Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Pursuant to order I present the report of the select committee's inquiry into the Abbott government's Commission of Audit, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I seek leave to speak to the report.

Leave granted.

This inquiry was timely because there was intense public interest in the budget and in the work of the commissioners, particularly because of what it meant for the future of the country. I would like to thank the committee for a very broad-ranging inquiry that covered many aspects of the Australian economy and society. I would like to give special thanks to the deputy chair, Senator Lundy, and to the secretary, Lyn Beverley, for their hard work in making the final report of this inquiry that we are tabling today such a timely and comprehensive document.

Our inquiry was able to take a detailed look at the workings of the Commission of Audit. We examined their terms of reference and questioned many of the underlying assumptions that they were working towards. We heard from experts about the true state of the national economy. We looked at the effect of the commission's recommendations on health and welfare and on employment. We looked at alternatives to the many cuts that were recommended, including examining Australia's overgenerous use of tax concessions.

There is very little doubt that the Commission of Audit report had a very significant influence on the federal budget. Not every recommendation found its way into the federal budget—which is really not surprising, when you consider how radical some of their proposals were. But what is surprising is that in some cases the response to the commission of audit from the government went even further than the commissioners recommended.

Mr Hockey says that criticism of his budget is political in nature, and he is right, because politics is a contest of ideas. It is about priorities. It is about whether we want to live in a caring and compassionate country or a cruel and harsh one. Politics forces us to make decisions about what we think is fair and decent. So, yes, Mr Hockey, our criticism of the budget is intensely political—and rightly so.

Mr Hockey slams criticism of his budget as class warfare—then, in the same breath, he tells average Australians that they work for over one month each year to support welfare recipients. The hypocrisy of that is simply breathtaking. The very definition of class warfare is perpetuating the myth that hardworking Australians are having their taxes wasted on dole bludgers and no-hopers. We know from the work of the committee that is a lie: the vast majority of Australians get much more out of the tax system than they put in. We get it in the form of health care, education, income support, the roads we drive on and so on. We also learnt that most of what people work towards, through their taxes, is not paying for dole bludgers—it is actually paying for assistance for older people. In other words, people work hard to contribute to their retirement and the retirement of their co-workers.

It is true, though, that some high-income earners do contribute more to the system. But it is also important to remember that many professionals—people like myself: doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, dentists—have managed to achieve high incomes in large part because we received a taxpayer funded university education. We were beneficiaries of the system. As a medical student, I was lucky enough to get a taxpayer funded education. I was also lucky enough to get into a decent hospital training program. After that, working as a GP, I was able to get income thanks to Medicare. It was not my hard work that made those conditions possible; I was the beneficiary of the tax system. Without that, I would not have been able to achieve the things I have. As a result of that, I also have a responsibility to make a contribution and help those people on lower incomes who did not get the same start that I had—a stable home environment, a decent school, some good luck; all of those things. That is why I, like many other Australians, want to make sure that we do contribute so that people who do not have the same luck, the same start in life, might get the opportunities that mean even they could one day become a dentist, a lawyer, a pharmacist and so on.

It is convenient, and we saw this through the Commission of Audit work, to foster resentment about paying tax. You create an environment where you can slash services. Terms like 'great big new tax' and the like demonise the fact that we need to collect tax for things like health care, education, disability support, transport and so on. That taxation is the price we pay for a fair and decent society.

One of the things the report did was look in detail at the issue of tax concessions. Look at the language Mr Hockey uses: he talks about lifters and leaners; he talks about making sure we end the culture of entitlement. What we learnt was that Australia is one of the most generous countries in the world when it comes to providing tax handouts to the big end of town. Mr Hockey will not say that the average worker has to spend weeks to fund tax concessions and subsidies like fossil fuel subsidies in the form of the diesel fuel rebate or other subsidies for superannuation, private health insurance and so on. The bulk of these benefit people on high incomes. Why is it that the average Australian should pay for the cheap fuel of the mining industry—an industry that has made massive profits, most of which go offshore? Why should you slug ordinary Australians? Why is it most Australians have to work to pay for the massive superannuation tax concessions? I think it was former Liberal leader John Hewson who said this was one of the areas the government should be focusing on, and recommended that to the Commission of Audit. He says we are approaching $150 billion in super tax concessions, most of which go to the wealthy. Through this committee process, people were able to learn about the huge handouts that go to the big end of town and the priorities of both the commissioners and the government in framing their budget.

What was very clear is that—rather than picking on young kids who are doing their best to get a job and are now going to be cut off from income support, and will struggle to feed and clothe themselves; or the single mother whose tax support will be cut; or the pensioner with a chronic disease who will face huge out-of-pocket health care costs—there was an opportunity for the commissioners and the government to start looking at addressing the real age of entitlement, and that is the entitlement that exists at the big end of town. It is true that there is some heavy lifting going on there—but there is a hell of a lot of leaning, too.

The report does not say that all of these tax concessions and subsidies should be removed tomorrow. What it does say is that we need to have an open, frank and factual debate about these huge tax concessions. We need to look at whether we really want to target the poor, the sick and the vulnerable or whether we want to target those who can afford to do a little bit more of the heavy lifting, and truly end the age of entitlement.