Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Yes—it never happened. Exactly—it never happened. Nothing to see there. No matter what question we asked about what the government was doing about anything, they immediately went back to the 43rd Parliament and what Labor did or did not do. It is as if three years of government and all the things they could have done in those three years were gone. Out came the metaphorical paintbrush and off it went. The 44th Parliament—gone. The whole Abbott-Turnbull horrible mess disappeared completely. But I looked at these appropriation bills over the weekend, and what do you know—here it is, back again in all its glory. These appropriation bills contain all of the zombie measures from 2014 budget, all of those that were still there in the 2015 budget and still there in the 2016 budget, and here they are. So, in spite of all their efforts today to Photoshop it out, to pretend it did not happen, here it is, back in the 45th Parliament in all its glory. The zombie measures are here. The zombie measures are back. We heard in the election campaign Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister, saying that if he won the election it would give him a mandate to impose these on the Australian people, and here he is again trying to do it, and here we are again—in 2014, 2015 and again in 2016—stopping them from ripping the guts out of support for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

So let's look at what this budget actually locks in. Let's pull the 44th Parliament back out of the cupboard and have a good look at what they tried to do then and what they are still trying to do. The budget locks in family tax benefit cuts to 1.5 million families; cuts to paid parental leave for 80,000 new mums every year, leaving some $11,800 worse off; cuts to 330,000 part pensioners; increasing the pension age to 70; cuts to young job seekers that will force them to live off nothing for a month; cutting $30 billion from schools; $100,000 university degrees for Australian students; a plan to increase the cost of medicines for everyone by increasing the co-payment as part of the PBS, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; cutting bulk-billing incentives for diagnostic imaging and pathology services; cutting the pension to 190,000 pensioners through the plan to limit overseas travel for Australian pensioners. That is a particularly nasty budget measure that hits people in my community very hard. And of course it also locks in a new one, which is the $50 billion tax cut to some of the biggest businesses in the country, flowing through eventually to any business with a turnover of less than a billion dollars. That pretty much sums up the whole 44th Parliament, I think: cuts to the most vulnerable and giving the benefits of those cuts to the big end of town. The 44th Parliament is alive and well. I expect them to still try to Photoshop it out tomorrow, but with these appropriation bills before the House they are just not going to be able to do that.

When the Prime Minister rolled previous Prime Minister Abbott, the country breathed a sigh of relief, and I have to say that so did I. Even though I and probably the entire country thought that the deposing of Prime Minister Abbott and the replacement with Prime Minister Turnbull meant that we did not have a chance of winning the next election, I still breathed a sigh of relief because we could not continue down the path we were going. We had been a country with a finger on the pause button for nearly two years. There were all of the things that needed to be done—the massive changes taking place in the world, the investment boom in mining coming to an end—and we had a government that was essentially sitting on its hands when it came to addressing the future. They were very good at repealing things, they were very good at cutting support for the most vulnerable in our society, but, when it came to putting anything forward which actually generated growth, when it came to doing anything which might position our country for the next decade or the decade after that or the decade after that, there was nothing. So we all breathed a sigh of relief and what a disappointment.

It is a year tomorrow since Prime Minister Turnbull deposed Tony Abbott and it has been a year of more of the same or, rather, nothing. It has been another year of nothing. Today, in question time, when we asked the Prime Minister to name his achievements, once again he could not. The only achievement he managed to come up with today was the NBN.

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