plan is something that I think is not unjustified at all and something that I think most Australians would consider reasonable and fair. The proposal here is to remove that current six-year statute of limitations on the ability of the Department of Social Services to recover those outstanding debts, in line with similar agencies, such as the Australian Taxation Office. It is not something that I think most Australians would consider unreasonable.

It is important to understand that those on the other side, in six years of government, in six years of trashing our economy, trashing the budget, leaving this nation with a legacy that we have had to deal with—and deal with it we will, albeit with no help from those opposite—did nothing. They did nothing in any constructive way to try to recover these outstanding debts that are owed to the taxpayers of Australia. So they sit there. But this is the lot that we have. As I described before, we have come in to clean up the mess that the bad tenants left us.

I mentioned that at the end of June 2015 there were over one million individual debts, with a total value of $3 billion. These debts have increased by almost 10 per cent. The issue that I described earlier, in respect of the statute of limitations, is that people effectively go dark. They go underground. I did not realise that this was something that occurred. How on earth do you get away, with your credit cards and different things that we have in this day and age, with that situation? It probably says something about what a great country this is—that you can actually survive and you can live in a cash economy out there. You go dark for six years, and as it stands at the moment—

See this speech in context