Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Families and Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

Clearly part of our response to the COVID pandemic has been around making sure that we provide the resources to the financial counselling sector into the future not just to deal with the COVID pandemic, which we know is going to put many people into financial difficulty, but also to make sure that in an ongoing sense we have the kind of capacity and capability built into our financial counselling services so they are able to assist Australians in the future.

Certainly I'd like to recognise the huge work undertaken through the Sylvan report, where recommendations were made about providing greater capacity in the longer term. It was probably very timely that this capacity was being built and we were providing additional funding to the financial counselling sector to build that capacity because when the COVID pandemic hit we realised the need for those services was going to be very strong. So we as a government will continue to invest in financial counselling services to assist Australians no matter what the circumstances. (Time expired)