Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Under the childcare scheme the Prime Minister personally designed, the childcare subsidy is capped for families with a combined income of more than $189,000. Why does the Prime Minister consider families with a combined income of over $189,000 rich?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The reheat of the former Leader of the Opposition's rhetoric in this place, seeking to introduce class wars again, is of no great surprise. Our government has always believed that, when you're applying support across the Australian community, that should be means-tested. The program that we designed to put in place to support families across the Australian population was means-tested.

The other thing we do is we ensure that, when we means-test these arrangements, we target it to those who need it most, and that is those on low and middle incomes. That is where our childcare support, which runs to $9.2 billion per year, is designed to help those who need it most. So we can target that support to where it is most needed. That is how you responsibly run a budget. You target your support. You target the challenges that are there to ensure that it has the greatest impact. That's what we do. Right across the government services, we means-test any number of services that are provided across the community and we will continue to do that.

But I'll tell you what we do for all Australians: we give all Australians lower taxes. Whether you're on a higher income or a lower income, we believe all Australians work hard and we don't tell them how to spend their money, because they earned it. When they earn it, we want them to keep more of it. Last time we were in this place, the Leader of the Opposition made a whole bunch of promises totalling up billions of dollars and he wouldn't tell Australians how they'd pay for it. We found out soon after that, once again, the Leader of the Opposition wants to say to those Australians, for whom in this place we have made more tax cuts for them so they can keep more of what they earn, that this leader of the Labor Party, just like the last one, can't wait to get his hands on their money by taking away their tax cuts.