Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. On delivering our fiscal prudence in this budget, the statistics are there for all to see. As promised, we will return the budget to surplus in 2012-13—back in the black, just as we promised the Australian people. We will do that because the important thing to assist Australians as our economy moves towards full capacity is to make sure that the government is not adding to inflationary pressures. That is why we are determined to run such a tight spending policy. That is why across the forward estimates you are seeing growth in spending on average at one per cent. The last time that occurred in Australia was in 1988 e have delivered a year with a negative in front of increasing growth—that is, spending will go backwards. The Howard government never delivered a year of spending reduction. Rather, they delivered spending growth in excess of three per cent on average even at the top of resources boom mark I. The best thing we can do to assist families with cost-of-living pressures is to keep our economy strong and to bring the budget to surplus so as to not add to inflationary pressures which would then feed into the cost of living for working families.

But we can do some things as well to directly assist working families, to assist families under cost of living pressure, and in this budget we have. We are assisting families with teenagers. Our family payment system has made the old-fashioned assumption that somehow kids leave school when they are very young. We are in a modern economy—we need them to stay in school. So families with teenagers will get special new benefits.

For some of our lower income working Australians, we have pulled forward the low-income tax offset so they can benefit week by week from the money from that low income tax offset to take a little bit of pressure off and to more clearly demonstrate to people the rewards of work. We have in this budget honoured our commitment to include school uniforms in the education tax refund because we want to assist families with the costs of getting kids to school. We have in this budget honoured our commitment to enable families to get their childcare payments fortnightly, because we understand that that too will provide a bit of cost of living relief.

We understand that right around the nation there are families battling cost-of-living pressures. As a government we will be working with them, doing what we need to do to keep our economy strong, to keep people in jobs and employment, to make sure they have decent working conditions when they are there—which is why we got rid of Work Choices—and to provide targeted relief in a budget that will get us back into black exactly as promised.

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