Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Instead, 40,000 Australians have joined the jobs queue since the budget, and young people are finding it more and more difficult to find work than at any time since the 1990s.

The Liberal Party like to regard themselves as the party of business, but let us have a look at what business thinks of this government's economic performance so far. The Australian Institute of Company Directors' November survey of company directors found that almost half of directors are claiming the government's performance is affecting their business decision making negatively. The majority of directors believe the government's performance is negatively affecting consumer confidence, while around half of directors would rate the government's first year in office as 'poor' or 'very poor'. Director sentiment has declined by 7.1 points since the last survey, to continue a downward trend since the election in the second half of 2013. Directors have become more pessimistic about the future health of the Australian economy. For the first time in the survey's history, sentiment has become negative regarding the ASX All Ordinaries index, with more directors expecting a fall in the index than expecting a rise. Directors' sentiment regarding the government's understanding of business has declined, with more directors disagreeing than agreeing that the government understands business. A majority of directors claim the abolition of the carbon tax has not affected their business. Thirty-five per cent of directors believe the level of red tape has increased in the last 12 months, while more than a quarter of directors expect an increase in the coming year.

There is definitely a role for the Senate to propose and discuss options for spending cuts, because, when it comes to making decisions about savings, this government needs all the help it can get. After all, despite all this government's rhetoric about Labor's record, it should recognise that we made $250 billion in savings. We made those savings without gutting health and education in the way that this government proposes to do. We did it without taxing people who visit the doctor or forcing young job seekers to go six months without income.

Those opposite constantly accuse us of being obstructionist, of not being willing to play a constructive role. But this is absolute hypocrisy from a government which doubled the deficit immediately after coming to office and continues to engage in waste and throwing money away, while forcing Australia's most vulnerable and disadvantaged to pick up the tab. If you want to see examples of this waste, I will just give you a few. Let us consider the $117,000 that the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and his assistant minister paid for media analysis, transcription and clipping services. Let us consider the $45,000 the Minister for Industry paid for an international meeting of industry ministers in a luxury Mexican resort, supposedly connected to the G20 which was held in Brisbane thousands of miles away.

How about the $80,000 that the government spent on rent for an unused ministerial office for the stood-aside Assistant Treasurer? And there are plenty of much bigger examples such as the $8 billion gift they gave to the Reserve Bank, against the advice of their own Treasury department. If they wanted to say 'Happy Christmas' to the Reserve Bank, surely a Christmas card would have done?

There is no better example of wasteful spending than the government's $20 billion paid parental leave scheme, which gives $50,000 per child to millionaires and which the Productivity Commission said would have 'few incremental benefits'.

If this government wants constructive suggestions about alternative savings measures to their cruel and unfair budget, Labor has plenty. But this government needs to stop using economic arguments to take away money from the poor and the vulnerable and to treat those less well-off as commodities that can be put on the scrap heap. How anyone could ever believe that you could live on six months with no salary is absolutely beyond me. It is one of the worst polices I have heard of in my whole life—and I am over half a century old.