Mrs CROSIO —My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. Is the Prime Minister aware that a single income family with a child under five living in Wollstonecraft and earning $62,000 per year is entitled to part B of the government's family tax package, but a family from Fairfield in my electorate also with a child under five on as little as $17,000 per year and receiving close to the maximum parenting allowance does not qualify for part B? Is it the view from Kirribilli that causes you to punish approximately 140,000 battling families whilst giving free kicks to those who live on the North Shore?

Mr HOWARD —We are getting some good old Labor Party class politics back into the chamber. Let me say in answer to the member that the family tax package does not punish anyone. In fact what the family tax package does is to provide for every eligible family under a certain level of income—and the level of income is in the order of $70,000 a year with increments according to the number of children—to be better off.

The fundamental mistake of the honourable member's question is that nobody is punished. A large number of Australian families—indeed, two million Australians—are in fact enhanced under our family tax initiative. I am delighted to see, from a political point of view, that the member opposite regards a measure that adds to the situation of families as punishing families. Of course, what the member has obviously forgotten is that every eligible family, whether it is a single income family or double income family, is entitled to a tax reduction in respect of every child over and above that.

It is something for which my government makes no apology at all, whether people live in Wollstonecraft, Fairfield, Parramatta, Burwood, Strathfield, Malvern, Claremont or wherever they might live—wherever you like. I make absolutely no apology for the fact that what our family tax measure has done has been to redress some of the imbalance against single income families within the system that we inherited. I am very proud of that. It punishes nobody. It benefits two million Australian.