David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with great interest in being able to contribute to this matter of public importance debate, although I find it somewhat hypocritical that the member for North Sydney would come forward and draw attention to one of the biggest contradictions in the budget response he has led for the opposition. As anyone who has followed any of the interviews that the member for North Sydney has given over the last 24 hours would know, the contradiction is that, on the one hand, he wants to tell everybody that the budget handed down last night was too savage and ripped away at the heart of so-called middle-class welfare, as people out there say, but, on the other hand, he wants to tell us that it was not nearly savage enough. It is somewhat confusing and somewhat hypocritical but the member for North Sydney will get his opportunity, through his leader, tomorrow night to spell out in clear detail exactly what this confused position will ultimately mean for the Australian people.

I saw that the member for North Sydney raised the issue of cost-of-living pressures. I note that the issue of cost of living pressures has been raised with him on numerous occasions over the last couple of weeks in relation to specific measures that the government has indicated will provide relief to families from those cost of living pressures. On each occasion that any of these initiatives have been put to the member for North Sydney, he has failed to commit himself and his party to supporting these measures to provide relief to those families facing these pressures. On each occasion when he has been asked whether or not he supports the government's initiatives the best he could do was to fail to agree to support the government's initiatives and respond by saying the following, which I quote from Australian Agenda on 4 May:

At this stage the best support the Government can give is to get the budget back to surplus as soon as possible and take some of the upward pressure off interest rates.

Then on 8 May on the Insiders program he was asked the question again. I think it was Barrie Cassidy who tried to pin him down on whether or not he would support these measures which would provide relief to families. Once again, he refused to confirm that he would support those measures and the best he could come up with was to say:

If you want to take pressure off families, if you want to take upward pressure off interest rates, you have to get back to surplus as quickly as possible.

We agree that you have to get back to surplus as quickly as possible. That is why the budget that the Treasurer handed down last night charted out a pathway for a return to surplus in 2012-13. I know we have heard from the member for North Sydney that he thinks that somehow he is going to deliver a surplus sooner and I guess we will all see whether or not that is possible when his leader comes forward and sets out his party's plans tomorrow night. I think we all wait with bated breath to see that fiscal consolidation. That clearly would be the fastest fiscal consolidation known to man if that were to be achieved, but we will wait and see exactly how he intends to achieve that.

So we have the member for North Sydney out there raising issues of concern about the cost of living pressures. I note that he has failed to acknowledge any of the measures and we will see tomorrow night whether he supports the measures that this government is proposing to ease those cost-of-living pressures. There are many. If you have children in child care, for example, apart from having benefitted from the increase in the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent that this government introduced—

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