Senator NEWMAN (Minister for Social Security and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women)(6.22 p.m.) —Paragraph (c) of the ALP request No. 3 proposes to include single beneficiaries in the MTAWE bill. Paragraph (d) proposes to include partner beneficiaries in the bill. Request No. 8 provides that, if a single or a partnered pensioner has his or her pension increased under the provision of the MTAWE bill, a single or partnered beneficiary will have his or her allowance increased by the same amount.

The government opposes these requests because the bipartisan commitment from all major parties was for a 25 per cent male total average weekly earnings benchmark for pensioners. I repeat: that was for pensioners—from both sides of the chamber. The election commitment given by the government was only for pensions. If we accept the need to correctly target taxpayers' funds, as the government does, then it is consistent that pensioners who on average rely on social security support for much longer periods of time are therefore the people most in need of having their base level pension protected.

The MTAWE increases flow through to family payments and senators should recognise that that is the case as a result of the legislative link that already exists between family payments and the married rate of pension. All family payment recipients will continue to have the base rate of that payment kept at or above 16.6 per cent of the combined pensioner couple married rate for under 13-year-old children and 21.6 per cent for those aged 13 to 15. Therefore these amendments will also provide protection for family payment recipients.

All allowees will continue to have their allowances indexed for cost of living increases as measured by the CPI. This measure enshrines in legislation, in a sensible and in a fiscally responsible way, the government's commitment to maintain pensions at a minimum of 25 per cent of male total average weekly earnings. Under this legislation, pensions will be reassessed twice a year to ensure that they are increased in accordance with CPI increases or to 25 per cent of the male total average weekly earnings benchmark, whichever is the greater.

For all the posturing we have heard, as I said earlier, the ALP has never put money aside in the budget forward estimates for these matters. We are the first government ever to put money aside for future years to see that money is available to meet the commitment. Provision will continue to be included in the forward estimates to allow flow-ons to those allowances that have pension type characteristics, which is the way flow-ons have occurred over the years; that is, for married allowees, single allowees with children and single allowees aged over 60 who have been on long-term income support. Traditionally the flow-ons from the pension have gone to those with pension type characteristics as I have described.

The difficulty for the government, overnight, has been that the requests were only provided by the opposition late yesterday. It has been difficult to provide an entirely satisfactory indication to the Senate of the cost and impact of the amendments, but it is estimated by my department that the cost of extending the flow-on to single allowees without children would be $401 million over the years to 2001. I therefore urge the Senate to reject requests 3 and 8 provided by the opposition for all of those reasons that I have indicated.