Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

One thing is for sure: the government has no idea how bad this budget is. They are doubling the deficit and unemployment is going up, and I find it extraordinary that the member for Flynn clearly has not read the budget papers, where that is clearly set out.

Looking back on it now, a year after last year's horror budget, you have to realise that very little has actually changed. A year ago I said the Abbott government's first budget confirmed:

… the worst for all Australians who believe in a fair, tolerant and compassionate Australia.

A year on, the Abbott government's second budget confirms that unfairness is still at the very heart of this Liberal government. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Abbott government's approach to families. Just three days before this year's budget, the Prime Minister said:

We know it will be good for families.

Before that, just a few months ago, the Prime Minister said:

We, the coalition government, are not going to repair our budget this year at the expense of your family budget.

These were the assurances that the Prime Minister gave Australian families in the lead-up to the second budget. Then, on budget night, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer handed down a budget that includes the same massive cuts to family tax benefits that were in last year's budget—kicking families off family tax benefit part B when their youngest child turns six, freezes to the rates of family tax benefits. Labor understands just how devastating this government's cuts are to families.

New research from NATSEM confirms the worst for families already battling to make ends meet. I will give you a couple of examples. A single-income family, where one of the parents is working, on $65,000 a year, with two school-age children, will lose over $6,000 a year. I ask each of the government members in the parliament today: have you been out and told those single-income families in your electorates that your government is going to take $6,000 off them? Because that is exactly what you will be voting for. That is around 10 per cent of their entire family budget that this Liberal government wants to take off those families. The cumulative financial impact on these families is enormous. Another example is a single-parent family, where the parent is working, with two children—one in primary school, one in secondary school—with an income of $55,000. That parent will lose $6,000 a year, each and every year, by 2018-19. These losses will increase every year. It is abundantly clear that this year's budget is just as unfair on Australian families as last year's horror budget.

It is not just the NATSEM modelling that supports this argument. Professor Peter Whiteford from the ANU said:

So overall, the Budget proposals would take far more out of assistance for families than it puts in.

Over this weekend we saw new analysis from the Australian Council of Social Service showing that $15 billion will be stripped from Australian families because of this government's unfair budget. This is what this government wants to take straight out of the pockets of families. The Prime Minister and the Minister for Social Services have not come clean with their own modelling. I have asked again and again for the government to present their own modelling of the impact of the government's changes on families—and they refuse. This budget means that families will be worse off. Labor will continue to oppose these unfair cuts to family tax benefits, as we have over the last year.

The attack on families is not limited to cuts to family tax benefits. This year's budget includes, quite extraordinarily, cuts to paid parental leave—cuts that will leave 80,000 new mothers worse off; cuts that will see new parents forced back into the workforce earlier. In the mother of all insults, the Treasurer announced these cuts to paid parental leave on Mother's Day! The Treasurer agreed that it is, according to Laurie Oakes's question, 'fraud' if women take paid parental leave from their employer and the government scheme. The Minister for Social Services described women claiming both employer and government paid parental leave as being part of a 'rort'. The Treasurer and the wannabe Treasurer, the Minister for Social Services, also approved the use of that appalling language—it is actually in the budget papers—of 'double dipping'. All of the ministers on the ERC, including the Assistant Treasurer, who is at the table, approved the use of this language. The torrent of scorn following this decision has been unrelenting.

We have seen businesses come out and criticise the cuts to paid parental leave, saying that the cuts will undermine their own schemes to support parents. The chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry indicated that employers would shift payments to other benefits. Kate Carnell said:

It's hard to see why employers would continue to pay parental leave if it meant the government stopped paying and they were simply footing the bill for the government.

This is exactly what the government said it would not do, according to the previous Minister for Social Services. But you cannot believe anything these people opposite say, especially on family payments or paid parental leave.

The criticism has not just come from business. Unions have been strong in their condemnation of the government's cuts to paid parental leave as well. Ged Kearney from the ACTU said:

There's an early agreement that employers and the unions will get together and discuss how this can be changed. … It just won't work the way it has been announced.

There has been criticism as well from the government's own backbench. Last week the member for Murray urged the government to go 'back to the drawing board' on paid parental leave. As the member for Murray said: as a result of these cuts, women had been left with 'the worst of all worlds'.

The most appalling behaviour in this whole saga has come from the Prime Minister himself. This was the man who said, quite a few years ago now, that paid parental leave would happen in this country over his dead body. Then all of you opposite went to the last election and the one before that saying that you would deliver a gold-plated paid parental leave scheme that would have given $75,000 a year to wealthy women. That was the policy you took to the last election. Mr Abbott likened his paid parental leave scheme to his Nixon-going-to-China moment. That is what he said. Of course, he eventually dumped that unaffordable and unfair scheme.

Now, in this budget, the Prime Minister has a third view. He has decided to cut paid parental leave to around 80,000 new mothers because, apparently, the scheme that he once mocked as being inadequate is all of a sudden too generous. So now he wants to cut $1 billion from paid parental leave. That is what is in this budget. Australian families now know beyond any doubt that they cannot believe a single word that this Prime Minister says. He has taken three different views to different elections, and now we have the view in this budget. This Prime Minister has absolutely no credibility when it comes to Australian families, and Labor will firmly oppose this government's cuts to paid parental leave, as well as the cuts to family tax benefits.

You might be surprised to know that there are a couple of things in this bill that I do welcome and do support. I do welcome the continued rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme that will see, in total, 460,000 Australians with disability getting the care and support that they need and deserve. We were pleased to see the money for this scheme, particularly to see funded, in the bill we are currently debating, a new ICT system to support the NDIS. I am also very pleased to see the continued funding of many microfinance initiatives that were established by the previous, Labor government, as of course the National Disability Insurance Scheme was. These microfinance initiatives have been very important in helping people, particularly those trying to get out of poverty, to start little businesses, or helping with their education, and it is a very positive thing to see that in this bill.

With regard to pensions, however, I am very, very concerned. It is true that, after a year of relentless campaigning by pensioners and by Labor members right around Australia, we have shamed this government into scrapping its unfair cuts to pension indexation for now, cuts to the pension that would have seen pensioners cop an $80 a week cut to their pension over the next decade. Each and every one of the members opposite, Liberal and National party members, voted for that cut, and we will certainly be reminding each and every one of your electors in the lead-up to the next election that you voted for a cut to pension indexation. Of course, this is the Prime Minister that said there would be no changes to pensions, so pensioners were understandably extraordinarily angry about that.

Labor opposed these cuts the night they were announced in last year's budget and we opposed them because we knew that cuts to pension indexation were fundamentally unfair. For a year, the Prime Minister, in question time after question time, kept repeating that pensions were not going to be cut, that pensions would keep going up and up. But Australian pensioners are smarter than that—

See this speech in context