Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in response to the matter of public importance submitted to the Senate by our parliamentary colleague from the ACT Senator Gallagher. Senator Gallagher would like the chamber to consider the growing levels of financial stress and inequality being experienced by Australian families, as revealed by the latest household, income and labour dynamics survey, the HILDA Survey.

I feel I need to apologise in advance to those who were here yesterday for what may be, potentially, a sense of deja vu, because it was only yesterday that I delivered an eerily similar refutation of Senator Wong's matter of public importance. My response is similar because, in spite of the opposition's hectoring, the government position has not changed in 24 hours. This government does indeed take the plight of working families very seriously. But rather than griping or wringing its hands, the Turnbull government is committed to delivering, has delivered and will continue to deliver genuine policy solutions and legislative change to ease the burden on Australian families.

I find the disingenuous opportunism of the Australian Labor Party on issues of inequality so galling. Senator Gallagher, like Senator Wong before her did yesterday, and countless others are uncritically following their leader's empty rhetoric on income inequality as an attempt to incite the corrosive politics of envy. In the absence of any substantive policy agenda, the Leader of the Opposition is attempting to use populist bombast to somehow prove the case for his socialist agenda. But the Leader of the Opposition should be warned: do not underestimate the intelligence of the Australian population.

Senator Polley interjecting—

Australians are not fools, Senator Polley. They can see through the opportunism of an opposition desperate to overcome the entrenched personal unpopularity of their leader. The Australian electorate have seen the opposition leader, Mr Shorten, at work: disposing of Prime Minister after Prime Minister and selling out the members of his own union, the very people he was there to protect. The Australian people are far too smart to be duped by this rhetoric, which, quite simply, is a smokescreen for a radical redistribution agenda. Australians, while egalitarian and generous by nature, are naturally suspicious of socialist ideals that demand that, in order for someone to win, someone else must lose. Australians have resisted socialism before, and they will do so again and again and again at the ballot box, over and over.

Senator Gallagher should know better than to ignore the facts by trying to make the case for an increasingly unequal Australian society and by using statistics she clearly does not understand. While I am loath to use my time in this chamber to go into the dry economics of statistical measures of income inequality, I simply cannot stomach the continued perversion of the truth by those opposite to suit their political agenda. So, please, indulge me for just a moment. Senator Gallagher's reference to the HILDA Survey refers to a statistical measure called the Gini coefficient. It is a commonly used measure of inequality that ranges from zero to one. Zero means total equality and one means total inequality. So, zero is everyone on the same income and one is the equivalent of one person having all the income. The HILDA survey data shows that the Gini coefficient was 0.303 in 2000-01 and was 0.296 in 2014-15. In other words, it has in fact barely shifted. If anything, it has in fact decreased. So do those opposite fail to understand the information that they regurgitate? Or, instead, do they wilfully deceive the Australian people to serve their political agenda?

While those opposite are desperately grasping at mendacious opportunities for political advantage, the Turnbull government is actually doing the hard yards of policy development and implementation to deliver household savings to those families who need it most, to shore up the Australian economy for future years and to deliver its intergenerational responsibilities to the Australian families of the future. We have delivered a $2.5 billion investment in early childhood education and care. Almost one million families benefit from that, and low- to middle-income families are the greatest beneficiaries of that package. Only the Turnbull government has actually tackled the rising energy prices head-on by directly dealing with energy retailers. This will ensure that Australian families get a better deal. The Turnbull government is dealing directly with gas suppliers to ensure that Australian businesses and householders come first. And the Turnbull government has repealed the insidious limited merits review regime, introduced under Labor in 2008, that has cost Australian families millions of dollars in excessive energy bills for nearly a decade.

Finally, the Turnbull government has delivered relief to the small business community in the form of cuts to the corporate tax rates for small and medium-sized entities and maintained the instant asset write-off provisions to encourage investment by those businesses. This is a government that is committed to assisting the small business community to invest in growth, to pay their workers more and to put on more workers.

This is a government that takes the cost of living pressures seriously and a government committed to delivering for families and small businesses, not to squawking politically motivated slogans intent on emotionally dividing our nation into the haves and the have-nots. Australia remains one of the most wonderfully egalitarian and equal societies in the world. We have one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. The economic data has shown a decrease in measures of inequality, and yet the ALP persist with this disingenuous and perverse rhetoric of the politics of envy. While I thank Senator Gallagher for bringing this matter to the attention of the Senate, I am content in dismissing it as the mere political stunt it is.