Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to make some comments about the adequacy of the provisions in the government’s budget approach to family and community services through the Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation (2006 Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2006. I have deep concerns that the government has missed an opportunity to address the significant issues that face many of the most disadvantaged in our community, and I will go through some of those shortly. First, I want to quote the Welfare Rights Network from budget night, when they said:

... we can at least be thankful for the small mercy that there are no new cuts or significant reductions in payments or conditions this year.

I am deeply concerned that that is a pretty sad indictment of the so-called lucky country. Some went on to say:

... whilst this Budget provides large tax relief of $119 per week for a person earning $2,900 per week, payments for parents and for people with disabilities who will be forced onto Newstart Allowance after 1 July 2006, will be slashed by $29 and $46 a week respectively. We should also recognise that the 30% of individuals who have insufficient earnings to be taxed will gain no benefit from these tax cuts.

There are two million people in this country who do not have an acceptable standard of living. Some are born into families that are struggling; others are people whose lives have been turned upside down by illness, disability, loss of a job or family separation. I believe that, in a country with a $10.3 billion surplus this year, we should have been investing that surplus much more wisely than by delivering tax cuts to people who generally have enough money to get by. We could be doing more to help people who do not.

We have been told time and time again that the ageing of our population makes the age pension system unaffordable. We have been told that we must instead provide generous tax concessions to superannuation so that Australians can fund their own retirements, but modelling done by the Greens shows that for middle- and high-income earners the cost of tax concessions we give to superannuation is actually higher than the costs of providing for an age pension.

The government spent billions in the budget increasing the retirement incomes of superannuants but did nothing to increase the age pension, which many retirees currently survive on. Superannuation has a role to play in topping up the age pension, but an adequate age pension is and will remain the foundation on which Australia’s retirement income system is based. It is the generosity of the age pension that should be the government’s priority, not the tax concessions granted to Australia’s wealthy retirees.

How much extra personal income tax revenue would the government have collected if they had done things differently? Our estimates are about $9.3 billion for the 2006-07 financial year and $10.1 billion in 2007-08. If they had also done things differently with superannuation, we calculate there would be another $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion in the following financial years. This is a significant amount of money that I argue would have been better invested in dealing with some of the major issues of disadvantage that we have in this country and in helping others who have fewer advantages in our society.

Let us look at carers. Estimates by Access Economics suggest that carers contribute about $30 billion per year to our economy through the care that they provide. You would have thought that we could invest some of that back into supporting carers and the people who they care for. For example, with regard to supported accommodation, we unfortunately do not know the numbers of people with unmet needs in this country, because various states and the Commonwealth do not collect the data. We have a bit more of an understanding in Western Australia, and it is hundreds and hundreds of people who have unmet needs for supported accommodation, and I understand that it is higher in various states around the country. We should be investing in providing that accommodation.

There is also a crisis in respite care, particularly in regional areas. I heard just yesterday a story of a mother in Esperance who ended up going and sitting in the local MP’s office until she got respite care for her son. Surely, in a country awash in surplus, we could have been investing that money in providing more supported accommodation and respite for people with disabilities and, of course, for their carers. I do not think that is too much to ask. Then we look at what happened just a couple of months ago when the government moved to reduce back pay for people caring for children and people caring for adults, reducing it from 52 weeks and 26 weeks respectively down to 12 weeks, for a saving of $106 million over four years. The government gave a little bit back with their bonus payments for carers, but that does not make up for the money they took away in back pay—another thing they could have been investing in through the budget to family and community services. ACOSS, the Australian Council of Social Service, has estimated and recommended that a boost of at least 20 per cent should be made to the carers budget.

If we look at child care, we see that there was money in the budget for child care. While I think money invested in child care is a good idea, and it was a start, it did not go far enough and it did not address the issue of long day care, the quality of care or the provision of capital grants to community based day care centres, which provide a high quality of care and are worthy of support by the government.

A particular area I have deep concerns about—and which I know a wide section of the community has concerns about—is funding for affordable housing. There was not a significant increase in funding. I think it is fair to say that there is a looming national crisis in housing affordability. I think the benefits of investing in affordable housing, public housing and community housing are manifold. A recent Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report on the value of community housing and public housing articulated and argued—just by the statistics—a very good case for why public housing and community housing are so important. This type of housing is provided for people on low incomes, where some people are paying up to 30 per cent of their income on rent and are forced to live in low-rent areas where jobs and transport are difficult to access. Providing housing support for people in those areas is particularly important.

The stock of social housing under the Commonwealth-state agreement has fallen 32 per cent in real terms from 1996, resulting in an 11 per cent fall in stock between 1996 and 2005. Over the last five years the number of households assisted each year has fallen from nearly 40,000 in 2001 to fewer than 28,000 in 2004-05—a decline of more than 30 per cent. While there is some growth in funding in the agreement over the next two years, this will be at less than half the rate of the expected rate of inflation. This means reduced funding for social housing in real terms and will leave more than 200,000 social housing applicants wondering if they will ever have an affordable place to live.

When we look at the statistics in the reports, we see that 81 per cent of main income earners in public housing were people on a government pension or a benefit of some sort—clearly in need of low-rent housing support. Forty-one per cent of the tenants were aged between 45 and 64, and 18 per cent were aged between 65 and 74—again, a section of our population that clearly needs housing support. With both public housing and community housing, it was very clear from the statistics that, through this support, people’s quality of life had improved. Many people said that it had allowed them to find a better job and to find space and time to train and to improve their qualifications. They also said that they felt that it had improved the quality of their life significantly and had turned their life around. Fifty-seven per cent of people living in the housing said that they could not afford private rent and that this housing provided secure tenure and promoted a sense of community. And isn’t that what we are trying to build in our country—a sense of community? So I am very disappointed that more money was not invested in housing.

Then we move on to the issue of Indigenous housing. The statistics show—and I have not heard these statistics disputed—that around $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion needs to be invested in Aboriginal housing to bring it up to any level of equality and standard that non-Aboriginal Australia would expect. Of course, we did not see that level of investment in Aboriginal housing. We are still seeing figures of between 15 and 20 people being crowded into three-bedroom, one-bathroom houses in Aboriginal communities. How anyone could expect or demand—as some people are doing—that Aboriginal communities turn their lives around, when they are living in such absolutely atrocious circumstances is beyond me. We need to be seriously investing in Aboriginal housing.

Then there is the issue of Aboriginal health. We all know the appalling statistics in Aboriginal health—the 17-year age gap and the worst statistics in many of the health areas. There was a modest $25 million increased allocation to Aboriginal health. This goes nowhere near the estimated $250 million to $570 million that is needed per annum to deal with primary health, and no overall plan was articulated. Tom Calma, in one of the many excellent speeches that he has given recently, said:

... how ironic it is that the Commonwealth Government has committed to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals by contributing to the international campaign to eradicate third world poverty by 2015, but has no similar plan to do so in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia.

That is right: there is no plan for dealing with these appalling statistics. Tom has put forward a plan to reach equality of health statistics within a generation. As I said in this place the other day, unless we start now we are not going to achieve that. So we need to clearly articulate a plan with milestones and goals about equity of access to health infrastructure and standards to meet the equality of health goal within a generation. To do that requires a huge investment. It has been estimated, as I said, at between $250 million and $700 million per annum, and we get a measly amount in this budget to deal with this issue. It is an indictment: where we have a budget surplus of over $10 billion, I argue that, instead of investing in inappropriate areas, if we were not providing the tax cuts we would have a far bigger surplus to invest in our community and in family and community services.

There are many other areas that we also need to be dealing with in Australia. There are significant issues around training, particularly now that the Welfare to Work package is coming in. There isn’t adequate training and support for the people that are being forced onto Newstart. It is not only lowering their incomes but putting them into situations where they have to take a job, any job, even if they are only earning an additional $1.66 per hour. I do not believe it is an appropriate way of helping our community. The best way to help the least advantaged is to provide additional training and support but, unfortunately, that is not available under the present system. It was inadequately provided for in the budget. We have a significant level of poverty in this country and, again, the most disadvantaged in our community are being ignored. We have no overall plan for dealing with poverty in Australia. I would have liked to have seen in this budget a significant investment in that area.

Overall, I think where we have invested our surplus and the decisions that we made on tax cuts have been misdirected. They are not supporting the most disadvantaged in our community. They are not fair. They are not caring and they are not aimed at providing a decent life for all Australians. This budget needed to look at all of those key areas and beyond what I have outlined—I have just touched the tip of the iceberg. I note that the Australian Council of Social Services, prior to the budget, provided a very comprehensive plan about where funding should be invested. They also identified areas where some of that funding could come from. The government does not need to have that identified; it knows it has a $10 billion surplus. I do not think that community groups should be forced to identify areas in the budget where the money should come from. It is there. We need to spend it appropriately and invest it in Australians so that we can have a much fairer and more equal Australia.