Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

You know—surprise, surprise—on this side of the House we say that at 50 or under 50 there is a great importance in maintaining engagement with the workplace. That is good for you; it is good for your family; it is good for the nation. So we simply do not accept whatever assumptions you do and you work under. What we are doing is devising a system that provides, by having an alignment between the way in which we fund child care and the way in which we transfer taxpayer funds to family tax benefit recipients, the greatest possible incentive to work. I would put this question: when we saw, as we did under members opposite, that you took $7 billion out of the FTB system by indexing income thresholds, which you did in 2008-09, which you expanded in 2009-10, which you continued in 2011-12, which you continued in 2013-14; when you removed the indexation of FTB rates from pension indexation, which you did in 2009-10, which took $6 billion out of the system; when you failed to proceed with additional increases to FTB part A payments, which took $2.5 billion out of the system, which affected grandparent carers and affected every single family on FTB, but there was nothing ancillary or in relation to that that helped any of these people—nothing in child care, nothing for children under one— (Time expired)

Mr Ewen Jones interjecting —

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