Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Welcome, Senator McGauran. We have missed your intellectual grunting for some time now, but we are glad to see you back. There are a couple of issues that I want to respond to—to Senator Xenophon in particular. He raised the subject of average weekly earnings. It is the benchmark that Senator Xenophon is so worried about—he has stated publicly that we cannot leave the threshold at $50,000. This benchmark is the subject of eternal embarrassment for Senator Cormann. As much as he wants to wave his arms around and gesticulate, it is something that the former government did. They defined high income earners and they set the limit. They did it, not us. You defined high income earners, Senator Cormann. Now you are trying to pretend that high income earners earn more than $50,000. It is below average weekly earnings, for goodness sake. So you have absolutely zero credibility on this. This is your policy—where you created a definition for high income earners. But all of a sudden, when we actually try and make it a realistic figure, you say that this is some sort of atrocity. So we welcome your intellectual contribution on that.

To Senator Xenophon, if you acknowledge that you cannot leave your threshold at $50,000, then why can you not accept a threshold of indexation that is based on wages? You almost seem to contradict yourself a little bit there and I hope that we can get some clarification on that. You raise the issue—and I appreciate that it is a genuine concern—about the pressure on public hospitals, but the 330,000 people who are currently paying the surcharge are not using private hospitals. They are using the public hospitals when they need a hospital.