Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a reactionary budget. It is a vicious budget. It is a budget based on a manufactured emergency. It is a budget full of counterproductive austerity. Most of all it is a confusing budget; it is a really, really confusing budget. The member for Longman and before him the member for Bass both proved how confusing this budget is. Indeed, this bill is evidence of that confusion, a confusion of values within the Abbott government.

This bill, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (Seniors Health Card and Other Measures) Bill 2014, provides indexation for some payments when the government is cutting it everywhere else. We heard the member for Bass and the member for Longman stand up in this House and say, 'We are fulfilling our commitments.' To use the words of the member for Longman, they are 'solemnly fulfilling their contract with the Australian people.' That is very Tea Partyesque, American, language.

Those opposite talk about promises and they talk about commitments. We know that on 6 September 2013 Tony Abbott said there would be no changes to pensions. What did we get? We got a new indexation system for pensions that gets rid of male average weekly earnings—which was put there by John Howard, I might add— and gets rid of the pensioner living cost index. It reduces that indexing to CPI and applies it to the age, disability and carers pensions as well as to the parenting payment. They are freezing all the means test thresholds on pensions, as well. So we have seen them get up in this House and, puffing and beating their chests, proudly tell us that they are meeting their commitments. Yet that core commitment—that there would be no changes to pensions—that Tony Abbott made on 6 September 2013 has been broken. It is a budget full of broken promises and confused rhetoric.

On 20 November 2012, Tony Abbott said, 'We're about reducing taxes; not increasing taxes. We're about getting rid of taxes; not imposing new taxes.' Yet they are increasing income tax and increasing petrol tax, and they are giving $400 million back to big business through changing and unwinding the tax integrity measures. It is a confused picture with tax. On 6 September 2013, Tony Abbott said that there would be no cuts to health. We got $50 billion worth of cuts—that is thousands of hospital beds, thousands of nurses, thousands of doctors. We got a $7 GP tax. It is not $7 once; it is $7 every time you go to the waiting room, every time you get a blood test and every time you get a scan. How that will operate has not been revealed by the government. It has not been revealed to the opposition. It has not been revealed to GPs. It has not been revealed to the Australian people. We suspect that the effect of that $7—that compounding, cascading $7—will be worse than the government is owning up to. There are increases to the PBS; that bill passed the House just this week. There is an attack on state government revenues and, consequently, encouragement for them to impose emergency room taxes on category 4 and 5 cases.

So we know that in those areas they are breaking their promises over and over again. Yet we saw the member for Bass and the member for Longman and others stand up in the parliament and proudly tell us how they have fulfilled their contracts with the Australian people. We heard all of their rhetoric about how they do what they say and say what they mean. It all came out a bit confused from the member for Longman: he was not quite sure what he was saying there for a while.

We know what Tony Abbott said about families on 4 May 2011:

A dumb way [to cut spending] would be to threaten family benefits or to means test them further

Yet in this budget he is cutting family tax benefit A and B by freezing indexation, and he is reducing the eligibility for family tax benefit B, costing some families $6,000. That is a real broken promise; that is a big broken promise.

We know what those opposite are doing on universities. We do not have a quote from the Prime Minister, but we have a quote from the now education minister, Christopher Pyne. On 26 August 2012, he said:

The Coalition has no plans to increase university fees …

That sounds like a commitment to the Australian people to me. What did we get? They increased the interest rate applied to HELP loans from 2.25 per cent in 2014-15 to six per cent. We all know that that is about creating a loan book which you later sell to some corporate entity. There has also been a 20 per cent increase in student contributions to university funding and a deregulation of course fees. We all know what that means. For nurses it might mean a $98,000 degree which they would end up paying off when they were 48.

This is a bill that runs contrary to the cascading river of broken promises from those opposite. We have indexation being introduced in some places where they are cutting them elsewhere. We have confusing rhetoric about the government meeting their commitments when we know they are breaking their promises everywhere else. When the Australian people look at this vicious budget, manufactured on a lie, that is full of austerity and broken promises, you can understand why they might be confused.

There are other areas where the government could be making savings. One such area is the Paid Parental Leave scheme. There is nothing wrong with paid parental leave, but this is a $21 billion scheme. You would have thought that such a massive expenditure runs somewhat contrary to the government's rhetoric on austerity. The government have kept superannuation breaks for the very richest in the community. Again, that runs contrary to this manufactured emergency and pledge of austerity. Further, the government are giving nearly $1 billion back to multinationals by unwinding various tax integrity rules that we introduced.

This is about introducing counterproductive austerity. That counterproductive austerity has done here what it has done in Europe, America and other places around the world—that is, smashed confidence. It has absolutely smashed people's confidence not just in the economy but in the safety net. What do people do when they do not have confidence in the economy and the safety net? I can tell you what they do. They stop spending. We have seen that reflected in consumer sentiment. Austerity has been a counterproductive disaster around the world because it undermines economic growth and subsequently undermines revenue. It means you find yourself going down the economic gurgler.

I heard the member for Bass utter words that those opposite are very reluctant to say in this parliament. He said the words 'global financial crisis' in this parliament. He talked about the global financial crisis.

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