House debates

Monday, 29 May 2017

Bills

Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2017-2018, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018; Second Reading

4:47 pm

Photo of Tim WattsTim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an old cliche, but budgets are about priorities. They are about governments making choices about what to do, what to fund and who to tax. Through these decisions, through these choices, the character of a government is revealed. As the old aphorism attributed to former United States Vice-President Joe Biden goes: 'Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.'

Unfortunately, the measures in this budget show that the Turnbull government values millionaires, multinationals and Malcolm Turnbull, and not much else. With the removal of the deficit levy on 1 July, millionaires will get a tax cut of over $16,000, paid for by tax increases on average Australians. Australians earning $65,000 a year will pay an extra $325 in income tax this year as a result of the increase to the Medicare levy put forward in this budget. Australians earning $80,000 will pay an extra $400 this year. Multinationals and Australia's biggest corporations will get a $65 billion tax cut, around 40 per cent of which, it has been estimated, will be shipped directly offshore in dividends to overseas based investors, according to research conducted by UTS. And the Prime Minister will get a political band-aid for the issues that he is bleeding on politically. They include a reduction in the cut to Australian school funding from $30 billion to $22 billion. We are expected to congratulate the government on this. It is as though they have robbed a bank and returned 25 per cent of the proceeds, and are expecting a pat on the back for it. It is not the way it works in the community. They also include the removal of the Medicare Benefit Schedule freeze on a small minority of medical services over the coming years, and a bank levy that will raise revenue for the government, true, but will be immediately passed on by the banks to either Australian consumers or Australian bank shareholders.

There is no vision in this budget for the kind of nation that we want to build. There is no narrative, no economic leadership, for a strategy to confront the structural economic challenges that Australia now faces. There is no coherent agenda, just fix ups for vested interests and political band-aids designed to stop what remains of the government's support from bleeding away.

I do want to call out a few areas of the budget that have received less attention in the media and that fail the 'fairness' test that the Prime Minister has set for himself and his government under this budget. The first issue I will talk about in this respect is Australian aid. Yet again, this budget reveals a coalition government walking away from Australia's obligations as a good international citizen. We on this side of the House were, obviously, disappointed when the Abbott-Turnbull government dropped the bipartisan target of growing Australia's aid budget of 0.5 per cent of GNI, but it is the cuts that really hurt. Australian aid cuts have very serious real-world consequences. Australian aid goes directly to the most vulnerable in the world, providing health services, education, gender support and disaster and climate resilience.

The campaign for Australian aid has quantified what some of the impacts of these cuts were. If we consider that in the last year Australian aid helped 1.8 million girls and boys enrol in school, trained 100,000 teachers, provided 4.6 million textbooks to kids in the Pacific, provided vaccinations for 2.8 million girls and boys around the world, provided clean drinking water to 2.3 million households and provided emergency relief in response to disasters like the Nepal earthquake, Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu and recent famines in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, these cuts have life and death consequences. They mean that children will not get vaccinations, girls will not go to school and women who are experiencing violence in Third World countries will not receive support.

These cuts—$300 million in the most recent budget—come on top of the $11.3 billion cuts to Australian aid that have been implemented by the Abbott-Turnbull government since coming to office. As a result, the Australian aid budget is now at its lowest level, as a proportion of gross national income, on record. Most observers in the aid sector thought that after the enormous cuts of previous budgets the government would say, 'Enough,' and would leave the aid sector to regroup and adapt to the new disappointing Australian aid baseline. But, as I said earlier, in the most recent budget the Turnbull government cut a further $300 million from Australian aid, delivering the weakest Australian aid budget in history—spending just 23 cents in every $100 of gross national income on foreign aid. By linking the Australian aid budget to CPI over the next decade it will continue to weaken over time, reaching a new low of 0.17 per cent of GNI.

The justification for this abdication of Australia's role in the international community was, again, the budget deficit, as if we were the only country in the world dealing with fiscal challenges. It is worth noting that the Conservative United Kingdom government—confronting a budget deficit in the order of 50 billion pounds in the last fiscal year and a national debt equivalent to 85 per cent of GDP—did not walk away from its international responsibilities. Indeed, Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister, recommitted just this month, during the current election campaign in that country, to the UK's pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid.

In response to this announcement, the former Tory chancellor George Osborne tweeted:

Re-commitment to 0.7 per cent aid target very welcome. Morally right, strengthens UK influence and was key to creating modern compassionate Conservatives.

He is right that that was the morally right decision for the United Kingdom to take, and he is right that that decision strengthened the United Kingdom's influence around the world, as it would have strengthened Australian influence. His comments also reveal the extent to which hard line ideologists have killed off any possibility of 'compassionate' conservativism in Australia. These cuts to Australian aid are cuts to the most vulnerable in the world. They are cuts that will mean more children will die from preventable diseases and more girls will miss a chance to get an education. They also reveal the hypocrisy at the heart of ideological conservatives who claim to have compassion for the most vulnerable in our society.

The Treasurer proclaimed in his first speech in this place:

From my faith I derive the values of loving-kindness, justice and righteousness, to act with compassion and kindness, acknowledging our common humanity and to consider the welfare of others; to fight for a fair go for everyone to fulfil their human potential and to remove whatever unjust obstacles stand in their way,

…   …   …

My vision for Australia is for a nation that is… above all, generous in spirit, to share our good fortune with others, both at home and overseas, out of compassion and a desire for justice.

It is appropriate that we judge members of this chamber against their first speeches. They are meaningful. But a budget that takes the Australian aid budget to the lowest level on record does not meet these values. These values are abjectly missing from the government's further aid cuts.

Unsurprisingly, the Treasurer's failure was endorsed by the Australian Christian Lobby, who congratulated the Treasurer for his 'commendable' and 'positive' message that he would like to increase Australian aid sometime in the future. ACL managing director, Lyle Shelton, had the gall to issue a press release that stated:

Mr Morrison made it clear that aid remained a government priority and in reflecting his own views said that he looked forward ‘to the day when we can be more generous'.

Mr Shelton further stated:

The aspiration to increase foreign aid, espoused today by Treasurer Morrison, will go some way in restoring confidence in Australia’s commitment to be generous to the world's poor.

I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that Mr Shelton was surely the only person in Australia whose confidence in the Australian aid budget was restored during budget week.

Despite claiming that Australian aid is a priority in the face of more than $11 billion in cuts to Australian aid from this government, if you visit the ACL website the only petitions and campaigns you will see on the home page are for a marriage equality plebiscite, the opposition of the Safe Schools program and the very worthy cause of opposing the genocide in Syria and Iraq against Christians and minority groups. If you click through to their 'Issues' pages, you will find a page that notes:

Sadly Australia has failed to meet its MDG

Millennium Development Goals

targets and groups like ACL and others are working to encourage the Australian Government to recommit to meeting our MDG targets.

Australians can judge for themselves just how hard they are actually working.

Labor went to the last election with a policy of stopping the clock on further cuts to the Australian aid budget and growing it over time. The greatest challenge to Australia's development assistance trajectory now is a lack of bipartisan support, which is what we have seen in the United Kingdom. Without bipartisan support, it is much harder for either side to protect the budget from further cuts.

Another issue of fairness in this budget, where the fairness test has failed, that I want to touch on briefly here today that has not attracted significant media attention is with respect to the new long-stay parent visa class that was introduced in the days leading up to this budget. There are a number of injustices in this situation. I should explain that there are currently around 500,000 Australians with Indian heritage. It is a very significant issue in their community—the ability for them to bring their parents from India to be with their family as they establish a new generation in Australia. The primacy of parents and of older generations in subcontinent and Asian families more broadly is very significant. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important thing in these families' lives.

Before the election, both parties made a commitment to creating a visa class that would enable Australian-Indian families—or families of any ethnic background, I should say—to bring their parents to Australia to stay with them while their children were young. This would not be a cost to the Commonwealth. All costs would be borne by the sponsors. So private health insurance would be covered by the sponsors and a bond would be issued by the sponsors to ensure that, if anything went astray and the parents needed to return to India or needed medical treatment that was not covered by private health insurance, the bond would cover it.

Unfortunately, what we see in the implementation of this commitment by the government in the latest budget is the removal of a bond and its replacement with a visa fee. There is a very important distinction. A bond, you get back at the end of a visa claim, whereas a fee you will never see again. The fee is for bringing parents to Australia. A five-year visa attracts a $10,000 fee. A three-year visa comes at a cost of $5,000. It is not a bond; you do not get it back. That is a fee. In fact, the budget books $26 million of government revenue from this visa class in 2018-19, rising to $44 million of revenue in 2020-21.

I have heard from many of my constituents about the anger that they feel as a result of this change in policy from the election campaign to government. The Australian-Indian community feel like they are being taken for a ride. They feel like their family relationships—they commitment to their parents—is being used as a cash cow by this government. They are angry that the commitment for a bond has been changed to a fee. They used words like 'lies', 'deception' and 'deceit' when they talked about this with me. Not only are they angry about being squeezed for money through this visa class; they are also angry about the very unfortunate family dynamics that this new visa class is going to create, because, as was not revealed before the election, this visa class will be limited for each family to one of their sets of grandparents. So even families with the means to bring out mum's parents and dad's parents, under this visa class, will have to choose: is it mum's parents or is it dad's parents?

I would like to ask the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and the assistant minister responsible for this visa class whether they have any advice to Indian-Australians—to husbands and wives—about how to have this conversation. I know that it is not a conversation that I would relish having with my wife—whether to bring my mother-in-law and father-in-law to Australia or my parents. I think that would be a very divisive and awkward conversation. There is no need for this cap. There is no need for this visa class to force families to make this choice. If families can afford to bring both categories of parent—both sides of the family—to Australia, they ought to be permitted to. They should not be forced by the government to decide. Members of my community are very angry about this. They told me and the member for Lalor and the shadow immigration minister, Shayne Neumann, about their anger at a recent immigration forum that we held in Wyndham, just to the west of my electorate. It was very well attended, and tensions ran very high. This change certainly does not meet the fairness test from the budget.

Another very important part of the budget that has not attracted media attention is the cut to TAFE and vocational funding in this budget. Under this federal budget, Victoria will see cuts of $128 million each year to TAFE and vocational education. Instead of investing in local jobs and skills, the Prime Minister's unfair budget cuts funding to TAFE, vocational education and apprenticeships by over $600 million in total. In my electorate, youth unemployment is well over 20 per cent. Ensuring that kids who are not able to complete school or who are not going on to tertiary education still have that post-high school education to enable them to increase their skills in order to get a job is a very significant issue. Similarly, underemployment is at a record high, and wages growth is at a record low.

In this context, these cuts to TAFE and vocational education come at the worst possible time for Melbourne's west. The number of government funded TAFE students fell by over 20 per cent between 2013 and 2015, and my electorate was particularly affected. Victorian universities are one of the most significant public TAFE providers in Victoria. They felt these cuts acutely. In the last 12 months alone, trade apprenticeship commencements have dropped by 10.5 per cent. Again, we felt this acutely in Melbourne's west. We used to have significant numbers of apprenticeships being taken on at the Williamstown shipyards. The 1,400 jobs that have been lost there used to include over 100 apprenticeships. Those are long gone. What Bill Shorten committed Labor to in the budget reply was to work to ensure that one in every 10 jobs on every single priority infrastructure project funded by the federal government goes to an Australian apprenticeship. That would have meant at least 2,600 apprenticeship places in the context of the last election. That would have made a realistic difference to young people in my electorate.

Comments

Bernadette Sitler
Posted on 15 Aug 2017 10:39 am

This comment has been deleted