Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

A very good reform, as the Treasurer points out. A couple could have $294,000 of additional assets. These are very practical measures which help our older Australians. Let us just have a look at how much they could earn today before they pay tax. As a result of the senior Australians tax offset these Australians pay no tax up to an annual income for a single person of $25,867 and $43,360 for a pensioner couple. That is as a result of the initiatives of the Howard government and good economic management. That is not unlike the average Australian family. The average Australian family with two children pays no net tax today before $50,800 of income. That is an unbelievable achievement when you consider that, just a short 11 years ago, for every dollar earned over $50,000 they were paying 48½c in the dollar.

I am asked if there are any risks to this and if this is under threat. The reality is that you cannot provide the bounty of this nation to our older Australians if you run deficits. The opposition ran deficits on nine out of the 13 occasions they had the opportunity to sit here on the Treasury benches. They continued to run up debt. They did not reward older Australians in this country for the contribution they had made in tougher times to this nation’s wellbeing.

I guess you do not think too much about older Australians on those incomes if you really genuinely believe that someone on over $200,000 is a struggler, as the Courier Mail reported on 30 April. The article says:

Households earning more than $200,000 a year have been identified as Kevin Rudd’s “strugglers” and will carry him to electoral victory.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition: what about the pensioners? What about the self-funded retirees? What about the bonus the Howard government has just been able to deliver them so they can also benefit from these measures? I remind the member for Melbourne and all of our senior Australians, as we have not had a clarification at this point, of what he said in this place when last in government:

We should have an inheritance tax or some tax of that nature.

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