Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Budgets are like sermons. At their best, they can inspire and they can offer hope. Even the difficult ones can attract and sometimes hold the attention of the electorate. They can give us all pause for thought. Budgets and budget night are about more than the national accounts. They're about more than economic management. They are a political exercise, because they are about national priorities. And that's not an entirely bad thing. Budget week offers the government and the opposition the chance to reset the national agenda. The budget process should challenge both the government and the parliament to think afresh. The budget speech and the budget reply from the opposition leader are a chance to reconnect with the people and reassure those who have been doing it tough that they have not been forgotten. A good budget will offer hope as well as help.

As I sat listening to the Treasurer's speech last Tuesday night, my thoughts turned to what it might mean for the people I represent—what they may make of it all. In particular, I wondered how many young Australians might be asking themselves, 'Why does this government hate anyone under the age of 50?' Younger Australians face a far tougher jobs market than people of my generation did. They'll find it harder to own a home or start a family. In increasing numbers, they'll be weighed down for years, paying off a HECS debt, despite the declining market value of many degrees. They are the generation that will have to bear the cost for the slow and faltering progress in addressing climate change over the last 40 years. In a country as rich as ours, it's a disgrace that, on average, over the last four years, over 270,000 of those aged 15 to 24 can't find work, no matter how hard they try. One in 200 Australians, many of them young, don't have a roof over their heads. And so many young Australians feel discarded or hopelessly left out of the system. This isn't, by the way, just a working-class problem. The sons and daughters of middle-class Australians are having a hard time and are up against it too. Times are tough all around.

According to the most recent HILDA survey, real average household disposable income has actually fallen slightly since 2012. The sharpest decline in homeownership, according to the Melbourne Institute, since 2002 has been among couples with dependent children. In 2002, 55.5 per cent of individuals in this family type were homeowners, but by 2014 it had slid to 38.6 per cent. Homeownership amongst 18- to 39-year-olds has fallen from 36 per cent in 2002 to only 25 per cent in 2014, and it's still falling. Waiting lists for public and community housing are rising, further exacerbating the systemic housing issues and outright discrimination faced by young people. Even those with means and parental support continue to find it very difficult to rent a home near their work in most of our capital cities. I look back at what my own generation has done, and I wonder whether we might have served those who have followed us just a little bit better. Young people have every reason to believe that this government has closed it's mind to all of this. This government is just incapable of joining up the dots on multimillion-dollar cuts to TAFE, further turning the screw on HECS debts and repayments, and ignoring the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people who are reliant on Newstart and job seeker allowances that are below subsistence level.

After a series of coalition budgets that have offered little, that have cut or pared back support for basic services like health and education and that have allowed the value of support to the unemployed and other victims of the economics of tough love to wither and that have conspicuously failed to address a deadening sense of economic insecurity that grips many, I wondered whether this Turnbull budget might offer at least some sign of being better attuned to the needs of young Australians and their families. Will the damage inflicted on those who've had to wear most of the pain of the last four coalition governments be eased? I'm afraid not. Was there nothing to be done for young people in this budget, other than the vicarious pleasure of handing an $80 billion tax cut to the banks and multinationals and income tax cuts spread over the next decade that will favour most of those who are on incomes over $200,000? There was nothing—not even in what's called an election-year budget.

This government, which claims to be the low-tax party, has never delivered an Australian worker earning less than $80,000 a year a tax cut or tax relief. The best that this government could offer was $10 a week, which won't actually be paid out until July 2019 at the earliest—well after the next election. What we witnessed during the last sitting week was the Treasurer handing down a typical Liberal budget. This is a budget that, above all else, fails the fairness test. This is a budget that supports the big businesses and the banks and lets down the residents of my seat of Macarthur. The Macarthur electorate has been let down time and time again by this coalition government, and local residents are understandably fed up. The people of Macarthur—the young families, the small business owners, the students, the grandparents, the migrants, the shift workers, the job seekers, the unemployed and the people with disabilities, who I have the distinct honour of representing, will see very little from this budget. The reason for that is very simple. It's because the hardworking people of south-west Sydney are not necessarily from the big end of town. Having been elected to this chamber to represent these constituents, I'm not here to represent the interests of CEOs or the big banks. I should have a couple of nice things to say about them, if I could find it in my heart to do so, but I can't. If this budget were delivering projects to the tune of $80 billion in my electorate of Macarthur, I'd be jumping up and down and singing the government's praises—but there's nothing.

This budget does very little for my community. The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and their government fail to understand the needs of the people of Macarthur. I have a few key issues in mind where it is particularly disappointing to see that the government continues to drag its feet. Firstly, I want to speak about Appin Road. As many members of this chamber would be aware, as I have spoken on this subject a number of times, Appin Road is a secondary highway which serves as a thoroughfare connecting south-west Sydney through Campbelltown to Wollongong and the Illawarra. There is one word that comes to mind when speaking about this road, and that is 'notorious'. It's notorious because so many people have died on this road. It's notorious because traffic levels are increasing rapidly, including large trucks and semitrailers. In my electorate it has a truly frightening reputation, and I was most pleased that, following Labor's commitment of $50 million to begin the upgrade of Appin Road, the coalition jumped on board, agreed that it needed to be done urgently and matched our commitment.

However, progress has been far too slow. At the previous federal budget the coalition provided a mere $5 million for 2017-18 for Appin Road, just 10 per cent of their commitment. The remainder is supposed to trickle through until the end of 2021. Very little has been done other than removing a few tree stumps. What this means for my constituents is a longer, drawn-out process in which little has been achieved. Instead of investing in a well-thought-out project that creates a dual carriageway, this government is dragging its feet. The government needs to stick by its previous commitment and make these upgrades a priority.

While we're on the subject of infrastructure, we again see in Macarthur a lack of any real action by the federal government to link the Western Sydney Airport with a rail connection to my electorate. In spite of me talking to all the transport experts around the country, who agree on the need for a rail link through Macarthur to Western Sydney Airport, through the Leppington line and the north/south line from Macarthur through the new airport and on to St Marys, nothing has been done. We have failed to get any commitment to complete the Leppington-Airport line or to complete the north/south line from Macarthur to the new airport and beyond. We are now told we have to make a business case. We know that that's not the case for many other infrastructure projects, such as the northern part of the rail link to the new airport, but nothing for the south-west. It's really been politicised, and the government has, once again, failed the electorate of Macarthur. The surrounding electorates of Werriwa and Hume et cetera have similarly failed to get proper infrastructure spent—infrastructure that might have seen the completion of the Maldon-Dombarton rail line, which connects the Illawarra through Wollongong to the electorate of Hume through Picton and then on to the Macarthur electorate. The airport must be connected by rail. We know that. Every expert says it must, and it must happen soon. But there is nothing from this government. The government's City Deal has been very elaborate, a politicised hoax, and unfortunately, to Macarthur there's nothing. It is irresponsible of the Liberal National government to continue to shirk their responsibility to the most rapidly growing electorate in the state. What the government has done time and time again is put this project in the too-hard basket and send in their public relations experts to create more spin. Without adequate infrastructure to serve the new airport, my constituents will not be able to access the economic and social benefits that this project offers. Labor, for some time now, has been committed to investing in this project, on which the government appears determined to continue to avoid taking any real action.

In addition, this government have maintained their $17 billion cuts to our schools, and they're keeping their cuts to our hospital funding. This has meant that in our schools vital resources to fulfil the full Gonski plan have been lost in some of the most disadvantaged schools in the state. This has meant that our hospital waiting lists for things like elective surgery such as cataract surgery have blown out to amongst the longest in Australia. Our waiting times in our emergency departments are blowing out in an electorate that is facing a rapidly increasing population, an older population, and in an area where there have been cutbacks to after-hours services by general practitioners, putting more and more stress on our local hospitals. It beggars belief that this is apparently what the Prime Minister calls 'responsible government'. Any man who can preside over a government that could consider a harsh cap of $3.35 million from Campbelltown Hospital as 'responsible government' is clearly out of touch and in dire need of a new dictionary.

The government has continued to do things that are really setting up our future to be even more difficult. Cuts to the ABC—it is very hard to fathom why this is happening. The government appears to have fallen in with the Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in attacking the ABC and in destroying a vital Australian institution. Is there nothing that can be done to stop this government on its destructive course?

Unfortunately, this government—a decade after the global financial crisis—is continuing to put stress on our much-needed community resources such as the ABC and on our local, state and federal infrastructure and yet it gives big tax cuts to multinational businesses. It really is relying on what they call a trickle-down economy to make things better for the people who are struggling the most. There's no evidence that this works, we hear time and time again from economists that it doesn't work, but they have persisted with their cuts. I don't call this trickle-down economics; I call this siphon-off economics. This is the economics of siphoning off desperately needed money from vital public resources, such as schools, hospitals and the ABC, to big business and wealthy shareholders.

Household debt in Australia is at record highs. What people are paying for their power costs, their council rates, their schooling costs, their health costs is blowing out further and further, and it's putting young families that I've cared for for many years under increasing stress. The economic consensus is that the task of budget repair is proceeding all too slowly, and yet the government continue with these huge tax cuts. Also, promising workers tax cuts that are so far off into the future they may or may not come into effect long after this government is gone is also irresponsible and undemocratic.

Is there a plan with this government? I doubt it very much. The government is clearly attracted to some form of budget planning, but the planning has been distorted by it's want to give many billions of dollars to big business and vested interests. Listening to the Treasurer and the Prime Minister talk about the government's plans for jobs and growth, you'd think we'd all been transported back to some eastern satellite of Soviet Russia, circa 1962. Unfortunately, while they do have some totalitarian ideals, we are not attracted to the Soviet system. The good news is that planning is pretty minimal and the jobs and growth mantra is just that, rather than any real plan. The Treasurer's budget speech brought to mind a passage from Donald Horne's 1964 seminal critique of Australian society, The Lucky Country. When it comes to claiming credit for things not of its making, this government is indeed a worthy successor— (Time expired)

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