Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australia is a country built on opportunity, and as elected members of parliament we have a responsibility to uphold that tradition and make sure that it means opportunity for all Australians. With opportunity comes a sense of hope and optimism about the future that all Australians deserve to feel. People living in my electorate of Calwell are hardworking. At a time when the world and in particular this country are experiencing strong economic growth, they expect to be able to afford the basic cost of living. Parents expect quality child care and education for their children. Senior citizens expect security in retirement. Working Australians expect their basic rights and conditions at work to be protected. Young Australians deserve to be given the opportunity to build a bright future for themselves and for this country. When we make policy in this place, therefore, these expectations should be at the forefront of our minds.

Many Australians also want to see honesty and integrity return to political life. Most Australians want a government that is in touch with modern Australia, not a government that is always looking backwards and playing on the politics of fear—one that looks tired, increasingly out of touch and fresh out of new ideas. Opportunity, honesty in political life and policies that give Australians reason to be optimistic about the future—these are the foundations on which the 2007 budget should have been built.

The budget provided the Howard government with an ideal opportunity to outline a vision for Australia’s future and to match that vision with concrete policies designed to lock in Australia’s long-term economic prosperity. It also provided the government with an opportunity to make significant long-term investments in services like aged care, child care, education and health care, which play a crucial role in supporting the quality of life Australians deserve. But on both counts the 2007 budget failed the Australian people. It failed to outline a vision for Australia’s future and in a fast and changing world it failed to develop the long-term policies we need to prepare Australia for the challenges that lie ahead, especially when it comes to lifting Australia’s flagging productivity growth, taking advantage of future technologies and addressing the economic challenges of climate change.

The 2007 budget failed to provide any real or sustainable long-term relief for countless Australians who are struggling to keep their heads above water as the basic cost of living continues to soar. The greatest contradiction today is that at a time when we are supposedly more prosperous as a nation, more and more Australians are finding it harder to make ends meet. Everything has become far more expensive. Petrol prices have risen by over 40 per cent in the last six years, biting into household budgets in a way that is unsustainable for working Australians. The price of basic groceries has shot up. Child care, health care and dental care are all less affordable now than they ever were. Aged-care beds are in short supply. Personal debt levels are at record highs. Job security is disappearing as the Australian workforce undergoes casualisation and as Work Choices takes effect. First home buyers are spending on an average more than 30 per cent of their disposable income on mortgage repayments. House repossessions have trebled in Victoria over the last six years. And the list goes on.

In short, the cost of living today has far outstripped the growth in household disposable income, and this has happened under the Howard government’s watch. A growing number of Australian households have barely enough at the end of the month to pay the bills, to finance the mortgage or to cover the expenses associated with raising a family. There are many more Australians, especially retirees, those on a minimum wage and those who are struggling to find full-time work, who simply cannot afford the high cost of living and simply cannot keep their heads above water, no matter how hard they try. They feel forgotten and they feel left behind.

But instead of investing in basic services and in public infrastructure to help offset today’s rising cost of living, the Howard government produced an election year budget full of election sweeteners and one-off payments that, whilst welcome, are all about trying to protect the Prime Minister’s own political future in the short term rather than protecting Australia’s national interests in the long term. The Prime Minister wants us to trust him, but this budget shows that John Howard is still very much up to the same old tricks. In the time that is allocated to me today, I want to look in particular at the areas of child care, dental health, aged care and education and assess what impact the budget will have in these areas for residents living in my electorate of Calwell.

In terms of child care, the 2007 budget provides additional funding to the childcare benefit subsidy, the childcare inclusion support subsidy, JET childcare fee assistance, Indigenous childcare services and child care in regional and remote Australia. The big ticket item in the 2007 budget is a 13 per cent increase in the maximum hourly rate paid under the childcare benefit subsidy. For a family with one child in long day care for 40 hours a week that is on the maximum rate of childcare benefit assistance, this means an extra 41c an hour. Compare this extra 41c an hour in childcare assistance with what has happened to the cost of child care since John Howard became Prime Minister. In the last 10 years the cost of child care has shot up by around 126 per cent in my city of Melbourne. Each year the cost of child care increases nationally by an average of over 12 per cent. A one-off 13 per cent rise to the childcare benefit subsidy barely covers one of these yearly increases. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, childcare costs under the Howard government have increased by a massive 82.5 per cent since December 2001 alone. To put this in perspective, this is double the increase we have experienced in petrol prices, which rose by 41.4 per cent over the same period, and nearly six times above the consumer price index average of 14.8 per cent since 2001. Today parents in my electorate of Calwell pay an average of over $240 a week on child care, with many parents having to pay a lot more. Of course, the net result of all this is that childcare affordability has plummeted by over 50 per cent since 2001, with many families being priced out of the childcare market altogether.

To make matters worse for working parents, there are nowhere near enough childcare places available. Four out of the nine Melbourne suburbs hardest hit by severe childcare shortages are located in my electorate of Calwell, with childcare waiting lists at some centres in these suburbs over two years long. Yet the Howard government continues to deny that there is a childcare crisis in Australia and refuses to solve a problem that it has created and which is now systemic. What working parents living in Calwell want is quality childcare services for their children. They want childcare centres to be close to where they live so that they do not have to drive long distances before work in early morning traffic, and they want child care to be affordable.

Labor has a plan to help working families with the cost of child care and to boost childcare place numbers. At a cost of $200 million, Labor will build 260 new childcare centres in areas of need like my electorate of Calwell. Where possible, these centres will be built on primary school sites, to make life easier for parents when dropping off their kids at school in the morning and when picking them up after school. By working with local government, Labor will also develop a single waiting list for childcare places in local childcare centres, to save parents the hassle of having to register their child’s name at multiple childcare centres. And, under Labor’s Early Childhood Education Plan, all four-year-olds in Australia will receive 15 hours of preschool early learning each week for a minimum of 40 weeks per year, supervised by a qualified teacher, at no extra cost to parents. Costing $450 million, this will include funding an extra 1,500 new university places in early childhood education, scrapping TAFE fees for childcare trainees and halving HECS repayments for early childhood graduates working in areas of need such as my electorate of Calwell.

In the area of dental health, one of the very first things that John Howard did when he became Prime Minister back in 1996 was to scrap the $100 million Commonwealth dental health program, ripping $100 million a year from public dental services in Australia. Since then, the Howard government has presided over the virtual collapse of Australia’s public dental health system to the point where it is now in a state of terminal crisis. Despite the fact that state governments’ spending on dental care has increased since 1996, all that the Howard government has done over the last 11 years is to play the blame game, pointing the finger of responsibility at state governments rather than accepting responsibility and fixing the problem.

There are now over 650,000 Australians on public dental waiting lists across the country. In my electorate of Calwell, waiting lists for public dental care have blown out to over 30 months. Nationwide, up to one in 10 visits to a GP are now related to dental problems, and more than one in five Australians are going without recommended dental treatment because it is just too expensive. Dental conditions account for a quarter of all hospitalisations for children, and around 50,000 Australians are now hospitalised each year for preventable dental conditions. The simple fact is that very few people can afford to pay for regular dental checkups or expensive dental work, and they have absolutely no hope of accessing subsidised public dental care services in a timely fashion.

Again, the budget for 2007 does nothing to change this situation. The budget does provide an additional $378 million to expand Medicare benefits for dental services. But only patients with a chronic disease that is made worse by their dental condition are eligible for these benefits. The Howard government first introduced dental care benefits for patients with a chronic disease back in 2004. What makes this decision to commit an extra $378 million to this program all the more peculiar is that just over 5,500 people have benefited from it over the last three years, at a cost of only $1.6 million. The Howard government is effectively pouring an extra $378 million into a $1.6 million dental program that will only help a very limited number of people. In contrast, Labor will re-establish a Commonwealth dental program to channel Commonwealth funds back into providing Australians with affordable and accessible public dental care services.

In the area of aged care, severe shortages in qualified nursing and aged care staff, coupled with ongoing aged-care bed shortages, are two of the biggest problems facing aged care today. It follows that these are the two areas that the government should be prioritising. But nowhere in the budget is there any attempt to introduce recruitment and retention measures to address current staff shortages in aged-care facilities across Australia. And there is no attempt to re-examine the Howard government’s failing bed allocation system that has seen the government turn a surplus of 800 aged-care beds in 1996 into a 2,735 shortfall in aged-care beds in December 2006.

In a budget with a $10.6 billion surplus, Australian pensioners get a one-off payment of $500, which roughly equals the same amount they receive each fortnight. Whilst welcome, the reality is that an extra $500 is a two-week reprieve that will not help pay the rent and bills in the months and years ahead.

It is the same story for Australia’s 2.6 million carers. Carers worry most about what will happen to their loved ones when they are no longer able to care for them. They worry about finding suitable accommodation for those in their care, and about how they are going to meet the long-term expenses associated with caring for an individual with special needs. The budget provides a one-off payment of $1,000 for recipients of the carer payment and a one-off payment of $600 for recipients of the carer allowance for each eligible person in their care. But this hardly compensates for the $107 million over three years that the Howard government recently took away from carers by reducing the backdating of the carers allowance to only 12 weeks. In both areas, Labor will develop long-term policies designed to sustain and support the invaluable work that Australian carers do and to protect and strengthen aged care in Australia.

On the issue of education, a substantial part of the budget centres on a last-minute bid by the Howard government to reclaim some of the ground it has lost to the Labor opposition in the area of education. The budget includes a proposal to establish a Higher Education Endowment Fund, a $5 billion investment that will provide $300 million per year income stream to be distributed across 38 eligible universities. Each eligible university will receive up to $10 million a year. To put this in perspective, the department of education’s assessment of the cost of deferred capital works for the university sector is $1.5 billion. Australia’s education system has therefore been one of the biggest losers under the Howard government.

Whilst education spending has increased on average by 48 per cent amongst developed OECD countries over the last decade, in Australia it has actually fallen by seven per cent since John Howard became Prime Minister. Similarly, whereas higher education spending per student has gone up on average by six per cent among OECD countries, in Australia it has fallen by six per cent. And under John Howard’s watch, Australia has tumbled to last place among OECD countries when it comes to investing in early childhood education. Even after factoring in the education announcements made in the 2007 budget, recurrent funding to universities will still only make up 0.6 per cent of our GDP. In 1996, Commonwealth recurrent funding for Australian universities stood at 0.9 per cent of GDP. With university HECS fees continually rising, students living in my electorate of Calwell now owe a staggering $59 million in HECS debt. And, in this year alone, 20,000 Victorian students missed out on a university place during the first round offers.

These statistics speak for themselves. They highlight a decade of chronic underfunding and neglect by the Howard government. In announcing Labor’s education revolution, it is opposition leader Kevin Rudd who put education back on the national agenda and at the front and centre of public debate, not John Howard. I cannot stress that point any more—it was not John Howard; it was Kevin Rudd.

In the area of preschool education, Labor has announced its $450 million early childhood education plan, which I have already touched upon. In the transition from preschool to primary school Labor has announced a health and early skills assessment test which will help identify any early learning difficulties children may have. Labor will also set up a national curriculum board to develop a rigorous, consistent and quality curriculum for all Australian students from kindergarten to year 12. Labor will also invest $62.5 million in a pilot program to fund the construction of shared facilities between government and non-government schools. Labor will also invest a further $111 million to encourage more Australian students to study maths and science at university by halving university HECS fees for maths and science students and by further halving HECS repayments for graduates who teach or work in maths or science areas.

To help Australia’s skills crisis, Labor’s $2.5 billion trades training centres in schools plan will see new trades centres built in every secondary school in Australia, helping Australian students to find the skills that best suit them and providing them with real career paths in trade and apprenticeships. When it comes to Australia’s education system you need to think in the long term and not put forward piecemeal policies wrapped in a mother-of-pearl coating. You need reforms across all levels of education—from preschool learning through to education.

In the area of productivity, expanding our productive capacities as a nation and lifting Australia’s national productivity growth is the best way to secure Australia’s long-term economic prosperity after the resources boom is over. In the mid-1990s Australia’s productivity growth averaged 3.2 per cent. At the turn of the decade it had fallen to 2.2 per cent. Just last month the Howard government downgraded its 10-year forecast for productivity growth to just 1.5 per cent. Labor believes that one of the best ways to lift Australia’s flagging productivity is to invest in people—in our children’s education and in skilling up tomorrow’s workforce. Labor’s education revolution provides a blueprint for this investment.

We also need to invest in new technologies like broadband to bring Australia into the 21st century. Labor’s new national broadband network will connect 98 per cent of Australians to high-speed broadband internet services at a speed more than 40 times faster than most current speeds. This will mean that business, education and household services on the internet will all happen in real time.

Finally, Labor understands that we need to act now to tackle the threat of climate change in a way that is economically responsible. In this area Labor has announced that, when in government, it will ratify the Kyoto protocol, cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent on 2000 levels by 2050, set up a national emissions trading scheme, establish a $500 million national clean coal fund and establish a $500 million green car innovation fund designed to generate $2 billion to secure jobs in the automotive industry and tackle climate change by manufacturing low-emission vehicles in Australia.

Labor will also provide $50 million to establish an Australian solar institute and a further $50 million to assist companies seeking to develop geothermal energy. Labor will also substantially increase the mandatory renewable energy target. Labor will set a target of making half of all Commonwealth cars in its fleet environmentally friendly by 2020 and establish an office of climate change within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Labor has a vision for Australia’s future and it will continue to put forward strong policies designed to lock in Australia’s long-term economic prosperity. On behalf of my constituents in the seat of Calwell I would like to convey to this chamber their disappointment that the 2007 budget failed to address the issues and areas of greatest concern that are most pertinent to their lives and those of their families.

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