Senator CROSSIN (3:13 PM) —People at home who have been listening to the events of the parliament in the last few days should be left in no doubt at all that Ebenezer Scrooge is not in fact a fictional character in a story book but that Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well in the hearts of each and every member of the federal government. What we have seen this week from this debacle of the impact of the GST on charities is that this government is very strong on taxing the weak and very weak on taxing the strong or the rich members of our society.

We have a government that wants to turn charities into tax collectors. We have a government that is also quite inconsistent about its policies and where it is going. Yesterday Senator Kemp stood up in the Senate and told us that World Vision sponsorship, for example, could be subject to the tax. The GST will be payable on money you pay to World Vision to sponsor a little child overseas. At the same time, in the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister was forced to declare a backdown, whereby a GST exemption for child sponsorships would apply. We have heard a great deal of inconsistency about their policy on the GST. If the ordinary person sitting at home does not understand this policy, you could well understand why. Even the members of this government do not know how this policy is going to apply.

We now have a GST on compassion. We have a GST on the goodwill in people's hearts. Let us look at the elderly volunteers, for example, who run a stall at the base hospital in Orange. They raise over $200,000 per year, probably using old ice-cream containers or tins such as that for a till, and donate over $100,000 to that hospital because they believe in the cause. They believe that they are trying to raise some money for the hospital. They will now be caught up in the GST bungle.

The answer today from this government is that charities will now have a choice. They will not have a choice. The choice will be that if you have a turnover of under $100,000, you can opt to be part of the system or not. If your turnover is over $100,000, you are in the system. The choice is either whether they bother with all the paperwork and try to recoup some of the money back that they will be paying on the GST or whether they will say it is all too hard.

The real essence of this is that there will be a decline in the number of volunteers in this country who willingly give their time to charities and volunteer to bank this money or do the limited paperwork that is now required. Charitable organisations will be relying more and more on fewer and fewer people. No-one will be bothered being a tax collector for this government when they want to spend their time raising money and assisting the charities that they believe are worthwhile assisting. At the end of the day, we will see less money for activities and those people that those charities are designed to assist.

Nobody in the community believes Senator Eggleston or Senator Kemp when they say that this will be a good thing for people who are poor and struggling and for organisations that need these extra funds. Nobody believes that. I cannot believe that the government is so out of touch with the anger in the community at this time as this GST debacle rolls out before their eyes.

We have a tax on compassion. We are turning charities into tax collectors. We really want the government to stand up and say categorically that they will be exempting charities and their fundraising efforts from the GST. That is what ACOSS have called for and that is what charities have called for from day one. They want a complete exemption from this debacle and a complete acknowledgment by this government that they play a very valuable role in this community. That role will now be turned into nothing less than a tax collector for the federal government.