Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

tor GALLAGHER (—) (): I thank Senator Smith for the question. I would say that, in the budget, one of the largest line items we had was to increase indexation to community organisations, some of whom are charities, who provide services to the community, in response to the fact that they had been inappropriately—or the indexation that had applied was not adequate and not allowing them to continue to meet some of the costs they were incurring. That was in the order of several hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was in response to a request from ACOSS and some in the charity sector to have a look at the indexation when we came into government.

I undertook to do that. It was unfair. It had been left in an inadequate state. It hadn't been addressed. It was, in a finance sense, quite costly to deal with, but we did that in the first budget, in respect of the work that they do, the value that we place in it and the fact that we recognised their costs were increasing and they needed extra support.