Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

just as this minister has no idea about the future. The Treasurer has no idea about the future and he is pretending that he has just discovered social inclusion. He is obviously looking for something to pad out newspaper interviews but he has no idea about what the content of a social inclusion policy might look like. This is Howard government members in the run-up to the election: always desperate to get their names in the newspaper, they just forget the content. After 11 years the Treasurer now says that he wants to ensure that Australia’s prosperity is shared in ways that re-engage those who are at risk of exclusion or already excluded from our society and our economy.

Clearly the minister at the table does not understand what social inclusion is. But in not understanding what social inclusion is, he might want to explain why his colleague the Treasurer now uses these words about social inclusion when they ring hollow from a man who has presided over a prosperous economy for more than a decade yet has still allowed disadvantage to become more entrenched and more complex. Given that the minister is in a joking mood, he might want to joke about these statistics. The Brotherhood of St Laurence, for instance, has identified 21 federal electorates with a simultaneous high incidence of single-parent families, low family incomes and high unemployment rates, and it has found that these are the electorates with higher birth rates.

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