Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Lundy for the question. Unfortunately, time does not allow me to do justice to the question—because of the very long list of achievements—but I do want to focus on the plight of families. I think they understood that, when the Rudd Labor government came to office, it was confronted with very high inflation. The legacy of the Howard-Costello era was very high inflation, and that was putting enormous pressure on families in terms of the cost-of-living pressures. That is why in our first budget we made the centrepiece of the budget tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners. We focused not on the high-income earners, as the previous government had done, but on working families and low- and middle-income earners. We gave large tax cuts to assist those families to deal with those economic pressures. We also introduced a 50 per cent tax refund for families for key educational expenses—for laptops, stationery and school textbooks. That tax refund was a very important measure to assist families in educating their children.

What we also did in that budget was to provide for a very large surplus so that we could ensure that, if times turned tough, we could help protect Australians from the worst excesses of any downturn in economic conditions. That is why, with the economic security package, we are able to assist families and pensioners by providing payments to them—which will be paid next month—which will go a long way to supporting those families, supporting those pensioners and helping stimulate the Australian economy. (Time expired)