Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Boy, what a spray we have just heard from the government—isn't it amazing? If they are successful in repealing the minerals resource rent tax at some point I am wondering what they will blame then. Everything they have talked about today they did so in such broad sweeping statements—lots of figures coming from the government but nothing in evidence about the minerals resource rent tax. It was all just a big spray like the big spray on the carbon tax—untruths and generalisations. On and on it goes. If they are successful in repealing this bill they are going to be exposed for the mean-spirited, no-new-ideas, backward-looking government that actually are.

The Australian public have already woken up to that fact. We have the harshest and most cruel budget on record I would suggest before us and all they can do is look backwards and take away every single positive, forward-looking idea and policy that Labor put into place. The truth is heading towards them, because suddenly they are going to be in the glare of the spotlight and they will not have anything to blame Labor on anymore. They will have to start to stand on their own two feet—unlike the spray that we heard just then from the government with big numbers all apparently related to the MRRT but nothing specific.

What this repeal by the Abbott government confirms is that the government are introducing a retrospective tax grab on millions of Australia's low-paid workers. Just for once I would really like to hear the Abbott government sticking up for ordinary, everyday Australians. They stick up for their rich mates, their rich mining mates, they stick up for the big banks. Last night we heard them sticking up for the big shipping companies. I have yet to hear them actually stick up for Australian workers—from low-income earners. Not from this government. Their mates, we know, are at the big end of town, raking millions and millions off Australians through the resources boom that has been going on that apparently Australians should not be allowed to share in.

It is a retrospective tax grab on Australia's low-paid workers. Not words you would hear from the government, though. The reason for doing this—and from a government who pledged to govern for all Australians? I heard our Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, say that the night he won the election: 'I'm here to govern for all Australians.' Australians are still waiting. Australians are not going to be fooled anymore, because what the Abbott government is doing is simply governing for big business in this country. It has nothing to do with 'all Australians'. It is taking directly from the poor and giving to the rich. How is that governing for all Australians?

It is also taking money from school students. When the Abbott government tells us it has a commitment to education, those are just weasel words. As the government has confirmed, it will rip payments of $410 per primary school students and $820 per high school student from a 1.3 million Australian families who will have children starting school in January next year. I can tell you as a parent who, when my children were at school, was on a single income that I struggled in January to find money for books and school uniforms to make sure that my kids were the equivalent of other kids they attended primary and high school with. It was a struggle because it is a time of the year when you have just had Christmas and children are holidays. Every cent of my income was taken up and it was a struggle to find $200 or $300 for books and uniforms. That is what this government is doing. That schoolkids bonus money assisted families with school fees, textbooks and uniforms. The government will simply take that away when it abolishes the schoolkids bonus.

What dishonesty we have heard around the schoolkids bonus. It will be interesting to hear if the government mentions it today or whether they will just continue sticking up for their big mining mates. This payment is not linked to the MRRT. There has been this dishonest statement from government from day one that somehow it is. It is not. The Australian public will not be fooled, despite the government's rhetoric that somehow the schoolkids bonus is linked to the MRRT. When families have to scrimp and save, as I had to, and miss out on events or on going out with their children because of this slash and burn to the schoolkids bonus, those Australian families—1.3 million of them—will know that it is the Abbott government who put a hole in their pockets. It will be the Abbott government who has forced them in December and January to wring their hands, to worry, to scrape money together to make sure that when their kids start school in late January or early February they and have the same books and uniforms as the other children they are attending with.

Taking away the schoolkids bonus is a big slug on top of the Prime Minister's already harsh and cruel budget. It is absolutely targeted at ordinary, everyday Australians. They are hit with a GP tax; they are hit with a whole range of increases. On top of that, come January, there will be no additional money for families to support them to get their kids to school. The loss of the schoolkids bonus will add pressure on families at a time when families can least afford it. Finding that money to get kids ready for school, after Christmas and the school holidays, is a stressful burden on families. I can speak of that from firsthand experience. The loss of that bonus will hit 1.3 million families because the Abbott government wants to look after its rich mining mates.

It has not taken long for the Abbott government to show its true colours; it has not taken long at all: taking from the poor, taking from Middle Australia and giving to the most wealthy, whether they be mining companies or rich Australians—as long as they are rich, the Abbott government will look after them.

The Abbott government will not just stop at the schoolkids bonus. There is superannuation. It is a time when all sensible governments—which the Abbott government likes us to think it is—should be encouraging Australians to save for retirement and doing what they can to support those savings. But what does the Abbott government do? It slugs low-income Australians again—Australians earning just $37,000 a year. Perhaps the Abbott government has never met a cleaner, a hospital worker, a hospitality worker or a low-paid manufacturing worker. There are many hundreds of thousands of Australians out there who scrape by on $37,000 a year—mere pocket money for their rich mates in the mining industry.

If only the government cared to do a little research to establish some facts—something it does not do. It never has any established facts that it can share with the Australian community to show that, perhaps, 'We need to pull our belt in here or there.' No, it just goes on in a broad generalised spray about how evil everything Labor put in place was and how everything we put in place that supported Australian families and low-income earners somehow has to be ripped away. The Abbott government wants to pull that rug from underneath the feet of low-paid, ordinary working Australians. And for what? To reward its rich mining mates in this case. That is what it is doing.

Let us have a look at superannuation. The Abbott government is quite happy to deliver to the rich, boosting the superannuation of just 16,000 people. Sixteen thousand people—you could almost count them! These are people who have staggering super balances—balances of over $2 million in super. If you put aside for just a moment the fact that the Prime Minister promised to implement no adverse change to superannuation—yet another broken promise on the long, long road of broken promises—the removal of the low-income superannuation contribution is a telling move. This move will increase super taxes in one out of every three of Australia's lowest paid workers—not a bad move from a party which purports to be a low-taxing government.

This bill, if it gets up, sees the government scrapping the low-income superannuation contribution, which sees the equivalent of the superannuation tax up to $500, which is not very much, paid by a low-income earner earning up to $37,000 per year, which is a very low income, and paid into their balance. This measure was important for a number of reasons, and if the Abbott government had stopped and looked at the facts, it would have worked this out for itself. For high-income earners—the rich mates of the Abbott government—superannuation can be concessional. For low-income earners, there are no effective incentives for them to contribute to their superannuation. This measure, Labor's measure, addressed that very issue. It tried to just make the field a little more even.

The removal of the low-income superannuation contribution hits women particularly hard. Our Prime Minister purports to be some new-wave male equivalent of a feminist. He is the Minister for Women, and this is what he does to low-income earners—2.1 million of them against his 16,000 rich mates that he wants to reward. He is going to punish and make life difficult for 2.1 million low-paid women. If he just stopped and had a look at the balances of the cleaners, the hospitality workers, the care assistants, the hospital orderlies and all of those low-income earners, he would see that their balances are very low. If it was a government that was, as it says, sensible and methodical, and was committed to looking to the future instead of spending its time looking in the rear-vision mirror, it would see that these are the very people it needs to support. But, of course, it does not because it is too busy supporting its rich mates at the top end of the town.

What about those 2.1 million workers that our Prime Minister—our Minister for Women—seems to completely ignore? A significant percentage of those women are mothers working part-time and looking after young children—our future generations of Australians. It is this time that is exactly the part of a woman's career where an additional $500 a year going into super will be the most benefit for building savings for their retirement. Everyone knows that you need to put the money in early to allow it to have the opportunity to earn interest over a very long time.

Of course, our other major concern with the bill's removal of the low-interest super contribution is that it is an example of a retrospective tax measure—a fact confirmed by the Parliamentary Budget Office's checking of the coalition's election costings. Low-income earners—2.1 million of them women—entered the 2013-14 financial year with a different understanding. It was an understanding that they would be refunded their super tax. Part way through the financial year, the government has changed the rules on taxpayers. Luckily, we are where we are in the cycle. But the benefit that ordinary low-income Australians, many of them women, were budgeting for and looking towards the future for, will be ripped away from them again if this bill is repealed. Again, the Abbott government rips that rug from under their feet.

What does Industry Super Australia estimate? It says that when combined with the proposed delay in increasing the super guarantee to 12 per cent—we know our Prime Minister is not going to increase that—the removal of the LISC will reduce national savings by $53 billion by the year 2021-22. That is a truly staggering amount of money. Again, a sensible and forward-looking government would say, 'This is exactly where we want to be; this is exactly what we are building for the future.' But, no, we have a government that is always looking in the rear-view mirror, a government that has no idea how to plan for the future. All it ever talks about is a debt burden on young people into the future. Well, what is it doing? It is ripping potentially massive savings, billions of dollars of savings, out of our combined wealth without a care in the world. It has no idea and no plan. It is not saying, 'Labor's plan wasn't bad but we thought we could build on it.' No, it just wants to rip it down and pull that rug out from under everyone's feet. What does that mean? It means there will be a reduction in the available capital for infrastructure investment of about $5 billion, based on current industry-wide asset allocations. This is at a time when the Abbott government says it is looking around for new funding streams to finance new infrastructure projects. Here are some funds it could have called on, but it does not want to. Why? Because it has an ideological hatred of any plan that Labor put together. The Abbott government is certainly not governing for all Australians.

Let me put Labor's view on the record. Labor's view, and it is a fundamental view, is that Australians deserve to share in the benefits of the minerals we own. This is not something we heard from the government opposite. All we heard was: 'No, it's the mining companies' and they pay a bit of tax and we should all be grateful and thankful.' The minerals belong to Australians collectively, therefore Australians should share in the overall benefit from them. The MRRT is a profit based tax. This means that when profits are high, revenue is up, and that mining wealth can be shared by all Australians. The MRRT was not put in place for the next six months, it was a long-term approach. Labor was a forward-looking government, looking at what was going to set Australia on a good solid path that would build for our future and make sure our children and our grandchildren continued to benefit. That is what Labor was, a forward-looking government. This government is a backwards-looking government. It has just taken us back to the dark age with its repeal of the carbon tax today and it will continue to take us back to the dark age. Its other message to Australians is: 'Hey, you're on your own. Don't expect anything from the Australian government.' It is not the Australian government's job, according to the Abbott government, to help you along the way. No, you have to get there yourself. You have to scrape and beg and borrow and work two or three jobs if you are a low-income Australian to make your own way in the world, because everything Labor put in place to support our community the Abbott government is ripping up.

The MRRT was there for the long term, as I said. It was put in place for the next generation. That is something the Abbott government goes on about, but a smart government would not abolish the MRRT. A smart government that did more than look after its rich mates would be keeping it in place so that future generations could share in the wealth generated through mining, not just a handful of rich mining companies. But, of course, the Abbott government wants to continue to deliver to its rich mates. We know the MRRT will work into the future. That is how it is designed; it is not about 'let's get it done now'. The Abbott government is attempting to repeal yet another forward-looking, progressive policy.