Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

On 13 May this year, about five months ago, the Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, handed down the worst budget in living memory. It went down very badly indeed. It was a budget based on a confected budget emergency, and there is a booklet that seems to have gone missing—a blue booklet called 'Real solutions'. I never see any members of the government come into the chamber with that, yet I recall numerous occasions in the last parliament when they put it under their arm like a bible. It was the manual. It would get the country back on deck. But so much of what we have seen in the legislation and the budget which this government announced in May cannot possibly and is not found in the missing blue book. You know: the book the then Leader of the Opposition used to hug so close to his chest. He put it in front of him like he had steak knives as well!—'Buy this and vote for me.' It has gone missing entirely.

I am always amused by those opposite, including the member for Herbert, who criticise us on our side as if none of us have business experience at all. I ran a business for more than 20 years. It grew from the time I was about 26 years of age into a medium-size firm in the Brisbane CBD. I grew that business, so don't come in here and say none of us have any idea, as if somehow those in the government alone know what it is like to be in business. Many of us on this side of the chamber know because we ran businesses ourselves.

A budget that clearly the government thinks is about lifters or leaners is a budget of broken promises and really cruel cuts: $50 billion in health and hospitals, $30 billion in schools. It is a budget that abandoned needs based funding and Americanised our universities. They are on about liberating our students with debt and $100,000 university degrees. It is a budget that fundamentally attacked the universality of Medicare. That is what it is about. There were massive cuts to family support and pensions, slashing $534 million in PM&C's Indigenous portfolio alone, on top of that cutting legal aid funding for Indigenous people, Indigenous language programs and on and on. There were $653 million in cuts to the aged-care sector. On top of that we have the cuts to the dementia and severe behaviour supplement—a one-two punch to the head of the aged-care sector.

So we have here legislation before the chamber which we will oppose and which again is about cuts, so many of which were never mentioned in that famous—or infamous—blue book they carried around everywhere. We will stand up on this side of the chamber for families, for fairness, for veterans, for older Australians, for those in the country in the cities and for those people from all over the country, from the Torres Strait to Tasmania. We will stand up for Labor values. We will. We would support sensible budget saves and we have done so. In fact, in the last few weeks we have demonstrated that. But we will not support savage cuts to family income.

Those cuts impact on electorates around the country, many held by Labor. Independent modelling produced by the University of Canberra's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling revealed that families and residents in my electorate of Blair are worse off by about $406 per year as a consequence of the budget. I admit that Blair sits in about the middle of the electorate table, but the NATSEM modelling reveals that 15 of the 16 hardest hit electorates in Australia are held by the Australian Labor Party, those on this side of the chamber.

We fought the measures in the bills we are debating today when this stuff came before the house in a couple of omnibus bills. We fought these measures in the public, we fought in the Senate and we won. We won the argument with the public and saw the government backflip on this issue. We saw the government split bills, introducing four new bills to the House, and we supported responsible saves of about $2.7 billion which we told the government we would support back in May after the budget. But, in their arrogance—indeed, in their ignorance—they did not have the grace and humility to negotiate and talk to the opposition about this issue.

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