Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not unusual to be speaking about the budget in late March, as we are now. It is just that we are normally talking about the upcoming budget, not the one from last year. The chaos and disruption that the government have caused with their ongoing wrathful cuts and broken promises are still reverberating around the country, which is why we continue, day after day, in this parliament to talk about the budget that was—the budget that has never quite been yet and is never going to be.

We know about the hurt that the budget is causing out there to the Australian people and the hurt it is causing to our economy. It has been 10 months now since that last budget, which was described most aptly by an unnamed source among members opposite as that 'stinking, rotten carcass' that hangs around the neck of the government. It has been 10 months, and what do we have? We have wages down and unemployment up. We have growth down and youth unemployment up. We have confidence way down and cost of living way up.

This government of broken promises has torn up that social contract with the Australian public by pushing ahead with its purely ideological agenda for cuts. It is cuts to education, cuts to health, cuts to family payments, cuts to science and the arts, cuts to the ABC and the SBS, cuts to the environment, cuts to the Human Rights Commission, cuts to overseas aid, cuts to social services, cuts to legal services, cuts to Indigenous affairs, cuts to pensions: I do not know where to stop!

In my electorate of Newcastle, when the budget was handed down—the one that was handed down last year—unemployment was 4.7 per cent. In the latest data, it has doubled. Thousands of jobs have been lost and there is no sign of repair, no plan for the future. Rarely a week goes by that I am not fielding calls from distressed local employers telling me that they are having to let more good people go. Just this month, the local shipbuilder in my electorate, Forgacs, announced that they have been forced to sack another 100 employees from their plant—another 100 people with no jobs in my electorate—and they are in danger of losing their entire workforce by Christmas. A few weeks earlier, Downer EDI announced that 59 workers would lose their jobs from their Hunter operations. The week before, steel supplier Martensite Australia shut the doors of their Tomago operations—another 20 jobs gone from the region. Many smaller job losses go largely unreported, but they are no less damaging to the health and wellbeing of the workers and families that are affected.

While not all jobs losses can be blamed on governments, state and federal governments have a very significant role to play in terms of creating the right economic conditions for employers to prosper and operate with confidence about the future. The Prime Minister is too busy fighting Labor, talking about the past and talking about his own enemies in his own internal operations—

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