Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy Speaker Kelly, for your company last week. I want to commence my contribution to the debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018 not by talking about the budget but by talking about something which is probably far more important in many respects—that is, to express my condolences to Ray Riley and his family for the passing of his wife, Sue, who died very recently from mesothelioma.

She died from mesothelioma as a result of acquiring the disease through washing her husband's clothes. She lived down on Mosquito Bay on the south coast and was someone who I came to know well over the last decade or so. She was a fine person and an extremely wonderful woman. She was a nurse and a champion for her community. Her family was the centre of her life—her husband, Ray, her children and her grandchildren. I can only imagine the pain they are feeling as the result of her loss.

I just wanted to say how sad I am at her passing. My partner, Elizabeth, would want me to express our condolences forthrightly and appropriately in this place. I have said elsewhere and at other times that often we do not spend enough time contemplating the good deeds of so many Australians. Sue was a wonderful woman and a great Australian who gave her life to her family. She was also a highly qualified nurse who worked up until very recently. To Ray and the family, please accept our condolences on the sad passing of Sue.

I also feel sadness when I look at this budget. We have opportunities here to do things which are fair and reasonable for all Australians, but this budget fails dismally. It fails, as others have said, the economic credibility test. It fails the fairness test. It clearly sees it as important to allow someone earning $1 million to have a tax break while someone on $65,000 pays more tax. That is not fair and it is not reasonable. It is not fair to attack young Australians or low- and middle-income earners as this budget does. When I go around my electorate—and there are not too many millionaires, I can tell you—there are many who say they want something that is fair, that addresses their needs and that addresses the aspirations they might have for themselves and their families.

It is in that context that I want to talk about the education cuts in this bill. The Northern Territory, almost perversely, will be $254 million worse off over the next decade than it would otherwise have been if the full Gonski 1.0 had been put in place. The schools of the Northern Territory serve 19,000 Northern Territory families and 34,500 kids at 153 public schools. The majority of those schools are in my electorate of Lingiari. The majority of those are in remote Aboriginal communities looking after the educational interests of the most disadvantaged Australians in the country. As a result of this budget the students, the families and the schools will be worse off. Average per-student funding for government school students across Australia will grow by five per cent per year for the next decade. In the case of the Northern Territory, funding currently receives 23 per cent of the school resourcing standard. Under the proposals in this budget, schools in the Northern Territory will be expected to transition to 20 percent of the SRS by 2027. So there will be an effective three per cent cut in terms of that standard in the Northern Territory applied to the most disadvantaged students and the most disadvantaged schools in the country.

One wonders how the Commonwealth and the government—in particular, the Minister for Education, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer—can stand up and say that students in the Northern Territory will somehow be better off. They are clearly going to be worse off, and this is the direct responsibility of the government. I am sure they will come up with some proposal for transitional arrangements—offer them a little bit of money—but it will not address the disadvantage and inequality that will come out of the Northern Territory as a direct result of this budget. In 2017 the Commonwealth funding per student in an NT government school is $6,445. In 2027 it will be $7,369. That is a difference of $924 over the 10 years. It is hardly a remarkable amount of money. In effect, these students will clearly be worse off in real terms as a result of that funding arrangement.

It is up to the Commonwealth to address this issue and support Labor's view on the education cuts. It is not reasonable to take $22 billion out of the education funding across the country, which is what is happening. As I said, $240 million of that will come out of the Northern Territory. Why should Northern Territory kids and their families be persecuted in this way by this government?

I sit here very close to the front of the chamber, and I see a rancorous Prime Minister at every question time trying to demonise people who object to or criticise the government's position. All I can say is that clearly he has not walked in the shoes of the people I am referring to, nor does he understand what it would be like to walk in them. If he did, he would change his view.

I also want to refer briefly to health expenditure, particularly in the area of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Clearly in this budget there is very little new funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. There are a small handful of announcements, which we welcome. The National Partnership Agreement on Rheumatic Fever Strategy continuation and expansion measure allocates an additional $7.6 million to continue and expand the agreement. The Project Agreement on Improving Trachoma Control Services for Indigenous Australians is due to receive an additional $20.7 million over the forward estimates to continue trachoma control up to 2021, by which time that dreadful Third World disease should be eliminated from this country forever.

What is not in this budget, though, is any funding for the implementation strategy for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan, which is a bipartisan plan supported by the government and the opposition. We were hoping we would see something concrete around how the government sees this plan progressing over the period, because it goes from 2013 to 2023, the government has been in office now for four years, and we have not seen an implementation strategy. It is hard to see how the plan can be properly implemented until we see resources allocated to this implementation strategy.

I note also that we are getting back a bit of the money cut out of the 2014 budget. A hundred and thirty million dollars was cut out in the 2014 budget, principally from Indigenous antismoking campaigns, and still that money has not been fully restored. Some of it has been put back, but we still wait to see the full restoration.

The other area where we have seen not new funding but an announcement in this budget is the expansion of the Australian Nurse-Family Partnership Program to four new sites to increase the number of sites by the end of June 2018. It might be worth pointing out, just so that people do not have any illusions about this, that this is not new money either. This money was first announced in the 2014 budget, and it is being reannounced in this budget. The 2014 budget made the appropriation. Minister Nash was the minister at the time, and her press release of 19 June 2014 said:

As Minister Nash outlined in Senate question time today, the 'Better Start to Life' investment in the 2014-15 budget will commence from July 2015. It will include:

…   …   …

In this year's budget, the minister responsible, Minister Wyatt, said:

The Australian Government has committed $40 million under the Better Start to Life approach to progressively expand the ANFPP from three sites to 13, by 30 June 2018.

Clearly, there will not be 13 sites funded by June 2018, and we would like to know what has happened to the money that was allocated to those sites. Will there be additional sites selected? What will be the process for their selection? When will it be done, so that we can meet the commitment which the government itself has made to have these new programs commenced by the middle of 2018? They are very important, and we support their expansion, but it is important that we understand what the government is actually proposing in the budget. It is very hard to tell.

The other issue I want to talk about very briefly is funding for the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service. CAALAS's current funding is due to expire in December 2017, and there is no indication that it will be renewed. In 2016 CAALAS provided 8,342 legal services to its clients across Central Australia. In 2016 its lawyers each handled an average of 491 cases. It provides a duty lawyer every day at the courts in Alice Springs and attends every single bush court in the region. It also does important work for the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. The funding of CAALAS is extremely important for the provision of justice to Aboriginal people who live in Central Australia, and it is up to the government to make sure that this funding is provided.

The Attorney-General may have a reason—I do not know what that reason could possibly be—that he will not guarantee funding beyond December this year for this service. Other Aboriginal legal services have been assured of their funding as part of a reversal of planned cuts to community legal centres and ATSILS which were due to happen in July this year. These organisations need to engage staff to make sure that they have security of employment. They supply an essential service for the justice system and for Aboriginal people in Central Australia. So it is up to the government, and up to the Attorney-General, to make sure that sufficient funding is made available so that they can continue to operate.

As I say, we see the Prime Minister carrying on like a pork chop most question times, and we need to appreciate that the palaver that we are hearing from him has very little to do with the real world. When he was asked a series of questions today—very good questions, I would have thought—about the impact of a tax measure, he was simply unable to answer. He was asked a simple question about taxing the banks and then allowing them to write it off as a business expense in the taxation system. He was asked what that means in terms of the dollars that will be spent, and he was unable to tell us. It demonstrates just how disingenuous the Prime Minister really is. (Time expired)

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