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

I am pleased to speak on the Social Services Amendment (More Generous Means Testing for Youth Payments) Bill 2015 and to offer Labor's support for this bill. I have to say, it is a very rare day that we see this government seeking to make income support payments more generous or to provide extra support to ordinary Australians. Indeed, in the two years of this Abbott-Turnbull government, this may well be the first time a bill has come before the House that seeks to make life easier for Australian families. Such is the legacy of this government.

So, before I go into the details of the bill, I want to spend just a moment or two reflecting on the legacy of this government and the impact they would want to have on pensioners, families and young people in our community. It is a legacy of cuts to income support the likes of which this country has never seen before—unfortunately a legacy that in some cases is likely to continue, because, despite what could only be described as a brutal change in leadership, there does not seem to have been much of a change in direction. And I guess you could ask, why would we expect there to be? The new Prime Minister has been just as much of a player in the decisions of the government as when Mr Abbott was the Prime Minister. The new Prime Minister was at the cabinet table when the 2014 budget was drawn up. He would have supported, around that cabinet table—in fact, he said so publicly—all the cuts in the 2014 budget, including the cuts to indexation of the pension, cuts that we now know would have seen every single one of Australia's four million pensioners left with $80 less pension a week over the next 10 years. The new Prime Minister also supported and voted in this place for the second round of pension cuts in this year's budget—cuts that will leave 330,000 pensioners worse off in 2017.

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