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

I am glad for the opportunity to address the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and related bills and the budget they underwrite, because there are a number of measures within the government's plan that are of great concern to me and to the people I represent.

In broad terms, this budget fits the government's established practice of making a big noise about fiscal responsibility yet doing virtually nothing to demonstrate that responsibility, and then producing a lot of harm and uncertainty on the way through. In many areas, this budget reinforces the disappointment and negative impacts delivered in last year's budget.

In the case of Indigenous affairs, for example, the cuts of more than $500 million last year persist, and are exacerbated by uncertainty involved in the government's Indigenous Advancement Strategy. This runs against the national imperative and is contrary to the rhetoric of the Prime Minister in terms of the urgent need to do more in closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Kirstie Parker and Mick Gooda, co-chairs of the Close the Gap Campaign, expressed concern that the impact of last year's cuts have not been acknowledged or reversed. They noted:

The nation wants continued focus and action to close the unacceptable health and life expectancy gap. We need bold policy initiatives supported by long-term investment in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.

The same can be said in relation to policy and programs that cover pensioners and the unemployed.

The Salvation Army released data from the latest economic and social impact survey on 27 May that showed couples with no children on Newstart allowance were living off only $9.57 a day after accommodation expenses. From the survey of more than 2,400 people it was found that 56 per cent of respondents said their financial situation was worse than last year, 78 per cent of respondents in private housing were experiencing extreme housing stress, 62 per cent of parents could not afford an internet connection and 43 per cent could not afford to give children fresh fruit or vegetables daily. There is nothing in this budget that goes to ameliorating this kind of serious disadvantage.

In some areas this budget provides fresh disappointments. At a time when the Australian community is seized by the importance of addressing domestic violence, the government has totally missed the opportunity to provide meaningful resources or programs to achieve change. It is true that any government's first obligation is to ensure safety and peace for its citizens, but it is wrong only to trot out that line in respect of an overblown threat of harm from terrorism, when harm of much larger scope is occurring on a widespread basis in Australian homes, done by Australians to one another.

The only budget spend in this regard is a contribution of $16 million to an awareness campaign that will cost $30 million. Not a single one of the nine critical areas of funding identified by family violence experts has been provided the resources necessary to see change—the resources that are needed to provide shelter, advice, counselling and legal assistance. Renee Carr, executive director of Fair Agenda, responded to the budget by saying:

Last night was a test of the government's commitment to dealing with Australia's domestic violence crisis, and it's a test they failed.

As reported in The Sydney Morning Herald, we know that thousands of women are being turned away each year from crisis centres and refuges. We know that thousands of women are turned away from community legal centres and that thousands of calls to domestic violence hotlines go unanswered. Karen Willis, executive director of Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia, has said that they need $2 million to ensure that one in four calls do not go unanswered.

At the risk of being howled down by those who believe that any criticism, however reasonable, of our approach to the threat of terrorism marks you as some kind of soft-hearted traitor, it is ridiculous that the government is applying $1.2 billion to meet that threat and only $16 million—or a bit more than one per cent of that amount—to address a scourge that kills a woman in Australia every week. It affects one in three women over the course of their life and it is the leading cause of death, disability and ill health in women between 15 and 44 years of age.

Good government requires a focus on substance, not surface, and if we are serious about reducing harm and violence there are several areas of much greater concern than terrorism per se. Of course, we need to be wary of the potential for such acts and properly resource our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. But when we take the imperative to protect our citizens and residents from harm seriously, we cannot apply such a disproportionate focus on terrorism when much more frequent and harmful kinds of violence are being ignored and neglected.

What the Lindt Cafe siege showed is not a failure to deal with a potential terrorist but rather the failure to deal with a man who perpetrated serious domestic violence and, to some degree, the failure to take account of a person who was likely suffering from a mental illness and who had a history of strange behaviour. I am very sorry that this budget further perpetuates the government's inclination to beat the national security drum while failing to combat more immediate and harmful dangers in our society.

Another area of fresh disappointment is the decision to take $100 million, or 15 per cent of the total budget, out of the Australia Council for the Arts. There has been no justification for this cut, and it flies in the face of the reform process the Australia Council has undertaken, the outcomes of which were announced, with the responding strategic plan launched by the current Minister for the Arts.

The decision to pull more than $105 million into an arts fund that will be run by the minister and the federal arts ministry is not based on any review or analysis that indicated the need or value of such a move; nor was it done on the basis of any consultation with the Australia Council or the broader arts sector. It would appear to be a politically motivated decision aimed at giving the minister the unstructured and unsupervised power to reward friends and pick winners—perhaps a grand opera cycle by Andrew Bolt or a set of interpretive dances about the ways in which data retention is good for one and all!

The point is that what should be out of the question in an independent process could potentially be approved solely at the discretion of the minister. This is terrible decision-making and it will impact heavily on Australian arts and culture. The minister himself has previously argued that art will always provoke debate, saying:

… that's why we have an arms-length and peer-reviewed structure for the allocation for the funding.

Now he has altered that sound practice.

The Australia Council will lose more than 25 per cent of its discretionary funding outside the support provided through its major programs. In response to the surprise cuts, it has already been forced to announce the cancellation of the ArtStart, Creative Communities Partnerships Initiative and Artists in Residence programs.

In this budget, our international development assistance is further hammered, with aid to Africa slashed by 70 per cent, abandoning the Labor government approach of being prepared to help people in the poorest and most disadvantaged nations.

The Minister for the Arts and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, rather than safeguarding the interests of their sectors of responsibility—whose best performance and function you would think they would understand, represent and support—instead appear to be presiding over their ransacking. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

On a similar theme, this government's approach to retarding creativity and innovation, it is sad to see the ongoing uncertainty around the operation and support of Australia's cooperative research centres. Sadly, this is entirely in keeping with the Abbott government's tendency to hamstring scientific research in Australia. Previously, it has been cuts to the CSIRO, with $111 million chopped out over four years, in addition to reduced funding for the Australian Research Council and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, among others. Taken all together, the Minister for Industry and Science has presided over $3 billion of cuts to science, innovation and industry programs.

In Senate estimates yesterday, it was confirmed that, in the health field, the Abbott government has cut $600 million from drug and alcohol, mental health and chronic disease services. Of course, the Treasurer did not think to mention these cruel and counterproductive cuts during his budget speech.

There was not even one mention of climate change in the Treasurer's budget speech, which is bizarre in itself, but of more concern is the fact that, through this budget, government spending on climate change measures is being halved, from $1.35 billion in 2014-15 to $700 million in 2015-16. Specific cuts have been made to the National Landcare Program and the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative. The electorate I represent wants to see action on climate change; it wants to see Australia make rapid progress towards a low-carbon economy and take advantage of our natural conditions and our human capital, when it comes to science and innovation, by developing world-leading renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.

Other matters that did not rate a mention in this budget but that are of enormous concern to the Australian community are affordable housing and urban public transport.

The electorate I represent is not interested in overheated rhetoric about terrorism and cybersecurity; it wants to see real action on domestic violence, social disadvantage, affordable housing, public transport, mental health, and climate change. The electorate I represent is happy to consider sensible reform in areas like superannuation, capital gains tax, negative gearing and corporate tax avoidance, in order to improve our capacity as a nation to invest in the things we share: health, education, the environment and essential community infrastructure like public transport. This budget unfortunately staggers on in a kind of pale imitation of last year's budget. It is timid and ineffective on the question of a path to surplus and it does nothing to chart a path towards a fairer, smarter, healthier, more creative and more sustainable Australia.

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