Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In addressing the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Senior Supplement Cessation) Bill 2014 and related bills, I will put in context why we are having this conversation and moving in these circles. In 2013, we went to the election with a four-pillar promise. We said we would axe the bad taxes—the carbon and mining taxes. We said we would stop the boats, that we would build the roads and the infrastructure of the 21st century, and that we would fix the budget mess. The carbon tax and the mining tax are gone. Tick. We have had one successful boat this year. We have announced $150 billion worth of roads and over $800 billion worth of approvals through the Department of the Environment to get this economy moving. The fourth pillar is to fix the budget mess, and that is taking a long time. And it will take a long time.

First of all, I will take up the point made by the member for Jagajaga and state emphatically: this is a lot of money. The savings we are trying to put through with these bills is a lot of money. By my calculations, over the forward estimates it is about $8.7 billion. That is a tremendous amount of money. But then consider that social security is, at the moment, $146 billion per year. In the next four years we will be spending nearly $600 billion on social security payments. To put it in context, we are talking about $8 billion versus $600 billion—over half a trillion dollars. What we are trying to get through here is about 1.5 per cent of that.

We have an economy growing at around four per cent, but our social security and health costs are rising at nine per cent and over. We have real issues here. The thing that gets to me the most is that rather than discuss the numbers the opposition always want to argue about the words. Was it a budget emergency? They say it was not an emergency. I say: is it an emergency as you are going over the cliff, or is it an emergency as you are getting close to the cliff? I have a real issue with the way we talk about numbers in this place. People in the street, people at the Herbert Hotel, the Great Northern Hotel and the Shamrock Hotel do not know what a billion dollars is. People in my family do not know what a billion dollars is. It is almost impossible to get your head around that concept. So what business are we actually in? The vast majority of people are paying things off for their whole lives. So the mere concept of paying off debt is hard to get across. Are we really in the debt collection business and the paying money back business? I do not think we got elected to pay back debt. I think we got elected by the people of Australia to fix the thing. I think that this government is here to fix stuff. I think that is what we have to try to get across here: that something is broken.

These bills are not just about the last six years. These bills go back a lot further than the last six years, because we have got structural issues in our budget and in the way we spend money which go back an awfully long time. I have a friend who is a stay-at-home mum. The family have five kids under 15. Her husband works and has a car supplied by the company. He earns 120 grand. She gets nearly $1,800 a fortnight in family tax benefit part A. That is just short of $47,000 net a year. No wonder she is a stay-at-home mum. That is a $70,000 job. That is what we are paying her to stay at home. That sort of stuff has to end. She said to me, 'We're paying enough tax.' I said, 'I don't think you're paying any. You're not paying any tax.' We have to look at the way the money is going out.

I have a real issue when it comes to the way that this has been portrayed by the other side. When you are in business, if you have a business that is struggling—and when I took over a business in Townsville, it was losing $150,000 a year and I was given the imprimatur to do whatever I had to do to get that business turned around—you do not just sit there and say, 'It's all too hard,' and just expect to keep on getting paid. What you have to do when things are tight is you have to look around and fight and scratch and punch and kick to get money in the door. That is what you have to do, and that is what we have to do to try and get this budget back into order. We have to fix the thing.

What Labor did, what the member for Lilley and the member for Rankin, his offsider, did was that they took the family car, kept it for six years and then gave it back to us, and it is dinged up, it has blown a head gasket, it has got bald tyres, it has got dings all over it and it has got a busted windscreen. We can keep on driving the thing until it stops completely—we can just keep on putting a little bit of petrol in all the time until it stops completely—or we can fix it. We can put new tyres on it, restructure it and get the windscreen fixed and then we will still have a good motor car. It is the same with the economy. It is the same with these bills here.

We have a very generous social security system. Like I said, nearly $600 billion over the next four years is going out in social security, and we are asking for $8 billion in savings to go through—1½ per cent. I do not think that is too bad. We are in the fixing business. Governments—and I am not just talking about the last six years; I am talking about governments before that too—have known that we have an ageing population for a long time. This government is the first one to really address it. This government is the first one to even really talk about it. We do generation papers and all that sort of stuff, but we do not do anything about it. This government has said, 'Jeez, you know.' The Leader of the Opposition, in his budget reply speech said that, when he was at school, there were 7.5 taxpaying workers per person over 65. Today there are five—and there are more people in the workforce today than at any other time in Australia's history. By 2050, there will be 2.5 taxpaying workers per person over 65. That is a lot of weight to carry.

The hullabaloo about raising the age pension age to 70 from their 67 was just ridiculous. When the pension came in in 1908-09, it was at age 65 and it was fully means-tested. For every 10 quid you had over 100 quid, in cash and assets, including your home, you lost a pound off your pension for the year. The average life expectancy of the Australian male in 1908-09 was 62, so you had been dead for three years before you even got the pension! If we applied that today, you would not get the age pension until you were 84 years old. That is the challenge we have got. Instead of having a very small number of the population actually get to pension age, to where they are completely and utterly unable to work, we have people on average living nearly 19 years over the age of 65. That is a massive challenge for us here, and if we do not address it now, if we just keep on going the way we are, it is never going to get back. We are never going to catch up, and it is never going to be sustainable.

The other thing I hate is: did we take this to an election? I submit that, by saying that we had to fix the budget, that we had real issues in the budget, that should have said enough. We are not taking out a system 8 in the Lotto each week to pay down the budget debt. We are trying to fix the thing. It is both sides. You have to look at your spending and you have to look at the way you bring money in. But I submit to the Labor Party, on the great Hawke and Keating thing, was the floating of the dollar taken to an election? No, it was not. Was HECS taken to an election? No, it was not. The member for Jagajaga, with pious righteousness and sanctimony, standing there and talking about single mums, was the one who stuck it to the single mums in the last parliament. Did she take it to an election? No, she did not. Was it a structural reform for the betterment of people? No, it was not. It was a grab to get back to surplus. That is what it was. I have not even spoken about the carbon tax—I think we have done that to death.

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