Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start not with what I was originally going to talk about but by responding to the contribution by the member for McMillan. I have in this House voted twice on the removal of people from parenting payment to Newstart, for a couple when their youngest child turns six and for a single parent when their youngest child turns eight. The first time I voted on that was in 2006 when John Howard introduced in, I think, July a bill which meant that parents would be transferred from parenting payment to Newstart, for couples when their youngest child turned six and for single parents when their youngest child turned eight, for any child born after July 2006. That was the first time. I do not recall the member for McMillan speaking on it, but I could be wrong; he may have done that. That bill passed this House. As of that date, everyone in this House knew that, as of 1 July 2012, parents would start to transition from parenting payment to Newstart because of that legislation passed by the Howard government in 2006. That was several months before the Labor government moved legislation which also put the 'grandfathered' parents in the same circumstances as the parents that had been affected by the Howard government bill. By the time that legislation was introduced, the Howard government legislation had seen parents transitioning from parenting payment to Newstart for at least six months without the kind of outrage by the now government that we are seeing now.

By saying this I am not at all trying to assign blame. I get very tired in this parliament of what I call the 'he bit me first' argument: when you ask a six-year-old why they bit their younger brother and they say, 'He bit me first.' I am really not trying to do that. What I would like to say is that if there is a belief in this House that this approach is inappropriate then it has actually been brought about by both sides of parliament through two bills before this parliament supported by both sides of parliament on a number of occasions. The full story is far more complex than the one we are hearing. The day the members on the other side want to reverse that decision, the day they come to this place with the budget to reverse not just the decision that Labor made but the far more expensive decision that Howard made in 2006, I will take their outrage far more seriously, because the vast majority of parents affected and the large savings in the budget actually came from the Howard decision, not the Labor decision.

What I wanted to talk about today, and I am running out of time, is an event that is likely to happen in this House in the next month. We think it is going to happen. We have been told it is going to happen. We do not know when it is going to happen. We are reading press reports. It is what the Abbott government calls the 'repeal day'—the famous repeal day. We have heard the Minister for Small Business and various ministers on the other side talk about the repealing of 6,000 or 8,000—

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