Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank my friend the member for Gilmore for her question and I thank her for hosting me at Nowra once again the weekend before last at a successful country conference. On 1 July this year our government wants to deliver a tax cut for every Australian taxpayer, all 13.6 million of them. We want people to earn more and we want people to keep more of what they earn but there are some barriers to this. The barriers to this are, of course, the Liberals in the other place moving amendments to restore the principle of their unfair tax cuts on stage 3, and the Greens political party have foreshadowed amendments to kick it all off to a committee so the Senate can talk about it some more by the end of the month. We want these tax cuts to pass this week, because women in particular will benefit from our tax cuts. Ninety per cent of women will be better off than under the old Morrison plan.

This government has put economic opportunity for women at the heart of our agenda. Today we have required large companies to publish their gender pay gap and what that is about as transparency, making sure that people are aware of exactly what companies are doing. This has added to the support we have for feminised industries such as the 15 per cent aged-care worker increase that we have put in place. But those opposite do not even support that. Senator Canavan has gone onto the media saying the latest gender pay gap report is 'useless' and would encourage men to support men's rights activists like social media identity Andrew Tate—Andrew Tate! He said, 'This gender pay report must be the most useless set of data that a government agency has ever collected.' So while some of those opposite are out there saying this is a 'good thing' and even claiming credit for it, others are out there saying it is 'completely useless'.

What the Senate can do, with the support of the Liberals and the Greens, is to vote for these tax cuts, and vote for them today. Vote for people to earn more and to keep more of what they earn—not stand in the way like the Liberals and the Greens want to do in the Senate. This is what Australians deserve to deal with cost-of-living pressures.

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