Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow the Deputy Speaker and to comment on his contribution on drought. I have a high regard for the Deputy Speaker. He is a good local member. He has a good and thorough understanding of rural and agriculture issues, and I too share his concern about the ongoing nature of the drought and the el nino which is ahead, so I cannot understand that within his agriculture white paper the minister has not included resource sustainability or climate change. How are we going to produce more food and increase farm productivity with the same limited and, indeed, in some cases depleting food, water and people resources? This is the really big question for the agriculture sector and those who survive and rely on it. It amazes me. Whatever the causes of climate change might be—there are certainly different views about that—climate change is very real and should be part of the white paper.

I also cannot help but make the point that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Agriculture in great fanfare undertook a drought tour three months ago. There was plenty of television footage and plenty of picture opportunities, and straight after a big announcement, the centrepiece of which was a $280 million farm financing package for drought affected farmers, three months on, sadly, not one cent of that money has gone to struggling farming families. That is very disappointing. I just hope that in the not-too-distant future the minister can prove to the parliament and to the farming communities that are being affected that he is capable of putting a drought package in place.

I am here to talk about the budget. Never before has an electorate felt so misled and let down by a Commonwealth budget. I have been here for 18 years. My first budget was 1996. It was a tough budget delivered by Peter Costello, the Treasurer in the Howard government, but this one is extraordinarily worse. It is full of inconsistencies, it is full of mixed messages and it is full of bad priorities. It has inconsistencies in that it is spending big money on programs like the paid parental leave scheme, feeding big money to high-income families while cutting the lowest-income families and people in this country. They say it is about fiscal consolidation, but we are seeing very little consolidation. We are feeling the pain.

Government Member:

A government member interjecting—

Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am going to take the interjection. People say, 'It's not coming from the taxpayer, because the paid parental leave scheme is coming from an extra tax on companies.' But it is a revenue measure foregone. It is money that is collected by the Commonwealth which could be spent elsewhere. This is the point they do not seem to understand.

There are two things that really set this budget apart from many others. First of all, the groundwork for this budget was this. This is a government which, before the election, promised anything and everything to the Australian electorate, and of course denied there would be any cuts: 'No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no cuts to pensions'—those were almost exactly the words of the now Prime Minister, on the eve of the election. And a lot of people relied on those words.

I am happy to concede that a lot of people voted for the coalition in my electorate—more than ever before. Of course, it is complex and there are many reasons for that, no doubt. But, more than anything, they were relying on a Prime Minister who gave them very solid commitments, and they are commitments that now he has reneged on. So they are angry. The baseball bats, to use the political vernacular, are well and truly out.

So who is angry? Well, it is pretty hard to find someone who is not angry. The list is very, very long.

Talking of voters in my own electorate, my National Party opponent in the last three elections, who happens to be the Mayor of the Upper Hunter Shire, is out there defending the government's budget in his electorate. In other words, he is putting the interests of his party ahead of the interests of those who live in his local government area.

So that list is long. The elderly are upset because they were promised there would not be changes to pensions, and there are—a whole range of them, all the way from the indexation to the rebates they may not now get from councils and water authorities et cetera. Low-income families are upset because their income support is being slashed. Families generally are worried about the future of their children's education, partly because Gonski—the schools education reform put in place by the Labor government—is being cut, and partly because of the changes to universities, and, in particular, what will be happening with HECS debts. Young people are angry, partly because of education but also because assistance is being pulled out from under them. Unemployed people—people looking for work—will be forced to struggle on much less money. Labour market programs are being pulled out from under them—some very good labour market programs, some of which I spoke about in the House earlier this week. Local government is upset because the money from the states is going to be reduced because the money from the Commonwealth to the states is going to be reduced. The states are upset because their money is being reduced, and the deals they had done through the COAG process with the Labor government are being torn up.

Just about all of us, if not all of us, are concerned about the health system. People are concerned about the GP tax. They are concerned about what is going to happen with the public hospital system. One thing Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister which he gets very little credit for is the deal on hospitals. Kevin Rudd could see that, with the diminishing revenue bases of the states, almost all of their budgets were going to be taken up by the public health system in the years ahead. So he went out there and gave them a deal and a commitment to fund 60 per cent of public hospital costs in the states. That has just been torn up. So, given that the problem the former Prime Minister identified was real and remains real, how are the states going to fund the public hospital system? I can tell those in this chamber with an interest in rural and regional Australia that the hospitals that will be hit hardest and first will be those in rural and regional Australia, if the past form of state governments generally is followed in the future.

So this is a bad budget for everyone, and of course it is based on a lie—this confected lie that we have a budget emergency, notwithstanding the fact that we have a AAA rating from each of the international credit rating agencies. Of course we need to consolidate the budget. There is a thing called the budget cycle, where you go into debt and spend money when things are tough—and I remind the chamber that we are one of the few Western nations that did not go into recession—and then you start saving again as things improve, which was exactly the former Labor government's plan. There is no budget emergency. Budget consolidation can take place without perverse priorities and without hurting people in society who can least afford these cuts.

In the last six years, prior to the election of the Abbott government that is, my electorate enjoyed record levels of infrastructure funding. The list is very long and I do not have time to go through it. The biggest example is the $1.7 billion Hunter Expressway, which has made an extraordinary difference in the Hunter. It has been transformational, providing a bypass for many towns, improving transport safety, improving economic efficiency, bringing investment to the valley and improving travel times for commuters everywhere. Another example is the new $28 million bridge over the Hunter River in Aberdeen. This was a project fully funded by the Commonwealth, an important project in economic efficiency terms. You can imagine my astonishment when on Wednesday afternoon of this week, I received an invitation from Duncan Gay, the New South Wales transport minister, to the official opening of that bridge to be held at 11 am this Friday in Aberdeen. I do not expect everyone in this chamber to understand the geography, but that is an hour and a half north from my electorate office in my home town of Cessnock.

Obviously, parliament is sitting this week and we will be here till five o'clock this afternoon. I have commitments tonight, tomorrow morning and tomorrow afternoon, and it would be impossible for me to get to Aberdeen at 11 o'clock tomorrow morning. Duncan Gay says, 'I note parliament is not sitting on Friday.' I do have a diary and it is constantly pretty full and I need a little more notice than Wednesday afternoon. Not only would I have to get to Aberdeen by 11 o'clock; I have to get back south for other things in the afternoon as well. As I pointed out, it is a long way back. I just cannot get to Aberdeen tomorrow. I think it is very disappointing and extraordinarily discourteous for the New South Wales government to do this. I am not going to fight to have the date changed. I am not going to delay the opening to traffic on that bridge. That would be childish of me. I will not do that. But I am going to express my disbelief and anger at this decision. Duncan Gay, whom I wrote to yesterday, says, 'It's the Commonwealth's decision when it opens.' That is not true. The Commonwealth minister approves the date put forward by the RMS through him. The RMS and the minister in New South Wales would have known for weeks, if not months, when this opening was going to occur. Why has this happened? I do not know. But if it is a political game, it is a very childish one. I think my electorate will stand by me and agreeing with that comment.

This is a New South Wales government which put $200 million into the $1.7 billion Hunter Expressway. Yet there was Duncan Gay cutting the ribbon with the Commonwealth minister, with me in the background. I was not offended by that either; I do not care. The people of the Hunter know who takes responsibility for the success of the Hunter Expressway. And here we have an even worse example of political games being played where the former Labor government was the primary deliverer of these infrastructure programs, and in the case of Aberdeen the only funder of the program. This takes me to the New South Wales government and its performance. It is not in a position to play games, I would suggest. This is a New South Wales government which is making a very bad decision on the location of a new hospital it had promised, denying services to my people in the upper Hunter and some parts of the lower Hunter. This is a government that is selling the port of Newcastle. It originally said it would get about $700 million for it and said it would give Hunter half the money from the sale for infrastructure in the Hunter region. But now the government tells us it is going to get $1.7 billion but we are still only going to get $340 million of the proceeds. That is a disgrace. This is a government that failed to deliver a reasonably priced electricity contract to the Hydro aluminium smelter, which could have saved that smelter in the face of a high Australian dollar and dramatically falling metal prices.

This is a government that says it has a resources to regions program, yet denies the Cessnock and Maitland LGAs designation of a mining affected region. It is just ridiculous. This week it has reversed that decision but two years have now passed. Cessnock and Maitland have missed out on two years of funding under the Resources for Regions program. This is a government which reacted to the mining tax by raising its royalties against an agreement. This is a government that is not doing enough to assist the coalmining industry generally, at a time when prices are plummeting in that area. This is a government that is not doing very well out there. It has better things to do, surely, than play political games like not inviting me, with sufficient notice, to a bridge opening in my electorate—a bridge which was fully funded by the Commonwealth. It is childish at best.

I congratulate the Victorian government, which is not something that I do all that often. I want to congratulate it on its $2 million program for cattle underpasses in Victoria. These underpasses take dairy cattle, for example, off our roads. It is enormously helpful to the farmers; and, of course, it is very important in safety terms. It is not a lot of money at all, but it will provide big outcomes. I appeal to both the federal government and the state government in New South Wales, if they can get anything right, to look at that program and consider doing the same in New South Wales. I have situations in my own electorate where this would be very helpful, including around the Jerrys Plains area. I appeal to New South Wales to have a look at this program and to consider replicating it in New South Wales.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note the comments from the member for Hunter. His passion for and interest in regional and rural Australia—we like Joel—in particular agriculture, is long term. I am a positive person and my contribution today is really about highlighting the positive aspects of this budget, which is a very forward-looking budget. The trouble with the party which the member for Hunter is a member of is that they have never seen a dollar that they did not want to spend. They do not understand the fundamental that governments, including theirs, do not have their own money. Governments have money that is raised by the good people and the good businesses around this country that pay tax. Unfortunately, after the party of the last six years, somebody has to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, Labor just simply will not go home after the party. The initiatives to clean up the budget, to fix the budget and to reinvigorate the Australian economy are being blocked in the Senate. It is time for the Leader of the Opposition to get his senators back to work. The Labor Party is in denial. We simply cannot keep paying the mortgage on the nation's credit card with more borrowed money.

This is a budget for the future. It is about Australia. It is about Tasmania. In my case, it is about my electorate of Lyons—and I will touch on the good things in the budget for my electorate in more detail later. It is also about my children and my grandchildren, as it is about yours. So many good aspects of the budget have been overlooked by those on the other side because of their ideological pursuits.

Here are some general budget facts. The government is currently paying $1 billion a month in interest on the money borrowed during the six years of Labor, and the debt repayments on this borrowed money is forecast to grow to $3 billion every month. This simply cannot go on. The underlying cash deficit for this year is estimated to be $49.9 billion in 2013-4. This was the budget that the member for Lilley, for those who have a memory, said was going to deliver a surplus.

Under the coalition's plan, the budget is forecast to be back in balance by 2018-19 with surpluses building to at least one per cent of GDP by 2023-24. This is a plan for the future. The face value of Commonwealth government securities debt on issue is expected to fall from the previous estimations, if nothing was done, of $667 billion to fall by almost $300 billion with the initiatives we put forward in this year's budget. There is a long-term plan to get the Australian economy on a sustainable footing by asking everyone who can to help. Higher income Australians on incomes of more than $180,000 will contribute through the Temporary Budget Repair Levy. Individuals will contribute through indexation changes in pensions, means-testing the family tax benefit, changes to Newstart eligibility and new patient co-contributions for standard GP consultations. This is about all as Australians making a contribution to this nation. Businesses will contribute through a reduction in industry assistance, the public sector will be rationalised and politicians and senior public servants will have their wages frozen.

There will be no change to pensions during this term of government. There will also be a wage subsidy for mature age job seekers with up to $10,000 available to bosses and businesses who hire mature job seekers over the age of 50 who have been out of work for at least six months. This is in addition to the initiatives around the Tasmanian jobs plan. The Higher Education Contribution Scheme, HECS, will be extended from degree courses to sub-bachelor and diploma courses and a new $20,000 loan for trade apprentices introduced. These are such important measures and such important initiatives, particularly in regional areas of Australia and particularly in my home state of Tasmania.

One of the key aspects of the budget was the investment in infrastructure. Tasmania will share in the single biggest investment, a $50 billion investment in infrastructure across Australia over the next seven years to deliver vital transport infrastructure for the 21st century. With contributions from the private sector, with contributions from state governments, this amount can be leveraged up to over $120 billion. The investment will transform infrastructure across the country and lay the foundations for future growth. The budget is a structural document to move us away from perhaps I would argue 10 years of short-term consumption, accelerated enormously in the six years of the previous government, to a budget that is building for the future, to a government that is restructuring investment on the medium and longer term time frames.

To further leverage private sector investment, the government will use its balance sheet to help manage risks that might otherwise impede private sector financing. Key projects in Tasmania include the Midland Highway upgrade and the freight rail revitalisation to upgrade the rail network to secure the safety, reliability and competitiveness of rail freight operations. Even as recently as last week there was an announcement of the upgrade of the Brooker Highway between Hobart and my electorate of Lyons at Bridgewater.

In the case of Lyons, more than $500 million will be spent on local infrastructure projects in road and rail. $400,000 has been contributed to a new strawberry venture near the northern Midlands town of Longford. $3.5 million has been contributed to Huon Aquaculture to increase their capacity to value-add in one of my state's most important and quickest growing industries, the salmon industry, at Parramatta Creek in the municipality of La Trobe. There is $1 million for the upgrade of the Port Sorell Road and $1.5 million for the Port Arthur penitentiary restoration, one of the nation's icons, a World Heritage site on the Tasman Peninsula in my electorate. There is $300,000 for solar communities in Lyons and a share of the $400 million that has been committed for the Midland Highway upgrade. Most of that will benefit people living all around the state, from the electorate of Bass of my colleague here, from the electorate of Braddon of my colleague also here today and those people that live in the electorates of Denison and Franklin in the south. But most of that money will land in my electorate of Lyons.

A large share of the $120 million to be spent on freight rail will also be spent in the electorate of Lyons, not least of all on the Rhyndaston upgrade. A share of the $26.9 million is earmarked for upgrades of north-east freight roads, which will include some contributions in the electorate of Bass, and replacement in the north-east of timber bridges in Mathinna and the Evercreech area of my electorate. Another $3.2 million has been allocated for land acquisition for the proposed Bridgewater Bridge development, on top of the $3.2 million already provided. There was $250,000 for the Dunalley community hall, to rebuild an important piece of community infrastructure after the devastating bushfires on the Tasman Peninsula in 2013.

It is important to understand that these are benefits that are recognised. These are accessible funds for councils all around Australia. The 13 municipalities that I have within the electorate of Lyons will no doubt be able to share in the $200 million extra for road black spots. An extra $350 million has been added to the Roads to Recovery program, which is significantly important in an electorate the size of Lyons, which covers 36,000 square kilometres—nearly 50 per cent of the state of Tasmania by area.

In the budget, $43 million has been committed to tourism infrastructure. As tourism is one of the most important industries in my home state and in my electorate, we will certainly be working with the Minister for Trade and Investment to seek what share of that money we can.

Also, $100 million has been committed for mobile phone black spots. Those of you who travel around Tasmania will understand that there are many areas of the state where mobile phone coverage is very poor. This $100 million is effectively a subsidy to encourage the private sector—be that Telstra, Vodafone, Optus or anybody else who wants to put up their hand—to construct infrastructure, or enhance existing infrastructure, to put mobile phone communications in areas where, if it were just based on economics and population, it simply could not be justified.

There are a lot of myths about health funding in this budget, but the fact is that next year health funding will increase by nine per cent. In the following year, it will increase by another nine per cent. In the following year, it will increase by another nine per cent. In the final year of the forward estimates, it will be six per cent, over the four years.

In education, over the forward estimates funding will increase by 34 per cent on funding levels from 2013-14—$4.6 billion every year between 2013-14 and 2017-18. This is a good outcome. As we all know, there are many things that go to making a child's education a worthwhile education. That includes parental engagement and the ability of a principal to have greater autonomy within the school he runs. It is important that we have quality teacher training and it is important that we have a robust and flexible national curriculum. Yes, funding is important, and funding will increase over the forward estimates by 34 per cent, but it is not the only measure of student success.

Briefly, in the time that I have left, I want to highlight some facts around higher education. I truly believe that the reforms that have been proposed within the higher education sector will substantially benefit young people and people looking to benefit from tertiary education within my state of Tasmania, particularly at UTas, which has a high proportion of students accessing university in non-degree courses—sub-bachelor and diploma courses. These are the stepping stones that many students use to go on to further degree courses. I just cannot overstate how important this reform is for providing the opportunity to another 80,000 students every year around Australia—many from low-socioeconomic circumstances—which currently only those attending university in a bachelor degree have, with no up-front costs no matter what your background, no matter where you come from, to go to a higher education institution of your choice.

I also wish to compliment the government, the ministers and the departments that have also extended the Higher Education Contribution Scheme to the $20,000 loan for trade apprentices. Again, it is a game changer in my state of Tasmania. This is providing flexibility by removing the impediments that young people might have to studying a trade, so we are doing everything we possibly can.

Yes, we are proud of the fact that we do not think that it is right that young people who are leaving school should be able to go straight onto Newstart. But we are putting everything we can and every resource that we can into supporting employers to take on young people who have been unemployed for more than six months. We are putting in place pathways for young Tasmanians, for young Australians. If they are unable to earn through work that is available, we are supporting them and will make it as easy as we can to help them get into tertiary education.

I truly believe that this is a landmark document. This is a document for the future. It is a document for Australia, Tasmania, my electorate, and my children and my grandchildren for the future.

Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Members in this place will often talk about the values that define them and their political party. I am a member of the Labor Party, because it is built on the principles of fairness, equality and social justice. It is incumbent on members of the Labor Party to fight against those acts that seek to destroy, inhibit or remove fairness, equality and social justice from our society.

This budget is not fair. This budget will worsen inequality in our society. This budget will deepen the divide between the privileged and low- and middle-income Australians. True to our fundamental values, Labor will fight this budget.

Let me start by calling out the deception of the Prime Minister and his confected budget emergency. There is no budget emergency. Australia has a triple-A credit rating, one of only 10 economies in the world. Our net debt is 12 per cent of GDP compared to the average of 74.7 per cent of GDP in advanced economies around the world. Our deficit is 1.2 per cent of GDP compared to the average of advanced economies of nearly five per cent. Spending is not out of control; in fact, between 2009 and 2013, this period was the lowest four-year period of real spending growth in 23 years.

Designing a budget is about choices. This government has used a confected budget emergency to resurrect Margaret thatcher's infamous 'There is no alternative' doctrine. This doctrine was used by Thatcher to rip apart the social fabric of the UK, and this is clearly the intention of the Prime Minister and Treasury.

The fact is there are many ways to place the budget on a trajectory to return to surplus in a reasonable time frame. There is no justification for the vicious cuts and targeting of the most vulnerable contained in this budget. For example, if the terms of trade follow the trajectory closer to that forecast by the market or indeed the Reserve Bank, Commonwealth revenue will be significantly higher than that forecast in the budget. Another part of the budget surplus would involve scrapping stupid and expensive policies such as Mr Abbott's 'rolled gold' paid parental leave scheme or Mr Hunt's subsidies for polluters scheme.

For that matter, scrapping the emissions trading scheme not only destroys any chance we have of reducing carbon emissions effectively in this country; it also removes the source of revenue for the Household Assistance Package. These are all choices. There are alternatives. To suggest otherwise is a falsehood, one that is made by a patently heartless and mendacious government.

A fortnight has passed since this budget was delivered. I, like many members in this place, have spent much of the time in the community talking to people about the impact it will have on them and those around them. At street stalls, in meetings and telephone calls, in letters and emails, the message is clear: this budget is unfair. It is unfair because it asks less of the privileged and the powerful than it does of ordinary people and those less fortunate. It is unfair because it supports multinational corporate tax minimisation, while young people looking for work suffer. It is unfair because it destroys egalitarian principles which are the bedrock of our society.

Every person is entitled to quality health care and education regardless of how much money they have or where they live. Take for example Betty, a pensioner from Blackalls Park in my electorate. Betty contacted me and told me that for her the most important part of living on a fixed income is planning ahead. She works out her budget well in advance, factoring in the cost of household bills like water, energy and rates. Betty is worried about the changes to indexation of her pension because she knows that this means her bills will go up but her pension will not rise in line with the increase. She is fearful of losing concessions on her bills as a result of the 1.2 billion cut to the national agreement which supports these measures. In her last quarterly electricity bill, Betty received a seniors discount of $57. Her water bill for the last quarter was reduced by $87. She received discounts on her council rates, car registration and she is entitled to reduced fares on public transport as a result of these concessions. On Sunday night when asked about concession changes, the New South Wales Treasurer, Andrew Constance, a Liberal said:

I think it is a cruel and callous cut. It is one which needs to be reversed.

There are 18,400 people in Charlton like Betty who live on a pension. These people have contributed to our country, have raised families and have paid taxes. They deserve our support. Instead, they face having their pensions and concessions cut as a result of this budget. In the words of Betty, these pensioners have been 'deceived by the Prime Minister and his budget of lies'. This is just one example of the cost shifting embedded in this budget, which transfers responsibility from the federal government to states and territories for a range of measures. Principal among them is the combined $80 billion cut to health and education, a move the New South Wales Liberal Premier has quite rightly called 'a kick in the guts'.

In the Hunter region alone, almost $220 million will be ripped from public hospitals over the next five years. As the husband of a nurse, I know of the wonderful work doctors, nurses and health professionals do in our health system. I also know that this system is under increasing pressure. Why would this government abandon their responsibility when it comes to the health and wellbeing of people in my area? Because they are ideological opposed to public health care.

This budget cuts funding for public dental services and bulk-billed optometry. This budget raises the cost of medicines for all Australians through changes to the PBS, including for some 42,000 health care concession card holders in my electorate. This budget destroys Medicare. It asks every person, regardless of their circumstances, to pay $7 every time they visit a doctor, a measure which will cost the people of Charlton around $6 million in the next year alone. This budget clears a path for states and territories to charge the copayment for general practitioner attendances in hospital emergency rooms.

The destruction of the Medicare system has been condemned by countless health academics and economists, including the AMA, the College of Emergency Medicine, the Doctors' Reform Society, the Public Health Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Consumer Health Forum and the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association. The arrogance of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, who believe they know the health system better than those who work in it or, indeed, rely on it, is astonishing. Let me quote a doctor from the GP superclinic in my electorate, Dr Wolf Du Plessis, whose practice in Morisset bulk bills around 600 patients a day. An article in the Newcastle Herald last week stated:

… the $7 tax … will cause 'death, disfigurement and disability'.

  …   …   …   

'Some people will end up dead,' Dr du Plessis said.

…   …   …

'Many people who come here don't have the money to pay. Often single mums come in with three children all sick.'

His practice saw people in their 90s, who did not have enough money for food.

'GPs are not supposed to be tax collectors,' he said.

Last week, the architects of Medicare publicly contradicted the Minister for Health by making clear that bulk billing is not a safety net; it is intended to be universal. They also said that there is no such thing as too much bulk billing and made clear their views that there is no evidence that people who will be most persuaded by price are the ones who are less sick.

I will now speak about the shocking cuts to Australian schools, which represent a very clear betrayal of Australian parents, students and teachers. This budget cut $30 billion from education. This is the biggest cut to school funding in Australian history and is clearly visible from the budget papers. In my electorate, schools are angry, parents are angry, teachers are angry. They have 30 billion reasons to be angry.

Government Member:

A government member interjecting—

Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whilst robust debate is encouraged, the member should be heard in silence.

Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not content with making schools suffer, the budget will also punish universities and those people who want to get a degree. There will be a staggering $5 billion cut to the tertiary education sector by this Liberal government. By deregulating universities, the Prime Minister and his government are making it abundantly clear that they do not believe in fair and affordable higher education. They want to take us down the path of an Americanised university system, where you are paying $100,000 to get a university degree. Well, this is Australia, and we are proud of our fair and accessible university system. These cuts are a disgraceful betrayal of Australian children and their families, who should be able to access a world-class higher education.

These cuts mean more student debt, and changes to indexation in relation to HECS balance will make it even harder to get a degree, particularly for rural and regional students. There are around 20,000 students from across the Hunter region who attend the University of Newcastle, and we are rightly proud of our uni. In fact, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings recently named the University of Newcastle as the best Australian university under 50 years of age. This draconian deregulation model has been widely criticised by vice-chancellors, some of whom broadly support deregulation. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney, Ross Milbourne, has stated:

I don't support this budget package because it is a badly designed model of deregulation plus the biggest funding cuts in history to higher education.

The University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor, Warren Bebbington, observed:

… it is starting to look as if the student debt burden for many under the proposed reforms might well be worse than in the US. Deregulation would become mis-regulation.

And the University of Canberra's Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Parker, noted:

I also think it is unethical for a generation of leaders who by and large benefited from free higher education to burden the generations behind them in this way.

This is a damning condemnation of the government's plans from those who know the system best.

Of course, not every student wants to go to university, but the government has proposed similar severe cuts for trade and skills training. Almost $2 billion will be taken out of skills programs, over $1 billion of which was funds to support apprentices. The government committed to create one million jobs before the election but is now abolishing essential services for apprentices and workers. Nearly $1 billion in support payments under the Tools For Your Trade program will be cut, a particularly harsh blow for young Australians trying to get a start in a trade. Many apprentices have contacted my office voicing great concern about this measure.

It is not just apprentices who will suffer under this harsh budget. Families will also suffer. At the same time as their family tax benefits are reduced, they will need to find extra money in their household budget to cover the impost of a GP tax, higher medicine costs and the fuel tax every time they fill up at the bowser. Families on family tax benefit part B will have their payment cut when their youngest child turns six. The government also plans to freeze the rates for family tax benefits and has reduced the threshold for payments from $150,000 to $100,000. This will mean that a single-income family on $65,000, well below the average, with two children aged eight and 14 is going to lose over $6,000 by 2016. These are figures from the independent National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, NATSEM, a centre that Prime Minister Abbott was lauding when he was in opposition as the greatest repository of family income modelling in this country. This cut equates to an 11 per cent cut in that family's income. Why is it fair that someone on $180,000 or $200,000 a year will pay $400 extra in tax but a family on $65,000 will lose over 11 per cent of their income? And this cut will be permanent because of this heartless and cruel government.

Finally I would like to speak about the cruel changes to Newstart for people under 30. The overwhelming message to these people from the Abbott government is: 'You're on your own.' Young people under 25 will now be shifted from Newstart payments onto the youth allowance, leaving them $48 a week worse off. After 1 January next year, job seekers under 30 who need Newstart and youth allowance will be forced to wait six months before receiving any support. This is right-wing conservative ideology at its worst. It is victim blaming and it is fundamentally unfair.

These appropriation bills are the first step in bringing in some of the harshest budget cuts we have ever seen. These bills are peppered with callous cuts, but, whilst essential services and supports are slashed, making life hard for those on low and middle income, there is money in the kitty to pay wealthy women $50,000 to have a baby and increase the non-concessional superannuation cap to $180,000.

This budget is about choices: Tony Abbott and the Liberals have chosen to hurt the most vulnerable whilst protecting the interests of the wealthy. Labor has made a choice too. We have chosen to defend our legacy of Medicare, of historic levels of funding for schools, of the social wage, of representing the interests of workers and families. We will fight against the abolition of universal health care, increases to the costs of medicines, the petrol tax and the unfair cost to families, students and pensioners. Labor will fight these measures because they attack the very values on which our movement is based—fairness, equality and social justice. I will stand up for the 100,000 pensioners in the Hunter region who will suffer cuts because of this heartless government; I will stand up for the patients in the Hunter Valley who will pay an extra $28 million because of the GP tax.

Budgets are about choice. I have a one-year-old daughter, and I want her to grow up in a society that is fair and equitable, where she has the best chance of advancing, based on her hard effort and her intelligence—not on the size of the bank balance supporting her. How is it fair to have $100,000 debt when coming out of university while those opposite enjoyed a free education? It demonstrates the hypocrisy of this government that this Treasurer was protesting against a $200 fee for university education 20 years ago, but now is trying to impose an American level of debt on university students. This budget is an attack on the Australian way of life; it results in a 12-per-cent cut to family income for people on well-below the average wage while giving a free kick to the wealthy. Labor will not support it. Labor will oppose it because that is what the Australian people elected us to do—to fight for lower-income Australians, to fight for pensioners and to fight for those who need Medicare most.

Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wanted to be a member of parliament since I was 12, and some would say that my parents should have sought therapy at that time. Was it for the title? Certainly not. Was it for the pay? No. Was it for the travel? No. It was to try to make a difference—to be part of the democratically elected to team who would always put the interests of our nation above our own interests. It was to bring my values to the community debate; to be part of a robust national discussion about the future of all Australians—our families, our businesses and our communities. It was to confront the tough and challenging issues—not to run from them. It was to ensure that the excellent services that Australians have come to expect are sustainable into the future.

This budget fulfils those aspirations. Yes, it is a challenging budget, but we live in challenging times. I would ask the good people of my electorate to reflect on the road ahead—a road not yet travelled by our children or grandchildren. It is a road that already includes 832,000 people on the DSB, 2.4 million people on either a full or part pension, 695,000 people on Newstart, 112,000 on youth allowance. It is a road that will include a massive increase in the number of our fellow citizens who will be aged over 65. Over the next 35 years, the number of people aged between 65 and 84 will more than double, and the age of those older than 85 will more than quadruple. It is a road that will include 2.8 working-age people for every person over the age of 65. Fifty years ago, shortly after World War II, that ratio was 10—10 working-age people to every person over 65—and today it is five. It is a road that will include the paying of $68 billion in the next 10 years for people relying on a pension, an increase of 70 per cent from what it is today. It is a road that will include people who will live on average a life beyond 80, compared to very few people reaching the age of 60 just 90 years ago. It is a road that will include an ever-increasing number of people visiting their GPs with a Medicare bill increasing significantly every year. Ten years ago it cost $8 billion; today it costs $20 billion; and in 10 years' time it will cost $34 billion. With an ageing and welfare dependent demographic, it begs the question: who will pay for it?

With an ageing and welfare-dependent demographic, it begs the question: who will pay for it?

Despite the best efforts of our opponents to dismiss concerns about debt and deficit, I believe that the people of Australia, in their heart of hearts know that the current trajectory of spending cannot continue. If we are to have a bright and sustainable future for our children and grandchildren it cannot continue. Does any sensible person believe for one minute that it is a wise idea to get another credit card to pay off your mortgage and your other credit cards? No, they do not.

Nothing in life is free. The hardworking taxpayers of this nation are the wealth creators of our nation, and they contribute their taxes. They are the Australians who provide the money to deliver one of the world's most accessible health systems. They are the Australians who provide the money for the world's most generous welfare system. They are the Australians who have been providing the money to pay the first 60 per cent of university student fees—the money that will never be paid back. They are the Australians who work hard to earn their income, often a very good income, and they are growing increasingly tired of those people who depend on their taxes for the payment of welfare, saying that they should carry even more of the debt and deficit burden. We should not forget that, in addition to the new debt repair levy, a person earning $180,000 contributes $55,000 in income tax and pays a further $2,700 as a Medicare levy. This nation would not survive if it were not for ordinary Australians paying their share of income tax.

I have a fundamental question. How can you cut funds from a program that was never budgeted for and never funded? You cannot. It is financially irresponsible to suggest that this budget has cut funding to health, education and foreign aid. This is a deceitful message that Labor continues to propagate. Labor expects this government to live up to its pie-in-the-sky unfunded policies that it knew full well in the dying days of its government the nation could not afford. Labor never budgeted for these programs in the out years. The state and territory governments certainly have not budgeted for these illusionary funds, because they only budget for four years in advance of their current budget. They have not employed people on the basis of those illusionary funds. They have not built infrastructure or introduced programs on the back of these illusionary funds. Everybody should get real about what is actually happening.

Let me make it clear for the people of Braddon. There is no cut to the pension. The pension will continue to increase each six months as it has. The scaremongering needs to end. Older people around this nation, particularly in my electorate, are scared because Labor is putting out messages that are absolutely deceitful. Let us talk about the introduction of the co-payment to visit the GP. There are currently 263 million free services provided through Medicare, with this number growing significantly each year. The system is unsustainable. We all need to share the responsibility to ensure that it remains sustainable. The idea that health care is free is a myth. Many people already pay a gap fee every time they go to the doctor. The previous speaker said bulk-billing is universal. That is simply wrong. The issue of unsustainability in health system was identified by Prime Minister Bob Hawke in the 1990s. That reforming Labor Prime Minister introduced a co-payment $3.50, which would be approximately $7 in today's terms. He was strongly supported then by minister Jenny Macklin and he is strongly supported even today by the current Labor shadow Assistant Treasurer. It was also a Labor government that introduced the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme co-payment. Labor should cut the rubbish, cut the crap, about this government's co-payment being the first ever introduced. It is not true. It was a Labor reform by a courageous, reforming Labor Prime Minister.

The budget papers clearly show that there is no cut to hospital funding in the budget—quite the opposite. Funding to the states for hospital services increases by nine per cent each year for the next three years and six per cent after that. The other important point that I will make is that an element of the funding of the states and territories was activity based, incentive driven. In the case of Tasmania, our state then under the leadership of the Giddings-McKim partnership failed to deliver on increased activity.

Hospital funding in Tasmania next financial year will increase by $45 million from $292 million to $337 million. Over the next three years, that amount will increase to $391 million. I have made this point before in this place but let me make it again. Just because you throw money at something does not mean for one minute that the outcomes are better. Take Tasmania for example. Over the last 10 years there have been record levels of health spending. But what have we got? We have the longest waiting lists in the nation, chronic illnesses at disgraceful levels and a half-built Royal Hobart Hospital, a project out of control and thankfully now in the hands of a new and competent state Liberal government.

It is very deceitful for Labor to suggest that funding for our schools in Braddon has been cut, when it was Labor in fact, under their education minister, Bill Shorten, who ripped $1.2 billion from the forward estimates just months out from the last election. The coalition have put that $1.2 billion back and we have met our commitment to provide certainty for schools over the next four years. We have met our commitment. From this current year through to 2017-18, total Commonwealth funding will increase by 37 per cent or $4.6 billion. Needs based funding will continue. From 2018, funding will increase by CPI and will also take into account the growth in school enrolments.

Taxpayers currently pay the first 60 per cent of all university fees in this country. Unbelievably, last week I spoke to university students in my office who did not know this vital fact. If your degree has a fee of $40,000 then the taxpayers of Australia pay the first $24,000—never, ever to be repaid. The remaining $16,000 has in the main been paid for by HECS—that is, the student only has to start paying that debt back when they earn over $50,000, and even then at a modest rate of just two per cent of their income. So the member for Franklin's hysterical contribution in the MPI yesterday and last night's appearance on Richo by the shadow minister for education were both intentionally misleading and show their deficiency and knowledge in this sector. They both say that students are scared and they will not be able to pay the uni fees. This is ridiculous. Any student currently studying will not see any change to their fees as their existing arrangements will remain in place until 2020 or when their course is completed. The exciting improvements to the higher education sector will see an additional 80,000 places by 2018. I look forward to the University of Tasmania, especially the Cradle Coast campus in my electorate, taking full advantage of these changes.

The community is divided on the issue of providing foreign aid. Many of my constituents would like to see far more funds provided and even more constituents would like to see the amount reduced; some, sadly, would even prefer that no funds be allocated at all. Let us get to the facts on the table before I address some of the finer points. In the last 15 months of the previous Labor government, they removed $5.7 billion of aid funds from the forward estimates—fact. So, please, stop the crocodile tears and have a look in the mirror. Just like every other aspect of the last Labor budget, we find that a financial skeleton falls out of every cupboard we open. To those in my community, especially those of my brothers and sisters in the Christian faith, please try to familiarise yourself with the facts before you start demonising the coalition. This does nothing but show a lack of your balance or fairness. It has been said by many that we have broken an election promise on foreign aid. This is not correct and even the formal response from the coalition prior to the election on the Australian Christian Lobby website proves this. It says:

The Coalition supports and is committed to the Millennium Development Goals and the target of 0.5 per cent of gross national income in overseas development aid. However, the Coalition is unable to commit to a date because of the uncertain budgetary position that any incoming Coalition government is likely to inherit. There have been massive blowouts in debt and deficit under Labor and the Coalition will review the budgetary position if elected to Government.

We have made that commitment. Regardless of the size of the overseas development aid budget, the effectiveness of aid delivered must always continue to be the overriding priority. Gone are the days when hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money will be spent on detention centres to house tens of thousands of asylum seekers after Labor played into the hands of the people smugglers. Gone are the days when aid funding will be spent on building a parliament house in a foreign country to gain some credibility for a seat the UN Council. Gone are the days when we would spend aid on an ineffective program just because an NGO has the most polished lobbyist. Gone are the days when hundreds of millions of dollars of hard earned taxpayers' money has been wasted in aid due to self-centred efforts to gain a seat on the UN Council. Gone are the days when millions of dollars to help save the Sumatran rhinoceros will be spent.

We should be focused on reducing poverty in our region. Overseas development should always be about reducing poverty. Gone are the days when a government would want to spend more than $100 million of its aid budget to join the African Development Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Let's drag this debate back to where it should be: giving our resources to those fellow humans that need our help, ensuring that we have an outcome focused humanitarian aid program. Labor has got a fair bit to say. Their deceit knows no bounds. Their desperation is placing political populism above the interests of the elderly and the vulnerable in our community. They say there is no debt emergency; they say there is nothing to see here, everything is okay and we should keep spending money we simply do not have.

I encourage the people of Braddon to look at what Labor has done in the past, not what it says and then look at the what the coalition has done in the past, not what we say. Before people jump to a conclusions about this budget, based mostly on the fear campaign of the Labor Party, they should stop for a brief moment and reflect on who they can trust to deliver a strong economy and sustainable financial future for our children and our grandchildren.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like all MPs, I have spoken to literally hundreds of people about the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-2015 before us today. One of the most common reactions I have had from people is confusion and perplexity. Why would a government take the most from the people in a community who can least afford to pay? Why attack the foundation institutions of our nation like Medicare and the age pension? Why implement a university funding system that will stop working-class kids who could be the first in their family to go to university or to dream of higher education?

What I am realising is this: our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, and our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, do not get it; they just do not get it. Their lives are so divorced from the experiences of the ordinary Australian, the experiences of a person who lives in my electorate of Hotham. Let us have a look at some of the numbers: 82 per cent of the cabinet that created this budget went to a private school. In my electorate of Hotham, just 14 per cent of residents did. Most of these cabinet ministers went to university for free or on very heavily subsidised HECS. You know what? They are going to ask students in my electorate of Hotham to stare down the barrel of $80,000 to do nursing at Melbourne University. The income of a senior cabinet minister is around $7,000 a week. Do you know what the median income of someone in Hotham is per week? It is about $518. That means for the ordinary person in my electorate to make what the Treasurer earns in an hour, they need to work for almost two full days.

We are learning a lot about the Treasurer at the moment. We are really getting to know him as a public. Many of you would have seen his performance on Q&A couple of weeks ago. He was asked how he kept in touch with the lives of ordinary Australians. In response, he told a story about his family history, how we went from rags to riches and how his parents came to Australia and built what they have through hard work in the private sector. I am very admiring of that story; I am very admiring of Australians who come here with very little and who have managed to build something from nothing. The critical point here is that all this Treasurer knows is his own life experience. It is a very aberrant life experience and that is what he believes is all that he needs to know about the Australian public.

This really explains a lot to us. It explains their genuine incredulity of a Treasurer who cannot understand that a $7 GP co-payment for every family member, every time they go to the doctor, is a significant sum. It tells us why, instead of listening to the concerns of Australians, Joe Hockey suggests that those struggling spend less of their money on beer and cigarettes. It is comments like these that show us just how completely divorced this cabinet is from the ordinary Australian.

I want to take the opportunity this morning to talk to the House about how the budget will affect ordinary families who live in my electorate of Hotham. I will talk about some key areas of change. I cannot possibly cover them all in 15 minutes. However, I want to tell the stories of some families I know and how they will be touched by this budget. I want to start with health because, of all the things in this budget, the health changes will affect every single one of us in the Australian community. Bulk-billing in my electorate is very high. It is, by and large, a working-class electorate, so about 82 per cent of all doctor visits are bulk-billed. The $7 GP co-payment will see almost $6 million raised each year in additional tax across my electorate. That is an additional $6 million collected from sick Australians by the $7 GP tax. It is regressive, it is unfair. One of the best things I will be able to do, as a first-term member of parliament, is to vote against its implementation in this House.

The Treasurer is so confounded and so frustrated by his lack of understanding of how anyone could feel that such a tax is unfair, so I want to tell the story of a constituent of mine, Danny. Danny was born with some significant health problems. As a child he suffered from kidney reflux. He was quite ill as a young person, but he managed to complete university and find a job. Later in his youth, he was diagnosed with brain cancer and the surgery, which saved his life, has left him with significant short-term memory problems. Danny battled on. He found a job and got married. Then later he, sadly, lost his wife and his unborn child to cancer. His kidneys packed up and he was forced onto dialysis at night. It was an expensive period for him and he had to remortgaged his house. Eventually, he was able to get a kidney transplant and he now works as a forklift driver and manages a warehouse. He is on low medication and requires significant and frequent medical treatments. He pays $139.70 for medication a month. He will face an additional $25 imposed by the government for his drugs, an additional $7 a month for pathology reports and an additional $7 a month for each doctor's visit, which are monthly but sometimes more often.

Danny earns about $500 a week. He works but he struggles and the changes to this budget will see him struggle a lot more. It is so unfair that Australians like Danny are being shouldered with the burden.

Let us talk about education. We are very lucky in Hotham to live in quite close proximity to Monash University. Almost a third of my residents in Hotham are students at one level or another. And, boy, will they be hit hard by this budget! There are billions of dollars of cuts in school funding, there is the cowardly backdown on the supposed unity ticket that we went to an election on on the Gonski funding that would, for the first time in Australia, see school funding follow the children with the greatest need and then there are changes to university funding. I have had the chance to really think about the budget changes over the last couple of weeks and it is the university changes that are, increasingly, making me the most sad because it is university education that provides the skills in this modern economy where skills are what really matter when you go out into the workforce. It is university education that provides us social mobility in this country. I just cannot fathom how a government would make changes that will very much affect Australians, particularly those in families in low-income brackets.

The coalition has argued that young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds will not be more affected by the changes. That is inane, nonsensical and completely lacks common sense. It is absolutely out of step with the research, which shows that students in lower income brackets are affected by fee changes all over the world. We have even seen that in Australia when changes have been made to HECS over time and how in fact almost 100 per cent of enrolment changes have been from students in lower income brackets.

I have spoken to a number of school principals about the changes to education and how that will affect students in their schools. One conversation struck me in particular. I called a principal who runs a very good school in one of the lowest income parts of my electorate. It is also one of the most multicultural parts of my electorate. When I talked to this principal, he was genuinely devastated by the changes that are being made to higher education, because he and the teachers at that school work so hard to try to make a culture of excellence and to help these students, who come from sometimes quite difficult backgrounds, to believe that there is actually a hope that they will be able to go on into higher education and go into a profession, which many of them dream of. He is the principal of a school where a lot of the students come from families that are from cultures where debt is very unusual and you would never normally take on debt. They are brought up in households where they are already under pressure to go out into the workforce quickly after they finish school so that they can help bring in income for the family. He said to me: 'For these families, a sum like $100,000 is a TattsLotto win. Remember, these families have a family income of $40,000 or $50,000. They rent their homes. Their kids are already under pressure to get out into the workforce quickly and contribute. Of course this will make a difference.'

We talked about some specific students, but one of the biggest imposts that this principal is concerned about is around the impact on culture. How can he try to build the sort of culture of excellence that he wants to see in that school when university is effectively being put out of reach for many of his students? And for people who do not believe that these impacts are real, I really invite you to come to Hotham, to come down to this school, and to talk to the principal and to some of the students. I know that life in Warringah and life on the North Shore perhaps does not reflect these realities, but they are the realities of electorates like ours—all of us who are here in this chamber at the moment.

I would be very remiss not to talk a little about the changes to pensions. I have about 23,000 residents in Hotham who are pensioners, and they have been probably the most virulent in their opposition to this budget. To be fair, the pensioners are contacting me not just because of changes to the pension but because they are so worried about things that will affect their own grandchildren and some of the changes that they see which reflect very different opportunities and life chances from those that they feel they have had as Australians.

ACOSS has estimated that pensioners will lose about $80 a week by 2024, due to their payments being linked to CPI. So there is obviously an income impost here. But what really frustrates me about this pension change is what this is saying about our country. By linking the pension to CPI instead of to wage growth, what we are saying is that, as our country grows more prosperous, there is no need for us to share that prosperity with age pensioners—that they should stay basically living, and, many of them, struggling, on those same incomes, despite the wealth of other Australians increasing. This just does not reflect the way that we do things in Australia. As a nation, when we grow everyone should benefit. That is just how we do things in this country.

There are also changes to the pension age that are going to really have a significant impact on people in Hotham. About 35 per cent of my constituents who are in work, work in blue-collar jobs. Shifting the pension age arguably could be workable for people who work behind a desk, who spend most of their time in white-collar industries. But for manual labourers, this is an extremely rough change. Increasing the age pension age to 70 will make Australia's the highest pension age across all of the OECD countries. That is interesting, because I think we have the lowest or at least one of the lowest debt levels in the OECD. Again, Labor will oppose this change, and I will be very proud to stand up for the older Australians in my electorate who rely on a pension, and there are so many of them.

Before I close I will make some brief comments about the impact of this budget on women. In so many ways, but for women in particular, this budget absolutely fails the fairness test. Some of these measures will impact very disproportionately on women. I am talking here about female students, who will pay significantly more for their education. It is women who will usually pay the price of losing family tax benefits. Lower-income women—and this is no surprise, given the values in this budget—will be the hardest hit. An unemployed single mother with one eight-year-old child will lose 12 per cent of her income as a result of this budget. All of us have single mums in our electorates and we know that these are the families who are watching every dollar. Can you imagine—12 per cent of their income will simply disappear. A single-income couple with two school-age children and average earnings will lose about six per cent of their disposable income. Again, these are families that in many instances are struggling a great deal. For any of us, dealing with a five or 10 per cent sudden reduction in our income is going to be very difficult to manage.

For women at work and women trying to balance the cost of child care, the freezing of threshold and indexation for childcare rebates and fee relief is going to have a fast impact. For a government that is supposedly so concerned with the participation of women in the workforce, I see this as absolutely regressive and contrary. If you are interested, have a look at the numbers for education, because the impact on women is absolutely shocking. A woman who does an accounting degree at the University of Melbourne will pay $120,000 for her degree. That will include $45,000 in interest and, if she takes off the usual amounts for part-time work with kids, she is going to be paying off her degree for 36 years. How can this be considered fair? I am absolutely staggered.

One of the best things about this budget, though, is the significant empathy that I have had for other Australians who are concerned about the impact on their fellow Australians. I have more and more stories that I could share with you, but I want to tell you that a Mrs Swallow contacted me. She was acknowledging she is comfortably off and will not be affected by the budget but is worried about those who will be. Jeannine, another constituent, stated the budget would not impact her personally but she is deeply troubled by what it will mean for those who are struggling. These are people who do not want to live in a society which makes it harder for people like Danny, for people like students in the low-income school. They do not want to see those kids get a second-rate education. They do not want to live in a country where families have to make tough decisions about whether or not to take their kids to the doctor. This is ridiculous. This is life in Australia. It is not what we know and expect given we are one of the richest countries in the world.

It does not make sense to me. It does not make sense to so many Australians. That is why I will be fighting with Labor as hard as I can against the changes that we have discussed.

Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in support of the coalition's first budget in the 44th parliament. It is a budget that charts a real course to surplus, a budget that addresses the dual problem of unsustainable spending and fast-growing debt. Finally, after six years of hard Labor, Australia has a budget that starts to address the damage inflicted on our economy since 2008 and sets the conditions for regaining Australia's economic freedom of action. It is a budget the Australian people know is necessary to ensure we do not steal the prosperity of future generations to fund our unsustainable debt and spending today. It is a budget that delivers some outstanding projects in my electorate of Bass which help support the brighter future that our citizens deserve. I would like to touch on just a few of these projects which will create both economic activity during the construction stage and also an enduring benefit for the people of northern Tasmania.

We have $6½ million to revitalise North Bank on the Tamar River. There has been silt removed from the Tamar River for over 100 years. Some form of mechanical removal of silt has been a feature of the river's management strategy for over 100 years. We have $2½ million to make sure we can keep the Tamar River silt free, to remove the silt built up over the years and to fulfil the promise that Labor made but never delivered on. Prior to the 2010 state election the then Tasmanian state environment minister, Michelle O'Byrne, promised $6.65 million for silt removal in the Tamar River and never delivered it. There was $1 million put in that was spent on permits and all sorts of things but they never delivered. In a very cooperative way with the Launceston Flood Authority, the Launceston City Council, TasWater and others we have put together a plan that last year shifted some 242,000 cubic metres of silt and that in the next three years will continue to take away that silt accretion and promote the healthier Tamar that our community deserves.

We have $500,000 that will be provided to look at the sewerage infrastructure problem we have that also affects a healthier Tamar River. There are seven sewerage infrastructure plants in and around Launceston. It is a fairly archaic system. We are going to fund a study that charts a critical path to work out how we can get a First World sewerage infrastructure system so that at times of heavy rain we do not have sewage going into the Tamar River. The silt money and the sewerage infrastructure money will work together. Some of that money will also be used for quick wins. For example, we might build a retaining structure around Ti Tree Bend to make sure that during times of heavy rain we do not get sewage going into our river. It is a very important project for my community.

In the budget we also saw $2.7 million allocated to the Major Projects Approval Agency in Launceston. This is yet another important project announced by the Prime Minister on 15 August last year as part of the economic recovery plan for Tasmania. It is an authority that will promote more investment in Northern Tasmania, a one-stop shop for major projects based in Launceston and a single Commonwealth entry point. If someone has money to invest and they have a regulatory problem, whether it is a tax, occupational health and safety or environmental issue, we are going to help them remove obstacles impede that investment, to work with the Coordinator General, which was a promise of the Tasmanian state Liberal government at the last election, with a similar function at state level, to make sure that there is coherence in a policy sense between the way that we approach investment at a state and federal level.

As the Tasmanian representative on the coalition's Deregulation Taskforce, this is one of the most important things we can do for a community that has the highest unemployment rate in our country—I am talking about both adult and youth unemployment here—and the lowest participation rate in the country. We will benefit from the $6.5 million trial Jobs Program also announced as part of the economic recovery plan that Prime Minister Abbott put up before the last election. There is a $3,250 incentive specific to Tasmanian employers who put on someone who has been on Newstart for six months. I note also the welcome announcement in the budget of an incentive of $10,000 for employers who hire mature workers. In my community of Bass, both of those incentives will be very well received.

We have $2½ million for a mountain bike trail in Derby in the wonderful municipality of Dorset, which also extends into the Blue Tier in the electorate of my colleague the member for Lyons. I walked the first couple of kilometres of that new mountain bike trail earlier this month, with the mayor of Dorset, Barry Jarvis. It is going to be a world-class facility—some 80 kilometres of world-class mountain bike trails that will pull tourists into the that area, a depressed area of Bass, and make sure that Northern Tasmania becomes more of an entry point for our state. It is a very important project.

We have $1½ million to improve the drainage and lighting at Invermay Park—one of the most used sporting facilities in Northern Tasmania. This is where Ricky Ponting first started his career. Young people who aspire to be like Ricky Ponting will be able to use Invermay Park for many, many more weeks each year. During winter, it is often boggy and unusable. We are going to improve the drainage and the lighting so that that much used sporting facility becomes even more accessible to people in my community. Out of the $9 million that was allocated to regional airfield upgrades, we have almost $1 million of that for the Flinders Island airfield and the Cape Barren Island airfield. These remote island communities desperately need these upgrades. As we know, everything that comes onto and off Flinders and Cape Barren Island comes on and off by either air or sea, so this is a very popular project in my community.

As you can see, Deputy Speaker, this budget has a lot of good news for my community of Bass. It encapsulates a whole range of things both during the construction phase and later that will be of enduring benefit for the people of Bass. But there is much to do to ensure that the budget is repaired to make sure that we can keep doing these sorts of things into the future. There is an old adage about history repeating, and it has never been truer than in the context of the 44th Parliament. Yet, again, the Labor Party has left government with the detritus of the Australian economy in its wake. Yet, again, the Liberal Party has the task of restoring our economic fortunes, restoring our economic freedom of action. When I say 'freedom of action', I am talking here about the sort of freedom of action that former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had when the global financial crisis came along. He was able to drink deeply from the economic well left to him by the Howard government and the regular surpluses delivered by Peter Costello. He was able to drink deeply from that reservoir in order to respond to the challenges of the global economic crisis. That is what we want to do: we want to pay down debt. We want to make sure that the budget is on a sustainable footing and we want to make sure that in the future we are able to respond should there be a downturn in our international or national circumstances.

The evidence for what I am saying is compelling, yet those on the other side of the House refuse to admit the damage that they have caused. We on this side of the House will not let them forget that damage. Most Australians will have heard of Bernie Madoff and the massive Ponzi scheme that he ran in the United States for over 20 years. As we now know, Madoff's asset management scheme had no foundation to it or plan. Increasing risk was built into the scheme, which was like a deck of cards built on the hopes of gullible people.

There are some similarities there with what has been happening to the Australian economy and the Australian budget over the last six years under Labor, and then Labor-Greens, government. They told Australians not to worry about Australia's economic foundation of debt and unsustainable spending. They borrowed and borrowed, and not just against the income of current Australians but against the income of future taxpayers. Those who are going through school now will get that debt and be responsible for that debt into the future.

The day after the budget I did a live-cross to a KPMG breakfast in my home city of Launceston. The room had some 270 people in it, and we had a great discussion about the budget. About an hour later, they filled the room with young year 11 and 12 children. The analogy I drew for them was: if your parents spend unsustainably, borrow to the hilt and die with a massive debt, the laws of our country say that you are not responsible for that debt when they die. Sadly, that does not apply to government debt, because every dollar we borrow today is a dollar that has to be repaid in the future. With gross debt due to peak at $667 billion, those children who I was talking to will be responsible for that debt when they enter the workforce.

We heard from the previous speaker that Labor often likes to talk about debt as a percentage of GDP, but why are we comparing ourselves to the sick men of Europe—countries that have been spending unsustainably for decades and countries like Greece that have a debt-to-GDP ratio above 100 per cent? Why is that a benchmark that we want to apply to our country? Is it not better to pick a benchmark that is more contemporary and relevant to our circumstances? What about the economy that John Howard and Peter Costello left the country at the end of 2007 with a $20 billion surplus, money in the bank, a Higher Education Endowment Fund and a Future Fund that provided the economic freedom of action for the Labor Party to respond to the global financial crisis?

It is a matter of record that in the annual budget papers Labor never delivered a surplus in six years despite promising to do so on over 600 occasions. Key figures, including Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen, even bragged that a surplus had already been delivered by Labor. In fact, Labor left us with below-trend growth, falling resource investment and rising unemployment. The economic legacy of the former Treasurer, the member for Lilley, was $191 billion in achieved deficits, another $123 billion in deficits across the forward estimates—anticipated in the four years after they left government—and gross debt due to peak at two-thirds of a trillion dollars.

We borrow a billion dollars every month just to pay that debt. Imagine going to your bank manager and saying, 'I'd like to borrow the money that I need to pay my mortgage each month.' He would kick you out, just as the Australian people kicked the Labor Party out on 7 September last year. It is unsustainable and it has to stop. This budget puts a stop to it and sets us on a path to a sustainable surplus.

The budget situation that Labor left us was significantly worse than they chose to admit when they released the 2013 economic statement just days before the election was called. They left myriad issues that should have been addressed while they were in government, including an offshore processing black hole of $1.2 billion, a secret cut in education spending—another black hole of $1.2 billion, which we have restored—and 14,500 job cuts in the public service when they had only funded 800 redundancies, along with the Reserve Bank requiring an $8.8 billion injection in part due to Labor taking dividends from the RBA against the wishes of the RBA governor.

We have started the budget repair process, yet Labor is standing in the way. They are opposing tens of billions of dollars of savings put before the parliament, including $5 billion of savings that they themselves promised the Australian people that they would implement if they were successful. I can think of no greater deception than ruining our economy and then standing in the way of those who are trying to restore our economy, to restore the budget and put us on a sustainable path to surplus. If we do not act now, the problem becomes worse. It is like a skin cancer. That analogy I made before about comparing ourselves to Europe, it is like saying that my skin cancer is smaller than yours. The problem with skin cancers, the problem with budgetary problems is that if you do not address them they get bigger and worse over time. So I would say to those opposite, get out of the way of what we need to do and what Australia knows we need to do to restore our economic fortunes into the future.

Our economic action strategy delivered through the budget will strengthen the economy, create jobs and reduce Labor's debt by $300 billion, but only if we show resolve and all contribute to that outcome. Without our plan, Australia will keep borrowing $1 billion a month every month just to pay the interest on the debt and that will get worse. This would almost triple to $2.8 billion a month in a decade if nothing is done. This is a budget that the people in my electorate and across the country know is needed to get Australia back on track. If we act now, if we cut gross debt almost by half, we solve a problem that our children and their children potentially have to address. We reduce the deficit in a manageable way and an honest path to surplus. We take our hands out of the pockets of future generations and we create the conditions for a brighter future our children and grandchildren deserve.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian public do not play word games. They do not hedge, they do not engage in clever verbal moves that frequently dominate this demand. They are direct. They were with our side of politics last September. That is why we are on this side of the House. We respect their decision, we accept the umpire's call, but in the election two spotlights are always working the field. The focus is on the two major sides of debate, and the public watched and made up their minds. They took into account the pledges, the commitments and the promises made and their fresh memories are being used as a basis to judge this budget. The public, the same umpire that made the call with us, is speaking authoritatively about the coalition's budget and about the coalition's values as demonstrated by deed in government. Remember that before the election when you turned on the TV you would see the Prime Minister doing two things: he was either wearing a fluoro vest or he was making a promise. These days he does not wear the vest and he does not keep the promises.

I could literally fill up my entire speech recounting the long list of broken promises, but I won't. I'm going to use the speech to talk about how the budget hurts the nation and hounds the Chifley electorate. There are two critical quotes I think are important to remind the House of. One is a quote deliberately and specifically designed to create an impression in the minds of the public about how the Prime Minister would behave in government. The other is a promise built for full effect, purposely repeated, delivered right as the public were about to cast their vote. The first defining quote is this:

It is an absolute principle of democracy that governments should not and must not say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards.

That was spoken by the Prime Minister in 2011 as opposition leader. The second commitment, promise, pledge or vow uttered last September is this:

I want to give people this absolute assurance: no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to pensions and no changes to the GST.

I need not add any commentary or observation of my own. Why? Because the public has made its own mind up based on what they saw and heard. This budget has either transformed or confirmed their view of the Prime Minister. The budget shows that the Prime Minister has gone from being chief promise maker to chief promise breaker, and we can see the reaction within the public domain. After all the sweat and all the effort to sell this budget, this work has delivered nothing. The verdict does not just sit in the minds of the public; it sits on the minds of their own. It is their own side that has been revealed to have said 'the budget is a stinking carcass', and Chifley residents are telling me so too. Some of these residents spoke sharply to me when I was in government and they are now scathing of this government. One emailed:

When I last night saw and confirmed this morning on the internet that the seniors supplement of $60-plus per fortnight ie. $1,560 per annum is going to be abolished as of 1 July 2014, I decided I will never ever vote Liberal again. A government never takes anything away from age pensioners. It will give but never take away.

Let me add his earlier quote:

You will remember me from before the last federal election. Over the past 48 years, I have voted without fail for the Liberal Party both federal and state.

So within the minds of their own side and within the minds of their own voters outside this place, the budget has failed. It has stained the Prime Minister and it is set to smear everything this government touches or does over the term of this parliament. It is a budget that will be spoken about for many years to come, and rightly so.

The public is already speaking loud and clear. For example, Fairfax Media found in a survey of voters overwhelming rejection of some of its key measures: 76 per cent disapprove of the budget's cuts to public hospitals; 62 per cent reject paying more for prescriptions; 61 per cent reject the twice-yearly increase of the petrol excise; and there was substantial rejection of any move to increase the pension age to 70. And the public is sending a signal about their views of the Prime Minister. In other work conducted by Central Media, it was shown that more than two-thirds of respondents, 67 per cent—an increase of 11 percentage points—said that the PM was 'out of touch with ordinary voters'; less than one-third of voters agreed he was trustworthy; and 63 per cent—up five per cent—said he was arrogant.

The trust of the Australian public has been smashed. Their sense of fairness has not only been abused but has been stomped all over by an uncaring coalition government. We knew what was coming in this budget. We got a taste of it in the release of the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, MYEFO, before the election. In August, the independently compiled pre-election fiscal outlook showed we would have a deficit of $30 billion. By December when the coalition brought down MYEFO, the deficit blew out by an extra $17 billion. Sixty per cent of the blow-out was attributed to decisions the coalition took.

When the coalition keeps talking about debt and deficit, I did not realise their own guilt was speaking for them. When in opposition, the coalition told us we did not have a revenue problem; we had an expenditure one. In this budget they are bringing in new taxes and tax increases. When in opposition, the coalition told us not to trust Treasury figures. Now we are told we will get to a surplus under the coalition based off the same group of Treasury officials that framed previous budgets using figures that were disputed by the coalition. I do not criticise Treasury here; they are professionals—dedicated and committed. But I do seek to spotlight the duplicity of the government and, through this, seek to show why the public has rejected their first budget.

Australians for weeks if not months before the budget were told they would be equally required to join in the 'heavy lifting' to restore the budget to surplus. Now, look what is occurring. A sole parent with an income of $55,000 with two children—one in primary, one in high school—will face a $20,000 hit to their family budget. By just 2015, this family will face a 10 per cent annual hit to their current family income or more than $5,700 a year. A couple on a single income of $75,000 with two kids—one not yet in school, one in primary school—will face a $2,000 decline in annual family income 2015. By 2017-18, this family will have $7,400 less income than they would have had prior to this budget. I mention these particular groups of families because they make up a big part of the Chifley electorate that I am proud to represent in this place. As I have said numerous times since the budget announcement, the electorate of Chifley, which I represent, has been hit hard and probably harder than many others in country on so many levels.

Much has been said in this place and in the public about the impact of $7 GP tax. The insult to the Australian public was soon followed by the Treasurer referring to that impost of a GP tax as equivalent to two small beers. In defending the indefensible, the Treasurer said:

One packet of cigarettes—

Not cigars, mind you—

One packet of cigarettes cost $22. That gives you three visits to the doctor. You can spend just over $3 on a middy of beer, so that's two middies of beer to go to the doctor.

It's just bizarre to say that in a public space.

In the two weeks since the budget I have had cases of long-time, long-serving doctors come up to me and say that the GP tax is simply an attack on the medical profession. One GP told me last week that his practice does not have the resources necessary to become a tax collection agency for the Abbott government. Then there is the issue of security with cash now being kept on premises, and any new costs to be borne by small practices in changing their security arrangements. What about the valuable time lost with staff forced to travel to the bank to deposit that cash? These small businesses, these GP practices, will line up to be the first to dispute the coalition's claim that it is both the best friend of Medicare and small business. Practices in Mount Druitt, Woodcroft, Glendenning, Rooty Hill and Blacktown have seen drops in the number of patients presenting for help—people scared away from health because of the GP tax. These clinics are SMSing patients reminding them to see the doctor because the GP tax has not come in yet.

Many of the GPs in my area, especially the ones who practise in residential areas, are close to retirement age. They stay in practice to help neighbourhoods that they know will struggle to get medical help close by—suburbs like Whalan, Tregear and Emerton already struggle with a lack of local GP services. Any drop in patient numbers coming through the doors of GPs will bring forward decisions for retirement. They cannot afford to bear those losses; nor should they carry those losses into retirement. The GP tax will not only make health care less affordable, but it will make it less accessible. This week we see reports that imposing on struggling families a $7 hit every time they visit a GP will threaten immunisation rates, and that is a very dangerous move, but that, sadly, is a reality.

What about the billions cut from hospitals in this budget? State governments were already making terrible decisions when it came to health care, for instance, in Mount Druitt—an area where heart disease is a major killer. The New South Wales Liberal government is shutting down our cardiac ward and replacing it with a methadone clinic. We have many avenues available to help those afflicted with substance abuse, but we do not have enough to help us with heart disease. Now the state government has made that decision, it is expected to manage with billions less for its health budget. Remember that in MYEFO the Abbott government callously cut the funds that were expected to be used in securing an MRI for Mount Druitt Hospital, which had been fought long and hard for. I shudder to think what comes next as a result of budget pressure that the Abbott government is loading onto its state counterparts.

It is not that I need to be reminded, but today I looked back over the last census of the Chifley electorate conducted in 2011 at the unemployment rates. Back then, national unemployment was running at 5.6 per cent, while local unemployment stood at nine per cent. It has always been the case that unemployment in our area runs higher than the national average. Chifley's unemployment rate continues well above that average, and youth unemployment is much worse. It is not only a heartless move but a dangerous one to target young unemployed in this budget. It is simply unconscionable to say to an unemployed person under 30 in our area: 'Bad luck if you haven't got a job and, by the way, we won't allow you access to unemployment benefits for six months.' Who among the unemployed can last six months without help while they are trying to find work? What parents these days have the resources to carry an unemployed child during that time, especially with the changes to family tax benefits, the GP tax and the fuel tax straining budgets. What about those young people not lucky enough to have parents to support them? Telling young people still residing at home that they will have to move elsewhere for a work-for-the-dole program is not the answer. It will just not work the way people think it will.

This is a budget that threatens to pressure families beyond limit. Things like the de-regulation of university fees and the huge debt swamp loaded up on the young are causing concerns in the minds of middle Australia who worry about the future of their young and the next generation. That generation will be forced to carry debt well into their working years and will be handicapped in their efforts at the start of their working lives.

Chifley motorists, among all other Western Sydney motorists, will also feel the pain from this budget as fuel excise indexation makes its unwanted return after being frozen for 13 years by then Prime Minister John Howard. On my way to this place this week, I passed service stations where signs heralded unleaded fuel at $1.60 a litre, which is much higher than the point at which the excise was frozen. But its reintroduction will bit and bite again not only when the motorist pays at the browser but also when they buy anything that is dependent on transport moving them to market. The double-whammy effect on households will be that costs will be sent down the line from transport companies, who will also be slugged with the twice yearly fuel indexation. Those costs will flow on to everything you buy. If you try to sidestep that cost by using public transport, you will be hit again because the Abbott government refuses to fund public transport infrastructure that could be used to move people, particularly across Western Sydney. Labor are opposed to fuel excise indexation.

The anger that remains in the community more than two weeks after this budget is clear evidence of its unfairness. It is a budget that squarely puts low- or no-income earners, the elderly or the vulnerable squarely in its sights. Pensioners have been cruelly lined up for attention by this Abbott government. In my home state alone, $450 million in joint funding with the New South Wales government has been axed across the forward estimates that was intended for concessions for pensioners on transport and for council rates, water and electricity bills. To strip pensioners of these simple but vital means of assistance is cruel and it is little wonder state governments are howling about the burdens suddenly placed on them by the Commonwealth. My electorate office has been swamped and people are furious. Pensioners are angry over the fact that the seniors supplement, a vital leg-up for a couple, will be wiped out from September. And there will be the sting in the tail of deeming draw-downs on superannuation and indexation changes that will rob pensioners of future earnings. Welcome to retirement, Abbott government style.

The pain of this budget, the unfairness of this budget and the way that it affects low and middle Australia yet leaves those well off untouched and potentially gaining under a Paid Parental Leave Scheme that is squarely unfair in its architecture and its operation will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the public, and they should not be forced to bear this cost.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It goes without saying that there is a great deal at stake in the debate we are having in this place. What is at stake is the future of our country, the future of our children and the future of our children's children. That is why I rise to add my comments to the debate because I believe sincerely that the decisions the government have made in this budget are decisions made to preserve the future of our children and our children's children. There are clearly difficult decisions that have been made in this budget, but they are absolutely the right decisions. We have not taken any difficult decisions lightly, but we have taken them responsibly. We know that if we do not stop the reckless spending and if we do not cut the Labor waste then the future is looking very grim for all Australians.

You cannot speak about this budget without putting into proper context the position that Australia finds itself in after six years of Labor. As much as members opposite would like everybody to have a significant case of amnesia and forget about the absolute waste, reckless spending and complete mismanagement of the economy, we do not have that sense of amnesia that the Labor Party would like. I do not think that members opposite, when they formed government six years ago, consciously decided to take a budget surplus of $20 billion and a $60 billion Future Fund and to turn that into $50 billion deficits and over $300 billion of debt rising to $667 billion. I would not suggest that they were that callous that they deliberately sought to do that. But their complete and utter incompetence is something that they should hang their heads in shame over. The fact that we have members opposite now getting up and criticising the remedial measures that are only required because of that incompetence is actually breathtaking for me. In any other form of society, in any other organisation, if you had the arsonists criticising those who were there to fix the problem, there would be absolute condemnation and there will be absolute condemnation for this approach.

So putting into context where we were at when we inherited the budget from the former government, let us consider some statistics. Labor delivered $191 billion in deficits plus $123 billion in deficits over the next four years. Indeed, today, because of Labor's record, we pay a billion dollars of interest every month. And without remedial action, that will rise to $3 billion of interest every month. So, in effect, Australia, if it were a household, or the Australian government, if it were a household, is paying the interest on its mortgage with its credit card. That is what members opposite are advocating for every time they criticise the remedial measures taken in this budget.

Members opposite have not offered a mea culpa for the absolutely outrageous state in which they left our budget. Members opposite do not even admit that there is a problem with the budget. I suppose that is how they can justify blocking $40 billion in savings measures in public pronouncements and in the Senate. Crucially, of those $40 billion of savings that are being blocked, $5 billion of savings were those identified by the Labor Party and taken to the previous election by them as policy. Clearly, if you cannot admit there is a problem then you cannot be a part of the solution and that is the message to the Australian people. The Labor Party have vacated the space or repairing the budget and, every time they criticise remedial measures undertaken in this budget without offering solutions, without offering counter savings, that is what they are saying to the Australian people.

Yesterday or two days ago, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition came out, in effect, promising $16 billion of additional spending in the foreign aid budget. It is outrageous. The Labor Party have now adopted an approach where talking about tens of billions of dollars is just a throw-away line saying 'we will just work out the numbers later on'. That was the approach of the last six years; that is not the approach of this government. The days of the Wayne Swanesque approach to the budget, which is to promise surpluses until you are blue in the face and then deliver deficits are over.

This is the first honest budget that Australians have seen in six years and that is why I was elected in my great seat of Deakin. People spoke to me ad nauseam prior to the election about the worrying trajectory of debt that this country was taking on. And when we talk about the future of our children, what generation wants to be responsible for gifting to the next generation an inheritance of debt? How dare members opposite lecture us for taking the necessary decisions to fix their budget messes while completely ignoring that simple fact. We did not make the mess. We are not the arsonists. We did not start the fire but we will put it out and we will fix it because that is what we have been elected to do.

Our budget, a part of the government's economic action strategy, will ensure that debt, which was projected—if no remedial action was taken—to rise to $667 billion, will be nearly $300 billion less. This is the prescription that the Australian people voted for in September last year. And, unlike the Labor Party, we will not squib the challenge. We are repairing the budget to protect our living standards, to prepare for an ageing population, to ensure that we can respond to the unexpected events in the future and to provide for future tax relief. We are not making these changes so we can squirrel more money away; we are making these changes for the future prosperity of our nation. Australia has had an enviable economic record in the last 15 years. In the late 90s we were able to successfully deal with the Asian financial crisis. In 2007-08 we were able to successfully deal with the GFC, not withstanding a lot of waste.

Why were we able to weather those two storms? It was because we had put money away for a rainy day. Like any household or business, you have to have some money set aside for a rainy day, and, at the moment, I hate to say to Australians that we do not have that. If there were to be extraordinarily unexpected economic headwinds, Australia is not ideally placed. It is certainly not placed, as it was in 2007, to address those.

We are not just on an economic frolic to stash money aside for grandiose plans like the Labor Party. We are doing what is fundamentally right for the country and fundamentally right for the prosperity of our children. Alternatively, Labor would have the government spend our country to ruin. I have spoken about the $40 billion of savings that the Labor Party have pronounced they will be blocking. There were significant black holes and time bombs in the forward estimates. The Labor Party, in their utter dishonesty, went to the former election claiming that there would be a surplus in 2016-17, and then we find out that, if remedial action was not taken, Australia would suffer another 10 years of budget deficits—16 years of budget deficits.

There is no household or business in this country that could spend more than it earns for 16 consecutive years and still be viable, but members opposite do not care about that; they do not understand it. So what are we doing? We are fundamentally ensuring that the long-term spending trajectory of the budget is improved. To talk about cuts is wrong. The reality of this budget is that it sets the medium- to long-term spending trajectory of the budget and makes it more sustainable.

When we talk about health reforms, the government are delivering record funding for hospitals. In health, we are increasing overall spending by more than $10 billion, or 16 per cent, to 2017-18. In Victoria, importantly, hospital funding will increase each year from $3.6 billion to $4.7 billion. It just does not grow at more than 10 per cent a year, which Labor put in as a line item in the budget. If that trajectory were followed, health spending would skyrocket from $15 billion to $40 billion. We know members opposite were not necessarily expecting to win the last election, so they did not feel too concerned about having these very grandiose and undeliverable promises in the forward estimates. If they did unexpectedly get elected, I am sure what was going through their mind was, 'We'll just deal with that at the time.'

At the same time as increasing this funding, we are asking Australians to make a modest contribution to their own health care with a GP co-payment. I get very angry when I see the indignation of members opposite when they talk about the co-payment. For the most vulnerable people, the highest possible liability per annum that they will be subject to is $70 for 10 visits. Those same people right now are spending an additional $550 each year per household because of the carbon tax. So where is the consistency? A carbon tax of $550 is completely justifiable in the minds of the Labor Party, but a $70 contribution per annum to your health care is not.

One of the proudest things—and I will not walk away from this—for me in the budget is the establishment of the Medical Research Future Fund to which the GP co-payments will contribute for the next six years to build up the corpus of the fund to $20 billion, which will then provide an everlasting dividend to medical research in this country. The absolute short sightedness of the opposition in this respect is very disappointing. Why are people living longer today? They are living longer today because of the work of medical researchers in times gone by. Why is the mitigation of health problems occurring? Because of the medical research of yesteryear. So the least we can do in this generation is to ensure that we give our medical researchers—where we have a competitive advantage; we have the best researchers in the world—the resources to find the cures of the future to improve the life expectancy of our population, the liveability of all Australians and, ultimately, reductions in health costs into the future.

In education reform, funding will increase every year under this budget. None of that changes. Forget the scaremongering of the opposition. Education spending is increasing. Not only that; reforms to higher education will ensure that more people, people from less advantaged backgrounds, will have better access to higher education.

I want to finish by talking about some statistics. When I started speaking, I said that in order to grasp this budget you have to understand the context in which it is being delivered. As much as members opposite would like to forget the last six years, forget the waste and profligacy, we need to appreciate that context. There is another context that we need to understand about our entire system. In 1964, when an average income for an Australian was $26,000, in today's terms, government spent three per cent of gross domestic product on welfare payments. In 2014, average incomes have increased to $66,000. You would expect welfare spending to have declined—no. It now consumes nine per cent of GDP. Nearly half, 48 per cent, of all Australian households make no net contribution through their taxes. Clearly, generous spending on welfare, health and other programs is something that Australia should and does aspire to. But a country, no matter how rich, that continues to run deficits while spending ever increasing amounts on entitlements is headed for certain disaster. So some changes to our society will be made. I believe these changes protect the most vulnerable and, most importantly, put our country onto a sustainable footing—something which the Labor Party are not interested in. They have vacated the space in that respect.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is an important opportunity each year for members of this place to talk in the appropriations debate about the budget that has been presented to the nation in that year. This is important because budgets, by their very nature, are not simply the dry tallying of figures or assessment of income and expenditure; they are, indeed, a description of the priorities and the view of the nation held by the government of the day. Given the budget that was brought down in May by the new Abbott government, it would not surprise the chamber that, for an area like mine, we have grave concerns about, and take serious exception to, the priorities that are set out in this budget and also to the view of Australia that is encapsulated by the way those priorities are constructed and put together in the budget.

I will go to quite a few of matters, but I want to address one matter directly that I did not have in my notes, which the previous speaker has just raised in terms of his lack of understanding of how members of the Labor Party can be concerned about the Medicare co-payment and, at the same time, be happy for the cost impact of the carbon price to remain on households. His bemusement by that position completely fails to recognise that one of the reasons we are supportive of the structures we put in place for a carbon price is that we provided a household assistance package which ensured that those who are at the most vulnerable end of our community, in particular, were protected from the cost impacts of the flow-through of a carbon price. I notice the current government has not dismantled it. We did not put an extra impost on families and households without having a package in place to provide assistance for them to manage it. This is the big difference. Families are now facing a Medicare co-payment, on top of things like additional fuel costs and changes to their payment entitlements, for which they are getting no compensation. It is an issue that the previous member needs to have a closer look at if he is still bemused by that position.

He also went to the issue of the budget's financial position. I would point out to him that it was not a case, as he described it, of the sacking of Rome at the end of the Labor government in terms of the nature of the financial position. In fact, we left this country with a triple-A credit rating. That is unprecedented, and it was a very important indication that, as many nations acknowledged, we had managed the nation through one of the most difficult international times during the global financial crisis in a way that meant that our financials were on a strong footing and the impacts on things like employment that make a real difference to people's lives had been ameliorated by the sorts of measures that we had put in place. Many countries were looking to Australia to see exactly what we had done and why we had managed so well through that process.

Of course, all governments always have a responsibility to look to the sustainability of their budgets over the longer term. All governments do that. The reality is that in the lead-up to the election the current Prime Minister was asked time and time again by journalists, community members and so forth: if you are saying that there is a budget problem and something has got to be done about it, what exactly are you going to do? He constantly made assurances about the things that he would not do in creating his solutions to longer term budget sustainability, and he made them pretty clearly. That is why people are white-hot angry about what has actually been put in place in this budget. They are angry in my area as well.

The member for Throsby and I have had a lot of comment and contact at our offices from people who were particularly concerned about the Medicare co-payment. It has been the case that we have valued our universal healthcare system in this nation for many decades now. It is such an important part of the social fabric of this nation that those opposite and their leaders have always declared that they are, indeed, the 'best friends that Medicare has ever had'. They know it is absolutely untenable to say anything else to the Australian community, because we do value the fact that in this country it is your Medicare card that will determine your access to health care not your credit card. You only have to talk to the older generation who remember the pre-universal health care days where people were struggling to pay off massive debts that they ran up to their general practitioners during periods of illness to understand this.

This is an underpinning social support network in this country that has been well supported for a long time. Australians are not fools. They know that the co-payment system will dismantle the universality of that system, and they are not going to stand for it. Stephen Jones, the member for Throsby, and I organised an opportunity for people to come together in Wollongong on the weekend to have a talk about the impacts that this decision, this GP tax, would have locally on the community. Over 300 people came together within less than a week to express their grave concerns about it. We were joined by a young doctor who is in training who indicated that the university based doctors who are in training have a national association, and that national association had joined together with that hotbed of radicalism, the Australian Medical Association, to indicate their opposition to the GP tax. Speakers opposite might one after the other say, 'This is just those terrible Labor people. They don't understand the reality.' What they need to understand is they are also telling that to almost the entire medical profession who are also rejecting the GP tax as a policy implementation out of the budget. In my own area, the Illawarra Mercury spoke to some local doctors and they repeated exactly the same concerns.

We have spent quite a long time now in this country working in one of the most important areas of medical intervention. That is early detection and prevention. Those are schemes—for example, across cancers and chronic health issues—that we need to address in order to stop the expense at the other end where you get people in acute and diabolical health situations putting the pressure on the most expensive interventions. You get prevention and early detection right and not only do people have a better outcome and a better quality of life; it is actually an efficient and more financially sensible way to go.

The foundation of prevention and early intervention is the general practice, having a strong relationship with your GP, going regularly and making sure you participate in all the sorts of screening and opportunities there are. If people, particularly those on fixed or low incomes, have an instance of illness and think: 'I've got a couple of days to go till the pay comes in. I've got 10 bucks in the purse. I have to get milk and bread to get me through. I can't go to the GP; I'm going to put it off,' that will be a real decision that people will be making, and that is not what we should be supporting. It will not achieve and will run absolutely counter to all of the interventions that we have been making over recent years to try to get the health of our nation on a more effective footing by getting into identifying illnesses quickly and early and treating them effectively.

People are white hot with anger about the GP tax and, for all the valiant efforts at defence from those opposite, I have no doubt that they are hearing exactly the same thing in their own communities, because it is really bad policy. They cannot even put the argument—the straw horse—that it is about addressing the budget deficit that they doubled before halving, because it is not going to address the budget deficit. It is going into this specific long-term medical research task. Nobody objects to medical research and nobody objects to the investments in finding the cures for the future—of course we do not. But you do not do that off the backs, pockets and purses of the ill and sick. That is absolutely the wrong way to go about achieving that outcome.

Across the board, obviously one of the very clear things that the Prime Minister said time and time again before the election was that there will be no changes to pension, and what do we see now in the budget? We see a proposal to change the way in which pensions are indexed in a way that will ensure pensioners see their increases in the pension over the future be much smaller than they necessarily would have been, because they are going back to indexing by the CPI. This is to come in in 2017, and the government is saying we will go to an election before then. If it is the case that you want to take that to an election, take it to an election. Do not build it into your budget papers in order to claim the credit for it but not actually have told people before the election that that is what you are intending to put into place.

And don't even get me started—I am talking to my local councils, as I am sure many people are—about the flow-on effects of the cuts to funding to the state governments for all the pensioner concessions that are made available and how that is going to impact on people in terms of all sorts of costs across utilities, council rates and so forth. So no changes to pensions—absolutely a lie, absolutely misleading, before the election, on what was actually going to happen in the very first budget.

The same, obviously, for changes to family tax benefit and the impacts on families. In terms of the family budget, my area has one of the highest commuter corridors in the country, Wollongong being an hour south of Sydney. We have tens of thousands of people who travel to Sydney and south-western and western Sydney for work. By and large many of them use a car for that purpose, so the changes to the new fuel tax will have a very significant impact on their family budgets given that quite often it is more than one person in the family travelling. That is a really significant effect for them.

Finally, I want to touch on an area that is also of direct concern to our region, and that is youth unemployment. I am not going to go into it in too much detail, because I had an opportunity in the matter of public importance before the House yesterday to talk about this a bit. If you are a parent with a child over 18, you would not want to be any of the members opposite going out and talking to those families. I am a mother of sons who are in their 20s. To think that if someone under 30 were to become unemployed, they would get no income support and would have to go back home and rely on mum and dad to support them up to the age of 30 is incredible. That does not even begin to acknowledge the very many young people who do not have a family whom they can rely on to go to for support if they suddenly find themselves unemployed and have to face months with no money coming in. It is extraordinary.

The question was put to the Treasurer in question time: what do you actually expect them to do? To me, the Treasurer looked confounded at that. I do not think he understands the reality for people under 30 and the fact some may have no-one to go to other than perhaps a charity to help keep a roof over their heads or food on the table. Then they say, 'They need to learn or earn.' Great, we all want people learning or earning, but what if you already have one qualification and you are not entitled to an exemption from the fees? Where are you supposed to find the money to pay for a course? You will not be given any income support. You are supposed to go and learn but you do not have the capacity to pay the fees that will be required let alone find a job. You are not going to have any money to travel to get to interviews or to dress and prepare for job interviews and so forth. It is an astonishing proposition and it is both cruel and heartless. I think it reflects the very foundation of where this budget is aiming to hit and punish people in order to address the perceived problem that the government wants to address.

If you want to talk about getting the budget back into surplus and those sorts of longer term tasks, we can have a conversation about that. We have some suggestions. Perhaps the government could put off their gold-plated Paid Parental Leave Scheme for a while—there is a thought. I think secretly, and perhaps less secretly on occasions, some of those oppose would profoundly agree with us about that proposal. There are options, but what they have chosen to do as a government reflects their priorities and they will be judged on that. I would suggest that there is going to be a lot of pain ahead for members in having those conversations with their communities because their communities will not endorse the values that are at the heart of this budget and will feel doubly ripped off, because they were not told before the election what that was going to be about.

Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking to these appropriation bills. The sense of denial from the members opposite is absolutely staggering. The Abbott government's first budget is the medicine we might not want to take but it is necessary if we want to get the state of the nation's finances to get better. As I have said in this place previously, my nonna often told to me as a child that if the medicine tasted good, the patient would never want to get better. On that rationale, the Labor Party must love being sick because they certainly love making budgets sick. Six years of Labor in office delivered $191 billion in record budget deficits, $123 billion forecast in cumulative deficits and gross debt heading towards a staggering $667 billion, and if nothing was done that would blow out even further by 2017-18 to a deficit of at least $30 billion.

Far from being impressive numbers, these are disastrous numbers, all delivered by a prime ministerial candidate who in the lead-up 2007 election described himself as a fiscal conservative. I shudder to think what would have happened to the debt if former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had been a fiscal progressive. What sort of debt levels would we be looking at right now if he had not made the comment that he was a fiscal conservative? Labor's debt performance is even worse when notice is taken of the fact that when they left office in 1996 —and I was here then; I have had the wonderful and rare opportunity of representing two federal electorates—Australia had a $20 billion surplus and $50 billion in the bank. Without the coalition's plan, Australia will be forced to continue borrowing a billion dollars a month every single month, and that is just to pay off the interest. But those opposite do not want to talk about that. As my parliamentary colleague and fellow Queenslander, the honourable Steven Ciobo, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, said in the House yesterday: to put it in household budgetary terms, that is the equivalent of paying your household debts with your credit card. It is ludicrous, it is not responsible and it is not sustainable.

If we do not act now, in ten year's time interest payments on Australia's debt will be a staggering $2.8 billion a month. Right now, that is $1 billion that Australian taxpayers have to find every month just to pay off the interest on Labor's debt, and that is $12 billion a year. Just think of that, $12 billion a year. What would be the positive impacts that level of expenditure would have on our roads? Just think how much NDIS funding that would provide, how many dental services, how many positive employment programs. Just think of all those skills training courses that could be provided to get Australians up with the skills and knowledge that they need to get jobs. But we cannot do these things when we want—and we need to thank Labor for leaving this enormous debt.

These are the facts that Labor does not want the people of Australia to know. In many respects, Labor's astonishing level of denial in relation to the budgetary mess they have left behind can be likened to naughty children caught raiding the pantry—hands in the cookie jar, mouths full of lollies and chocolate smeared all over their faces—while at the same time they are trying to deny that they were ever even there. This analogy, however, does not actually capture the gravity or the extent of Labor's delusion.

There is a bizarre sort of political strategy to Labor's denial. Why try and defend the indefensible? Which is what the Labor's budgetary performances have been over the last six years, absolutely indefensible. Instead, what Labor sought to do was to flip the issue on its head and to make outlandish claims—that even they cannot believe—along the lines of they left the budget in a healthy state and that we do not have a budget emergency. They continually deny that there is a budget emergency. If Labor's woeful fiscal performance of the past six years was not enough to prove that they are unfit for office then their current grossly irresponsible short-term political gains just confirm it.

The government has committed itself to reducing spending in a slow and measured way. But rather than taking their medicine and being part of fixing the mess they made, Labor has committed itself to blocking key measures that are worth now over $40 billion over the forward estimates. This is a strangely bizarre and very schizophrenic stance for Labor to adopt given that their very infamous Treasurer in office, Treasurer Wayne Swan, so often spoke in the last six years about 'living within our means'. He would say it over and again, 'living within our means'. But that was never something that Labor actually did in office. Their focus always was on talking the big game, but they never ever played it. At least they claimed that they were trying to but they never had the guts to go out there and make the real decisions, the tough decisions that would be good for the nation in the long term.

Something that stands out in stark contrast is the change that the Abbott government's first budget set in place. It is a fact that we had the guts to face the mess that Labor left and start the difficult process. Yes, it is a difficult process; it is a very hard process. By way of contrast, Labor has no alternative policy position other than its obsessive commitment to keeping Australia in debt. They had no plan in office and they have got no plan out of office. It is so extraordinary to hear them speak and it is so obvious to all that they have absolutely no plan except playing the negativity game.

This leads me to the next issue I would like to highlight—that is, the level of trauma that the Australian people have endured under the Rudd-Gillard and then Rudd circus when Labor was in office—and it was trauma. They were subjected to a level of trauma that they are still recovering from.

It is widely acknowledged and accepted that Labor in office during the last six years delivered one of the worst governments in this country's history. As I spoke with the people in my electorate leading into and during the federal election campaign last year and in my ongoing conversations with them this year, they are still traumatised. This trauma makes our job that much harder. We have to do better in communicating to the Australian people exactly what we are doing, and how and why we are cleaning up Labor's mess.

I am already on the public record as saying governments need to stop playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Australian public as to what is in and what is not in the budget. People are sick of these games. They have been played by all sides of politics for far too long. There has to be a better process where we have closer integration between the parliament and the executive in the development of the budget, and the reporting of these processes should be formulated in the future to provide certainty.

To that end, I was concerned about the debt levy when it was first mooted in the media and was the subject of a speculated level of $80,000, which in my view would have been grossly unfair. To those commentators from the left and the right, who chose to misinterpret my comments as pandering to high-income earners in my electorate, I say this: the only thing more dangerous than a little bit of knowledge about something is no knowledge about it at all. The median personal income level in my electorate is $45,084.

I am a great believer in the willingness of the Australian people to put their shoulder to the wheel. When they see a job that needs to be done, that we need to make the tough decisions and structural reforms have to be undertaken through this budget, it is a task that is worthy of them, and many people in my electorate understand that there are tough times ahead. They understand that they need to work with us to put Australia back on the right track.

We cannot deny that we have an ageing population. We cannot deny that our level of expenditure exceeds our level of earnings. Again, it is not sustainable. This job is made that much harder by Labor's scare campaign, which, far from being designed to be part of the solution, is focused squarely on ensuring that Australia will always be mired in the debt that they created.

In taking the medicine that this budget delivers for Australia, we want to be in a position where, as a nation, we are not comparing ourselves to the worst, and those opposite always want us to compare ourselves to the worst; we want to compare ourselves to the best. In terms of comparing ourselves to the worst, we are right up there as being the worst or very close to it. In terms of the fastest growing debt amount from the IMF Article IV assessment of advanced economies, for the six years between 2012 and 2018, Australia is forecast to have the third largest increase in net debt—that is in percentage terms of GDP amongst profiled IMF advanced economies. That puts us ahead of the likes of Sweden, Canada and the USA. So, thanks to Labor, we are getting the bronze medal—yes, the bronze medal for the fastest-growing net debt—probably not an award that we would really want. For the six years to 2018, Australia is forecast to have the largest percentage increase in spending. Again, thanks to Labor, we have won the gold medal for the fastest-growing level of expenditure.

Our spending is growing faster than the likes of Korea, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. This is Labor's legacy, because of their big-spending promises and their waste. As I pointed out earlier, the longer we stay on this course, the more vulnerable the nation will become to global economic shocks. Without a fiscal buffer, governments are unable to respond to future crises, the pain of which falls on the poor and the disadvantaged—precisely the people Labor would have us believe they serve and protect.

More directly, for the electorate of Brisbane, I am really pleased to confirm the Abbott government's responsible management of the budget has resulted in funding for all of the election promises and for all of them to be delivered. These projects are to commence in 2014-15 and include the GPS Rugby Club Ashgrove facilities upgrade of $200,050,000; an upgrade to the Broncos Leagues Club ground redevelopment, which will be a huge community development as well as a sports training facility for $5 million; the Brisbane Inner North Sporting Community's facility upgrade of 750,000; and a wonderful grant of $125,000 to OzHarvest, which is responsible for picking up food from restaurants and cafes, and delivering it to services that provide food for the homeless. That is a total of $6.12 million.

There has also been some infrastructure spending. The Wooloowin and Milton intersections in Brisbane will benefit from infrastructure investment program spending to the tune of about $1 million. They are very dangerous intersections, particularly the one in Wooloowin, which has been the scene of many accidents.

The Abbott government will be investing close to $50 billion in infrastructure across Australia over seven years to deliver vital transport infrastructure for the 21st century. In Queensland, we are investing $10.3 billion over 2013-14 to 2018-19, plus an additional $3.1 billion from 2019-20. Our investment includes $6.7 billion to fix the Bruce Highway over 10 years to 2022-23.

There has been an additional $200 million in Black Spot funding over the period 2015-16, and this will be very welcome. From this, Queensland will receive an additional $20.3 million in the 2015-16 year. It will also receive the same amount in the 2016-17 year.

It is a tough budget. Regrettably, every time the coalition comes to office after Labor has been in power there is a fiscal mess to clean up. I say this to the people of Brisbane: do not fall for the Labor lies. They deceived you when they were in office for six years and they are deceiving you again now. The facts are these: instead of being slashed to the bone, welfare spending continues to rise by 2.5 per cent annually in real terms until 2017-18. Far from the brutal and cruel cuts to schools that Bill Shorten has denounced, Commonwealth funding of government schools in 2018 will be 36 per cent higher in real terms than this year and more than double its level in 2003. And in the health area there will be real spending on hospitals, and the 2018-19 budget will be increased from 40 per cent to 50 per cent higher than it was in 2002-03. The pension supplement will also continue to be paid to eligible pensioners.

We need to have policy reform, and currently the cost of the age pension is projected to increase by 70 per cent over the next decade to almost $40 billion a year. We have to make sure that we have funding for pensions and other programs and, like all governments around the world, the coalition will continue to make sure that we are on a sustainable path. (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.