Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an incredible insight into the mind and thinking of Senator Bernardi! Senator Bernardi said many things that I object to, but he made one comment in particular about which I will say something. That was his comment about 'worshipping at the altar of internationalism'. Senator Bernardi seems to be arguing that if as a nation we fulfil our international obligations and meet our international responsibilities, somehow that has to come into conflict with the responsibilities we have at home.

I will talk about the budget more broadly, but I think the most horrible parts of this budget, Senator Bernardi, were the decisions to take $7.6 billion out of foreign aid, to cut the Australia Network and to take an average of over $100 million a year out of the DFAT budget. The government seems to want us to believe that we do not have the ability to simultaneously walk and chew gum—that we cannot meet our international obligations while we meet our obligations at home. Quite frankly, I think that is a false choice.

Never has a government so shamelessly lied its way into office. Promise after promise, commitment after commitment made before the last election has been broken. The Prime Minister's actions are made even worse by the fact that he staked his entire reputation on the idea of honesty. This was the standard set by the Prime Minister—repeatedly. Let us not forget how, on election night, after being made the Prime Minister of Australia, he promised us:

… a government that says what it means and means what it says, a government of no surprises, and no excuses, a government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential. And a government that accepts that it will be judged more by its deeds than by its mere words.

Let us then hold them accountable to their own words. Less than 13 hours before polling booths opened, the Prime Minister, then the opposition leader, said:

There will be no changes to pensions …

Now we find out there will be changes. There will be a new indexation system for pensioners. The pension was at 27.7 per cent of average male weekly earnings, against which it was indexed, but from 2017 it will be indexed against the CPI. That is about a 1½ per cent cut. Freezes to means test thresholds on all pensions means more people will receive a lower rate of pension or will be bumped off the pension entirely.

Let us hold the Prime Minister to what he said on 20 November 2012:

We are about reducing taxes, not increasing taxes. We are about getting rid of taxes, not imposing new taxes.

We just heard Senator Bernardi passionately talk about his ideological crusade to bring taxes down in this country. I do not know how he is going to vote for a budget that has an increase in income tax of two per cent for incomes over $180,000 and, by bringing back biannual CPI indexation, an effective increase in the petrol tax. The budget also gives $400 million back to big business by unwinding tax integrity measures.

Let us hold the Prime Minister to account for telling us, 13 hours before polling booths opened, that there would be no cuts to health when, in fact, $2.8 billion will be cut from public hospitals over the next five years, when there will be a $7 tax on GP visits and when there will be—something that has gone largely unnoticed—an increase in PBS co-payments of $5 for general patients and 80c for concessional patients. Let us hold the Prime Minister to account for saying that there would be no cuts to education when there is $181 million being cut from education over the next five years, to be followed by much bigger cuts to school funding beyond 2018.

Finally, let us hold the Prime Minister to account when he said:

A dumb way to cut spending would be to threaten family benefits or means test them further.

The government are cutting Family Tax Benefit Part A and Part B by freezing indexation and by reducing eligibility for part B. Cutting the family tax benefit end-of-year supplements by up to $306 and freezing family payment thresholds will mean that more people will be bumped off or will incur a lower rate. The one cut that I find quite horrific is that they say there will be no cuts to the ABC and no cuts to SBS, and then they come out on budget night with a $43 million cut, wag their finger and say that there will be more coming.

The Prime Minister said that he would be the Indigenous Prime Minister. He promised bipartisan support for Closing the Gap, yet he cut over $530 million from Indigenous affairs programs. This government said before the election that they had no plans to increase university fees, but straight afterwards they deregulated the entire industry knowing that it was going to mean the fees are going to go up.

This government will be and should be judged by their actions, as the Prime Minister said on election night, and stand condemned for them as well. Instead of saying what they meant during the election campaign, they kept making promise after promise, and it was clear they had no intention of keeping them. They promised that there would be no cuts to health, that there would be no cuts to education, that there would be no cuts to the pension, and that there would be no new taxes. They went to the Australian people under a series of promises in a budget situation which they were well aware of. Now there has been a kind of rethink and retake and MYEFO. We have gone through this in the Senate estimates process where matters seem to be recalculated and relooked at. Let us be clear, before the election the PEFO, the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, was signed off as an independent document by the Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson, and the Secretary of Finance, David Tune. It was signed off by the two most senior bureaucrats as an independent document. The government went to an election knowing that was the financial statement and came out afterwards, after they had made those promises, after they had made those commitments, with a clear view of breaking their promises.

Last Tuesday's budget was both full of surprises and full of excuses. It is a budget that rips billions from schools, from hospitals and from pensions. It will force Australians to work longer, and it introduces a great big new tax—to use the Prime Minister's words—on everything courtesy of the increased petrol prices. You almost have to feel for the state governments that, in good faith, negotiated with the federal government for funding programs in health and education. Many of them are conservative governments and supported the coalition when it was in opposition at the time of the last election, which they are entitled to do. Not once were they told that those programs, those initiatives, were going to be cut. They are not small cuts. We are talking about cuts in the vicinity of $80 billion. The Premier of Queensland said that it is nothing more than a ploy to create a situation in which the states will be forced to make the case for an increase in the GST. Frankly, it is not good enough. It is buck-passing and it is not going to work. I have to commend the state premiers, even the Premier of New South Wales Mike Baird, for being prepared to say that this is a kick in the guts for the people of New South Wales, because frankly that is what this budget is.

At the last election, if the government had said to the Australian people: 'This is what we are going to do. These are the cuts we are going to instil. We are going after Medicare. We are going after pensions. We are going to take away the benefits that middle-income earners have come to rely on. This will be our path to prosperity,' they did not do it because they knew the Australian public would not vote for it. So, what do we have? We have a great big lie. The government love to talk about and lecture those on this side of the chamber about mandates. There has been no mandate for their savage cuts, no mandate for their tax increases, no mandate for a budget that was built on mistruth and dishonesty. This budget is fundamentally a breach of trust. The worrying thing is that the government are not done yet.

The state premiers have opposed the government's $80 billion cuts to health and education. They have called it unreasonable cost-shifting. Many of the state premiers have come out, in particular Campbell Newman, bleating that it is nothing more than a smokescreen for the government to break yet another promise of no change to the GST. Let us be clear, any change to the GST is going to disproportionately hurt those on the lowest incomes. The idea that it is going to be made an issue for the states is another way of the government saying, 'If the states want an increase, we're not really going to be talking about tax compensation, we're really going to be talking about just broadening the base or increasing the rate.' It is going to disproportionately hurt lower and middle income families. It is just not good enough. It is not good enough as a nation to say, 'We're not going to be able to fund our schools. We're not going to be funding our hospitals,' without putting a greater burden on those lower and middle income families.

What is the plan now? The plan is to buck-pass $80 billion. Pass it onto the states and hope that they will go out and do the heavy lifting for the government, that they will call for an increase in the GST, and thus give the Prime Minister an excuse to blame the states for breaking his promise. The idea that has been peddled out by one government minister after another that you cannot change this agreement because all the states would have to agree is a fallacy and a farce. The government have gone out of their way to create an environment in which the states will be forced to make that argument. Frankly, it is not good enough and it is not fair to the states. It is a cowardly and a treacherous way to raise taxes. This government are hoping that by the next election Australians are going to forget the abuse of power and the abuse of process that this budget has demonstrated. They are hoping that, two years from now, the Australian people will no longer remember what has got on.

But that is not the case. We on this side of the chamber are going to hold them accountable; we are going to hold them accountable to the decisions that they made; we are going to hold them accountable to the promises that they made. This budget has given Australians an opportunity; they can send a signal that governments who betray the electorate cannot be rewarded. The hypocrisy of some of those on the other side—who berated those on this side of the chamber on the issue of placing a price on carbon—to defend this budget! The hypocrisy of going to an election campaign with one set of commitments clearly articulated!

Let us look through the process of what has happened. At first, the government pretended they would not be breaking their commitments. That lasted for about 48 hours—it even began pre-election. It was no coincidence that the Prime Minister was out for a few days but then vanished last week. Then the Treasurer was out and about and he kept fumbling. Then they had to bring out Senator Cormann to do the heavy lifting. What do we have here? We have a budget of broken promises, a budget of lies, a budget built on twisted priorities, a budget built on new and increased taxes and cuts to pensions, a budget built on more than $80 billion of cuts to schools and hospitals, a budget that is being built on the back of low- and middle-income Australians who are going to pay for the majority of it. At the same time, in many areas, this budget delivers more money to those Australians who do not need it.

What I am most concerned about is what this budget does to young Australians and those on low incomes. There is a generation of Australians, particularly those under 35 years of age, who are going to face the ultimate brunt of the horror of this budget—a generation of people who will be working until they are 70, a generation who will have to wait for six months until they get unemployment benefits, a generation of people who are not going to have the same access to family payments as those who went before them. Many of them are still in school and will see money being ripped out of their schools with the government's failure to commit to funding agreements and increased university fees and debt for the rest of their lives. There is a generation of Australians who are going to be fundamentally hurt by this budget more than others. I think it is a tragedy, I think it is a disgrace and I think it is something that none of us in this chamber should be proud of.

The fabric of Australian society is built on the notions of egalitarianism and a fair go. In the lead-up to the election there was a lot of rhetoric from the government about the idea of sharing the pain, of sharing the burden, of 'we're all in it together'. But when you go through the budget documents, when you look at the details of what is actually proposed, you see that this is not the case at all. The rhetoric is one thing; the reality is another. The reality demonstrates that those on lower incomes, those who are young, those who rely on government support and assistance are again and again the most targeted, the most hurt and the most impacted on by this budget.

This is a budget that the government should not be proud of. On budget night, in the other place, we had the Treasurer's beaming smile and the Prime Minister behind him with his beaming smile. They decided to celebrate the budget by dancing in offices, listening to music and chomping on cigars. That demonstrates not only how fundamentally wrong the government's priorities are, but also its attitude to those who rely on government the most. This was not a budget about keeping commitments made prior to the election; this was a budget about breaking them. They went through a Commission of Audit process which gave them an opportunity to start breaking their promises—and they came through.

There was all that talk of fearmongering. The Prime Minister went up to the electorate of Griffith during the by-election and said the opposition was scaremongering about Medicare co-payments and cuts to pensions. The same thing happened in the Western Australian election campaign. There was all that rhetoric from the government that the opposition was running a fear campaign and scaring people. The reality is that the horror of this budget, the horror of what was released on the day, was worse than anything that the Labor Party had proposed. Not even those who strongly and ideologically oppose this government thought they would be this cruel, this heartless, in their first budget.

As I was saying earlier, this budget has given Australians the opportunity to send a signal that this government has betrayed its electorate and should not be rewarded at the next election for its deceit. We will remember how this government promised that it would not surprise us. We will remember how we were played for fools and that this trust was abused. The Prime Minister will be held accountable for this deception.