Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

As the dust settles and the details clear on the 2017 budget, we see that there is much to be disappointed in. This is not a budget for the Illawarra, the South Coast and the Southern Highlands—the regions that I represent. There is not a dollar in it for the long awaited Maldon-Dombarton rail link which will connect our port to the inland rail routes. There is not a dollar in it for a bridge over the Shoalhaven River which would help those thousands of people who each week make their way from the Illawarra and from places further north down south to the Shoalhaven. There is not a dollar in it for affordable housing; although we heard a lot about affordable housing in the lead up to the budget. It has nothing for our pensioners who have worked hard for generations, saving a little to put forward for their retirement.

The budget has got more in it which is about spin than substance. It cuts money away from our schools; in fact, $22 billion over the forwards and beyond for school education—$20 million from my own electorate. It increases student fees, cuts funding to universities and, through these two initiatives, ensures that class sizes will be larger and the quality of education will decline. It sees the reduction in employment with over 95,000 fewer jobs over the forward estimates. In fact, there has never been a budget which is more pessimistic about the future of employment than this government's budget in 2017. It has assumptions about wages growth in it which go in the exact opposite direction to the government's treatment of its own workers and its campaign, which champions the reduction in penalty rates for workers throughout many industries, particularly those workers who are some of the lowest paid in our economy.

Budgets are a statement of the government's priorities, and the priorities in this budget are not about the wellbeing of the Australian people; they are about one thing—that is, the future of the Liberal Party's leader, the Prime Minister of this country. It is an attempt to convince the people of Australia that the direction set by his predecessor in that universally reviled 2014 program has been reversed. This was a budget that included within it attacks on Medicare; attacks on hospitals, universities, TAFEs and schools, on pensioners and the unemployed, on family payments. It proposed to do damage to family budgets. This program devastated the coalition party politically. However great that political damage was, it was nothing compared to the impact, the human costs that it would have wrought on each of the groups and individuals who were affected by these proposals, each of these wrong turns.

In 2015, the Prime Minister set the standard against which his own government and his own prime ministership will be measured. Thirty consecutive Newspolls show a lack of faith in the government's program. In my view, this is a puerile measure but most Australians can hardly be blamed for holding him to the standard that he has asked them to hold him to. He is halfway through. This budget will do nothing to reverse the political fortunes of his government but, more importantly than that, nothing t reverse the real problems that are being encountered by Australians every day.

The people of Australia are not buying it. A part of the problem that the government faces is that there is no clear vision for what it stands for and what it wants to do for the country. We have, over the last two years alone, been asked to be excited about innovation only to see that dropped like a hot potato. We were then asked to get on board that jobs and growth express only to see that dropped like a hot potato because the projections on jobs and growth in the 2017 budget are so anaemic that they could not possibly champion that as their campaign slogan. We are now asked to believe that there are better days ahead when Australians looking for work see that in this budget there are nearly 100,000 fewer jobs in the economy over the next four years.

We have seen thought bubbles masquerading as serious policy debate only to see them disappear as quickly as the bubble bath that entertains my children at night. Too often we have seen these ideas put out only to be reversed the next day. Is it any wonder that the people of Australia are looking at the 2017-18 budget through the same cynical glasses that they have used to look at the chops and changes, the constant reversals and the overblown rhetoric of this Prime Minister? They are asking themselves, 'What has changed?' Quite simply, the answer is nothing. What we want is an alternative story for Australia and the policies that are going to back it in, particularly for regional Australia.

Too often when city politicians come to this place, they imagine regional Australia as a place to deal with the overflows and the excesses that they are experiencing in the cities—everything from waste to excess of people. If they are not thinking of our regions as somewhere where they can dump the things that they no longer need or they can no longer fit anywhere, they are thinking of our regions as sites of remediation: things that are overwhelmingly different and in need of being fixed. I think of my own region and the regions that I visit as very different places—places that we live in by choice; places, sure, with challenges but with a multitude of assets and unique identities, and so often the custodian of our national legends. To think of our regions in this way does not mean that we ignore growing inequality, particularly the inequality that is growing between those Australians who are living in our capital cities and those who are living in regional, rural and remote Australia.

I look at wages alone, and I see the gaps that are growing in wage inequality in this country. Here, in one dataset, we can see the problem that we are facing. Wage growth in the Australian economy is at its lowest level ever. But, in regional Australia, we compound that issue by the fact that people in regions like my own are already earning wages—if they are lucky enough to have a job—that are well below the national average. When I compare the average wage of somebody working in Dapto at $55,800 a year or in the Shellharbour LGA at a little over $56,700 a year to somebody who is working in the Prime Minister's own electorate at $89,500 a year—and these are averages—is it any wonder that people in regional Australia are saying this is an acute problem? But these calls are falling on deaf ears, and the world that the Prime Minister lives in is a very different place to the one that we live in and represent.

If there has been a debate around this budget that has attracted the focus of the nation, it has been around the priorities for school education and post-school education. If you look at the post-school participation rates in higher education between regional Australia and the capital cities, you will see the pathway to change is getting harder and harder and harder. Participation rates in higher education in the Wollongong and Shellharbour LGAs are between 20 per cent at the lower end and 29 per cent at the upper end—lower high school participation rates than the Australian average. In the Prime Minister's own electorate, they are well in excess of 50 per cent. Is it any wonder that there is no priority for higher education in this budget? The Prime Minister does not see it in the world that he lives in and therefore he does not believe that anybody else has these problems. We have to have a different plan for the region that I represent and a different plan for the rest of the regions in this country.

I want to stress again: I do not subscribe to the deficit model that sees regional Australia as a dumping ground for other people's excess or as a place that needs remediation. We have fantastic assets. We have one of the most beautiful regions in the country. We are connected by the busiest commuter corridor in the country to the largest city in the country. We are connected, mostly, by decent NBN. We have a hell of a lot of copper based NBN in the ground, which is a headache but there is the capacity to change. We have a fantastic regional university. It is not only one of the best in the country but one of the best in the world. We have the capacity to leverage off the enormous strength and depth of knowledge and expertise in heavy manufacturing and engineering. We have some of the smartest and hardest working people in the country. We have the benefit of decades and decades of migration of people from just about every country on earth who have made Australia and our region home—a great connection to the people and the markets of the world.

We have much to be proud of, but this does not mean we turn our backs on the challenges that we need to focus on to make it a better place. The things that are going to make the Illawarra, the South Coast and the Southern Highlands not only a great place to live but a great place to do business and work are things that are going to make us a more connected region by road, rail, sea and, yes, fibre.

If we are going to ensure that this occurs, we need bipartisan support not just within this place but also across three tiers of government which endures across the political cycle. We do not need to see one government, for example, fund the Maldon-Dombarton rail link only to see it half-built and have another government cancel it, leaving a bridge literally half-built and hanging in the air. We need to have consistent long-term policies which are going to see that railway line built, that are going to see investment in the Albion Park Rail M1 bypass, that are going to see the much needed river crossing over the Shoalhaven River built and which are going to see the M1 extension in Sydney, which we call SouthConnex. I know the problems that they face in Western Sydney, but there is life south of Sydney as well and we suffer the same transport links problems. We have one of the busiest rail corridors in the state. Over 20,000 people on a daily basis make their way from the Illawarra, South Coast and Southern Highlands to Sydney city or its western suburbs for work. If we cannot do that in under an hour, we are wasting human capacity, productivity and potential. We can do it much better than we are doing it at the moment.

We have to invest in our people, our human capital, as I have spoken about, which means investing in our schools. The $20 million the government has taken out of schools in my electorate needs to be put back and re-invested in our primary schools and secondary schools. We need to be working together with the state governments to ensure that we can reinvest in our TAFE system, a national icon. People come from other countries all around the world to see this great thing that we built in this country over many governments and over several decades—the TAFE system. It is systematically being dismantled. It is not too late to stop. It needs to stop if we are going to ensure that we can invest in the skills that our nation will need in the future.

I want to see a retirement and income policy that provides people with certainty that if they are saving for the future they will have that nest egg available for them to ensure that they will derive an income from it over the years of a long and happy retirement. We need to set a retirement age which acknowledges that, if you have worked with your body your entire life, you probably are not going to be able to work in heavy, physical, manual labour until you are 70. Your body is going to start breaking down. Yes, people have different capacities, but almost universally if you have worked in backbreaking work for your entire life a retirement age of 70 is not going to cut it.

A dignified society means Medicare. It means the NDIS. It means affordable medicines. It means reasonable income support for people who are looking for work, not demonising the unemployed. While many of these are Labor ideals and values, we invite those across the aisle to join with us in ensuring that these become part of a bipartisan vision for a great country and a great region. Labor cannot do it alone. We need to work with all levels of government and across the aisle to ensure that these things become a reality for my region and our country now and into the future.

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