Treasury Misc (Cost of Living and Affordable Housing Support) Bill 2021
Ms WEBB (Nelson) – Madam Deputy President, this will not be a long contribution. I wanted to bring up some things that were covered in the briefing that you were interested to hear about. I will just put them on the record here and see if we can have them addressed in the Leader’s reply.
One was a query around the quantum of revenue that has been foregone by the Government across these measures. As part of that further details might be useful. Presumably it has been modelled for each of them. How many people? And a breakdown of where that foregone revenue was going to fall across the different measures. How many Tasmanians potentially will be accessing or being supported by these measures? That would be useful detail to have so we can understand the modelling that was done and the impact on revenue foregone for the state.
That was something from the briefing I wanted to get on the record. Other than that, I am very pleased to see the ability to do the bill smoothing with the vehicle registrations. It is something that the community services sector has been calling for for many years. It is a really standard way to support people on low incomes to be able to better manage the costs of living, to be able to smooth bills across a year rather than have them come in a big whack or even two big whacks.
My concern about this has already been raised by the member for Launceston, but I will reiterate it. If we make it more expensive to do that it is really counterproductive. The expectation is that this is a measure mostly designed to not help people like me, people like others in this Chamber who can quite readily pay a bill when it arrives once a year. If the idea is to assist people on the lowest incomes better smooth and manage their bills, why would we penalise them by making that a more expensive way to pay the cost of that bill?
We may not be able to control whether private companies do that sort of thing, but certainly as a state and as a government we can decide whether we do that sort of thing. If it is that this quarterly arrangement is more expensive and I would like to know whether it is more expensive to do it that way than pay six-monthly? I would like to know how it is in relation to the one-off annual payment?
It would be quite appalling if we saw our Government applying a poverty penalty to vehicle registrations so people have to pay for the privilege of smoothing their bills because they happen to be on very low incomes.
Other than that, while all the measures in the bill seem reasonable and helpful to those who will be able to access them, the point I would also like to make is for people on genuinely very low incomes, very few of these things will apply other than the vehicle registrations smoothed out. People on very low incomes, Tasmanians living very close to the bone will have no benefit from these things. It is not to say we should not do them, it is good to help people across a variety of income categories. The reality is most of these measures will assist people on medium to high incomes have lower costs across various things, rather than people on very low incomes. It is important to also maintain a focus. Just because we call something cost of living it does not mean it is about people who are on low incomes, it can actually mean helping people out who are already fairly comfortable.
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