Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to make some comments about last night's incredibly disappointing budget. The core of this budget will have an enormous impact on the electorate of Lalor. People are waking up this morning to pick up their newspapers and find that this government is going to give a tax cut worth thousands to millionaires, while people earning under $80,000 a year will get absolutely zero in relief from tax from this government. On top of that it has backed in the 2014 cuts to the family tax benefit which will leave some families in my electorate $4,500 a year worse off. Waking this morning to this budget is bad news for many in my community. In fact, the median income in the suburb of Werribee is $52,000, so there will be very few people in that area who will be getting any tax relief from this budget.

More importantly and most disturbingly was about infrastructure in the budget papers last night which confirms that this Prime Minister and this Treasurer do not know that Victoria exists, that they do not go south very often and that they need to start to pay attention. Again, we have Victoria short changed. Estimates say that 9.7 per cent is the share Victoria will have from the infrastructure budget compared to 31 per cent for New South Wales and 28 per cent for Queensland. I know that locals in the electorate of Lalor, particularly the Werribee South growers, will be waking this morning and, like me, pouring through the documents to see if our state government's work with the Commonwealth had bought any relief, any funding, to assist in the modernisation of the Werribee and Bacchus Marsh irrigation districts. They will be bitterly disappointed. There is no money for the modernisation of the irrigation system for our growers.

Of course, there is one thing in the infrastructure space that this government is very keen for and that is a gift for the member for Higgins, which is a new station. The Victorian state government estimates it will cost $1 billion and this federal government would like to say, 'Well, we want to give you $857 million,' but the state government has already said that they want to go it alone. The Assistant Treasurer thinks there should be a new station in her seat where a station already exists, yet this government does not want to fully fund infrastructure anywhere in Victoria.

There are a lot of things in this budget that are on the never-never—childcare and higher education—and we are going to an election without policies in either space for the public to judge this government. It is a very disappointing morning in Canberra.

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