Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Deputy Speaker. The mover of the motion is a former Bjelke-Petersen minister really just shows the length and depth of experience that the member has. So this is an idea which shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand.

But the two things that I'd say to substantially address the motion are that, in terms of acknowledging and giving monetary value to the incredible work done by stay-at-home parents, yes, they absolutely deserve that recognition, and that's what the family tax benefit was about. My understanding is that it was something introduced by the Howard government, particularly family tax benefit B, which really focused on stay-at-home parents. As a second income earner, once your income gets to about $6,000, you start to lose that FTB B, so there is an incentive at the moment.

In terms of allowing couples to start or grow their families so that the nation stops relying on migration for growth, yes, we absolutely do want to lift the national birth rate, but income splitting doesn't do that because it doesn't specifically target people who are staying home to look after kids. Ultimately, yes, in an ideal world, there absolutely is a hunger in the community to be paying less tax. The community knows that the tax burden falls unfairly on pay-as-you-go income earners, but that is something that this government is also addressing through income tax cuts and repurposing the income tax cuts—which the Morrison government left us with—to be more fairly applied across the community. The two income tax cuts that the government took to the last election were about getting to those lower income earners and spreading them evenly. So, yes, the intent of this is 100 per cent obvious. That why there's an acknowledgement from the government that it needs to be fairer and the actions of this government are about making it fairer.

The honourable member would understand through his time here that the importance of the social wage is ultimately not just what's left in take-home pay; Medicare itself is something that is fundamentally part of that social wage that provides benefits to people fairly and equally across the economy and the community. Superannuation is also something which, apart from some of the changes we've made around the LISTO, really targets those lower income earners. In the electorate of Forde alone, there's something like 14½ thousand people that will benefit from those changes to that, by making the tax on their superannuation less—that's 14½ thousand low-income earners, of which 7,600 are women; somewhere around 68 per cent are women. Superannuation is also now being paid on government maternity leave. So, again, there are incentives there that are fairly targeted across the community to encourage people to stay home and raise their kids.

Finally, there are changes to child care to make it cheaper, such as removing the activity test. There's the work we're doing around bulk-billing. There's a lot of work, and while I agree with the intent of the motion, I think this government is doing it in a fair and targeted way as we move to a fairer system.

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