Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

():  My question is to the Prime Minister. According to Anglicare's 2025Cost of living index, single-parent families on minimum wage are left each week with $1 after covering essential expenses like rent, transport, and food. Foodbank's Hunger report 2025 states that nearly 68 per cent of single-parent households are now going hungry. Prime Minister, in light of these disturbing figures, why are more Australians going hungry under Labor?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. Of course, she's new to this House. She wasn't here when all of the cuts were made by the former government when they were in office, or when the pluses that we've moved in, of cost-of-living help, were opposed by her Liberal and National Party colleagues. I wish the member all the best in encouraging a turnaround in the Liberal Party's position when it comes to assisting people, because all of the measures that we have put forward—whether it be the changes to Medicare, the cuts to the cost of medicines, the improvements to the minimum wage, the improvements to taxpayers with tax cuts—have been opposed by those opposite.

We understand that the job of assisting people is never done. That's why we're focused on it. That's why we also point out just the fact that those opposite, when they were in government, ripped $20 million from Foodbank each and every year.

And they interject again. They 'put it back', they say. So they concede that the cuts were there, each and every year, and then they say, 'Oh, well, we put it back.'

I'm asked about single parents, as well. One of the things that I'm very proud of is that, in our first budget, we changed the single parenting payment so that it applies until the youngest child reaches the age of 14—something that was never done by those opposite. If there's one thing I'm not going to be lectured about by those opposite, it's looking after kids from single-parent families. That is something I'm not going to be lectured on by the bunch of people opposite, who've never seen an increase in living standards that they didn't oppose, who stand up and continue to argue against minimum wage increases and continue to argue about tax cuts and who had a Leader of the Opposition who gave a speech about the culture of dependency. What do you think that means? That means cuts, more cuts and even more cuts; and we know that's the case, because that's their form.