Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

What a humiliating back down from this government we have seen today! Never before have I seen such a shambolic budget mess—shambolic, absolutely shambolic. We had a budget brought in by the Treasurer in May this year and from budget night the Labor opposition has made it absolutely clear that we would fight these pension cuts every day until we defeated them. And today is that day. This government has been forced to back down and acknowledge that they cannot get these cuts through the parliament.

We have also said every day since budget night that we would stand with Australian families and fight for the $7½ billion that they want to take out of the pockets of Australian families. Today, Labor has prevailed on behalf of Australian families. We know how hard it is for Australian families to make ends meet, but what does this lot opposite want to do? For an ordinary family, a single-income family on $65,000 with a couple of kids at school, this government's budget would leave that family $6,000 a year—each and every year—worse off. That is exactly what this minister, who claims he stands up for families, wants to do. The reality is of course that he wants to strip 10 per cent of those families' incomes. That is what this budget means in real dollars for those families.

But as we said on budget night, the cruellest measure of all in this budget, a measure that we could not actually believe when we saw it in the budget papers—because never before has Australia's social security system seen such a cruelty—was the decision by this government to say to young Australians under the age of 30, 'If you cannot find a job and if you cannot find a training place, then we are going to leave you with absolutely nothing to live on.' What are they going to live on? They are saying to young Australians that for six months they will have nothing to live on. Then they will be told to go and work for the dole and, if after that period they still cannot find a job, they will go on nothing again. That is what this government is trying to introduce. Today Labor has said to this government that these measures are cruel and we will not support them and we have protected some of the most vulnerable people in this country. We have campaigned with pensioners—

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