Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will tell you about the bill. But there is an interesting thing first. In the electorate of the member for Wentworth, the person they installed as Prime Minister, there are 3,003 recipients of family tax benefit part A and 2,712 recipients of family tax benefit part B. In my electorate, there are 17,008 recipients of family tax benefit part A and 14,676 recipients of family tax benefit part B. My electorate is the real world; it is not where the Prime Minister lives. With all due respect to the member for Wentworth's electors, who I am sure are lovely people, they do not live on the edge—where family incomes are so precious, where people live from week to week.

When you represent one of these electorates, you are constantly aware of just how tight people's budgets are. So you would not try and balance the budget on their backs; you would not put the burden of revenue raising or of making efficiencies in government on their backs. Yet this is what this government is doing. And we know what they promised at the last election. They promised that there would be no cuts and they were going to get rid of the carbon tax and the mining tax. The carbon tax lost about $6 billion in revenue. They gave that away. They were going to have a budget surplus.

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