Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister confirm that the government's own modelling says that at least three million Australian households will be worse off under her carbon tax?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To the Leader of the Nationals question: we have always said we were providing assistance to nine out of 10 households. As a Labor government, in the provision of assistance, we of course have sought to benefit middle- and low-income families. We have sought to benefit people in Australia on fixed incomes, like pensioners; we have sought to benefit those who need that assistance the most. That is what Labor governments do. That is why we have provided a tax cut by tripling the tax-free threshold—because I believe that working Australians who earn less than $80,000 a year should see a benefit, and I believe that part-time working Australians, many of them working women returning after the birth of their children, should see the biggest benefit, and many of them will go from paying tax to paying absolutely no tax at all. Many of them will see themselves $500 or $600 better off.

Then, of course, we are concerned about those on low- to middle-income families raising kids. It can obviously be a struggle. That is why we have done things separate to pricing carbon, like the schoolkids bonus and like increasing the amount of money for childcare costs. But, as we have put a price on carbon, we have increased family payments and we are intending to do it again, through the minerals resource rent tax, so those families too can get a share of the resources boom.

Then, being the government that provided an historic increase to pensioners who had waited far too long for that increase—and who certainly had not seen it considered by the former government—we determined to provide pensioners with 20 per cent more than the average impact of carbon pricing on them, because we wanted to make them better off.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know the circumstances of working Australians, pensioners and people raising kids might be a matter of comedy for the opposition, but for the government it is deadly serious business. We will continue to do everything we can to work with those Australians to ensure that we keep the economy strong, to ensure that we manage it in their interest and to ensure that we work with them on the cost-of-living pressures they face—like the big escalations in electricity prices that the Leader of the Opposition is pretending do not exist, because he is worried about offending his Liberal mates in states around the country.