Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking in this appropriation debate before the Main Committee today. For 11 long years we have been waiting for the Howard government to show some leadership by detailing a vision for this country, a comprehensive vision of what they are going to achieve for all Australians and how they are going to achieve it. The wealth generated by the mining boom has given the Howard government a golden opportunity to invest in the long-term future of this country by investing in infrastructure, addressing the challenges of climate change and taking measures to boost our national innovation and productivity. But this year’s budget failed the future test dismally. This year’s budget should have been about the next 10 years. This year’s budget should have been about nation building. Instead it was about short-term electoral advantage in shoring up the Howard government’s chances at this year’s election, which means it and the Howard government have failed all Australians.

My constituency in Chisholm are concerned about the issues that affect their daily lives, in particular, higher education, water, climate change, health, child care and industrial relations. You would think that after 11 long years we would be going forward in all these areas. Instead, we have gone backwards. My constituents know that our education system is crumbling while the Howard government has stood idly by watching it happen—indeed, making much of it happen. Their children and grandchildren cannot get a place at university. They cannot afford to pay the skyrocketing fees and they cannot afford to pay for all the services that used to be free or low cost before the government disbanded student unions. They cannot afford to get a place at a TAFE—indeed, most of the TAFE places seem to be going off into these weird and wonderful things called ATCs. They see how the 11-year drought, combined with denial and inaction by the Howard government, has crippled our water supplies. Dam levels are at all-time lows, severe water restrictions are in place, gardens are dying and fruit and vegetables are expensive to buy. My constituents read daily in the newspaper about the effects of climate change and how the world that we are leaving our children is going to be a much hotter, drier and more inhospitable place. Indeed, we are the only generation alive who will actually leave a worse environment to their children than the one we had ourselves. This is not something to be proud of. The Howard government knows that it needs to take urgent action, but it has done nothing—and it is worried. It is worried because the polls are telling it so, not because it believes it needs to do something.

As many of my constituents are getting older, health is a very important issue for them. But instead of having a genuine universal healthcare system, the Howard government has created a less efficient healthcare system that delivers less and is propped up with a safety net. The Howard government agenda is to get as many people onto private health insurance as possible, whether they can afford it or not, and with rising private health insurance premiums many cannot afford it. If the Howard government wins the election and sells Medibank Private, all health fund fees will go up. Private health care is becoming unaffordable. Many in my electorate of Chisholm have private health insurance and struggle to maintain their private health insurance as self-funded retirees or as pensioners. Many are now faced with the unenviable choice of having to give it up because they simply cannot afford to keep paying those premiums. In addition, many of my constituents are waiting years to access public dental care because the Howard government has slashed funding and blamed the states.

People in Chisholm are also concerned about Work Choices and the Howard government’s attack on their employment and their children’s and their grandchildren’s ability to secure well-paid employment with good working conditions. They are struggling with mortgage repayments, rising interest rates and a high cost of living. They are finding it difficult to understand why, at a time when the country is awash with profits from the mineral boom, they are fighting to hold onto hard-fought-for working conditions. The budget did precious little to address these issues and it made no attempt to deliver a national vision. Therefore, it failed my constituency—the very people it was supposed to help.

Higher education is a big issue in my electorate of Chisholm and it is an issue close to my heart. Two of Australia’s largest universities are housed in Chisholm. Monash University’s Clayton campus, the largest campus in Australia, and Deakin city campus in Burwood are in my electorate, together with a large proportion of students and academics who also live in the seat. On top of that, we have a world-class TAFE at Box Hill. There are also a lot of families with children in high school who aspire to a university education and their parents and grandparents who want them to get one.

They all worry that a university education is becoming more and more out of reach, and for good reason: it is. Ten years of underinvestment by the Howard government means government recurrent funding to universities has fallen by 0.9 per cent of GDP in 1996 to just 0.6 per cent in 2007. The Howard government’s investment in education has declined as a proportion of GDP during its term in office. Australia’s overall investment in education is 5.8 per cent of GDP. This puts us behind 17 other OECD economies, including Poland, Hungary and New Zealand. This is a disgrace. That means fewer university places, less funding for courses, fewer teaching staff, less equipment and less student financial support. It means more of the financial burden falls unfairly on students and their families.

The government’s Higher Education Endowment Fund will go some of the way towards addressing this, but it is not enough—not by a long shot. The $300 million per year to upgrade university facilities will be divided up between each of our 38 universities. That is not even $8 million per university per year. How many of them have outstanding repair bills worth much more than that? To put it in perspective, the outstanding maintenance bill at Australian universities for just one year was $1.2 billion in 2005 and growing. At ANU alone, the capital and maintenance backlog exceeded $500 million.

Each university will be required to buy into the endowment fund by providing matching funds to increase their chances of getting a grant. Where does that leave the smaller, poorer and regional universities, I ask? Although the Howard government has committed to providing additional Commonwealth recurrent funding in a range of priority courses, it just does not go far enough. HECS fees for over 50,000 students studying accounting, economics or commerce will increase by more than $3,500 over an average three-year degree. This means students will pay nearly $25,000 for a degree in these disciplines. This is the thin end of the wedge. The cost of getting a degree is becoming prohibitive, shackling students with ridiculous amounts of debt for years to come.

This year’s budget also saw the Howard government remove the limits on the number of full-fee paying university places. Increasing the number of full-fee paying places is another example of the Howard government shirking its responsibility to properly fund our universities. Full-fee places are inequitable, and a Rudd Labor government will get rid of them, as I have said on numerous occasions in this place. One of the constituents in my electorate, two years ago, got a 95.5 TER score, which is pretty amazing. She is the ninth child of an Italian family. She got the Monash Law Prize and she applied for law at Monash. Funnily enough, she got 95.5 and the cut-off at that time was 95.7. She missed out by 0.2. Had her parents been able to pay the full fee, she would have required only an 89 TER score. Where is the equity in that? You tell me. The members on the other side do not get that. They do not get that it is inequitable to be able to buy your way into a university. You should get there by your ability, by your own endeavours.

Currently there are an increasing number of students living in poverty, struggling to study and pay their bills and working too many hours to pay the rent rather than concentrating on their studies. While student income support received a modest increase in the budget, considering the decline in student financial assistance under the Howard government, even the increase means students will not keep pace with the cost of living. The fact remains that our higher education system has gone backwards under this government.

Unfortunately, in my electorate we have seen a number of scandals recently with students living in substandard housing. People are exploiting students in this way. A lot of them are foreign students, but also country kids moving into the area are living in appalling conditions. They are being forced to because they literally cannot afford to go to university and survive.

The budget was a great opportunity for the Howard government to address the dual challenges of water and climate change to make up for their complete inaction on water and climate change over the last 11 years. I was really surprised recently when the Prime Minister said that there might not be an allocation out of the Murray-Darling this year. I found it a bit naive that, after 11 years of being in government and not having had rain for 10, he was a little surprised that there might not be water in our system. It shows their complete lack of vision in this area. This year the budget failed the climate change test and showed the Howard government’s complacency over water.

The budget announced a spending commitment of less than half of one per cent of the $10 billion national water plan in the next financial year. On top of that, the budget highlighted an extraordinary lack of detail and programs for water. The first real spending on water does not come until 2009-10, and after three years the government will have only spent 11 per cent of the $10 billion. We need action now, not in three years. Action is needed now to deal with the problem of overallocated water licences. The budget also does not contain a single new program for urban water. How can the government call its water policy a national water plan when 17 million Australians living in coastal areas are not part of the plan?

Action on climate change is as vitally important for our environment, our economy and our future. But true to the government’s lack of form on water, I see the budget also fails the all-important climate change test. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have once again failed to acknowledge that the magnitude of the climate change challenge will ultimately cost Australian jobs and hurt the Australian economy. The climate change budget is less than 0.1 per cent of GDP and declines over the forecast period. What an appalling indictment of this government.

Three major UN reports this year have broadcast loud and clear the risk climate change poses to our environment, our economy and our way of life, but the message still has not got through to the Howard government. There were no initiatives announced to help stop our greenhouse gas pollution from rising to dangerous levels—27 per cent by 2020. The budget will not create any new Australian clean coal jobs. Clean energy has been ignored in the budget. There is no emission-trading scheme, no long-term targets for emission reductions, no increase to the mandatory renewable energy targets and now no new substantial funding initiatives outside the solar rebate program. The only glimmer of hope was the government’s decision to join Labor in increasing support for the solar rebate program, and that was only after originally planning to abolish the scheme and slash the size of the rebate.

It would be nice if the Howard government chose to take some decisive action on climate change. But the only decision they seem to have made is to spend around $23 million of taxpayers’ money on a direct mail and advertising campaign to shore up their prospects in the next election. The only other action they seem to be taking—committing Australia to a nuclear future—flies in the face of what Australians want. In today’s papers we read the Howard government is seeking advice on whether it can override state governments to impose 25 or perhaps 40 nuclear reactors on communities around the coast of Australia. That is funny; I don’t remember Australians voting in favour of nuclear power at the last election, just as I do not remember them giving the Howard government a mandate at the last election to slash their wages and working conditions. If this is the Prime Minister’s version of acting on climate change then it is a sad indictment of the Howard government. This year’s budget proved one thing: that only a Rudd Labor government has the vision and courage to act decisively on climate change.

There were big gaps in this year’s health budget—actually I am not sure that there really was a health budget this year at all. One of them was the failure to seriously address dental health. The public dental health waiting list in this country currently numbers 650,000 people. This budget achieved nothing for these people. In a First World country awash with the proceeds of a resources boom, this is a disgrace. People are waiting years to have basic dental work done. Left untreated, poor dental health leads to myriad other medical problems. Under this budget the Howard government will continue to pour more money into its failed scheme to supply dental care to people with chronic diseases. This scheme does not apply to the 650,000 people on the dental public waiting list. It also has complex referrals and involves patients paying very high out-of-pocket costs. In 1996 the Howard government scrapped the successful $100 million a year Commonwealth Dental Program and left public dental patients on the scrap heap and then blamed the states for huge public dental waiting lists. I thought the Prime Minister was supposed to stand up for the battlers.

Preventive health care was also ignored in this budget. We have a national epidemic of diabetes, obesity and heart disease, yet little is being done by the Howard government in this area. We need a health minister who is willing to show leadership in taking preventive measures to tackle this public health time bomb we are sitting on. We need a comprehensive approach, including in the areas of public health, the economy, taxation, education, advertising, marketing, research, communications, regulations, prohibitions, persuasions, planning, construction and transport. And what have we got? Nothing; absolutely nothing. We are sitting on a time bomb of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The World Health Organisation predicts this, and we are doing nothing. We are sitting on a time bomb of depression. Very little is going towards preventing these diseases. If there were targeted, affordable, cost-effective programs, we could avoid these issues. We are not doing so.

Affordable child care is a big issue for families in Chisholm. Every time I go out there and speak to somebody, every time someone walks through the door, this is one of the issues that comes through loud and clear. It is expensive and hard to find. Over the last four years, childcare fees have increased by more than 12 per cent every year, which is more than five times the increase in the cost of living for a family. That is a huge impost on a family budget. The budget provided families with some relief on child care but not nearly enough. Funnily enough, action to help families with childcare costs only seems to have happened in an election year. The one-off budget measure of a 13 per cent increase in the childcare benefit will cover only one of the 12 per cent annual increases in childcare fees. Families will continue to shoulder the burden of annual childcare cost increases, and most families will not receive anywhere near the $8,000 trumpeted by the Treasurer. In fact, the average payment under the childcare tax rebate is closer to $813 per family per year.

The childcare tax rebate changes in the budget will not deliver any extra funding to help families with the cost of child care. Bringing forward the childcare rebate was just the Howard government finally delivering on a promise made at the last election. Parents have already waited for up to two years to get their rebate. This year’s budget announcement simply delivers on the Howard government’s original promise to pay the rebate immediately after the financial year when childcare expenses are incurred rather than leaving them in limbo for up to two years.

The Howard government has failed to deliver for families. What families really need is a Rudd Labor government, which will deliver. Parents will have a right to flexible working arrangements until their child goes to school; parents will have the right to request an extra 12 months unpaid leave; there will be an improvement in the quality and affordability of child care with minimal cost increases; there will be investment in preschool, primary and secondary schools; and there will be a fair and balanced industrial relations system.

Of course, the Treasurer did not mention Work Choices in his budget speech. We dare not mention that name—not even once. Work Choices, that great showpiece of the Howard government’s fourth term in office, was not mentioned once. Funnily enough, it is not mentioned in the Howard government’s new $75 million advertising campaign to rebadge Work Choices either—$4.1 million of which was spent in one week alone—because Work Choices has shown itself to be a complete and utter dud of a policy. People in my electorate know that, because it is cutting back their wages, crippling their working conditions and ruining their and their families’ lives. A constituent of mine, Sherine, came into my office recently. She is 60, she is on an AWA and it has expired. But an AWA can just keep going on indefinitely. Even though it has expired, there is no way that she can go to her boss and say, ‘Look, I really would like to negotiate a new one.’ She can fill in a form to go back to the award; but, if she does that, she reneges on getting any pay rises in the future. So she is left with this AWA that she cannot get out of. If she is on an AWA she cannot get any of the increases under the aptly named Fair Pay Commission, but if she goes back to the award she loses the minimal benefits that she got in the AWA—which were the pay rises in that time frame. So she can go back to the award as it was four years ago or she can stay on an AWA and never get a pay rise again. Sherine said, ‘What do I do? Where do I go?’ She is now leading a campaign in her workplace, not for herself—as she said, ‘I’m 60, I work casually and I can tell the boss what to do because I am beyond caring now’—but for all the young women in that workplace. She is fighting for them, because they do not have the option to stand up to the boss like she does. For them, it is the only income coming into their family home. I do not think we should be leaving people in that sort of ‘money or the gun’ situation. In this situation there is no money, and the gun is self-inflicted.

The government knows that Work Choices is a dud, and that is why it is working hard to try to sell the unsellable, using taxpayers’ dollars, of course—not Liberal Party coffers but taxpayers’ dollars. Why would people vote in favour of laws cutting their penalty rates, shift loading and holiday pay, putting even more pressure on the family budget? The government did not take this to the last election, funnily enough. The only thing the budget did show up about Work Choices was that there is no economic case for it. The budget forecast confirms that, under Work Choices, employment growth will decline slightly to 1.5 per cent and unemployment will increase slightly to around five per cent. Australia’s productivity growth went backwards for the first six months following the implementation of Work Choices, and it is presently only 1.5 per cent compared to a historic average of 2.3 per cent. Australian productivity growth will decline from the end of the next financial year. It is strong commodity prices and demand for our resources that are largely responsible for our strong employment performance. If Work Choices is such a great success, why don’t all the economic indicators show it?

There is every indication that the Howard government is using tax cuts to buy back voters disenfranchised by Work Choices. I welcome the tax relief for low- and middle-income earners delivered in this year’s budget. Labor has been calling for it for a long time. In fact, Labor has been campaigning for the last two years for these tax cuts, and they were well and truly overdue. But the tax cuts do not come close to handing back the extra tax that the government is collecting due to the mining boom. The Treasurer will collect a hefty $10 billion more in income taxes over the next three years than he anticipated just a few months ago. The tax cuts will not go anywhere near compensating those families who have lost wages and conditions through Work Choices. But these long overdue tax cuts will be welcomed by many local families in my electorate who are struggling with rising health and childcare costs as well as four interest rate rises since the Prime Minister promised to keep rates at record lows. The Prime Minister’s four rate rises have squeezed an extra $240 on average per month out of Australia’s household budgets. Australian families are now losing a higher proportion of their disposable income to mortgage repayments than ever before; higher than under Paul Keating. The great myth of the Howard government is that they are great economic managers. Australians and my constituents in Chisholm deserve a whole lot better. Our circumstances demand decisive action and only a Rudd Labor government has the vision and the courage to deliver it. There are no other options any more.

See this speech in context