Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

The budget is an opportunity for the government to send a message to the nation about the things they stand for. The sad thing about this budget is that it sends the wrong message to the nation. It is a very sad message indeed, and it goes something like this: do not get old; do not dream of going to university; for god's sake do not lose your job; and do not get crook. If you are unlucky enough to get sick, make sure you have a credit card, because your Medicare card is not going to be enough for you to see a doctor anymore.

The unfortunate thing is that it did not have to be like this. It did not have to be like this, and Australians were promised it would be very different. We all remember the Prime Minister—the Leader of the Opposition as he then was—telling Australians there would be no cuts to pensions, no changes to Medicare and no cuts to health. That is what Australians voted on but it is not what they got. It did not have to be like this. When they came to office, they inherited an economy with low unemployment rates—one of the lowest in the Western world—and growth. We have been growing at trend growth through some of the toughest economic times in the world's economic history; there is no other nation on earth that can make those sorts of claims. Even through the darkest days of the GFC there was one quarter, and one quarter alone, when the Australian economy did not grow.

That did not happen by accident; it happened because of deliberate decisions by the government—decisions that said that, when the economy is grinding to a halt, the role of government is to support confidence, business, and jobs and keep the economy ticking over. So yes, we did spend money, and we did take the budget from surplus to deficit. We did that because it was the right thing to do. There was an alternative—it was the alternative cheered for by the opposition at the time, the now government, and those policies would have seen over one million people thrown onto the unemployment heap.

So when the government came into power it inherited a very good set of economic circumstances: low unemployment, a growing economy, a triple-A credit rating—they do not in those out like confetti—and low interest rates. You would have thought, with an inheritance like that, they could have kept faith with their pre-election promises. Instead we are seeing in this budget something very different. We are seeing, if the bills associated with this budget find their way through both houses of parliament, that Australia will have the unenviable title of having the oldest retirement age in the world. Increasing the age before you are entitled to a pension is nothing more than a breach of trust.

This picture says it all. This guy is a fellow by the name of Bobby Turner.

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