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

It was the cost of increasing the liquid assets test from $2,500 to $5,000. The $900 special payments will—and this has been quite a difficult item to delineate—go to all genuine low-income earners who would have missed out under the proposed arrangements. There are people on low incomes who have not put in tax returns but who are genuinely poor and who would have been missed under the conditions laid out in the package. We want to see that those people who are right at the bottom, living in poverty, and who, through anomalous circumstances, would have missed out on this package get the payment the same as their fellow citizens.

I mentioned earlier the commitment to the age pension in the forthcoming budget. That is a very important commitment, and I am very glad that the government has continued that commitment for pensioners. We have been assured that there will be additional funding for the Australian Bureau of Statistics in the forthcoming budget. It is incredibly important for the delivery of social services in this country, as well as for a whole range of measures, not least as we move into a period of economic squeeze. I mentioned the new triennium funding for the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne.

I finish by thanking my colleagues. We have worked very hard over the last week to come up with these amendments. I thank the community for being so generous and for so rapidly feeding in information which has enabled this improved outcome. I thank the government. I met the Prime Minister without commitment very briefly at the outset to discuss the importance of this matter. On several occasions I have met the Treasurer, with colleagues. The Treasurer’s department, prime ministerial officials and other departments and ministers involved have been able to work constructively with us. There are always tensions that arise in these matters, but we never gave up on the idea that we had here a high responsibility to the people of Australia. We had difficulty with the so-called cash handouts. You will see that that has at least been pared back. The paring back has enabled some very constructive job creation—somewhere in the order of at least 10,000 new jobs to come out of this package—and I think the spin-off will be much greater than that.

We are moving towards being a wiser, greener, more socially just country because of these amendments. We have concentrated on the creation of local jobs, green jobs, community oriented jobs, assuring people that they not only will get work in their regions through this stimulus package but also may well be skilled for a new career in an age which has different demands on the economy and where tackling climate change overarches everything. Climate change will be a king hit on our economy in the years ahead, and it is going to get worse if we do not tackle it now. That is another matter coming up in June this year, one on which the Greens may not so easily—if I can say this was easy—come to agreement with the government. We will be constructive there as we are being constructive now. We came into this constructively minded. We wanted to improve this package. We have improved this package. We now support this package. We hope that it brings the benefits intended by government and the Greens to the Australian community.

Finally, it does not mean that the package is one we would have devised or that we cannot criticise or that we will not be hard on the government to get further outcomes—of course we will—but we have been able to make it better.