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

There is also the idea of increasing the interest rates on student HELP debt, the idea of not proceeding with the final two years of Gonski, the discussion about those who are younger without dependents moving to areas of higher employment by directly impacting their access to welfare, abolishing the family tax benefit B, lowering the Paid Parental Leave scheme, scrapping the Australia Network and consolidating—which is a nice way of saying cutting—a whole series of Indigenous programs. All of these were ideas that the government chose to adopt, and there was a series of ideas that the government did not adopt. My concern about this process from the start was that it was a stacked committee with a stacked inquiry with a predetermined set of outcomes that would allow the government to say, 'Look how terrible these measures are; we're not going that far. We're only going to go 75 per cent of the way, we're only going to go 60 per cent of the way' in order to make what the government knew was going to be a series of broken promises in the budget process look reasonable. And frankly, they failed. They failed because it does not matter how you set it up. It does not matter how many inquiries, processes, documents, sham reviews or commissions the government was going to conduct. The fact is that the budget that got produced—and this played a key role in providing input—is bad for Australia and bad for Australian families. That is why there is an outcry across the country by so many different people, so many different groups and so many different organisations that say that this is not the budget that they were promised, these are not the measures that they were told about before the election, and there was a series of promises.

From the start of the process, those on this side of the chamber made it very, very clear that we felt this was going to be nothing more than a fig leaf to cover what was going to be a sham process to give the government cover for broken promises. Unfortunately we were proven right. The final budget that was produced at the end of this had repeated broken promise after broken promise.

What concerns me is that we have here a series of recommendations that I worry the government is going to adopt as part of the MYEFO process. I worry that there is a series of measures here that are more damaging, more painful and more hurtful, and that even this government, with its tin ear, felt it was not appropriate to impose them now, but they are going to be imposed on Australian families. Until the government is able to give us an ironclad commitment that the remaining ideas are off the table, that is a danger we will live with.

In concluding I do want to acknowledge the incredible work of Senator Richard Di Natale, who chaired the inquiry, and Senator Kate Lundy, who was the deputy chair. Senator Di Natale was incredibly gracious and accessible with his time and the time of his staff. They spent a lot of time working on this process, and it should be acknowledged that the way in which he conducted himself throughout the process was of the high standard that we expect of a place like the Australian Senate. The deputy chair, Senator Lundy, did an incredible job. There were a lot of meetings at the start of the year—which I know a lot of people were not here for. The committee team, the committee staff and the secretariat did a fantastic job, as always. I note that these kinds of inquiries tend to be simply additional work on the already very heavy workload, and I think that should be acknowledged.

Finally, I acknowledge that that the coalition senators participated in a very healthy debate as part of this process. I acknowledge Senator Smith and the several opinion pieces that he wrote in the Fin Review; I think I wrote a few as well, where we clearly disagreed with one another. There was a lot of enjoyment and Senator Smith is clearly a big fan of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. He kept speaking about them at every inquiry meeting we had, and I promised him that I will one day get him a signed poster from the two of them.