Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Schools) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills that constitute the budget of the government. At the outset, my concern with this budget is that the whole is actually, and perhaps remarkably, rather less than the sum of its parts, bad as most of those parts are, because at the centre of this budget is a void. This is a budget of narrow vision and still lesser purpose. It fails to articulate a sense of where we should be as a nation and as an economy. So, unsurprisingly, it fails to chart a path to shared prosperity, or even to grapple with the task, which should be that of our national government. In place of a plan for growth that is inclusive, this budget represents a commitment to racing to the bottom.

When the member for Wentworth auditioned for the role of Prime Minister he was full of optimism. He spoke of innovation and agility, as watchwords for what would be his approach to securing our future prosperity—or 'what would have been' I should say, because his optimism didn't last. It's remarkable how quickly our Prime Minister was diminished as soon as he assumed that great office, but it's unforgivable that he has transposed his own weakness onto those he should be governing for. Australians today are no less capable than then. They are just less supported, less encouraged and less secure, and that is down to him.

That this is so represents I believe a moral as well as an economic failure on the part of this government. This is recognised in the alternative contributions to debate on these bills on this budget. On the one hand we have the National Press Club address of the member for McMahon, the shadow Treasurer, which started with a reference to a remote Indigenous community in Central Australia and our responsibility to secure decent lives and agency for the children and all members of that community. On the other hand the Treasurer started off by asking three questions. Members may have missed those three questions because the first one evoked a fair amount of mirth. He asked, rhetorically I believe: 'What have you achieved? What are you going to do now? What is it going to mean to me?' They were the questions he believed Australians wished to have answered. I don't think they were the right questions.

The budget ultimately is a statement of where we are and where we should be going. It's not so much, 'What's in it for me?' that Australians want answered. It's: 'What's in it for us? How can we chart a pathway to prosperity that is secure and that is shared? How can we chart a pathway to decent lives? How can we give every Australian an equal chance of fulfilling their potential in life and allow older Australians to enjoy the retirement and the dignity in retirement that they deserve?'

At the core of this is an extraordinary piece of symbolism. We see on the one hand cuts to schools—$17 billion—baked in in this budget. These mirror a $17 billion gift to the big banks that's also attempted to be baked in in this budget. This starkly shows the dividing line between the two sides of Australian politics today: blind faith in neoliberalism and blind faith in trickle-down economics on the one hand in defiance of everything we are seeing every day in the banking royal commission, apart from everything else—and I'll get to the 'everything else' later—against a plan built on evidence to invest in the capacity of Australians.

I was here for the conclusion of the member for Griffith's speech when she spoke so effectively about the importance of early years. When we talk about the cuts to schools it's important to also focus on the fact that we have a government that continues to put bandaids over early learning when instead we need long-term commitment. Again in this budget, in these appropriations, we have another bandaid. We don't have a secure pathway to ensure that every Australian child starts school having had the benefit of high-quality early years. Again the contrast between our vision for Australians and the capacity of Australians if given the chance to realise their potential and this government, which is so dismissive of them, mirroring their own lack of confidence, is absolutely stark.

The shadow Treasurer in his budget reply speech spent a bit of time focusing on things that the Treasurer should have focused on—in particular our broader commitment to investing in human capital and seeing that as absolutely key to unlocking our productivity challenge, mirroring our moral commitment, our faith in Australians and our belief that every Australian is entitled to have the education, the skills and the training to fulfil their potential as well as to make an economic contribution, but recognising that that is our pathway to higher productivity as well as some other investments. That's the other thing that's missing. Today's MPI on infrastructure showed a gaping hole in this budget. The Prime Minister managed to generate some fantastic front-pages in newspapers about infrastructure projects, but it's all smoke and mirrors.

Off-book equity finance arrangements are no way to deliver the sort of congestion-busting public transport that our big cities—particularly Melbourne, as I'm sure the member for Lalor will agree—need if we are to do the two things that we need to do in the most urbanised country in the world. The first thing is to make sure that we continue to realise the benefits of agglomeration and of having extraordinary productivity in and around our CBD. That's the first challenge, and that is absolutely hamstrung at the moment by the break on productivity that is the difficulty that my constituents and the member for Lalor's constituents have in accessing those jobs and amenities there. The flip side of this is, if we don't get the infrastructure challenge right in our big cities, we are condemning people in the outer suburbs to live as second-class citizens, to not access the labour markets that they should be able to access and to not access the amenities that they should be able to access, dividing our cities in a way that is simply unjust, as well as a ridiculous break on productivity.

I reflected more generally on the Treasurer's second reading speech, and it's interesting that he sets out quite up-front five things that he says we must do. When you scratch the surface, these things—and I think that is an appropriate descriptor—aren't plans and aren't policies; they're just empty words. They are rhetoric. What we have from the Treasurer is a budget by talking point. It is not by theory, other than this blind faith in trickle-down economics and in tax cuts as the only driver for greater productivity. There's no goal at the end of it either. I said that the worst bit about the budget is the absence of a vision for the sort of country he would like to see. Again, the contrast could not be starker, when we look at the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition. For us, the appropriations we would make are not an end in themselves. They are a means towards a fairer society and a more equal society, because we see that as a good in itself; but we recognise the economic benefits of reducing the excesses of inequality that we are headed towards under this government.

What is particularly egregious—and other Labor speakers have commented on this—is the way in which this rhetoric and these talking points attempt to wrap around a defence of the things that, from conservatives in Australia, are indefensible. Their claims to attach their tax cut agenda to securing Medicare are risible. They are risible on their record and even more so in the face of cuts that, again, are found in the appropriations that constitute this budget. The Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer have set out a clear alternative to this narrow, dark, depressing and unconfident vision of this government. It's not just an alternative to this budget, as I've said before. It's an alternative vision for the country, founded in optimism in the capacity of Australians to compete in the world economy and to look after each other.

In Labor, we recognise that this trajectory towards extreme inequality is a problem, and we commit ourselves—and we have committed ourselves, in the detailed work of the shadow Treasurer in particular—to solving this problem. It is a problem at two levels: morally and instrumentally. For me and for all of us on this side of the House, it is bad in and of itself that gaps between the haves and have-nots have increasing dramatically in Australia. We see that particularly as the suburbs in our big cities segment and people lose touch with experiences of life that aren't exactly like their own. We see this in social mobility becoming less and less achievable, with people's destiny being overly shaped by the postcode into which they are born, and our society more generally becoming more stratified, segmented and separated. That's how we think in the Labor Party; that's how we see the world. We think these are things that we should do something about, because they're not good things.

We also recognise that beyond our understanding, and beyond our ideological world view, that inequality is a drag on growth, as the IMF have recognised and as the OECD have recognised. This is why we are investing in Australia, through physical infrastructure, and investing in Australians, through developing our human capital. We are putting the money back into schools—that's every cent of the $17 billion this government has cut. We are reopening uni places to kids who are being cut out of uni and priced out of uni by this government and its arbitrary caps and plans to increase fees to unsustainable levels. By the way, that is without—and I'll give credit to the member for Sturt—even having a plan to try to compensate the universities for this. It's cutting without offering the carrot. Their plan for universities, if it can be described as such, is a complete abandonment of a sector that's so important to Australia and to the city I live in. The commitment about abolishing up-front TAFE fees for 100,000 students is a critical driver of skilling young and some not-so-young Australians to equip them for jobs of the future.

There is so much in this budget, but I'd like to talk about a couple of things in the time remaining to me. The Treasurer boasts of setting a speed limit on the tax-to-GDP ratio. He can't explain why 23.9 per cent is a magic number; the fact is, it's not. This is his way of cloaking an ideological argument in language less confronting to Australians. He is seeking to commit us to shrinking the state, our vision of the role of government, and our vision of how we support each other—the sorts of things that have characterised Australia's social compact. If he is interested in having an argument about what constitutes the Australian social compact, I think that's a good and respectable argument to have. We will stand up for our strong social wage, we will stand up for our vision of the entitlements of citizenship, and we look forward to having that contest of ideas. It's an important one, which I think we will win. This commitment is a polite way of baking in inequality, of confining people's life choices, of committing people to lives that are less secure and offer less agency than they are entitled to.

We see in this budget a reflection of who we are and who we can be, an optimistic vision based on recognising all of our common humanity. Our belief is that talent is shared equally, and it's part of the role of government to ensure it can be equally revealed, because it is becoming increasingly evident that opportunities are not being offered up in any meaningful way to too many Australians, whether it be those kids in Central Australia that the shadow Treasurer has spoken about, or too many kids in the electorate I represent. I want to talk about a particularly vulnerable cohort of people, many hundreds of whom live in the Scullin electorate: asylum seekers awaiting assessment, who have effectively been rendered destitute by decisions of this government. Despite rhetoric from Minister Tudge about finding jobs, the government cut $68 million from jobactive programs for those who have had their claims accepted, which would enable them to equip themselves for the reality of the labour market. This government talks about self-reliance and giving people the capacity to compete in this economy, but then denies it to them.

There is almost nothing in this budget for electorate of Scullin. I've talked about infrastructure generally, and I make the point that the state budget offers a very stark contrast, investing in the growing communities I represent, roads, rail and, critically, completing the trail from Diamond Creek to Hurstbridge, a vital bit of active transport and tourism infrastructure that should be completed. The fact that the Liberal government will not support it is a disgrace. I urge government members to think about what's in the Treasurer's second reading speech, what it says about the country that we live in today, and what it says about their vision for the sort of country that he and they are setting out for tomorrow. (Time expired)

See this speech in context