Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills, which of course we support, but I don't want anyone to confuse support for the bills with support for the policy and the funding decisions that this government has made. I say this on a day when we've learnt that one in five Australian companies don't pay company tax, yet a key part of this government's budget, which it hasn't been able to progress, is to give companies a tax cut—a tax cut that they clearly don't need if they're not paying tax in the first place. It really underpins the decision-making process that went into the things that we see in this bill. There are many areas that I could speak on, but I'm going to stick to just a few.

One of the big gaps in the budget is any vision for the manufacturing sector. Australians want Australia to make stuff, not just to bring it in from other countries. One area where we know there's nearly $50 million of investment planned in the next decade is in rail investment—rolling stock—with state governments around Australia doing a variety of projects. In Sydney, we have an existing rail network that needs serious investment, and in the longer term we should be building high-speed rail between Brisbane and Melbourne via Sydney and Canberra. Australian steel should be given absolute priority in these projects, but we should also be looking to produce the rolling stock itself, not buying it overseas. It is an absolute disgrace that in New South Wales you've got a government that is buying new trains for the Blue Mountains, in my electorate of Macquarie, which are coming from overseas. That's $2.3 billion of investment not going to Australian businesses. There's the complication that the carriages are too wide and too long for our platforms, and there are serious questions about the suitability of the trains for our early morning commuters.

A commitment by the federal government to develop a national $50 billion rail industry plan wouldn't be a big burden on the budget. It would make a huge difference, though, to have collaboration between industry, governments, training providers and unions. The federal government would not be stumping up that money, but it would facilitate the expenditure of those billions of dollars in Australia. It would lead to more apprentices and a more highly-skilled workforce with specialist skills, which we lost with the demise of the car manufacturing industry, thanks to this government's unwillingness to have any vision.

It's impossible to predict what a workforce skilled in train production might be able to turn its hand to in decades to come, but you could imagine a range of sectors where there would be future transferability. The AMWU, which has seen its members suffer most under the loss of manufacturing jobs, can see the sense of this coordinated approach. In my own electorate, we've got about 500 manufacturing businesses of varying sizes. We have the capacity for growth and, outside of the tourism sector, the manufacturing sector has the most businesses employing 20 people or more, largely in the Hawkesbury. Workers can see the benefit of working closely with industry. Business can see it. It's government that can't seem to see how all this fits together. Investing time and money into building the capacity of local manufacturing would not only produce trains; it's the sort of investment in our people and our future that this government should be making.

Of course, the federal government has a central funding role for education. I want to start with TAFE. That system is fundamental. The latest data shows that Commonwealth funding to the vocational education and training sector has had a $1.6 billion cut. That's a 27.3 per cent reduction, according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, and this is on top of state governments cutting around 13 per cent of funding. No wonder the Australian Education Union describes the VET system as being in crisis. The New South Wales TAFE Teachers Association president, Annette Bennett, says urgent action is needed to reverse the decline. So do we see that from this government? Of course not. The TAFE sector continues to compete in a flawed competition and contestability environment. It means we're destroying the place where young and older people go to advance their careers, advance their skills, advance their future and get training. As the New South Wales Teachers Federation points out, it isn't just unions who are arguing for a stop to the funding attack on TAFE. Last year Jennifer Westacott, the chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, told the Press Club that an effective vocational education sector is essential to the future of our economy and that not one more cent could be taken out of TAFE. The fact that the government's response is to totally fund their training system through a charge on 457 visas shows how little they care about building a skilled and employable workforce in this country.

It isn't just tradies who are being belted by the government's education policies. The government's cut to universities, with a freeze on places, is actually their fourth attempt to reduce spending on university funding. They clearly would like to keep university for the elite, as it was when Labor came to government in 2007. It was a university system that was increasingly out of reach for many Australians. The numbers of undergraduate places were determined by bureaucrats here in Canberra. It failed to keep up with the changes in population or with the changing needs of our economy. I know it's hard to remember back more than a decade, but, because supply was tightly constrained as demand was increasing, entrance scores were extraordinarily competitive. The brutal reality was that, if you had parents who could afford it, you could pay your way into a course with full fees but a lower entry score. That meant a lack of participation in universities from students in outer metropolitan areas like mine. Labor's commitment to a demand-driven system has meant that, over the last decade, 190,000 more Australian students have gone to university, and that has particularly benefited outer metropolitan areas.

The latest attack by this government occurred just before Christmas, just as students were seriously thinking about their options at university. There was the announcement of a freeze in the growth of university places, which will mean that, this year alone, up to 10,000 students could miss out on a university place. Western Sydney will be one of the places hardest hit. The government still wants students to reduce the income threshold at which people will need to start paying back their loans, and it still wants to increase the fees universities can charge. I fear this is not the last hurdle to be thrown into the path of university students.

Schools have not been spared cuts. New data from the Parliamentary Budget Office and the National Catholic Education Commission shows just how bad the funding this year and next year will be for public schools and low-fee Catholic schools. Public schools will suffer a massive 86 per cent of the cuts that will occur. Low-fee Catholic schools will bear 12 per cent of the burden of the cuts, while independent schools, including some of the elite high-fee schools, will get a cut of just two per cent. These are cuts the Prime Minister calls fair. Well, he and I clearly have a very different definition of 'fair'.

One of the key responsibilities of a federal government is to provide funding to the states for hospitals and to ensure that people who are sick can see a GP or specialist. It shouldn't be that hard to do such a fundamental thing, should it? But the government seems incapable of finding in its budget the ability to adequately fund hospitals. My constituents rely on the Katoomba, Hawkesbury and Nepean hospitals, all of which would benefit from additional resources and capital expenditure. I want to talk about Nepean for a moment, which is really the hub of specialist hospital care for our region, even though it can be a bit of a distance from some of my constituents. We are on the fringe of a high-growth area, and there's no equity in the New South Wales government's promise of a half a billion dollars for Nepean Hospital when hospitals in areas with less population growth and less disadvantage are being given $1 billion. This is an area of higher rates of chronic heart disease and diabetes. This hospital is carrying a bigger and heavier load as the population of the west increases.

My neighbouring colleague the member for Lindsay, in whose electorate Nepean Hospital lies, tells me not a day goes by without her office receiving a call from a distressed patient about waiting lists, overcrowding and long emergency times. Certainly the state members find that. The office of the member for Blue Mountains is often in contact with me about these issues. This is in spite of the work of the doctors, nurses and other health professionals—HSU members—many of whom live in my electorate, who are doing an incredible job in an incredibly under-resourced environment. So, is the government doing anything to alleviate any of this pressure? It is doing nothing—absolutely nothing. In fact, in spite of the growing demand for hospitals, the latest offer from the recent COAG meeting is best described as an insult.

The government is also happy for people to keep paying more and more for health insurance. At my mobile office in Lawson on Saturday, an older couple came to speak with me about this very issue. Like many people, they've paid for health insurance for more than 50 years, since they were in their 20s, and they've not used it a lot. Now that they are older, the wife has had breast cancer and the husband has had a prostate operation. That's a not-uncommon combination of illnesses. They are grateful that they have been treated promptly and professionally, but the out-of-pocket costs have been a killer. The gap for the anaesthetist meant thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs. They are wondering why. They don't think they can keep their private health insurance going for another year. It's all because this government wants to keep seeing private for-profit insurance companies keep making record profits. The stats show the pre-tax profits of private health insurers increased by 7.3 per cent in the 12 months to 2017. They earned $1.86 billion before tax. At the same time, out-of-pocket costs continued to soar, and Australians are literally being forced to dump their cover.

This is just more evidence of the need to act to make private health insurance fairer for Australians. Instead of standing up for the budgets of families, the Prime Minister just stands by his private health insurance mates. Australians are paying more and more. We really can't have this continue and the pendulum has to swing back to consumers. Labor will cap private health premiums at two per cent for two years and task the Productivity Commission with the biggest review of private health insurance that's taken place in 20 years. To quote a much-loved phrase, 'It's time.'

It isn't just private hospitals that the government is forcing more and more people to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets for. The government is also continuing to save money by keeping the freeze on the GP Medicare rebates. The consequence for my constituents, particularly in the Upper Blue Mountains, is that it is next to impossible to find a bulk-billed visit to a GP unless you are a pensioner, a child or have a health card. The years of freeze which the GPs have been absorbing are not being lifted with any speed by this government and people are now facing financial pain along with their physical pain. Doctors at Katoomba hospital tell me that they are seeing as a consequence an increase in patients to emergency. People are turning up who are desperate and sick and will go wherever they can afford to go. Now we have come full circle, back to where I started, talking about hospital funding. When we talk about the cuts this government makes, they are such big numbers in the health sector that it is easy to glaze over, but these cuts affect people. People have come to me defeated and dispirited. In their time of need, they feel they are being let down by this government.

Finally, I want to turn to foreign aid. This government has cut $11 billion from foreign aid, and this is having gone to the 2013 election promising to match Labor's investment in aid. There has generally been in the past bipartisanship around foreign aid. In 2013, they were saying, 'Not a dollar difference—we'll support the Millennium Goals'—yeah, right! What has actually happened since then is an $11 billion cut. At the last election they said, 'We won't have any further cuts,' but they put a freeze on foreign aid. That's an effective cut. Costs go up, wages go up and electricity to run your office goes up, but funding doesn't. It's time again to say, 'Enough is enough.' Aid spending now equates to about 22c in every $100 of national gross income—a historic low. We can't continue to see the foreign aid budget carved up by cuts and freezes. I recently met with a delegation from Kiribati and they see Australia as a big sister, but we've been a pretty mean big sister. It is time to reinstate our aid budget. That's something Labor will be committed to, but clearly this government has no commitment to looking after our neighbours.

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