Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This budget has failed to put in place the base or the principles that we need to meet the very important challenges of the decade ahead. The Leader of the Opposition made it clear in his budget response when he said that budgets should be not just about the next election but about the next decade and the decades beyond that. We need to build long-term economic prosperity beyond the mining boom by rebuilding productivity growth. We need to deal with any challenges of climate change and the preservation of water before the cost of inaction becomes too much, and we need to ensure the fair go in Australia has a future, not just a past, both in the workplace and at home. That is why this budget should have been about the next decade, not about the next election. It is obvious that this year’s budget is one that was very carefully marketed and targeted at groups which the government saw as potentially important ‘vote changers’ in the coming election. The amount of money that has been splashed around has not taken in important services, infrastructure and social needs which underpin our society. The Leader of the Opposition went on to say that we could anticipate many challenges and that we should act on those challenges while there is still time or we could fritter away the opportunities before the nation and squander the opportunities in meeting those challenges. Now is as good a time as ever, he said, to fix the roof while the sun is shining.

I think the budget has relied on the good luck that comes with a huge resources and mining boom. That is evident not just in Australia but internationally. In Tasmania we are feeling the benefits of the mining boom at the moment, but we also know what it is like for a mine to close and we know the effect that has on a community. We cannot afford to not be innovative in our communities; we need to ensure that we can diversify our economy so that we are not just relying on one industry. We know that our economic growth owes as much to the economic reforms of the last Labor government as it does to anything that the Howard government has done. But they have squandered it by not ensuring that our education is keeping up with growth; training in skills has been falling way behind and most of the infrastructure that should have been replaced in a timely fashion is now in dire straits.

The Tasmanian national highway is a case in point. It has been neglected for too long in the south, which has prevented much-needed works from going ahead to link much of the old infrastructure. Our transport hub should have been up and running by now, but the proposed bypass at Brighton to Bagdad—Bagdad is in my electorate—has been on the drawing board for some 30 years, and it is now more urgent that the works be undertaken. It is the same with the northern roads in the Lyons electorate, where there are still a number of significant problems that lead to unnecessary accidents. These roads are not in the Bass electorate or the Braddon electorate; therefore, they did not get anything in redress.

The main point about this budget is that it assumes that every Australian is already comfortably off, which of course is not the case. It is like assuming that, because our unemployment rate is down to five per cent—and we heard the previous member talking about that happening in her electorate—all people are fully employed. This just is not so. If you have an hour’s paid work a week, you can technically be called employed. The way it operates at the moment means that we may have low unemployment but we also have a growing underemployment, with people desperately trying to find second and sometimes third jobs to survive.

I want to talk about poverty, as I believe the appropriations in this budget have been predominantly for those who have. Those who have not seem to have been completely forgotten by the government. To illustrate why I think these bills are so short in dealing with the problems many people face today, I have a number of stories. On Friday a week ago I attended a function at one of my local schools, and people were there to make a difference by undertaking a walk for poverty. The aim of the walk was to raise awareness about the Make Poverty History campaign and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which identify clear ways of achieving an end to extreme poverty in the world. Students at Exeter High School have been learning about how our society is built on justice and equity and how democracy was born out of those concepts. Democracy is important because it gives people a voice in the political and, ultimately, social and economic direction of their country. Unfortunately, the majority of the world today does not have this voice.

Are You Mad? is an innovative education program that allows young people to drive real change in their school and community. It is based on a belief that young people can make real change happen in the world. The program allows students to express their concerns and to initiate and carry out real-life projects. The Mad Day Walk began at Exeter High where, with various community groups, I walked down the main street of Exeter and back to the school for a function there. I spent some time with the students and they were very much aware of what poverty meant for many Third World countries. But they were not familiar with poverty in their own backyards. They would not be able to tell me how many of their family and friends have difficulty finding appropriate housing, assistance with health and access to employment and training.

The heartening thing is that at another function I went to recently, a school assembly, I met a young student named Shania Kava, a nine-year-old from New Norfolk who had recently gone on holidays with her father to Fiji. She had observed some youngsters around her own age kicking a coconut for a football. When she inquired why they were using a coconut, the response came that they could not afford a ball. This led this little girl, with her father, to buy them a football. When she returned to school in her home town she set about collecting materials for that school in Fiji. At the New Norfolk Primary assembly we parcelled up 20 boxes of books and materials and found two computers, and those were sent off to Fiji.

So our young are aware of the fact that people overseas need our help, but for some reason we do not always alert them to the real poverty we have in our own backyards. Take housing, for example. A lot has been said about housing in the appropriation debate—the fact that housing has become so expensive that no-one on a low income could ever think of owning their own home. This is happening in our country, Australia. Renting has become a nightmare too, because there are no houses available for rent, even if the potential tenant can afford the cost of the rent. If you happen to be one of our older citizens or have a disability then you have no hope, as this budget has, if anything, reduced the availability of low-cost housing. Over the last three Commonwealth-state housing agreements, including the current one which is set to run out in June next year, the federal government has ripped $3.1 billion out of public and community housing. You cannot do that and not have a dramatic effect. Over the last few years the state housing authorities have therefore been faced with funding the shortfall by cannibalising their existing stock.

This is not something new; this has been going on for many years. The result is that a debt has been built up to the extent that three-quarters of the funds coming through from the Commonwealth to Tasmania for housing is eaten up in debt repayment. This is a total nonsense and I will be seeking to have this debt reallocated or sorted so that we can provide more public housing. We need to readjust this debt. It is just on paper and it needs to be reallocated or discharged so that we can use that money not to repay the Commonwealth but to build houses. Let us look for some one-off payments, such as those received by pensioners—$1,000 each this time. I do remember last time how much concern was generated when they thought they were going to get the $1,000 that was promised to them in the budget and it turned out that that had to be divided between a couple. So each pensioner who thought they were getting a little windfall found that they were only getting half of what they thought they had been promised.

The government has been wiser this time, but it is not going to make much of a difference. With the cost of living rising, the price of goods and services has gone up by more than $2 a day, which is what this works out to be. They forgot those on disabilities altogether. The one group in our society that could have used even $2 a day extra has been completely ignored. As my constituents constantly remind me, there are fewer and fewer services provided for those with a disability. It takes many of them, housebound and without any assistance, a good deal of the day. This is a hidden poverty that does not go away. It is there, but no-one sees it and these people are the least likely to be heard. We need to be so much more aware of their needs and act to ensure that they can still be useful and productive members of society without the punitive measures we tend to put on them as they struggle to leave the poverty trap of one of the new disability benefits, which is just the same as Newstart.

This is what makes employment read so badly: the hidden people who are not registered but are on fixed incomes, those who cannot claim these valued tax cuts. If you have not got an income, you do not pay any tax. The silent poor, the aged on pensions, those with disabilities, those who are underemployed, those who are 25 and are attempting to survive on Austudy and the parents at home with children under six are the people who are most in need of services and are not considered in the budget.

My state is going through the throes of trying to deal with an ever-demanding health system. Tasmania spends a considerable amount of its state budget on health. This has great implications for those in aged-care facilities as many of them share facilities with small hospitals. We just do not have enough aged-care beds and we do not have enough respite beds. We just do not have enough services in our region and in isolated communities, so people are chased out of their communities to hunt for a place in some other part of the state. It is just not good enough and we need to do something about it. The state is doing what it can, but it is time that the Commonwealth did something with all the surplus moneys it has flowing about—little is directed to those in dire need. Shame on the other side of politics! Government is there to step in where the market cannot go. We are falling down in these responsibilities.

I cannot finish without commenting on the ridiculous amount of money that has now been spent on selling the government’s industrial relations policy. This government has the hide to complain that unions have been funding the case in opposition. Those of us in unions, those of us that have been in unions since we were 15 or 16 and those constituents who are in unions, are paying for their ads, voluntarily dipping into our pockets to fight an injustice, and we have done so over the last century. The government is stealing their funds from our taxes without so much as a request or a thank-you for listening to what workers are saying about this totally unfair legislation. Even with the latest legislation trying to put fairness back into the unfair legislation, they are talking about improving the safety net. It is a bit hard to improve a safety net if there isn’t one in the first place. It is simple maths: nought times nought equals nought. You might think that might have been achieved by now, and people might understand it.

These amendments will not stop those unfair laws from continuing to hurt working families, and the people in our electorates know this and will not support this government for that reason. I believe this government will be punished very severely because of these unfair laws. These changes to Work Choices will not fix the lack of balance in Australian workplaces. Importantly, these changes to Work Choices will not protect basic conditions. Australian families rely on things like notices of change to rosters and redundancy pay. These changes to Work Choices mean huge government bureaucracies will decide in secret what can be in an Australian workplace agreement and what cannot.

We cannot put up with this, nor should the people in Australia. There are many areas that I have not even touched on here today. There are areas which I believe needed to be touched on by this budget but were not. Education and the setting-up of an endowment or building fund for universities is not putting in what the education system needs. Many things should be happening in education but are not. Transport infrastructure is still falling down in so many areas. Child care is in urgent need. Many areas in my electorate are crying out for more child care. The government says that it wants people to come back into the workplace and to become productive in the workplace, but it is just not producing the opportunities in child care that are needed. There does not seem to be anywhere to go if the private sector will not pick up and start up a childcare centre. There are many regional centres and regional areas where the private sector just will not start that up, and the government should be assisting them to do that.

Labor has promised 230 new childcare centres within school grounds so that people will have only one stop in dropping off the kids and picking them up. Child care could become much simpler for many families. The trouble is that in this budget there is also the great pork barrel and the opportunity to try to use a lot more money. I think we saw some of that today, with the Deputy Prime Minister’s announcement about what went on in Queensland. I think it is a shameful budget and it did not touch the people it really should have touched. Therefore, I will be opposing it and supporting the opposition’s amendment moved by Mr Tanner.

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