Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, they laugh! They don't care, because, of course, only they're allowed to talk about people who they think are worthy. The fact of the matter is: when women are leaving situations where they are experiencing domestic violence and they need to move into an apartment and they don't have the money for a fridge or a couch, what's the Labor Party's answer to that? It is: they should just go without. When it comes to people on welfare, who actually know how to run their lives better than people in Canberra, better than bureaucrats and better than the know-it-alls on that side, what's their answer to that? It is: no, they should do what they're told. That's because that's what the Labor Party have always been about.

The truth of the matter is that their private member's bill would actually put to an end people being able to lend to people. It would actually stop people from being able to borrow money to buy things like refrigerators, to buy things like microwave ovens and to buy things that they need to make their lives work and to be able to do that. See, the ALP believe that people shouldn't be able to make a decision on how they spend their own money, because no-one knows how to spend their own money better than the Labor Party do. The fact of the matter is that we on this side are actually about breaking the cycle of poverty that exists throughout this country, and you can't do that unless you give people freedom to make their own decisions in their own lives.

The member for Newcastle says that there's almost universal condemnation of people who rort. Well, there's not almost universal condemnation—there's universal condemnation of the rorters in payday lending and the rorters in the consumer credit industry market. There's universal condemnation. There's no-one on this side of the House who doesn't believe that those people should be put out of business if not in jail. There's no-one on this side who believes that. But we don't believe that that should be done at the cost of people who simply want to get on with their lives not being able to borrow money to buy the simple essentials of life. When Good Shepherd Microfinance admitted that the Labor Party's private member's bill would shift people out of the consumer credit market and leave them with nowhere to go to borrow, their answer was that taxpayers should put a billion dollars into a consumer credit market. Where are your costings on that? There are absolutely none.

The Labor Party come into this House over and over and over again and claim that everyone's vulnerable. They claim that no-one can make a decision and that no-one understands how to run their life. The fact of the matter is that there are people in this country who may be on low incomes, but they actually have a much better sense of how they spend their money than some of the bureaucrats in the Labor Party do. They don't need you to tell them how to do it. That's because, let me tell you, they're aware of what they're doing. They're not vulnerable, and they understand what they're doing. They don't need the Labor Party to be constantly hectoring them and telling them that they have no idea how to run their lives. It's the sort of ignorance that this place has had enough of.

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