Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in the debate on the motion before the Senate on:

The Abbott Government's vicious attack on low and middle income Australians.

I think this debate is actually a debate between reality and fallacy. That is what the difference is between the coalition government and those opposite—the reality of the coalition fixing Labor's mess versus the fallacy of Labor believing there is nothing to fix; the reality of the coalition budget ensuring the fixing of the economic mess left by Labor versus the fallacy of Labor pretending that we are sticking it to low-income earners.

Labor claims to be the champion of low-income earners, but it appears to be unrequited love. None of the seven federal electorates with the lowest median weekly incomes elected a Labor MP at the last election. If the ALP's economic game plan was what low-income earners wanted in this country, then someone forgot to tell the low-income earners of Australia! If the false hopes and pipe dreams peddled by the previous government were what low-income earners wanted, then why did they reject the ALP and the Greens? That is because low-income earners in this country tend to be tough—they are tough people, and they knew that tough measures were required, and they understood how much $1 billion in interest payments could actually deliver for their communities. If I go through the ranks in the 2012 electoral divisions, No. 1 was Hinkler with a median income of $940; then there was Cowper with $970, Lyne with $978, the electorate of Page in New South Wales with $999, Wide Bay in Queensland with $1,008, Lyons in Tasmania with $1,029, and Mallee in Victoria with $1,069. They are the seven lowest median income level communities in our nation, and all of them have elected coalition members as their local representatives.

The MPI not only claims that there is a government attack on low-income earners; it claims that it is 'vicious', which means that it is with malicious intent, and that is the fallacy. The reality is that our only intent is for a stronger future, a sustainable future, a self-reliant future, for our nation.

Labor has some nerve, coming in here accusing us of attacking low-income earners! Let us have a look at the reality of how the last Labor government treated low-income earners. It was the last Labor government that put an extra 200,000 Australians on the dole. It was Labor that ripped off regional students with drastic cuts to youth allowance. It was Labor that sabotaged our border protection policies, resulting in more than 1,000 asylum seekers drowning at sea. It was Labor that slashed $700 million from payments to single parents, and it was a Labor MP who spent the union dues of the country's lowest-paid workers on champagne and prostitutes. That is the reality. It is easy to expose the fallacy of Labor's claim that the budget is characterised by malice against low-income earners. There is no tax increase on low-income earners, but a temporary debt levy—