Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

As I stand here in the chamber this evening debating this bill, the Social Services Legislation Amendment Bill, guillotined in the manner that it has been, I cannot help but think of the millions of children around the country that will be affected by these cuts. There are 1.5 million families and two million children that will be worse off. As previous speakers have highlighted, many of these families are on the maximum rate of family tax benefit A, which means that their household income is less than $52,000 a year. I ask senators in this place to contemplate what it means to live on an income like that.

Currently in Western Australia we have the highest unemployment rate in the nation. We have gone from having a very low rate of unemployment to a very high rate of unemployment. That means that these are the very families that have gone from earning an income to suddenly being dependent on this kind of income support. It is income support that is the social safety net and the social contract that Australians expect in our nation.

Think about what it might be like to have gone from a reasonably well paid job in mining at $120,000 or $185,000 a year with a mortgage and perhaps a partner who works part time and children to suddenly, as the primary breadwinner, losing your job and having those mounting mortgage payments and essentially be relying on an extraordinarily reduced household income that has no capacity to keep up with the cost of living. This is the very real situation of thousands of Western Australians currently. This is really rubbing salt into the wound of what is already a very difficult situation for families in Western Australia.

This, we know, is the resurrection of the 2014 budget cuts. Again, I am sure there are more insidious measures that the coalition put before this place then that they will again. When we are talking about the most vulnerable families in our nation, we on this side of the chamber will always stand up against these kinds of cuts. We do not want to see this $1.4 billion ripped out of the pockets of low-income Australian families.

Now, I know we are talking about bringing the deficit down. We are talking about moving towards a balanced budget. This is the conversation that we are having about reducing debt. But you are exchanging that debt for household debt for the very poorest in our country, who have mounting credit card debt because, in times of crisis and in times of need, they turn to their credit cards, they pay the high interest rates and then they are stuck paying them off on these terribly low family payments. I know this because, within my own portfolio as shadow assistant minister for families and communities, I see the financial counselling services that are counselling families and I also see their emergency relief programs. These cuts are targeted at the very families who need our support the most.

When you look at families who access financial counselling, it is not because they have got extravagant lifestyles and it is not because they are necessarily bad at managing money. It is because they need someone to come in and help them renegotiate their debts, because essentially for the basic household expenses of rent, food, water, utilities and schoolbooks—all of the basic necessities of life—their income is not enough to meet these basic needs. When you look at people who access financial counselling and emergency relief, these are the families we are talking about.

That is why things like the family tax benefit exist. It is to help low and middle income families cover the costs of their children, to alleviate child poverty and, frankly, to alleviate household stress. We have thousands of families around the country who deal with family and relationship support services. What are the things that drive family conflicts? Frankly, often it is money. It is the stress that comes with that. Often, it does not really matter how resilient or good your relationship is: when those stressful times happen with your household budget, then it can often mean trouble at home.

When we look to things like the proposal to freeze indexation to family tax benefits, it is extraordinary that what we are doing is actually mounting this increasing pressure on the environment within Australian homes—costs of energy, costs of groceries, costs of water, costs of housing and costs of rent. Essentially, you are saying as a government, 'We're going to allow these cost to keep rising, because that was what inflation does, but your household income will not rise.' That is why I am proud to stand on this side of the chamber to defend the lowest paid workers in the country, many of whom rely on family tax benefit to simply make ends meet.

I really want to call out these cuts for the rubbish that they are. Malcolm Turnbull has wanted us to believe that these cuts to vulnerable Australians are needed in order to deliver reform to child care, but that is simply not the case. They want us to believe that it is to support the budget, but I say to them that they have the wrong priorities. They are seeking to hand a $50 billion tax cut to corporate Australia while putting increasing pressure on household budgets for the Australians with the lowest incomes in our country. It is extraordinary to me when you consider how low the incomes are that we are actually talking about here.

Frankly, I would challenge people to really look at how it is even possible to survive on the kinds of incomes that we are talking about here. For example, we know that when it comes to parenting payments, the threshold will be reduced to $188 per fortnight. There is absolutely no rationale, in my view, for this freeze for three years. For people who are relying on parenting payment, it is single parents that care for at least one child younger than eight years of age and partners that care for at least one child younger than six years of age below the threshold amount who are affected. These are parents who are struggling with children who are at the most vulnerable times in life, when you need that extra support to get them to school, when you need to be able to buy their schoolbooks, get transport to school and put food on the table. These are the very things that this bill attacks.

It is not just families, I would like to highlight, but students as well. Students and people on Newstart live on extraordinarily low incomes in our country. I thought it was hard enough as a student in the 1990s, but compared to today there is an extra onus on students to participate in the workforce. I do not think that is a bad thing, but I have to say time and time again I see people drop out of university because they simply cannot afford to go because they cannot balance a full-time study load with the kind of work they need to do to keep a roof over their head, petrol in their car and food on the table. These are exactly the people that you opposite are targeting.

In closing, I really just want us to think about the combination that has been placed before us between this bill and robo-debt, through which you opposite have attacked thousands of ordinary, law-abiding Australians who have done nothing yet have been sent these debt letters. You have absolutely the wrong priorities. We will always fight for what matters to Australians: local jobs, protecting Medicare and building a strong economy that delivers for all. Most of all, we will always stand up to give a leg up to the most vulnerable Australians, unlike you across the chamber.