Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister and his government is cutting the energy supplement, which is costing pensioners $14 a fortnight. At the same time, they are forcing people to stay in the workforce until they're 70 years of age. The budget fails the fairness test on education. The government is still cutting $17 billion from our schools. In my electorate of Newcastle, public schools are losing an average of $350,000 both this year and next year alone. The budget locks in $2.2 billion worth of cuts to universities and levies $270 million in new cuts to TAFE. We haven't forgotten the previous cuts to TAFE, but these are additional cuts.

The budget also fails the fairness test on hospitals, cutting $2.8 billion out. This means surgeries get delayed, nurse and doctor numbers will decline and emergency wait times will increase. In Newcastle, we're losing close to $10 million from our public hospitals in 2017-20. The budget fails the fairness test on child care, with 279,000 families set to be worse off under the government's new childcare policy. The budget fails the fairness test on Medicare. The Prime Minister's freeze on the rebate for specialists means Australians will pay even more when they visit a doctor. The budget fails the fairness test on vital public services, with 1,200 jobs set to go from Centrelink. Yes, that is the same organisation that has outlandish wait times and unanswered calls because of previous cuts to staff and resources.

The budget also tragically fails our national broadcaster, with the ABC set to lose a further $127 million as a result of the Liberal government's war on public broadcasting. This is on top of the $254 million in cuts that were imposed since 2014. That was a cut acutely felt in my region with our ABC radio, 1233 AM, losing 12 members of staff and lots of local content in the last round of cuts.

Even the Turnbull government's budget centrepiece is nothing but a cruel hoax designed to hide the fact that they are doing absolutely nothing for older Australians. The 14,000 in-home care packages for four years are funded by cuts into residential aged care, and they won't go anywhere near fixing the atrocious wait list of 105,000 older Australians who currently cannot access the care they need and deserve. There is an alternative, and Labor has made that vision very clear for Australians. You can have a Labor government that puts people and the services they need first or you can have more of the same from the Turnbull Liberal government. That government is about cuts, cuts and cuts and favours to the big end of town. (Time expired)

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