Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Capricornia for her question. She certainly does understand what the government has done and continues to do for both pensioners and families, as we help them with their cost of living pressures. We have already delivered very significant reforms, particularly for pensioners. We have delivered much needed support for more than three million Australian pensioners. It is this government that are going to introduce Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme—a scheme that will certainly help mums and dad, and their babies. This government also believe that it is very important to target family support like the family tax benefit and the baby bonus.

These are very significant reforms that we have delivered in our two years in government after 12 years of inaction on these very important issues from the former government. Those opposite refused to do anything to increase the pension for 12 long years, even though they knew that pensioners were doing it tough. They also refused to introduce a paid parental leave scheme. We know what the Leader of the Opposition has had to say about that—that paid parental leave would be introduced over his dead body.

It is becoming very difficult to keep up with the policies of those opposite. Earlier this month we had a lot of confusion on one day when Mr Abbott seemed to backflip on his opposition to a paid parental leave scheme only then to flip over again later in the day. There was a front page splash in the Sydney Morning Herald saying that he was about to develop a policy—no costings, no detail, but nevertheless he was apparently going to have a policy. Within hours of that being on the front page of the Herald he was desperately back-pedalling, saying that the paper had jumped the gun.

Today we see more policy confusion from the Leader of the Opposition. Once again in the Herald, they seem to have a copy of a very secret plan that would see older Australians working longer to pay for welfare payments to high-income families. This is a shadow cabinet proposal from the member for Warringah:

If a universal family tax benefit payment needs to be fully funded it could be done by further increasing the retirement age.

We already know from the Leader of the Opposition’s book that he wants to increase the retirement age to 70 and the good thing about today is that we now know why. We now know why it is that he wants to see the age pension age increased to 70, because he is saying that under a future Liberal government pensioners would have to work longer so that welfare payments could be paid to high-income families. That would mean that those higher income families would get $4,800 per child per year and that would be paid for by making older Australians work until they are 70. That is the policy of the Leader of the Opposition.

We now know that the Leader of the Opposition is a very serious risk to older Australians. You might think that this is a policy, but instead of that being a clear direction for the Leader of the Opposition we had a comment from a spokesperson saying that no final decisions have been made.

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