Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a very serious question that I ask on behalf of working families and I address it to the Prime Minister of this country. Prime Minister, during a recent trip from Cootamundra to the New South Wales coast, I counted more than 70 vehicles for private sale parked on the side of the road. Prime Minister, why are people doing it tough since the election of the Rudd Labor government?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Hume for his question. The truth is that working families, pensioners and carers are experiencing great challenges when it comes to cost-of-living pressures. That is the absolute truth. What in practical terms do you do about it? I say this to the member for Hume: what you do not do about it is bring about a set of economic conditions which make it easier for the Reserve Bank to continue to put up interest rates. If you look at the cumulative impact of 10 interest rate rises in a row, what you have is the Liberal’s $400 a month interest rate hike that was imposed on working families. That is what those 10 interest rate rises in a row led to.

Our response is responsible economic management, which makes it easier for the Reserve Bank to act to bring interest rates down. That is what we have done in the nine months that we have been in office, as demonstrated through the budget that we put through this parliament in May and that was announced by the Treasurer, and which is now, in substantial measure, being threatened in the Senate by the party of those opposite. That is a clear-cut course of action.

The second thing that you can do to assist working families under financial pressure is to honour your pre-election commitments on tax cuts, which is what we have done with a $44 billion package to reduce taxes for low- and middle-income earners. The third thing you can do, in practical terms, is to assist families dealing with the cost of child care, which is why we took a commitment to the Australian people to increase the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent—and that was honoured as of 1 July this year. These are practical measures which assist working families balance the budget, given that they are under enormous cost-of-living pressures.

I tell you what does not help the challenges faced by working families: the action of the Senate—which I presume the member for Hume is supporting through his party in the Senate—to vote against the government’s measures on the Medicare levy surcharge. If you look at the maths of that and how it flows through to families, for a family on a combined family income of, say, $120,000 a year, the measure we are putting forward would save that family $1,200 year—and that means something in the order of $20-plus a week. I would suggest to the honourable member for Hume that that is a practical measure, again, where he could help working families under financial pressure.

These are the practical actions which a government committed to dealing with these challenges have advocated. I would strongly say to the honourable member: get with the government’s program in the Senate—get in particular with the matter which is yet to be voted on, the Medicare levy surcharge, because that is a real potential hit on working families who continue to do it tough in Australia.