Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is good to see you in the chair. Right before Christmas, just after this government dropped its MYEFO, my local paper reported, 'Government’s cuts hit La Trobe's clinical placements'—22 December. An article the following day says:

La Trobe University has been left to find $2.6 million per year across its campuses to fund clinical placements – many of them in nursing and allied health courses – after Treasurer Scott Morrison announced a raft of budget cuts this month.

So, right as universities were ending the academic year, this government announced it was cutting funding to the following year's clinical placements. There was no warning and no opportunity to look at the reserves to see if they could fund this. This government announced, with days left in 2015, that they were going to cut the funding for clinical placements.

Many of these students are based in Bendigo. We have the Rural Health School in Bendigo at La Trobe- Bendigo campus. That facility was built by the former Labor government, a government that did invest in higher education—not like what we have seen from this government. At the time, the paper reported that the university would not axe the clinical placement program; it was too important. However, they did acknowledge that funding would be found from elsewhere within the university budget. Funds that otherwise would have been used for teaching and learning resources will now be deployed for those clinical places. This is the chaos of this government. This is what this government does when they make these radical budget decisions—whether it be in the May budget or the December budget—that affect universities and regional communities.

Clinical placement funding is critical if our students are to receive the same educational opportunities in Melbourne. That is just a simple fact. If we are serious about ensuring that we have the skilled health workforce we need in the regions, then we need to make sure that universities like La Trobe and the Bendigo campus can have access to funding for their clinical placements.

At the time, the health minister said: 'That's okay. They'll be able to apply for the new fund that has been established.' But what is not being made clear to the university is whether they would qualify for this new fund. Bendigo Rural Health School does not have a medical school within it. It has everything but. So it is unclear whether they can even apply for the new funding. It is not known whether Bendigo-La Trobe's Rural Health School will qualify for the new competitive funding round. Secondly, the very nature of competitive tender processes means there is no guarantee this campus will be successful, especially given there is now less funding in the pot than what there was previously. Thirdly, there was the timing of the announcement of the cuts; they tried to sneak them through right before Christmas.

These were not the only cuts that hit Bendigo in the MYEFO budget and in the appropriations bills that are before us. What was also shocking was the cuts to funding for programs that help our most vulnerable job seekers. With just under $130 million cut from jobactive, in addition to about $130 million cut from the Skills for Education and Employment Program, this means one in five job seekers in central Victoria will miss out on the opportunity to acquire new skills to help them find employment. The group they are targeting with this is our older workers.

What this government does not seem to understand is the shift in the nature of work and work opportunities within the Australian workplace. People who may have worked in manufacturing their entire working life or may have worked in mechanics or a number of other skilled jobs that simply do not exist today—or there are fewer of them—do want to retrain. They do want to have their skills going forward, yet this government is cutting the very programs that support that. That is where this government is narrow-sighted. They want to get out the big stick and whack you if you do not look for work, yet they are not willing to help fund the programs to help you find work.

Last week I caught up with a local group that has come together to talk about the long periods when you cannot find work, about how depression can set in and about the effects on mental health. This group of local men have put their hands up to say: 'You know what? It's really hard to find work. It's really hard on my family when I can't find work. I find it really stressful. And now I'm seeking mental health support and I'm looking for support to get through this troubled period.'

All these issues could be avoided if the government only funded support programs properly and, more importantly, had a genuine jobs plan, a plan that would actually create and secure jobs into the future—lots of jobs, the jobs that we have today that will exist tomorrow. It is this great statistic that people like to throw out there: '40 per cent of the jobs for tomorrow have not been created yet'. Guess what that means: 60 per cent of the jobs we have today will exist tomorrow. Yet what will the nature of these jobs be? Why isn't this government doing more to create good, secure jobs that people can count on? There is a reason we have net negative wage growth in this country. It is because more and more people are losing good full-time jobs and are being forced to take up insecure casual and part-time jobs. People are working for less money than they have previously, and that is having an impact on their household income.

In the MYEFO there was also a recommitment by this government to cut $80 billion from health and education. In my part of the world that included $34 million from Bendigo Health. Next year—it is very exciting—the state Labor government will actually open the brand-new Bendigo hospital. It is a massive investment project that has been building for quite some years. But what is disappointing to the people of Bendigo and to the state government is the fact that this federal government is short-changing them on the operating funds. They have cut money from the operating budgets, meaning it is going to be harder for this new hospital to turn the lights on, to perform procedures and to have the funding for wages so they can open more beds. This government is not paying its fair share when it comes to health funding.

It is not just the Bendigo hospital; it is also the cuts to the Castlemaine hospital, to the Kyneton hospital, to the Maldon hospital and to Heathcote Health. These are smaller hospitals that rely on urgency care and that are, for some people, the only way to access emergency care during the weekends and during the evenings. They are staffed by doctors who basically bulk-bill those patients. We saw this government recommit to introducing some form of GP tax and, worse still, continue to cut funding from Medicare. It is a government that does not understand that in the regions we actually need to invest more in health, not cut funding from health services, because it makes it very hard for these smaller hospitals and health services to deliver the health support that is needed.

This government, in its MYEFO, also committed to the funding cuts to our schools over a decade—$10 million to the schools in the Bendigo electorate. The Bendigo electorate schools would have been some of the biggest winners under the Gonski reforms. Years five and six would have delivered the resources that a lot of our smaller regional schools need. They would have delivered the resources for a lot of our schools in low-SES areas, like Eaglehawk, Long Gully and Heathcote They would have delivered extra resources for schools that have a higher than average number of students with a disability. I do not know if many of those opposite are talking to their prep and primary school teachers, but they have never seen the numbers of students with a disability, who are on the autism spectrum or who may have a learning difficulty, like dyslexia, coming into their classes. Specimen Hill Primary School said that 40 per cent of students in their prep classes need some form of help. Yet when the schools most need this government to partner with the states and invest in them the government is cutting away these critical dollars.

I was out at Huntly Primary School a few weeks ago, and I went on a tour with the school captains and school leaders and spoke to the principal. The oval was looking very dry. I said, 'Is that because of the water bill?' and the principal said: 'Yes. I have the choice to either water the oval, which costs me about $4,000 a quarter'—water is very expensive in central Victoria—'or in a year that is the funding for a part-time teacher aide. My school made the tough choice of putting the numeracy and literacy skills Reading Recovery program ahead of watering the oval.' These are the tough choices our schools are making, because this government has short-changed them and not paid a fair share into schools.

Education is absolutely critical. We need to ensure that every student, regardless of their postcode, will get a great education and that, regardless of their postcode, the schools will have the resources they need. But under this government and the funding they have cut, some of our schools will continue to fall behind, not because they are not good schools but because they do not have the resources. This Prime Minister stands up here and says, 'It's not about resourcing.' That is wrong on so many levels. I challenge him again to come and to the schools in my electorate, meet the students and their teachers and learn what it means to be a school that cannot afford art applies and that is making the tough choice between a language program or a music program because they simply do not have the dollars in their budget to pay for those extracurricular activities.

Earlier I mentioned jobs. This budget, again, in MYEFO, failed to have a comprehensive plan on how the government is going to create jobs for our young people. What disappointed me in this budget was that there was no concrete commitment to return funding to successful programs like Youth Connections, there was no concrete commitment to restoring the funding they cut from skills and apprenticeship systems and there was no concrete commitment to guarantee future funding for our TAFEs. All the talk about the fantastic new white paper means nothing if you do not invest in skills. In my electorate I have the Bendigo Bushmaster, which is built at Thales, and the Hawkei contract will come online. It is a bit hard to build a Bushmaster and a Hawkei without having an engineer who has being trained and without having apprentices to go into that work so that they have the skills that they need to build our defence equipment. If we are serious about innovation, if we are serious about having jobs in the manufacturing sector going forward—high-tech, high-skilled jobs—we must invest in education.

Finally, I would also like to highlight that this government has not reversed its decision on the financial assistance grants to our local government areas. It is okay for MPs who may have electorates in the inner city. They can make up the revenue cut by this government, through parking meters. In the regions, you cannot. Ratepayers in the regions cannot afford to pay anything extra. In one part of my electorate, rates increased by as much as 18.5 per cent over three years. It was unsustainable. At the same time that their property prices went up, their rates became a cost-of-living pressure, forcing many households into poverty. So increasing rates for local government is no longer an option, because the ratepayers cannot afford these massive increases. That is why the government needs to restore the funding that it cut in its first budget—and has confirmed it will cut in its next budget—to the financial assistance grants. That is to ensure that our local government has the resources to build the roads, to build the footpaths, to make sure that our SES as well as an array of other services are there to go forward.

The minibudget that the government has released demonstrates again that it does not matter who the Liberal Prime Minister is or who the Liberal Treasurer is; they are addicted to cutting funding from the areas that need it the most. It does not matter who is in charge of this government; it is just more of the same: cruel cuts that hurt the most vulnerable in our community, actually stall growth and mean that we are not moving forward as a country.

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