Senator MURRAY (10:24 AM) —I want to take issue with a number of remarks that the minister has made. Minister, I think your advisers need to be a little judicious in the language they put on the notes to you to read from because earlier you said that the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not trust the HES data. I listened very carefully throughout that hearing, and there is the Hansard record of that hearing, and in no sense ever did they say that they did not `trust' the HES data. I quoted to you from the ABS submission No. 731, page 1, what Mr W. McLellan, the Government Statistician, said. I will quote him again. He said:

The ABS consider statistical data from the households expenditure survey can be used at a suitably disaggregated level after appropriate adjustments are made to reported expenditure information to describe the expenditure patterns of population subgroups.

That means that they use the information carefully and adjust it appropriately on good statistical and professional grounds. That does not mean they do not trust it. If they did not trust it, they would not use it. We then move on to a number of things you have been saying about what the views of Professors Harding and Warren were. I will quote Professor Warren's words to the committee in the evidence on 8 April at page 2405. He said:

. . . an average goes both ways. There are people above it and people below it. In a sense, what you are looking for is how important is that variation within those groups for those people, where that group on average is sailing close to the wind, and that type of issue. If they are quite close to the 3.4, even though we indicate on an average basis that they are still the beneficiary, on average there could be some groups within that who are the losers.

That is a very clear statement about losers. You must then go on to the nub of the Warren and Harding argument—that is, that the compensation is not adequate. That is the point that Dr Hewson is making. He is not quarrelling with you that you should not give compensation; he is quarrelling with you that it is not adequate. Senator Conroy has been quoting the figure of 37c as some of the compensation available to a particular population subgroup. I remind the Senate that 37c works out to about $20 a year as compensation for the imposition of a GST. By any measure, $20 a year is miserable and mean. If that is the best you can do for the average, imagine what it is like for people below the average who Professor Warren says will be losers.

The firm consensus of Warren and Harding in the NATSEM report and by other commentators who addressed the committee, including Geoff Carmody from Access Economics, is that the compensation clearly is not adequate. If it were adequate, why would Warren and Harding have put up option 7, as they did, where they argued for an increase in pensions from 3.4 per cent to six per cent in 2001-02? Why have they argued, and other people consistently argue, that the male ordinary time earnings benchmark—an area first highlighted by Geoff Carmody of Access Economics—required there to be a different form of compensation certainty introduced? Why have Warren and Harding also proposed that the age pension savings rebate needs to be doubled?

Minister, you are going to be put in a position of trying to defend the indefensible. Throughout the Senate select committee process what has been established is that the ANTS package of compensation is irredeemably flawed and requires it to be significantly boosted if the government is to meet its claim that it will make individuals and groups properly compensated in this matter.

You can argue endlessly about who said what as we went through the process. The conclusion that all the professionals, all the academics and leading supporters of the Liberal Party of Australia have come to is that the compensation is inadequate. So all that your government has to come to terms with is how much you are going to up the ante by. That is your problem. We are told you have $2 billion to $3 billion that you are looking at, but the first step is for you to admit that it needs to be increased.