Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

People do want to do well. Thank you, Senator Duniam, for pointing that out. People do want to do well. But they understand that we do best when we provide support to all of our community to stand up for one another. We do best when we don't leave people to fail, when we don't leave them alone when things get tough. All of that is dependent on having a government that has the resources to do the things that the community needs it to do. The problem with the bill before us this evening is that it strips resources from government in the most egregious way. To date, no-one on the government side has explained how that stripping away of resources is going to be managed from a budget perspective.

We have a very, very narrow surplus that will be achieved in the first part of the next decade, according to the budget projections. It would only take a tiny shiver to run through the global economy to knock those projections out of the water. Indeed, many reputable economists have looked at the budget projections and drawn the conclusion that the wages growth that they are predicated upon, the commodities prices that they are predicated upon and the tax revenue that they are subsequently predicated upon mean that they are wildly unrealistic. There is already a cloud over the surplus projected by this government. The idea that you can strip away billions upon billions of tax revenue from the government budget, handing it back to multinationals, is barely credible. It is barely credible. It has yet to be explained.

We are very concerned about the impact of this bill on the budget over the medium term. The government has gone on and on and on about the need for budget repair. You will recall that this is the government that made debt and deficit its major election campaign issue. We don't hear so much about debt and deficit anymore, and we certainly do not hear about the budget emergency.

Let's have a look at what is actually going on in terms of the numbers, because they are genuinely worrying. The deficit for this financial year has blown out by more than six times. It was $2.8 billion in their first budget; it is now $18.2 billion. These are numbers that most people can barely compute. Most normal people look at a number like a billion and don't understand it. But what they do understand when we talk about billions and billions of dollars is that it means that, when you turn up at the emergency department, there just might not be someone there to treat your child if your child is sick; or that, if you need elective surgery and you're not in a position to fund it privately, personally, it might be 18 months, 24 months, until you receive a service. These are actual problems. They are abstract numbers in the billions, but they impact on people in very real ways.

Why is it that the government, which carried on so much about debt and deficit and about a budget emergency before the last election, wishes to place even further pressure on the budget?