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

I rise to make a contribution to this debate because the Turnbull government's budget has put high-income earners and big business before families, students, patients, pensioners and low-income earners.

They are giving the big end of town $12 billion worth of funding in tax cuts and tax breaks. They will be giving high-income earners $6 a week in a tax return. Six dollars a week does not even by you a sandwich. But imagine what you could buy with $12 billion? You could certainly afford to raise Newstart, because people on Newstart are currently living below the poverty line and keep dropping, fairly rapidly, under that poverty line.

The government could then not require people with disability who are on Disability Support Pension to be reviewed against the new eligibility criteria. They are the people who have been on DSP, but who were not reassessed before the new eligibility criteria came in. We estimate that the government plans to drop about 36,000 people off the Disability Support Pension and onto Newstart, costing them nearly $7,000 a year. Already, estimates show that nearly half of people with disability living in households are living below the poverty line. This government now wants to drop those people below the poverty line. And that is supposedly the funding for the NDIS.

The NDIS is fully funded anyway, so potentially what we are going to see are people getting an NDIS and not having Disability Support Pension. How are they supposed to pay for their food, basic living requirements and accommodation? Obviously, they cannot when they are living on Newstart. This is a ludicrous situation. The government could be funding that with the $12 billion they are giving back to the big end of town.

They are taking the Clean Energy Supplement from aged pensioners and people on Newstart—again, costing people who are already living either on the poverty line or just above it if they are an aged pensioner, or below the poverty line if they are living on Newstart.

And the government is saying, 'We've got this new plan for youth. We'll have them as interns.' The potential for exploitation of young people is phenomenal and mind-blowing. Senator Lindgren just let the cat out of the bag: it is what business want. I bet they do, because they are going to get a source of extremely cheap or free labour from the government. Of course they will be lining up!

What does the government think is going to happen to the people who are currently employed at those particular workplaces? The experience from England is that people were sacked so that the businesses could get access to free or very cheap labour. To say that it is voluntary is absolutely ludicrous, because the government also has legislation in the parliament—and there are already sanctions on the books—that if you do not agree to your employment pathway plan, you will be breached. In other words, you will be dropped off your income support. If your jobactive and job services provider says that you have to do this and you do not agree, you could be breached. So to say it is voluntary is absolute nonsense. It is good to see that the government has finally admitted that Work for the Dole is ineffective.

This budget is also conspicuous by the absence of any significant new funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In February we had the Prime Minister with his hand on his heart saying, 'We're going to do whatever we can to close the gap'. Well they are not, because there is no funding in the budget for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health implementation plan—no funding for that. There is no redress, no support for putting funding back into the half a billion dollars that the former Abbott government took out.

And of course this is on top of those harsh cuts that the Abbott government's two budgets delivered. Income support payment cuts and family tax benefit cuts, which this Senate has resisted supporting. I hope the new Senate continues to resist supporting those cuts to family tax benefits. This government still wants to leave young people with no income support for five weeks. That legislation was resisted by this Senate, but this government, the Turnbull government, which is supposed to doing things differently, is supporting all of those harsh, unfair budget measures that the community so clearly rejected. This Turnbull government has put them all back in there again. They are counting them in there, thank you very much. So this is an unfair budget that unfairly targets the most vulnerable members of our community. (Time expired)