Emergency Services Levy

Mr TARZIA (Hartley) (14:54): My question is to the Treasurer. How much will one of my constituents, who owns two $350,000 investment residential properties, as well as their $500,000 family home, have to pay for emergency services levy this financial year?

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Treasurer, Minister for Finance, Minister for State Development, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy, Minister for Small Business) (14:54): If the member for Hartley wants to give me the exact values after question time, I will get him an answer today on the exact amount. I don't have the tables here with me now, but I can get them for him. There is going to be an increase. The government has not hidden the fact that there will be an increase in the emergency services levy; in fact, we hid it so much that I sent the increases to the member for Unley.

Mr Pisoni interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Unley is warned for the second and final time.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Every Economic and Finance Committee is sent the prescribed rate and the effective rate. It was in the report that was sent to the Economic and Finance Committee, which the member for Unley is a member of, and he is obviously a diligent reader of those reports. Perhaps if I had put it anonymously in his pigeonhole, he might have read it then, but because it was sent to him he didn't bother reading his papers.

If he had bothered to read those papers, he would have noticed that the government would be announcing the remissions to the emergency services levy on budget day, which might have sparked his interest. Alas, he didn't bother reading his committee papers. That's a question for him and the Liberal Party, to decide whether or not he is derelict in his duty as a member of the Economic and Finance Committee.

Mr GARDNER: Point of order: the question was about the emergency services levy chargeable on those three houses.

The SPEAKER: I return the Treasurer to his text.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: Yes, sir. I understand that the member for Hartley's constituents may feel aggrieved by the increases that they will have to pay to the emergency services levy. Just to give the house a quick update on what exactly it is we are doing, every year, as the authors of the emergency services levy would know, we calculate the cost of the emergency services budget. We have a levy in place and we impose a 50 per cent remission on everyone.

Given the question that the member for Hartley asked, I suppose it would depend on their principal place of residence and if they were a concession card holder, because, as members opposite would be aware, concession card holders are exempt from any increase—as they should be, given what happened to them in the commonwealth budget, when they were so deceitfully attacked by the commonwealth government after their promises not to touch the pension, not to touch pensioners. Of course, we have seen dramatic changes to the pension and pensioners, and we are doing all we can to try to immunise pensioners from the cruellest of the cuts that the opposition's counterparts in Canberra are making.

What we have done is that the remissions we used to offer the emergency services levy recipients, we have now taken that money out of the emergency services fund and put it into health and are raising the full amount of the emergency services levy, excluding pensioners. Yes, there is a new impost to constituents. Yes, I understand people's anger and frustration about it. I do say that I am prepared to reverse these increases.

The government has made it very clear that if the Leader of the Opposition and members opposite join with us in a campaign to reverse the cuts of the commonwealth budget to health and education, we will reverse this increase. My advice to you and your constituent is that he should ring Chris Pyne and he should say to Chris Pyne, 'Reverse your $5½ billion worth of cuts to health and education,' and he won't have to pay this increase in the emergency services levy.