Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wasn't on the list but I am called to speak. I am moved to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Better Targeting Student Payments) Bill 2017, not just to fill three minutes and avoid a division but because I wish to condemn the government in the strongest possible terms for this latest attack on the most vulnerable Australians. This bill slashes support yet again to low-income Australians. Abolishing the pensioner education supplement, paid to 11,000 people, and the education entry payment, paid to 38,000 people—and I note there are about 9½ thousand people who get the double whammy and lose both—is a disgrace. These payments, quite simply, are to help social security recipients with the costs of study. $62 may not seem a lot to those opposite, who've just awarded themselves—and everyone in this House, to our shame—a tax cut, along with everyone else earning over $180,000, but to people on the disability support pension, carers, sole parents and the unemployed, these payments are critically important to helping them into study or training.

I know this, because I was raised by a single mum. When we were at school, I saw the difficulties that going back to do a year 12 subject caused my mum. That was one subject, while trying to raise two kids. I'm proud to say that she topped the state in VCE psychology—probably trying to understand her two kids! I saw the difficulties firsthand, and I know the difference that these kinds of payments can make in my community. They incentivise and help people.

These are zombie measures. We have seen them before. They've been hanging around since 2014. You can kill a zombie only by finding its brain and hacking it out. Obviously the government hasn't managed to find its own brain and hack it out, or we wouldn't be having this debate yet again, day after day, month after month. They're based on the flawed trickle-down theory embedded within this government's political and budgetary priorities—that is, if you cut spending, take away from the most vulnerable in society, give tax cuts to the rich, give Gina Rinehart and her mates the biggest tax cuts in the country with $65.4 billion, somehow everyone will be better off. I'm going to say the 'p' word. I know those opposite get sensitive when you say the 'p' word: poverty, poor people. If you take that trickle-down economic theory to its logical conclusion then you should plough poor people into the fields for a more efficient use of their carbon.

We have seen the big picture that this budget measure sits within. There is the tax cut to the top end, the $65.4 billion of multinational tax cuts, and further defence of regressive taxation loopholes—negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. Yet this budget measure is also accompanied by a tax rise for everyone else in the country. There is bill after bill, taking away five bucks here, 10 bucks there, a hundred bucks there. They are having another go at the age pensioners: 'Let's take a little bit off migrant pensioners who spend eight weeks overseas visiting family before they die.' They are cutting funding for education and lowering repayment thresholds for any young person earning $42,000. Apparently that makes you rich enough to repay your uni debt and start a family while putting up with frozen family payments. The list goes on. When you compare and contrast who gets benefits, who gets money, where they spend the money and where they take, you see what the government really thinks of those at the bottom.

The other word they get sensitive about is inequality, because they do not accept there's a problem. Any self-help manual says, 'You have to accept there's a problem before you're able to address it and do anything about it.'

See this speech in context