Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Chair, and for your protection. As I have said in the previous contributions, we have increased payments, including for those on JobSeeker, including for those on parenting payments single and including for those who are in receipt of rental assistance. We have also taken a number of other steps that interact with the payment system. Our Medicare bulk-billing, for example, was targeted to people on concession cards and those under the age of 16 until we made it broadly more applicable. To make medicines cheaper for people on concession cards, they were capped at $7.70 for the next few years. These are all steps that we have taken to provide support. Energy bill relief, including an extra payment that went to those on concessions, was recognising that people on fixed and low incomes require additional cost-of-living support, and we have provided it. As I said, we will continue to look at payments, as we do every budget. They are appropriately indexed so that when there are periods of higher inflation, that is dealt with through the way we index those payments.

I don't accept the analysis put forward by Senator Allman-Payne in any way. The reality is the Greens political party don't ever have to make choices; you just have a list of demands. You are a party of protest, and you come in here and exercise that protest on the floor of the chamber. But the reality is that you don't not have to think about the broader decisions that go into making a budget.

That's fine, but I am making a different point. The point I'm making is that when we are looking at some of the changes to social security, including adequacy of payments, we don't do it by a Greens amendment on the floor of the Senate; we do it through a budget process. That's what parties of government have to do, because, at the end of the day, they have to work out how you meet competing and different priorities. Whether it be national security and defence, which I know you would ignore and think is not a priority, whether it's dealing with pressure in the education system, whether it's dealing with pressure on hospitals, whether it's dealing with pressure on payments, whether it's dealing with pressure on the energy system, across the board those are the decisions we have to make when we put a budget together.

I know you would like to make it sound that you could just stop that, triple that, end defence spending and have everyone be happy, but the reality is that that is not the world that we are living in. It might be a Greens fantasy world, but it isn't the real world. The parties of government that sit in this chamber have to deal with the real world. You can scoff, Senator Allman-Payne. You can scoff and you can ignore reality and live in Greens fairy land, but we will govern from the real world.