Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Further 2008 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2008. Schedule 1 of the bill, the maternity immunisation allowance, clearly encourages parents to immunise their children and especially extends the allowance to cover children adopted overseas. Immunisation is important, and schedule 1 of the bill is clearly supported. Immunisation works to prevent disease, and the benefits clearly outweigh the risks. Immunisation is available against 23 diseases through the National Immunisation Program. Australians can be protected from diseases such as whooping cough, rubella, measles, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and even good old influenza. I am a supporter of immunising our communities. I congratulate the over 88 per cent of families who immunise their children. I know it is hard. I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and I take my children to get immunised. I took my poor little boy when he was six months old; his face went red and he let out that little squawk, but I understand how important it is.

Schedule 3 concerns child support. It is quite often said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the Rudd government demonstrates this again. Clearly, schedule 3 is supported. But it is schedule 2 that I have a significant problem with. This nation has a contract with its veterans. It is an unwritten contract—it is not spoken loudly in the halls of parliament or elsewhere, but it is a contract nonetheless—that says: ‘You will train, you will be led and you will fight. We will put you in harm’s way. Some of you will pay the ultimate price and will die. Because of that service, because you love country more than self, because you are not afraid to face this country’s adversaries and to fight for the freedom we take for granted, our contract with you is that we will have a range of entitlements that we will preserve.’ That is the contract with veterans.

In my military career and my time serving in operations overseas, if someone did not pull their weight or went back on their word, we said that they were ‘jack’—that they were a ‘jack man’. I stand here today and say to Mr Rudd, the Prime Minister, and to the government: you are a government of ‘jack men’—

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