Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to address the three issues attached to the discussion which seem to be having some prominence. Firstly, the constitutional background to the passage of the bill, if it should be passed in due course; secondly, the issue of precedent in terms of bills that have been passed in previous years in this place on one or two occasions, having originated in the Senate and hence being cited as precedent; and, thirdly, the utility or merit of the content matter of the bill that is going to be considered by the House of Representatives, as I understand it, sometime this week.

Firstly, let us turn to the constitutional basis of the bill—if the bill were to be passed, if it were to become an act of the Australian parliament and if it were to be challenged in the High Court in due course—and whether it is a lawful bill or would be a lawful act of the Commonwealth parliament. We are very, very clear on that position. We have said from the outset that in our mind there is no power in this chamber to initiate the passage of a money bill. We say that because section 53 of the Constitution, which Senator Crossin referred to earlier, clearly states:

Proposed laws appropriating revenue or moneys, or imposing taxation, shall not originate in the Senate.

Clearly, we say, it is a logical conclusion from that that a bill to institute a pension payment or to increase a pension payment would need to be paid for out of revenues. Therefore, an increase in a pension payment will require the Commonwealth to spend extra funds, extra moneys, and the only way to do that is to increase the amount appropriated from consolidated revenue. The explanatory memorandum circulated with the bill clearly states that the financial impact of the bill at this stage is something in the order of $1.45 billion. Indeed, the clause of the bill headed ‘Objects’ also clearly states:

… the objects of this Act are to:

(c)

increase the single age pension, single age service pension and the Widow B pension by $30 per week …

So we simply regard it as a matter of absolute logic that, if you are attempting to increase a pension payment paid by the Commonwealth under law to recipients and you are increasing the amount, that is by definition an appropriation, and appropriation measures may only be initiated in the House of Representatives and not in the Senate. On that basis we say that if the matter were ever challenged in the High Court it would be ruled to be invalid and hence is likely to be ruled constitutionally flawed.

Let us now turn to the proposition raised by Senator Troeth in her contribution where she said there was precedent in this place for initiating money bills, and she particularly referred to the National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical Benefits) Bill 2007. There are two points to be made in respect of that bill. Firstly, just because something has been done in the past does not make it correct, does not make it have legal standing; it is just something that has occurred in the past. But, more importantly, we suggest to Senator Troeth that the bill passed then and the bill passed yesterday are fundamentally different.

The 2007 bill only changed the way prescriptions could be prescribed by allowing optometrists to write scripts. An additional person within the medical community was given authority to write scripts. This changed administrative arrangements, not items on the PBS. Nothing else was added that allowed extra expenditure. It simply changed administrative arrangements and was not funded from a standing appropriation. As I said earlier, the opposition’s pensions bill clearly states that it has a financial impact of almost $1.5 billion a year, funding from a standing appropriation. Therefore, the situations in the two bills are in no way analogous. A proper analogy with the 2007 pharmaceutical bill would be, for example, a bill allowing pensioners to claim the pension through the Taxation Office and not through Centrelink. (Time expired)