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

I am quite saddened to speak on this budget. I did not become a member of parliament to watch our country push the pause button for as long as it has. There is a lot of work to be done. I was actually quite hopeful that we would see some of that begin in this budget, but, unfortunately, there is no vision in it. We have seen a lot of slogans in past budgets from the Liberal government. I suspect the most accurate description now is 'storyboards'—plans of how the government is going to sell itself as fair, as caring about education and as caring about health. When you strip away the glossy words and look at the reality, the vision is simply not there.

I ask myself: how long can this go on? I have said to this parliament before that when Prime Minister Turnbull first rolled Prime Minister Abbott I had a moment of hope that the pause that Australia had been in for so many years might be over and we might actually start dealing with the extraordinary challenges and opportunities that our country faces in the world as it is. It is extraordinary change. It is no less than an age change. There are massive opportunities and massive risks. We can already see that there will be great winners and great losers, and we cannot afford to let year after year go by without facing the reality of the modern world in this place. This budget does nothing for that. It has no vision. It does nothing to position Australia for the future. We must do that because every year we delay makes it harder for us to do that.

I used to make a chemistry joke among people who understood chemistry, and not everybody does. I used to refer to Prime Minister Abbott when he was opposition leader as a 'political halogen'. Halogens are the group of elements second from the right end. They are highly volatile. There is fluorine, bromine and chlorine. Fluorine is so volatile it cannot even be stored. It reacts with glass. They are so volatile. They are one electron short of stability. For that reason they bond with the first thing that comes along. When they do bond they cannot be moved. When fluorine bonds with carbon it makes Teflon, for example. It is so strong and it bonds so fast that you use it in the hottest parts of jet engines. Once it bonds nothing breaks it apart.

I used to watch Tony Abbott as opposition leader and then as Prime Minister cling to something—the idea that debt was bad, for example. Once he had bonded to that he was so fixed nothing would move him. I used to refer to him as a 'political halogen'. People got it, strangely enough. The minute I called the government of the day a halogen, people who understood chemistry got it, so accurate I think was that description.

The government we have now is not a halogen. I think it has moved one step further to the right, and it is now in the noble gas territory. Noble gases are completely opposite to halogens. They are completely stable. Nothing changes them. Nothing touches them. They are called noble gases for a reason. They exist as one atom at a time; they are monoatomic. They are extraordinarily stable things: nothing touches them. When I look at this budget, that is what I see. I see a government that are untouched by what happens around them, that are untouched by the furnace that young people face—the combination of unaffordable housing, a declining job market, an extraordinarily rapidly changing world, climate change—and we have a government that do not seem to notice. They are the gas that you put in the light bulb, because when you heat something up to an extraordinary level they do not care, they do not give a stuff, they do not react—they just sit there like a noble gas. So we have gone from halogens a step to the right to noble gases.

I will talk through some of the things that are happening in the world today in our communities in Australia that this government does not seem to notice. Before I do that, I am going to talk about one of the biggest ideological bombs that the Abbott-Turnbull government has had for a long time and which they now seem to have ignored. That is debt. The Abbott government fixed on debt as bad and spoke about it every day. Joe Hockey, the then Treasurer, came out prior to his first budget, made a few increases to expenditure and then projected what would happen if the entire parliament went to sleep until 2026 and said, 'Oh, terrible! The debt will be $680 billion.' I remember it because it was a quite precise figure: $680 billion, how terrible this would be. For week after week, year after year, we heard the cry of 'Debt, terrible! Debt, terrible!' from this halogen who had bonded to the notion that all debt is bad.

Now we have a quiet increasing of the debt ceiling to $600 billion by this government. It did not take until 2026, which is what Tony Abbott said it would take for the Labor debt to reach $680 billion. We have quietly increased the debt ceiling now to $600 billion, because we are going to go over it very soon. Yet where is the response from this government to what everybody sees is a growing problem, everybody except the government, who are now silent on it? Certainly, they are approaching the dreadful peak that they thought Labor would reach if we all went to sleep for 10 years, but they are reaching it about five years earlier, and suddenly it is not a problem. The flame does not matter. The AAA credit rating? Not a problem; nothing touches us. They are the noble gas of economists: nothing touches them. It is extraordinary.

It was the same with the bank levy. When Labor introduced a levy one-tenth the size, in response to a request from the Governor of the Reserve Bank that we do that to improve financial stability in the sector—it was going into a financial stability fund—the cries from the then opposition as they bonded to that notion that this was an increase in tax, the cries from the parliament that we were trousering the pensioners' money, that we were sticking our hands in the pockets of pensioners, the outcry from that was phenomenal. It was going to destroy the world, so firm were they in their conviction, the halogen Abbott government. Now it is 10 times the size, but it is not actually going to affect anything. It is just going to raise money for the government. It is not going to affect anything. They are untouched by the consequences of this. They are untouched by whether it will be passed on. Suddenly it is 10 times the size—just like the debt is so much greater—but certainly it is not a problem, because they have moved to the right. They have moved into the field of noble gases and nothing touches them. They are just sitting there—no problem at all.

Jobs and growth: they latched onto that phrase like it would never be broken. Jobs and growth are two really good words, by the way, which we actually do need. We do need jobs and growth. There are good words, a good objective.

Where are they now? Where are even those words now, let alone the policy? We have record underemployment. We have fewer hours worked per Australian than in longer than living memory. We have higher rates of casualisation and insecure work. We have record slow wages growth. But it is: 'Oh, no problem. It doesn't touch us. It doesn't touch the government. No problem. No need to address it. No need to do anything.' Show me anything in this budget which is actually about growing jobs. We know it is not, because the budget papers show that there are nearly 100,000 fewer jobs forecast for this year compared to the last budget. Not only have they stopped talking about jobs and growth; they have stopped doing anything about jobs and growth, and they are openly predicting fewer jobs in the coming years—and there is not a word. They are untouched by that. They are untouched by the consequences of that out in the community.

There is a consequence. There are people who are having the Bunsen burner held to them. They are losing their jobs. They are working fewer hours. They are not getting pay rises. They are suffering cost-of-living pressures. And from the government there is nothing. There is nothing there. There is no narrative. There is not even a storyboard for jobs and growth anymore. There is nothing. It does not touch them. There is no jobs plan at all—none.

On taxes: under the Abbott government, tax was bad. Labor was the party of taxes. Anytime Labor got in, Labor was going to raise taxes, but the Liberal government never did that. They never did that. Their firmness, their conviction, that they simply would never raise taxes because Liberal governments did not do that—that is gone. Suddenly we have $21 billion in new taxes—$21 billion in new taxes—from the government, which now have a tax-to-GDP ratio at one of the highest levels we have seen in living memory. It is quite extraordinary. It is going up and up and up. Again, it does not touch them. This dreadful thing called tax, for them a year ago, would destroy the whole world if you increased it. Suddenly there is $21 billion more of it. Suddenly, there are no consequences for what they do. It seems that there are no consequences even if you increase the tax for the lowest paid through the Medicare levy. There seem to be no consequences for the government. They are completely untouched.

On housing affordability: the median house price reached a billion dollars in my electorate last year—a billion dollars in my electorate. Let us be honest about this. Even if state governments and federal governments got together and managed to do things that took the heat out of the housing market—if they took the heat out of it and stopped it from rising as fast—how many decades would it be before a person on the median wage, around $70,000, could buy a house anywhere near where they work in Western Sydney? It would be decades. And where were the government on this? 'Nothing to do with us. Housing affordability? We've got a few little things, but essentially it's a state matter, nothing to do with us. It doesn't touch us.' There are people out there suffering rental stress at higher levels than we have seen in decades, and the government are untouched by it. They are not out of touch; they are untouched by any of the consequences of their actions or their lack of action.

The cost of living is going up. The cost-of-living pressures are amazing, yet what do they do? They cut, because there are no consequences for the government. They do not see any consequences. It is as if what happens out there because of their actions does not actually matter. A family on $65,000 will pay $325 more in tax in two years time. Changes to family tax benefit A will mean that a family with an income of $80,000 will lose nearly $730 per child. Axing the energy supplement for pensioners and people with disability will cut $14 a fortnight, or $365 a year, from single pensioners. These are not small numbers if your earnings are $400 or $500 a week or less, which many are. These are not small numbers. Fourteen dollars a fortnight is not a small number if you are on Newstart. It is not a small number. There are consequences for these decisions.

And there are consequences in education. In this year's budget we have seen another $600 million cut from TAFE. We have had $3.8 billion cut from universities and $22 billion cut from schools. We already have 130,000 fewer apprenticeships and traineeships than when the Liberals were elected. Again, are they touched by this? Do they show concern? Do they have anything to say about this? No. What they have is a storyboard—a storyboard that says, 'We're increasing the funding to schools.' Well, they can only call it an increase because they cut it first. If you cut $30 billion from schools and then you put some more back in, you can claim an increase and do a nice storyboard and hold it up. It is a storyboard. It is not the truth. It is a marketing exercise. That is all it is. All we are getting from this government is a marketing exercise.

'We care about health. We're going to unfreeze the rebate, which we put on four years ago,' but not for a few more years—they do not tell you that. 'We're funding infrastructure'—actually, less than it was funded, but it makes a nice storyboard. There is no reality and no vision. It is a government that does not see the consequences of what it does. It does not see the consequences of its lack of action in these areas. It is really letting this country down. We face a time in the world when governments have to act and respond. Governments have to prepare our country to make the changes that it is going to need to make at the end of one age and the beginning of a new one. This government is ill equipped to do so, in terms of both its capacity and its caring. This country deserves much, much more.

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