Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today the government backed down on legislation that would have cut $4.8 billion from family payments. Those cuts would have affected 1.6 million families around Australia and three million children. But the government backed down not because it understood how unfair those measures were but because it could not get its unfair legislation through this parliament, thanks to Labor's position on it.

It was legislation that was going to make life so much tougher for families that were already struggling to make ends meet, cuts that would have seen an average family with two children lose $2,600 a year. A typical single-parent family would have lost $4,700 a year. These cuts are top of the government already having abolished the schoolkids bonus of $842 for each secondary school child and $422 for each primary school child.

The government wants to fix its budget mess, but it wants to do so on the back of the lowest income Australians. We know that from the policies that it has brought into this House time and time again. We now also know that the government wants to increase the GST or broaden the GST base. On Tuesday in the MPI they had every opportunity to dismiss that suggestion and did not do so. This is a government that wants to fix its budget mess on the back of the poorest Australians when it has other options of targeting higher income Australians instead.