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

This is absolutely true and it is very, very mean. It is unfair. It is just plain nasty. Of all the areas in the budget you could have picked on to get the money to pay for this reform. I will admit, there are parts of this reform that are quite positive, but there are a lot of bits that are very negative. To the positive parts, if you were going to find parts of the budget to pay for this, maybe picking on the people who can least afford it—picking on pensioners, people who are trying to find work, single parents, those who are the recipients of family tax benefit—is definitely not the best way to go about it. It is just plain nasty and it demonstrates how out of touch the government are. These childcare changes are going to end up leaving one in three children worse off. This is the same flawed package that the government have tried to introduce three times. They just will not learn.

In addition to that, the activity test will see 150,000 families left worse off. This slashes the subsidies for about half of the families. In addition, if a child's parent works casually or part-time, the likelihood of being able to access stable, subsidised early education is completely compromised, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to improve the childcare rebate and subsidy system. At its core, why we fundamentally think it is a good idea to improve childcare rebates and accessibility to child care, is that this is about equality. It is not just about making sure that our kids get the best start in life, which is absolutely fundamental; it is also about making sure that those in our society who have the predominant responsibility for looking after our children—which, let's be frank about it, is mothers; there are definitely dads out there who do this, but it is predominantly mothers—are not left disadvantaged by not being able to return to the workforce to pursue their careers, and we are able to make sure that we narrow the gender pay gap. The legislation that the government is proposing is not going to end up fixing that. In fact, it may end up making it worse because of the other cuts that it will apply through the welfare system. That is the travesty of this legislation, but it actually gets worse.

When we look at how this legislation affects those who are the most disadvantaged in our society, we have a situation where the government are scrapping the budget base funding for Indigenous early education providers and mobile services in the regions and remote Australia. Early education to around 20,000 children will be put at risk. The government has not been able to guarantee these services. So, for the children who live in some of the most impoverished situations in Australia, those who need the most assistance, the government is going to actively make their situation worse. Again, that demonstrates how nasty this legislation is. This comes on top of the government's decision to cut 38 Indigenous child and family centres. Of course, these unfair measures are on top of the cuts to family tax benefit, cuts to paid parental leave, cuts to the energy supplement for pensioners and cuts to young people and to jobseekers. It is basically indiscriminate cutting across the board to everyone who receives some sort of benefit in this country because they have found themselves unemployed or under-remunerated and need to be assisted. Those are the people that the government has decided to pick on.

I said before that this is a nasty government and this legislation demonstrates it. It is also a love-hate government. This legislation was brought forward on, of all days, Valentine's Day, but all it served to show was that the government hates Australians who find themselves in a situation of needing our help the most. All it shows is that they love big business— (Time expired)

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