Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was a rather extraordinary speech from Senator Hanson. If I could summarise it, in a nutshell it would be: 'Senator Hanson doesn't like being criticised in this chamber. Attempts to justify the cuts that One Nation are voting with tonight whilst pretending that they are on the side of the battler'. Then there was about 15 minutes on everything being Labor's fault. 'Absolutely everything that is happening is Labor's fault. Labor has not done enough in opposition to address some of the problems in this country and One Nation doesn't like being criticised.' Then we went back to defending One Nation's record on a bill that cuts money from over 1.5 million families in this country who will be worse off.

On one level I sympathise with Senator Hanson because she is in the difficult position of trying to defend the indefensible. It was no wonder tonight that there was no attempt to actually explain why One Nation has walked hand in hand with the government yet again, as they do on every single vote that matters in this chamber, to make these savage cuts, to enforce these cuts without appropriate scrutiny from the Senate and to attempt to blame everything on the Labor Party.

What a contrast Senator Hanson's contribution was following the speech of Senator Lambie tonight. Senator Lambie put a very human face to the impact that cuts like this have. It struck me today, when I was listening to members of the government defending this bill in the media and also making their contributions tonight in the Senate, how it is very easy to turn these matters that affect so many people in reality, when they are putting their budgets together at home, into some seemingly innocuous budget repair measure that is only saving $1.6 billion. They have all these big numbers and it is all about budget repair and how it has to be done; but what Senator Lambie did tonight was explain in very real terms about what that means for individual households and what the reality is for the vast majority of people in this country. I do not think those opposite ever have contact with them or have ever experienced the situations that these families will be placed in because of the cuts that are being rammed through tonight.

I speak from some experience in this, as somebody who never, ever thought that they would rely on social security, welfare or income support. I never imagined that I would be in that position. To build on Senator Lambie's contribution, I went to university, I always worked, I had a reasonably comfortable childhood. It was never meant to happen to me that I would have to exist week by week on the sole parent pension. But in one week I went from being a member of a two-person household looking forward to the birth of my first baby, with reasonable paying jobs. After an accident one weekend I was a widow, pregnant, unable to work, looking for somewhere to live and without enough money to pay for a funeral for my partner. The unions that are so maligned in this place day after day helped me by fundraising to help me meet those immediate legal costs.

Then I relied on the sole parent pension, then I relied on the healthcare card. I relied on childcare support when I had to go back to work part time to pay the rent and make sure that I could look after my daughter. That was my life for three years or so. I never thought it would happen to me, but I relied on the government of the day, on the Australian community, to have a social welfare system that looked after me when I needed it. It meant everything to me. Without that, I would have had to live with my parents. I cannot imagine what I would have done without that support. It does matter. I think how lucky I am now that I do not rely on that, but I also think of the importance behind protecting—it is not a lot that each household gets through family tax payment, but it is important to those families that to allow them to live a dignified life. It is very easy to package it all up and pretend it does not matter, but, speaking from experience, I can tell you that for those families it does matter—even if it is only stopping indexation. Every cost goes up. That matters to people. They rely on those small adjustments to make sure that they can live week by week. I have seen it time and time again. Even in an affluent city like Canberra, when you go past Uniting Care in Kippax and you see the mums with their kids—it is sometimes dads, but usually mums—lining up for their care packages, the petrol vouchers, the extra blankets in winter because the cost of heating your house here is so great because of the climate, you see that it is not only these payments that support people to get through; it is a whole range of other supports in our community. It is that sort of working together—the community sector with government payments, and with things like our high-quality education system, access to free hospital care and bulk-billing; all of those things—that allows us to live a much more equal lifestyle than many other countries across the world.

For me today, listening to the contributions by government members, I think that we cannot just pretend that this does not have an impact or that it is the only choice available to government. We all accept that budget repair is important, but governments also have to accept that budgets and budget savings are all about choices. We over here would say that this is the wrong choice to make. It is the wrong choice to hit these families and to ask them to shoulder the burden disproportionately for budget repair at a time when the budget also allows for tax cuts for expenditure in other lines of the budget—for the generous tax concessions for negative gearing and capital gains tax, for example, that disproportionately go to the wealthier in our community. Those kinds of tax concessions should be the government's first point of call, not these families.

They are consistently told by this government that they have to shoulder the burden and that they have to do the heavy lifting. No wonder they are angry, when they look around and do not see anyone else doing the heavy lifting. We know from comments today by Senator Cormann that this is not the end, that there is more coming. This was confirmed, I think, on Sky News earlier today when it was put to the Treasurer about where all the old omnibus bills measures were. He replied, 'Well, those measures continue to stand as government policy.

So not only are these changes being rammed through tonight—and the crossbench have suckered up to this and accepted this; some may see it as an improvement on what was previously offered—the government has come out today, before this bill even passes, and said that the others still stand as government policy and they will be coming back in one shape or another. We would not see that as a significant win for the crossbench today. What they have done is to enable the government—they are the enablers—and the government is going to keep coming back, because none of these measures ever go away forever.

We will continue to stand up for those families. We will continue to argue that the government should look for savings elsewhere and that those who need the most support should not have to shoulder the burden of budget repair disproportionately, as they are being asked to do in this bill tonight.