Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The Abbott government will never do the right thing by Australian families. They simply do not get it. Barely a month ago we saw the second Hockey-Abbott budget, containing all the old unfairness of the first budget—rebranded, rebadged, repackaged. It had a new paint job and a new slogan, but it could not hide the harm that this budget will do to millions of Australian families. This is one of those budgets which is best described as: the further away you are from it, the better it looks, and the closer you get to it, the uglier it looks.

John Howard had core promises and non-core promises, if we remember. The non-core promises were the ones, obviously, that he never wanted to keep. But Tony Abbott has now updated the core/non-core promise falsity with pre-election/post-election promises. Pre-election, it is all things to all people; post-election, it is, 'Will you leave me alone? I'm just too busy putting the boot into you.' Of course he has broken pre-election promises, but now he has started to break his post-election promises. It is a lazy second budget because it passes the heavy lifting of reforming the Australian economy onto the states. We see $50 billion in cuts to hospitals. Families get sick, families need hospitals. They are taking the money away from the states and they are basically discharging their own responsibility to stand up for Australian families.

This $50 billion cut from hospitals, which Labor will articulate to every hospital in the coming weeks and months, is matched by a $30 billion cut to schools. What happens with the school cuts is that they cut opportunities for families as well. But their broken promises that are hurting families are not just $50 billion from hospitals and $30 billion from schools. There are 8.4 million Australians who are having their superannuation increases frozen—not once, not twice but three times by this government. It is stomach-churning to listen to this government say they will never do anything adverse to superannuation. It is the epitome of the big lie to get a lecture from people who have never fought to increase superannuation, never tried to improve people's conditions. They have simply frozen superannuation at 9½ per cent. Every year this government is in power, every year they freeze superannuation, they are damaging the retirement incomes of millions of Australians.

Not only have they broken their promises with their lazy budget and passed all the pain onto the states, in hospitals and in schools, and not only have they frozen the superannuation of 8.4 million Australians, but what is the mechanism that these unscrupulous operators in the government have adopted? They are using the Greens political party to implement their wishes. They are working with the Greens political party. I do not necessarily give all the blame to the government. The Greens political party obviously were so pleased that they could have a meeting with Tony Abbott—or maybe they did not even get to meet with him; maybe they had Eric Abetz and George Brandis inflicted on them, although it does defy logic that they could convince anyone—they were rewarded by having the time in which people can write submissions to the taxation review extended by six weeks. They could not believe their luck. Someone was talking to the Greens and they were so grateful, they said, 'Where do we sign?'

We have seen their attack on family payments and the chaos of the hour before question time. That is an hour in the life of the nation we will never get back. Again this government steals time from Australians with their own inadequate plans. We have offered to work with the government on some of the savings propositions, but this government said 'no' to our shadow minister, because the Pavlovian response of the Minister for Social Services—who is so busy polishing his credentials for leadership—he cannot even see someone smarter than him, or deal with it—

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