Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise today to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Family Payments Structural Reform and Participation Measures) Bill 2015. It is marvellous how you can get a debate in this place when everyone is actually agreeing on a bill. Anyway, that is the nature of what happens here. I have been listening to some of the contributions from members of the opposition this morning. I was in my office, tolerating the member for Blair's contribution in the background. He was suggesting that the members of the National Party should have no influence on what policy comes into this place and that anything that is of benefit to the people that they represent is somehow a sop to the parliament. I might just remind the member for Blair that the 'scandalous indulgences' that we agreed upon, with the change of Prime Minister, were such shocking things as a commitment to help students get tertiary education, a railway line from Melbourne to Brisbane, more funds for parents who want to stay at home with their children in their first year of life and a telecommunications fund so that people actually had a phone that worked—all those scandalous things that those in the National Party seem to think the Australian people have the hide to actually expect that they should have and which the electorates that they represent take for granted. So I have had about enough of the lectures from the Labor Party on empathy and fairness this morning.

I admire the member for Lalor's contribution and her commitment to the people in her electorate, but we should not forget the underlying reason that this legislation was brought in in the first place—and, quite frankly, a lot of the original changes in it were taken out, and, today, we have the proposed legislation that both sides of the House agree on. It was not so that the coalition could be complete and utter mongrels and create harm, pestilence and unwellness for people in Australia. It was all about conserving our future. The member for Lalor gave a good example of a young mum with two kids and the importance of the schoolkids bonus. But it is important to note that the schoolkids bonus is money that is borrowed from overseas. We are borrowing money to pay the interest on last year's schoolkids bonus and the one from the year before. We are still paying that off and the interest—and the $900 cash handouts that Kevin Rudd put out willy-nilly. One of the RSL clubs in my town had a $50,000 bonus put through the pokies that week. All those things are on borrowed money. If we had money in the bank, we could afford to be more generous to the Australian people. But this is a time in our history where we need to reset our country so that we are sustainable. The greatest disservice we could do to those two boys that the member for Lalor spoke about would be to impact on their future so that, as adults, they were still paying for the programs that we put in place and that they had no say in. We need to come back to a point where we are sustainable. You could mount an argument that nearly every dollar spent by the government is worthwhile, but we never hear from the Labor Party how they are ever going to pay for anything. It is the magic pudding that seems to keep on giving that they can afford to be so generous with. But we need to make some adjustments, and we are now at a point where I think nearly half of our population are actually net noncontributors—that is, on payments from the government or welfare payments.

This bill is one of the first steps towards that sustainability and what we have an obligation to do. My electorate of Parkes has one of the lowest per capita incomes of all the electorates in Australia. No-one knows about the impacts on low-income families more than I do, but what we need to do is have a vibrant economy so that when young people like those which the member for Lalor was talking about leave school there is a worthwhile job for them to go to. This is so that when their parents need care in years to come, when the baby boomers need care, we have the strength in our economy to handle the challenges that are coming our way.

The government has proposed amendments to this bill to remove measures that do not have Labor support, and we have just talked about that. The government wants to help families find affordable child care, and this bill goes towards helping to find the funds for that. I will not go over what other speakers have said, but one of the programs that the government is supporting through these changes is the Nanny Pilot Program. I have heard the mockery from members of the opposition about this program, but this is a very well-received program. There is a lot of interest in this program in my part of the world. A lot of people who work in occupations that are not regular nine-to-five jobs—police officers, healthcare workers, aged care workers and abattoir workers; people like that who work irregular shifts—are looking for an opportunity to find care for their children that fits in with their work programs. This measure would help them overcome the difficulties they have now. The other group of people who are also excited about the nanny pilot are those who live out of town and are concerned that in many cases their children are spending up to 100 kilometres a day in a baby seat. Mostly, the mother is driving them to and from a day care centre in a country town. The parent then goes to work and then they all drive home. Not only is there an inherent danger in doing that on a daily basis; it is incredibly wearing on children to be involved in that amount of travelling. For people who live and work in more isolated areas to have access to child care that fits their needs is a very welcome step.

I do support this bill. I will not be made to feel guilty for the decisions that I make in this place by those sitting on the opposition benches. This is not a job that I come to where no tough decisions are made. This is a job that comes with great responsibility. This is a job that comes with an eye to the future. Every parent wants to have a country that is a better place for their children to grow up in than what they had. As a baby boomer, I am a member of the most privileged generation that Australia has ever seen, and I want to make sure that my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have an opportunity to have the same things in life that my generation has been able to take for granted. Unless we take stock of where we are going with our economy and make some tough decisions now, we will look like the countries that some of our European friends have at the moment, with some of the shocking difficulties they are facing because tough decisions and correct and courageous decisions were not taken when they needed to be taken. I support this bill.

See this speech in context