Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills. Every weekday morning in my electorate, only a kilometre from here, breakfast is served to the homeless. This particular service has only been operating for a year and has grown from serving breakfast to a handful of people to regularly serving more than 70. Their clients are homeless and, in this weather, many of them are still sleeping rough—sometimes in tents provided by the service in lieu of affordable housing. They stay on after breakfast for counselling and referral. Many of them have complex issues which will need much time and help to resolve. After homelessness, one of the biggest problems seen at this centre is poor dental health—a problem for many other Australians too. Most of their clients have not seen a dentist for years, and this has led to the alarming circumstance in modern Australia where the service has had to modify the food supplied for breakfast as those attending simply cannot eat things like apples. The apples in a large consignment that was recently donated had to be chopped and stewed by staff before they were soft enough for the clients of this support service to eat. They are clearly being adversely affected by the current banana shortage.

The Commonwealth Dental Health Program was introduced to reduce waiting times for Australians such as those to whom I am referring for access to public dental services by giving public patients subsidised access to private dentists. But the present Liberal federal government discontinued its annual funding in 1996. The result is that many Australians—not just those attending this breakfast centre for the homeless—cannot afford adequate dental treatment. We have levels of tooth decay and gum disease that would not be out of place in the Third World. People who cannot afford access to private dentists have to wait for the limited public services on offer. By the time an appointment comes around, decay is often so advanced that the removal of affected teeth is the only option. This is a problem not only of the homeless. Constituents in low-paid work, such as child care and aged care, also complain to me that they cannot afford to visit a dentist and that they are not even eligible to register for an appointment with the public dental scheme.

This experience here in the affluent city of Canberra could be repeated 100 times over around Australia, yet the Howard government refuses to act. It could easily fund a replacement for the national dental scheme which they abolished in 1996. To re-establish such a scheme at 1996 levels would cost approximately $140 million or $150 million per year. The failure to act to meet this crying need highlights the wrong priorities reflected in this budget. When you have $40 billion extra to spend, what you do not do tells more about your values and your priorities than what you choose to do. The Howard government must know about this crisis in dental health. Many coalition members would have similar stories to tell from their electorates. What are they doing? Don’t they know what is happening in their constituencies? Don’t they care, or can’t they persuade the Minister for Health and Ageing, the Treasurer or, most particularly, the Prime Minister to act?

In my local area I want to pose those questions to the member for the adjacent electorate of Eden-Monaro, Mr Gary Nairn, because the issue is at least as bad, if not worse, in Queanbeyan as it is in Canberra. I say to the member for Eden-Monaro: ‘Don’t you know what is going on, don’t you care or won’t the Prime Minister listen to you? Which is it?’ Of course while the crisis in public dental health is reflected so starkly against the $40 billion of new spending in this budget, it is not the only area in which these wrong priorities are reflected. It is just the starkest and the clearest one and the one that has confronted me most directly.

With regard to the homelessness issue that I referred to earlier, the Tenants Union and the ACT Shelter have been running a campaign in my electorate entitled ‘Housing is a human right’. Postcards have been distributed which highlight individual stories, many positive, and the overarching message is that adequate and affordable housing provides a foundation on which people build their lives. Stable housing has been shown to lead to improvements in health, education and access to more job opportunities, yet in this budget there was no extra funding to deal with the homelessness crisis and no extra funding for homeless people with a mental illness. Tax cuts will not help those people who are already homeless.

I use these stories to highlight the character of this budget, a budget of missed opportunities and skewed priorities. It is also a budget characterised by economic risk, but I will come to that later. Having dealt with two examples of the failure of the government to use this budget as an opportunity to begin to repair damage that previous Howard government budget decisions have created, I now wish to turn to an important opportunity for the Howard government to remedy over the next 12 months another of its failings—in this instance, the employment of people with disabilities.

I notice the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations has convened a task force to encourage employers to employ more people with disabilities. I do not disagree with his doing that, but it is occurring in parallel with the Howard government putting pressure on people with disabilities to rejoin the workforce and there is, of course, great controversy and anxiety about the consequences of the Welfare to Work legislation. But, while all those things are going on, I want to focus on a different aspect of the issue: the abject and continuing failure of the Howard government to get its own house in order with regard to the employment of people with disabilities.

The government’s own statistics show that the number and the proportion of ongoing employees of the federal government with a disability has fallen dramatically since the Howard government came to office. The Public Service Commissioner’s State of the service report shows the number of people with a disability working on an ongoing basis for the Commonwealth has fallen from 7,008 in 1996 to 4,642 in 2005, a fall of more than 30 per cent. In case you think there is some measurement effect, that this is a product of a change in the size or the shape of the Public Service, think again. The proportion of the total ongoing APS employees with a disability has fallen similarly, from 5.4 per cent of the workforce in 1996 to 3.8 per cent over the same period. It is a trend that must be reversed.

This is a scandalous situation. Under this Commonwealth government, the Howard government, which professes concern about the employment of people with disabilities and is an employer of 123,000 people in this category of ongoing APS employees, for every year that it has been in office, except 2003, the number of people with disabilities employed by the Commonwealth has fallen in absolute numbers, and it has fallen as a proportion of Commonwealth employment every year except 2003 when it was flat—5.4 per cent, 5.3 per cent, 5.1 per cent, 4.8 per cent, 4.5 per cent, 4.2 per cent, 4.0 per cent for two years, 3.9 per cent and, in 2005, 3.8 per cent.

What a disastrous performance for a government in support of Australians in need. If the same proportion of Commonwealth employment had been maintained, there would be 2,000 extra people with disabilities employed by the Commonwealth. This is of course a big issue in my town of Canberra because there are a lot of public servants here. But it is also a big issue in Townsville, Darwin, Sydney or Melbourne where there is a very large proportion of Commonwealth public servants and a very large proportion of the sorts of jobs that could well be identified for employment of people with disabilities.

I call on the Howard government to take some measures to turn this around. There is no central program dealing with the question of employment of people with disabilities. It is proposed in this budget that there will be a substantial increase in the number of Commonwealth public servants. The number has been quoted at 7,000. I am not absolutely sure if that is right, but it is of the right order of magnitude. So let us use that proposed increase to fix the problem. Let us start now. I do not object to the Commonwealth government having a task force to encourage employers to employ more people with disabilities—it is a worthwhile goal—but the government should start with themselves.

I say to the government: if you are genuinely concerned about employment for people with disabilities, start employing some. Set up a central program—probably through the Public Service Commission, but I do not care about the structure—to examine suitable job vacancies, to recruit people with disabilities, to assist agencies in their recruitment, to adapt workplaces to suit people with disabilities and to train both the people with disabilities and the people with whom they will work, so that this disastrous trend is reversed. It is clear that a hands-off attitude will only lead to a continuing decline, as it has every year since 1996. It is just not good enough. For individual Australian citizens with a disability and for their families this situation is an ongoing source of anxiety, and it is totally unjustified and totally unnecessary.

In the remaining time available, I want to turn to the economic risk inherent in the short-term focus of this economically complacent budget. From an economic point of view, the problem with this budget is that it is a triumph of politics over economics—a triumph of the short term over the long term. The loose collection of individually welcome hand-outs might enhance the Treasurer’s image but it does not constitute a responsible or appropriate economic package, and I feel it is inherently risky. We now face a situation in which monetary restraint and fiscal stimulus are in conflict. The risk is that it will create the circumstance in which more monetary policy restraint is required to offset the excesses of fiscal policy—that is, it increases the risk of further interest rate increases later in the year.

More fundamentally, the budget reinforces the risk that we are repeating one of the two great economic policy mistakes of the last 30 years. All the attention has been focused on not repeating the great mistake of the eighties—keeping interest rates too high for too long. As a consequence, we are in grave danger of taking our eye off the ball with regard to the real risk—repeating then Treasurer John Howard’s folly of the seventies in frittering away the benefits of a resources boom in a populist rush of consumption spending rather than responsible saving and investment policies.

The Treasurer argues that because the budget is still in surplus it cannot put upward pressure on interest rates. This thesis would fail high school economics. An inappropriate boost to consumption leads to pressure on interest rates. The big risk is that families will lose the benefit of the tax cuts in further interest rate increases by the end of the year. But nothing can hide the risks and wasted opportunities in this budget. A wide range of economic commentators before the budget were pointing to this risk, and since the budget have been referring to it. I want to take such time as I have to refer to some of those. They are not from the traditional Labor contacts; they are from mainstream economic commentators in Australia who have been expressing their concern for some time.

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