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

I think the one thing that the Leader of the Opposition got right just then in this matter of public importance debate was that this is not going to be the last word we hear from him. We know it is not going to be the last word because a month ago he said that he would not be increasing taxes to fund policy promises. Now he wants to introduce a tax to raise $2.7 billion to pay for his latest thought bubble. So you are dead right about one thing, Leader of the Opposition: we know this will not be the last word. In a month’s time we will have another backflip from you. We know that this Leader of the Opposition has absolutely no consistency not just on the issue of tax but fundamentally on the whole question of paid parental leave. We can go back to the time when he was a minister in the Howard government. Back in 2002 he said:

I am dead against paid maternity leave as a compulsory thing.

He went on to say:

I think that making businesses pay what seems to them two wages to get one worker. Almost nothing could be more calculated to make businesses feel that the odds are stacked against them.

I think that really says, in a rather convoluted way, that he is against it. He was against paid maternity leave then. He said then—and this has become the famous quote from him: ‘Compulsory paid maternity leave, over this government’s dead body. Frankly it won’t happen under this government,’ and, of course, it did not. When they were in government, for 12 years they had the opportunity to stand up for families in the way that he just described in his flowery language, but we know who the real Tony Abbott is. This is all about him trying to say to Australian women that he really is their friend.

Australian women, Mr Abbott, are a wake-up to you. They know that this is a complete and total sham from the Liberal Party—no detail at all, no timing. We have heard nothing about when this is going to be introduced. We have nothing from the shadow Treasurer—who I gather did not know anything about this policy—about when this great new tax is going to be introduced. When is it going to be introduced, Joe? When are we going to see this great big tax from the Liberal Party? This is the great new tax from the opposition—a $2.7 billion tax. That is what this is about.

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