Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

If we ever needed to be reminded it was confirmed again today from the answers that Senator Abetz provided to the opposition in question time: the government are not the government they said they would be. We saw a very clear set of examples in question time today of that fact. First, in relation to health and education, which the Prime Minister assured Australians were definitively absolutely ruled out for cuts, when the Leader of the Government in the Senate was asked to rule out again here in this chamber as a minister he declined to do so. He hid behind the weasel words of 'intention' and 'we will keep our commitments', but he declined to rule out the most important issue on which he was asked: 'Will you rule out any cuts to health and education programs during the term of this government?' The answer was that he could not.

The facts are that, as we know from the Treasurer's own mouth, as we know from the terms of reference to the Commission of Audit, as we know from the answer given today by the Leader of the Government in the Senate, it is absolutely and patently clear that the government have no intention whatsoever of delivering on their commitment not to cut programs in health and education.

The Leader of the Government in the Senate was also asked a question about the 3.6 million Australians earning up to $37,000 a year that this government is imposing a tax grab on. This is at the same time as they are giving a tax break to some 16,000 Australians with around $2 million in their superannuation balances. Remember, this was the Prime Minister who said that he would not leave anyone behind. Clearly there are 3.6 million Australians for whom that does not apply. It seems that people who will not get left behind are those with a couple of million dollars in their superannuation balances, but 3.6 million Australians—hardworking Australians—who earn up to $37,000 a year are expected to front up and pay more tax. What sorts of priorities do the government have? More importantly, this is not the sort of Prime Minister that the Prime Minister told Australians he would be.

Then, of course, we come to debt and deficit. You couldn't move before the election without bumping into images of Mr Hockey—and you do tend to bump into images of Mr Hockey—going on about budget emergencies and drowning in debt; telling everybody that the sky was falling in; failing to recall that in fact under Labor we had a AAA credit rating from all three credit-rating agencies, something even Peter Costello never managed. Then, after the election, all of a sudden the man who said that we were in a debt crisis and we had to manage debt bowls up to the parliament and says: 'By the way, I want a couple of hundred billion dollars more on the debt limit.' It is the largest low doc loan application in history! He rocks up to the parliament and says: 'We want a couple hundred billion dollars more on the debt cap, and—you know what?—we are not even going to put before the parliament what the current budget numbers are. We are not even going to tell you what the budget numbers are.'

This is not the government they said they would be. They told Australians that they were going to reduce debt, they were going to get the budget under control. Yet the first act as Treasurer that he engages in in the new sitting of the parliament—from the bloke who was going to get the budget under control and debt and deficit under control—is an application for a $200-billion increase to Australia's debt ceiling.

In the short time since this government was elected we are already seeing that they are not the government they told Australians they would be. I predict that that will get worse. I predict that after the Commission of Audit, which is able to look at everything—including cuts to health, education and co-payments—it will be even worse. (Time expired)

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note the comments of Senator Wong that the government are not doing something they said they would and that they are not the government they said they would be. Let us have a look at what Prime Minister Abbott said before the election. Where would his first trip overseas be? Not to Geneva, but to Indonesia. Where did he go? He went to Indonesia to clean up the mess that those now in opposition—where you justifiably should be—made for things like our cattle industry. Go to the Northern Territory and have a look at the flow down for the cattle industry and the crash in prices because of your response of cutting off the supply to Indonesia. What sort of relationship did that help build with our nearest neighbour? You did that, and Prime Minister Abbott has honoured his word to go to Indonesia as his first port of call.

I would like a dollar for every time Prime Minister Abbott said before the election, 'Our first piece of legislation will be to abolish Labor's carbon tax.' What has been introduced in the other place, the House of Representatives, today? Legislation to clean up this tax that you said you were never going to bring in. Remember what Julia Gillard, the former Prime Minister, said prior to the 2010 election? She said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' She was backed up by the then Treasurer, Mr Wayne Maxwell Swan, who was talking about 'this hysterical idea out there that we will introduce some carbon tax'. We have immediately honoured our promise that the first piece of legislation would be to repeal that tax.

We know the Labor Party's history on border protection. The then Prime Minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, did away with the very effective border protection policies of the Howard era, only to see more than 50,000 people arrive here at a cost of billions upon billions of dollars to the taxpayer and, sadly, more than 1,100 lives. In the 51 days before the election on 7 September we saw the thousands of people arriving on boats. We have seen a 76 per cent reduction in that number, as my colleague Senator Cash said in the answer to a question today.

Now we get to the budget. People like Senator Conroy may not be aware of it, but the Treasurer, Mr Joe Hockey, has not delivered a budget. That will come next May. We inherited your financial mess. The Labor Party leaving a legacy of a financial mess is part of your DNA. I have said that here before—and I see Senator Conroy is nodding his head, agreeing with me. Perhaps it is all about the five per cent rollout of the National Broadband Network over five years—one per cent a year at a cost of billions. At that rate it will be rolled out in a hundred years. Good luck to future generations who might have benefited from Senator Conroy's NBN, but the plan is for a 100-year rollout at the cost of who knows what—ninety-six hundred billion dollars? We have inherited your financial mess.

In the late eighties to early nineties, the state of Victoria was sent broke under a Labor government. The states of South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania were the same. The so-called 'world's greatest treasurer', Mr Paul Keating, was sending this place into financial borrowing and debt. It is part of your DNA. We inherit the financial mess and we have to make the hard decisions to clean it up. Prior to the election, former Treasurer Mr Swan said on radio, 'The debt limit is going to extend past $300 billion.' But you did not put that in your budget legislation. 'That will be someone else's problem,' Mr Swan said. 'We've just blown the budget, let someone else clean up the mess.' This is what you are about.

You are saying that the Abbott coalition government is not keeping its word. You are wrong. The Prime Minister has kept his word on his first visit to Indonesia. He has kept his word on the first piece of legislation to abolish the stupid carbon tax—the very tax that will take our emissions from 578 million tonnes last year up to 637 million tonnes by 2020. Emissions would be up by tens of thousands of millions of tonnes, and you say the carbon tax is working. Senator Milne is also saying that this is what causes typhoons. Your policy is wrong. We are here to clean up your mess, and that is exactly what this government will do. We will clean up your financial mess, honour our promises and build a better future for all Australians, because that is what government is about—protecting the future of Australians. (Time expired)

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion that the Senate take note of answers given today in question time. This was the first question time in the Senate for this new government. It was the first time that opposition senators have had the chance to ask legitimate questions of the government. This is an important part of the operation of the parliament, and I am pleased that young people are sitting in the gallery and will understand why we have question time. The purpose of question time is to provide the opportunity for questions to be asked, so that the community can better understand what their government intends to do and what their plans for Australia might be. It is also an opportunity for the opposition to undertake a very important part of parliament's role, and that is to provide scrutiny of the government of the day.

Today's question time fell very far short of meeting that benchmark. We had questions of Senator Abetz that went to the fairness of superannuation charges. Was it fair that 16,000 Australians will in fact be richer as a result of this government's changes? The 3.6 million people are people who are on very low incomes in this country—under $36,000—and the 16,000 people who will get more money under this government are millionaires. They are people with millions of dollars in their superannuation funds. Did we get an answer? I did not see one. I did not get an answer about fairness to that question.

The second question that Senator Wong asked of Senator Abetz was to give an assurance to the Senate that there will be no cuts to education and health over the term of this government, and we got those very interestingly selected words 'every intention'. That will give no comfort to people in Australia who are planning for the education of their children or who are thinking about the provision of health care to their families, and to their children in particular. The government have 'every intention', hand on heart. Well, I am sorry: you need a lot more than that to make Australians feel confident that the programs that were put in place under the good Labor government policies will be delivered.

But then we got to the final question of today, where Senator Cash was asked by Senator Sterle about a boat in Darwin: was there a boat in Darwin Harbour? We got a lot of words but we got no reference at all to whether or not there was an asylum seeker vessel in Darwin Harbour that she could respond to as part of the role of question time to provide clarity about what is happening. So the theme that is developing is one of secrecy—a theme of limited disclosure of information and selective sharing of what is happening out there. What we saw today was avoidance, rhetoric and a lot of bluster—a lot of non-telling of the answers to questions that we asked.

We have two things happening at the moment. We have, on the one hand, this commission of audit. I am from Queensland. I have heard about commissions of audit before. We have had a commission of audit in Queensland, and that saw deep, deep cuts to both our health sector and our education sector—deep cuts right across the state. We were told that no front-line services would be touched. Doctors and nurses were cut out of hospitals right across the state. Mental health workers in Cape York Peninsula lost their jobs; they were not 'front-line workers'! I do not know how much more front-line you can get than providing mental health services in Cape York Peninsula. So we know what a commission of audit will do, and I say to Australians: look to Queensland, because that is what you can expect out of this commission of audit. At the same time, we have the speech last week from Maurice Newman, chairman of the Business Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, who tilled a field to say that we need to wind back the costs of need-based funding and—this is close to my heart—DisabilityCare Australia. We are watching. (Time expired)

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

Poor old Senator McLucas—trying her very best there to confect up a great furore of concern about what is going on. But this government is not going to play the class warfare game, and we are committed to assisting low-income workers across the board by reducing the tax burden for them.

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

By reducing their income.

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

We will be retaining the current tax threshold, Senator Conroy, and that means that any person in Australia will earn $20,500 a year on which they pay no net tax whatsoever. The rest of it, of course, is trying to fix the mess that we have been left by the Gillard-Rudd government. On the confected concerns that the Labor opposition has regarding the fact that we will not be taxing people who earn more than $100,000 a year on their superannuation, that is because the bill that the past Labor government put through is unworkable—undoable. It cannot be done. If it were in fact to be done, it would be at such a huge expense to the system that it would cost more to administer than it would reap. Of course, that is not something new or different for this Labor opposition—the fact that it was very good at putting through legislation where what it got back was less than what went out. That is clear in many of the bills that it put through. The other issue is that we, through our paid parental leave, will be increasing the amount of superannuation that parents, and particularly women, will receive over their lifetime. The miserable little Paid Parental Leave scheme that the opposition put through does not include superannuation.

Most important, when we get down to the concerns of the government for families and low-income earners compared to those of the opposition, is the question of the carbon tax and the effect that that has on families. If you look at it, households in Australia will save an average of $550 a year when the carbon tax is abolished. But, of course, again we have to rely on the Labor-Greens coalition to behave (a) as the Australian people asked and (b) as the Australian economy requires to get the system through.

It was quite amusing to listen to the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Senator Wong, talk about low-doc loans. My god! If any government ever tried to fix up and con its way through a system, it was the past Rudd-Gillard government. But we are not going to play the game that Senator McLucas seems to need to be played, whereby there is an announcement every 20 minutes about something or other. We are going to methodically, seriously and calmly go about fixing the economy, and we will do that by including things like lifting the current deficit level to $500 billion, because that is what we need it to be to deal with the problems that have been left for us by the Labor opposition. There is no way that we can continue with the unfunded, unaffordable propositions that the previous government put together. When we are in a stronger budget position, as we have outlined, we will proceed to undertake whatever we can to assist people. To suggest that a commission of audit is in some way a cuts mission is just ridiculous and typical of the Labor opposition.

Productivity is never going to go out of fashion. The amount of money that this government will invest in health and education will be the same. Is the Labor opposition seriously suggesting that what we should be doing is just leaving money inefficiently where they put it so that cuts do not happen in particular small programs? (Time expired)

Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of answers given by Minister Abetz to questions asked by Senator Wong on the government's plans to scrap the low-income superannuation co-contribution. This nasty measure will affect over 3.6 million low-paid Australians. Sales assistants, cleaners, food and hospitality workers, carers and labourers as well as nearly all part-time workers are in this conservative government's firing line. They are in the firing line, despite comments from the Prime Minister after the election of 'no adverse changes to Australia's superannuation system'. On 26 September, just a week after being sworn in, Mr Abbott made the pledge:

The assurance that I give the superannuants and the superannuation savers of Australia is there has been no adverse changes to their superannuation arrangements under this government.

Yes, the new Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, assured the Australian people just a week after being sworn in that there would be no adverse changes to their superannuation. He just forgot about the 3.6 million Australians that he planned to slug by removing their tax rebate on their superannuation savings. Barely one week into his term of supposedly governing for all Australians, the Prime Minister simply forgot about the lowest-paid workers in our community, forgot about his plans to end the much needed boost to the superannuation savings of low-paid Australians. This boost enables workers to save an extra few dollars a week for their retirement, and without such an incentive most could not afford to do so.

Yesterday the backpedalling was in full flight. The Prime Minister's previous assurance of 'no adverse changes' was replaced with a guarantee of 'no negative unexpected changes' in the Governor-General's address. Yes, low-paid Australians now have to cop it sweet that this conservative government will be making changes to the superannuation system. This conservative government, who so espouse the virtue of private individuals supporting themselves and caring for oneself in retirement, are so willing to bluntly pull the rug from under low-paid Australians and slap them with this unfair tax, a tax that penalises one section of the workforce—our lowest-paid workers—for saving for their retirement. These workers will receive no tax break on their contributions, paying more tax than if the money were part of their take-home pay. This regressive slug typifies the new brand of class warfare those opposite plan to wage on our working Australians.

The conservative government will scrap Labor's 15 per cent concessional tax rate on earnings above $100,000 in superannuation income streams. This measure that sought to level the playing field in superannuation would affect only about 16,000 people with superannuation assets typically over $2 million. They will of course maintain their generous 30 per cent tax concessions on the super contributions of high-income Australians. This is an unjust policy that typifies the class warfare that the new conservative government seek to wage on our low-paid Australians and workers more generally.

It is a policy that in particular hurts working women hard. Around 2.1 million of the affected workers are working women. We all know that female workers face many other barriers to saving for their retirement. Women continue to be paid, on average, four-fifths of their male counterparts. Women face more breaks from the workforce. They continue to be overrepresented in lower-paid industries where their wages are suppressed because the work is seen as 'women's work'. A significant percentage of low-paid working women are mothers working part time while looking after young children. This is exactly the part of a woman's career where an additional $500 a year will be of most benefit in building savings, and yet this conservative government are quite content to penalise those low-paid workers, the overwhelming majority of whom are women, to provide tax cuts for those who need it the least.

It is obvious from the answers provided today that tax concessions are fine for the haves but too onerous on the budget bottom line to be extended to low-paid Australians who need them most. I call on the government to listen to the community, to listen to the experts and not to proceed with this regressive class warfare. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.