Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

Budgets should be about a long-term vision for the country’s future. They should be based, of course, on fiscal responsibility. They should also be based on how we most equitably and efficiently raise the public revenue—in the case of this budget, some $200 billion. They should also embrace a clear-cut vision of how we best invest in the country’s long-term economic capacity, in our people, in our infrastructure and in innovation. Budgets should also be about the social and economic foundations of our country and of our local communities, including the local community which I represent in this parliament, Brisbane’s southside.

Tax relief of course is welcome for all families. We make no bones about that. That is why we are not standing in the way of this budget. Families need all the assistance they can get, given the triple whammy that they now face: petrol prices, rising interest rates and uncertainty in the workplace through the introduction of the new workplace relations laws. Budgets also must be committed to effective service delivery, front and centre, for the nation as a whole but also in our local communities. And when we come to the question of how the funds allocated in this budget are spent, local people are asking themselves whether in fact the government is spending wisely and appropriately the financial resources government is currently deriving from the resources boom. Are those financial resources being best invested in the country’s long-term economic capacity? Are they being best invested in effective social service delivery as well?

Residents in my community on Brisbane’s southside want to know what government is doing about the lack of child care availability in our area. They want to know why bulk-billing rates are now down to 66 per cent, from 88 per cent in 1996. They also want to know why their basic rights at work are being stripped away by the government. In this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills I propose to outline some of the concerns raised with me by residents from my community about Medicare, about child care, about workplace relations and about the debt burden being inflicted on the hardworking families and residents of my community.

The provision of child care is a central responsibility of government—any government that is serious about raising productivity. It allows mums and dads to get back into work after the birth of a child, and that of course is a good for the economy because it increases the participation rate and makes it possible for people to work more productively in their workplaces. It also provides the flexibility which employers and employees need, given the demands of the modern economy. However, it is in this area that the current government has failed working families on Brisbane’s southside, with many families in my community finding it almost impossible to locate affordable, quality child care. Our local waiting lists for long day care and outside of school hours care are often unacceptably long and often involve parents being forced to give up paid work because they simply cannot secure effective child care.

In April 2005, there was a sleep-out overnight in the suburb of Balmoral in my electorate so that parents could put their children’s name down on a waiting list for child-care places in 2006. What this demonstrates is a fundamental failure to adequately provide for child care at the local community level. There is also a national shortage of child-care workers, and Brisbane’s Southside is one of the many local communities throughout the country which bear the brunt of this skills shortage across the industry. One practical example of the way that the child-care system is failing families on the south side is demonstrated in the case of Angela, a single mother from the suburb of Coorparoo who has two young children, aged four and nine. Angela works as a full-time paramedic while also studying to further her career. Angela enjoys her work as a paramedic in spite of the fact that there is a shortage of qualified professionals in her industry in Queensland, which means that the expectations of her in the workplace are large because there is also a skills shortage in her chosen profession.

Angela has told my office that she would like to continue working as it enables her to provide for her family and also because it provides her with an ability to contribute to her community. However, the burden and considerable expense of child care is beginning to have a significant impact on her health, with the stress of paying for child care now giving her migraines, cold sores and other sicknesses. Angela has her youngest child in preschool for most of the day. However, she enrols this child into long day care all day because preschool finishes at 3 pm and Angela works 12-hour shifts. This means that Angela has to pay for long day care every day of the work at a rate of $180 per week to effectively have only a few hours of care for her youngest child at the end of each day.

In addition to this, Angela needs to pay for the outside of school hours care for her eldest child, which means that after the significant weekly expense of child care Angela has little money left after paying for food and utility bills. Angela is not on a low wage, yet she is considering quitting her job because she cannot make ends meet due to the spiralling costs of child care in our community. Angela knows that there are other parents out there who are experiencing the same frustrating situation. They feel, as she does, that the system is now, for them, simply out of control. Angela knows the impact that the unavailability of child care has on women in circumstances similar to hers. Also, she is concerned that the expense associated with child care is preventing many women from re-entering the workforce altogether.

Angela is not alone in her struggle with finding child-care places. Mel from West End contacted my office because she found it difficult to secure child care for her two children, aged four and six. Her eldest daughter has been able to secure a place in the outside school hours care program at her local school, but her younger daughter has not been able to be accommodated because there are not enough preschool places offered at the same centre. This means that Mel has the frustrating task of calling the outside school hours care centre every morning to see if there is a vacancy in the program, because her younger child does not have a permanent place. There is of course the odd casual vacancy when another child who has a guaranteed place is unable to attend due to illness. That helps Mel get her child into care on those few occasions. But for the majority of the time the situation is simply impractical given her family circumstances.

The other option for Mel is for her to put her children in care in two different locations. Those working parents who have to drop their children off before work will know all too well what this means. The family needs to get up even earlier in order to get to child care and the workplace on time. This is the dreaded double drop-off, which the Leader of the Opposition has spoken of on many occasions in his recent responses to the federal government’s budget. If Mel cannot find formal care somewhere else, she needs to take time off work, which places a significant financial burden on her family.

The cases of Mel and Angela are by no means the only ones that we have encountered in our own community. They are symptomatic of the struggle which local families are experiencing in finding effective and affordable local child care. My office and I have been approached by hundreds of residents over the past few years because they simply have not been able to find enough local child care. When we turn to this budget, it is quite plain that the government could have been doing much more, on a national basis and in communities such as my own, to deal with this problem in real terms. Instead, we have programs advanced by the government which do not deliver additional affordable places for local families.

This reflects a deep deficiency when it comes to what this budget has delivered for families in my community. There is nothing more basic for young families with young children—for young mothers, in particular, with young children—than having ease of mind delivered by the availability of effective, affordable and high-quality child care. In this budget, we do not see an effective national strategy for doing that, for a whole range of reasons, not the least of which is the unavailability of a sufficient supply of skilled child-care workers not just in Brisbane but right across the country.

Medicare represents another area where, in terms of basic social service delivery, my community on Brisbane’s south side continues to experience difficulty. Once again, the government, through the budget, has not delivered an effective strategy for increasing bulk-billing rates. In fact, bulk-billing rates in my community continue to head in the wrong direction. This problem simply has not gone away. Four years ago, in August 2002, I stood in the parliament and spoke about the problems that many Southside residents were having with the declining rate of bulk-billing. At that time it had fallen from 88 per cent to 69 per cent over the previous two years—that is, going back to 2000. I said at the time:

Something has to be done about this, because it is a crisis affecting local families and local communities, for whom bulk-billing provided through our national Medicare system has been a mainstay in the provision of basic health services to families in need.

With much fanfare, the federal Minister for Health and Ageing has been running around Australia for the past couple of years proclaiming victory on bulk-billing, saying that he has raised the national level of bulk-billing services. When it comes to my community, on Brisbane’s Southside, this simply has not been the case. Since I first raised the matter in the parliament in 2002, our local bulk-billing rate has fallen further. In fact, it has got so bad that the health minister rarely releases the figures anymore. The last time he did, in December 2005, the figures demonstrated that the bulk-billing rate on Brisbane’s Southside had fallen from 88.3 per cent in 1996 to just 66 per cent in 2005. The continued assault that the government has waged on Medicare over that period of time has seen a massive 22.3 per cent reduction in the rate of bulk-billing in my community on Brisbane’s Southside.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that the health minister wishes to keep these figures secret? They are a damning indictment of the health minister’s inattention to this basic requirement of his portfolio. They are a damning indictment of the government’s treatment of Medicare and bulk-billing rates as a proper priority for spending out of this budget. Those who ultimately bear the burden are local families. If there is anything which demonstrates a government out of touch, it is when the basic services of child care and health care, as demonstrated through the declining bulk-billing rate, are not being effectively addressed. In my community it is becoming harder and harder to locate a bulk-billing doctor.

When it comes to workplace relations, we see members of my local community becoming concerned about the impact of government policy on their standard of living. The child-care shortage represents a further impost on the family budget. The declining level of bulk-billing also represents an expense which people have to cover when they cannot find a bulk-billing doctor. When it comes to workplace relations, the basic fear which communities like my own are experiencing is: ‘What will this mean in terms of my take-home pay? What will it mean in terms of the income I currently derive from penalty rates? What will it mean in terms of the time I have to share with my family?’

The system of workplace relations we have had in this country was one which evolved over the last century and one which, for a large part of that century, was based on a simple Australian concept of fairness—a fair day’s work, a fair day’s pay. This meant that if your employer wanted you to work at the weekend it was reasonable that you should be compensated for not being able to spend that time relaxing with your family and that you should, as a consequence, be rewarded for doing that, through things such as penalty rates. If you went to work on a public holiday, you would be appropriately remunerated and you would feel secure in your workplace because your employer needed a decent reason to sack you. These basic rights at work are now being stripped away as a consequence of what must be regarded as the most conservative, right-wing, ideologically driven changes to workplace laws that this country has seen in a century.

Under the federal government’s workplace relations changes, entitlements such as shift allowances, overtime rates and redundancy pay are now under threat, and it simply gets worse. One of the most serious changes under the Howard government’s new industrial relations laws is the removal of unfair dismissals for employees working in companies that have fewer than 100 staff. When it comes to the future of unfair dismissal laws, it is important that justice be returned to the system. These most recent changes in unfair dismissal have meant that four million Australian workers will lose legal protection from unfair dismissal and are vulnerable to the nightmarish situation of losing their job without notice or an opportunity to remedy the situation. The government’s extreme legislation has also taken away the Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s power to set minimum wages and award conditions. In a practical sense this has meant reducing the allowable matters considered from 20 to just four.

I have had in my electorate office a stream of concerned residents contacting me and my staff about what precisely will be the ramifications of these new laws on their working lives. They are deeply concerned. There is no question that there is a sense of anxiety across the working families in my community. For example, Andrew from Greenslopes contacted my office following the introduction of workplace relations changes in his workplace. He is one of many concerned residents within my electorate who have taken the time to come and talk to me about what these changes will mean in their place of work. Andrew explained to my office that he is—to use his own term—appalled that the rights of Australian workers have been stripped away by the government’s recent legislative changes and that the right of Australian workers to have a fair go in their place of employment has simply been ditched through the introduction of these radical, ideological changes. These changes have forsaken simple pleasures that we as Australians have held dear, such as being able to spend quality time with family on the weekends. There are many families in my community on Brisbane’s Southside who are currently working out how precisely their families, their living standards and their ability to have justice in the workplace will be affected by the introduction of these changes.

When it comes to the delivery of basic services in my community, the budget has many fundamental deficiencies. We see this when it comes to Medicare, we see this when it comes to child care and we also see it in the changes which have been brought through on workplace relations and the impact which that will have on the disposable income of families over time. If there is one common theme about the government that resonates through the many mobile offices I have conducted in my community—I think I have conducted 194 altogether—it is that people are becoming very tired of a government whose priorities lie increasingly with themselves and not with the kitchen table issues which local families have to deal with: how they balance their family budgets, how they deal with the practical problems presented by child care, how they find a local bulk-billing doctor, how they make ends meet when they have to deal with the extra costs of fuel and the rise in interest rates in bills from their banks over their home mortgages as well as having to deal with the uncertainty presented by the government’s new industrial relations package.

We will not oppose this budget, because it provides some tax relief, but the government should be under no illusion that, when it comes to communities such as mine on Brisbane’s Southside, the families that I represent in this parliament feel, legitimately, that they have been short-changed in the delivery of these services. This government could have done much better with this budget for the nation. It could have done much better with this budget in the interests of local communities right across this nation, including those in my own electorate.

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