Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow the member for McMillan. I do not agree with everything that he said but as usual he says it eruditely and with sincerity. It is a pleasure to talk on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-2015 and related bills. They are part of a set of the most important bills, certainly in my time in parliament and I suspect much longer, because they lie at the centre of a budget that does more to challenge and confront what we understand to be the Australian way of life than any other in my memory.

Before addressing the details of the budget underpinned by these bills, I want to talk a little bit about the seeds of the response that has come from the community about this budget, because in my view the seeds of this budget and the response that it has generated in the community go back to last year, a time when the now Prime Minister as opposition leader was presenting himself to the Australian people as all things to all people. He was trotting around the country talking very negatively about our government's agenda—which I guess was his role as the opposition leader—but not telling any hard truths to the Australian people about the challenges that our country and so many other countries confront in the 21st century. It was all going to be, according to the then opposition leader, beer and skittles.

It was clear though from feedback that I received in my electorate and when travelling the country with the then Prime Minister, and the research we received—and, I suspect, the anecdotal feedback that all members at the time received—that the Australian people were concerned that, if elected, the then opposition leader now Prime Minister would cut services, that he would cut health services, education funding and a range of other things. They knew that he was a member of parliament who had form, particularly when health minister. They knew that the member for Sturt had been trash-talking the Gonski school reforms for months and months. They had concerns that this Prime Minister, if and when elected, would cut seriously into services that they cherish. Clearly, the Prime Minister was getting the same feedback, because he gave the clearest possible assurances to the Australian people right up to the day before the election that there would be no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no changes to pensions, no cuts to the ABC or the SBS and no changes to GST arrangements.

The Australian people, rightly and understandably, took the then opposition leader at his word. Well, the deception started within weeks, with the release by the Treasurer of the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the MYEFO. This, as was very helpfully pointed out by the minister for immigration today in question time, follows the PEFO, the Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook, which is signed off by the secretaries of the departments of Treasury and Finance, with no political overlay, no consultation with the political leadership of the government, the Treasurer, the finance minister, the Prime Minister of the day—a very clear set of books that was countermanded in a spectacular way by the Treasurer only several weeks after being elected into government.

The MYEFO released by the Treasurer in December changed extraordinary economic assumptions. It gave $9 billion to the Reserve Bank of Australia and it more than doubled the deficit over the course of the forward estimates, adding more than $68 billion in deficits in a matter of weeks, just weeks after the government being elected in 2013. The Australian people rightly ask, 'Why would the Treasurer have done this?' and the answer unfortunately again is crystal clear. The Treasurer was hell-bent on trying to manufacture a crisis, trying to give the sense of a budget emergency, which he has maintained ever since. Never mind the truth—that the previous government had achieved AAA credit ratings from all three major international credit agencies. No matter the fact that the public finances of this country are the envy and have been the envy for many years of the developed world, the Treasurer was hell-bent on manufacturing a sense of crisis and budget emergency.

The next phase of the deception was an old trick of the coalition, a trick they have engaged in for as long as I have been involved in politics—the Commission of Audit, to come in and write a blueprint for an incoming coalition government, be it a state government or a Commonwealth government, to start hacking into government services cherished by the Australian people. On this particular commission there was no diversity of views. There was no vague attempt by the government to ensure there was a diversity of views on this Commission of Audit—all good people, I am sure, but no diversity in this group. It has been said I think by the opposition leader that this was a report by the big end of town for the big end of town. Then the Treasurer sat on it. To add to the deception, the Treasurer sat on it. While the people of South Australia and Tasmania went to state elections, while the people of Western Australia unfortunately were dragged back to another Senate election, the Treasurer and the Prime Minister refused to release the hard truths of their blueprint for cutting services.

On budget night a few weeks ago 12 months of this calculated deception finally crystallised into a budget of broken promises. This budget hits pretty much every group in the community that you can imagine, except obviously the big end of town, which was protected by the Commission of Audit report. It hits pensioners in the Port Adelaide electorate, it hits low- and middle-income families in an appalling way, it hits young people trying to get a start in life in the way in which the member for McMillan talked about, it hits motorists, it hits Australians visiting their doctor and so much more, all to halve a deficit that the Treasurer had created only a matter of a few months earlier.

It is hard to know where to start with this budget. As I am sure is the case with all other members—although on this side of the table we are probably being a bit more frank about this—I and my office have been inundated with calls from members of the electorate I represent, Port Adelaide. I have been spoken to at street-corner meetings over the past few weeks about the measures they are most concerned about in this budget. Without ranking them in any particular order of concern, it is quite clear that the measure attracting the most calls and the most significant feedback to my office and to me personally has been around pensions.

The Prime Minister could not have been clearer before the election, including the night before the election, when he said that there would no change to pensions under a government that he would lead. Well, there clearly are. The lift to the age of 70 is quite profoundly and qualitatively different to the package of pension reforms that the Rudd government put in place in 2009. A lift to the age of 70 as the eligibility age for the age pension would be the highest eligibility age that I am aware of. No-one is able to point to a higher eligibility age anywhere, at the very least in the developed world.

The difference also between this change and the 2009 reforms was that those reforms by the Rudd government were part of a package that importantly included the largest-ever increase to the single pension in its history—an increase that finally saw the single age pension brought up to a benchmark of two-thirds of the couple's rate. This is something that seniors group had been agitating for, for many years and something that was not delivered by the Howard government, although I do acknowledge that the Howard government made some positive changes to the pension, which are impacted by this budget.

I particularly refer to the Howard government's decision effectively to index, effectively to benchmark, the age pension to earnings or to MTAWE. This is perhaps the most insidious change proposed to pensions in this budget. Not even the Commission of Audit recommended that pensions be indexed according to the consumer price index. Even the Commission of Audit recommended that indexation at least be at the PBCI, which, in the vast majority of quarters, will be higher than the CPI. As I said, there is effectively and has been for a decade and a half a wages link, an earnings link, for pensions in this country, which is so important for maintaining the value, the purchasing power, of the age pension, the disability support pension, the carers payment and a range of other pensions as well. A couple of days ago, the Treasurer in the parliament said that the CPI, apparently in one quarter recently, was higher than MTAWE, the male ordinary times average weekly earnings. I challenged him to find another quarter in the last 10 or 20 years where CPI had been higher than MTAWE, and of course he could not. For the vast bulk of modern Australian economic history, MTAWE has been significantly higher than CPI.

We have seen a change like this before in the early 1980s. We saw Margaret Thatcher get rid of the earnings link for the British basic state pension and link it instead to CPI. What we have seen over the course of three decades is the purchasing power, the value, of the basic pension in the UK deteriorate markedly, to the point where it is now probably only around 15 per cent of average earnings in Britain—a country which now finds 30 per cent of its older citizens aged over 65 officially living in poverty. This is an incredibly poorly thought-out change in this budget—something which does nothing to recognise and value the contribution of particularly older citizens in this country, who have worked hard, paid their taxes, raised their families and built the society that we so often, unfortunately, take for granted. This is a measure that will be resisted very, very strongly by the Australian Labor Party.

Time does not permit me to go through all of the other measures that people in the electorate which I have the privilege of representing have raised with me. The electorate is also very concerned about the changes to family payments, the freeze on rates and the exclusion or the removal of family tax benefit part B for families when their youngest child turns six. It is a shocking hit to single income households, including single parent households, along with a whole range of other changes and hits that this government has inflicted on those families—for example, removing the schoolkids bonus. Apparently, this is part of the Prime Minister's tough choices—the tough choices that include a tax increase to people on $200,000, which, by contrast, involves them paying $7.70 a week extra in tax for just three years, while single income households, with a primary and a high school aged child, might take a hit to family payments and cuts to other benefits that would total more than $6,000 in a year in 2017-18.

I would also like to talk very quickly about some measures in my portfolio, the environment, climate change and water portfolios, that have again shocked the constituencies in those areas. It is not easy to shock stakeholders in the environment portfolio when it comes to decisions by this government because, in eight short months, they have shown themselves to be a government that is disdainful of environmental protection, science and evidence based policy in the areas of environmental protection and climate change.

I particularly want to point to the decision in this budget to abolish ARENA, Australia's renewable energy agency, in spite of a very clear promise before the election that ARENA would be maintained by an incoming coalition government. It is yet another broken promise, perhaps overshadowed by the extraordinary broken promises in the areas of health, education, pensions and the like, but a very significant broken promise on the back of more than $400 million being stripped from that agency in MYEFO.

Half a billion dollars has been taken out of Landcare. The Minister for the Environment will say that that has been replaced with the Green Army program, a program that the opposition will not oppose, but natural resource management bodies and Landcare bodies will tell members of the coalition, as much as they tell members of the opposition, that a labour market program like the Green Army is no substitute for Landcare programs. As much as the Minister for the Environment might pretend otherwise, if you go out and talk to farmers and NRM bodies, which have been working on land care for years and years, they will say that switching $500 million out of that program into the Green Army is nothing more or less than a sleight of hand. Another $500 million has been stripped from the Solar Roofs program; a million solar roofs was a rock-solid promise made time and time again by the Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment. It disappeared under this budget, as so many other things in the environment, climate change and water portfolios did.

I did want to mention one or two things in closing that are not in my portfolio, but are close to my heart. In spite of the Prime Minister's promise to make no cuts to health, I was very disappointed to see $50 million stripped from Partners in Recovery, a program designed to support the needs of perhaps the most vulnerable Australians in the community—people with enduring, chronic and very severe mental illness. I was very appreciative of the support that we received from the shadow minister for health in the Mental Health Reform package. I was very disappointed to see that cut to the program that was intended to support perhaps the most vulnerable Australians.

Labor will fight this budget; we will hold the Prime Minister to his word and we will make sure that Australia retains the pillars of a fair and prosperous society that have been attacked by this budget and that so many Australians fought to build up.

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