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

No. 93 over here says that national debt is bad but student debt is great. Big, American-style student debt is great! The Minister for Education says that taxpayers hate paying for university education for other people. Here is some news for him. Even those cleaners that this government has cut the wages of, may hope that their children, one day, can aspire to go to university. They do not mind paying their taxes to make sure that we live in a more prosperous country where every child has the opportunity of a university education. And here is the other piece of news for the education minister: those university students turn out to be taxpayers. And when we have got a progressive taxation system, guess what? That extra income that they earn because they have gone to university, they pay extra tax on that.

One of the other things that has been so disappointing about this budget are health cuts: $50 billion from hospitals, $400 million from public dental, $400 million from prevention. You know what? There are ways of making savings in health. The best way to make savings in health is to keep people healthy and out of hospital. Our work in prevention dropped the rate of smoking.

Budgets are all about choices, about priorities and about values. This government shows its priorities and it shows its values when it says everybody has to tighten their belts: families on $60,000 a year, by $6,000; pensioners, by $4,000 a year; young unemployed people, by almost $7,000 a year. Everyone has to tighten their belts but high-income earners pay an extra little bit of tax for three years and then nothing. Poor people's cuts are large and they are permanent; rich people's cuts are small and they are temporary.

It is a priority for this government to spend $20 billion to give millionaires $50,000 to have a baby. It is a priority for this government to hand $1.1 billion to multinational companies in tax breaks. It is a priority for this government to make sure that people on high incomes get big breaks on their superannuation not available to low-income earners. It is a priority for this government to give handouts to big polluters. They are their priorities.

What are our priorities in government? Our priorities are: investing more fairly in education so that every child has great education; investing in a National Disability Insurance Scheme so that disabled Australians finally get choice and control over the services that they get; looking after the poor and the vulnerable; and, yes, making sure that what the best and wisest parent wants for his child, society gets for all of our children. This is the type of society, the type of country that we want to hand over to our children.

One of the things that strikes me most about the response to this budget was it is not pensioners saying, 'I am really worried about my pension.' It is pensioners saying, 'I am really worried about the uni students.' And it is not uni students saying, 'I am really worried about myself.' It is students saying, 'I am really worried about the pensioners and the health system.' This shows that we care about a fairer Australia.

See this speech in context