Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I am so sorry, deputy chair, and I would hardly refer to you as the member for Solomon. You are nothing like the member for Solomon. Thank God for you, is all I can say.

This bill is because the Prime Minister wanted us to share the burden, somehow or another. He said:

What I don't want is for a pensioner to be able to look me in the eye and say 'I'm bearing pain and you're not,' because it's got to be fair.

Then he says

We will do it in ways which are fair, which are equitable, and which I believe will be seen to be fair by the Australian people.

Well, on any judgement, this piece of legislation and the budget that it is part of tell us very clearly that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and his accomplices on the front bench, and all the backbench supporters of them, are telling the Australian people one thing before the election, something after, and doing something which is very inequitable and totally unfair to the Australian community. It is based on a farrago of absolute lies, that somehow or another we are in some sort of budget crisis—which of course we are not—and on the premise that the people who need to pay are those who can least afford to pay. That is what the budget and this piece of legislation epitomise.

We know what the Prime Minister said before the election because he said it on a number of occasions. On one occasion he said:

There is one fundamental message that we want to go out from this place to every nook and cranny in our country: there should be no new tax collection without an election.

He said this in August 2011 when he was speaking at an anti-carbon tax rally. I wonder which rally that was. I can just see the placards behind him. Can you? The imagery is therefore ever. That is the sort of Prime Minister we have got leading this country. He gets up in front of a rally and says there should be no new taxes unless there is an election, goes to an election telling the Australian people there will be no new taxes, and then immediately introduces a suite of new taxes and charges.

We in the Labor Party believe in progressive taxation. We are not unhappy about supporting this particular element. But why is it only temporary? All the other measures in the budget bills are permanent. This is a temporary levy so that the Prime Minister can look pensioners in the eye and say, 'I'm temporarily doing my share—and, by the way, on my 500 grand a year it's going to cost me what? Five per cent?' Five per cent of 500 grand a year? Give me a break! What reasonable person could say that is a fair way of dealing with the Australian community.

We know what happens when we go into the other measures in this budget. NATSEM modelling shows that families with children, those in the richest 20 per cent, see a reduction of 0.3 per cent in their disposable incomes. Those richest people in the country will pay 0.3 per cent; the poorest 20 per cent in the community will see a reduction in their incomes of five per cent. How is that equitable? How can the Prime Minister look people in the eye—as he said he would—and say: 'I am going to be doing my fair share.' He is not doing his fair share, and he is making it very clear to the Australian community he does not care how they feel nor what travesty he is perpetrating upon them as a result of this budget. They know; they are not silly. The member for Solomon scurried out of here with some excuse of chairing a committee but let me tell her and every other member opposite: the people in your communities know what is going on. They have worked you out. They have worked out the Prime Minister; they have worked out the Treasurer; and they have worked you out. You know precisely what is happening in your communities and you know that they are saying this is a very unpopular budget. They are saying this is a very unfair way of dealing with the Australian community.

My electorate, Lingiari, is among the poorest in the country. It also has one of the highest costs of living in Australia. It is bad enough to tell fibs and lies to the Australian people but it is even worse to take actions that are cruelly unfair—actions that will have a devastating impact on household budgets. Let us just go for a moment to families. Prime Minister Abbott said in 2011:

A dumb way to cut spending would be to threaten family benefits or to means test them further.

And in Our Plan: Real Solutions for All Australiansremember that great tome?—he said:

We pledge to the families of Australia we will never make your lives harder by imposing needless new taxes.

In 2013 he said:

I absolutely guarantee to the Australian people, absolutely guarantee to the Australian people, that the tax burden will be less under a coalition government.

Let us make it very clear: there are 10,487 Lingiari families in receipt of family tax benefit B. Under Labor, these families received the benefit until their children turned 16. Now, under this government, those families will be cut off from family tax benefit part B when the youngest child turns six. This cut on its own—on its own—will leave one child families $2,268 a year worse off. If they have two children they will be worse off by $5,000 a year. These are families who are struggling to make ends meet.

It gets worse. They will also lose the schoolkids bonus; it is no longer going to be paid to them. They will be paying $7 when they visit a GP. It has become very clear over the last couple of days through the comments of the health minister, the Treasurer and the Prime Minister that this is really a demand reduction strategy. This is about trying to turn people away from the health system. It is going to do that—but it will not be the likes of me or the minister opposite who will not go to a doctor, because we can put our hands into our pockets. It will not be him, or me, or any of the other members of this parliament who will not be able to afford to take their children to a doctor, get medicines for their children, send them to get a pathology test or get them X-rayed. It will not be us. It will be those poor blighters who are the poorest in the country. They are the ones. We know from people involved in medicine around this country that people are already making a judgement about not going to see a doctor when they need to see a doctor. How is that in the interests of this nation?

What this tells us is this government's short-term political fix is belting Australian families when there is no need to do so. It is going to determine for many whether or not they go and get a check-up, whether or not they take preventive health measures and whether or not they live longer. It is as basic as that. Yet this government stands up proudly and says: 'This is a fair budget for all these reasons'—all of which we have exposed as blarney. The people who are going to suffer are the people who are least able to afford to do the things they need to do: put bread in their children's mouths and go to a doctor. When they get slugged for fuel for their family car in a constituency like mine, where fuel prices are on average 22c a litre higher than the national average, it has a compounding impact. One thing I will say about this budget, which is clear to all Australians now, is that the government has no comprehension—none at all—of the impact this will have on people living in regional and remote Australia. Tony Abbott is using this budget and this bill as a smokescreen to hide the real extent of the cruelties he is inflicting on battling families. Families in Lingiari are going to have their own budgets savagely cut as a result of Mr Abbott's mean, brutal attitude towards them and the community.

And what about pensioners? They have talked about looking pensioners in the eye. We have had the minister responsible getting up here in the chamber and saying: 'They will still be getting their increase in pensions twice yearly.' We all know that; pensioners know that. But they also know that the indexation rate will change and, over time, their incomes will fall. They are not silly. How can the Prime Minister look them in the eye and pay his 0.3 per cent? I think it ends up costing him five grand out of $500,000. How can he look them squarely in the eye, the pensioners of this country, and say this is somehow fair? They are not silly.

We had the whole debate about the indexation rates of military pensions. Do you remember it? They indexed them at the same rate as that of other pensioners around the country then, not three months later, they cut the pension rate. Service pensioners, prior to the last election, were being led to believe that somehow or other this government was going to do them a great favour. What this government has done is told them it has sold them down the river. What this government has told them, by its very actions, is that their pensions are going to be affected in precisely the same way as the pensions of all other Australians. We will oppose this cruel tax on the standard of living of 3.2 million Australian pensioners. Fifteen thousand of them live in my electorate and I know what they want me to do in this place: they want me to speak up on their behalf. The member for Solomon has gone. The pensioners in her electorate and in every other electorate of government members want to know what they are doing to protect their interests. They know precisely what you are doing—sweet nothing.

That I think epitomises the concern we have about this budget and its attitude to carers and job seekers. It was pathetic the way in which the minister responsible said it is okay for people under 30 to be penalised in the way they are proposing to penalise them because they should be working or earning even in places where there is no prospect of a job or no prospect of any training. What is going on in this country when we have this government introduce this legislation trying to tell the Australian people that somehow the rich buggers are suffering some sort of penalty and it is fair? It ain't fair. It ain't reasonable. The Australian community will cast their judgement. If the Prime Minister has the gall and the guts to come into this place and say, 'We really do want an election over it,' then let us have it, let us call it on. (Time expired)

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