Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance. I would firstly like to agree with part of the speech that the member for Barton gave, where she said that it is the most vulnerable and the most marginalised in our society that rely on Centrelink. It is for that very reason—for those people in our society who need support—that we need to make these reforms to Centrelink.

Let's look at what the coalition inherited. We know that over Labor's last three years of government there was an estimated $1.9 billion in fraud and overpayments. It is the mismanagement that we saw during the Labor years that allowed that fraud and those overpayments that puts more pressure on the very people in the system that we are trying to help.

We also saw, as the member for Oxley mentioned, that the payment system is 40 years old. Why then, when Labor were running the show for six years and that system was 40 years passed its use-by date, didn't the Labor government invest any money in sorting it out? We know why—because they were wasting money lock, stock and barrel on everything that they could think of, flushing billions and billions of dollars down the toilet rather than investing for the future.

Also, Centrelink hand out an astonishing sum of money every year. Currently this year Centrelink will hand out $154 billion. They will hand out $154 billion. What we should remember in this place is that every single cent of that money has to be earned by someone else.

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