Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition will be supporting the government in relation to this bill, and I made that very clear in my speech in the second reading debate. I thought it not really appropriate to cavil with every proposition put forward by Senators Murray and Bob Brown. However, I do think it is both extravagant and outrageous to claim that the former Howard government neglected pensioners and carers. That is simply not true, and I think it is appropriate that I put on the record a couple of facts as to that.

Quite apart from the issues that took up a lot of this year, in particular the issue of the carers’ bonus, which was largely agitated by the opposition and supported by various pensioners and carers’ groups, the Howard government’s record as to both pensioners and carers is, I think, a sound one. That is quite apart from the fact that the Howard government decreased unemployment, through 2.2 million new jobs, increased real wages by 21 per cent and doubled on average the real net wealth per head of every person in this country. Of course Senator Brown would say that things got pretty bad, and let me tell you that things got so bad under the Howard government that we actually paid carers and senior Australians bonuses that had never been paid before—and we did that for four years. We increased pensions to 25 per cent of average weekly earnings and in fact we legislated that percentage increase, which had never been put into legislation before.

What carers and pensioners can trust is of course the record of the coalition. We did not just talk; we delivered. Between 1996 and 2005 the real disposable income of the poorest 20 per cent of our society, who are very important to us—the carers, the pensioners and seniors—increased by 25 per cent. There was a 25 per cent real increase in the effective income of carers and pensioners. That statistic does not come from me; that comes from the independent and authoritative National Centre for Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra.

We can obviously disagree about points of emphasis. That is not to say that pensioners and carers do not deserve better; they clearly do. However, rearranging or attempting to rearrange the government’s priorities on the tax cuts by an amendment of this kind is hardly a way to put pensioners and carers on a more sustained footing that I think would satisfy Senator Brown. We are in opposition; we are not the government. We are the opposition with a proud record—we think—of caring for pensioners and understanding the specific needs of carers. Under the current circumstances, we think Australian families who are the subject of this bill that we are considering deserve these tax cuts. They have worked hard; they have earned them. I am not making any qualitative comments about pensioners and carers other than to say that in a different setting and context we might be able—as an opposition and on the crossbenches—to urge the government to take better care of them and to look further at what needs to be done for them. But doing so in the course of this bill is not the place.