Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Senator for the first question to me for 2013. In relation to the CEFC the only reporting I have seen on that is in the context of a few more stunts from the opposition to try to distract from anything of weight and anything that is of policy relevance to the Australian people. Yet, what we have seen from this opposition is more stunts and an assertion by the shadow Attorney-General—an incorrect assertion which I note he is crab walking away from—about caretaker conventions and what that means, and Mr Hunt trying to generate a bit of press by writing letters and demanding that people in a statutory body do something or not do something. Everybody in Australia knows all of this is designed to distract attention from the fact that those opposite simply have no plans for the future of the nation.

In relation to the proposal to which the Senator refers, the Senator would be aware that is not the only cut that the coalition have proposed. As the Leader of the Government in the Senate has reminded us, the coalition also want to take money from families with children at school by abolishing the Schoolkids Bonus, and they want to take money from low-income Australians. These are the priorities of the Leader of the Opposition, who pretends to everybody that he is the worker's champion. Meanwhile, his secret plan really is to take the knife to the social services of working Australians, and one of the few things he is prepared to front up on is that he is going to ensure that the tax breaks that we are giving, as a government, to working Australians are ripped back, taken back, and—this is the policy we might have come to shortly—his plan to increase the taxation for low-income earners' superannuation. (Time expired)