Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I spoke with reference to this bill only a week or so ago and at that time I observed that this legislation was put forward by the government on, of all days, Valentine's Day—a day that is usually referred to as a day of love. What this legislation really highlights is how this government is a love-hate government. Whilst this government does love big business and wants to give big business a $50 billion tax cut, it seems to hate ordinary Australians. This legislation is a bill that takes much more than it gives.

It is laudable that the government has recognised that we do need to make some changes to our childcare system in this country so that more people can access affordable child care. That is a laudable ambition. However, the way in which the government has gone about trying to do that with this legislation and the way it has married up a laudable objective—not really with great detail, I have to say, there are definitely problems with what it is trying to achieve—with massive cuts to family payments for ordinary Australians really demonstrate where this government's priorities lie.

The thing that really highlights it is that we have a situation right now in Australia of what is euphemistically referred to as 'an economy in recovery' or 'a transitional economy'. I can tell you right now that in Western Australian we have had two consecutive quarters of net state demand being negative—I think that is what is technically called a recession—and people are hurting. Ordinary Australians are hurting all around the country; in Western Australia they are particularly hurting; and of course the people who hurt most are those who earn the least. And those are the people who benefit from family tax benefits and people who have come onto Newstart payments because they have found themselves out of work through no fault of their own. This is what happens when we get to what was referred to by the Reserve Bank governor as 'the other end of the cycle', followed by the decline in mining construction in my home state.

At a time when people are hurting more, this government's response is: 'We're going to take more money off you.' I do not think that is the right approach for any government, and we should not be letting this government get away with that. We have these cuts—$2.7 billion worth of cuts to family payments and a total of $5.6 billion being ripped out of family budgets. Many of those household budgets were hitherto supported by Sunday penalty rates. So we have the double whammy. At the same time we hear, and it has been put to me, 'Oh, well, it's okay if people have a reduction in their penalty rate income because they will pay less tax.' When you are already not paying tax and when you are trying to benefit from receiving these welfare payments—whether they are FBT benefits or other sorts of supplements, which will no longer be indexed but capped or frozen for three years—that really makes life even harder.

This legislation in particular demonstrates almost the cruelty of this government—linking a supposed benefit in changes to be childcare benefit with cuts to other benefits. The government will say and has said, 'Well, sometimes you have to make hard decisions. You've got to make cuts to pay for these benefits. We have a budget emergency'—as they have been telling us for years, not that they have done anything about that, I might add; they have just let the debt and deficit blow out. To tackle their budget emergency or to pay for some extra benefits for people who need child care, what do they do? They think: 'How can we pay for that? What should we cut?' They look through the budget. They went through all of the lines of the budget and wondered what they should cut. This government had a great idea. This government thought, 'Do you know who we should cut back on? Do you know who we should take that money off? We should take that money off people who get family tax benefit. We should take that money off people who get the pension'—people who have paid taxes their entire lives—'We should take that money off people who are on Newstart allowance. We should take that money off young mums and off Australians trying to go to university. We should freeze the indexation of their payments.'

This is a very odd set of priorities by a government, Mr Deputy Speaker To look through an entire Commonwealth budget and ask, 'Where can I save a few billion dollars? I will save it from Australia's poorest people.' The thing that really jars for me about that, and I think it jars for all Australians, is that in the whole context of the Commonwealth budget when looking at what could be saved the thing that did not occur to them was $50 billion worth of tax cuts for large businesses. It did not occur to them—I am going to make a suggestion here to the government—to reduce the tax cut so that it is only, say, $48 billion worth of tax cuts so that it did not have to do take that money off the poorest Australians, those who are struggling the most and those who are finding it the hardest to get by and those who need the most support. If we take this back out to the macro level—

Debate interrupted.

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