Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on today's matter of public importance. I speak from the perspective of being one of the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who took to the streets of our cities and communities, yesterday, to protest about the Abbott government. For the government simply to ignore all of us—families, young and old, students, young people, pensioners—who took to the streets to voice our concerns about a government that has only been a government for six months is extraordinary. Our Prime Minister has said that the only rally he noticed yesterday was in relation to St Patrick's Day, yet we had protests by tens of thousands of people in our major cities, and similar numbers throughout the regional areas of Australia

This was not a small group; this was not a particular part of the Australian community; this was Australians of all walks of life saying to the Abbott government, 'We've had enough already.'

From day 1, the government started with an agenda of secrecy. The Commission of Audit fits into that agenda. It is a secret, so it did not prepare a paper for discussion. It has held hearings, but they have been in secret. So the Australian public know absolutely nothing about what the Commission of Audit is undertaking. What we know about the Commission of Audit is that it is largely comprised of members of the business community, and we do know what is on the business community's agenda. It is in our newspapers every day. They want to be taxed less. They want to be able to make profits, which, foolishly, the government seems to think will turn into jobs, and yet they have not been able to demonstrate any time in our history where, when you free business up, it invests in jobs. Business invests in profits for its shareholders. That is what business does. Business wants to see less corporate tax. Certainly the business community, the AiG and others have talked about broadening the GST and increasing the GST, and all of that hurts ordinary Australians and makes it much more difficult for ordinary working Australians to balance their budgets. Nevertheless, the Commission of Audit continues along in secret.

The only hint we have had is when the Senate set up a committee, which I sit on. Mr Shepherd, the chair of the Commission of Audit, told us that nothing was ruled in and nothing was ruled out. That runs contrary to the promises that the Prime Minister was giving us in the lead-up to the election and post the election, although now many of those promises have gone, as we have seen, and we are now going to get some kind of tax—a big, fat tax, as the government likes to call these taxes—on Medicare. When you visit a doctor, you will be charged an additional fee. That seems to be widely supported by the government. It again shows how out of touch the government is with ordinary working Australians who already pay when they go to a doctor, and the government wants to slug them again with a big, new fat tax on Medicare.

In addition to that, Mr Abbott has been forced by the opposition to say he will at some point release the Commission of Audit document, but all of the political commentators in this country say that it will not be released before the WA half-Senate election because the government knows it has bad news and it is not in its interests to do that. So it will not be before April. That gives us about four weeks to look at the document when all of the deals, all of the argy-bargy and all of the cutting will have already taken place for the May budget.

This is a dishonest government. It is a government that is hell-bent on trying to say that we live in an economic community and not a community made up of families and individuals. It is a government that, quite frankly, does not care what happens to ordinary Australians. It does not care and it demonstrates that by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets yesterday, along with myself and my grandchildren, to protest about what the Abbott government is doing. You cannot say that those people are not concerned. We have a government absolutely committed to silence. It is time to come clean and put the Commission of Audit document out there.