Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed I am, Madam Acting Deputy President. I thought the question we were debating was twisted priorities. And if there are any twisted priorities in this place, the kings and queens of twisted priorities are sitting on the opposition benches. In fact the queen of twisted priorities would be Ms Jenny Macklin, the shadow minister for social services, who thinks her priority is to scare people on disability pensions and people with disabilities and their carers witless by misrepresenting and deceiving them about what was happening with this budget.

We will see yet another example of twisted priorities tonight, one imagines, unless of course the opposition leader, Mr Shorten, chooses in his reply to the budget to tell us what he is going to do about the $191 billion worth of deficit that the former Labor government created and the other $123 billion of deficit they would have had in the forward estimates—and that is even without properly funding half of the programs they did. It is amusing to listen to people opposite bleat about the national partnership on homelessness when you realise the funding provided by the former Labor government for the national partnership on homelessness runs out in just over a month. This government was left with the airy-fairy twisted priorities of Mr Swan, who thought that he could deceive his way into coming up with a surplus. It cannot be done. He could not do it, so he just left half the funding needs for his promises out of his budgets. That is not something that this government will ever do.

I would like to make the point that there are currently 800,000 Australians on the disability support pension. We have one of the lowest rates of workforce participation by people with disability than many other OECD countries. This is not because people with disability cannot work; it is because many of the policies developed by the previous government gave them no opportunity to get into work. The vast majority of people with a disability would like to work, and I am certainly aware of many with an intellectual disability or cognitive impairment who, if the opportunity was there, would work.

Courtesy of the current opposition leader when he was the relevant minister, we had about three reviews of disability employment services with no improvement in outcome. The expenditure on disability support pensions is currently about $16 billion a year, and it is projected to grow by 27 per cent by the end of the decade. It is not sustainable. When is the twisted priority view of the opposition going to ever include the word 'sustainable'? It's not. There is a group of DSP recipients under 35—from between 2008 and 2011, when the then Labor government finally tightened up the impairment assessment tables—who will be reassessed by this government. That is reasonable. You just have to look at the way the graph goes to see that between 2008 and 2012 the growth was unsustainable. And this is not, by any means, suggesting that anyone with a severe or manifest disability will be reassessed—they will not. Let's just put to bed, finally, the deceits and twisted priorities of Minister Macklin, who is far more interested in playing politics with the NDIS than she is in assisting in its development. We will support the NDIS. We have put extra funding into the NDIS to ensure that what happens is right. But we have inherited a budget position that is unsustainable.

I will also put to bed some of the deliberate deceits that have been bandied about by members of the opposition in terms of how household incomes will be affected by the changes we are proposing. For a start, the changes to family tax benefit B, for those already on family tax benefit B will remain until June 2017. If you have a 10-year-old for whom you are currently receiving family tax benefit B, you will continue to receive that until the child is over 12—June 2017. By 2016-17 a sole parent with one child under six will be earning $60,000 before they pay more in tax than they receive in government benefits. A sole parent with two dependents under six will be receiving $70,000 in private income before the scale cuts in so that they pay more tax than they receive. The list goes on. You will be on at least $60,000 to $70,000 before you do not make a net gain from the government.

So there is no cruelty in what we are doing. What we are doing is trying to fix the ridiculous, unsustainable mess. One would hope that the opposition could get over its twisted priorities and support doing what is right for Australia into the future.