Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

I see that Senator Conroy has woken up. That is very exciting. Perhaps you could wake up enough to have a discussion with your Prime Minister about how making things harder for families when it comes to child care is probably not the best way forward. Perhaps if you took a little bit of time to have that discussion with your leader, Senator Conroy, maybe you can enlighten her about how this is a shocking bit of legislation.

All of those parents out there who are struggling and working hard to make ends meet and need to use childcare facilities are now going to do it that much harder because of Julia Gillard and this Labor government. It is as simple as that. Because of this Labor government families are going to do it tougher than they otherwise would have. I do not think that that is something that the people of Australia want to hear. Yet that is what they are stuck with.

How important is it to this government that we are able to support our children and access childcare facilities and have that financial assistance, recognising how important it is for families? No, not this government, ‘We will just make it a bit tougher.’ There is a really good idea. Like the independent youth allowance, ‘Let’s make that a bit tougher for students as well.’ There is another really good idea! It is anything but a good idea. Again, that is a conversation for a later time.

One has to wonder how much this government really does care about families and the future of Australia. You would have to say, for all intents and purposes, ‘Not very much.’ What have we seen it do? Firstly, and the real biggie, we have seen it completely mismanage the finances of this country. We only have to look at the billions of dollars of waste in the pink batts program and the billions of dollars of waste right across the board. There was the mismanagement of the school halls program.

Let us not forget the $900 cheques—that was a really good idea. I heard a story from north-west New South Wales about the $900 cheques. A farmer up there had a backpacker on his place for a while. I remember when all that happened and the backpacker called him up and said, ‘Can you thank your Prime Minister for me for my $900 cheque?’ while he was sitting in a pub in London. The Australian people deserve better. They deserve a government that has their best interests at heart.

I will move to slightly more recent times. Let us have a look at the flood tax. This government has proposed a tax on the Australian people that will make it even tougher for them to manage. We have rising costs of living and rising electricity prices. Thank you very much, Kristina Keneally, for the great management of the electricity situation in New South Wales.