Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the Prime Minister's budget. Budget after budget, we've seen the Prime Minister and his friends from the top end of town tell us that big businesses getting more will benefit working Australians. We've seen the lowest wage growth in the history of this nation. We've seen cuts to hospitals and schools, an increase in the age for eligibility for the pension and the abolition of the energy supplement payment for pensioners. What this budget represents is a government that will find any excuse to sneak services away from the Australian public.

Many residents contact my office about the services that they receive. Many residents make me aware of a whole range of issues that they experience—for example, pension applications with ballooning waiting times and a shift away from being able to speak to someone in Centrelink and from being able to get assistance with your application from people who know the system. Instead, they move them on and tell them that they have to do it through the internet, on their computer. This is fine if you're computer literate, but a 75- or 85- or 95-year-old person who doesn't have the skills that a lot of the generation after mine have grown up with, who perhaps feels very uncomfortable with computers and who has no idea how to even turn on a computer still needs assistance. They need face-to-face interaction with these services and agencies to ensure that they get their payments correct or to correct mistakes that may have been made by them or by Centrelink. It is so cruel. The age pensioners who come to my office say that they are frustrated with waiting times when they call Centrelink and that they can't get through. They get put onto a robocall that tells them to press certain buttons or to go on a computer and apply online.

These people have a tradition of face-to-face interaction with other people. They've done it all their lives, continuously, from childhood and their working lives right through to pension age. They speak to people; that's the way they deal with things. And now they go into Centrelink and are fobbed off. It's not the staff's fault; it's the cuts that have taken place and the automation that's taking place. I think there should be a special exemption for people who are not computer literate so they are able to go in and talk to someone about their issues and have their problems solved. That's just one example of the cuts taking place across the Public Service that are actually hurting people and making them feel the cuts in a real way—in the delays to having their problems solved.

I've had many constituents come in to see me, so I know that the current Centrelink system is flawed in this manner. People are already falling through the cracks. But the budget that was released recently didn't want to address these flaws. It simply wanted to move the goalposts, with new announcements of more cuts to the Public Service sector. We need a budget that's going to support these people, not diminish their services and make them lesser services.

Of course, increasing the age pension doesn't assist older people either, especially if you're doing back-breaking work—working in a factory or as a bricklayer or carpenter. The increase does nothing when you're asked to work until you're 70, and it does nothing to support many hardworking Australians who have worked all their lives and who are simply trying to get by.

It also astounds me that the government continues to operate on the belief that an $80 billion handout to big business and banks is the way to go, but supporting pensioners and those on low incomes isn't. I know that we on this side of the house will never give an $80 billion handout to banks and big business. The difference in priorities between the government and the opposition is clear. The priority of the government is the top end of town, and our priority is 10 million working Australians and delivering fairer working conditions and fairer cuts to them.

The government can't seem to find $17 billion in the budget for schools to fund the future of Australia, so they've cut it. But we'll deliver needs based funding and restore that $17 billion to those schools. In hospitals, the national waiting time for elective surgery is the longest on record. And what does the government do? It cuts $2.8 billion. We on this side of the chamber are committed to investing the $2.8 billion in more beds, shorter surgery waiting times and upgrading emergency departments.

This government has a dreadful Medicare record, and that record does not stop with this budget. The government wants to continue the freeze on Medicare rebates, leaving everyday Australians to foot the bill when they visit a GP. We want more investment in better health—20 MRI machines—and better education, and we want to ensure that Australian working men and women are better off through the tax breaks that we are talking about, compared to an $80 billion tax cut for the big end of town.

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