Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

He said twice that it is just too much money. How can any credible Leader of the Opposition say that there is too much money in the public school system? Not only do they oppose our investment at a really important time in the economy for school infrastructure, but also they say there are too many teachers, that we should cut one in seven. The shadow education minister said that there are too many teachers and that none of them are good enough so let us start by cutting one in seven, that class sizes do not matter. In which part of the world do they not matter? The opposition is clearly setting out a slash and burn agenda and it is a rolled gold guarantee.

Let us look at the lived experience. What are people experiencing right now? I will give you a really good example—let us just go to Queensland. You want to talk about frightened people not just in the public sector but right across the economy? People are genuinely scared because they are seeing a government with an enormous unprecedented majority out of control to the point where they are having really big fights internally over the cutting, slashing and burning of the Australian economy. They are trying to have it both ways. On one hand the Queensland government is saying that it is so bad in Queensland that they will be the next Spain, that there is a collapse imminent. At the same time, the Queensland Treasurer is going overseas and lauding it to the rest of the world that we have the best economy in the world because we have such great numbers and opportunities.

Let us turn now to the living experience of the really good things we have done. We have the schoolkids bonus to help families educate their kids. We understand that families are doing it tough and we are doing something about cost-of-living pressures. It is urgent and we have a $3.6 billion cost-of-living package for families under pressure. The beauty about us is that we got this package through a hung parliament, in difficult circumstances, but the opposition opposed it every step of the way because they do not want families to get relief from those cost-of-living pressures. I agree: there are cost-of-living pressures and the opposition make them more difficult by not supporting any measures to ameliorate them.

Not only have we made a commitment to increase the tax-free threshold but also we have tripled it to $18,000, which means that more than one million working Australians will no longer have to fill out a tax return. This is something people dreamt about two decades. I do not know how many times constituents would come into my office and say, 'Why can't you lift the tax-free threshold from $5,000 or $6,000 up to maybe $10,000?' We took it to $18,000 and we did it in a tough economic climate. We did not just do it when it was easy, when anybody could have been a good Treasurer and you literally just had to turn up for work and you did a good job; we did it in tough times when you have to manage an economy, to make hard decisions, to make savings in the right areas, to spend in the right areas, to invest in schools and education, to invest in health, to reform parts of the economy and to make big structural changes including a new carbon economy in step with what the rest of the world is doing.

The Climate Commission has come out with its report which says we are now in step with the middle of the pack when it comes to our policies on climate change and carbon pricing because the world has a number of schemes in place. There is one thing clear about that report and that is, if we do not do something now, we will be left behind and it will cost 10 times as much. That is the lived experience. That is what happens in real life.

What else is happening right now? Since we got into government we have lowered taxes. If you are on $50,000 a year, which is a fairly basic wage, you are now paying $1,750 less tax than you were in 2007-08—that is, 18 per cent less tax. Under a Labor government you pay less tax and the total tax take from government is a figure which cannot be disputed. You cannot just accept a figure when it suits you and then not accept it when it does not suit you. In fact, all taxpayers with incomes up to $80,000 get a tax cut. That is the lived experience. That is what we are doing as a government to make cost-of-living pressures come down. We understand cost-of-living pressures are real. We do not just oppose them, bleat about them and frighten parents about their kids' education. We put more money in and that is how to deal with it.

Family payments will increase by $1.8 billion from1 July next year. That is on top of the increases we have already put in place. We understand families are doing it tough because we had a GFC and one of the worst natural disasters in Australian history. The Queensland floods had a bigger impact on this economy, a whole percentage point on GDP, than the GFC. We responded. We took action to make sure that the economy did not suffer. What did that mean? People did not lose their jobs. The economy is still going. It means that people can still go to a hospital. They can still send the kids to school. It means they still have a job to pay the mortgage. The best thing you can do to reduce cost-of-living pressures is keep people in jobs.(Time expired)

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