Page 470 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
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the kinds of things that the party would support in the ACT as far as low-income families and workers are concerned. It is right to ask the Canberra Liberals: what is it that they are going to cut? What is it that they are going to privatise? What is it that they are going to sell off, if they are going to stop ACT government providing opportunities to low-income families and low-paid workers in our community? What are the Canberra Liberals going to cut?
Today, I also want to touch on Newstart. I know that ACT Labor had invited the Canberra Liberals to support our calls on the federal government to improve Newstart payments to low-income families in the ACT. That has not occurred. It has not been supported by the federal Liberal Party, but it is very clearly one of the barriers that people who are on low incomes face in trying to make ends meet in this town. There are decades and decades of low incomes from welfare payment, because the commonwealth government’s Newstart allowance is the lowest unemployment benefit in the developed world.
That speaks volumes for how we care for people who are on low incomes in the ACT. What does the ACT government do? It continues to introduce policies to support those people who are on low incomes, through no fault of their own but through the policies and the ideologically driven decisions that the Liberal Party makes.
Finally, I want to talk about penalty rates. The ACT Labor Party has been absolutely solid in its support for low-paid workers being paid for work and time spent away from their families to deliver services so those people in the ACT can go out and have their coffee on the weekend, or go out and have their bacon and eggs in the morning on the weekend. These workers spend time away from their families. They are already on low incomes and they are continuing to have their penalty rates cut for the services that they provide to everybody else in this community.
Penalty rates have been an important part of the pay of the Australian workforce, particularly those 20,000 in the ACT who have been affected by those cuts. These cuts to penalty rates in the ACT that affect 20,000 workers were supported by the Canberra Liberals. If they are fair dinkum about saying that they support low-income families in the ACT, let us have a look at some of the systemic causes of that low income that have been supported by the Canberra Liberals and their colleagues in the Australian parliament over decades.
The Canberra Liberals’ support for these causes has forced so many people in our community into poverty and into a really tough life, but the ACT Labor Party has never left those people behind and will continue to support them through the measures that we have talked about today. Labor supports them through the provision of Chromebooks so that every student, regardless of their background or their family’s income, can afford to get a really great free education. ACT Labor will support them to get really great free universal access to preschool, which has been expanded to three-year-olds, particularly for those families who need it most.
I commend the Chief Minister’s amendment to Mr Coe’s motion, and I look forward to hearing from Mr Coe and the Canberra Liberals exactly what it is that they are
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