Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I hear the member for Moreton interject, and I'm pleased. I actually did give him permission to interject, which was a little bit silly on my part, but I'm always happy for the member for Moreton to try to contribute to the debate, and I'll be interested to hear what he has to say later. But we have seen, over the 18 or 20 months of this government so far, the amount of personal income tax collected by this government grow by 27 per cent. That has been in large part driven by the removal of the low- and middle-income tax offset. While they're talking about 15 bucks a week over there, they've forgotten to mention they took away the low- and middle-income tax offset. Real net disposable income per person has fallen by some 8.6 per cent. On average, that represents a $150 a week fall in real, net disposable income. The trade-off the government is waxing lyrical about is, 'Oh, well, your position is $150 a week worse off, so we'll give you 15 bucks a week back.' Wow! That's very generous! It's extraordinarily generous of those opposite to make people $150 a week worse off and give back $15.

As I've said many times in this place—and we can go through the long list of broken promises by this government—never listen to what the Labor Party say; look at what they do. Nine times out of 10, they are two completely and utterly different things, and the second one will always make you worse off. We've seen people in real terms about $8,000 a year worse off. But that's before we get to mortgage payments. They're paying on average an extra $24,000 a year in interest out of after-tax income. That doesn't include the capital payments on top of that.

So, if we think that, on average, people are $32,000 a year worse off in total—$600 a week—and those opposite, out of the generosity of their heart, are giving people an extra $15 a week, then: wow. I think that's an extraordinary amount of hubris on their part, to say, 'Well, look how good we are, giving you $15 a week,' when in real terms you're actually $600 a week worse off per year. It's a disgrace. And the government has no answers to this problem. They haven't had any for 18 months. In their current economic plans—which are none—they've demonstrated no capacity to deal with any of the real issues facing the Australian people, and it's about time they started to deal with those issues properly.

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