Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

We have heard a lot lately from this government about fairness. This government is a lot of things, but the history of its budget measures over the past four years shows that fair is not one of them. In 2014 we saw the true nature of this government, with its harsh cuts to education, cuts to health, cuts to the ABC and the SBS, and changes to the pension. In the 2014 budget we also saw cuts to community legal centres, which the government has now, finally, backflipped on after extensive campaigning from the legal assistance sector. Make no mistake, this government has not changed. It did not understand fairness then and it does not understand it now. How could it, when it fundamentally believes that tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the less well off is good policy making or that multinationals should not be forced to pay their fair share?

Australians know that only the Labor Party can be trusted to stand for equality and fairness, because that is we have always done. We have fought against every unfair budget that this government has brought before the parliament and we will keep fighting that the most unfair measures in this budget do not pass through the parliament.

This budget breaks away from much that the coalition is supposed to believe in—lower taxes, reducing debt and deficit, and minimising the role of government—yet it is not a budget of social investment. It is neither a Labor nor a Liberal budget. That just leaves open the question: What does this budget mean? What does this budget tell us about the government's plans for the future of this country? All this budget tells us is that the Prime Minister wants to keep his job. He knows that his government is failing to live up to the expectations of the Australian people. He knows that inequality is rising—wages growth is at record lows and people in lower socio-economic groups are struggling. And he knows that the budget deficit has actually widened under this government. It is clear that the government's trickle-down approach is not working.

So now he is trying on Labor values for size. Well, Prime Minister, you are not in the Labor party—as much as you might wish you were—you never will be. This is a Prime Minister who does not understand the meaning of fairness, a Prime Minister who does not understand that equality benefits all of us and that it cannot be achieved by giving handouts to big business. This budget comes nowhere close to being a Labor budget. It does not uphold Labor values or promote equality of opportunity, and it definitely does not do anything for the safety net to make sure that Australians are kept from falling through the cracks.

Only Labor believes in fairness and delivers it. Only Labor is committed to the environment and combating climate change. The Prime Minister will do anything to keep his job, even if it means throwing the next generation under the bus. The government's failure to take any real action on climate change means that they are just leaving the next generation to deal with it. The Prime Minister once said that he did not want to lead a Liberal Party that did not feel as strongly about climate change as he did. But was there even one mention of climate change in this year's budget speech? No. This budget delivers zero new policies or funding to drive down carbon pollution and respond to climate change.

A Labor budget would not cut $22 billion from schools and $4 billion from universities. Labor understands that Australia's future lies in the skills, education and training of our people. Our education is our biggest asset, and we must invest in it if we are going to meet the challenges of the Asian century and bring something to the table in our relationships with China and India. It is clear that this government has their priorities all wrong when you consider that they are giving away $65 billion to big business while cutting $22 billion from Australia's schools. Young people are hurt by this budget and so is our future. Labor believes that every child in every school deserves to have an excellent education.

A Labor budget would protect Medicare. Over the past four years the government has cut Medicare, taxed Medicare and they have tried to privatise Medicare. And now they are backtracking to save themselves, because they know that Australians do not trust them to protect Medicare. And, of course, recently we have come to understand that the lifting of the freeze on large numbers of services for which Medicare pays is not to occur until as late as 2020. So much for the lifting of the freeze.

A Labor budget would provide more funding for public housing, especially for women and children fleeing family violence. This government does not understand that responding to family violence also requires addressing the shortage of affordable and available housing. Domestic and family violence is the number one reason why people access homelessness services. And, of course, victims of family violence need legal assistance. The government's cuts to community legal centres and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services would have caused countless examples of suffering to victims of family violence. Community legal centres are already turning away thousands of people each year, and these cuts would have seen many of these centres actually close their doors. Labor protested these cuts for years because we understand the vital work that community legal services do. Community legal centres provide assistance to vulnerable people to ensure that they do not become stuck in a cycle of disadvantage. These services deserve stability and predictable funding. They certainly do not deserve the uncertainty that they have been faced with because of this government announcing cuts, which it did in 2014, then pausing those cuts with the effect that right up until a few weeks ago—for some three years—the community legal services sector has been forced to endure uncertainty about its funding, and we know the kind of damage that that kind of funding uncertainty does to centres like this. It has meant the loss of experienced staff and, in some cases, the physical closure of centres, because they were unable to keep up their leases. In some cases it has meant the closing of long-established programs, because there was no certainty that those programs were going to be able to continue to be funded.

The government has taken some steps in this budget to address family violence. It has taken the government three years to finally agree, but they are now implementing the Productivity Commission's 2014 recommendation to stop alleged domestic violence perpetrators from personally cross-examining their victims in the family courts. While Labor does welcome this overdue change, we are yet to see how this change will be implemented. Let us be clear: you cannot implement this measure without additional funding for legal aid lawyers, who would need to be ordered by the courts to assist unrepresented litigants. Labor has committed $43.2 million for additional legal aid funding to ensure that parties refused the right to personally cross-examine are not denied natural justice.

Labor will not support the government setting aside $170 million for a divisive plebiscite, which is another measure that we see has come back in this budget. Despite explicitly banking more than $100 million in savings for not proceeding with the marriage equality plebiscite in last year's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, here it is again, a zombie measure back from the dead. The plebiscite was always a terrible idea, and it met with strong opposition from a majority of Australians. This government needs to let parliament do its job and get on with making marriage equality a reality in Australia. That is what Labor would do because we understand what Australian people want, and that is a fair go for all Australians, including the LGBTI community. If we can take one thing from this budget, it is that both Labor and the coalition at least acknowledge that Australians want a budget that is fair. It is just that only Labor actually understand what fairness means.

See this speech in context