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

Seven weeks after it was handed down, the public has delivered a resounding verdict on this budget. It has been the most unpopular budget in four decades—the most unpopular budget in 40 years. Why is that? Because it is the worst budget in 40 years. This is a budget that inflicts the greatest hurt on the poorest and most disadvantaged people, not just in Australia but around the world. What is more, the hurt is built on a phoney case that cuts are necessary because of a made-up crisis. It is a cruel budget, but it is not cruel for any reason. It is a budget that asks the greatest sacrifice of the poorest—a sacrifice that Australians would be prepared to make if they actually saw budget benefit from it, if they actually saw that we are all in this together. Instead, what they see are the greatest disadvantages going to the people who have the least.

Let's turn to foreign aid for a moment. There has been $7.6 billion cut from the aid budget. Labor are proud of the fact that we doubled the aid budget when we were in government. We are proud of the fact that we helped the poorest people in the world; that we did our share as a wealthy nation. Australia is the fifth richest country in the world. We can afford to do our share. How did we determine what our share is? How did we determine what our goal should be? It was not the Labor Party who determined that, it was John Howard.

When the nations of the world came together to ask what they could do to end extreme poverty and they set the Millennium Development Goals, who was it who said that, as Australians, we should do our share too; that as the world's fifth richest nation per capita we should do our share? It was John Howard who said that. And it was not just Australia that was pulling its weight. In the United Kingdom, what have the political twins of those opposite done with their aid budget? They have not just kept it at 0.5 per cent of gross national income, they have gone to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, with British Prime Minister Cameron saying this made him 'proud to be British'. He said:

We accept the moral case for keeping our promises to the world's poorest even when we face challenges at home.

The case for cutting aid that those across the chamber here have tried to invent is built on the idea that aid does not work, that there is nothing we can do—that old saying: 'Like the poor, they'll always be with us.' In fact, our $7.6 billion that is being cut could teach 25 million people to read and write, it could provide 1½ billion malaria treatments, it could deliver antiretroviral treatments for 10 million people living with HIV-AIDs, it could train three million midwives so that women giving birth in developing countries could have a skilled birth attendant by their side when they deliver those tiny babies.

Our aid was successful. An OECD development assistance committee peer review of Australian aid rated it extremely highly. They said we have a dynamic approach to being a good international citizen, punching at or above our weight, that we are in a strong position to deliver a growing aid budget effectively and efficiently. Our independent review of aid effectiveness also made the same point, but you only need to look at the results on the ground. Australia helped six million Afghan children go to school, including two million girls. The minister was talking before about the breeding of terrorists in Afghanistan. What could be a surer antidote to that than a decent education system for all its children, for boys and for girls?

We cut malaria in Vanuatu by 80 per cent and by more than 50 per cent in the Solomon Islands. You talk about the economic development of the country. We know that these illnesses keep people out of the workforce. They do not just affect the individuals. They do not mean individual sickness; they mean and economy is struck again and again by working age people who cannot be in the workforce because they have malaria. We helped build 2,000 schools across Indonesia. That is what our aid program did.

It is not just the poorest around the world who have suffered because of these budget cuts; it is Australians. Low-income Australians have been the hardest hit by this budget. The greatest unfairness has been reserved for those who already have the least, who are already struggling to make ends meet. Despite every promise that the Prime Minister made during the election about tackling cost of living, what we see with this budget are pensioners who are $4,000 worse off, self-funded retirees who are $1,600 worse off and families who are $6,000 worse off.

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