Mr PRICE (12:35 PM) —I must say that I am greatly indebted to the member for Dunkley for encapsulating the impacts of the GST, and I congratulate him on saying that he believes no child in Dunkley, or Australia for that matter, will live in poverty as a result of the GST. Well done! Congratulations! There is one thing about the honourable member for Dunkley, and that is that, without question or qualification, he is an unhesitating supporter of the government. I congratulate him on his steadfast nature in that regard.

We are debating two bills today: A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Bill 1999 and A New Tax System (Family Assistance) (Consequential and Related Measures) Bill (No. 1) 1999 . That the member for Dunkley would trumpet the way these changes will be delivered by the new Family Assistance Office I find particularly interesting because we do not know what that means. What we do know is that this office will be established in part of the tax system.

It is very interesting historically to reflect that another family issue—that is, the child support scheme—was originally set up in the Australian Taxation Office. Looking back on the establishment of that scheme, more attention was paid to the actual legislation and all the implications of the scheme than the administration. There is going to be another bill, and presumably we will know when that bill is presented how it will work.

The member for Dunkley said that the taxation department, with its 26 offices throughout Australia, will be able to give a one-office approach for all the different inquiries that will result from the changes in this bill. If we look at the child support scheme, if we look at Centrelink, we know that telephone inquiries can be useful, and queuing systems have their place but heavily qualified. In fact, Centrelink cannot actually handle the calls it receives. But, at the end of the day, from time to time ordinary citizens have a right to speak to people face to face.

It will be interesting in your state of Tasmania, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, how all the people of Tasmania, or any other Australian, are going to be able to exercise what I think is a fundamental right. They will have the right to locate the trimmed down taxation offices—26 of them—presumably and speak face to face there. Is this an improvement in service? I have to say that there are many more Centrelink offices now than there are taxation offices, and the child support scheme that was established in the Taxation Office has now been removed to the department represented by Minister Newman. They have taken it out of taxation. This was not a proposal of the Labor Party, although it is true in one of the parliamentary reports we said that we ought to review that. This government has taken that decision.

Presumably the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade, at the table, the honourable member for Richmond, is saying that clients of the child support scheme are going to be far better off having that removed from the Taxation Office to the other department, the former Department of Social Security. If the parliamentary secretary is happy to advocate that course for child support, why are we setting up this new office within the Taxation Office? How will it operate? This legislation is replete with references to the secretary. I ask the parliamentary secretary: which secretary is it? Is it Mr Carmody, who is Commissioner of Taxation? Is it the secretary who is the head of the department of social security? Is it the secretary to the Department of Health and Aged Care? Could you please inform the people of Australia which secretary it is?

You may think this is pretty inconsequential—here is the opposition splitting hairs—but who makes the decisions about these payments? When you go to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which departmental decision are you appealing? Aren't these reasonable questions to ask about this all-singing, all-dancing, truncated, narrowed-down three payments system? I would have thought they were quite reasonable questions to ask.

We have had a functioning Social Security Appeals Tribunal. I think the Social Security Appeals Tribunal has worked very well. I am delighted to say that my office has been responsible, acting on behalf quite properly of constituents, for lodging some appeals to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal. I ask the parliamentary secretary, as he is the duty minister at the table, to inform honourable members how the appeal mechanism will work. Are you going to expand that or are you going to do what Taxation did? In fact, the shadow minister was responsible when he was the then parliamentary secretary of introducing the review office.

Are we going to have a review office in this office of family payments? Is this the mechanism that you are going to be able to operate under and then presumably make an appeal to the Federal Court or the Administrative Appeals Tribunal? Could you please tell people how it is going to work? I do not think it is unreasonable as we are debating the bill in the House to have some understanding of it. I appreciate that you are putting all the legislation in first and the administrative bill second, but surely the parliamentary secretary has some ideas about how these things will work.

Mr Sciacca —I don't think he has.

Mr PRICE —I think the shadow minister is being a little ungenerous. I am prepared to accept that he will want to inform not only me and other honourable members but also the people of Australia about how this system is going to work. I have the highest possible regard for officers of the taxation department. In fact, over the years I suppose I have had quite a lot of interaction with them. But, with no disrespect to the tax office, they are not the best people to deal with people. I think we found that out with the child support scheme. I am not having a vicious attack on them or trying to denigrate them. They have a background of receiving one bit of correspondence from constituents—that is, their taxation return, whether it is lodged by them or by their agent—and processing it. I think they do an excellent job. Their interventions either on the phone or face to face with taxpayers in relation to taxation matters is minuscule, but they do that well. But when you get into this area of payments they just do not have the skill base. Perhaps the parliamentary secretary could outline whether there was a cabinet tussle between the Treasurer and Minister Newman and Minister Newman lost. Is that what it was? If it was, I can accept that. Alternatively, the Prime Minister might have intervened.

Mr Anthony —At least we put through some real reforms.

Mr PRICE —I accept that this government is hell-bent on what it calls reforms. I will get to that. But I am asking for an explanation about the positioning of this agency and how it will function. There has been some suggestion that this will be like a joint business venture between the Health Insurance Commission, the Department of Health and Aged Care, the Department of Family and Community Services and Taxation, with three departments oversighting this organisation within Taxation and telling it what to do and how to do it. I do not know if you are going to have to appeal the three departments' decisions or whether they will all have to have an IDC before they can work out how to make a change. I am looking forward to the honourable member informing me of that. He might indicate when he expects the administrative bill to come through. He might tell us how people are going to be better off in trying to interface with this new agency.

We would not be talking about this reform were it not for the introduction of the GST. This is a $30 billion impost on the Australian people. I can remember—as I am sure others can—when we introduced the capital gains tax. We were told that in the first year it would probably gather $5 million and after five years $25 million.

Mr Anthony interjecting—

Mr PRICE —You can use Treasury for your estimates—I acknowledge their expertise—or you can use the academics in universities to try and project what you think the tax system is going to collect. We know, and people accept, that it is $30 billion, but we also know that this is a growth tax. I suggest to the parliamentary secretary at the table that there is every real prospect that this is an underestimate. If you get your bills through the Senate, clearly time will tell how good an estimate this was, but it may very well be an underestimate. If it is an underestimate, the people of Australia are going to be paying.

This bill tries to reduce 12 current payments for families into three principal ones. We in the opposition are always in favour of the concept of simplification. If you go through history, Labor has been at the forefront of the changes and simplifications to payments. In terms of the real reform that the parliamentary secretary was talking about, I want to make a point about the abolition of the assets test. The system of social security we inherited allowed people to bank a million dollars in their cheque accounts and receive the age pension. The conservative representatives opposite did not blush or blink at that. When we were in government, for 13 years we tried to target social security at those most in need.

Mr Anthony interjecting—

Mr PRICE —It might upset the parliamentary secretary, but we took away the pension for millionaires. I am the first to concede that there is a special case regarding family payments to farmers. But there is an existing hardship provision to accommodate the rather difficult times our farming community are going through, not only as a result of commodity prices but from time to time in the way they experience drought.

Mr Sciacca —The budget didn't do much for it, did it?

Mr PRICE —No, but what people in my electorate are going to be most concerned about is not that we are singling out a measure to help people who may have a lot of assets but are going through a difficult time. They perfectly accept that. That is a reasonable approach. But they are going to be concerned at a blanket removal. It does not matter whether you have $½ million, $1 million or $10 million worth of assets: if you are able to minimise your income, under this government you are entitled to family payments under this bill. What a disgrace. What a turning back of the clock. If anything demonstrates how this government will always look to reward privilege and to reward wealth, here we have it.

Our change was eventually accepted in a bipartisan way, although I remember Mr Hodgman, a member from Tasmania, talking about us extracting gold teeth out of pensioners when we made this change. It was resisted by the coalition members at the time, but I thought that over time they had accepted this idea that it is reasonable to want to ensure that, in terms of social welfare payments, those most in need get the most. As I have said, there are groups in our society like farmers who can be very asset rich but who go through some very hard times. We have no quibble at making exceptions for them. They are catered for without this change. But you are just unleashing the floodgates.

The honourable member for Dunkley made a rather interesting contribution, but he said, `Our government is not interested in assisting a developer who might put a spec child-care centre up.' If anything could be further from the truth! Up until this coalition government, one of the delights I had as a member in Western Sydney, where our greatest asset is our young people, was seeing new child-care centres opened. We were always pressing to ensure more and more. I happened to represent both the Penrith and Blacktown local government areas. Those two councils are unique in New South Wales for the number of child-care centres that they have being operated by councils. In addition to that, of course, we have private providers.

But what has happened? Under this policy that no child shall live in poverty under the GST, a phrase remarkably coined by the member for Dunkley, I have actually had child-care centres close. For the first time ever, they have actually physically closed. We have gone through a system where there were long waiting lists for children to get access to child care. It is true: you have solved the problem not by building more child-care centres but by removing demand. It is very easy to just say that, but what is the impact of that on families? Firstly, it is forcing people, particularly women, but it has an impact for the whole family, to reduce the number of hours they work. Some people in my electorate are removing themselves totally from work because they just cannot afford the changes you have wrought to child care. This government has a lot to be ashamed and embarrassed about in terms of child care rather than suggesting that we have a bunch of developers in Victoria or every other state who are putting up spec child-care centres. How absurd! How out of touch with reality.

The other thing I wanted to say was this: Senator Harradine, a senator whom, I might say, I am pleased to work with in committees and for whom I have a high personal regard, has been absolutely distraught about what has happened to the common youth allowance. What did this government do?

Mr Sciacca interjecting—

Mr PRICE —I regret to say it is very strong language, but it is the sort of language that Senator Harradine himself used. He said, `I feel betrayed. I feel that I have let the people of Australia down because we passed this legislation on the understanding that something decent would be done to help them.' It is this philosophy that I find really insidious—that is, if you have a family where a child is unemployed, it is somehow a failure by that child or young person and the parents and they should bear the burden. This government believes that it is totally wrong for a government to say, `Yes, your young son or daughter is unemployed and we want to assist you.'

We on this side of the House believe it is appropriate for governments to not only provide financial assistance to those young unemployed people but also get them back into the work force. We are prepared to invest in them. We always have been prepared to invest in them. We think it is a worthwhile thing to invest in young people not only for the good of everyone in our current society but also for the future of this country. What does the coalition do? (Time expired)