Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about the appropriation bills, which are the budget bills for the government. This affords me a good opportunity to talk about the priorities for my electorate and my region of Lake Macquarie and northern Central Coast. I'd like to start my contribution today by reflecting on a picture of what my electorate is like. When you look at the budget and everything that's in it, its priorities, you'd assume that the typical worker in Australia earns $100,000, or $200,000 as the case may be, and that families earn much more than that. That's where the tax cuts are targeted, and that's where those opposite seem to think people are residing in terms of affordability.

The true picture is very different for my electorate. The true picture for my electorate is that the median worker—so if you lined up every single worker in my electorate end-to-end and picked the 50th percentile, the person in the middle—earns $47,300. Half of all my workers earn less than $47,300; half of all my workers earn more. The median household income in my electorate, including retired households, is $65,000—that is, they live on $65,000 a year. A very high number of pensioners, about 22,000, reside in Shortland—it's a fabulous place to retire to—and the average retiree household survives on $32,000 a year. That's for a couple; that's not for an individual. The median retiree household in Shortland lives on $32,000 a year. The median household assets for retired couples is $650,000. This includes the family home and all their assets, including car, couch, furniture, clothing and everything else. And the median super balance for retired households in my electorate is $165,000. It's very important to put these facts on the record, because this goes to who the people of Shortland are and what their priorities are, and it is my job to reflect and to deliver on their priorities.

I regret to say that one in five children in my electorate will go to school at least once a year without a meal, without having breakfast—not because they didn't want Corn Flakes or Weet-Bix, but because their family could not afford to have food in the fridge for breakfast. This is a sad indictment on our society, and it's an indictment that, along with every other member of the Labor team, I am intent on rectifying. That's the true picture of the people of Shortland.

I want to now go to some of their priorities. The No. 1 priority for the people of Shortland is affordable health care: being able to see a doctor when you're sick; being able to get into the hospital when, heaven forbid, something's happened to your child or your grandparent or your mother or your father. I'm sad to say that this government's budget bills contain $715 million of cuts to hospitals around the country, including $37 million of cuts to hospitals in my region. That is already having an impact. For example, waitlists are increasing and only 66 per cent of urgent emergency department patients are seen within the recommended 30 minutes. These cuts are having an impact, and it's something we need to rectify.

That's why I'm so proud that the Labor opposition, in our budget-in-reply speech by Bill Shorten, announced $2.8 billion of additional funding for public hospitals and $80 million for 20 new MRI machines in regional hospitals and outer suburban hospitals. This is so important. At a budget forum I held last week, I had a constituent who said that their partner had gone to a private hospital and they'd been required to get an MRI. Not only was that MRI not Medicare rebatable but they didn't have a licence so they couldn't even claim the cost of the MRI off their private healthcare insurance. This is unacceptable, and we need to do much more about that.

We also need to restore needed funding for Medicare. Under this government, Medicare has been cut and cut. The Prime Minister has broken his promise to unfreeze the rebate for specialists, despite making a cast-iron promise to do so. Out-of-pocket fees to see specialists have gone even higher. They've increased to $88, an increase of $12 since the election, and that will only go higher since the rebate has been frozen. If you freeze that pay specialists get from Medicare, they will charge their patients more. We've also seen the out-of-pocket costs for visiting a GP increase by $4 since the election as well. If this government was serious about health care, they would restore the vital funding needed to public hospitals, they would match our commitments around MRIs and they would ensure Medicare is adequately funded.

I will turn to the other great priority for my electorate, and that's education. This budget confirms the $17 billion in cuts to school education through the needs-based funding model. This is $17 billion in cuts against what the government committed to in the 2013 election. They proudly bragged about the cuts in the infamous 2014 budget, where their glossy document bragged about $80 billion of cuts to schools and hospitals. Their exact words were $80 billion of cuts—not reductions or increases, but cuts. That is having an impact. My schools are some of the poorest schools in the country. They made great use of the early years of the needs-based funding. One great example is St Pius X Primary School in Windale. I'm grateful to my colleague, the member for Lyne, in correcting me yesterday.

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