A former Liberal MP and the mother of model Tziporah Malkah has been blasted in Parliament for suggesting poor people lack discipline and housekeeping skills.
Pru Goward, who until 2019 was the NSW minister for community services and social housing under former premier Gladys Berejiklian, has been widely condemned for an opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review about social divides.
The 69-year-old former ABC journalist and federal sex discrimination commissioner said she 'understood poor people' growing up as the daughter of a shopkeeper.
But Ms Goward recalled there was an underclass among the poor who 'behaved differently' and in her mother's words were 'not very nice', especially to social workers.
'Of course, they are always seen as a deficit,' she said.
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A former Liberal MP and the mother of model Tziporah Malkah has been blasted in Parliament for suggesting poor people lack discipline and housekeeping skills. Pru Goward, who until 2019 was the NSW minister for community services and social housing, has been widely condemned for an opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review about social divides
'Social workers, traditionally good young men and women who thought it would be nice to be kind for a living, despair of their appalling housework, neglect of their children and, notably, their sharp and unrepentant manner when told to lift their game by the patronising do-gooder.'
One Nation's New South Wales leader Mark Latham said Ms Goward's column was a 'slurring of all the children' from families that live in outer south-west Sydney.
'It's disgraceful that Pru Goward would write this generalisation, writing off a whole generation, not knowing these success stories,' he told the Legislative Council on Thursday.
'So out of touch, so arrogant, so condescending, so elitist.'
Mr Latham, who lives in south-west Sydney near where he grew up, likened Ms Goward to a Jane Austen novel