Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

Labor will not be supporting this Greens amendment. Labor has a strong record of increasing workforce participation for older Australians. When we were in government Labor introduced measures including the productivity ageing package, which provided additional training and financial incentives for employers hiring older Australians. The previous Labor government also commenced the phase-out of the mature age worker tax offset—MAWTO—in the 2012-13 budget, limiting it to taxpayers born before 1 July1957. That measure had an estimated $255 million gain to revenue over the then forward estimates period.

This reform implemented a recommendation from the Henry review, Australia's Future Tax System, and built on Labor's growing record of tax reform. At the time, the then Labor government stated:

The MAWTO is a high cost method of facilitating mature age workforce participation. The Government will be investing in better targeted workforce participation programs.

The mature age worker tax offset is regressive and is not an effective way of encouraging older people into the workforce. Encouraging mature age workers to participate in the workforce can be done more effectively through direct payments or incentives. The Labor government planned these savings in order to be able to redirect support to better targeted mature age employment initiatives in order to give mature aged workers the greatest opportunity possible to secure and retain work if they wish.

In keeping with those plans, the government claims to have replaced the mature age worker tax offset with the restart program. This program will make a payment of up to $10,000 available to employers who hire a mature age job seeker 50 or over who has been receiving income support for at least six months. When initiated by Labor, some of the measures the savings were linked to included the National Workforce Development Fund to provide additional support to mature age workers and mature age participation through job seeker assistance and the Economic Potential of Senior Australians package of measures.

So it is for those reasons that Labor will not be supporting this amendment.