Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration! I tell you what, Mr Deputy Speaker, sitting here in question time and listening to the Minister for Defence Industry, who has been a member of parliament for the good part of forever, talk about aspiration just epitomises how out of touch this government is. They say that they believe in aspiration, but we know that they certainly do not believe in the aspirations of working- and middle-class Australians because of their failure to prioritise them—their complete failure.

I come from a very proud working-class background. My dad was a bus driver and my mum was a nurse. In fact, my mum worked in aged care. She was a very proud aged-care worker—I believe she looked after Mr John Howard's mother in her day. If the Prime Minister suggested to my mother, as he did today, that she should 'aspire' to a better job than being an aged-care worker, I hazard to guess what my old mother might have had to say to the Prime Minister.

It's a long time since I was a struggling single parent but not that long ago that I was a middle-income earner. I will tell you just how out of touch this Prime Minister is. This Prime Minister is so out of touch that he wants someone on a $200,000 salary, which could hardly be described as middle income, to pay the same rate of tax as someone on $40,000—someone like Renee, from Marangaroo in my electorate. Along with her husband, she is raising her two girls, Aisha and Sarah, on a $40,000 middle income. And not only that; this government's grand plan for working-class and middle-income Australians includes an $80 billion tax cut for corporate Australia, $17 billion of cuts to schools, $270 million cut from TAFEs, unfair cuts to pensions and a requirement for people to work until they are 70. How is that going to work if you are a roof tiler or a carpet layer? There will be a $77-a-week cut to the penalty rates of hardworking Australians. Families and pensioners are paying $20 a week more for private health cover. Parents are paying $40 a week more for child care, and there are record costs to see a GP. Australians are now another $9 out of pocket when they go to see a doctor.

Having been a struggling single mother living from pay cheque to pay cheque, I have seen it all. I have seen how it adds up—$20 here, $9 there, $40 there. It all adds up. And what does this out-of-touch government have to offer? A measly $10 a week. It is insulting that this government thinks it can throw crumbs to hardworking Australians who have lost penalty rates, who haven't seen wage increases for years and who can't access TAFE or higher education for those who aspire to more. It is insulting to parents like me who today are feeling the sting of having to leave half their groceries at the shopping centre counter because they simply can't afford it.

In question time the Prime Minister talked about aspiration, as he often does. I am convinced that he doesn't actually know what aspiration means. Aspiration, according to this out-of-touch Prime Minister, is directly correlated to the size of your pay packet. As a low-income earner who aspired to send her kids to school, to get an education and to lift her family out of poverty, apparently I was not one of Malcolm Turnbull's aspirational Aussies—because I didn't earn enough, because I wasn't a banker and because I didn't have rich parents.

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