Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This is a budget of broken promises. It is a bad budget for Australia and it is a bad budget for Australians. The broken promises of this budget reveal a government with a serious deficit—a values deficit. The budget's broken promises will hit low- and middle-income families and the elderly. The poorest will suffer the most, but everyone suffers. Before the election the Prime Minister said there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS. Every single one of those promises is broken in this budget.

Australians expect their government to run a strong economy, but that is just the start of what we expect. We expect the government to have a vision for the future of our country and a plan to get there. Australians value our egalitarian society. We want a society where hard work is rewarded but where a little bit of bad luck does not mean the end of the world; a society where no-one is left behind. This budget fails that fairness test. It hits the poorest the hardest. It makes life harder for millions of ordinary Australians struggling to balance their family budget. This budget makes it harder for people when they fill up at the petrol pump, when they go to the doctor, when they buy medicines. For that reason Labor will fight the unfair measures in this budget every step of the way.

The budget shows how starkly the differences between the two sides of politics play out. What kind of government would deliver a budget that will reduce the income of a couple who have a combined income of $95,000 and two kids by almost $5,000 a year?

How do those members go back to their electorates and tell those families that this government is taking $5,000 a year from them? What kind of the government would deliver a budget that will reduce the income of a sole parent with two kids, earning $55,000 a year, by $6,000 a year? These are not our numbers—these are figures provided by NATSEM.

What has really surprised me, though, about the public anger in response to this budget is that people are not just angry about the broken promises and attacks on their own family budgets; they are angry about what is happening to other people. Parents with young kids who have lost the family tax benefit and the schoolkids bonus are not just talking to me about their family budget—they are talking to me about how unfair it is that pensioners who have worked hard all their lives are being told that their pensions will be cut. Pensioners who have never had a chance to go to university themselves are talking to me about their grandkids—and not even their own grandkids, but kids that age—who now have to choose between getting a decent university education and buying a home of their own one day. Young Australians, who are set to be slugged with these mind-boggling student debts, are talking to me about how it makes the decision to go to university much harder, but that is not all they are talking to me about. They are concerned about the $7.6 billion that this government is cutting from the aid budget, cuts made on the back of the world's poorest.

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