Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Melbourne's population is growing by more than 2,400 people a week. Over the past year, more than 125,000 new people have called Melbourne home. That's more than saw the Western Bulldogs win the flag at the MCG in 2016. This made Melbourne the fastest-growing city in Australia, at 2.7 per cent, ahead of both Brisbane and Sydney, on two per cent each. And the fastest-growing area in the fastest-growing city in the country is the place that I represent, Melbourne's west. Three hundred and fifty-six thousand more people lived in Melbourne's west in 2016 than did in 1996. That's more than 17,000 new people each year, nearly 1,500 a month, every year, for 20 years. This growth is set to continue.

Our city is currently experiencing growing pains as a result, and it will only get worse without appropriate infrastructure investments in response. If you're an average driver in Melbourne's west, you have a 30 per cent chance of getting stuck in heavy traffic today. Infrastructure Australia estimates that traffic jams rob Melbourne of $3 billion each year. Without proper infrastructure investments, by 2031, Melbourne is set to be $9 billion a year poorer, every year.

To cope with this growth, we need to do things differently, to get smarter about the way that we do infrastructure investment. I've spoken a lot in this place about the need for better public transport infrastructure to cope with this demand in urban areas, but we also need to make investments in active transport infrastructure to reduce pressure on our roads and public transport networks during peak periods.

Good active transport infrastructure is about making it easier for anyone to choose to safely cycle or walk to work, school, TAFE, uni or whatever. It won't be the right option for every person for every trip, but more than one in two vehicle trips in Melbourne today are less than six kilometres in distance. With the right infrastructure, a trip like this would take just over 20 minutes on a bike. Many of these trips could be made on bikes, and every trip that is made on a bike frees up capacity on our roads and our public transport networks. That's why this is a serious, mainstream infrastructure issue that affects everyone in Melbourne and in Melbourne's west in particular.

It's not only about congestion either. Numerous studies show that cycling and increasing walkability decrease the risk of heart disease, cancer and general causes of death in our community, meaning that people live healthier and longer lives. Active transport also reduces pollution and increases an area's livability.

Despite these benefits, Melbourne's west has a relatively low active transport utilisation rate. This is because we don't have the same infrastructure as the rest of Melbourne. Our cyclists and our pedestrians are forced to compete with thousands of truck movements a day on our residential streets. In Brunswick, nearly one in five people cycle to work. In Footscray, it's just one in 20. Why do people cycle at nearly four times the rate in Brunswick, despite our suburbs being the same distance from the city? Why do people cycle at nearly three times the rate in Thornbury as in Newport, two suburbs of similar distance from the CBD? The answer is in infrastructure. People don't feel safe cycling without the right bike paths and barriers. Melbourne's west is still mourning the death of Arzu Baglar, who was tragically struck and killed by a truck whilst cycling to a friend's house in my electorate.

We need investment that increases bike safety and encourages more people to cycle. Just last month, Infrastructure Victoria's report showed that, in Sunshine alone in my electorate, there were around 20,000 daily trips that could happen through cycling or walking. We need federal government leadership to turn these potential active transport journeys into actual active transport journeys. However, this Abbott-Turnbull government doesn't believe in public transport and doesn't believe in active transport. We know this from its budget priorities. In this budget there is not a single dollar for active transport infrastructure—zip, nada, zero. A Shorten Labor government will make investment in cycling a mainstream infrastructure priority and find room in the budget for this infrastructure for Melbourne's west.

I thank everyone in my community who has contacted me about the latest scandalous cruelty against sheep on live export ships, revealed on 60 Minutes. The shocking footage broadcast on 60 Minutes is just the latest in a long line of similar incidents. Labor has been looking seriously at this problem for some time now. As the Leader of the Opposition said two weeks ago, the industry has had plenty of chances to clean up its act, and it's failed. The government has had plenty of chances to properly regulate, and it's failed—indeed, it's actively made things worse. This cruelty is the legacy of the member for New England's period as agriculture minister and the Prime Minister's failure to hold his Deputy Prime Minister accountable for his own portfolio. The Abbott-Turnbull government abolished Labor's Inspector General of Animal Welfare and Live Animal Exports. It abolished the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee. It defunded the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy. And it abolished the Office of Animal Welfare in the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. The Abbott-Turnbull government slashed and burned regulatory oversight in this industry, which allowed the scandalous cruelties that we have seen to occur. That's why Labor announced that we will work with all those involved in the industry to plan for a future that doesn't rely on live sheep exports. The Turnbull government should be doing this right now.

Labor has been clear from the start that we don't think the inquiry that was initiated by the Minister for Agriculture into the live sheep trade during the northern summer would ever find that the trade would be sustainable in the long-term. The industry itself has conceded that it's not possible to guarantee that there will be no future events like those we saw on 60 Minutes. This is why Labor is committed to working with industry to plan for a future that doesn't rely on live sheep exports. The government should be doing the same. A transition plan would take a number of years but should take nothing like a decade. Labor will work with farmers, unions and business to develop a sustainable red-meat industry plan to assist sheep farmers during this transition. Labor's plan will lift farmer profits and add more value here in Australia to create more jobs in Australia—in fact, to create more jobs right along the supply chain. I thank everyone in my community who has contacted me on this issue for their advocacy and for the role that they have played in driving change for the better in our democracy.

One area of the government's budget that hasn't got much media coverage but deserves more is the budget's savage cuts to Australia's foreign aid budget. This budget cut another $140 million in aid from the Australian aid budget. The Abbott-Turnbull government has now slashed well over $11 billion from the Australian aid budget. The Lowy Institute calculates that since the member for Warringah became Prime Minister Australia's aid budget has been cut by a third. By some estimates, Australia is down to giving just 19 cents in every $100 of its national income in foreign aid. Australians think of ourselves as good global citizens with a good reputation overseas, but with these aid cuts we damage our credibility and our national reputation.

But it's the world's poor who are really hurt by these cuts. After the second round of aid cuts in 2015, Foreign Minister Bishop promised that there would be no more cuts to aid. We now know that she misled the poorest people in the world. In the budget papers, the Treasurer and the foreign minister heaped further fictions onto this deception. Page 103 of Budget Paper No. 2, under the title 'Maintaining the level of official development assistance', shows cuts of more than $140 million. Apparently, cutting Australian aid by $10 million, by $10 million, by $10 million and by $110 million in each of the next few years is maintaining the level of foreign aid. The real loser here, however, is not the government's credibility but, instead, some of the poorest people in the world. Foreign aid is one of the few areas where the decisions made in this place directly save people's lives. I've visited a women's refuge in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea and seen for myself the transformative impact of Australian aid. Seven in 10 women in Papua New Guinea suffer violence at the hands of men. Australian aid is making a difference to these people's lives. We support women's refuges, we support gender education and we support programs to change women's prospects in that society. These are the people who will suffer from these budget cuts. In his first speech to parliament, the Treasurer said that foreign aid was 'the Australian thing to do'. We don't get more un-Australian than these cuts. A Shorten Labor government will rebuild and grow the Australian aid program.

I want to talk in this debate a little bit about the shameful way that politics in Australia has been criminalised under the Abbott-Turnbull government and the way that institutions of our democracy are used to pursue criminal ends against participants in our political system. This trend started with the political stunt of the trade union royal commission. For 189 days, that royal commission wasted more than $40 million of taxpayers' money pursuing the government's political opponents, including the Leader of the Opposition. We know that it was a stunt because of the way that the long list of referrals from the commission have either collapsed or amounted to nothing. Apart from $46 million wasted, political opponents put in the dock and innocent families terrorised, what have we got from this exercise? There's been only one conviction resulting in a suspended sentence.

Recently, charges brought against Mr Setka and Mr Reardon from the CFMEU were sensationally dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions. What made this even more spectacular was that they were dropped before the DPP had even finished calling evidence at a committal hearing. The result, after three years of legal battles, showed the anti-union royal commission was simply a figleaf for a political witch-hunt. The saga featured royal commissioners and Boral executives cosying up in court, and workplace bargaining being treated as a criminal matter. We saw a staged arrest of senior union officials in front of their distressed families and children. We've heard former Prime Minister Abbott and the former employment minister, Senator Abetz, were involved in the orchestration of these charges, conspiring with Boral accusers to smear political enemies. The co-opting of the Australian Federal Police by the Turnbull government's Registered Organisations Commission, stinks of hijacking the criminal justice system to attack political opponents. We all know the wrong person resigned in Minister Cash's office over the disgraceful leaks on the AFP's raid. The Abbott-Turnbull government cannot hide its attempts to criminalise politics behind a big whiteboard forever. Our democracy suffers when the institutions that the public relies on, institutions that are crucial for public faith in our democracy are weaponised and trashed in the name of short-term political tactics.

The contrast in this regard could not be sharper with the way that the Abbott-Turnbull government has dealt with the scandals in the Australian banking sector. For 600 days, Prime Minister Turnbull refused calls from across Australian society, including from the opposition, to establish a royal commission into activities in the Australian financial services sector, 600 days in which evidence heard by the royal commission showed that people were being fed dodgy financial advice, 600 days in which dead people were being charged fees for services that they never received, and 600 days in which one person, at least, lost a quarter of their super, and small businesses were crushed. At every point, Prime Minister Turnbull and the Treasurer ran a protection racket for the big banks on this issue. Today, they refuse to even say sorry to the thousands of Australians ripped off during the time that they rubbished the royal commission, calling it a 'populist whinge', a 'talk-fest', a 'thought bubble' and, when they were finally forced to admit the inevitable and establish a royal commission, 'regrettable'. Even today, the only recognition they can give to their delays in initiating the royal commission is to call it a 'political mistake'. They won't take accountability for the Australian consumers that suffered from this delay; all they would admit to is the political price that they themselves have paid.

After the evidence that we have heard before the banking royal commission, what is the government's response? It wants to reward the big banks of Australia for their behaviour with a $17 billion tax cut. This government is so out of touch; it's from another planet. Let's also compare the pair when it comes to the Abbott-Turnbull government's treatment of political opponents and the big end of town. After the trade union royal commission, union officials were arrested on criminal charges in front of their families—criminal charges, we have found, that were not sustainable in a court of law. Instead of being arrested, for those in a range of other sectors in the big end of town, accountability has not been delivered. We see this in the endemic wage theft in Australian workplaces. In workplaces across the country, temporary migrant workers are being exploited in the most reprehensible terms. We see frequent evidence of employers doctoring pay slips, of forging documents to disguise the theft of wages from everyday Australians. Yet, in these instances, we don't see police raids; we don't see executives arrested in front of their family. Indeed, when Fair Work took action against Caltex for the systemic wage theft occurring in their franchises, the time for the raids against Caltex was negotiated in advance with the Fair Work Commission.

This is a government that's hard on workers' advocates and soft on companies that steal the wages of Australians. Instead of fixating on its political opponents, the government has been asleep at the wheel on wage theft. The compensation bill for wage theft at the 7-Eleven franchising network has ticked over $110 million. Already wage theft claims have hit some of the biggest companies—Pizza Hut, Woolworths, Myer, Dominos, Coles, Caltex, Spotless and other cafe and farming businesses. This is a government that will trample the criminal justice system to get to its political enemies while turning a blind eye to people who are stealing from Australian workers.

Proceedings suspended from 13:30 to 16:01

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