Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will tell you what we did. We left the budget in surplus so you could pay for things like this; we did not run up $174 billion in cumulative deficit.

Mr Champion interjecting—

Keep the interjections coming. We did not have to raise the debt ceiling of the Commonwealth from $250 billion to $300 billion. We did not project in the budget, as your Treasurer did last night, that the unemployment rate is going to go up in the next year.

Mr Champion interjecting—

Keep the interjections coming if you want to know what we did. I do not think the record stands any comparison with the incompetent Labor government that we have at the present time.

In programs such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, just one-twentieth of the need is going to be met. There will be just 20,000 out of the 400,000 packages projected to be needed, because the money is not there. Another example from the budget is its approach to aged-care reform. There was a bit of money for aged-care reform in the budget last night, but is that going to meet the ageing of the population and the huge increase in demand that is coming in future years as more people get older and need dementia services and other services? No. Why can't these services be provided? They cannot be provided because we have a government that is chronically unable to control the budget of this country, and this budget is just another example of its inability to do so.

Another reason that this budget represents bad policy is that it is basically compensation for the carbon tax. I heard the minister saying in her second reading speech that families were facing pressures—and they are. But this is what the Treasurer said last night:

The price on carbon pollution that begins this year will only be paid by Australia's biggest emitters. It will not be levied on families.

As if big emitters will not pass costs on to families!

But to help with any price increases, we are cutting income tax and increasing payments to pensioners, families and recipients of allowances beginning this month.

In other words, despite telling us that families in Australia are not going to have any impost because of the carbon tax, the Treasurer let the cat out of the bag last night when he said, 'Yes, there are cost increases coming and this is part of the reason we are having to give these handouts.' That is what this is about as well. It is not just about moving payments that would normally occur in next year's financial accounts into this year's; it is also about providing compensation with a bit of pretext that it is about an education allowance. As I explained before, you can make educational payments for genuine education needs under the present system without making this change. The Treasurer let the cat out of the bag last night. The reality is that this is about compensation for the carbon tax. Labor know that the carbon tax is toxic in the community. They know that people have made up their minds about it. People do not believe the spin that only big emitters will pay and that, having done that, they will absorb all the costs.

In reality, two things will happen as a consequence of the carbon tax. Emitters will, where they can, pass on the costs. Any business does that. If a business has an increase in the cost of production of its goods or services, it passes on the costs. It would have been better if the government had come clean and said this, but they are trying to walk both sides of the street. That will be one consequence. The other consequence will be that many small businesses in particular, where they are not able to pass on the costs, will reduce the number of their employees. This is happening already. If you go for a walk around the northern suburbs of Melbourne, where there are a lot of small manufacturing businesses—or the eastern suburbs of Melbourne or elsewhere around Australia—and if you talk to the people who are out there running businesses, you will find that the reality is that jobs are being lost already, and that is because of the impact of these changes under the Labor government. What the government is seeking to do is to give a bit of a sugar hit now, because they know that the big hit to the budget of ordinary Australians is coming with a huge whack in July.

The pretence in this budget is that we are taking money from the rich, the miners, to pay for the poor, but we are also taking a lot of money from low-income earners. There are changes to the FTB in relation to older teenagers—which is something that the government promised back in 2010 they would look after. That is suddenly gone in this budget. So one group of low-income earners are paying for another group of low-income earners. Then there are single parents. The government are taking a saving of about $700 million from that group of low-income earners to pay for other low-income earners and, at the same time, slashing the funds in the budget for the job service providers who might have been there to provide for these people whom the government are moving off parenting payments onto Newstart. While the government are moving them off parenting payments onto Newstart, they are actually slashing the funds that are available to the job service providers in Australia to provide the services that might help those single parents to get into a job. This pretence that this is just taking from one group who can pay it to another group who need it is just that: spin and pretence. There are low-income earners who are losing money under this budget and the reality is that the cost of the toxic carbon tax will be passed on when it is passed. That is what we are facing.

In terms of the carbon tax, the budget has $36 million to advertise and promote the carbon tax. I calculated that the government are going to have to spend almost $2 million a week on promotion and advertising for the carbon tax. Why have they got to do that? They know that it is so toxic that they have to try to convince people otherwise. At the same time, we know that electricity prices have gone up, gas prices have gone up, prices are going up and they will continue to go up.

Unemployment is forecast to go up under this budget, and that means job losses for ordinary Australians. There is every reason for this budget to be feared by the Australian people. When they look beyond the spin to what is actually in this budget, it will start to unravel, because they will see that one-off handouts—handouts that can be misused in some instances—are not going to fix the structural problems of the Australian economy. They are not going to make Australia a more economically secure place than it is at the present time. Worse than that: at the end of this budget process, nothing much has changed. We still have Julia Gillard as Prime Minister and Wayne Swan as Treasurer. It is still a government hanging onto the vote of the member for Dobell in order to maintain its majority in this place. We still have a tricky PM who did a deal with the Speaker in order to try to shore up her votes in this place. Nothing has changed—nothing at all. These issues are not going to simply go away because of whatever spin the Treasurer wants to put on these matters.

As I said at the outset, the coalition will oppose this measure. We will oppose it because it is bad policy. It is bad policy because it is taking a targeted payment and making it a general payment that can be used in any way unrelated to education expenses. It is bad policy because it is bringing forward expenditure from next year's financial accounts into this year's financial accounts in order to give the Treasurer his surplus. For those reasons, this measure should be opposed.

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