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

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2015-2016, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016, Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2014-2015 and Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2014-2015. Before I make some remarks about the budget, I want to just inform the chamber of a significant event in South Australia. The South Australian branch of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the SDA, the union I was a member of and an organiser and official for, had its 125th anniversary this year, and we had a very large dinner to celebrate that. At this dinner, one of the real stalwarts of the union, Roger Nicholls, who I know well and who lives in my electorate, received life membership of the union. The reason Roger received life membership of the union is that he has been a member for 20 years, since 1993. He is employed at the Woolworths distribution centre at Gepps Cross.

Roger is an absolute stalwart not just of the union; he has served as a delegate and a member of the committee of management. But for so long he was just a rank and file unionist, a rank and file worker, but one that people respected greatly and listened to. He was always a voice for common sense and moderation. He has been well respected not just by his friends and colleagues on the floor of the warehouse but also by management. So much of the corporate knowledge of that distribution centre is held in Roger's head, to the extent that he is relied upon by both workers and management in enterprise bargaining agreement negotiations. Roger has been there over the years at the bargaining table, sometimes in some pretty tough bargaining circumstances, but they have always managed to have not an entirely harmonious but a fairly harmonious working environment where problems are resolved through negotiation, common sense and common decency.

That is a tribute not just to the workers but also to the management of the distribution centre. I think Roger sets the scene for so much of that. He is a good unionist and a good Australian. He is a person I have certainly relied upon, not just through my time as a member of parliament but before that as a union official, for his wise counsel and his advice and common sense. It was great to see him get life membership. One of the workers at the distribution centre who was asked to say a few words about Roger said that he was just an all-round good guy. I think that sentiment should be echoed in the parliament as well because I would certainly back that notion.

I should say that Roger and his family are great supporters of the Elizabeth Vale soccer club. I know he would not let me get away without mentioning that. They are such good representatives of the northern suburbs of Adelaide and of the families who live there. They are decent, working-class people who want not just a good suburb or a good state but a good country as well. They are really good people. They look to this parliament, and I think to all governments, with a sense that we should have a fair go and a fair country. That is something that I think is often talked about, but it is another thing entirely to have it expressed in public policy.

That is one of the great disappointments of this budget and one of the great disappointments of this government – the broken promises, the broken commitments, the sugar hits now and the spin that we see as coalition backbenchers try to wriggle out of the electoral trap that they are in. Today we saw a lot of laughter in the House of Representatives about NATSEM modelling. This is modelling that shows that nine out of 10 of the lowest income families lose out from this year's budget, while nine out of 10 of the wealthiest families benefit; they win.

It is worth thinking about how you judge a budget on whether or not it is fair. I think that most people, when they are given that information, will come to the conclusion – when the smoke clears, when the hoo-ha clears, when the spin clears and when they actually have a look at the detail – as they did last year, that his government's approach and values are fundamentally unfair. We can see this in the NATSEM modelling which shows that a family with a single income of $65,000 with two children will be $6,164 a year worse off by 2018-19. A single mum with an income of $55,000 with two children will be $6,000 worse off. A family with a dual income of $60,000 with two children will be $3,843 a year worse off by 2018-19. Particularly for that last family, the key words there are 'dual income' – that is, they are a working family. There are so many of them in my electorate, people who do the right thing by this country because they go out and work for a living. They uphold the values of this nation and do the right thing by this nation. They look after themselves and their families and what they expect from this government is a commitment to the Australian value of a fair go.

Now, we know what the Australian Council of Social Service said about this budget. ACOSS CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie said that the overall budget fails the fairness test because it delivers an estimated $15 billion in spending cuts, including new cuts to child dental and community health programs in the budget, on top of the retained savings from last year's budget. We know that those savings were savage indeed—some $50 billion last year in cuts to education and health, money that is coming out of hospitals and local schools—and we are yet to see the impact. We know that last year we had no fewer than five versions of the GP tax—five versions of a co-payment that would stop a million people going to the hospital in the first year of its operation and 500,000 in the years after. We know that the government, rather than now having the guts to stick to their policy and charge people to go to the doctor, have simply gone in and cut doctor rebates, which will have the same effect.

We see the same policies wrapped up in a different way with a sugar hit and a lot of spin all designed to buttress the Prime Minister's position in his own party room. We know that is a vulnerable position. It is a delicate position: 39 of his colleagues voted for someone else. The choice they had was 'none of the above', because the member for Wentworth did not have the courage to put his head above the parapet, and I think he probably regrets that now, because he might have missed his chance. We know that this budget is based around supporting the Prime Minister's job and is not about the future, including the future of working families.

We have this situation where $5.5 billion has been hacked away from family tax benefits. We have seen cuts to paid parental leave. One minute the coalition had one of the world's most generous paid parental leave schemes, and now they have completely jumped the shark and they are going to hack into the benefits that working families get if they dare to get a paid parental leave provision in their enterprise bargaining agreement or in their salary. It was once said in this country that it was very doubtful that workers in retail would get paid parental leave because of the demographics of the workforce, but Woolworths and Myers are to be congratulated for being employers of predominantly female workforces yet still going down the path of having a paid parental leave provision in their awards and paying for a benefit for working women to have decent and generous paid leave while they have their children. This government is going to go to town on that provision and make it completely worthless for Woolworths to do that, because it will hack into the amount of money that the government gives you at that time. We hear all this palaver about rich public servants, but I tell you: those people will always get by, but the workers and working women at Woolworths and Myers and places like that really value those provisions and really need that money at a very important time in their family's life, the birth of a child.

So you can imagine that the working women of this country are very disappointed about this budget. When they work out their cuts to family tax benefits and when people do their figures on the spin and the smoke and mirrors trick that the Prime Minister has done, the coalition backbench will find that the support for this budget diminishes and seeps away into the ether just like last year's budget.

We have seen this phrase 'Tony's tradies'. I am reluctant to use it because it is one of those coalition things. Like 'Reagan Democrats' and 'Essex man' in the United Kingdom, it is a lot of palaver. It is a coalition desperately trying to associate themselves with the working people of this country, the people who do the work in this country, at the same time as they hack into their living standards in terms of family tax benefit and in terms of making them want to work until they are 70. There are not many tradies whose bodies are not suffering by that age. You would have to be a pretty lucky tradie—a pretty lucky bricklayer or builder—to still be going at 70.

We see the approach of the coalition, this smoke and mirrors trick. We know what they are doing to young workers. They are reducing the waiting period from six months to one month, but that is still one month where young people will have no income at all. I know in my state the effects that they are having at Holden, and we have seen now the first forced redundancies ever at GM Holden in Elizabeth. That tells you something about this government. They have plunged the South Australian automotive industry and with it the Victorian automotive industry—50,000 people—into the prospect of unemployment. We are now seeing the effect of that at Holden with job losses, with people having to face a very tough labour market. Unemployment is up, debt is up, taxes are up so we know people are walking into a circumstance which is going to be very difficult for them to walk out of.

Only today Ian Macfarlane belled the cat in the Financial Review and said that the first subs would not be made in South Australia—and this is after the launch of the Hobart on the weekend. We have had this government promise one thing before the election and deliver very little—broken promises, spin, hoo-ha, sugar hit but nothing substantial in the long term. We know that on submarines, on shipbuilding and on car making they are determined to destroy the industrial and manufacturing base of this nation, particularly in my state of South Australia. It will have a devastating effect on jobs for South Australians and it will have a devastating effect, I know, on my electorate. We see that every single day and every single week out there in my electorate.

I think it is so disappointing for those workers because they do work hard and they do the right thing. The workers at Holden, through their enterprise bargaining agreement, offered up the required amount of savings to make that factory viable if only they had got government support. Rather than government support, what they got was a Treasurer trying to chase them out of the country and a cabinet that was bent on the principle of scorched earth at the time. They have since gone completely to water on every other issue but at the time they were bent on the scorched earth approach. The outcome is 50,000 people are looking down the barrel of unemployment. We see that in my electorate. Only the other day in TheAdvertiser, Mr Adris Salih, 51 of Gawler East—51 is a tough time to face unemployment—said:

Saying goodbye to your workmates who you work with … you get all emotional. They are like your family. You see more of them than you do of your family sometimes. I didn't think I would, but I shed a tear. I have worked with some of them for 28 years. It is sad to leave.

Those are the real stories that are going to undermine the spin and the garbage of this budget. Working people and working families all over this country will soon bell the cat on this budget and reveal it for the unfair document that it is.

See this speech in context