Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I like the member for Wakefield. I am always glad when I am in here with him, but he said that the member for Forde had bored him to death when the member for Forde spoke to the bill—he understood exactly what the bill was about and had reasoned debate about the bill. We also sat here as the member for Wakefield did his best impersonation of the member for Shortland—15 minutes of fill; 'Can we get through to half past six so we can all go to dinner?' That is what the member for Wakefield did. No-one in this country is any wiser after those 15 minutes. I would rather put out cigarettes on my eyes than go through that again.

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Family Payments Structural Reform and Participation Measures) Bill (No. 2) 2015. The package includes increasing family tax benefit part A fortnightly rates by about $10 for each FTB child in the family up to the age of 19. It also seeks to amend the rules and introduce a new rate structure for FTB part B and to phase out the FTB part A and part B supplements. These are the changes we are making but in my contribution today I would like to concentrate on supporting the notion that governments must live within their means. I see no better example of where governments can do this than our work on the family tax system. This is the part of our social security system that people in my electorate raise with me most regularly. Those who have it do not want to lose it or have it changed and those who have never got it cannot see the sense in it. This is one of the reasons I came to this place. The reforms in this package must be at the forefront of any message we as parliamentarians—not just in the Liberal Party or the LNP—send to our constituents when it comes to living within our means.

The family tax benefits scheme, which we are dealing with here, was a Howard government initiative. It was his government's way of saying thank you to the people who had done the hard yards when it came to repaying the $96 billion Labor black hole from the Keating period. These are the families who backed the Howard government when it came to the introduction of the GST. These are the people who went about their work and did the heavy lifting to get the budget back into surplus. We need their help again.

Whilst we have an economy that remains in good shape we have a country that seems down on confidence as we transition from the construction phase and the mining boom. My city of Townsville is a prime example of that. We also see a budget that is under great strain and we have structural issues around this budget that must be addressed. And this is part of it.

Just like every family, government should live within its means. There are times when you will spend more than you earn. For those of us who have children, you know what I am talking about. The member for Wakefield spoke about being brought up in a single-parent family. I was a single parent for a very short time myself and when I remarried we had a child straight away, so we had an extended period where we only had one income. I understand. It hurts. It does not matter what your suburb is, it hurts. For government, the first stimulus package when the GFC hit is a prime example of spending more than you receive but for a purpose. We spent more than we earned but it was for a good reason. Now, however, we need to get our budget back in order.

I do not want to oversimplify the issue. Our budget is a very big deal and incredibly complicated. But we also have an opposition that talks a good game, when it comes to savings measures, but it opposes just about everything we do to bring order back into the system. Here is a prime example: all of us, here, want the budget to be in order or, at least, we should. I discount the Greens and the crossbenchers. They do not, really, have a role here. But there are two sides of this parliament who get control of the Treasury benches. They are the ones who believe, in the long term, that you should live within your means and grow in the term of the cycle.

We all understand that we have philosophical differences on how to get our budget back into order. That is the nature of the place and that is the system of our politics. That is why people change governments, from time to time. But when you win an election with one of your four key pillar promises being to fix the budget mess, you should not be unduly hindered in your work to do just that. Let the people decide what sort of job we do—not the Senate.

This is the central issue in the debate today. We were elected to fix the budget. To that end, there are two sides to any budget—be it a multinational conglomerate, a small business, a family, a P&C or a single person. There are just two sides to your budget that need to be addressed: you have income and you have expenditure. That is all. Anyone in business will tell you that the only thing you can control is your expenditure. What we are trying to address, here, is sustainability of support now and into the future. Budget repair is vital.

Getting people ready to work and supporting them in that pursuit is also vital. This bill works alongside our $3 billion Jobs for Families and childcare package. I understand the other side has a philosophical bent against this but, gee, we won the election, guys, and you should be prepared to back us on that. There are those who believe that the family is sacrosanct and should be supported. There is certainly a case for that. But, at the end of the day, what we as the government must do is use our best judgement. We earned the trust placed in us by the people of Australia to right this ship and get it heading in the right direction. We deserve to exercise that right. What we as a generation must do is decide if we are to be the ones who draw the line in the sand and say, 'We can fix this. This is our job.' Or do we just continue down the path of borrowing each and every day and run programs that allow people to not work or participate in our society?

From my perspective, just because the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard governments drove down the road handing out cash to everyone—for everything—it does not mean we should, could, or even can do the same. We speak a lot about the lives we want to make for our children, the next generation. We can start with this. Our system of social security benefits and family payments has become a nightmare for all who try to navigate the system. As a one-time participant in this, it is an absolute nightmare. All of us in our electoral offices are besieged by people with problems with this system. The poor men and women at Centrelink are continually challenged to explain our latest manifestation of the social security system to a population who just stand there, with their eyes glazed over, getting more and more confused by this system. The money handed out through the social security system is taxpayers' money. It is not earned by the recipients. It is not free.

Since being elected, the word I have come to hate the most is the word 'free'. It drives me deadset batty. We want free internet. We want free education. We want free health. We want free access to roads and bridges. We want it all for free. But nothing is free. Even our opinions come at a cost to the education system. It all costs cold hard taxpayers' cash. The cost of our social security system is over $150 billion each and every year—and growing. And I am using round figures, here.

The average Australian wage in 2015 was $74,724. That means that our social security budget is more than two million times that of the average wage. That is every year! The biggest ever Australian Lotto jackpot was $80 million. Our social security budget is 1,875 times larger than our biggest ever Lotto win. That means that if you were lucky enough to win $80 million in the Lotto each and every week you would have to do it 1,875 times—in a row—to get one year's social security payment. That is more than 36 years of winning the Lotto—at $80 million a week—to equal one year's social security. And that is just this year. We, simply, have to do better or we will lose this fight.

I have three children. My eldest is telling me that she is not really interested in superannuation or social security. Her reasoning is that no matter which side is in power, eventually, we will just see it as a big bucket of money and tax the living daylights out of it. She is 22

When I was 22 I reasoned that by the time I was 65 there would be no pension, and superannuation was vital. It looks like I might be wrong on the prediction about the pension, but I was right on superannuation: it is vital. But the message we have got from people out there who should be interested in this thing is that it is all too much. We have made everything so complicated and so overwhelming for people. It is time to send the basic message from government that we can live within our means.

We are not helping anyone by deferring the decisions on our budget's sustainability. If we lose our ability to run our own budget, the ability to run the country is lost soon after. That is a long way down the track, so I do not want to sound alarmist here. But it takes a long time to turn a big ship around. It will take hard work as well.

What we are after here is a change in the mix and the reason for people receiving the benefit. What we are after here is participation in the workforce. That is why the payment system must be addressed. That is why we need to look at how we, as a government, do business and work our capital. We should be asking ourselves these questions every day: are we doing everything we can to get people in work; are we working government capital hard enough; is this capital washing through or is it just some levels of our economy which are getting the benefits?

These are the areas on which we must focus. These are the areas we need to address if we are to live within our means. Saying it is too hard is too easy. You will see the other side continually say that they are for working families and it is all too hard and we have got to find other areas and we will put it off and it will be a tobacco-excise-led recovery and all that sort of stuff that they will go on. At the end of the day you have to pony up and make the decisions. Telling each other that others can pay and that it is all right for you to keep on getting it but somebody else can pay is all so easy. What is hard is standing up and saying that we are all part of the answer. We can all be part of the solution, but it will mean that we have to make decisions. The hard part about making decisions is that some will not be happy with the outcome.

The family tax benefit scheme was a fantastic way of saying thank you to families who stood with John Howard and his government and did the hard yards from 1996 to 2007. In those days our government was assisted with rising terms of trade and the first mining boom. We had rivers of gold coming into this place. We have a different set of circumstances today and we must recognise this and act accordingly. This is where the hard work must be directed.

These changes are necessary. These changes are fair. They recognise where we are in the economic cycle. They encourage participation in the workforce. They are, to me, a good start.

Before I commend the bill to the House, I would just like to make one final point. Yesterday on one of these other social security measures we had the member for Denison and the member for Melbourne divide on a bill that had bipartisan support. We divided on saving $40 million out of the social security budget over the forward estimates. That is $10 million a year that they were prepared to say is too much out of a budget of around $160 billion. That is what the crossbenchers are up to here. It is the ultimate in populism to sit there and say, 'We voted against it because we think everything's fine, and if we could just get multinationals to pay an extra $2 billion everyone would be okay.' The numbers are a lot bigger than that and a lot tougher than that, and if we do not start the work it will never get done. If we keep on passing the buck to the next parliament it will never get done. This is a good start, and I commend the bill to the House.

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