Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I will not detain the House long in my contribution because I understand there are a number of issues for us to get through in the parliament today. The Labor 2013-14 Budget Savings (Measures No. 2) Bill 2015 before us is one where government amendments have now been circulated. We will be opposing the bill in its current form for the second reading debate, but, if the government then moves the amendments—as we understand they will, after the second reading debate—we will be supporting the amendments and then supporting the bill in its amended form.

The bill itself has four different measures: schedule 1 deals with the conversion of student start-up scholarships into income contingent loans, schedule 2 is the efficiency dividend on higher education funding, schedules 3 and 4 deal with the removal of the HECS-HELP discount and voluntary HELP repayment bonus, and schedule 5 deals with the interest charge on certain debts. We have previously opposed all of these measures on the basis that the first few were originally proposed by the Labor government specifically in the context of the funding for the Gonski education reforms. The government abandoned the Gonski education reforms and, therefore, got rid of any reason that Labor would have had for supporting the measures.

While the government has repeatedly, since that time, used an argument of, 'These were your measures; why won't you still support them?' the answer has always been pretty straightforward. They were supported in order to fund a significant improvement in school education, which the government promised they would keep to but then abandoned. The government having done that, we were no longer going to support the measures to provide the revenue for something that they were not going to do. It is a pretty simple symmetry. So the title of this bill, where it refers to 'Labor budget savings measures' as though there was some automatic obligation for Labor to support these, completely ignored the fact that the context in which they were being supported by Labor in government was the context of the Gonski education reforms, which the government subsequently abandoned.

There are two reasons why, on two of these measures, Labor will be changing its position. The first is the deteriorating state of the budget. Since we first established our position on these different measures, we have seen the deficit double from one year to the next. Let us not forget: the government's figures, where they say the deficit has doubled, have been on the basis that even if they got all of these measures through there would still be a doubling of the deficit. The fiction we hear from those opposite is that, somehow, the doubling of the deficit is the fault of Labor opposing individual measures—no, no, no, it does not work that way, because the budget papers always presume that every single measure will get through.

The second issue is that we have now announced our own higher education policy that does not involve imposing $100,000 degrees on students. In that context, we are making some decisions to further close the fiscal gap. We will therefore support the conversion of students start-up scholarships into income contingent loans. This is a saving of $920 million over the forward estimates. We will also support the removal of the HECS-HELP discount and voluntary HELP repayment bonus, which is a further saving of $200 million over the forward estimates. We will continue to oppose the imposition of an efficiency dividend on higher education funding and the introduction of an interest charge on certain debts.

Last year we supported over $20 billion worth of government measures that improved the budget bottom line. Since this year's budget, we have already supported a further $10.7 billion worth of government measures that improve the budget bottom line. Our position here, as a result of the support we will be providing to the amended bill—not the bill in its current form—represents a further $1.1 billion in improvements to the budget bottom line. I understand that the government will be moving amendments later, at the consideration in detail stage, that will remove the measures that we do not support and leave the measures that we do support. In that specific context, it will be unsurprising that will be opposing the bill at its second reading, because it will still at that point contain measures which we oppose. At the point at which the government amendments have gone through, which I certainly expect they will—unless the mathematics of government and opposition somehow added up to something different—we will be able to support the bill in its amended form.

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