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

Let's just get back to the topic, which obviously the member for Minister for Human Services really does not understand, and that is that this budget is not fair. It gives a massive tax cut to millionaires and the largest corporations in this country, and says to pensioners, carers and the unemployed that they will lose their energy supplement. For a single person on the age pension, that is $366 a year, while a millionaire gets a $16,000 tax cut. How can that be fair? That is the Liberal definition of fairness if ever you wanted to hear it.

Of course, the other extraordinary unfairness in this budget that remains from the 2014 budget is that this government wants Australia to have the oldest age pension age in the developed world. They want to say to people, no matter how hard their working lives have been, that they are going to have to work to 70 before they will be eligible for the age pension. We will not be supporting that, I can tell you, because we understand just how difficult it is, particularly for those who have worked in very hard blue- and pink-collar jobs. Axing the energy supplement and keeping the age pension age at 70 while at the same time giving these massive tax cuts to the top end of town might be the Liberal definition of fair, but it is certainly not Labor's definition. So all those people that somehow think this is a budget that Labor would have had anything to do with: you are so wrong. These are not the sorts of choices that a Labor government would make.

None of us on this side of the House think for a minute that this Prime Minister would be doing this if he had a bit of certainty about his job. We know the member for Warringah, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, and even the non-talker, the Minister for Social Services, who was here all morning, might be after the job. The Prime Minister was asked, on Fran Kelly, why it was that he is getting rid of these zombie measures. The Prime Minister said, 'They can't be legislated.' Fran Kelly said, 'Are they bad? Are they bad measures?' The Prime Minister said, 'It's not a matter of good or bad. These were measures that we thought had merit.' Not to be outdone, the Treasurer, at the Press Club at lunchtime today, was asked by Tory Shepherd: 'Would you have preferred option A: the $13 billion zombie measures'—remember slashing into families, pensioners and all the rest—'to raising the Medicare levy?' That is what she asked the Treasurer. How is this for a defence? The Treasurer said, 'It's now moot. If you are practical you do not dwell on matters like that.' That is it. That is the defence: you just do not dwell on matters like that. Of course he does not want to dwell on it, because he was the one that introduced the cuts to paid parental leave, just to take one example— (Time expired)

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