Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

You just simply cannot call something a cut when it is not. You can characterise it as that. You can spin it as that.

Ms Plibersek interjecting—

You just mentioned the childcare cuts, member for Sydney. If you are a family and your income stays the same, your childcare benefit from 1 July this year will increase. Under our measures, it will increase. If your income changes, the threshold at which you might qualify might also change. If your family income remains the same, your childcare benefit will not change and, in fact, will go up with indexation. So you cannot possibly call that a cut. I am getting sick and tired of the Labor Party calling these things a cut when they simply are not.

We have to get back to the context in which we are all operating. We understand that you have to live within your means. If you keep on adding expenses to the credit card, eventually it becomes unsustainable. This MPI is framed in terms of the most vulnerable. We will not walk away from our commitment to the most vulnerable. You, the Labor Party, cannot occupy the high moral ground on this subject—not now, not ever. When a government racks up a massive debt, who pays? The most vulnerable pay, because the debt is owned by the government and the welfare payments are paid by the government.

Vulnerable people rely on the government for support; wealthy people do not. When the Greek debt crisis struck, did you see rich people marching in the street? No; you saw poor people, because a government under pressure with that size of debt and deficit is unable to maintain its responsibilities. We are not there. Thank goodness, we are not there. We are putting measures in place to make sure that we do not get there. What we are doing is bringing the budget back under control, and we are doing it in a responsible fashion.

In 10 years time under Labor, you would have had gross debt of $667 billion. In 10 years time under our projected scenario, you will still have debt of around $300 billion. We were actually criticised by many for not hitting the brakes harder, for not reigning in the spending more. We believed in doing this responsibly. We are charting a path back to a surplus, but it is still going to take us a long time to get there—a long time—because of the sheer size of the debt left to us by Labor. That is an important consideration for members and those listening today to understand. This is not about cutting spending; this is about managing those next few years in a responsible way. The dishonesty that Labor brings to this debate every single day is to absolutely be condemned. It is always the most vulnerable who pay.

But I also want to talk about pensions. The member for Sydney talks about the budget papers. So she should know that there are no cuts or changes to pensions during this term of government—nothing at all. There are some changes that come in in the 2017 year, and there is an election before then. There are changes to the pension age that come in 2035, when the age pension age will be increased. But there are no cuts or changes to pensions during this term of government. But if you listen to the debate, if you listen to the Labor Party, you would assume as a pensioner that your pension payments are going to go down or that they are going to change. In this term of government, they are not. It is simply not true.

It is true that there have been changes to thresholds at which you qualify for certain payments, for family income supplements and child care. It is not a decision we would have preferred to make. It is not something that we would have planned. But, when we inherited debt and deficit from Labor, we simply had no choice. The most important thing a government can do is maintain a strong budget position.

The member opposite talked about overseas aid. That is her portfolio; so she spent some time talking about that. I just want to point her to the remarks of Minister Julie Bishop's predecessor, Bob Carr, when he said that you cannot fund aid on borrowings. We were in the bizarre situation where the previous government was borrowing money from overseas to fund an aid program to send money back overseas. How ridiculous was that! Given the whole premise that the member for Sydney builds her policy on, she should take good note of that advice from Bob Carr.

When it comes to the most vulnerable, one of the things that we are focused on in our budget is young people and the commitment that we have to put them on a sustainable path for the future. We are attacked for the measures that we are taking around earning or learning or working for the dole for young people. That is a key commitment of ours. All around this country you see young people who have disconnected from work, from school and from family, and they are lost in the system.

The Labor Party get a bit obsessed about university. They talk, as they just did, about the numbers attending university as if that is the only higher education pathway that ever matters—and we know it is not. Forty per cent of students leave school and go to university; 60 per cent do something else. Many of those 60 per cent do not have a valid and valuable pathway. Our earning, learning or working for the dole strategy is about making sure that each and every one of them does have exactly that. Instead of talking about that policy as walking away from young people and the vulnerable, it would be more correct to actually demonstrate that it is looking after the most vulnerable.

Work for the Dole is an intensive program that supports and looks after those young people, finds a place for them and teaches them life skills. It does not just send them out to break rocks in the hot sun and pay them the dole; it actually gives them real skills to find a real pathway in the real economy. We will start that in a graduated fashion on 1 July this year and it will pick up more so on 1 July 2015. That really does make a difference. I meet young people who, unfortunately, come from families where they might be the fourth generation unemployed. The sad thing about those families is that no-one actually wants to work, because they do not know what work is. They talk about going down to Centrelink to pick up their pay. I feel for those young people because they do not know what they do not know. And, yes, there has got to be some tough love, and we are the party to bring that tough love to the table, because we will not walk away from the responsibilities that we know we have to young people.

In the context of this matter of public importance today the member for Sydney talked about the sacrifice of the poorest, failing to understand the most important economic reality, which is that unaffordable consumption today means a lack of productive investment in the future. Unless we address the productive investment for the future and understand that you have got to save for that and that you cannot continue to consume in the current environment you will have an economy that just does not look after its people. That message and that understanding is simply absent from the Labor Party. You always get this high moral ground about who loses and how they lose. We should understand that the very valuable payments that are made in the welfare sector as benefits to people at the lower end of the income scale do not come from a government pot of money that just sits there. The government doesn't have any money; the money comes from the productive investment of those who are earning in small business or salaries often at the other end of the income scale. You simply cannot equate the two. Throughout this whole budget debate that is exactly what the Labor Party has done. They have said, 'These people lose this and these people at this end of the scale lose that amount,' and because those amounts are not equivalent somehow the whole budget is unfair. But what we are saying is that, unless we invest in the production of jobs, whether it be manufacturing or services or mining, into the future, we cannot possibly afford the welfare payments that are made today. We have a commitment to maintaining the level of those payments and we have a commitment to the most vulnerable. But, importantly, we recognise that because the government does not automatically find this money there and give this money to those who might require it, more work has to be done. (Time expired)

See this speech in context