Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I just listened to the member for Flinders with interest, and I want to pick up on one point he has made. He referred to the intergenerational theft. As Minister for the Environment perhaps he should consider his government's lack of action, and his personal responsibility in that as Minister for the Environment, with respect to the intergenerational theft of our lack of a response to the issue of climate change.

As I have said on other occasions, the budget reflects a government's priorities and its values. Budgets do not lie, and the figures within them speak for themselves. Last year's budget, the 2014-15 budget, exposed the Abbott government's values, its election spin and its true agenda. It also exposed a government that could not be trusted, that was arrogant and out of touch, and that clearly lacked compassion.

The Australian people showed their discontent after they quickly learnt about the government they had elected. Indeed, only earlier this year, we saw that the Prime Minister, and, I suggest, the Treasurer, hold onto their jobs by their fingertips. As a result of that, the 2015-16 budget, as contained in the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and cognate bills, has a very clear objective. Its objective is to secure or save the job of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and to win back political goodwill that was lost as a result of the government's 2014-15 budget.

The centrepiece of the 2015-16 budget is the policies relating to small business and child care changes. However, when one digs deeper into those policies and looks beyond the government's media spin in respect to the budget, what we continue to see is a budget that is filled with unfair and heartless policies. Indeed, it is those policies that underpin this budget. It is a budget that the government has tried very hard to sell as one that is good for Australia. Yet, simultaneously, we see that the government's own messaging has had to be changed. In fact, they have made a 180 degree backflip with respect to their debt and deficit rhetoric, which they had clung to for six years whilst they were in opposition. As soon as they came into government, within in a very short period of time they have had to do a complete backflip on that, as we saw in this year's budget. The hypocrisy of that flows right through to everything else we see in this budget.

Concerningly, this is a budget that has no plan and no vision for the future. Indeed, the government's spin has not fooled the Australian community broadly, and it certainly has not fooled astute business leaders or economic analysts. We have seen that even since this budget business confidence continues to fall. Only last week there were reports of capital expenditure across the country declining quite significantly. Capital expenditure, as we all know, generates economic activity throughout the country. And there have been other reports that point to similar trends.

Clearly, the government has not won back the confidence of the Australian people. The problem with this budget is this: if the budget does not have a vision and a strategy for the future of Australia, and if the budget deficit continues to be at levels that are unacceptable—and the fact is that this government has been in office for almost two years—the government can no longer continue to point to the past government and blame all of the woes on the past government. It has had plenty of time to change direction as a result of implementing, supposedly, policies that would work better. The truth is that the government is unable to do that. But if the economy continues to remain weak, as it is, then what happens is that unemployment rises, hardships continue to increase, small and medium businesses struggle, and tax receipts fall and then we see the Abbott government, by necessity, having to impose more unfair cuts on the broader community. Unfortunately, those unfair cuts, inevitably, add to the suffering of the most vulnerable people in this country, as we saw them attempt to do with their 2014-15 budget. Even worse, we have seen in this budget some of the measures that the Abbott government clearly understood were not popular and clearly understood that the Australian people were not going to support rebadged in a different way. The attacks on the pensioners that we saw in 2014-15 have been recrafted. Now, instead of doing away with the indexation change that the Abbott government wanted to implement, what they have come back with is reducing the limit on the assets that pensioners are allowed to hold before their pension gets cut. The truth of the matter is that that is going to take away $2.4 billion from pensioners over the forward estimates—that is the bottom line. That is $2.4 billion that most pensioners would spend in this country and add to the economic stimulus that they would have been able to do had those funds not been cut.

We see that also with the Medicare tax that the Abbott government wanted to introduce and all of its different versions of it. Yes, they appear to have sidelined that, but what they are going to do now from this budget is freeze the MBS payments to doctors. The net effect of that is that doctors will get less money from the Commonwealth for their service and in turn it will force them to put up their costs to their patients when they come through the door. It is a backhanded way of bringing in a Medicare co-payment. But probably the most pretentious spin of all in this budget is about the changes it wants to make to the childcare rebate and the pretence that this government cares about young families It wants to pay for those changes once the child gets to six-years-old and above by taking away the family tax benefit B payments that are currently available to families. In other words, we will give you a bit more money in the early years—this is what the government is saying to families—but we will take it away from you in a few years' time. In other words, you are going to pay, you the families, for this so-called beneficial change that we are bringing in. In my view, that is blatant deception because every child will grow through its early years and eventually turn six-years-old.

There are other matters about this budget which are deeply concerning. Some of the most unfair parts of the 2014-15 budget have been carried over into this budget: the $1.3 billion of pensioner concessions; the cuts made to the states, forcing them to impose additional costs on the people of their respective states; the nearly $1 billion dollars of cuts to local government as a result of freezing the Financial Assistance Grant program to local councils across the country; the $80 billion of health and education cuts—and I believe that the health cuts have had another $2 billion added to them; the $500 million cuts to Indigenous programs; the further cuts to Australian foreign aid, taking Australia's foreign aid spending to 0.22 per cent of GNI, which is, I understand, the lowest level on record. Then we have had the billion dollar cuts to schools and apprenticeships funding and another billion dollars of cut to industry assistance programs. These are all still in this budget. The people of Australia have to wear all of these cuts. And then we turn to the additional new cuts that the Abbott government has made in this budget and the 80,000 women who are likely to lose eleven and a half thousand dollars of paid parental leave. This was brought in as part of the legislation five years ago. I have never heard a word of criticism about it but all of a sudden these women are accused of double dipping. If the government members genuinely believe that they are double dipping, why did they not raise it five years ago when the legislation was first discussed and debated in this place? Then we have $125 million of cuts to the child dental benefits scheme; $144 million of cuts to the Medicare Benefits Schedule for child health assessments; $69 million of cuts to dental and allied health for our veterans; plus another $20 million of cuts to dementia and aged-care funds. The point I make about all those cuts is that they go to the heart of families in this country. They are direct cuts on the weekly budget of families across this country. One    that has not attracted much media attention is that fees for partner visas in this country, under this government, have gone up from $3,000 to $6,865 over less than two years. Those are partner visas—in other words, families trying to reunite and come together. It is totally unfair.

Then we also move on to the young people of this country and the 22- to 24-year olds that are being told, 'Instead of getting Newstart, you will be put on youth allowance and you will have $48 per week cut from your income'. Families are being told, 'We will freeze the family payment rate for the next two years'. Again, that is going to heart of hurting families in this country. This is not a family friendly budget. Indeed, this is not a family friendly government. The spin about childcare assistance and small business support is nothing but a smokescreen.

I want to turn briefly in the time that I have to how this budget affects South Australia. It is clear to me, and to many South Australians, that the Abbott government have little regard or concern for the people of South Australia. In their first year of office, they took away the supplementary local road funding of $18 million a year. Then in the same year, in their supposedly big infrastructure package of $50 billion, South Australia received $2 billion of that, which represents four per cent of the national infrastructure spend. I heard today the member for Grayndler talking about the fact that in this year's budget $360 million—I believe it was—was cut even out of that. Then we have $650 million cut of out of the water buyback program, which was directly targeted and put in the budget to assist with ensuring that the water flowed to South Australia and to restoring the extra 450 gigalitres of water that South Australians had asked for as part of the agreement. That was done away with as well.

But it goes further than that, because they are not just happy to hit South Australia with those cuts; this government that have turned their back on South Australia with respect to assistance to the auto industry. They took that assistance away from the auto industry, and we saw the collapse of the auto industry across Australia as a result. That, in turn, decimated what I call the Edinburgh Parks precinct of northern Adelaide, where many of the car component firms had established their businesses. They are all winding down as a result of Holden's closing in the next couple of years. On top of that, we get a massive hit to South Australia, because the government will not commit to the pre-election promise of building the 12 submarines in South Australia.

So when you put all that together, it is understandable that the South Australian government is saying to the federal government, 'It is time that you did the right thing by South Australia, because your policies are directly hurting the people of South Australia in a way that perhaps no other state is being hurt.' I say again: the federal Liberal members from South Australia in this place need to show some backbone, stand up for the people of South Australia and stand against the cuts that the Abbott government are bringing in, which they know directly impact on the people that elected them to this place.

In respect to South Australia, I know that the health cuts that are being proposed will take away some $655 million over the next four years. The failure of the government to commit to the Gonski education reforms means that South Australia will be particularly hard-hit. It will be hit worse than other states, because it was in years 5 and 6 that South Australia was going to pick up most of the Gonski funding. So when you then go to CPI increases on your funding, South Australia starts with a much lower base than it would have if the Abbott government had committed to the Gonski funding. So it will be particularly disadvantaged. This point was very much made to me last week when I met with several of the principals of the schools, when they were here in Canberra.

I said from the outset that this is a budget with no vision and no strategy. I contrast that with the response from opposition leader, Bill Shorten, in the budget reply speech that he made on the Thursday night. Certainly, he has not announced all of Labor's policies, and nor would I expect him to. But what he made clear was that the future of Australia rests in a government that has a long-term strategy, a government that looks at the young people of this country and what is required to ensure that they too have a future, and a government that actually has a plan—not just a one or two-year election plan—but a plan for a future of the nation. This budget simply does not do that.

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