Joyce StevenPart 2 BenefitsHon STEVEN JOYCE (National): We are now examining Part 2 of this bill and while it won't be the exclusive focus in this part from this side of House it is certainly going to have some focus and that's the winter energy payment. I thought it would be worth discussing at the outset just how this winter energy payment came about. It is a peculiar beast indeed because it is neither a payment for winter or indeed a payment for energy—but we will come to that. It is definitely a payment. I think it could probably best be described as a payment in lieu of a superannuation increase that was arranged by the previous Government for superannuation.The gestation of it is this: that actually under the previous Government the Family Incomes Package was of course adjusting the taxation thresholds and that was to flow through to superannuitants. A superannuitant couple would receive just under $700 in the course of a year in terms of increased superannuation on top of the superannuation adjustment that they would normally receive on 1 April each year.Of course the difficulty for the Labour Party was that when they reinforced their abhorrence of any change to tax thresholds and decided they weren't going to change the tax thresholds they were left with an inconvenient truth which was that that meant the superannuitants wouldn't get anything as a result of the Family Incomes Package. And so the winter energy payment was born. Of course it was weirdly created to be just slightly more—just ever so slightly more—than the superannuitants would have received under the previous Government's package. Or is it? Because actually in the first year it looks like it will be less—significantly less. And I know my colleagues will want to look into that at some depth.Also then there's the issue of who actually qualifies for it. We're going to want to examine that significantly because there are some fish-hooks in this. Initially we were told at the time of the election that there was going to be a signing-up process. We were going to have thousands and thousands of superannuitants lining up at Work and Income offices across the country—no doubt with their passports to avoid any suggestion that they were foreign superannuitants—and they would then have to register.Now thank goodness—thank goodness—the Government has dropped that. We now have an auto-enrolment process. And yet at the same time as having the auto-enrolment process we are told with a straight face that superannuitants who leave the country during winter won't be able to continue to keep claiming the winter energy payment. It's going to be on an honesty box system I understand not unlike when you go to somebody's house and they leave out something that you can buy—for example some eggs—and you have a little honesty box and you put your money in. So that's an honesty box system which is admirable but generally to ensure the system is robust and there is integrity there has to be some way of actually monitoring the honesty box system.In our case in this country when we provide somebody with a benefit—and this is undoubtedly a benefit—then we do police the requirements of the benefit otherwise it's unfair on other people. So either the Government is actually going to do something about this to ensure that there is some form of confirmation that we don't have superannuitants abusing the system such as they say or we're going to actually do what Carmel Sepuloni wants in making it so that there are no responsibilities for any benefits. This just might be the precursor of how they're going to handle the benefit system from here which is an honesty box system all the way across.There are some very significant things to address in this system that is being proposed in this part of the bill but can I say this: it's a shonky idea it comes around for a shonky reason and we're very very cynical about it.