Mr FITZGIBBON(5.46 p.m.) —In contrast with the words spoken by the member for Griffith (Mr McDougall), I thought the contribution from the member for Hindmarsh (Mrs Gallus) was quite irrational. The first thing she did was attack the member for Jagajaga (Ms Macklin) on the point of irrelevance, saying that she wandered far from the main point of this Aged Care Income Testing Bill. Then the member for Hindmarsh started talking about toilet seats and anything else she may have struggled to attach to the issue of nursing homes and hostels. She ranged far more broadly than the member for Jagajaga did.

My first job in this place tonight is to defend the honour of the member for Jagajaga. I can assure the House that the member for Jagajaga, the shadow minister, is a very genuine person with some real and sympathetic concerns about the future of those who are part of our aged community. The member for Jagajaga is not running a scaremongering campaign, as the member for Griffith suggested. What is scaring people is the uncertainty created by what is indeed policy on the run. I have not heard the shadow minister at any point misrepresent the position of the government, nor have I heard the Minister for Family Services, the honourable member for Pearce (Mrs Moylan), successfully challenge the member for Jagajaga on the accuracy of any of the issues she has raised in terms of the government's new aged care policy.

Indeed, it is the role of the shadow minister to highlight to the Australian community the inequities and faults within the proposed legislation. Governments make decisions within financial constraints. Ministers go to the ERC and they are often rolled. The policy that they eventually put to the parliament is not always the one which they would have liked to have presented to the parliament. But having been rolled they have no choice. There is no doubt that, having lost the fight, any piece of legislation which is funded with less money than the minister may have hoped will have some nasties in it. It is a simple fact of politics. Indeed, it is the first lesson in politics. The minister at the table knows that there are some nasties contained both in this bill and in the bill that will follow it. But, of course, as part of ministerial solidarity, she must come into this place and defend it.

It is the role of the shadow minister to highlight the inequities in the bill and I know that she will continue to do so and to do so very well. What she did particularly well today was highlight in great detail the financial impact this bill and the bill that is to follow it will have on the older members of our community, particularly part pensioners and non-pensioners. What she also did by way of an amendment, which I rise to support, is point out in some detail just how this bill is flawed. The second part of that amendment states:

. . . the Bill fails to:

(a)      allow for the need to involve persons acting for or on behalf of nursing home or hostel residents where necessary;

(b)      provide that the presumption should favour an appellant against a decision where the appeal has not been determined in the time allowed; and

(c)      provide that all determinations should be appealable through the Social Security Appeals Tribunal or the Veterans' Review Board to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal".

Those are very important safety measures. I do not need to go over in detail those points which the honourable member for Jagajaga made in the amendment, nor do I need to go over again the detailed financial aspects of the impact this will have on older Australians. What I do want to do is speak a bit more broadly by saying that this Aged Care Income Testing Bill is the precursor to something very nasty. It is the first step to removing a longstanding principle in this country that aged care should be equally available to all Australians regardless of their means. It is also a first step by this government towards the total abrogation of its responsibility for the provision of aged care in this country.

What the government began with the introduction of this bill is the systematic dismantling of the aged care system as we have known it to date. The bill seeks to put in place the necessary administrative arrangements to accommodate the Aged Care Bill, the detail of which we wait for with great anticipation. The Aged Care Bill will of course introduce a nursing home entry tax for the very first time. It will also whack nursing home residents with a new system of assessing daily residential contributions.

The government likes to call it a `bond'—I call it an entry tax—in the same way that the government likes to call the new superannuation tax a `surcharge'. But make no mistake about it: the Australian people are not fooled by these colourful names. They see them all for what they are. They know that the super tax, the nursing home entry tax, the reef tax and the additional Medicare tax are just that—new taxes, in blatant breach of the government's pre-election commitments.

You and I both know, Mr Deputy Speaker, as all members of this House know, members of the Australian public dislike deceit very much. As I said in this House last night on another matter, it is true to say that at the moment the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) enjoys some credibility and popularity out there in the marketplace. But we also know that that popularity is absolutely underpinned by a perception that he is a credible politician, that he is Honest John—a tag that we on this side of the House applied to the Prime Minister in a derisory way but which, due to his good fortune, has now been picked up by the media as a genuine description of his approach to public policy in this nation.

We all know that that perception is going to turn. We all know that once this measure starts to bite and once all those other fiscally restraining measures that were announced in the budget of last year start to bite out there in the electorate—many of those have not even taken effect yet—those polls are certainly going to turn on the Prime Minister. He will quickly learn that you cannot possibly seek to ride out a full term of government driven only by the polls and relying entirely on deceit. It catches up with you.

No issue out there in the electorate will bite harder than the bill that follows this bill, the bill that seeks to introduce both a nursing home entry fee for the first time ever and new daily charges for those who reside in those nursing homes at their cost. Mr Deputy Speaker, the issue is already biting in my electorate and I am sure it is biting in yours. I am very sure it is biting in the electorates of the member for Hindmarsh and the member for Griffith because that is why they are in here so defensive today. That is why the member for Hindmarsh was almost out of control, grasping at any issue she could to try to divert attention from the main points in this bill and the one that follows it. They are, indeed, biting very hard.

The aged in my community, and the families of those people who will be affected by these measures, are very worried indeed. I can assure you it does not take any scaremongering from the member for Jagajaga for that to be achieved. One only needs to look back upon newspaper reports in the months following the budget, and the minister's performance during question time, if one is seeking a source of the fear that exists within the community. We haven't needed the assistance of the member for Jagajaga, the shadow minister, to create that fear. The minister and the government have been doing a pretty good job of that all on their own.

Those who seek to defend the entry fee say that it is equitable because those who can afford to pay should pay to reduce the burden on the government's budget. Every nasty measure that gets introduced to this place harks back to the so-called deficit which was left by the Labor government. It is now more than 12 months since the election. The government is going to have to start taking responsibility for its own role in government rather than attempt to hark back to any deficit that may have been left it by the former government.

They say they are going to do more. I cannot see any benefits for either current residents of nursing homes or those who might access them in the future. The member for Hindmarsh had a lot to say about some appalling nursing homes in her electorate. The member for Hindmarsh should be rather ashamed about all that. She has been in this House certainly a little bit longer than I have, and I would have thought that, if she was all that concerned about the standard of care being offered in her electorate, she would have been in here fighting and doing something about it—fighting for more funding to improve those facilities rather than whacking the aged in the community as a backdoor method of addressing those problems.

The government also says that all it is doing with these measures is extending the existing arrangements which the Labor government put in place for the nursing home sector. They have missed a very important point. The move to a hostel is a lifestyle choice usually made months or even years in advance. Unfortunately, when it comes time to enter a nursing home, there is no choice and often there is no forewarning. So there is a very big difference between the two.

It is a very weak argument to come in here and say, `This is fine. You blokes were just as bad. You did it on hostels. It is all right for us to do it to nursing homes.' That is a very poor argument indeed. They tell us that Australians need to share the burden of fiscal consolidation. I would have thought that the aged in our community would have been the last they would have turned to when seeking to reduce that fiscal burden.

The older Australians being attacked by this bill before the House today, and the bill which will follow it, have contributed to the income of this country for many years—for most of their lives—some of them significant ly. Governments raise taxes to redistribute that income to make a fairer society to ensure everyone within this nation has access to basic services.

This is basically done in two ways. Some of the money raised in taxes and charges is returned to those in need of assistance in the form of cash benefits, but much of it is returned in the form of non-cash benefits by providing schools, road networks, hospitals, public housing and aged care facilities. The government uses the tax system to ensure that all Australians have equal access to these basic services and others.

The system is not about penalising those who have worked hard all their lives and saved in order that they may live just above the poverty line and pass on to their children and their families some of the fruits of that labour. It is not about that at all. Which of these two methods would you think plays the greatest role in narrowing the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country?

Those who read the Australian Statistician's report last year entitled The effects of government benefits and taxes on household income

will know the answer to that question. The answer is that it is the provision of non-cash benefits which does the most to achieve a fairer society in this country. The Statistician's report tells us a bit more than that, and I thank the Sydney Morning Herald's Ross Gittins for his assistance in making sense of some of those figures in an article one Saturday last year.

The Statistician took Australia's 6.6 million households and ranked them according to their gross income, which is private income plus cash benefits from government. He then broke them up into five quintiles and determined the impact on each group of the government's taxes and charges. The figures were based on the 1993-94 financial year and showed that the poorest households had their average income increased by $220 per week and the richest households had their incomes reduced by $355 per week because of the impact of tax and non-cash benefits. There is a significant effect there. The Statistician found that it is not the tax system which plays the greatest role in achieving this result. Indeed he found that the tax system plays very little role at all, mainly because of the impact of the regressive taxes and charges imposed by the states.

What the Statistician did find was that cash benefits reduce inequality in household incomes by about 25 per cent. Even more importantly, and bringing me to the point I would like to make, non-cash benefits reduce inequality by about 20 per cent. This is what the Statistician found. And why? Because they are not means tested. Cash benefits have a certain effect because of their means tested nature. Non-cash benefits have a different effect. So while the dollar value of these non-cash benefits was found to be worth around $135 per week across all households, that $135 represented 74 per cent of the gross incomes of poorer families but only 8 per cent of the gross incomes of higher income families.

What you see is this: by this government's constant attack on the provision of services—by virtue of the decisions in last year's budget, including this decision to charge entry fees and to change the arrangements for paying for accommodation—it is further increasing the gap in this country between the haves and the have-nots. That is not what governments are about. Governments should be about decreasing that gap, ensuring a more equitable society. This bill and the bill which it purports to assist does just the opposite. On that basis the government should be really ashamed.

What this bill also does is put the cart before the horse. The government is asking us to accept a bill which will be used later to support a concept that the parliament has not yet agreed to. The government has no way of being sure that those nursing home entry fees and those changed arrangements in daily fees will pass this parliament. It can be sure that we will not be supporting it on this side of the House. Its eventual fate will rest in the hands of senators in the other place. But it puts the cart before the horse. In my view it is rather rude to ask us to support a bill that acts only to support legislation that has not yet enjoyed the imprimatur of this House. On that basis it is flawed. I oppose it and I commend the amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga.