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

I respect the chair and I am happy to refer to the social services bill—I will refer to it many times—but, with due respect, as the member knows, this has been a wide-ranging debate. People have been talking about the carbon tax, and the member for Bass was talking about the global financial crisis. He uttered those magic words. I was really quite surprised because, in acknowledging the global financial crisis, you have to acknowledge a whole lot of other things, such as how well Australia did during that crisis, the fact that we have a AAA credit rating, the fact that our economy performed very well and grew right through that period and the fact that Australia avoided recession and avoided losing 200,000 jobs. It was an important achievement for this country and for the government at that time. It stopped people being thrown into the slaughterhouse of unemployment. It is that terrible for people to be unemployed. If you look at Spain, for example: it was running a budget surplus before the GFC and they had terrible unemployment and terrible social consequences afterwards.

We see a budget that is confused in so many ways. On the one hand, those opposite have the same attitude to working- and middle-class people that conservative governments down the generations have had: feed the donkey less and whip him harder. And the attitude of those opposite is that the rich need an incentive. It is all part of a counterproductive ideology which is about enriching some, the people at the top, and austerity for the people at the bottom. For the self-funded retirees who are the subject of this bill, it is a game of three-card Monte—the little prize that you might get quickly disappears as the game goes on.

This budget is an appalling assault on Australian values. It is a reactionary budget. It is a vicious budget. It is a budget based on a manufactured emergency. It involves counterproductive austerity. What this bill proves and what the rhetoric of those opposite proves—the member for Bass and the member for Longman—is that it is a confused budget and a confused government that does not know what it is doing.

See this speech in context