‘Not targeting you’: Ley reassures people on welfare they’re not in Liberal sights

Sussan Ley has sought to reassure people on welfare that her push to reduce dependency on government support wasn’t “targeting” them, after Treasurer Jim Chalmers accused her of pandering to “cookers and crackpots.”

The Opposition Leader pledged the Coalition would audit all government programs to test every dollar for whether it was delivering results and reflected the core responsibilities of government, as part of a bid to find savings and restore a balanced or surplus budget.

She also flagged more was needed to rein in the NDIS, which is one of the fastest-growing parts of the budget.

“There will be tough calls ahead. Programs cannot keep growing at 10 per cent a year,” Ms Ley told a Committee for the Economic Development of Australia event on Wednesday.

“Australians deserve to hear this truth before the crunch arrives.”

While the Coalition has offered bipartisan support to measures to slow growth in the NDIS, such as the recent announcement to divert children with autism and developmental delays to different services, Ms Ley warned that “we’re not giving them a blank cheque of goodwill.”

She called for an end to the mindset of people looking for Canberra to fix every problem and said the pendulum had swung too far towards dependency on government.

Dr Chalmers described it as “the exact same speech that Joe Hockey gave before the Liberals last came after pensions and Medicare” at the start of the Coalition’s term in office.

“These are the same Liberals who went to the election with a policy for more debt, bigger deficits, higher taxes and lower wages… These Liberals haven’t learned a thing, they haven’t changed a bit,” he said.

“Our government, our Labor Party, is defined by responsible economic management. Their party is run by cookers and crackpots and I think they are the real audience of Sussan Ley’s speech today.”

But Ms Ley anticipated this line of attack and insisted she wasn’t foreshadowing deep cuts.

Rather, she said, a strong budget was required to ensure there was still a safety net for those who needed it.

“So I don’t want anyone who’s on welfare to feel in any sense that this is about targeting them, because it’s not,” she said.