Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Adelaide has been so distracted not to know that this is all articulated in the budget. I can make sure the responsible minister can share that material with her if she is looking for a briefing. If she is so detached from the subject that she has not caught up with what is in the budget, I will personally ask the minister to give the member for Adelaide a briefing—that is how helpful and collaborative I am. But the point is that Labor have no policy, just obstruction, in this year of ideas.

Not only do we have the forward agenda and the improved policy settings; we have mapped out how we plan to fund it, because today we as a country are going to borrow another $120 million. And you know what? We are going to do that tomorrow as well and we are going to do that for at least a couple of years. That is off the back of borrowing of around the same order for about the last five years. This month we as a nation will spend $1 billion on debt servicing, just to pay for this constant borrowing, because we have not shown the wit to be able to pursue important policy objectives and live within our means.

This bill aimed to do both—put in place a better policy setting and a better arrangement for families looking for support, encouragement, incentives and certainty about the help and the financial assistance that they would get from a childcare package people could actually understand. You did not need a PhD in government program feng shui to work out what it is you were entitled to. You could plan with predictability about what the support is. That is what the goal is and we needed to fund it. What we were doing was better targeting family assistance payments as part of that goal, so that when children are of an age where they are probably pursuing goals of their own—I know when I was around 13 I would be out every night playing tennis or getting involved in sport or other activities—there is an opportunity for the level of direct care from a parent to take on a different shape. You know this yourself, Deputy Speaker Kelly. It is a chance for those parents to have a clear run to achieve their goals and their ambitions, with support.

Originally this package was around $4½ billion, as a reprioritisation and an increase in the total amount of support going to families. It refocused that. Labor took single parents off their payment and onto Newstart, unilaterally, with no support during the transition, with no thought to the impact on households and no idea of opening up new opportunities so that people could pursue goals themselves. We have not done that. It is a cooperative package, but we needed to fund it. Labor has decided that, of that total funding package of $4.7 billion, it will agree with $500 million. As that great philosopher Maxwell Smart would say: 'Missed it by that much.' It agreed to $500 million when we needed $4.7 billion to fund a clear plan designed to give tens of thousands of people, mainly women, an opportunity for full engagement in the economy, opportunities to improve their prospects and their income, opportunities for their families, opportunities to invest in themselves with training. It would have child care seen not as a welfare measure but as an economic and personal achievement and ambition measure. It would properly align that, and the funding was there, but no.

Labor not only have no plan for it; they have no other suggestion on how you would fund it. So they are just going to stand in the road of $4.3 billion of funding. That is standing in the road of increased payments going to a family with one child, with one parent working full time and the other part time, with a three-year-old daughter. These are called cameos; they are examples of real households. One parent works full time and earns around $85,000 a year and the other parent works three days a week and earns $51,000 a year. The child attends the local day care centre on the days when mum is at work. Under our comprehensive package, which Labor seems not to know about because they have been too busy—I do not know what they have been doing but they have not been doing policy work in the 'year of ideas'—that family will be $43 better off a fortnight in 2018-19, if the full package is implemented.

There are other case studies: a single parent—a single mum, if you will—working two days a week with a three-year-old son. The child is in long day care those days. Mum earns $34,000 a year. This is the package that Labor is standing in the road of, in the name of some concocted idea about fairness. Fairness is about enabling everybody to achieve their full potential. Isn't that a picture of fairness? Isn't that the story of our country? We are here to support everybody to achieve their ambitions and aspirations and their full potential. It is unfair to stand in the road of the machinery and the tools that help people achieve that. In that cameo, that single mum would be $38 a week better off. A family with two children—a newborn, three months old, and a two-year-old—where one parent stays at home while the other works full time and earns $51,000 a year, a modest income, under this package would be $60 per fortnight better off.

What is going on here? It is some parallel universe where there is $4.7 billion of additional and reallocated funding to go into a most visionary program of reform, to have child care support jobs, family ambition and higher incomes, and Labor comes in and say, 'No, we're not going to let you fund that.' And then they have the hide to say, 'Well, what's your plan?' We have a plan and we want to get on with it. The tens of thousands of families who would like a fuller engagement in the economy and every opportunity to achieve their best selves want us to get on with it as well. But to do that we need the whole package to pass. Instead of what we were hoping for, $4.7 billion, Labor has agreed to a $525 million down payment. That sounds unfair to me.

I would like my families to have the opportunity to be their best selves. Your postcode does not determine your potential, but some of these policy settings can inhibit you achieving that goal. We wanted to fix that. That is what we are trying to do here, and Labor is playing cheap politics, with no ideas in this 'year of ideas'. Why stand in the road of what this government wants to do? It is so meaningful. It is so thoughtful. It can be done and it can be funded. Why not do that?

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