Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This is a budget which is unravelling before our very eyes from a government which is united in its disunity as it tries to sell this atrocious budget. It is a budget which has been comprehensively rejected right across the country, and I am sure coalition members, in the week that just passed as they went back to their electorates, got the message loud and clear from their electorates just how bad this budget is for the people they represent. It is now up to them to stand up for the people they represent. Instead of giving a speech like the one we just heard, the member for Wright could actually have represented his electorate and stood up for his pensioners. Instead of claiming, falsely, that there are no cuts to the pension, he could stand up for the pensioners in his electorate, as all members opposite could. He could stand up for the schools and hospitals in his electorate which have had cuts. The Premier of Queensland knows they have had cuts, but the honourable member opposite seems incapable of realising they have suffered cuts in this budget—schools and hospitals. There have been cuts to family payments. People have been frozen out of Newstart, creating an underclass in this country.

These are the measures which are being comprehensively rejected around the country, along with the trashing of the fundamental principles of Medicare, one of the great institutions of this nation, which Labor created and Labor will fight to defend. It is all very well for the member for Wright and other members opposite to say that $7 is not much for people in his electorate and around the country to pay to see a doctor. But the universality of Medicare, the universality of health care, is a fundamental principle which members right across the country should be defending and which members on this side of the House will defend. We will defend it in this House and in the other place and we will defend it right around the country.

Members on the other side have a choice: they can come in here and stand up for their electorates, stand up for people's right to see a doctor, to take their children to a doctor free of charge, or they can stand up for their Prime Minister and their Treasurer. They cannot do both. They must decide. Are you for the people in your electorate or are you for your government? Because your government is launching an attack on the people in your electorates. We have seen the government, and we saw another example just then, scrambling to defend this budget, scrambling in an Orwellian attempt to deny that these fundamental changes in the budget are not broken promises—verbal gymnastics that we see from the Treasurer in particular, trying to say that this budget does not represent a fundamental breach of commitment to the Australian people.

There are two big problems with this budget. One is that it shows that this government was elected on a web of wilful and consistent and systematic deceit, making false promises to the Australian people about the cost of living, false promises to the Australian people about the state of the budget and being able to return the budget to surplus without new taxes and without spending cuts over and above those which had been previously identified. It is a web of deceit in which the Liberal and National parties engaged up until and including the September election which has now been exposed by this budget. The other is that it is a fundamentally unfair manifesto.

We saw the Treasurer's spin at work again on the weekend, with the leaking of Treasury analysis which apparently showed the impact on families was not that great; it was not that big. '"Nothing to see here," Treasury told us,' according to the spin from the Treasurer over the weekend. There is only one little problem with that: it was not Treasury analysis at all. It was not Treasury analysis at all. This is a Treasurer who said, when he came into office, 'I will never leak Treasury advice to defend my position; I will always stand up for myself.' I have to give him that; he has not done that. He has invented Treasury analysis. He has not leaked the real stuff; he has leaked false Treasury analysis, because it does not exist.

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