Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Greens amendment (3) on sheet 7104:

(3)   Schedule 2, item 2, page 5 (line 15) after “1 July 2013”, add “except in relation to a FTB recipient who is receiving a social security pension, a social security benefit, service pension or income support supplement”.

Senator Fifield, this one will not cost as much, so can I persuade you? As I said earlier, this particular measure will impact hardest. I make my point again: every cent counts for low-income families. This measure specifically exempts the freezing of the indexation in relation to FTB recipients who are in receipt of a social security pension, a social security benefit, a service pension or an income support supplement. In other words, it exempts those on a very low income.

Before the government use the argument that this will be hard to implement because of administration, I remind the government that they introduced the measure that we debated just yesterday on child health checks that require FTB supplement payments to be linked to a health check. So there will be a system in place that traces those particular people. You could use the same system to make sure you do not freeze indexation of the supplement for people on income support or those on a very low income, because that will ensure that they get the indexation to help them a little more. I commend the amendment to the Senate.