Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last night I started speaking on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017, and I drew the observation that this piece of legislation from the government highlights the love-hate relationship that it has with the Australian people. When it sat down and said, 'We're going to try and improve child care', not only did it get that fundamentally wrong in certain respects but it also got it wrong in the way it decided that it would pay for those so-called improvements to child care. When it went through the budget—when it went through the finances of the Commonwealth and thought, 'Where can we make the savings to pay for this initiative?'—instead of targeting any other area, it targeted the Australians who can least afford to have their payments and benefits cut. It targeted those on welfare payments. It did not target the $50 billion tax cut that this government wants to give to Australian business.

The point I was about to go on to make at that point last night was this: our economy is in transition. We need to see growth in the economy. The Reserve Bank Governor has said that he and the Reserve Bank are concerned that we do not have enough consumption happening in the economy. We need to see that grow. We do not want to see, for example, savings increase. And yet this government wants to cut the available money for people to spend, the people who have the least to spend already, in the economy. That is going to make our economy worse. This is all at a time when the government is out supporting a cut to penalty rates on a Sunday, making the situation even worse. So we have a situation where for years now this government has failed to deliver on childcare relief because it insists on linking the changes to cuts to the family budget. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and this is an absolutely atrocious way to go about delivering on government policy.

With the introduction of this bill, the government is not just holding families to ransom to pay for child care but also it is holding pensioners to ransom, it is holding people who are looking for work to ransom, it is holding new mothers to ransom. This is a travesty of a piece of legislation because this bill introduces $2.7 billion worth of cuts to family payments alone to pay $1.6 billion for a childcare package. In total, this piece of legislation is going to be ripping $5.6 billion from the household budgets of the lowest paid Australians, the people who most need our support. The bill would take more than $3.30 a week off pensioners, families, new mums, young Australians for every $1 that is proposed to be spent on childcare assistance. This is a rip-off and a fraud of legislation, and that is why Labor will not support this bill.

Let us look at the childcare aspect. We do, of course, support child care—and I say this, from a personal point of view, as a brand-new father—and we support additional investment in child care. But we do not support others being held to ransom to pay for it, especially those who are least able to afford it in our community. This government is more committed to the cuts that will hurt pensioners, families, new mums, young Australians than it is to delivering on its promise of increased childcare assistance. Wouldn't it be better if we had a government that thought the lifelong benefits of early education were more important than cuts to pensioners to rob Peter to pay Paul? Despite being warned about these serious flaws in its childcare changes for years—we have been talking about these problems for years—they have done nothing to fix them.

The bill before the House will cut access to early education in half for many vulnerable and disadvantaged children, effectively cutting access for families earning under $65,000 a year from two days a week to one. Labor is very worried about the impact that the government's changes will have on Indigenous children in particular, who in every state and territory already have lower early childhood enrolment rates than the average. These are the people who need our help the most. What sort of government is this? Seriously, what sort of government do the members opposite want to be known as? This is the lowest of the low approach.

I move on, because not only do we have these problems with the childcare changes but we also have problems with the way they are going to 'pay for this', which is by changes to the family tax benefit. Labor, as it always has, will stand for low- to middle-income earners in this country. That is what we have been having to do against this government since its disastrous 2014 budget, and yet year after year it throws up at these crazy zombie measures that it is claiming as savings when it is trying to attack ordinary and low-paid Australians. The government admit finally—it took a while to get it out of them—that their family payment cuts will leave 1.5 million Australians worse off at a time when our economy is already faltering. Families will be losing FTB A supplements of $200 per child and they will also be losing FTB B supplements of $350 a year. To put that into perspective for the people of Burt: there are currently 12,775 recipients of family tax benefit A in my electorate and 12,946 recipients of family tax benefit B. This is not small fry stuff in an area that is already suffering huge unemployment levels and having to deal with the decline in the mining construction boom, having to deal with a state government that has caused debt and deficit beyond belief, and having to deal with a state economy that is in recession.

But it is not only this, it is not only these changes. This government has really gone the whole hog when it comes to making life worse for those who rely on welfare payments in this country. At the moment we have a situation where welfare payments are indexed against CPI. I would point out Labor did a lot of work with a number of welfare benefits to make sure they were linked to the higher of CPI or average male weekly earnings, but CPI it is. What the government are going to do now is freeze a component of those payments for three years. They are going to freeze a component of those payments for three years instead of having them indexed against CPI. At a time when we have a problem with wage growth not increasing—in Western Australia we have a problem where not only do we not have wages increasing, we have wages not increasing in real terms either. Wages were increasing at a level lower than CPI; now they are going backwards. Now they are going to do the same thing to people who are on welfare benefits. This is actually going to have some very deleterious effects on the economy at large, let alone on the individuals who are having their payments cut.

We also have—and this is one of my favourites, especially on the back of the debate we just had—the automation of income stream review processes, neatly contained in schedule 11 of the legislation. Always get concerned when there are more than 10 schedules in a piece of legislation. These measures will automate the process by which the Department of Human Services collects income stream information that it then uses for data matching. The government has been at lengths to point out that it was a Labor government that introduced the data-matching processes when it came to welfare payments. What the government neatly forgets is that we had a human review process in there to make sure that we did not cut payments from people when they did not deserve to have them cut—that was neatly obliterated from the history of time, apparently, by the minister. So what it is going to do now is create more automation in the process before it has even got the current system working. This is a disaster just in itself, just in one little schedule, and it really highlights how this government has a love-hate relationship with Australia. It loves business. It is happy to give a $50 billion tax cut to business but it hates ordinary and low-paid Australians. It is making cuts to payments, it is making cuts to pensioners and it is making cuts to young people while it is giving big tax cuts to big business. It is a shame. (Time expired)

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