Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

For the benefit of Senator Pratt, I remind her again that the government that she was a part of opposed the indexation of all family tax benefit A and family tax benefit B supplement payments for a total of six years. If you want to check it out, that was in the Labor 2011-12 and 2013-14 budgets, and that was on top of reducing indexation for all family tax benefit A payments in Labor's 2009-10 budget, which was saving you back in 2009-10 about a billion dollars over the then forward estimates period. When Labor pursue these sorts of savings in government, we would say it is a sensible way to do it. When Labor pursue these sorts of savings in government, Labor describe them as sensible fiscal management. When we pursue these sorts of savings in government in order to reinvest the money in a very important reform, Labor come out with all their rhetoric on how we are cold-hearted and how this is nasty and terrible, and how we are ripping money off families. We are not ripping money off families.

We are reforming the family tax benefit arrangements and childcare arrangements in order to provide better support to families which need access to affordable and flexible childcare arrangements. We are rebalancing government support towards lower- and middle-income families in particular, and we are paying for it by making a sensible adjustment—in particular, in terms of the most significant savings in this bill—to the indexation of family tax benefit payments.

For these reasons, the government will not be supporting any of these amendments.