Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No Australian on modest incomes can breathe easy while those opposite are in government. Nobody in the suburbs and neighbourhoods of my community is out of the woods when it comes to government attacks on their standard of living—a tax on people who are just trying to put food on the table and make ends meet. We know this from their plans to jack up the GST, to make everything in our community more expensive. We know this about their abolition of the schoolkids bonus and we also know this from wave, after wave, after wave of family payment cuts. The latest rounds of cuts would have seen two-parent families with two schoolkids worse off to the tune of $2,600, and a typical one-parent family $4,700 worse off. My community would have been the hardest hit in Queensland, because I have 18,000 people on family tax benefit A, and 16,000 on family tax benefit B.

If we know one thing about this government, it is that even after a humiliating retreat like the one they had to perform today, it is only ever a temporary reprieve. If we know anything about those opposite it is that they are already ready for another attack on people on modest incomes in our community. I am proud to stand with people in my local area and around the country, with the members for Lalor, Bendigo, Newcastle, Jagajaga and others, to push back this latest attack. We will stand together again, and we will stand up for people again when the next attack inevitably comes.