Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to have this opportunity to be heard on the government's appropriation bills, which underpin a budget based on a fictional emergency and are driven by a set of ideological prejudices. It is a budget that amounts to a dismantling of Australia's future. It is a budget that is punitive towards those who have least and it makes no attempt to address the areas of expenditure or tax concession that are ineffectively directed towards those who have most, especially large corporations. It is in many ways a cruel and distorted budget. There is no other way to explain an approach that seeks to penalise the unemployed, age and disability pensioners, university students, single parents and low-income families while making a big show of getting a balanced contribution from high-income earners and big business with what amounts to a slap with the limpest of limp lettuce leaves.

Under this government's proposed budget, single parents will be poorer as their support is reduced, as they face GP co-payments, as they lose the schoolkids bonus and as they deal with the direct and indirect effect of higher petrol prices. Meanwhile, there is a tax cut for business, and even the biggest companies, at worst, will stay the same. The levy they face, which offsets the general tax cut, will be used to pay for an unnecessarily generous paid parental leave scheme, in a strangely firm adherence to the one commitment the Prime Minister apparently does want to keep.

The attempts to sell the budget have involved repeated claims that its harsh and conflicting measures are necessary for the long term, yet the budget takes a number of incredibly retrograde steps in relation to future costs. Some of the so-called budget savings, though dealt with by separate legislation, are created by unwinding national preventative health coordination and research and by decreasing investment in technologies that improve energy efficiency, increased renewable energy and support for the low-carbon jobs of the 21st century. These cuts conform to the coalition's general disregard for the role and responsibility of government in taking the long view and in shaping Australia's economic and social future. The cuts conform to a belief that the market will automatically provide wonderful solutions to the challenges that lie ahead even though history shows that without proper guidance, regulation and support the market is a poor mechanism for getting ahead of the curve. Health services and costs in the US are a great example where a much higher mix of private to public funding and service provision delivers significantly worse and less fair health outcomes at a much higher cost to the public purse.

The retreat in the area of climate change action is particularly muddle-headed when you consider that a set of balanced revenue and investment arrangements are being taken away, to be replaced by a direct action spending plan that all the experts agree will not sufficiently reduce emissions. So big polluters will no longer pay for the cost of their pollution. The incentive to lower emissions and improve efficiency will disappear, and the historic investment in Australia's renewable energy capacity, innovation and jobs will drop away at a critical period in the industry's burgeoning development.

Last week I had the privilege of meeting several young people from Kiribati and Tuvalu who were visiting parliament with the Pacific Calling Partnership facilitated by the Edmund Rice Centre's Eco Justice campaign. They discussed the devastating impact that climate change is having on their tiny islands, with increased cyclonic, drought and storm surge events, and sea level rise eroding precious land and polluting crops and freshwater with salt. There is nowhere for them to go as their islands become thinner and thinner. Nineteen-year-old Apisaloma Tawati from Kiribati described the 'slow and horrible decay of life—life of plants, animals and humans'. They called on Australia as a rich and developed country to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to help finance small island countries to adapt to the damage that climate change is causing.

Unfortunately this coalition government is taking Australia down the opposite path in turning our back on climate change and pulling out of international climate finance agreements that would help developing and small island states to adapt to the damage caused by climate change. This has consequences not only for our international reputation but also, far worse, for our Pacific Island neighbours whose nations are slowly drowning. If we truly care about the Pacific, as the government says we do, then we need to take appropriate and urgent action on climate change both here in Australia and internationally.

It goes without saying that there are a number of impacts that this budget will have on the people I represent in Fremantle. The changes to support for pensioners and senior Australians including the planned reversion to CPI pension indexation, the reset of deeming thresholds, the cutting of the senior supplement and the abolition of the national partnership through which state-based concessions are supported, will all have the effect of reducing the real income and the real quality of life for older Australians. Mr Abbott said 'no change to pensions' on the eve of the election. That commitment has been shattered.

As a co-chair of the newly-formed Parliamentary Friends of the ABC launched last week, I note with particular regret that the budget also includes cuts to the ABC and the SBS of $232.3 million and $8 million respectively. On the eve of the election Mr Abbott said 'no cuts to the ABC or SBS'. This is another promise given, another promise broken. Fremantle is a diverse and multicultural electorate with a community that has special regard for the value that exists in a properly resourced public broadcaster and a properly resourced multicultural and multilingual broadcaster. These cuts and those false words will be keenly felt in Fremantle.

We are all fortunate that Australia is, to a large extent, free of the phobia that exists in much of the US, for example, when it comes to government and the Public Service. We recognise that good government is a good thing—politics and politicians aside—that government is a critical guarantor of fairness and balance, an essential custodian of public institutions and free public goods and a particularly important regulator when it comes to the protection and conservation of our shared environment and natural resources. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, the Abbott government feels it has a duty to be a government in retreat, to abandon the role of custodian, to abdicate the responsibility of leadership. All around us, with perhaps the sole exception of defence and border control, the public institutions, public servants and public services that Australians depend upon are being whittled down and weakened.

We have seen cuts to the CSIRO, the abolition of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council, the disappearance altogether of AusAID and the prospective dissolution of the Medicare Local network—all steps that reveal a fundamental disregard for public servants and publicly-funded services. While the member for Tangney and I do not agree on major policy all that often, I believe he made uncommon good sense on the radio last week in relation to the CSIRO cuts when he said that it appeared that this government and this Prime Minister simply did not understand science—on this, he is absolutely right.

The Abbott government does not understand medical science or else why dismantle the recently established structure of preventative health research and coordination within our health system. It does not understand climate science or else why dismantle the historic and forward looking changes to reduce emissions and grow renewable energy production and jobs. It does not understand environmental science or else why propose changes that seriously weaken the regulatory effectiveness of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act by devolving decisions that are rightly for the Commonwealth to consider, including World Heritage and the application of the water trigger, down to the states and even to local governments.

As Adjunct Professor Rob Fowler from the Law School at the University of South Australia said in an address to parliamentarians last week titled 'Rolling back the years—regression in Commonwealth environmental laws':

Given the scale of the environmental challenges needing to be faced in this country, and globally, at the present time, and given also the growing sense of urgency on the part of scientists concerning the need to address these problems, it is difficult to understand the rationale for a substantial withdrawal from the field of environmental management by the Commonwealth.

It is the combined effect of the government's policies and budget measures that deliver compound harm in my electorate of Fremantle. The best example of this is the Abbott government's commitment to fund the construction of Roe Highway Stage 8, in combination with its decision to make no investment in urban rail and its intention to devolve EPBC assessments to state and perhaps even local governments.

In the case of Roe 8, this means providing funding to a massively expensive and out-of-date road project in the absence of a clear port and freight network plan. It means going forward with a road project whose only certainty is severe damage to a rare and precious remnant wetland and the cutting in half of local communities. I take this opportunity to again thank community campaigners from the Save Beeliar Wetlands group, including Nandi Chinna, author of Swamp Poems, Kate Kelly, Felicity McGeorge, Joe Branco, and Nyoongar elders Patrick Hume and Reverend Sealin Garlett. I congratulate them for their successful community workshop that was recently held in the Bibra Lake area.

The final substantial area of the government's proposed budget that I want to touch upon is international development. As someone who had the honour and privilege of holding, briefly, the role of Minister for International Development, how disappointing it is that, since its election, the current government has perhaps moved faster and more savagely to undermine both the organisational capacity and the funding for Australia's foreign aid program than it has in relation to any other area of government operation. Sadly, foreign aid continues to be seen by those opposite as a kind of misguided niche interest held by those with a bleeding heart—and therefore naturally the primest of prime candidates for funding cuts at every turn.

The reality is that Australia's international development program under the Labor government secured its place as a world leader in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. It has been making an incredibly important lifesaving difference to the poorest and most disadvantaged people in the world—many of whom are in our region. Even if you were the kind of person who thought Australia should not make that sort of contribution to the wellbeing of our fellow men and women, you should reflect on the fact that, dollar for dollar, well-directed foreign aid is as effective in improving economic capacity and for building regional peace and stability as spending in any other government program area.

It is profoundly depressing that some people will hardly bat an eyelid at the most astronomical expenditure on certain defence projects but will enthusiastically applaud the taking of money out of programs that give children the chance of living beyond five years of age. It is appalling when politicians say that we cannot commit funds to reduce poverty and disease in other countries in the circumstances of our own small and manageable national borrowings, yet heartily welcome the fact that we have committed to sending $24 billion overseas to purchase a set of warplanes in precisely the same fiscal circumstances.

For all the people of Fremantle, this budget is disappointing, short-sighted and dishonest. For many of them, it is also frightening and punitive. People in my electorate are bewildered at the conduct of a government whose single act of creation so far is the reintroduction of dames and knights and whose principal focus seems to be the relentless practice of negativity they honed in opposition.

Those opposite who spent the entire to period of the Labor government opposing measures that were not only for the broad economic and social benefit of this country but were also matters that Labor had canvassed openly with the public can have no reason to believe that we on this side should go along with policies that harm low-income and disadvantaged Australians and that were loudly and plainly disavowed by Mr Abbott in the course of the 2013 election campaign.

We will not go along with a budget that dismantles Australia's public health and education, our welfare safety net, our scientific excellence, our environmental protection framework, our public broadcasters, and our Clean Energy Future. We will not go along with a budget that goes blindly into massive defence spending commitments and turns a blind eye to the poorest people in the poorest countries. We will stand up for the values and the people that Labor has always represented—for fairness, for those who need support, for the public goods and services we share, and for a progressive approach to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We will do this government the favour of holding them to their promises, which means opposing the broken commitments and backward measures contained in this budget and these appropriation bills.

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