David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

This week Australia marked a significant anniversary. This of course was the week where the Abbott government turned two. It has, indeed, been a very harrowing two years for the Australian people. Alas, '2' seems to be the appropriate number for this government to have achieved because they behave like two-year-olds. Australia still waits for the adults we were promised.

In 2014, the Abbott government gave us the budget it wanted to give to this country—a budget of cuts and a budget that imagined a little Australia. We all know how that story turned out. So, in 2015, it then tried to give us the budget it thought Australia wanted. But, again, there is a theme running between these two budgets. The first is that this is a government that actually has no sense of its own purpose. It has come to government without a sense of what its task is. In 2014, the government told the people of Australia that it was here to deal with a budget emergency. By 2015 the budget emergency had vanished and instead we had a government that was in the business of doubling the deficit.

In 2015, however, we saw another theme emerge, notwithstanding the confusion of the other side, and that is that there were a number of malevolent cuts in the 2014 budget that endured and survived into 2015. Again and again, we have seen very important causes and very important undertakings, front-line services to the Australian people, cut by this government. Alas, when considering ice and the scourge of ice, this is not an exception.

In last year's budget, we saw some $197 million cut from the Health flexible funds. That immediately meant $7 million being axed from the Substance Misuse Prevention and Service Improvement Grants Fund—a very real and tangible slashing of service. What we have also seen in this year's budget is an additional $596 million taken from those flexible funds. So, again and again, we have seen critical services in health prevention cut and slashed by this government.

There is one area where the government seem keen to demonstrate their bona fides and that is in the pretence of action—the appearance of action in the absence of real action. That means television commercials and that means a government stepping up to the by-election in Canning and desperately searching for something to talk about, because we know the government cannot talk to the people of Canning about the economy. The Treasurer lost the power and the capacity to do that a very long time ago. Their message of low growth and no jobs is clearly not resonating in the community. So the economy was off the list. That left them, in their view, with a law and order campaign around ice. So we have a television campaign and we have a government fumbling through the Canning by-election advertising the pretence of action

In its by-election blues, in its pretence of action, it has talked about forming a National Ice Taskforce, because those opposite understand something very well indeed, and that is that committees are the practical alternative to work. So we have a task force, and we have a television campaign. What we do not have is a government stepping up to the challenge of building evidence-based policies that take this challenge on in a real and meaningful way.

We heard from the previous speaker, the member for Aston, about the real bona fides of the government in this debate, because when the rubber hits the road he said, 'Of course, this is an area that is principally a state responsibility, and states have the primary responsibility'—not the primary responsibility for television commercials and not the primary responsibility for announcing task forces but the primary responsibility for building evidence-based policies and funding them.

So this is a government fighting a mirage. It is in the Canning by-election searching for a reason to exist. It cannot talk about the economy and it cannot talk about meaningful action in terms of the ice epidemic, but it can talk about the appearance of action. Again and again, the theme that unites the chaos of 2014 and the anarchy of the government's present position is cuts, but there is also another theme, and that is an adherence to clinging to Labor ideas. Among the tiny number of achievements this government does seek to point to, it points to the collaboration between state and federal police forces and the MOUs and resources that have made those police forces' work more effective—a fine Labor initiative. Of course it enjoys bipartisan support. It was our idea.

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