Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like all MPs, I have spoken to literally hundreds of people about the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-2015 before us today. One of the most common reactions I have had from people is confusion and perplexity. Why would a government take the most from the people in a community who can least afford to pay? Why attack the foundation institutions of our nation like Medicare and the age pension? Why implement a university funding system that will stop working-class kids who could be the first in their family to go to university or to dream of higher education?

What I am realising is this: our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, and our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, do not get it; they just do not get it. Their lives are so divorced from the experiences of the ordinary Australian, the experiences of a person who lives in my electorate of Hotham. Let us have a look at some of the numbers: 82 per cent of the cabinet that created this budget went to a private school. In my electorate of Hotham, just 14 per cent of residents did. Most of these cabinet ministers went to university for free or on very heavily subsidised HECS. You know what? They are going to ask students in my electorate of Hotham to stare down the barrel of $80,000 to do nursing at Melbourne University. The income of a senior cabinet minister is around $7,000 a week. Do you know what the median income of someone in Hotham is per week? It is about $518. That means for the ordinary person in my electorate to make what the Treasurer earns in an hour, they need to work for almost two full days.

We are learning a lot about the Treasurer at the moment. We are really getting to know him as a public. Many of you would have seen his performance on Q&A couple of weeks ago. He was asked how he kept in touch with the lives of ordinary Australians. In response, he told a story about his family history, how we went from rags to riches and how his parents came to Australia and built what they have through hard work in the private sector. I am very admiring of that story; I am very admiring of Australians who come here with very little and who have managed to build something from nothing. The critical point here is that all this Treasurer knows is his own life experience. It is a very aberrant life experience and that is what he believes is all that he needs to know about the Australian public.

This really explains a lot to us. It explains their genuine incredulity of a Treasurer who cannot understand that a $7 GP co-payment for every family member, every time they go to the doctor, is a significant sum. It tells us why, instead of listening to the concerns of Australians, Joe Hockey suggests that those struggling spend less of their money on beer and cigarettes. It is comments like these that show us just how completely divorced this cabinet is from the ordinary Australian.

I want to take the opportunity this morning to talk to the House about how the budget will affect ordinary families who live in my electorate of Hotham. I will talk about some key areas of change. I cannot possibly cover them all in 15 minutes. However, I want to tell the stories of some families I know and how they will be touched by this budget. I want to start with health because, of all the things in this budget, the health changes will affect every single one of us in the Australian community. Bulk-billing in my electorate is very high. It is, by and large, a working-class electorate, so about 82 per cent of all doctor visits are bulk-billed. The $7 GP co-payment will see almost $6 million raised each year in additional tax across my electorate. That is an additional $6 million collected from sick Australians by the $7 GP tax. It is regressive, it is unfair. One of the best things I will be able to do, as a first-term member of parliament, is to vote against its implementation in this House.

The Treasurer is so confounded and so frustrated by his lack of understanding of how anyone could feel that such a tax is unfair, so I want to tell the story of a constituent of mine, Danny. Danny was born with some significant health problems. As a child he suffered from kidney reflux. He was quite ill as a young person, but he managed to complete university and find a job. Later in his youth, he was diagnosed with brain cancer and the surgery, which saved his life, has left him with significant short-term memory problems. Danny battled on. He found a job and got married. Then later he, sadly, lost his wife and his unborn child to cancer. His kidneys packed up and he was forced onto dialysis at night. It was an expensive period for him and he had to remortgaged his house. Eventually, he was able to get a kidney transplant and he now works as a forklift driver and manages a warehouse. He is on low medication and requires significant and frequent medical treatments. He pays $139.70 for medication a month. He will face an additional $25 imposed by the government for his drugs, an additional $7 a month for pathology reports and an additional $7 a month for each doctor's visit, which are monthly but sometimes more often.

Danny earns about $500 a week. He works but he struggles and the changes to this budget will see him struggle a lot more. It is so unfair that Australians like Danny are being shouldered with the burden.

Let us talk about education. We are very lucky in Hotham to live in quite close proximity to Monash University. Almost a third of my residents in Hotham are students at one level or another. And, boy, will they be hit hard by this budget! There are billions of dollars of cuts in school funding, there is the cowardly backdown on the supposed unity ticket that we went to an election on on the Gonski funding that would, for the first time in Australia, see school funding follow the children with the greatest need and then there are changes to university funding. I have had the chance to really think about the budget changes over the last couple of weeks and it is the university changes that are, increasingly, making me the most sad because it is university education that provides the skills in this modern economy where skills are what really matter when you go out into the workforce. It is university education that provides us social mobility in this country. I just cannot fathom how a government would make changes that will very much affect Australians, particularly those in families in low-income brackets.

The coalition has argued that young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds will not be more affected by the changes. That is inane, nonsensical and completely lacks common sense. It is absolutely out of step with the research, which shows that students in lower income brackets are affected by fee changes all over the world. We have even seen that in Australia when changes have been made to HECS over time and how in fact almost 100 per cent of enrolment changes have been from students in lower income brackets.

I have spoken to a number of school principals about the changes to education and how that will affect students in their schools. One conversation struck me in particular. I called a principal who runs a very good school in one of the lowest income parts of my electorate. It is also one of the most multicultural parts of my electorate. When I talked to this principal, he was genuinely devastated by the changes that are being made to higher education, because he and the teachers at that school work so hard to try to make a culture of excellence and to help these students, who come from sometimes quite difficult backgrounds, to believe that there is actually a hope that they will be able to go on into higher education and go into a profession, which many of them dream of. He is the principal of a school where a lot of the students come from families that are from cultures where debt is very unusual and you would never normally take on debt. They are brought up in households where they are already under pressure to go out into the workforce quickly after they finish school so that they can help bring in income for the family. He said to me: 'For these families, a sum like $100,000 is a TattsLotto win. Remember, these families have a family income of $40,000 or $50,000. They rent their homes. Their kids are already under pressure to get out into the workforce quickly and contribute. Of course this will make a difference.'

We talked about some specific students, but one of the biggest imposts that this principal is concerned about is around the impact on culture. How can he try to build the sort of culture of excellence that he wants to see in that school when university is effectively being put out of reach for many of his students? And for people who do not believe that these impacts are real, I really invite you to come to Hotham, to come down to this school, and to talk to the principal and to some of the students. I know that life in Warringah and life on the North Shore perhaps does not reflect these realities, but they are the realities of electorates like ours—all of us who are here in this chamber at the moment.

I would be very remiss not to talk a little about the changes to pensions. I have about 23,000 residents in Hotham who are pensioners, and they have been probably the most virulent in their opposition to this budget. To be fair, the pensioners are contacting me not just because of changes to the pension but because they are so worried about things that will affect their own grandchildren and some of the changes that they see which reflect very different opportunities and life chances from those that they feel they have had as Australians.

ACOSS has estimated that pensioners will lose about $80 a week by 2024, due to their payments being linked to CPI. So there is obviously an income impost here. But what really frustrates me about this pension change is what this is saying about our country. By linking the pension to CPI instead of to wage growth, what we are saying is that, as our country grows more prosperous, there is no need for us to share that prosperity with age pensioners—that they should stay basically living, and, many of them, struggling, on those same incomes, despite the wealth of other Australians increasing. This just does not reflect the way that we do things in Australia. As a nation, when we grow everyone should benefit. That is just how we do things in this country.

There are also changes to the pension age that are going to really have a significant impact on people in Hotham. About 35 per cent of my constituents who are in work, work in blue-collar jobs. Shifting the pension age arguably could be workable for people who work behind a desk, who spend most of their time in white-collar industries. But for manual labourers, this is an extremely rough change. Increasing the age pension age to 70 will make Australia's the highest pension age across all of the OECD countries. That is interesting, because I think we have the lowest or at least one of the lowest debt levels in the OECD. Again, Labor will oppose this change, and I will be very proud to stand up for the older Australians in my electorate who rely on a pension, and there are so many of them.

Before I close I will make some brief comments about the impact of this budget on women. In so many ways, but for women in particular, this budget absolutely fails the fairness test. Some of these measures will impact very disproportionately on women. I am talking here about female students, who will pay significantly more for their education. It is women who will usually pay the price of losing family tax benefits. Lower-income women—and this is no surprise, given the values in this budget—will be the hardest hit. An unemployed single mother with one eight-year-old child will lose 12 per cent of her income as a result of this budget. All of us have single mums in our electorates and we know that these are the families who are watching every dollar. Can you imagine—12 per cent of their income will simply disappear. A single-income couple with two school-age children and average earnings will lose about six per cent of their disposable income. Again, these are families that in many instances are struggling a great deal. For any of us, dealing with a five or 10 per cent sudden reduction in our income is going to be very difficult to manage.

For women at work and women trying to balance the cost of child care, the freezing of threshold and indexation for childcare rebates and fee relief is going to have a fast impact. For a government that is supposedly so concerned with the participation of women in the workforce, I see this as absolutely regressive and contrary. If you are interested, have a look at the numbers for education, because the impact on women is absolutely shocking. A woman who does an accounting degree at the University of Melbourne will pay $120,000 for her degree. That will include $45,000 in interest and, if she takes off the usual amounts for part-time work with kids, she is going to be paying off her degree for 36 years. How can this be considered fair? I am absolutely staggered.

One of the best things about this budget, though, is the significant empathy that I have had for other Australians who are concerned about the impact on their fellow Australians. I have more and more stories that I could share with you, but I want to tell you that a Mrs Swallow contacted me. She was acknowledging she is comfortably off and will not be affected by the budget but is worried about those who will be. Jeannine, another constituent, stated the budget would not impact her personally but she is deeply troubled by what it will mean for those who are struggling. These are people who do not want to live in a society which makes it harder for people like Danny, for people like students in the low-income school. They do not want to see those kids get a second-rate education. They do not want to live in a country where families have to make tough decisions about whether or not to take their kids to the doctor. This is ridiculous. This is life in Australia. It is not what we know and expect given we are one of the richest countries in the world.

It does not make sense to me. It does not make sense to so many Australians. That is why I will be fighting with Labor as hard as I can against the changes that we have discussed.

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