Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, tonight I rise to speak on behalf of millions of Australians who feel shocked and angry. Shocked by the brutality of this government's attack on their way of life. Angry at a Prime Minister who pretended to be on their side. This budget divides our parliament. More importantly, it will divide our nation.

The government says this budget is just the beginning. And it is. The beginning of extreme policies with an extreme impact on the Australian people. This is just the beginning, turning Australia into a place that most of us will not recognise—colder, meaner, narrower. Losing our sense of fairness and our sense of community. I and Labor believe in a different Australia. A place where your destiny is not predetermined by your parents’ wealth or your postcode. A fair and prosperous nation populated by a creative and productive people.

But this is not the Australia we saw reflected in the budget on Tuesday night. On Tuesday night we saw the battlelines of Tony Abbott’s Australia—an Australia being divided into two societies. This was a ‘tax it or cut it’ budget. Millions of Australians now understand what Abbott’s Australia will look like: if you need a doctor, you will pay more; if you need to buy medicine, you will pay more; if you go to work and earn a good wage, you will pay more; if you have a family, your support will be cut; if you lose your job, your support will be cut; if you are a young person, you will be left behind; if you rely on a pension, you will be punished; and if you drive a car, even for that you will have to pay more. And if you relied on the Prime Minister’s promises—then you were betrayed.

This is a budget of broken promises built upon lies. And not just lies—systemic and wilful ones. A budget that goes out of its way to create an underclass. A brutal budget that confirms the worst fears Australians have always had about this Prime Minister. A budget with the wrong priorities for our Australia. This is a budget based upon a myth. And now on the basis of this myth, this manufactured crisis, the Australian people have been ambushed with unconscionable changes. Where is the decency? Where is the honesty? Where is the humanity in this government? Where is the trust? For a Prime Minister who staked so much of his reputation and who campaigned to restore trust in our public life, he has let this country down—and badly.

The budget papers reveal the economic truth. Australia is fundamentally strong and so is the legacy that Labor left behind—low inflation; low interest rates; net debt peaking at one-seventh of the level of other advanced major economies; a triple-A credit rating with a stable outlook from all three international credit reporting agencies, one of only eight nations in the world; superannuation savings larger than the size of our economy; and around a million new jobs created in the five years before the last election. That is what we left.

Let us call the Liberal budget 'emergency' for what it really is. It is an attempt to justify the Abbott government's finally revealed blueprint for a radically different, less fair Australia, a government that do not see the Australian people as workers, as parents, as carers, as patients or commuters, but as economic units unentitled to respect.

Broken promises

The Australian people have now witnessed this Prime Minister repeatedly promising one thing before an election while doing something completely different afterwards. Say what you like, Prime Minister. Spin as hard as you can. Australians know a lie when they hear one. They can spot a phony when they see one. And they know when they have been deceived. This budget grievously underestimates the Australian people. Australians are up for hard decisions. But pay them respect, you sit down, you talk to them, you listen. No dancing past the hard questions. No lectures. No surprises. No excuses. What the Australian public expect are consistent structural changes aimed at the medium and long term. A budget that invests in the future. That is, a budget which points the way to an achievable destination but by a process, anchored in reasonableness.

Cost of living

We know that a nation's economic confidence begins with the family budget. And this is a budget which shows no understanding or respect for around nine million family budgets. This is a budget that will push up the cost of living for every Australian family. A budget drawn up by people who have never had to live from pay cheque to pay cheque. Never sat at the kitchen table with a stack of bills to work out which ones they can put off and which ones have to be paid to avoid being cut off. People who don't understand that increasing petrol tax will make the school run, the commute and driving the kids to sport on the weekend much more expensive. So I say to this Prime Minister, do not presume to lecture the Australian people about hard choices. Instead, do something to help them make ends meet.

This morning I met with a young family from Queanbeyan. Karim and Radmilla have two daughters, Isabella aged four and Mary Therese aged eight—and another baby due next week. Karim is a high school teacher. Like many Australians, they aren't wealthy—they work hard to make ends meet. They balance their budget, but some fortnights can be harder than other fortnights. They worry about their washing machine breaking down out of warranty—or paying for the new tyres on the family car. No matter how hard they try, the weekly shop never seems to cost less. It always seems like less than one month has passed since the last bill landed in their letterbox. And—if the Prime Minister gets his way—these good people and hundreds of thousands of other Australians just like them will be worse off because of the Prime Minister's budget.

The government's GP tax, the hospital tax and the increased cost of medicines will cost this family more than $450 per year. Whenever they fill up their car—they will be slugged at the bowser. And when term 3 starts, there will be no schoolkids bonus to help them with the costs of new books and new uniforms and shoes for their growing children. This Prime Minister's budget will smash family budgets across the nation.

NATSEM modelling shows that a couple with a single income of $65,000 and two children at school will have over $1,700 cut from their family budget. Add in the health costs, and this Prime Minister is cutting nearly $40 from their weekly budget, every week. And under this budget, the cuts will get deeper and deeper. More than tripling to almost $120 by the time of the next election. In 2016, this family will suffer cuts of over $6,000 per year. That's around one in every 10 dollars of the family budget gone. This is not a budget shaped by the everyday life of real people.

Medicare

Medicare is universal access to health care. It is fundamental to our Australian way of life. Labor created Medicare because we believe the health of any one of us is important to all of us. We are all members of the Australian family and Medicare, at its core, is a family measure. And with it, we created a new standard—one that is now 40 years old and one that both major parties previously had supported.

Labor rejects a US style two-tiered system where your wealth determines your health. The Prime Minister once claimed that he was the best friend that Medicare ever had but this budget proves he is ideologically opposed to Medicare and its central principle of universality.

This government proposes to establish a $7 GP tax for visits to a general practitioner. The justification is that the Medicare system is too expensive and requires greater patient contribution. Yet the budget reveals that not one dollar of the GP tax will be returned to recurrent health spending. Not one dollar. The GP tax is being applied simply to break the universality of Medicare. The basis of its application is purely ideological, the kind of thing you might expect from the American Tea Party Republicans, not from a once great Liberal Party committed to Medicare.

And no hypothecation to a future fund, whether medical or otherwise, justifies the measure or the wilful breach of promise that it entails. Taxing the sick will not heal the sick. Making medicine more expensive won't make us healthier. Yes, investing in medical research is crucial. All research is crucial. But you don't fund the search for the cures of tomorrow by imposing a tax on the patients of today. Australians are smarter and more generous than this.

But the GP tax does another thing. It turns GPs into tax collectors. To dragoon them into the service of a completely ideological quest—to distract their time and attention from their immediate task of diagnosing and treating their patients. This government has forgotten the general practitioners are the front-line troops in our constant battle to keep Australians healthy. Only the government's general contempt and disregard of them could lead it to impose such a burden on our GPs.

This parliament has a clear choice in this budget. It is either for or against Medicare. I give you this commitment. Labor will never, never give up on Medicare. We shall fight this wicked and punitive measure to its ultimate end. That is a promise.

$80 billion

But, in some ways, the worst thing the Treasurer said on Tuesday night didn't actually come from his speech. It was concealed in the budget papers. Hidden in the papers was a capricious, unconscionable attack upon health and education services. The budget papers reveal an $80 billion cut to schools and hospitals—a cut for which there had been no consultation, not a shred of consultation, no forewarning and no discussion. Let me repeat the sum, in case some people might have missed the scale of it—80,000 million. In today's parlance, $80 billion. Gone, $50 billion from hospital funding to states. Gone, $30 billion from school funding. An attack on this scale is unprecedented.

This Treasurer promised to bring forth massive savings, fairly applied. Instead, in an incompetent and cowardly manner he has outsourced the main burden of his savings task to the states of Australia. How could a collection of states with limited revenue possibly cope with these cuts? The Treasurer and the Prime Minister have hinted at an answer: a broader and heavier GST. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer are blackmailing the states with unconscionable cuts to turn them into the Commonwealth's cat's paw, a Trojan horse to a bigger GST but absolving the Abbott government of fingerprints or blame. This is how low the budget formulations have taken us. Even John Howard was prepared to take his GST to the people, to proselytise for it. But not Tony Abbott or big, brave Joe Hockey. This Foghorn Leghorn of treasurers is showing what he really is. He is a low-rent soft-cutter of Commonwealth outlays while a hard and unforgiving cutter of payments to the states. Never before in Commonwealth history has the scale of such an attack been so large as the one that has been mounted upon the states and never before so underhandedly. I make clear that we on this side of the House will have no truck with these brutal and cruel cuts to health and education funding.

Education

Labor is the party of education. We are the party that brought the dream of a university degree within reach of all Australians. We are the party that implemented the Gonski reforms for schools based funding based on need. A $14.7 billion additional investment in Australian schools. But after this budget, the Gonski reforms are, to quote a famous Australian: 'dead, buried and cremated.' Labor remains committed to making every Australian school a great school.

It was my mother who taught me about the power of education. The pathway that it can provide. My mother was a teacher. She won a teaching scholarship in the early 1950s. She taught in city and country government schools. She travelled the world, and taught in London. She raised a family. She then studied again in later life while working full-time. But Mum never stopped being a teacher. She taught my twin brother and me everything. She taught me the value of education. Like all parents, what Chloe and I want for our children is a quality education. What separates Labor from the Liberals is that Labor wants a quality education for every Australian child.

Labor knows that it is Australia’s productivity and competitiveness that will determine how we fare in the 21st century. When I was at school there were 7½ Australian taxpayers to support each Australian aged 65 years or over. When our younger daughter was born in 2009, that ratio was five to one. By 2050 it will be only 2½ to one. Labor knows that the only answer to this challenge is to make the right investments in skills and productivity. Only through education will Australia fully develop our economic potential, our scientific potential, our artistic potential—our people’s potential.

This is why the Prime Minister’s $5 billion worth of cuts to higher education are so wantonly destructive. These cuts mark the end of Australia’s fair and equitable higher education system. Cuts that bring down the curtain on the Whitlam university legacy. The legacy which has given great Australians like Dr Cathy Foley, astronomer Bryan Gaensler and author Tim Winton the chance to go to university. The legacy that gave Tony Abbott and at least 12 members of his cabinet the same opportunity. An opportunity they would now seek to deny the next generation of young Australians.

This Prime Minister’s cuts to higher education sell out Australian genius and they reject Australia's potential. Labor will vote against these cuts to university funding, these cuts to student support. Labor will not support a system of higher fees, bigger student debt, reduced access and greater inequality. We will never tell Australians that the quality of their education depends on their capacity to pay.

Pensions and superannuation

Just as we will never tell pensioners to tighten their belts again and again. This Prime Minister sees pensioners as a burden to the budget. Labor rejects this. Labor believes that Australians who have worked hard all their lives, who have paid taxes all their lives—if lucky, have a humble family home—have earned the right to a dignified and secure retirement.

Pensioners should not have to worry about whether or not they can afford to put on their heating, visit the doctor, buy the grandkids a treat or take the dog to the vet. Let's be clear: the age pension is not a king’s ransom. It is a modest sum. Barely $20,000 a year. The reforms introduced by Labor guarantee the pension keeps pace with the cost of living. If the Prime Minister’s pension cuts had been in place for the last four years—today pensioners would be at least $1,700 worse off.

The Prime Minister’s breach of trust with pensioners isn’t just breaking a promise he made before the last election. He is breaking a promise that Australia made with our fellow citizens 40 and 50 years ago. At the start of their working life. A contract that if they worked hard and made a contribution the nation would help look after them in their old age. This Prime Minister’s cuts trespass against the nation’s covenants with pensioners.

This Prime Minister’s lies and broken promises hurt every generation of Australians. Why should the sons and daughters of pensioners, worried about their parents' quality of life, have to worry about this budget too? Tonight, I make this solemn pledge to Australia's pensioners. Labor will not surrender the security of your retirement. We will fight for a fair pension. And we will prevail.

This government’s failure to plan for the needs of older Australians is not just a problem for those currently on the age pension. This Prime Minister and this Treasurer should stop haranguing Australians about working till they are 70, especially if their only plan for Australians is to work longer and harder and retire with less. I have spent my adult life representing the people who do the real heavy lifting: the tradespeople, the labourers, the cleaners, the nurses—the Australians who make a living with skilled hands and strong backs. Many of them started work at 15 and 16—don’t force them to work till 70.

Empowering Australian workers to save for their retirement is important. Labor wants Australia to have the world’s best retirement system, not the world's oldest retirement age. And in this budget, the government continues to target the retirement savings of all Australians. This Abbott government cut superannuation—another broken promise. More pensioners reliant on a pension in the future.

As a minister, I moved legislation in this parliament to raise superannuation from nine to 12 per cent. And reduced taxation on the modest superannuation contributions of Aussies who earn $37,000 or less. Yet one of the first acts of this government was to abolish Labor’s low-income superannuation contribution. What a cowardly raid on the retirement savings of 3½ million low-income earners. Two-thirds of these hurt were women who had moved in and out of the workforce to start and raise a family. How can this Prime Minister believe it is okay to pay multimillionaires $50,000 that they don’t need, yet rob the retirement savings of over two million women who earn less than that in a whole year? Prime Minister—can you not see how unfair your policies are?

Labor believes that every Australian should be able to find good and fulfilling jobs with decent pay and conditions in productive, profitable and competitive enterprises. But for Australians under 30 who are looking for work, this budget offers no hope. It offers despair. It offers poverty. It offers no plan for jobs. Prime Minister—where is your plan for jobs?

Arguably, the changes to Newstart are perhaps the single most heartless measure in this brutal budget. They sentence young people to a potentially endless cycle of poverty when they should be getting a hand to find a job. This is a classic blame-shifting, cost-shifting measure that will put the price of unemployment on to Australian families. Prime Minister, how are people under 30 looking for work supposed to survive on absolutely nothing? These are purely ideological changes that go to the very core of this Prime Minister’s character. They contradict every piece of expert advice. This Prime Minister’s vicious, victim-blaming policy will create a lost generation of Australians—shut out of the workforce. And Labor will have no part of it.

Australia does not have a budget emergency, as the government claims, but it has a budget task. And that task, in the face of declining terms of trade and lower nominal income, is to change and reconfigure the budget’s trajectory. To, over time, make certain that the combination and influences of Commonwealth spending and Commonwealth revenue come together to reduce the government’s call on national savings. In short, to make our national budget sustainable. But make it sustainable in a fair and reasonable way.

And why is this so particularly important? Because the budget supports and needs to support large numbers of dependent people, as it does families on modest incomes, and as it must, on schools and health. The budget always needs a balance in its imposition on incomes, the contribution of companies and those expenditures which underpin us as a civil society. Indeed, I believe, as a great social democracy. Labor has always held to these precepts. This is the kind of thoughtful responsibility I subscribe to. Recognising what needs to be done. But this is not the framework this government has adopted. It is walking away from this kind of balance.

This budget is designed to change the essential compact of Australian society. It is conservatism taking it up to consensus—tugging away at the very struts that have held us together as a good and prosperous nation. This opposition will support reasonable and balanced remedial budgetary measures but we will never support the conscious development of an underclass.

This is a budget that would seek to demolish the pillars of Australian society: Medicare, education for all, a fair pension, full employment. The very things that this Prime Minister promised not to touch are the first casualties of his fabrications. New and higher taxes. This is the budget of a Prime Minister and a government who wish to tear down everything Australians have built up.

By contrast, Labor invests. Labor educates. Labor believes in an Australia writ large. We believe that economic growth comes from extending opportunity. We believe in a prosperous Australia: prosperity for everyone who works and prosperity which works for everyone. An Australia where your Medicare card—not your credit card—guarantees you access to quality health care. An Australia where the National Disability Insurance Scheme is a reality for people with disability and the people who love them—not a scapegoat for complaints about spending.

We believe that science and innovation should be at the heart of national policy—central to our prosperity. We believe in an Australia where small business can grow and thrive. We believe in an Australia that still makes things. An Australia with quality infrastructure—including the best digital infrastructure. An Australia that is closing the gap and extending opportunities to its First Australians.

Labor believes in an Australia that cares for its environment and takes the science of climate change seriously, where multiculturalism is celebrated as a social and economic good—not treated as sport for bigots and ideologues. An Australia that is a good global citizen, confident and engaged with the opportunities of the Asian Century. An Australia ready for the future and optimistic about the future and investing in the future.

This Prime Minister and this Treasurer talk a lot about the freedom of the market, deregulating and liberating. Of course, you can get rid of fairness and leave people to fend for themselves. That is a kind of freedom.

Tonight I say to Australians there is another freedom—the freedom of integrity and the freedom of respect. The freedom that gives every person dignity and the right to be treated equally. A freedom of compassion and respect that gives individuals the opportunity to fulfil their potential. That is the freedom that we believe in. This budget undermines that freedom. This budget weakens it. This budget tears at the fabric of our country.

Madam Speaker, on Tuesday, the Treasurer quoted from Robert Menzies' 'The Forgotten People.' But the government forgot a lot of people on budget night. They are the Australians I am speaking on behalf of tonight and the Australians that I am speaking to tonight. The government forgot you in their budget—and they have forgotten what makes this country great.

It forgot opportunity. It forgot the reward for effort. It forgot the fair go. Well, Labor has not forgotten. We still believe in fairness. We still believe in an Australia that includes everyone, that helps everyone, that lets everyone be their best, that leaves no-one behind. This is the Australia that the Prime Minister's budget has forgotten. And it is the Australia that Labor will always fight for. If you want an election, try us. If you think that Labor is too weak—bring it on. But remember: it is never about you or me, Prime Minister. It is about the future of our nation and the wellbeing of the Australian people.

House adjourned at 20:03