Mr RIPOLL (1:28 PM) —I rise this afternoon to speak on the Family and Community Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2000. This bill contains various amendments to the Social Security Act 1991, the A New Taxation System (Bonuses for Older Australians) Act 1999, the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 and the Social Security (Administration and International Agreements) (Consequential Amendments) Act 1999. Schedule 1 of the bill, in particular, amends that double orphan pension provisions of the Social Security Act 1991 to guarantee the rate of family allowance for double orphans at the rate that was applicable at the time the child became a double orphan. This amendment is retrospective, applying to children who became double orphans on or after 1 July 1998. In addition, this schedule expands the definition of `double orphan' in subsection 993(2) of the Social Security Act to include the situation where one of the parents has died and the other parent is a long-term remandee. This is not currently the case—currently it covers only where one of the parents is serving a long-term sentence. This is a necessary change and it reflects a good change in trying to deal with what is a very difficult situation. It will go a long way towards making this situation somewhat better financially.

Schedule 2 amends the A New Tax System (Bonuses for Older Australians) Act 1999 to ensure that the disqualifying period for the self-funded retirees bonus ends on 30 June 2000 rather than on 1 July 2000. This will avoid a one-day overlap with the revised package. Without this proposed amendment, an older Australian who becomes qualified for an income support payment for the first time on 1 July 2000 may be precluded from receiving a self-funded retirees bonus, which is obviously an unfair result. This amendment is actually quite good and should be supported. While I think that in itself is good, that does not mean that the actual savings bonus changes and the proposed scheme per se are good. I am sure there are some people who will receive some money and think that it is a great bonus, but for the vast majority of people who will not receive anything it will be quite clear that there is nothing good about it.

The real problem about who gets this aged persons savings bonus is that there are just not going to be many of them. The government, at the time of the election, used this as a lever for those people who might not have been inclined to vote for the GST to persuade them that somehow they would get $1,000—and they were convinced. I have talked to many of my constituents who came to me and asked, `Aren't we getting $1,000?' I said, `No, it is actually up to $1,000 and you have to qualify and, in fact, there is a whole range of hurdles and barriers that the government have put in place.' While this scheme purports on the surface to be about giving people a bonus, the majority of Australians who (1) are eligible and (2) qualify will get very little bonus at all.

This first came to my attention when one of my constituents, Abe Stanley, received in the mail a government GST propaganda brochure about the A New Tax System package titled What you need to know. After some painstaking reading of this difficult to read document, he was getting excited about this possible $1,000 that he was going to receive—and he believed from all the electioneering in 1997 and 1998 that he would actually receive it—when he came across a part and realised that there were a couple of words before the $1,000, and those words were `up to'. He thought, `Hang on—up to usually means that there is a bit of a problem.' So he rang the information number and spoke to somebody in the department. They basically said to him, after asking him a number of questions, `You do not qualify. You will get nothing.' He figured he was the average type of person who might be in this situation—which I believe he is—and that if he did not qualify maybe a whole lot of other people did not qualify either.

We started making a few inquiries, and it looks like the way the government have structured this is to say, `We will give you a bonus, but to get the bonus you cannot earn more than $30,000 a year, and you only get a bonus based on income earned from savings or assets.' It is a dollar for dollar: to get up to $1,000 as a bonus, you would have to earn up to $1,000 in income from interest. For a lot of people—if you can do a quick bit of maths—that would mean that they would have to have a fair wad of money sitting in a bank and doing not much to be able to earn that. Most people at that age who might have that sort of money will not have it just sitting idly in a bank account earning two, three or four per cent if they are lucky; they are going to have it invested somewhere else, where it does not qualify for this scheme.

I decided, on behalf of the constituents of Oxley, to put a question on notice to the Treasurer. I asked him a number of questions in relation to this aged persons savings bonus component. I asked him, firstly, how many people would be eligible in totality. The response to that was 1,160,340. I then asked him how many persons did the government expect would receive less than half of the $1,000—that is, persons who will receive less than $500 based on their own accounting. The number they gave me was 838,818—roughly about 85 per cent. So 85 per cent of people who first qualify will receive less than $500. They did not quantify it down to a smaller figure, but I am now pursuing how many people will receive less than $100. In fact, I think we will find that of the 85 per cent, probably a further 85 per cent will receive little if anything at all.

This bonus saving scheme should have actually been termed bonus saving scam, because that is what it is. They told people that they would get a $1,000 bonus, and this is what people believed. This is not the reality; this is not what people are going to get. There is no $1,000 coming because, if you do qualify, you are going to find that you qualify maybe for $100, $50 or $150. It is going to make little or no difference in offsetting the sharp edges of the GST and the cost to these people—that is, to people who, to start with, qualify for that component.

The government went further to try to convince self-funded retirees that somehow there was an even better bonus for them, possibly up to $2,000. Why not? Why not make it up to anything you like, because they are not going to give it to you anyway. They could have made it up to $10,000 or $100,000, because it does not really matter what the `up to' is; the reality is that you get very little. I posed the same questions to the Treasurer in relation to self-funded retirees. His answer was quite interesting because, again, there are so few people who will be eligible that it is going to cost the government very little at all. He said:

Let us average it between the two—17,500. We are only talking about 17,500 people. Of those, not 100 per cent are going to receive anything at all. The Treasurer, in the response to my question, said:

They are saying that of the 15,000 to 20,000, the majority of those, because they are expected to have high enough incomes—this is why they are self-funded retirees or able to provide for themselves—will not actually qualify. Again, the terminology used by the government in so many parts of their legislation is something right out of the book 1984. It is all about doublespeak: more is less, less is more. When they say savings bonus, they mean you get nothing at all. It was like the `Better Jobs, More Pay' legislation. The name of the legislation should have been `fewer jobs, less pay' because that is the reality about what was contained in it. You can dress it up however you like; you can call it whatever you like. But the reality is that people know that they will get nothing at all.

This takes me to the next part in the bill about income support and parenting payments. When the government talk about income support, they are not really talking about support as we might traditionally think of it, as in `We are going to try to support you either financially or by some other means' they are really saying, `Let's do some more cost cutting.' That is what this is all about. When they say income support, they talk about cost cutting. How do they save money on those people who are supposed to receive income support? It is about bringing the goalposts in closer. It has nothing to do with providing more; it is to do with providing less. It is more of that doublespeak from the government.

Thinking through the real effect that this will have on parents—and this is in terms of child custody, Newstart and who has the majority of care, the 60-40 rule—the government will make it even more difficult for these people to actually be able to receive what they are entitled to and more difficult to be able to receive it in a manageable way. It is very difficult for people who have split up, whose families are no longer together. For the majority of them, if not all of them, the income support they receive is all they have. The government are proposing to take some of that away. They are trying to split it up. They are trying to use income support as some sort of mechanism to make it even more difficult for people who are going through extremely difficult family situations. This part is one of the most anti-family bits of legislation contained in this bill. There are many other anti-family policies and anti-family pieces of legislation contained not only in this particular bill that we are discussing today but in a whole range of legislation. I will be talking about those in a moment.

As I said, it makes it more difficult for parents to cooperate on issues of custody because they will be using this issue of who has the children for what percentage of time as another lever. Some parents will use this. It is tragic that that will happen, but the government are handing that over as a mechanism. They are saying, `Here you are. If you split it up this way, we will give you more of the money.' For example, if the father is not currently looking after the children for a percentage of the time, he might decide to look after them for 10 per cent more of the time, and then say that he is entitled to half or 40 per cent of what the mother is getting. I think this is going to create more problems, not just in this area but in the area of family courts and child support agencies. I do not think the government have thought this through.

The government make very big claims. John Howard, during previous elections, talked about family. He made a big issue of saying that this was a government about family, just like he made a big claim about this being a government about small business. I would say that it is quite the opposite. This is not a government about family. Everything they put in writing in every policy and in every bit of legislation is anti-family. One example is the GST: what is `family' about the GST? It puts the greatest burden on the shoulders of those least capable of paying, and they are families. The ones with two, three, four or five children, with only one parent working, will shoulder the largest component of cost in everyday items that they purchase, because it is a consumption based tax. We cannot seem to get through to the government that if you are wealthy—if you are on $100,000 a year, or $50,000 or $60,000 a year, although you may not be wealthy if you are on $50,000 a year—the GST is not such a problem. If you are a one-income family then you shoulder the full cost, whereas if you have two incomes you can spread that cost a little bit better. When the government talk about being pro-family, I would say that they are very sadly mistaken, because what is contained in this bill is the reality. The reality is that they are going to drive families further apart, not closer together. I think this is a very detrimental part of this bill.

To put all of this into context, I want to look even further at the government's record since they came to office. I am not just making this up when I say that this is an anti-family government. Let us have a look at the reality: $1.8 billion has been cut from labour market assistance programs. Who is that going to hurt? It is going to hurt people and families looking for work. They are slugging people, on the one hand, with an unfair tax and, on the other hand, with this so-called income support, which is about reducing the amount that people will get, or about splitting it up, so that it will not really matter anyway as it will be so small as to be insignificant. While they are talking about all this, the reality is that they have ripped away from families $1.8 billion in labour market assistance programs.

I will move on to something even closer to the heart and, again, anti-family: $851 million has been ripped away from child-care funding. If you talk to child-care centres that cannot provide services, they will tell you horror stories of families forced into relying on backyard unprofessional care, which the government have now said they might look at doing something about—a problem which they created. So what do the government do? They take money away from child-care funding. Is that a family policy? Would anyone look at that and say that this is a government that is pro-family? Here it is in their policy, legislation and actions—actions which include cutting away $851 million from families. There is a whole range of other examples in education and health, which make it more difficult for families to be able to survive. This has given a sharp rise to the inequality between the haves and the have-nots and the inequality between one type of family and another type of family. Again, this is a government that said they would govern for all, but they are a government that govern for very few.

I want particularly to touch on the effect that this bill will have in relation to the GST and the effect that will have on a whole range of areas. The government made a big deal yesterday—and over a number of months—about how tough it will be on businesses that try to profiteer from the GST. The government has already failed because we have now seen the Minister for Financial Services and Regulation come in here and bluster on about the Video Ezy case that they are now charging $7 for an overnight new release video rather than $6 and so somehow they will be facing fines of up to $10 million. It could be up to $100 million—it could be up to a billion dollars—because, just like in this bill, `up to' means nothing. I can tell you now categorically that Video Ezy will not pay $10 million—not even close.

Have a look at what is happening here. The government is saying that that company is profiteering from the GST before 1 July by putting their price up from $6 to $7. Video Ezy have said, `No, that is just reflecting costs. That is just reflecting what every other video distributor is doing.' When you look around at the moment, Minister, you will find that nearly every video store is charging $7. So I hope that the government will now pursue, through the ACCC, every single video store. But I do not think it will; nor do I think it should. By introducing this policy, the government has opened up the floodgates of profiteering. It has opened them up so wide that there will be no way known that this government or the ACCC will have the teeth necessary to prevent it. Nor will it get legal backing or find a court that will somehow find in its favour. This is what I believe will probably happen if the government takes them to court: one of the people working at Video Ezy, when asked, `Why have the videos gone from $6 to $7?' said, `Oh, you had better get used to it because the GST is coming in so there will be an increase in prices.' What a solid case you have there. What evidence that is. I am sure you will have fun in the courts with that. It is an absolute bluff on the government's part. The government has opened up the floodgates regarding profiteering. We will be the ones who will pay. It will be families that will pay.

Let me quickly touch on the inflationary issues related to the GST and on how they relate to this bill. When we talk about income support and about how people will actually get less, this government went out there and said, `1.9 per cent is the basis of inflation. We will set the benchmark for compensation.' They set the benchmark for compensation because it was needed. They knew—though they have not admitted it, but perhaps they have admitted it through their policies—that this will cost you. It will slug ordinary Australians. It will slug those least able to afford it. So they had to put in a compensation package because they had to offset it. Otherwise, you will not be able to cope. It is as simple as that. But it is not 1.9 per cent; it is much more. So everything that was promised—`There'll be more dollars in your hip pocket; you will be out there enjoying a better lifestyle; you will have more disposable income'—in reality means nothing at all. But it does mean one thing very clearly: you do not actually end up with more dollars in your pocket; you end up with less. So once again the government will have their hand firmly jammed into your pocket every time you go and buy milk and bread. And milk and bread do not have GST on them, by the way. Why do I say that? Because milk and bread are two staple goods or products on which the government says, `No GST will apply.' They have already gone up by 20 per cent. The ACCC is now looking at that. Why have they gone up by 20 per cent? Because of the inflationary impact of the GST.

The GST is affecting the price of everything today—before 1 July. Wait until 1 July comes around. Then we will really see how all of this affects inflation. So, while the government made all sorts of promises about how we will all be better off, the reality is that we will all be paying a lot more than we ever expected. (Time expired)