Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is the time of the year when we come in here and discuss these appropriation bills, Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and cognate bills. Speaker after speaker on the government side stands up to sprout their key lines without commitment, without passion and without any knowledge. And this gets followed up by speakers from the opposition who speak about their concerns and their communities. Today it has been no different. Australians have learnt quickly that, under this government, vision and plans extend no further than the next opinion poll or the next press conference, and this year's budget was no exception.

For two years the government have constantly wailed about Australia's budget emergency, citing it as their feeble reasoning behind last year's ideologically driven, cruel and unfair budget which attacked the elderly, the young and the families of our communities. But this year suddenly that budget emergency disappeared. It disappeared like Australian jobs under this government. It disappeared like the spending on health. It disappeared like the investment in education and it disappeared like every one of this untrustworthy government's promises of lower taxes and surpluses.

Despite the wails, the Abbott government has delivered a budget where spending is up, tax is up, deficits are up and unemployment is up. The government has broken its promise to save as much as it spends. Spending initiatives are greater than actual savings and the Treasurer has doubled the deficit in one year, from $17 billion to $35 billion. We all know that, at its heart, this budget is for the Liberal Party base that is threatening to walk away from the Prime Minister, or the member for Curtin, or the member for Cook, or even the member for Wentworth—if they could stomach his environmental opinions. Even former Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard stated:

It has certainly been framed by the government with an eye to political sensitivities.

That is why the government have removed the impacts on families modelling from the budget, because they know that thousands of Australian families in the bottom half of the income scale will feel the brunt, whilst the top end of the scale feel the greatest benefit.

The fundamental unfairness of last year's budget disaster remains: the $80 billion slashed from schools and hospitals, the GP tax, the cuts to Medicare rebates, the $100,000 university degrees and the massive cuts to family payments. The Prime Minister promised no new taxes, yet this budget contains 17 new taxes.

We have a Prime Minister who promised a surplus but, in fact, has doubled the deficit and failed to pass a budget. The Prime Minister promised more jobs. However, unemployment has risen to the highest level in 10 years and will remain high for a lot longer. The Prime Minister promised no cuts to health, but he has ripped another $2 billion out this year from health, in addition to the $57 billion that he ripped out last year.

The new analysis from NATSEM shows that a family with a single income of $65,000 and two children will be $6,164 a year worse off. A single mother with an income of $55,000, with two children, will be $6,107 a year worse off. In McEwen we have some 6,800 single parent families that this will affect. A family with a dual income of $60,000, with two children, will be $3,843 a year worse off. These amounts might not seem much to the Prime Minister or the triple dipper Treasurer, but for struggling families this could mean the difference between paying the bills and putting food on the table. The budget clearly articulated that the government has no interest in building industry or manufacturing in this country. In fact, it says it has 'liberated' thousands of workers—to the jobs scrap heap. It has said to employers, 'Here's free labour; try before you buy.' If the Australian public had that option, the Prime Minister and this government would be on the scrap heap today.

The government knows that it mishandled the economy so badly that what they have done with this budget is to inject a stimulus package in the hope that it will generate some positive feedback. We welcome the instant asset write-off. Why? Because we introduced it when we were in government, but this government claimed it was a rort and scrapped it in their first budget. Twelve months later a light bulb goes off in the PM's head and he realises that Labor's program actually delivers benefits for small business.

In my electorate, we are a community of hardworking families. The Abbott government is ripping their future away. Last year in this House I spoke about a constituent of mine, Stuart Edwards. Stuart is a single father of four who drives an hour each way to work to provide for his children and also studies at university part-time. When we asked the Treasurer about the impacts of the budget, the Treasurer's response was: 'This man needs to get a job,' even though he is already working full-time. After last year's budget, Stuart lost the family tax benefit, and his expenses increased due to the petrol tax stealthily introduced as a 'levy', or, as the finance minister called it, an 'indexation adjustment'. With this budget, Stuart will be even worse off because of the measures the government has put forward. So you have to ask: in how many more ways can you punish people trying to improve their future?

McEwen has the highest population of zero-to-five-year-olds in the country. We have thousands of young families, with parents trying their hardest to raise the future of our country. However, the Abbott government is ensuring parents caring for their children will be punished. The government is stripping stay-at-home parents—in most cases, mothers—of their childcare rebates. Families who have an annual income of $65,000 per year and over will have their childcare rebates ripped away. Families will be booted off family tax benefit B when their youngest child turns six. The Abbott government wants to freeze all the rates of family tax benefits. Yet taxpayers will be required to foot half the childcare costs of couples earning $170,000 a year.

Less than six months ago, the Prime Minister was still spruiking his 'signature' PPL plan. Those on the top end of incomes would get $75,000, at the expense of those at the bottom. It was their 'fair dinkum' policy that the Prime Minister said he 'passionately' believed in. The Prime Minister argued that this was giving women a level of support, and that it was not a welfare measure; it was a 'workplace entitlement' just like other non-negotiables, like holiday pay and sick pay. Now, in a complete 180, the Prime Minister has cut $967 million from the government's existing Paid Parental Leave scheme. This measure, along with last year's heartless cuts to family payments, will leave around 80,000 mothers up to $11,000 a year worse off.

The government's ministers have been in the media over the last month calling these mothers 'double dippers', and the Treasurer even called them 'rorters'. Yet it emerged that the government's own senior ministers had done the very thing they were decrying as a rort.

In 2010, the Prime Minister, then the Minister for Health, stated: '26 weeks, as everyone knows, is the minimum that should be spent at home by mothers with newborns.' Yet the Prime Minister recently said about new mums who receive more than 18 weeks paid parental leave: 'It is not right, it should not happen and it will not happen under this government.' We all remember the Prime Minister saying that he had 'been on a journey' with his new-found love for paid parental leave. But what this budget shows is that that journey was a return trip.

Another blow to families in McEwen is his incomprehensible cutting of the Seatbelts on Regional School Buses program. This program was introduced by the former Labor government to ensure the safety of our schoolchildren when travelling to and from school in regional areas. Yet the Abbott government is scrapping this program. For those of us in rural areas, transport options for students are few and far between at the best of times, and we rely on school buses to transport our kids. Regional school buses in Victoria often travel at speeds of 100 kilometres an hour, on rough road surfaces, and this can cause injuries if there is a crash. In 2009 a six-year-old girl was injured when a bus braked sharply near Alexandria. In south-west Victoria, a 10-year-old student suffered brain damage when a school bus crashed. It costs $30,000 to retrofit a bus with seatbelts, but this government would rather spend $250,000 on a flagpole in New South Wales. You could not make this stuff up, seriously!

Our elderly and our seniors are again being attacked by this government. On top of the almost $57 billion in cuts to health in the last two budgets, the Abbott government is slashing $20 million from the Dementia and Aged Care Services Fund. These are members of our community who are unable to look after themselves, and they need and deserve the highest level of care. However, the Abbott government is callously ripping out this much-needed funding, while it is willing to pay almost $25 million to explain to businesses what a free trade agreement is.

In addition to last year's $1.3 billion cuts to pensioner and senior concessions, the Abbott government is continuing to impose harsh cuts on McEwen's 13,669 pensioners. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have announced that they will adjust the threshold for the assets test for the pension, meaning that some 2,600 pensioners across our communities will no longer be eligible to receive the pension. In Sunbury, in my electorate, Beth and Bob, both self-funded retirees, after hearing what this disastrous budget as going to do to them, contacted my office and said:

We are by no means wealthy and continued working several years longer than we intended, to put us in a position to fund our retirement. The proposal to reduce the assets test simply pulls the rug from under our feet at a point life when we are no longer in a position to do anything about it.

Seniors still face cuts of $900 per year as a result of the Abbott government's plan to abolish the senior supplement, not to mention forcing seniors to work until they are 70—giving Australia the oldest retirement age in the developed world. No matter how they try to package it, the government are punishing seniors and pensioners across McEwen.

Unemployment has risen dramatically since they came to office and continues to rise. And we still do not have the effects of this government walking away and scrapping the automotive industry here in Australia. Many thousands of jobs in my local community will be gone because of this government's inaction. The latest nail in the coffin for job creation in this country is the overt snubbing of the state of Victoria when it comes to infrastructure funding. Victoria counts for 25 per cent of Australia's population; yet only some 13 per cent of infrastructure investment is being awarded to the state. Victorian coalition MPs should hang their heads in shame. Less investment in infrastructure means fewer jobs for Victoria. As I have said before, with the bulk of this heartless budget, it is low- and middle-income earners who will be the hardest hit. It is not fair, it is not right and Australians will not stand for it.

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