Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to join my colleagues in opposing this bill and supporting the very sensible amendment that has been moved by the member for Jagajaga. Once again this bill represents this government's twisted priorities and out-of-touch approach when it comes to not only policy development but reining in the budget deficit and ensuring that our fiscal position is sustainable into the future. This bill personifies the attack by this government on the most vulnerable and weak in our community.

We all know that we need to make savings in the budget. We also know that we need to increase revenue if we are going to continue to fund basic services such as Medicare, grow our education system, grow our healthcare system, invest in renewable energy and ensure that people have good vocational education and a pathway into a job. But it is about the way you do it. It is about the approach you take in doing that and the philosophy that you take to that approach.

The philosophy of the Abbott and Turnbull governments has been to attack the weakest and most vulnerable in our community, the lowest income people and women and to ask them to make savings and to make changes to make their difficult lives even more difficult so that more money can come into the budget but, at the same time, give the wealthiest Australians tax cuts. I am of course speaking of the $50 billion corporate tax cut the Turnbull government is proposing, the changes that have been made to superannuation and ensuring that the deficit levy on the highest income level Australians is removed. Those measures represent the government's twisted priorities. The fact is that this bill attacks the most vulnerable and weak, but the big end of town, the big corporations with turnovers of up to $1 billion, gets a tax cut. That is not fair.

It is also actually worse for our economy in the longer run because it is attacking the majority of the population. As the Reserve Bank governor pointed out before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics last week, the big problem for the Australian economy moving forward is the level of household debt and the fact that it is affecting consumption in Australia. People are saving to fund their mortgages and their household debt and they are not spending. If we are going to have a healthy economy in the longer run, we need to encourage people to spend. This bill does the complete opposite of that, because it attacks the majority of the population and takes money out of their pockets. So does the recent decision of the Fair Work Commission with respect to penalty rates on a cut to the take-home pay of some of the most vulnerable and weakest in our community. This bill, again, represents the Turnbull government's warped approach to supporting Australian families.

In 2013 then Prime Minister Abbott played a very cruel prank on the Australian people when he declared that paid parental leave would be his signature policy. Mr Abbott promised that he would help families with the real costs of raising children. Then on Mother's Day, of all days, in 2015 the Abbott government announced that it wanted to cut paid parental leave to tens of thousands of new mums each year. Around the same time, Abbott government ministers labelled women who had received paid parental leave from their employers as 'rorters' and 'fraudsters' and employers who wanted to support their staff as 'scammers'—a real highlight of the government's mean-spirited campaign of cuts to Australian families. Of course, these reforms were taken on by Malcolm Turnbull when he became the Prime Minister. So this process of attacking working mothers has continued under the Turnbull prime ministership.

In contrast to this government, Labor do not take that approach when it comes to working women. We do not ridicule them. We do not chastise them. We will stand up for working women who have bargained for paid parental leave, often sacrificing wage increases. We will stand up for their employers, who have supported them by providing them with paid parental leave. These are good Australian employers who have done the right thing by their staff in providing them with those paid parental leave schemes. Asking women to choose which scheme was better was a wicked approach by this government that has done nothing to ensure that mothers get the support that they need in the early years when they are rearing children and so that ultimately they can come back into the workforce and maintain working mother status.

We will support and protect the scheme that we introduced and designed to allow mothers to combine government and employer schemes. It was designed to provide the World Health Organisation's recommended 26-weeks leave to as many mothers as possible. The time spent by new mothers with their babies in the early days and weeks of their lives is some of the most precious and valuable time imaginable. Labor will not apologise for doing whatever it takes to protect that from the government's attempt to reduce it to just 20 weeks.

With the introduction of this omnibus bill, the government is continuing its twisted attempts to rob Peter to pay Paul. The bill introduces $2.7 billion worth of cuts to family payments alone to pay for a $1.6 billion childcare package. In total, it rips $5.6 billion from household budgets of low-income Australians. The bill will take more than $3.30 off pensioners, families, new mums and young Australians for every $1 in proposed childcare assistance. Labor will not support this approach. We will not support the government's attacks on pensioners through the energy supplement, their attacks on the unemployed through changes to Newstart and their attacks on families through reductions to family payments.

The government even admits—they have admitted freely—that their cuts will affect 1.5 million Australian families and leave them worse off. Families losing their family tax benefit A supplements will be around $200 worse off per child and families receiving family tax benefit B will lose around about $350 each year. These cuts add up for families who are struggling to make ends meet. For example, a typical family with two children and a single income of $60,000 will lose around $750 a year. A couple with one child on $75,000 will lose over $1,000 per year. The worst hit will be single parents whose youngest child is 17 and over and has finished school. These families will lose over $3,000 a year in family tax benefits alone. Again, it represents this government's approach of attacking the most weak and vulnerable in our community. These are people who live from week to week, who struggle to make ends meet and for whom finding the money to afford one of their schoolkid's excursions is a challenge. They very rarely get opportunities to go out to the movies or to dinner, or stuff like that. Or, when the car breaks down, they struggle to find the money to have it repaired. They are, generally, renting and are struggling to make ends meet. But these are the people that this government is seeking to attack through this bill to pay for a reform that is going to end up leaving many more children and families worse off when it comes to the provision of child care.

I said at the beginning that budget savings are all about priorities. This government has been shown to have the wrong priorities time and time again by attacking the most vulnerable over and over again. We have seen it with the Medicare co-payment, the freeze to the Medicare rebate and the $100,000 degrees. But, at the same time, they seek to let off the big end of town. They are not only letting them off but offering a $50 billion corporate tax cut over the next 10 years for corporations earning up to $1 billion in revenue. This massive tax cut, which includes Australia's hugely profitable big banks, comes whilst the government is pushing young job seekers to live on nothing for five weeks. That is why Labor is opposing this bill. We will stand up for pensioners where this government moves on the Pensioner Education Supplement and the Education Entry Payments—small payments that go some way to supporting people on income support who start studying. These changes will impact a large cross section of Australia, particularly those with not much to lose before they are pushed to the wall. These are the changes that are hurting regular Australians and are what the people in my community are interested in. These are things that people in the community that I come from are worried about. Yet, the government continues to focus on itself. We have seen that writ large over the course of this week.

In these last few weeks we have seen the government and this Prime Minister talk about themselves. We have seen the member for Warringah talk about cutting immigration numbers and reducing the renewable energy target. We have seen the current Prime Minister desperately attack others to retain his tenuous hold on the top job. Meanwhile, they introduce bills that seek to take more and more from everyday Australians. It is simply not on, and Labor will not stand for it. We will oppose reforms such as this. Labor supports additional investment in child care, but this government's attempts to link that with cuts to pensions, families, new mums and young Australians are beyond the pale and cannot be supported. We are not alone, with groups such as the Australian Childcare Alliance, Early Childhood Australia, Early Learning and Care Council of Australia, Family Day Care Australia and the Early Learning Association of Australia all supporting our opposition to this move.

Recent analysis by the ANU shows that these childcare changes will leave one in three families worse off; 330,000 families will be worse off and 126,000 will be no better off. That is almost half of all families. Under these reforms, 550,000 families will be worse off or no better off. The harsh activity test will leave children in 150,000 families worse off. Labor is particularly concerned for Indigenous children across the country who will feel the impact of cuts to 300 mostly Indigenous services that reach 20,000 children.

Once again—and I said at the beginning—government is all about priorities. This bill tells you everything that you need to know about the Abbott-Turnbull government's priorities and their approach to budget repair. Again, they are attacking the most vulnerable and weak in our community. In particular, those affected by these changes are women. Women, in case members of the government have not noticed, do it tough enough in Australian society. We are not reducing the gender pay gap, we are not making it easier for women to break through the glass ceiling, we are not making it easier for women to have children, continue in their careers and remain productive members of society with reforms such as these.

These reforms, and decisions like the Fair Work Commission decision last week on penalty rates, make it harder for women to participate in our community. That is why they must be condemned. These reforms make it tougher for pensioners. The member for Jagajaga and I met with a group of pensioners in our community last Thursday. Multicultural communities came together in our area to discuss these pension changes. They are horrified by the fact that they potentially will lose their education supplements, their energy supplements and their pension after a period of going overseas for six weeks.

These reforms attack the unemployed, some when they are at their most vulnerable—people like those who are going to lose their jobs as a result of the car industry shutting down. If they do not have decent redundancy schemes and they do not have the ability to access Newstart for five weeks then it can leave people in a precarious financial situation if they have just lost their job at one of the most vulnerable periods in their life in terms of their mental health. At the same time they offer tax cuts to big business. They make it easier for the richest in our community. It represents this government's twisted priorities, and that is why I and my Labor colleagues oppose this bill. I urge all members of the House to support the sensible amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga.

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