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

It is always a great pleasure to follow my colleague, although I do feel sorry for the people in the gallery—they must be pretty bored after that presentation. This bloke could bore for Australia; he could get gold medals—whereas, as the assistant minister knows, I always provoke a reaction from the other side of the House. That is because I like to point out this government's problems. We know they have a problem. Since they have been in power, they have basically attacked families, attacked the working class, attacked the middle class and they have turned their backs on progressive voters everywhere.

Look at their agenda. A GST—they have flown the GST kite; it has gone up, spun around a few times and then the Prime Minister brought it down; it hit the ground and now the Treasurer is trying desperately to stick it up in the air again. We know what they want to do on penalty rates; they want to go after people's penalty rates. We know that is part of their agenda, and we know that they are after Medicare—cuts to pathology and now they want to privatise the administration of Medicare. Believe you me, that is just the beginning of their attempts to privatise it. We know about the horror 2014 budget—$80 billion worth of cuts and Medicare under attack by GP co-payment. That GP co-payment would have cost $7 not only every time you saw the doctor, but every time you went to the pathologist or every time you went for a blood test or a scan. They were going to charge $7 dollars a time. Now they have resorted in the latest budget to cutting GP rebates, and so they are doing it by stealth. They are forcing every general practitioner and every pathologist in the country to turn into a de facto tax collector by cutting the rebates they get.

We have the slowest wage growth since I do not know when, but it is slow—ask anybody out there on the street about their wages. We know people who rely on penalty rates for their weekly income—and when banks ask for that as part of your loan application you know that it is an important part of people's income—we know the government is giving no security about that. Pensioners also came under attack; we saw the pre-reformed version of this government go after pensioner concessions. I mean how bad do you have to be to go after pensioners and their concessions? In South Australia we saw some $18 million in concessions ripped out. Interestingly enough, one of the manifestations of that is the suspension of the train between Adelaide and Melbourne, because the ripping away of those concessions destroyed the market for that train.

This is a completely divided government with a menacing agenda for the Australian people. We heard this lot's rhetoric before the last election; we heard about the perils of divided government—and I have been on the record in this House many times before as saying you should not remove a first-term prime minister. They swore they would never do it—they ran around the country telling us all about the great sin of removing a prime minister in the dead of night—and then they removed not only a prime minister but also a treasurer, an industry minister, a defence minister and the majority of the National Security Committee of Cabinet. And they shuffled various other people around. There is a new communications minister and there is a new infrastructure minister. I cannot keep count. We also lost a couple of ministers over Christmas—and we are looking down the barrel of getting a hat-trick. So we know that this government's record is simple terrible.

And what are they doing in this bill? They are trying to balance the budget. The former Treasurer, Mr Hockey, is now the Ambassador to the United States—and we all wish him well there. But what did Mr Hockey try to do? He tried to balance the budget on the backs of working people. What did he say before the election? He said that he would get us back into surplus straightaway. I think that is the impression he gave. Certainly, that was the impression that was given in my electorate—that he would just click his fingers and we would be back in surplus, that we only had to vote Liberal and the rays of economic sunshine would descend on us all!

But what do we get now? They have pushed up debt and borrowings. The budget has blown out. We heard a lot of tough talk before the election. But what are they doing after the election? They are cutting people's incomes. Under this bill—

Mr Ewen Jones interjecting—

This is just a preamble! It is nice to know that I have got at least one fan, the member for Herbert; and we often have a bit of a debate in this building. But, would you believe it, this bill is actually worse than Tony Abbott's bill; it is worse than some of Mr Abbott's cuts. So 1.5 million families are going to lose their family tax benefit part A, a cut of more than $700 per child every year. Around 600,000 of those families are single-parent families. I grew up in a single-parent family. My mum was a teacher. It is very tough when you are a single-parent family. It is interesting. I will give you some figures later about how this might affect my electorate. This is a very cruel thing to do to families who are working very hard. And we know that they do their best to remain in the workforce and literally raise their children single-handedly. Around 500,000 of those families are on the maximum rate. That means they are on a combined family income of less than $51,000 a year. And 1.3 million families will lose family tax benefit part B, a cut of more than $350 per family every year. Of course, single-parent families are again hit harder. They will have their family tax benefit part B reduced to $1,000 per year when the youngest child turns 13 and entirely cut off when that child turns 16.

Think about the consequences of that in the real world. Anybody who has actually lived in the real world, anybody who has tried to get by on a working income or tried to raise kids, would know it is incredibly tough. But I will tell you who is not in the real world, and that is our new Prime Minister. He has been in power for all of 141 days, thanks to the cowardice and betrayal of those opposite. And we know how they all plotted—not the people in the room at the moment. I do not think the member for Herbert was part of those shenanigans. No doubt he was sunning himself up there in Queensland, and he is a pretty straight shooter. But I can tell you that there are some people sitting on the frontbench who are not straight shooters. They all met at in Queanbeyan like a pack of thieves in the night.

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