Alex White (Labour)

In recent weeks and months, I wondered whether the inevitable tax increases would arrive before or after the final demise of the Progressive Democrats. The increases arrived just beforehand. It is a tax increase, yet the Government dares not speak its name.

Senator O'Toole and others are correct regarding the 2% levy. If we want to go after higher earners, which I would advocate, we should do so in an honest way. Let us face up to the taxation system and the dishonesty and unfairness therein. However, the Government appears to want to have it both ways. The Government is telling us to leave the debate on equality and equity of tax, in principle, to the Commission on Taxation next year, but it then introduces an extraordinarily regressive tax, undermining any suggestion of equity in the taxation system. We should face up to taxation and to the questions of how to match the public services we want with taxation, how to levy tax and from whom.

Senator Fitzgerald referred to several measures in the budget, but we will have an opportunity to revert to them. The cuts in services for children and education are the most serious and regressive of the Government's decisions. It will cut child benefit payments in half and then remove them in respect of people above the age of 18 years. It will increase university registration fees substantially, effectively re-introducing tuition fees by the back door. The decision to abolish the Combat Poverty Agency, which has done considerable independent work in the past two decades to identify poverty in society, is outrageous. It appears that the Government does not want independent voices raised on poverty and related issues.

My colleagues opposite always look in a forlorn way and wonder whether I have anything positive to say.