Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One year ago today, the Treasurer stood in this place and delivered Australians the most unfair and underhanded budget this country has ever seen. It was a budget aimed squarely at lowering the living standards of middle- and low-income families by cutting their benefits, increasing the cost of visiting a doctor and instituting $100,000 degrees. Thankfully, the Treasurer was unable to secure the approval of the parliament for his most horrendous measures and, one year on, the nation is still talking about the cuts that the last unfair budget failed to deliver. So I will be fascinated to see if tonight's budget actually achieves or delivers on anything.

For all my many years in this place, I have never seen a budget that has lasted 12 months. We are still talking about last year's budget. Indeed, most of the measures from last year's budget have still failed to pass the parliament. So I am not sure why we are having this budget, because last year's budget is still in abeyance—cuts that the Minister for Social Services is demanding still be passed to pay for his new childcare package. The Minister wants a $6,000 a year budget cut to families earning less than $65,000. How unfair is that? If we go by the Prime Minister's analysis, people on $65,000 are very low-income earners. If you are already doing it tough under this government, rest assured, later tonight you will be doing it tougher.

The Treasurer has been all but invisible before his second attempt tonight, and it is no surprise that Australians are looking on with cynicism and reservations. At least last time we saw him out smoking his cigar, but he has been nowhere to be seen this time. Actually, the 'treasurer in waiting' has been out working it hard.

Before the election the Prime Minister explicitly promised no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS. Every one of those promises has been broken at the expense of the living standard of average Australians. If you want to talk about scare campaigns, then go out and talk to a part-pensioner at this point in the cycle. They are terrified! My office has been inundated with calls from individuals who are not sure what is going to happen to them tonight. These people are living within set budgetary constraint and they have no way of earning any extra income.

In my electorate, this government's $57 billion cut to the health budget means that Eastern Health, which runs Box Hill Hospital and the Peter James Centre, has lost $1 billion from its budget over the next decade—$1 billion just from one hospital network. And it gets worse, because Monash Health, which operates the Monash Medical Centre—an enormous hospital in my electorate—has lost $1.7 billion from its budget. These figures, produced by the Victorian Health Department, show that over the next decade the living standard of any person needing elective surgery will severely decline. But the current government say that there have been no cuts to health. Well, there have been—and they have been dramatic. With such massive cuts, there is no way that these hospitals will be able to keep up with demands and provide timely treatment for patients. I challenge the Treasurer to explain to the people in my electorate, languishing in pain on already long surgery waiting lists, how these cuts have improved their living standards.

Mr Whiteley interjecting—

My friend from Tasmania may call out, but a lot of Tasmanians attend both of these hospitals for services. He may want to explain to his own constituents why they are now going to be on much longer waiting list. The Treasurer also needs to explain how the living standards of hardworking families are improved by a freeze on Medicare rebates, which will deliver higher out-of-pocket costs to families than the original $7 GP tax, and where and how that is going to impact? It is another mean tricky thing from a government that said 'no surprises'. The Prime Minister, in his deception, has started using the word 'fairness', but the sad fact is that these cuts were true Liberal cuts in a true Liberal budget. They would not know the meaning of 'fairness' if it came up and attacked them from behind—I will not use unparliamentary language to say what I really think.

The Liberal Party cannot be trusted to protect the living standards of middle- and low-income Australians. And they cannot—as the stream of angry pensioners and retirees calling my office this week can attest to—be trusted to protect the living standards of people on fixed incomes. The Prime Minister thinks it is fair to pay for child care by taking away support for low-income families. The Prime Minister thinks it is fair to stop 46 per cent of new mums accessing paid parental leave in the way the scheme was designed because he can give nannies to some others. Perhaps the worst of all, but least surprising, is that the Prime Minister thinks it is fair to ignore Australian jobs while he tries to protect his own. (Time expired)

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