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

In addressing the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Senior Supplement Cessation) Bill 2014 and related bills, I will put in context why we are having this conversation and moving in these circles. In 2013, we went to the election with a four-pillar promise. We said we would axe the bad taxes—the carbon and mining taxes. We said we would stop the boats, that we would build the roads and the infrastructure of the 21st century, and that we would fix the budget mess. The carbon tax and the mining tax are gone. Tick. We have had one successful boat this year. We have announced $150 billion worth of roads and over $800 billion worth of approvals through the Department of the Environment to get this economy moving. The fourth pillar is to fix the budget mess, and that is taking a long time. And it will take a long time.

First of all, I will take up the point made by the member for Jagajaga and state emphatically: this is a lot of money. The savings we are trying to put through with these bills is a lot of money. By my calculations, over the forward estimates it is about $8.7 billion. That is a tremendous amount of money. But then consider that social security is, at the moment, $146 billion per year. In the next four years we will be spending nearly $600 billion on social security payments. To put it in context, we are talking about $8 billion versus $600 billion—over half a trillion dollars. What we are trying to get through here is about 1.5 per cent of that.

We have an economy growing at around four per cent, but our social security and health costs are rising at nine per cent and over. We have real issues here. The thing that gets to me the most is that rather than discuss the numbers the opposition always want to argue about the words. Was it a budget emergency? They say it was not an emergency. I say: is it an emergency as you are going over the cliff, or is it an emergency as you are getting close to the cliff? I have a real issue with the way we talk about numbers in this place. People in the street, people at the Herbert Hotel, the Great Northern Hotel and the Shamrock Hotel do not know what a billion dollars is. People in my family do not know what a billion dollars is. It is almost impossible to get your head around that concept. So what business are we actually in? The vast majority of people are paying things off for their whole lives. So the mere concept of paying off debt is hard to get across. Are we really in the debt collection business and the paying money back business? I do not think we got elected to pay back debt. I think we got elected by the people of Australia to fix the thing. I think that this government is here to fix stuff. I think that is what we have to try to get across here: that something is broken.

These bills are not just about the last six years. These bills go back a lot further than the last six years, because we have got structural issues in our budget and in the way we spend money which go back an awfully long time. I have a friend who is a stay-at-home mum. The family have five kids under 15. Her husband works and has a car supplied by the company. He earns 120 grand. She gets nearly $1,800 a fortnight in family tax benefit part A. That is just short of $47,000 net a year. No wonder she is a stay-at-home mum. That is a $70,000 job. That is what we are paying her to stay at home. That sort of stuff has to end. She said to me, 'We're paying enough tax.' I said, 'I don't think you're paying any. You're not paying any tax.' We have to look at the way the money is going out.

I have a real issue when it comes to the way that this has been portrayed by the other side. When you are in business, if you have a business that is struggling—and when I took over a business in Townsville, it was losing $150,000 a year and I was given the imprimatur to do whatever I had to do to get that business turned around—you do not just sit there and say, 'It's all too hard,' and just expect to keep on getting paid. What you have to do when things are tight is you have to look around and fight and scratch and punch and kick to get money in the door. That is what you have to do, and that is what we have to do to try and get this budget back into order. We have to fix the thing.

What Labor did, what the member for Lilley and the member for Rankin, his offsider, did was that they took the family car, kept it for six years and then gave it back to us, and it is dinged up, it has blown a head gasket, it has got bald tyres, it has got dings all over it and it has got a busted windscreen. We can keep on driving the thing until it stops completely—we can just keep on putting a little bit of petrol in all the time until it stops completely—or we can fix it. We can put new tyres on it, restructure it and get the windscreen fixed and then we will still have a good motor car. It is the same with the economy. It is the same with these bills here.

We have a very generous social security system. Like I said, nearly $600 billion over the next four years is going out in social security, and we are asking for $8 billion in savings to go through—1½ per cent. I do not think that is too bad. We are in the fixing business. Governments—and I am not just talking about the last six years; I am talking about governments before that too—have known that we have an ageing population for a long time. This government is the first one to really address it. This government is the first one to even really talk about it. We do generation papers and all that sort of stuff, but we do not do anything about it. This government has said, 'Jeez, you know.' The Leader of the Opposition, in his budget reply speech said that, when he was at school, there were 7.5 taxpaying workers per person over 65. Today there are five—and there are more people in the workforce today than at any other time in Australia's history. By 2050, there will be 2.5 taxpaying workers per person over 65. That is a lot of weight to carry.

The hullabaloo about raising the age pension age to 70 from their 67 was just ridiculous. When the pension came in in 1908-09, it was at age 65 and it was fully means-tested. For every 10 quid you had over 100 quid, in cash and assets, including your home, you lost a pound off your pension for the year. The average life expectancy of the Australian male in 1908-09 was 62, so you had been dead for three years before you even got the pension! If we applied that today, you would not get the age pension until you were 84 years old. That is the challenge we have got. Instead of having a very small number of the population actually get to pension age, to where they are completely and utterly unable to work, we have people on average living nearly 19 years over the age of 65. That is a massive challenge for us here, and if we do not address it now, if we just keep on going the way we are, it is never going to get back. We are never going to catch up, and it is never going to be sustainable.

The other thing I hate is: did we take this to an election? I submit that, by saying that we had to fix the budget, that we had real issues in the budget, that should have said enough. We are not taking out a system 8 in the Lotto each week to pay down the budget debt. We are trying to fix the thing. It is both sides. You have to look at your spending and you have to look at the way you bring money in. But I submit to the Labor Party, on the great Hawke and Keating thing, was the floating of the dollar taken to an election? No, it was not. Was HECS taken to an election? No, it was not. The member for Jagajaga, with pious righteousness and sanctimony, standing there and talking about single mums, was the one who stuck it to the single mums in the last parliament. Did she take it to an election? No, she did not. Was it a structural reform for the betterment of people? No, it was not. It was a grab to get back to surplus. That is what it was. I have not even spoken about the carbon tax—I think we have done that to death.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hey!

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Greg's upset!

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

About the fact that they did not take it to an election. We have finished with it. But they did not take it to an election. They give us a gobful about not taking things to an election, about explicitly ruling it out. But I have a warning, especially to those guys who were not here in the last parliament. In the last parliament, as part of the deal making that went on, the member for Denison was able to get the then Prime Minister Gillard to agree to savage cuts in pokies and all the sort of stuff that went around that. The member for Shortland and the then member for Robertson and other people were taken to their local RSLs and sports clubs and so on, and they were belted. But the then member for Robertson stood up there and she stuck to the line. She did the right thing and she took her punishment well. I was talking to her one night and I said, 'The hard part about that is (a) it's state legislation and (b) you didn't take it to an election to do it.' She said, 'Oh, but it's so bad, Ewen. These people are killing themselves.' And then, when the then member for Fisher became the Speaker and they did not need Wilkie anymore, out it went, overnight. No-one was crossing the floor. It was no longer the greatest moral challenge of all time. They just did it.

So, when you go there, the changes to the age pension will not come in until after the next election. That gives the Labor Party enough time to come up with what they are going to do at the next election. That comes with enough time to sit down and say what they are going to do and how they are going to pay for it. That is the important thing here. We got brought in because they could not handle the chequebook. That is the reason we are on this side and they are on that side. It is not anything to do with social conscience. It is not anything to do with the budget or anything like that; it is because they cannot handle the money. We have to handle the money, and it is as simple as that. If we do not get this thing into order—if we do not ask people to do more for what they are getting—we will never get this thing back in line and we will turn into the archetypal Greece or Ireland because we are not getting it under control.

I have three children. I have a 21-year-old, my daughter is going to turn 20 at the end of this week and I have a 12-year-old. When I am old, grey and out of this place, I want to be able to say to them that I did my best, that we did not just pass it on to them to fix it up for us because we did not have enough ticker to actually front the thing. Previous parliaments have not addressed the basic structural issues around our budget. To the credit of the Treasure, the Minister for Finance and the Prime Minister, we have actually looked at this thing and said, 'If we don't pull this thing into order, we're in all sorts of strife.'

So we are asking for an awful lot of money out of these bills. It is $8.7 billion, and that is going to hurt some people, but what is the option? Tell me what the option is and how you are going to pay for it. Tell me how we get these things done, because at the end of the day we are still spending $146 billion this year in social security payments. Social security payments are 35 per cent of the budget. It cannot keep on going the way it is. So I say to those members opposite: get on board, let's be serious about this and let's fix this thing, because that is the business we are in. We are fixing it so the next people who get this vehicle can actually do something. Every cent you pay back in debt is money you cannot spend on stuff you want to do. I thank the House.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 13 May this year, about five months ago, the Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, handed down the worst budget in living memory. It went down very badly indeed. It was a budget based on a confected budget emergency, and there is a booklet that seems to have gone missing—a blue booklet called 'Real solutions'. I never see any members of the government come into the chamber with that, yet I recall numerous occasions in the last parliament when they put it under their arm like a bible. It was the manual. It would get the country back on deck. But so much of what we have seen in the legislation and the budget which this government announced in May cannot possibly and is not found in the missing blue book. You know: the book the then Leader of the Opposition used to hug so close to his chest. He put it in front of him like he had steak knives as well!—'Buy this and vote for me.' It has gone missing entirely.

I am always amused by those opposite, including the member for Herbert, who criticise us on our side as if none of us have business experience at all. I ran a business for more than 20 years. It grew from the time I was about 26 years of age into a medium-size firm in the Brisbane CBD. I grew that business, so don't come in here and say none of us have any idea, as if somehow those in the government alone know what it is like to be in business. Many of us on this side of the chamber know because we ran businesses ourselves.

A budget that clearly the government thinks is about lifters or leaners is a budget of broken promises and really cruel cuts: $50 billion in health and hospitals, $30 billion in schools. It is a budget that abandoned needs based funding and Americanised our universities. They are on about liberating our students with debt and $100,000 university degrees. It is a budget that fundamentally attacked the universality of Medicare. That is what it is about. There were massive cuts to family support and pensions, slashing $534 million in PM&C's Indigenous portfolio alone, on top of that cutting legal aid funding for Indigenous people, Indigenous language programs and on and on. There were $653 million in cuts to the aged-care sector. On top of that we have the cuts to the dementia and severe behaviour supplement—a one-two punch to the head of the aged-care sector.

So we have here legislation before the chamber which we will oppose and which again is about cuts, so many of which were never mentioned in that famous—or infamous—blue book they carried around everywhere. We will stand up on this side of the chamber for families, for fairness, for veterans, for older Australians, for those in the country in the cities and for those people from all over the country, from the Torres Strait to Tasmania. We will stand up for Labor values. We will. We would support sensible budget saves and we have done so. In fact, in the last few weeks we have demonstrated that. But we will not support savage cuts to family income.

Those cuts impact on electorates around the country, many held by Labor. Independent modelling produced by the University of Canberra's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling revealed that families and residents in my electorate of Blair are worse off by about $406 per year as a consequence of the budget. I admit that Blair sits in about the middle of the electorate table, but the NATSEM modelling reveals that 15 of the 16 hardest hit electorates in Australia are held by the Australian Labor Party, those on this side of the chamber.

We fought the measures in the bills we are debating today when this stuff came before the house in a couple of omnibus bills. We fought these measures in the public, we fought in the Senate and we won. We won the argument with the public and saw the government backflip on this issue. We saw the government split bills, introducing four new bills to the House, and we supported responsible saves of about $2.7 billion which we told the government we would support back in May after the budget. But, in their arrogance—indeed, in their ignorance—they did not have the grace and humility to negotiate and talk to the opposition about this issue.

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

You don't listen.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not listening is exactly what this government is about—not listening to the public and eventually compelled to undertake what I said back in early October. But we will not support cuts of the order of about $8 billion to $10 billion which this government is proposing in the splitting of various bills, because what they are about here is pension indexation changes, kicking families off family tax benefit B when their youngest child turns six, freezing family tax benefit payments, and forcing job seekers to live without any income support income for up to six months. Imagine a 28-year-old carpenter in Raceview in Blair living with his partner and they have two kids. He loses his job and she is a stay-at-home mum. They are in a position where he loses his job and he is off without any income. What is he going to do? Where is he going to go? It goes to show how callous and harsh this government is.

Australians must really wonder what this government is all about when they look at what it has done. I heard the member for Herbert talk about the budget. He went on and on about the budget. The pre-election fiscal outlook demonstrated the figures, not that trumped up MYEFO we saw at the end of last year, and then the budget reveals where things were up to. What this government did when they got in was they virtually doubled the deficit. What they did was change the economic assumptions; gave $9 billion to the Reserve Bank; forewent all those revenue measures that we put in, which they had opposed; and got rid of the carbon pricing mechanism, which was bringing in billions of dollars as well. So what they have done is then decide they going to spend across the forward estimates about $22 billion in a Paid Parental Leave scheme to actually pay millionaires up to $50,000 to have children. This is what they are doing. Claiming there is a budget crisis is not consistent with the actions of this government. It is not. We had a AAA credit rating and we had low interest rates. This country was not in a budget crisis when the coalition came to power. That is the reality. What this government is doing is taking people off that income support that they really and truly need.

A recent Melbourne Institute report found that while 23 per cent of working age people received welfare payments in 2001, this had dropped to 18.5 per cent by 2011. But if you listened to the member for Herbert you would think there was a massive explosion of people on welfare in the country compared to what it was a decade or so ago. It is not true. It does not work out that way at all. The reality is very different. The government cannot find economists anywhere to support their hysterical claims about a budget emergency and out-of-control welfare spending. AMP Capital Chief Economist Shane Oliver said this:

Australia is not facing a budget or public debt crisis right now. Our budget deficit and net public debt are low by OECD standards. Our bond yields are low and foreign investors are happily buying our bonds.

That was from The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 July 2014. Saul Eslake, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, compared Australia's budgetary position with that of the UK in 2010, which he had described as 'a crisis'. He said that to apply similar terms to Australia:

… was to abuse the English language.

So we had some Orwellian language from those opposite in relation to this issue. Even when members opposite come to visit my electorate of Blair they cannot get the record straight. We had Senator Barry O'Sullivan debating me before the Ipswich Chamber of Commerce forgetting his talking points and admitting there was no budget crisis, which was reported very well and accurately, I might add, by The Queensland Times, who had pictures of him looking in despair about the whole issue. It did not go down very well with the business community in Ipswich, can I tell you. He clearly lost the argument in relation to that.

The government should be forced to abandon the legislation that is before the chamber, but they will not. They are not deterred by their commitment to cut pensions and slash support for low-income families. They are simply not. But I think, as I mentioned before, the situation in relation to young people being forced to go without any financial support for six months if they were young job seekers is one of the cruellest things I have ever seen. The Prime Minister has now reintroduced these cruel cuts which we defeated previously.

What they are trying to do as well in the legislation before the chamber is end the seniors supplement from 20 September 2014. This is a $999.4 million cut in support of 300,000 older Australians. These are people who currently get the seniors supplement available to Commonwealth seniors health card and DVA gold card holders. It is paid annually currently at a single rate of $886.60 for singles and $668.20 for each member of a couple. In my electorate the latest figures I can discover is that there are 953 Commonwealth seniors health card holders. That is nearly 1,000 people in my electorate alone. That is replicated everywhere. I would love those people opposite to go and do their listening posts in street stalls and see the old people as they going to their shopping centres—going into Woolworths and Coles and IgA et cetera—and say to them: 'Look, I am just reducing your capacity to buy that bread, butter and cheese. I am taking away your income.' Those types of supplements, as many older people in my electorate have told me, help them to meet their rates bills, electricity bills and other necessities. Some people have told me that that is the money they use for a bit of recreation as well. These are people who have worked hard all their lives and those opposite are supposed to be on the side of those who put away and save and who want to do the best in terms of financial dignity and respect in retirement.

But as people walked into those polling booths on 7 September 2013 they had not an inkling, those nearly 1000 voters in Blair, that my LNP opponent was going to, if she won, sit opposite and get rid of their seniors supplement. They had not an inkling because my opponent in that election did not tell them. They did not tell I guarantee that none of the people over there told any of the electors who were going into vote on election day that that was going to happen. There was not a peep from the then Leader of the Opposition nor the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, that they would do it.

In fact, I had a look at this. I do not even remember any election ads from the coalition about this. In fact, there was something in the coalition's election policy. I had a bit of a look. It is mentioned It is listed as a benefit in the coalition's election policy in relation to this issue—the holding of a Commonwealth seniors health card. The policy document of the coalition simply states that holders receive payment of the senior supplement. Unfortunately, these holders did not learn anything about this until after the election. It was missing; there was not anything in the coalition's policies about the supplement not being available in the event of an Abbott government—not mentioned at all. We oppose this. We do not believe the Prime Minister should punish those Australians who have worked hard all of their lives to prepare their retirements.

And with the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Student Measures) Bill 2014, I cannot see any empirical evidence as to why students should suffer in the way they are doing. We are seeing the application of interest rates on certain debts in relation to student assistance payments, interest being charged at 90-day bank accepted bill rates plus seven per cent interest. I cannot understand why they are doing this. There is no evidence that this needs to be done. There is the replacement of the existing Start-up Student Scholarship with new income contingent student loans; there is no evidence that this will work. There has been no review that I can see, and no real legitimate policy reason given for that. In the circumstances, we oppose this. (Time expired)

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will sum up the three bills seriatim, beginning with the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Seniors Supplement Cessation) Bill. This bill will reintroduce the senior supplement budget measure, which was originally introduced in an earlier budget bill. From 20 September 2014 the measure will cease payment of the senior supplement for holders of the Commonwealth seniors health card or the Veterans' Affairs gold card. However, other benefits will remain available to cardholders, such as discounts on medicines under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. In conjunction with this change to the seniors supplement, the bill will ensure that cardholders who formerly received the clean energy supplement in association with their card will receive the renamed energy supplement maintained at current levels through the permanent removal of indexation.

Secondly, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Student Measures) Bill will reintroduce two measures relating to student entitlements that were originally announced by the previous government. The Senate removed the two measures from the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2013 in March 2014. The first measure will allow for an interest charge to be applied to debts incurred by recipients of certain student payments, but only if the debtor does not have or is not honouring an acceptable repayment arrangement. The aim of this measure is to encourage debtors to repay their debt in a timely fashion where they have the financial capacity to do so. The second measure in the bill replaces the current Student Start-up Scholarship with an income contingent loan, the student start-up loan. The student start-up loan is to help students with the costs of study, including the purchase of textbooks, computers and internet access. The loans will be available on a voluntary basis. They will be repayable under similar arrangements to the Higher Education Loan Program debts, and only after those HELP debts have been repaid. Both measures will be implemented from 1 January 2015.

Thirdly, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 4) Bill 2014 reintroduces several of the 2014 budget measures that were previously introduced in other budget bills. Our welfare system must be fair, but it must also be sustainable. The budget measures introduced by this bill help us to make our welfare system strong for the future. The amendments include changes to make payments more sustainable by maintaining certain rates, free areas and thresholds at current levels for up to three years. There are refinements to the family payment system to improve targeting to families most in need of support, and several changes to working aid and student payments that will target assistance towards supporting the most vulnerable Australians while encouraging those who are able to work or study to do so. I commend the bills to the House.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for the debate having expired, the question is that the bill be now read a second time.

The House divided. [19:15]

(The Deputy Speaker—Mr Vasta)

Question agreed to.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

(In division) Mr Deputy Speaker, on a point of order—

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

( Mr Vasta ) (): (In division) I am on the record as getting advice from the clerks because, at the moment, there is not a precedent that they have been able to ascertain for having the member in the chamber even though the doors had been locked. I am getting that advice and, when I do get that advice, I will let the chamber know.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

(In division) Mr Deputy Speaker, the precedent that I am referring to is at footnote 378 on page 279 of Practice.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: (In division) Order! I make the ruling that the member for Capricornia's vote will not be counted, and that is where the decision ends.

(In division) So that is in order?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: (In division) The member for Capricornia was given bad advice but she did not sit in a member's seat. Member for Watson, the precedent that you are talking about is when a member is sitting in their seat and they disregard a ruling from the chair and move to the back of the chamber. This is a different situation and the member for Capricornia's vote will not be counted.

(In division) Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a point of order. My understanding is that the member for Capricornia pushed in after the direction had been given that the doors be locked. At that point she pushed her way into the chamber. That is of a similar gravity to someone moving to the back because it is still occurring after the call has been given for the doors to be locked and the tellers to be appointed. The principle under which that precedent exists applies in the exact same way: someone moved to the back of the chamber in a disorderly fashion. The member for Capricornia should not be able to be counted out of the ballot as though she had not broken any rules; she did.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: (In division) The member for Capricornia actually got through the doors and she had the opportunity to sit down in her seat. She was advised not to; that was her prerogative, and she stayed at the back of the chamber. That is where she opted to stay. She should have actually sat down in her seat, because any other members would have done the same thing. She did not do that; she stayed at the back of the chamber. Her vote is not counted, therefore. Her vote will be recorded as having not voted at all. I thank the member for Watson for trying to clarify that.