Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is no wonder that the government's approach to this year's budget is chaotic, when you consider that last year's budget remains unsolved, the government's leadership remains unresolved and the government's policy agenda has consisted of nothing but the ideological destruction of forward-looking and necessary Labor reforms. The government's short-term ideas have been unacceptable to the Australian community and it does not seem to have a plan for the long term. Money has poured out in tax relief to big business, to be made up by harsh cuts to the most vulnerable—pensioners, the unemployed, students, low-income families and the poorest people in our region.

The deepest cuts of all have been made to Australia's international aid budget—some $11 billion—reducing our overseas development assistance to its lowest proportion of GNI in 40 years. The foreign minister has presided over the dissolution of AusAID and the decimation of Australia's aid budget. Make no mistake: this will mean more people living in desperate poverty; it will mean fewer lives saved; and it will mean less economic development and greater regional instability. For a government that is obsessed with appearing tough on terrorism and refugees, it would appear counterproductive in the extreme to be gutting Australia's world-renowned aid program which has worked to address some of the root causes—namely, disadvantage, discrimination and despair.

As if further evidence were required that this government just does not understand the concepts of fairness or social justice, we now learn that this government, which claims to care about ending family violence, is cutting funding around the country to community legal centres and emergency services for women and children fleeing family violence. This government, led by the self-described Prime Minister for Indigenous affairs, is cutting $500 million from Indigenous services, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, or ATSILS, and the peak body, NATSILS, as well as legal aid. The Abbott government's withdrawal of funding for remote Aboriginal communities—who are, after all, according to the Prime Minister, only maintaining a lifestyle choice—has led the WA government to propose the closure of something like 150 communities in WA. Again, it is hard to think of a more damaging cut to the fabric of fairness and justice in this country than to take away community services and legal advice from those who cannot afford to pay for it, especially when Indigenous Australians are massively overrepresented in the criminal justice system, and to force the removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands. Way to close the gap, Prime Minister!

This is the 'infrastructure Prime Minister' who does not believe in trains, Australian manufacturing or the renewable energy sector, who thinks that climate change is 'crap' and whose government has sacked 1,200 CSIRO scientists and threatened the jobs of 1,700 more researchers in order to bully its way towards a deregulated university system where degrees could cost $100,000 and young people's opportunities are dictated by their family's wealth. This is a government that has signed a uranium sale treaty with India that significantly lowers nuclear safeguards and is negotiating free-trade agreements in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that will put Australian jobs at risk and threaten our sovereignty. This is a government that is dramatically expanding live export markets into places that do not respect human rights let alone animal welfare and is doing so in the face of gross violations of animal welfare standards that continue to go unchecked and unpunished.

We all remember the Prime Minister saying before the election that there will be no cuts to health or education, pensions, the ABC or SBS. But, apparently, broken promises do not matter when this Prime Minister and this Treasurer do it. In any case, if you are going to keep helping your mates at the big end of town with tax breaks and by ending the mining tax and the carbon price, and if you want to keep torturing refugees in expensive offshore detention centres, you have to get the money from somewhere, right?

Tony Abbott may or may not survive as Prime Minister but, in any case, these policies belong to all of the members of the so-called Liberal Party. Whoever is their leader, we need to look at their policies and their budget priorities. Do they still intend to ignore the existential crisis of global warming? Are they still trying to dismantle the world's largest network of marine sanctuaries established by the former Labor government? Are they still banging the drum of national security and border protection as a cover to deny accountability in government, to persecute vulnerable people and to take away more of our rights and freedoms? Will public health and education, science, the ABC and SBS, pensioners, students, the unemployed, low-income earners, people with disabilities, Indigenous Australians, refugees, the global poor, people with mental health issues, animal welfare, respect for the UN and the environment—these important issues—remain expendable under this government?Those are the important questions. Unfortunately, with this chaotic and dishonest government, we are unlikely to get any reliable answers.

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