David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is my great pleasure to speak on the Turnbull-Joyce 2017 budget, which has made the right choices for the nation. It not only balances the need for us to responsibly fund essential services but allows us to live financially within our means and delivers a fair and responsible financial plan to get our budget back into balance—that is, to get the national accounts out of the red, or deficit, and into the black, or surplus. Being in surplus allows us as a nation to start paying back our national debt—or, in common parlance, our mortgage. No longer will we be paying our mortgage by borrowing on the credit card.

As I mentioned, any government needs to responsibly fund essential services like Medicare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We have the Medicare Guarantee Fund, putting aside the Medicare levy plus extra capital to guarantee Medicare. We have started getting the Medicare indexation out of the deep freeze and thawing it in a staged fashion. The NDIS has a well-documented $5½ billion funding gap that needs to be paid from somewhere. That is why we have a responsible solution, with a 0.5 per cent increase from 2019, when the funding gap appears, on top of the Medicare levy.

Also in the health space we have secured so-called financial headroom of $1.8 billion in savings on pharmaceutical benefits by getting a better price from the pharmaceutical companies for their old, established drugs which are now off patent or ending the period when they need to get that return for the billions of dollars invested. We are putting that aside to allow funding for the new, more novel and exciting but very expensive drugs to come in at the start of their life. That allows us to fund drugs like cancer drugs and drugs for heart disease, cystic fibrosis and hepatitis C. There are extra funds for mental health and cancer research. The Medical Research Future Fund is now starting to pay dividends.

Aged care has also been a beneficiary. There is over $5 billion across the forward estimates to keep our expanded Commonwealth home support packages going. They are allowing senior Australians to age in place, in their own homes. It is much better for them and for their families, and it is also much more cost effective. We have just recently—in the last week—announced out of this budget another $649 million for 9,900 extra aged-care places. Just in my electorate of Lyne, there is over $100 million paid annually into the aged-care industry, which supports many hundreds and thousands of aged-care recipients. In Wauchope, my home town, $8.5 million has been allocated to Bundaleer Care Services for a massive expansion, with 40 new high-care places focusing on ageing in place and dementia care. This will allow a new capital works development, replacing the old Bundaleer nursing home with a new, state-of-the-art building, which will expand the facility to 145 places eventually. It will also mean that, going forward, there will be somewhere for the huge load of aged care required because we have such an ageing demographic in our electorate.

In the Lyne electorate the dementia rates are in fact the second highest in the nation. We have one of the most aged demographics in the nation. We are at the forefront of the ageing phenomenon that is spoken about in this House so often. On the North Coast of New South Wales there is a demographic phenomenon called 'retirement', which has driven a lot of the population growth. That is why we have so many people in that space in their life where they eventually turn to aged care. It is better that they stay in their own homes longer, rather than being in full residential care. Many of us know the scourge of dementia and the various processes that lead to it, whether it is Alzheimer's, vascular dementia or any of the other variants of dementia. It places a huge burden on people's partners and other family members. Many sufferers eventually will need support in dementia-specific aged care, and that is what is going to happen at Wauchope.

This expansion is not unique to Wauchope. The current budget will fund some massive expansions. At Pacific Cape in Forster there is a $40 million project being developed, even bigger than the $30 million project that will be facilitated in Wauchope. Peter Sinclair Gardens at Tea Gardens has just undergone an expansion, with 17 new places, and the Whiddon Group has finished a six-place extension, worth $2 million, in Largs. All these expansions add not only to the suite of possible care but also to regular long-term employment, because in a 50-bed residential care facility the workforce matches patient numbers almost one for one.

Many other good things in this budget have come to the nation. Small businesses, like the 14,000 that operate in the Lyne electorate, will benefit from the 27½ per cent company tax rate. It means the return on small businesses' investments will be greater. People in small businesses are not like wage earners, where the business pays them. For many men and women in small business, the profit that the company makes is their wage, so if they do not make a profit they are working for nothing.

We have also continued the instant asset write-off, which is a great program because it is so targeted. Businesses buy only the equipment that will benefit the business, and they are paying with their earnings, their money; it is not like they are getting a grant. The idea that businesses should pay for stuff without the appropriation of tax is such a sensible idea. We should actually target that in many more things, such as in the transfer payment system. But that is an aside; we will get back to this budget.

We have addressed many other serious problems in the tax base, such as bracket creep. We are all familiar with what bracket creep is. For the average wage earner, now $87,000, rather than $80,000, is the level at which you move into the second highest tax bracket.

We really have tried to look after people in work with our new affordable and more flexible child care and jobs for families package, which means that if you are earning up to roughly $185,000 there is no cap on what you can claim for child care. The more you are working, the more you can claim. Then there is a tiered system where the more you earn after that, the less the rebate is. But we have maintained support so that the most vulnerable children, who would benefit from child care and day care, get access for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

We are also trying to help people to get ahead and establish themselves in life by helping first home buyers. So they can get ahead and get their deposit a lot sooner, we will allow them to salary sacrifice up to $30,000 into their superannuation scheme and then pay a reduced tax when they take it out. Up on the north coast, this will be a great boon to a lot of young families who are just starting of their life, as my wife and I did when we moved up to the north coast 25 years ago. At the other end of the spectrum, we are trying to free up housing stock and let seniors who have worked all their lives and put money into their own homes downsize and put up to $300,000 each into their superannuation. We are also getting people off welfare and into work with our ParentsNext program, our Youth Jobs PaTH program and our Work for the Dole program.

In the infrastructure space, we are delivering in spades for the nation. Not only are we continuing to build the Pacific Highway in the Bruce Highway; we have appropriated $8.5 billion for the Inland Rail, which will be a freight corridor running through Victoria, New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland and into the Port of Brisbane. This will open up the food bowls and resource bowls of all of that massive hinterland, getting products to the markets more quickly and more cheaply. It will get 200,000 trucks off the Pacific Highway and the New England Highway. It will be an economic catalyst for growth in regional areas like Narrabri, Toowoomba, Goondiwindi, Parkes and Dubbo. All these wonderful areas that are so rich in agriculture will actually be able to connect so that all the value-adding businesses will cluster around this critical infrastructure. As we have said before, we have been delivering on dams, and the funding for further dam and irrigation projects continues.

Everyone in Australia wants to be sure that the top end of town is paying its fair share of tax. We have a multinational tax avoidance law and we are extending it to foreign partnerships and foreign trusts. We have the tax avoidance task force, which is embedded into some of the big corporate taxpayers to make sure that there is no strategic or directed tax avoidance. To make our tax system much more integrated and much more reliable, we have a penalty diverted profits tax and we are addressing all these multinational anti-avoidance laws into transfer pricing and antihybrid mismatch rules.

Local government will be happy because we have reindexed the financial assistance grants. The Roads to Recovery program and black spot programs continue. In this space in regional Australia we also have our Regional Jobs and Investment Packages. The north coast is the recipient of one of these funds. We are looking to invest in and help grow critical infrastructure, social programs and businesses. The Building Better Regions Fund is aimed at these sorts of projects as well, as is our Stronger Communities Program, which is continuing.

There are so many good things in this budget that the coalition and the nation should be really proud of. As I mentioned, we have laid out a credible financial path to getting our finances back in order. By 2021 we should be in surplus, and shrinkage of some of the funding in the recurrent spending means we are starting to live within our means. But critical infrastructure that will grow the economy and the things that everyone in Australia who is working and has a family depends on, like Medicare and schools, is getting extra funds. Look at the school education budget: $18.6 billion extra into all levels of the school system, whether it is independent schools, the Catholic school system or state government run schools.

My last comment is just to put paid to the falsity put out by members on the other side that a cut means money this year is less than last year. Money is going up in education to the tune of $18.6 billion. It is not as big as the hypothetical, blue sky promises, but that does not mean a cut. That is just confusing people. There is an extra $18.6 billion going into federal education funding, into all levels of the school system. There will be state government schools, Catholic and Christian schools— (Time expired)

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