Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Hansard source

We thank Senator Collins for this motion. One Nation supports it. The 'widow tax' in the budget relates to the grandfathering of negative gearing on existing homes. Under this government's budget, passed with Greens support, if a couple own a negatively geared home and one partner dies, or they divorce, the home loses grandfathered status and starts attracting capital gains tax at the new, higher rate.

Senator David Pocock first raised this in Senate estimates on 16 June so the government has had plenty of time to get this fixed. I wonder: Was this measure typical of this government's history? A failure to think things through? Or an attempt to sneak the measure through? The budget's dishonest theme is 'intergenerational wealth'. So a widow tax fits the supposed agenda of taking wealth from older Australians into government coffers and supposedly giving some of that back to young Australians—their own money that they would have inherited anyway—and then the government expects the young to vote Labor for this fake generosity. What deceit.

Another measure that fits this dishonest sales pitch to young people is scrapping the private health insurance rebate for older Australians. This is a system to reduce healthcare premiums for older Australians, to keep them in the private health system, and minimise public healthcare costs the young pay. Currently, this rate is 24.6 per cent for over 65s, rising to 32.8 per cent for over 70s. The Albanese government reduced this figure to 24.1 per cent for all ages. Another example of ideology over sense—not intended to be sensible or fair; intended to demonise older Australians and falsely serve them up to young people as the reason they can't get ahead. It's the politics of deceit and division that Labor's budget promoted.

This discount exists because older Australians have paid into the system their whole lives. They consume more health services and if, on their retirement, they can't afford health insurance anymore they'll give it up and return to the public system, which the government's own modelling says will happen, increasing costs for the young. It's even worse in the bush. Industry reviews warn that regional private hospitals, where up to 70 per cent of patients who are insured are over 65, face sudden financial unviability and forcing health system closures and pushing entire communities exclusively into the public system.

This is a disaster for those Australians who grow your food, grow the cotton and wool in your clothes, and mine the minerals in your computers, phones and your expensive, damaging solar panels, wind turbines and renewables. The city lives off the wealth created in the bush—that is a fact—and yet this government declares war on the bush through this healthcare change, through arbitrary environmental regulations and through water mismanagement, stealing farmers irrigation water, and much more. All Labor and the Greens do is set Australians against Australians. No wonder so many people are saying 'Fire the liar'! (Time expired)