Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

The 2013 election might seem to be in the distant past to many people, but I am sure that few Australians have forgotten that on the eve of that election this government, the Turnbull government, promised 'no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to the pension, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS'. Australians were also promised a better government.

What Australians got after the election was the most shambolic government that I can recall. Key election promises were broken, and, whilst voters will say that they always expect promises to be broken, they nevertheless hold out hope that the government that they vote for will, on this occasion, be different. They hope that it will honour key election pledges, particularly when those pledges were made by a party that, when in opposition, made election promises central to its campaign.

But this government has not done so. This government has not only betrayed the Australian people's trust, but, in its first budget, cold-heartedly cut support to Australia's lowest-income households. The government also cut $80 billion of forward spending from health and education. Since then, it has cut about another $10 billion in health spending. It decimated national science and research institutions, cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from them. Climate change responsibilities were off the agenda. Only recently, Australia agreed in Paris to strengthen climate science, yet, after the Paris talks, the government came back, reneged on that and cut further into CSIRO's climate science division, with hundreds of Australia's most experienced climate scientists likely to lose their jobs. The effects of that will be that we cannot have the information that we need in order to put together a constructive climate change policy into the future.

We then saw the ABC gutted. Industry assistance was slashed across the nation, which ended with Australia's auto industry closing shop. The naval shipbuilding industry is not far behind. Not only have several of the shipyards already closed but places like the ASC in Adelaide are projected to lose another 1,300 employees within a couple of years. The government now talks about the fact that it is having discussions with the Punch Group about re-energising auto construction in South Australia. Yet when it really mattered, when we had an industry there, they turned their back and walked away from the industry, the hundreds of small businesses that relied on it and the thousands of people whose employment was dependent on car making in this country.

We then saw the coalition effectively bring back its failed Work Choices legislation by stealth. It did that by opening the doors to Australian jobs for low-paid foreign labour and by simultaneously allowing imported products, which are often substandard, to come into the country, all of which directly affect jobs for Australians. We saw a classic case of that with the MV Portland and CSL Melbourne ships in recent weeks. The CSL Melbourne, previously a ship that was crewed by Australian seafarers, was replaced by a Liberian flagged ship operated by Greek company with a Filipino crew. It has been given a licence to operate in Australian waters to do Australian work. Which other country would have allowed that other than this one? And for no better reason than to try and push down the conditions and pay of Australian workers.

This is a government that has pursued its ideological policies—tearing down the Public Service, cruelly cutting welfare programs, pushing up university degrees to perhaps $100,000, and bringing down wages and working conditions. We now have the government also trying to attack the penalty rates system in this country—again, a system that supports the lowest income workers the most. Whilst the government says that is not its policy, the reality is, when you listen to the rhetoric and look at what it is doing, that is very much a part of the government's agenda. Simultaneously, we have a government that has presided over the rorting of tens of millions of dollars by bogus registered training organisations that have been ripping off not only the government funding but also the trainees that enrolled in many of their courses.

Whichever way the Australian people turn, they are being hurt by the coalition government's warped ideology or its incompetence. This is an arrogant government that keeps treating Australian people with contempt, a government that has miscalculated the backlash of the Australian people. Not surprisingly, within a year of being elected as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott was under siege from his own party and, within another year of that, he was replaced only to see the chaos worsening and the cruel cuts continuing—more cuts to health, more cuts to industry and science, more cuts to welfare—and more chaos in the coalition with ministers being sacked, replaced or resigning from parliament. Indeed a quick count that I made would suggest that there have been 56 ministers or assistant ministers in the time of this government. Ministerial turnover has been unprecedented.

Above all, and perhaps worst of all, the government has failed and continues to fail on two critical matters. It has failed miserably to articulate a national economic vision for Australia or to get the nation's finances in order. Budget deficits are out of control, now up to $37.4 billion according to the latest forecast. Gross debt is headed towards $550 billion by the end of the forward estimates. Trade deficits keep growing and, for 2015, the trade deficit was $32.7 billion. This is despite all the government's rhetoric about free trade agreements.

What we have seen and what we have now is a reactionary, knee-jerk policy announcing government that is prepared to do grubby deals with the crossbench senators in order to get its legislation through parliament. We see the continuing infighting and leaks coming from the government. In desperation to hold onto government, the government now resorts to the old tricks of pork-barrelling, scaremongering and electoral manipulation. Voters simply have to read the adjournment speech of the member for Bass from only two days ago to understand pork-barrelling. They can also look at the Regional Development Australia funding distribution—$231 million going to coalition seats compared with $62 million for non-government seats. Even if you allow for the difference in the number of seats that both sides of politics hold, the difference is stark; it is clearly a case of pork-barrelling.

Then we see the electoral manipulation. Only this week we saw the Senate voting on legislation rushed into this place to change the Senate election system. It has been done for no other reason than to ensure that the government gets the most votes it can out of the Senate voting system. And it has done that after putting together a deceitful deal with the Greens and with Senator Xenophon. It is a deal that will shut minor parties out of the next election. We then saw a pretentious half-day hearing, which supposedly ticks the boxes of public consultation, when we all know that the deal between the Greens, Senator Xenophon and the government has already been signed and sealed.

The Prime Minister worked out that Australians are angry about multinational tax avoidance. Probably his focus groups told him that and so what we have now is the government jumping on the bandwagon of doing something about multinational tax avoidance. It is all rhetoric and lots of threats but there is very little substance to those threats or to that rhetoric. Labor in fact only recently put forward a policy to do with fixing up the budget. I am referring to the negative gearing policy that Labor put forward, a sensible policy on negative gearing where no existing investor will be affected, where future negative gearing will be allowed to continue for new construction, that in turn will create thousands of jobs as a result of the new homes that will be built. It is a policy that has widespread support across reputable economists and business commentators.

This government, the Turnbull government, is trying to dismiss Labor's policy and criticise it. In fact, the Prime Minister, in absolute desperation, jumped onto the fear campaign of warning that the sky is going to fall in, housing values across Australia are going to fall and people's assets will be lost. Of course the Prime Minister has no independent analysis to support his fear campaign, only his self-proclaimed superior intelligence. This is the kind of fear campaign put forward by a Prime Minister who is rattled, and the coalition government has a track record of doing that. When governments are faced with an election, they usually play the fear card and this is a campaign of fear that everyone's assets—that is, their personal homes—are going to lose value somehow as a result of Labor's well thought through negative gearing policy.

This is a Prime Minister who is incapable of making a decision of his own and who does not have the united support of his MPs; a Prime Minister who not only has turned his back on every value he purported to stand for in the past, but is finally showing his true self—showing that all that matters to him was becoming Prime Minister and that he would do or say whatever it took for him to become the Australian Prime Minister.

Anyone who had pinned their hopes on Malcolm Turnbull would by now be bitterly disappointed. But they should not be surprised. This is the person who, prior to being Prime Minister, as communications minister was the architect of the coalition's worst failure—the NBN rollout. The current Prime Minister was personally responsible for a revised NBN rollout that has left Australia with an outdated, second-rate system dependent on copper wire, with a rollout timetable that has blown out to 2020 and a cost blow-out of $26.5 billion—$26.5 billion is the cost blow-out, not the cost. The cost has gone out from $29 billion to almost $56 billion—nearly doubled. I cannot think of any other government program that cost $26.5 billion, let alone that has blown out by $26.5 billion.

For the government to have the audacity to criticise the Australian Submarine Corporation over the cost overrun of the Air Warfare Destroyer project, which was only a fraction of the cost overrun of the project led by this Prime Minister, is an absolute joke. It could be even worse, but the government is refusing to be transparent about the rollout, and we do not have all of the details. When the Prime Minister said this week that he had turned the NBN around, he was absolutely right—he turned it backwards.

Contrast that with Labor's position. We have focused on presenting and preparing policies in the lead-up to the next election—policies which are sensible and reasonable and which will go a long way to getting the budget back into order. Labor has announced superannuation savings of about $14 billion over the next 10 years by targeting very high income earners with respect to the current concessions they get on their superannuation savings. That is not mainstream Australians—it is the very high income earners. Labor has absolutely committed to building, maintaining and sustaining Australia's next submarine fleet of 12 submarines. We have committed to a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 and we are consulting on an emissions reduction target of 45 per cent on 2005 figures by 2030. We have also made absolute commitments to TAFE to ensure that TAFE remains the central provider of vocational education and training in this country.

Importantly, we have reinstated much of the funding that the government cut from the Gonski funding package, and there will be an additional $37.3 billion put back into education by Labor if we are elected. We have targeted the multinationals with a plan that will add $7.2 billion to the budget bottom line.

The contrast between the government and the opposition is clear. The government is in chaos. It does not have a plan, it does not have a vision and it is jumping from one issue to another trying to put out bushfires. By contrast, Labor has put together a very carefully structured set of policies—and there will be more to come—which show that we are not only capable of getting the budget back into order, we are also capable of getting the economy of this country back into order, securing people's jobs and ensuring that they have jobs with fair wages and conditions. Just as importantly, we are not about to decimate the welfare system of this country.

Debate adjourned.

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