Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2009-2010 and the associated bills. The electors of Sturt have suffered from this budget in myriad ways. Before I turn to the 72 per cent of my electorate with private health insurance—who have been particularly and poisonously hit by the government’s changes—I would like to talk more generally about the electors of Sturt who will now wear the burden of $300 billion, at least, of Rudd government debt into the future.

The young people of Sturt—my children, and not just my children but other people’s grandchildren and young people generally—who, in the first blush of the election of the Rudd government, believed that they would be treated with some respect, with some occasion, by a new government, have found themselves to be the biggest losers from the election of the Rudd government. Young people in Australia will be paying off the government’s debt of more than $300 billion decades into the future. It will materially affect their lives and their living standards.

Most generations in Australia’s history have tried to leave behind them an equal or better standard of living for future generations. This government, in a short 18 months, has managed to bequeath a legacy to young people of tremendous debt that they will almost certainly struggle to ever be able to pay off. It will not be paid off in my lifetime or your lifetime, Mr Deputy Speaker, I warrant. It may be paid off in the lifetimes of my children, all four of whom are under nine years old. But unfortunately it will materially affect their capacity to grow the economy; to get jobs; to provide for their own children, if they choose to have them; to save money to buy a house; or to put their children into non-government schooling, if that is what they wish to do. This is all because, in 18 months, this government has gone on a spending spree of mammoth proportions. The government seeks to try and blame the global financial crisis but let us not forget that $124 billion, net, of the $188 billion of net debt is actually new government spending in the last 18 months.

The budget papers indicate that unemployment will rise. Electors of Sturt will bear a part of that burden in the next few years. There will be people who will be jobless in Sturt in the future who would not have needed to be jobless but for the handling of the economy and the handling of the budget by the Rudd Labor government. It is a tragedy for them when you think that the Rudd Labor government was left an enormous budget surplus, low unemployment and a growing economy. This government came into power on that basis and, in a short 18 months time, have trashed the Australian economy, ripped up the fiscal responsibility of the Howard government and delivered higher unemployment and increasing joblessness. The voters in the electorate of Sturt will be the recipients of this mismanagement.

Young people leaving school today are now palpably nervous, palpably concerned, about what the future holds for them—whether they should study, whether they should go out and get work or whether they should start their own businesses. This was not the case under the 11½ years of the previous government when there was a growing economy, when young people looked with confidence to the future and recognised that they were living in a country with tremendous capacity to deliver them the standard of living that they had expected and hoped for in Australia. Eighteen months later, it is a very sorry tale indeed.

That is just the debt that the government has left young people. The deficit of $57.6 billion in the budget is an enormous turnaround, in the 18 months that this government has been in power, from the $23 billion of surplus that was left to Mr Rudd and Mr Swan.

My electorate has a very high proportion of people who are in higher education or who have parents that were in higher education. Sturt has the highest number of students in higher education and the highest number of people with a tertiary qualification of any seat in South Australia. People in my electorate had, I expect, anticipated that the Bradley review, which proposed $7 billion of new spending to grow and improve our higher education sector, might have been paid more than lip-service by the government. Unfortunately, there is no money left in the cupboard. The cupboard is bare.

The government has announced $1½ billion of new spending under the Bradley review. They would rather put money into pink batts. Your government, Mr Deputy Speaker, put $3.7 billion into pink batts. An idea that was put up over and over again by enthusiastic bureaucrats in the previous government, only to be knocked back, is a higher priority for this government than the higher education sector. Cash splashes of $900 each, many of them to dead people or to people who do not live in Australia, was a higher priority than the higher education sector. I am not surprised that the member for Fremantle studiously studies her papers rather than listen to this speech, because she would be embarrassed, as an educated woman herself, by this fact. The same cannot be said for the member for Braddon, but the member for Fremantle would be embarrassed that the government has made higher education a lower priority than pink batts and cash splashes.

Turning to private health insurance, 72 per cent of voters in my electorate are covered by private health insurance. In this budget, the government is returning to Fabian form by undermining private health insurance. When they were last in government, under Messrs Keating and Hawke, they did everything they could to poison the well of private health insurance. I think—I am sure I could be corrected—that only 30 per cent of Australians were left in private health insurance by 1996. Private health insurance was almost finished. In fact, Graham Richardson—a former member of this place—said that, if private health insurance fell again to the level it was at in 1995-96, it would not have a viable future.

The Howard government repaired and rebuilt the opportunity that Australians should have to choose to be in private health insurance and removed the burden of those people, who would otherwise have been in the public health system. There is a symbiotic relationship between private health insurees and the public health system. The Howard government helped rebuild that system and, as a consequence, removed pressure from the public health system. But we knew all along that Labor did not ever want to support the private health insurance system. We knew all along that in their Fabian dreams they do not like private health They do not like private property, they do not like private education and they do not like private health. They have done what they can in this budget to begin the process of undermining private health.

This is one of the most brazen broken promises from the government in the last 18 months. You would remember that Mr Rudd promised before the election that private health would not be touched—’Not one jot, not one tittle.’ Those were his words. He indicated that private health would not be altered one iota by this government. And yet, of course, within 18 months they have returned to their old ways—they have returned to the attack on private health, which they have always disliked and which they want to be in the public sector. Who is going to pay for it when people see their premiums rising, when they are incapable of being able to afford private health any longer and when they start joining the queues of waiting lists in the public health system? Attacking private health in the so-called higher echelons of income earners will flow through the entire private health system.

The most amazing thing about this reform, this change, is that it does not just attack those that Labor has never supported and never wanted. It actually attacks a lot of older people such as those in the electorates of the member for Forrest and me—not just self-funded retirees but many, many pensioners. I have had heart-rending letters, emails and phone calls to my office from low-income Australians, people on pensions, including the age pension, who go without in so many aspects of their lives. Goodness knows how they survive on the pension, but they go without.

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