Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

It was an interesting question time. There was a general theme. We went from the widows tax to auction clearances to how we're treating our ageing in this country, because they're all very key issues. It was an interesting response from the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Wong, when she sat there and she argued the point that we're not arguing about the taxes anymore. We've moved on. We're now talking about other aspects of what we're talking about. That is because that argument is one and done. Aspiration in this country is dead, buried and cremated. It's gone. All of Australia knows it. Don't try too hard, because you're not going to get there anymore, so just give up. What this government's tax package is saying is: 'Give up, go home, earn a wage, work for a good corporation, find a nice superannuation owned company, go and work for them under their IR laws and go home, if you can afford one.' We had to get confirmation the other day that we're not taxing car sales anymore, because let's face it—the way homelessness is going, cars will be homes later.

But we went back to the widow tax because what we passed in this chamber was not legislation that was fit for purpose. They've admitted it needs to be changed. The widow and widower tax is as follows. If your partner dies, it creates a capital gains thing where your property that you may have owned together, CGT exempt, is now CGT liable. You may have to pay tax on the capital gains of properties because you become a widow or a widower. It's the same for divorce. Imagine that. Imagine going through an emotional time. You and your partner have split up; everything's terrible. You settle with your partner. You've got custody. You settle your issues and your property, and then the government comes and says, 'And now where's ours? Can we have a bit more of your settlement too?' right at a really exposed time. How fair is that?

This could have been fixed. This could have been fixed at the time had we had the time here. Amendments could have been brought in, and we could have fixed it in one go. And they sit there and say, 'But we passed tax cuts.' It's not hard at all to separate the two and move the tax cuts through, which we would have supported. We said we'd support and we wanted to support tax cuts and the working people tax offset, but they wanted to link it so they could hold it over your head and say: 'Pay this tax. We're putting all these changes together with the tax cuts.' They were picking your pocket when they gave you a dollar. It is what they are good at. So we weren't talking about the tax. They say we moved on because that is done. Australia is done for that. Pack it up and work for the man.

When we come to that, it came to similar questions when we were talking about aged care at the end. Remember we were talking about that and we were saying, 'What are you doing about the aged-care rebate for Medicare?' These are aged people who are paying their private health insurance because they want to remain independent. They want their choice. They want to live their lives the way they want to. But this government, again, said, 'No, we're putting money into aged-care beds. We're putting it into health packages,' because they want you to live a life organised by the government, not by yourself. 'Don't have choice to go to your own doctor, your own specialist. Don't pay your health rebate and come back. Live it the way we want to do.' This is control. As I keep coming back to, this is an abusive relationship this government has with its people. It financially controls you. It manipulates you and gets you to do what it wants you to do. Everything is around that.

I come back to the second question asked by Senator Canavan here, the question about auction clearance rates, because we're speed-dating through this. The minister actually admitted, by their own thing, that 260,000 people have taken advantage of the five per cent home deposit scheme. The problem is housing seems to have gone down by about that pace in the last three months. So 260,000 people have no equity, are in greater debt, have done their deposit, have done their dough—backing a government backed scheme. This is what we'll see if the housing market falls.

I get getting young people into housing markets. The way they have gone about it is shambolic. You can't put hundreds of thousands of people into negative equity in their homes. More to the point, every homeowner in Australia is now poorer because the property market is falling. Congratulations! I've never seen an act whereby so many people have paid such high amounts of money for such poor legislation.