Bill Shorten accuses Joe Hockey of arrogance for 'poorest people don't have cars' comment

Updated August 14, 2014 11:37:44

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has accused Treasurer Joe Hockey of being an "arrogant", "cigar-chomping" politician over his remarks that poor people will not be affected by the increase to the fuel excise because they "don't have cars".

Mr Hockey yesterday defended the budget measure to reinstate a biannual increase to the excise by saying that high income earners will be hit hardest.

"The people that actually pay the most are higher income people, with an increase in fuel excise and yet, the Labor Party and the Greens are opposing it," he told 612 ABC Brisbane.



Mr Shorten has seized on the comments as evidence the Government is out of touch and "remarkably arrogant".

"Joe Hockey just doesn't get how rotten his budget is," he said.

"Are you serious Joe Hockey? Are you really the cigar-chomping, Foghorn Leghorn of Australian politics where you're saying that poor people don't drive cars?

Audio: Listen to Alexandra Kirk's report (PM)

"It is almost though as if the Treasurer believes that poor people should be sleeping in their cars, not driving their cars."

But Mr Hockey is standing by the comments and his office has released Treasury data from the 2011 census to back it up.

He says the criticism of his comments amount to "hysteria".

"If you look at total usage out of the ABS stats you can see that the higher the income the more the fuel taxes are paid by those households," he said.

However, the data does not show what proportion of income households spend on fuel.

And research from the independent parliamentary library released in 2001 found that "the excises and GST on petrol and diesel taxes are regressive in that people on low incomes pay a higher proportion of their incomes as tax than people on high incomes, given the same level of fuel use".

Liberal Party backbencher Alex Hawke says an increase to the fuel excise will impact all Australians and that fuel bills are a big concern for his electorate in north-western Sydney.

"You know I've got one of the electorates with the highest proportions of cars per household in Australia, so you probably won't get a lot of sympathy from me because we have no public transport options."

The Abbott Government announced in the budget that it would impose the fuel tax increase from August 1 - a measure that has so far lapsed because of a lack of support in the Senate.

The increase is worth $2.2 billion to the budget and was slated to go towards new roads.

Mr Hockey also said yesterday that the Government is prepared to consider wider exemptions to its $7 GP fee, after he met with crossbench powerbroker Clive Palmer in Brisbane on Tuesday night.

"We are prepared to discuss these things," he told 612 ABC Brisbane.

The Treasurer's office released the following data:

1.  The deciles in the chart are based on the ABS Index of relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage. This index summarises information about the economic and social conditions of people and households within an area. In creating the deciles, all areas are ordered from lowest to highest score, the lowest 10% of areas are given a decile number of 1 and so on, up to the highest 10% of areas which are given a decile number of 10. Decile 1 is the most disadvantaged relative to the other deciles. Note that deciles have equal number of areas, not people.

2.  No cars category includes the categories ‘no cars’, ‘not stated’, and ‘not applicable’ in the census.

Source: Treasury estimates based on ABS 2011 Census of Population and Housing tables from ABS 2033.0 Socio-economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, budget, australia, qld

First posted August 13, 2014 16:51:06