Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

We all remember the snakes and ladders interview. What were the snakes waiting for families as he tried to cut their support? He gave this absolute train wreck of an interview on Sky TV and he tried to pretend that these measures—these cuts to family payments and to grandparent carers of teenage children—were fair. When he was asked about it he said to David Speers:

Well, that depends on their capacity to access childcare and re-enter the workforce.

David Speers said:

I'm talking about a 15 year old.

The minister said, quizzically: 'A 15-year-old. Oh, maybe Labor's got a point.' So David Speers asks if they are $2,500 worse off, and the minister responds, 'Well, in isolation. It depends on their willingness to enter the workforce or go into child care.' This is a 15-year-old, and he is saying this to a grandparent carer who is 70 years old. Honestly, if you ever wanted a definition of how out of touch these people are, it was that absolute train wreck of an interview.

I remember that on Mother's Day in 2015 I was at the Mother's Day Classic when I heard that the Treasurer and other cabinet ministers were out there talking about mothers being involved in a rort. Mothers were being told they were frauds for accessing paid parental leave that they were entitled to. Ministers lectured us day after day, saying that the only way to make paid parental leave fair was to take away paid parental leave from 70,000 mums. Now they expect us to believe that they have had a change of heart. Well, we do not believe you, and nor do the budget papers demonstrate that we should. If you look at Budget Paper No. 1, page 3-38, up the top, it says 'Decisions taken as a result of Senate positions'. It is not that the government do not believe in these things anymore. It is not that they are taking these things out of the budget because they are not government policy. They are only taking them out of the budget for now because they cannot get them through the Senate. If they ever get the chance to put these measures in front of the parliament again, that is exactly what they will do.

We do not believe you. We do not believe that you are committed to getting rid of these things, and neither do the Australian people. We know what else you still have left there too, which of course did not get mentioned in the budget papers last night. They still want to say to Australians, 'You're going to have to work till you're 70 before you get the age pension.' They have not changed that. They still want to axe the clean energy supplement, which of course means a cut of $365 a year to new pensioners. So nothing has changed with this minister or this government. We know that these cuts will be back.

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