Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I hear an interjector over there: 'It's not a welfare policy'. And that would sit with the government's policy document, which reads as follows:

… paid parental leave is an economic driver and should be a workforce entitlement …

In other words: for the most affluent Australian families it is, 'Welcome to the new age of entitlements.' So much for the government's rhetoric.

We will hear suggestions tonight that the Treasurer has suddenly become Robin Hood. Let us face it: even the Sheriff of Nottingham occasionally got the odd knight or dame offside, but this is not going to be a Robin Hood budget. This will be a budget that will slug the battlers and will help the billionaires. This is a government that wants to strip away financial protections from vulnerable Australians, which will have the effect of boosting earnings in the financial sector, I am sure, but if the government puts FOFA back on the agenda, it is going to hurt low-income Australians. It is going to hurt pensioners, the very victims of the Storm Financial collapse five years ago.

This hit on low- and middle-income Australia is going to reverberate in so many other areas too. The government claims to be committed to closing the gaps. You cannot close the Indigenous-non-Indigenous gap if your policy is to widen the economic gap in Australia. This government says that it is committed to closing the pay gap between men and women, but you cannot close the pay gap between men and women if your industrial policy is to attack unions and to make it impossible for unions to bargain to assist gender equity across the community.

I say to the Prime Minister: enough of the tribalism, enough with the class warfare; it is time to govern in the interests of all Australians. We have heard talk lately that the government wants to engage in means-testing. That would be news to those of us on this side of the House, who sat through six years in which the coalition in opposition opposed means-testing at every turn. We tried to put in modest changes to the baby bonus, and the Treasurer compared it to China's one-child policy. When we put in place modest means-testing to the private health insurance rebate, the now Minister for Health said that it 'represents a betrayal of the 12 million Australians who contribute to their own health care', and many coalition speakers decried means-testing the private health insurance rebate as class warfare. And on page 93 of Battlelines, the Prime Minister has criticised means testing itself.

This is a Prime Minister who has no deep philosophical commitment to means-testing. Let us be honest: he has very little intellectual commitment to anything. This is a Prime Minister who, after all, when talking about carbon pricing some years ago said, 'If you want to put a price on carbon, why not do it with a simple tax?' And yet, in order to win the Liberal Party leadership, he was willing to backflip on that. This is a Prime Minister who promised Peter Reith that he would support him for the Liberal Party leadership and then backflipped and supported Alan Stockdale, with poor Mr Reith afterwards saying:

I honestly do not know, I really don't. But he certainly did ask me, and he did not just ask me, he asked people around him to join my campaign, as it were … I am a bit disappointed.'

Australians will be pretty disappointed by a Prime Minister who has said literally dozens of times, for example, 'What you will get under us are tax cuts without new taxes.' He said that there would be 'no new tax collection without an election'. He said, 'No country has ever taxed its way to prosperity,' and he said, 'Personal income tax will be lower under a coalition government in its first term than it is now.'

This is a Prime Minister who said in his budget reply just last year—the now Prime Minister was standing at this very dispatch box here—'No-one's personal tax will go up.' Let's see whether that holds up tonight. This is a Prime Minister who was pretty willing to have a go at our side of politics any time he thought that there had not been promises kept. In fact the Prime Minister in criticising former Prime Minister said:

I am not a doctor but I think that we are in the presence of a condition, a chronic condition, TDD, truth deficit disorder.

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