Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I think Senator Evans is in a difficult position of defending the indefensible. He is a good-hearted man, and he is putting the best spin that can be put on from a government that has done very little at all for the lowest income people in Australia. When he is talking about an extra $40 a week through $2,000 of extra payments, if you put them all together, those carers end up on less than $17,000 in income for the whole year. Let us try to live on less than $300 a week; let us try to make ends meet on that. We are having this debate because we are all getting feedback from people who, even with the bonuses—and they are very meagre bonuses that the good leader is talking about—cannot make ends meet and it has not kept their heads above water as rentals in particular spiral.

Let me just home in on that one. There are 100,000 single pension getters in this country who, when you take out the more than 40 per cent they are paying on rentals, are living on $20 a day. That is $20 for food, for shelter—they are getting their rental paid, but you know how the costs add up when you have to look after a household—for clothing, for transport, for health, for hopefully being able to buy things occasionally for children and grandchildren, to be able to maybe go to bingo or to the pictures and get some entertainment, for heating and the rest of it. They cannot make ends meet, and that is the problem. We submit that the $30 that is in this bill, which is aimed at single pension income earners, is not enough. We have never said this is going to fix things up but it gives some relief to the neediest. That is why we are a little concerned that Senator Fielding is now spreading it right across the field, because it loses sight of the fact that we did home in on the neediest. But we will support that because, right from the outset, the Greens have said that we believe that pensioners across the board should be getting a minimum $30 increase and it should be closer to $100.

I go back to this starting point, which is to do with economic responsibility. There has to be a budget brought in each year, but this year’s budget could not afford the $2.2 billion that these measures the Greens are bringing forward now would cost, to alleviate the misery of more than a million pensioners and carers. It could not find that $2.2 billion per annum but it could find $31 billion for the tax cuts across the board, and not least the $5 billion-plus for high-income earners’ tax cuts. Treasury did not have any trouble working out how much that cost. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer had no trouble bringing that in in the budget. But I remind the Senate that there was no committee inquiry into that, there was no going out and asking high-income earners if they could make ends meet, how they were getting along. They were simply given this gift.

It is specious for the government to say, ‘Oh, it was too difficult to work out how we could give a small increase to people at the other end of the income scale which would have been a fraction of that which we found for high-income earners.’ It just does not figure. Good on the opposition for bringing this bill in because we are having this debate now and it is continuing to say to the government, ‘Well, you might ignore this bill and you might have the numbers in the House of Representatives to block it, but this is part of a pressure based on need which is not going to go away—not this week, not next week, not next month, until the government acts on it. It is just a fair go that it act on it early and not put it off until the last minute in the run to next year’s budget, because a lot of unnecessary hardship will be created in the meantime. I am not talking about hardship for the government but hardship for the pensioners, who deserve this lift.

Senator Evans has said that this is a Dutch auction. No, it is not. This is a serious move to try to get some money to the people who are in need. To say it is a Dutch auction is simply to say, ‘Ultimately none of them do and we are not prepared to draw a line anywhere. Because it is complicated and there are various claimants, we won’t give anything to anybody until sometime next year after we’ve had more prolonged inquiries to see how we can juggle that into the budget.’ I remind the Senate again that in the last two budgets more than $50 billion over four years has been given in tax cuts. That makes the amounts of money we are looking at here look very tiny indeed; they are a small percentage of that sum. The government would have been very wise and very fair had it simply said, ‘If we are not responding to this bill, we will give this rise in the coming short period of time, and here is how we are going to do it.’ After all, let us not forget that the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the Minister for Finance and the Deputy Prime Minister have all said they could not live on the very amounts that the leader of the government in here was saying had been boosted, the boosted amounts that he was saying a while ago had gone to pensioners.

This amendment is important. The bill is more important. But the need for the government to act as a result of these deliberations tonight, and hopefully the passage of this bill, is all the more urgent if it says it cannot agree to this here and now. Do not leave it till next year; get on with this and make an announcement in the coming weeks. It is just not fair to those thousands of people out there who cannot make ends meet. It is easy for us to talk about their getting an extra $40 here and an extra $17 there and they will get an extra $30 through this measure if we were to pass it. The fact is that it is very easy to overlook the straitened circumstances they are in, and we should not do that.