Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the truly remarkable things about budgets is that they really lay bare for all to see the priorities of a government. This budget indeed tells you everything you need to know about the Turnbull Liberal government. It gives an $80 billion tax handout to big business at the same time as it hits our schools and our hospitals with savage cuts. Despite shocking revelations of misconduct from the banking royal commission, it splashes the big banks with $17 billion in tax cuts at the same time that it cuts $26 million from the banking cop on the beat, ASIC.

The budget looks after big business and high-income earners at the very expense of investment in health, education and vital public services. It cuts the energy supplement, costing pensioners $14 a fortnight, and it forces Australians to work until the age of 70. It locks in $17 billion worth of cuts to schools and confirms $2.2 billion worth of cuts to Australian universities. It maintains $2.8 billion worth of cuts to hospitals and keeps the Medicare freeze on specialist visits for a further year. It rips a further $270 million from TAFE and apprenticeships and levies more than $80 million in new cuts to the ABC. It axes 1,200 jobs from Centrelink, even though unanswered calls spiked from $29 million to $55 million last year. It delivers no new money for aged care, even though 105,000 older Australians are on the waiting list for home care packages. It proposes a radical attack on Australia's progressive taxation system, which would see a carer earning $40,000 on the same marginal tax rate as a lawyer earning $200,000. It squanders some of the best economic conditions in many years. Net debt is double what it was when the Liberals came to office and gross debt is set to be stuck well above half a trillion dollars for every year for the next 10 years.

Unlike Mr Turnbull, Labor has a clear plan to bring back fairness. A Shorten Labor government will improve our schools, fix our hospitals and save Medicare. We will make universities more accessible, guarantee the future of TAFE and put local jobs first. We will take real action on climate change, invest in renewables and safeguard our environment for future generations. We'll deliver genuine tax relief for working Australians, protect pensioners and improve the bottom line. It's a plan we can afford because we've made the hard decisions to rein in tax breaks for high-income earners and we're not going to give big business, multinationals and the big banks an additional $80 billion tax handout.

I would now like to step through a few of the concerns that I have about the impact of this budget on my community in Newcastle and, more broadly, for the nation. The University of Newcastle stands to lose an estimated $69 million as this government levies $2.2 billion worth of cuts on universities. This will undoubtedly hurt students, the wider community and, indeed, our regional economy more broadly. The university was able to protect students from those cuts this year, but that is an unsustainable pathway. When you rip $69 million out of a university, you cannot do so without impacting on student learning and student supports.

I am deeply concerned about the government's budget plan to cut two per cent of medical training places from universities across the country to help fund its so-called Murray-Darling medical schools network. Just to be clear: I do not begrudge medical places in regional Australia—indeed, I come from a regional university with an outstanding medical school—but I am concerned about this blatantly political plan that is so obviously designed with electoral rather than policy outcomes in mind.

It would be an absolute travesty if that plan were to come at the expense of places currently sitting in the nation's best regional medical training program, which is delivered in partnership by the University of Newcastle and the University of New England. This genuinely joint medical program provides the most successful model for regional medical training in the country. If anything, it should be boosted, not diminished. It runs three rural clinical schools in Tamworth, Armidale and Taree. It takes in almost twice the national average number of students from rural and regional communities. Graduates are also twice as likely to seek work in rural and regional areas. Not only that but the University of Newcastle graduates more than one-third of the nation's Indigenous doctors.

Why would you rip out these places? Why would you put a program like that at risk in order to stump up places that have an electoral advantage for the government? Why would you rip places from this medical training centre that has a clear, proven track record of delivering superior regional medical training? I've already personally raised with the minister my concerns about this issue, and I will certainly be seeking assurances that the University of Newcastle's leading medical program will be quarantined from this government's cuts.

This budget locks in $17 billion worth of cuts to schools. In my electorate of Newcastle that means that schools are each losing on average $350,000 over this year and next year alone. That will mean fewer teachers, less individual attention and less support for kids to achieve their full potential. What is worse is that the harshest cuts are being borne by the schools that can least afford it. Over the next two years alone public schools cop 86 per cent of the Liberals' most recent cuts. If that weren't bad enough, we recently learnt that Mr Turnbull has been busy doing more than 100 sneaky deals to give the elite private schools more cash from a $7 million secret slush fund.

Labor understands the importance of investing in education, of investing in our future generations. We think every child deserves the best start in life. Every child deserves a supportive learning environment to ensure that they reach their full potential, and that's why we are committed to restoring every single cent of the $17 billion that the Liberals have cut from our schools.

One of the truly tragic outcomes of this budget is the Turnbull Liberal government's ongoing cuts to TAFE. Hunter TAFE, which is in my part of the world, is Australia's largest regional TAFE and vocational education and training provider. It has been an incredibly important partner and a provider of that training in our community, but it's no secret that TAFE in New South Wales is on its knees. These cuts—this additional $270 million that the Turnbull Liberal government is now cutting from our TAFEs and apprentices—are adding to the crisis that we are already experiencing in TAFE. This extra $270 million cut to TAFE and apprentices is, of course, on top of more than $3 billion of cuts from previous Liberal government budgets.

Once again, it clearly demonstrates that the Turnbull Liberal government's priorities are completely wrong. No government should be prioritising tax cuts to foreign shareholders and the big banks while cutting federal government support to vocational education and training. Seriously, nobody thinks this is a good idea in my electorate and I doubt that they do even in Liberal electorates. It's astonishing that the government thinks that they should continue on this pathway of cuts into TAFE.

I'm very pleased Labor has committed to guaranteeing that under our government at least two out of three training dollars will go into TAFE, because we believe that TAFE must be at the front and centre of Australia's vocational education and training industries. We'll invest $100 million in modernising TAFE facilities around the country and ensure that one in every 10 jobs on Commonwealth priority projects are filled by Australian apprentices. We will provide 10,000 pre-apprenticeship programs for young people who want to learn a trade. There is still a place in many communities for a strong TAFE body to provide trade skills for men and women. From Labor's perspective, universities and TAFE are equal partners in a higher education pathway. I am very pleased that Labor will also provide 20,000 adult apprenticeship programs for older workers who need to retrain. Nothing could be more important for our citizens.

Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker Vamvakinou, you could be forgiven for thinking that there would be no more important priority for any government than the health and wellbeing of its citizens. So you can imagine how astonished I was to find that this budget continues to cut deeply into the budgets of our local hospitals in order to pay for big business tax cuts. This will mean increased delays for surgeries, that nurse and doctor numbers will decline and that emergency department waiting lists will increase. In Newcastle, the government is cutting close to $10 million from our local hospitals, and that is from the 2017-2020 years. The John Hunter Hospital, a major hospital in my region, which does not just service Newcastle but, indeed, provides emergency and trauma services through to the Queensland border, is standing to lose $6.88 million. The Calvary Mater Newcastle—again, the region's major oncology service provider—is losing $1.6 million. And, astonishingly, the John Hunter Children's Hospital is going to be cut by $1.2 million. Labor will fully reverse the Turnbull Liberal government's $2.8 billion worth of hospital cuts, as well as funding 500,000 more life-saving MRI scans through Medicare.

My community tells me how important those measures are and how appalling they find the ongoing attacks on local hospitals from this government. Like me, they find this to be both short-sighted and wrongheaded, and I would implore the government to rethink their ridiculous plans to cut further into the health budgets of this nation.

Of course, people in my region have grown used to the fact that Liberal governments do not any longer invest in significant public infrastructure projects in the Newcastle-Hunter region, so it was with great disappointment that there was no money on the table for the Glendale interchange and no investment for high-speed rail. It's astonishing that this government fails to understand the importance of connectivity between our major cities in Australia and why they might want to invest in a high-speed rail network on the eastern seaboard. The evaluation studies were done by Labor when we were in government. There's no need for any more feasibility studies. We know that high-speed rail would turbocharge regional economies like Newcastle's and understand the good that would have. But, of course, every year that we delay we have hundreds of millions of dollars added to the cost of trying to invest in these projects. Indeed, it concerns me that the transport corridor for the high-speed rail is still not protected.

There are many aspects that I would want to touch on, but I will end with the fact that there was, to my profound regret, no investment in a Commonwealth court registry in Newcastle. There are such physical constraints for that court and also a lack of personnel. We have been crying out for the Attorney-General to replace the judge who has just left and was transferred to Queensland. We are down a Federal Circuit Court judge again. We need one badly, and we need them now.

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