Family

Main policies relating to the family

The family unit has moved on from the traditional family of being related by blood or marriage (one man and one woman). The family unit is very diverse in today’s world and therefore even though some arrangements we may not personally recommend we understand that families are coming in all shapes and sizes. We therefore have expanded our definition of the family to include, adopted children, long term foster children and children living one or two adults as a family. The difficult times that we are passing through have distorted the traditional values and we do not ever want to disadvantage a single child in any of our policy decisions.

There are several policies that affect the family and as such we want to demonstrate our support for the family in our policies.

Policies:

• As to taxation we support income splitting so as to potentially reduce the tax for the family.

• School voucher system allowing parents right to choose their child’s school
• Family opal cards and other cards so as only one child under 16 needs to pay a fare in a family if traveling with an adult family member.
  
• Family assistance packages to be indexed every 6 months.
• We will repeal the compulsion to be involved in “Parents next program” but seek to rely on voluntary involvement in this program.

• While we will only encourage all people to consider whether to be immunized or not, we will not reduce funding to the family if they are not convinced that immunization is a healthy choice for them or their children, however we will try and persuade them on the merits of immunization. (We consider that immunization is a choice that one must make based upon the examination of the facts available to them).