Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking in this debate I want to talk about the future of standards of living for individuals and their families because, after all, the purpose of government is to serve its people. Government should do what it can to promote families' and households' living standards, so I want to talk about that. If we want to be a nation that is prosperous and a nation where everyone shares in that prosperity, our country needs to focus on jobs now and in the future. So I also want to talk about jobs and what this budget does or does not do about jobs. If government's purpose is to serve its people then federal budgets should serve the interests of the people. So an important test of a budget is: what does it do for the economy and what does it do to help everyone share in the benefits of the nation's prosperity?

As I said, a federal budget should help to promote families' and households' living standards. What is the point of living in a prosperous nation if people live in poverty? What is the point if even people in middle-class households are finding it hard to make ends meet? Why are we not dealing with these questions as a matter of urgency? What does this budget do in relation to those questions? Unfortunately, what this budget does is continue to take an axe to family tax benefit, particularly family tax benefit part B. As John Howard, the former Prime Minister of this country, said last year, family tax benefits are a form of tax relief for working and middle-class families. They are aimed at helping families with the cost of raising children. Yet the second Abbott government budget maintains last year's cuts to family tax benefits. They want to take away the family tax benefit from a family when the youngest child turns six and there is a long-term freeze on the rates of family tax benefits.

These cuts are going to make it harder for families to bear the costs of living. These are cuts that hit the families on the lowest incomes the hardest. Nine out of 10 families whose income is in the lowest 20 per cent will lose out under the Abbott government's first budget and second budget combined with cuts to family tax benefits. Meanwhile, nine out of 10 of the wealthiest families will actually benefit from the changes that are being made to family tax benefits. A single income family on $65,000 with two children in school will be around $6,000 a year worse off as a consequence of this budget.

We will continue to oppose these cuts, as we have done for the past year. These cuts are not minor; they affect literally thousands of families in each electorate—for example, these cuts to the family tax benefit will affect 7,172 families in my neighbouring electorate of Bonner, 3,408 families in the federal electorate of Brisbane, 8,638 families in Capricornia, 8,690 families in Dawson, 9,629 families in Flynn, 12,867 families in Forde, 11,654 families in Leichhardt and 12,502 families in Petrie. Where are the members for these federal electorates? Why are they not speaking out to oppose the cuts that will affect the families who live in their electorates? If it is not their job to represent those families, then what do they think their job is? Why are they not standing up for the working- and middle-class families in their electorates?

My electorate is one that is younger than average. It is one where there are a lot of young children. It is an electorate where we have a higher-than-the-national-average proportion of dual-income families where both parents work 40 hours a week or more. Those families know as well as anyone how hard it is to balance all of the competing demands that we all have—the demands of care for children, disabled relatives and elderly relatives, the demands of paid work and the demands of being part of a community. People do not just want to live to work and sleep; they want to be part of a rich and vibrant community. My electorate has plenty of those types of communities. Making it harder for people to bear their cost of living by making these cuts to family tax benefits is going to make our society a less cohesive one—a society where people have even less opportunity than they do now to go out and participate in civic life.

Australia needs a big, productive and healthy middle-class. We need economic settings that allow everyone to make a contribution, whether that is through the unpaid labour of love that is care for kids and relatives, volunteering in community organisations, paid employment, running a business, or a combination of all those things. A variety of settings and policies are needed—jobs creation; keeping unemployment low, for example. That is obvious. Importantly, we need settings that help parenting-aged people manage care responsibilities and settings that ensure that people get the best start in life. That is why we need, among many other settings, policy settings that support families. To support families, we need the tax and transfer system to work for them, we need a realistic understanding of the costs of care and we need structures and institutions in place that can serve families' needs. The family tax benefit is an important component of families policy—and so is early childhood and care.

In their first budget, the Liberal-National government sought to cut around $1.1 billion from early childhood education and care, including through cuts to subsidies, cuts to outside school hours care and cuts to family day care. This year it has announced some good changes that are not unwelcome in relation to early childhood, particularly child care; though I would note that last week Goodstart Early Learning released some modelling that showed that some families would be a fair bit worse off, around $4,600 worse off, and that about 100,000 children would be affected. I do give the government some credit for finally trying to tackle the issue of child care access in this country, but it should not be making those changes that are desperately needed—not just by the individual families and for the kids themselves but by the economy as a whole, when we try to increase workforce participation—contingent on passing cuts that are going to hit families, such as the family tax benefit cuts.

The government has also announced cuts to paid parental leave which will see around 80,000 people a year worse off, some by as much as $11,500. It has rightly been criticised for accusing working parents of rorts, of fraud, of double-dipping. This cut shows that this government does not understand paid parental leave. I doubt that the Treasurer or the Minister for Social Services have even read the Productivity Commission report of 2009 that preceded the introduction of the first universal Paid Parental Leave scheme in this country that Labor introduced after many years of work from people including, particularly, the member for Jagajaga, Jenny Macklin. It seems that the coalition does not even understand the Paid Parental Leave scheme, which is regrettable. I certainly hope that they will start to think more carefully about the way that all of these different components of families policies interrelate.

These changes are worrying not just for their impact on the individual children and the individual families but also for their impact on the economy and on our society. It is particularly disappointing to hear the Liberals and Nationals talk about cuts to support for families as a means of encouraging people into work—as though people just need to be encouraged to work, as though people are just sitting around thinking that they might just prefer not to work. What planet are they on?

I do not think that it is realistic to think that there are people who somehow need to be encouraged into work. I think that a better use of everyone's time and effort would be dealing with the fact that we are heading for 6½ per cent unemployment in this country—that is on the government's own projections in its own budget papers. This is in a country where we also have a significant underemployment problem. But they are looking around, saying, 'The real problem here is people are not doing enough to look for jobs.' Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs coming from? Where is the work for small business?

We have said that we will support the small business package. Of course we will support an asset write-off—we had an asset write-off that this government took an axe to last year. But the fact is that, if you are a small business, if you are a tradesperson, if you have an ABN, if you are working in an ABN capacity and you are a microbusiness or a small business, then all of the policies in the world aimed at helping you to spend money are no use to you if there is no work out there for your business because the economy is in the doldrums. This government has overseen a situation where their first budget smashed confidence in this country, damaged confidence so much that the economy was damaged.

On that side of the House they like to call us economic vandals. They like to say that about us, but it is absolute nonsense of course. It is just sledging and rubbish. If you want to know who the real economic vandals are, look at the first Abbott-Hockey coalition budget. Do not forget that they were warned not to make too many cuts too quickly. Do not forget that they were warned that if there was too much austerity, that would hit growth. They were warned about that but they did it anyway. What was the consequence? The rate of GDP growth slowed every quarter last year. The rate of GDP growth slowed from the first quarter. If you look at the March figures, then the June figures, the September figures and the December figures—on a trend basis, at the end of December quarter, GDP growth had slowed to 0.4 per cent for the quarter. It slowed all year. Every quarter was worse than the last for economic growth, yet the people in the coalition try to lecture Labor about economic vandalism. They should look in the mirror.

What are they going to do about the fact that we are about to have unemployment at levels worse than at the height of the global financial crisis? As we are all aware, unemployment already hit 6.3 per cent last year. It is still above six per cent now. Those figures are also worse than unemployment was during the global financial crisis and they are worse than they have been for many years. In fact they have not been this bad since the current Prime Minister was the employment minister in the Howard government.

Our country clearly needs to focus on jobs right now, as a matter of urgency. What are the jobs now and what are the jobs going to be in the future? We need to look at the way work is changing. People's jobs are getting less secure and anyone who is employed on a contract for a term knows how hard it is to get a mortgage, to plan for your future—if you are on a short-term, insecure contract.

Wages growth is slow. The Economist was writing about this in the context of the UK recently, saying that they needed to be pushing up their wages growth in the UK. In fact, if you look at the figures, it seems that their inflation actually dipped into deflation just recently. They are in a terrible situation, but we have slow wages growth here as well. Unemployment being up is obviously one of the culprits, but the fact is that wages growth is the slowest it has been since the wage-price index started being kept in the 1990s. That is as much of a warning sign for our economy as you can get.

The wage share of the economy is decreasing; the profit share, obviously therefore, is increasing. These changes are affecting people's ability to meet their cost of living and they are affecting how far a dollar will go. This second Liberal-National budget is just as much of a disaster for jobs and for the economy as their first. This idea that somehow we can be happy about a budget in which there is a forecast increase in unemployment to 6½ per cent is wrong. The Liberals and Nationals have no vision for jobs of the future or for the training and skills we need to be building right now in relation to those jobs of the future.

So what is their plan to deal with this unemployment issue in the longer term? We talk about coding in schools. We talk about that in question time and the Prime Minister displays his utter ignorance on this issue by mocking us for doing so.

Our country needs to invest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics to make sure that Australians are ready to take up the jobs of the new economy. There are jobs in this country right now that rely on those skills that we are not filling with Australians. That needs to change. We know it needs to change. That is why Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, announced in his budget reply that we would take immediate measures to skill up primary and secondary school teachers to make sure that they get degrees in those stem disciplines, to make sure that other Australians get the opportunity to get degrees in those disciplines, and to make sure that those subjects are taught at primary and secondary level so that we are skilling people for the jobs of the future.

I do not want to hear companies or big business asking me why we do not have the talent in this country and have to import people. I do not want to have to hear them ask why the government is not doing enough to get more girls interested in engineering. I want us to fix that right now. Unfortunately, the current government thinks it is all a bit of a joke, but we are serious about STEM and we are also serious about innovation. A lot of the entrepreneurs I speak to, a lot of the people in the innovation sector, say to me, 'Australia has a culture of fear of failure. Why don't entrepreneurs go out and take more risks and build more businesses?' They point to Silicon Valley. A key difference between Australia and Silicon Valley is that in Australia if you start your own business you almost always are going to be risking your family home. That is not the case in the US.

What does Labor say about this? Bill announced a fantastic policy in the budget reply, saying that we are going to find a way to help those start-ups and entrepreneurs to get the finance they need without having to risk their family home. That is going to contribute to a culture of greater risk-taking and greater entrepreneurialism. Risk-taking is not a dirty word any more in business, and nor should it be. It is through building businesses, through not being afraid of failure, through it not being a catastrophe for the family, that we will find those innovations of the future and build the new jobs of the future, as well. That is also why I am so proud of his announcement in respect of partnering with venture capital for new entrepreneurialism. The budget needs to be taken seriously by people. Talk to your MP and do not support this sort of economic vandalism that we have seen from the coalition.

See this speech in context