Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The 2017 budget was delivered in this House barely 17 days ago amid self-congratulatory backslapping and repetition of the word 'fair'. Since then the grim reality of what 'fair' actually means to this government has become clear.

The problem with this budget is not just that it is unfair and that it rips $22 billion from schools, keeps the freeze on Medicare rebates until 2020 and, apparently, aims to be fair introducing a levy on the big four banks. The Treasurer tells us that:

Unlike the previous bank deposit tax, this is specifically not a levy on pensioners' and others' ordinary deposit accounts, nor is it on home loans.

That just demonstrates utter naivety on the part of the member for Cook and the government. Does the Treasurer really expect that the banks are not going to pass this on to their customers? We are talking here about for-profit organisations which have an obligation to their shareholders to improve their financial position. So where else is the money coming from? More disturbingly, as the market and as investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank have pointed out, this levy will not raise the money that the Treasurer claims, creating a $2 billion budget black hole—not that there is any way to check, of course, as we are still waiting for the legislation to be released.

This government has been selling this budget on the basis that it is fair. But simply saying it is fair is cold comfort for the people living and working in my electorate in south western Sydney who are seeing no real wages growth but will pay $300 more in taxes. Saying this budget is fair is cold comfort for them when they hear that people earning over a million dollars will receive a tax cut of $16,400. And that pay cut does not include the amount they will lose when penalty rates are cut from 1 July. Police, nurses, baristas and any other shift workers in my electorate are set to lose $77 in their take home pay. That means that there will be less money to spend in businesses across the region and elsewhere.

One of the main issues that was constantly raised with me last year and during the election campaign and since has been Medicare and supporting it. Paul Keating once said that the health of any one of us should be important to all of us. This budget does not meet that test for my constituents or any other Australians, with the freeze on Medicare remaining until 2020. It is hard enough for my constituents to fund their out-of-pocked medical expenses as it is, with many of them already having been hit hard by other measures in this supposedly fair budget.

This budget also does little to address the substantive issues that are creating the housing affordability crisis across Sydney and instead tinkers around the edges. Housing affordability is particularly acute in my electorate, where many young families come looking to buy their first home. Ten years ago, workers on the average wage could save for a house deposit in six years; now it will take them over 10. For young people, the situation is made even worse when you consider that a recent university graduate, earning around $50,000 would be looking at paying $1,250 more in Medicare levies and HELP repayments. You are living in a different reality if you think for a moment that they have the means to enter the housing market. First home buyers cannot compete with the tax benefits that are afforded to investors and other parties who are already in the property market. The fact is that we cannot afford the capital gains tax discount or negative gearing in their current form. We need to seriously consider the impact that those measures are having on housing affordability. These measures simply make the dreams of first home buyers harder to achieve and they do nothing for renters either.

The repeated use of the word 'fair' is an attempt to hide from the people I represent and other Australians what this budget truly is and the fact that this budget does little for most people and nothing for the less well-off in my electorate. The fact is they deserve better. They deserve proper funding for Medicare and a pension that does not force them into poverty and working until they are over 70. They deserve a chance to buy a house where the repayments will not cripple them and, most importantly, they deserve a properly resourced education system, no matter where they live or who they are.

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