Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This is a matter of real public importance. A matter of what choices the parliament makes, what priorities it adopts and what values it implements.

Today, I want to talk past the government to the Australian people. The fact of the matter is that wherever I travel in this great country the two biggest priorities for all of us, and for the people I talk to, are their family and their health. It's the questions about: can you pay the bills? Do you have enough for a holiday? Are you able to make sure your kids can get a good education—do an apprenticeship if they want or go to university if that's their inclination? They talk about whether or not their kids will ever be able to buy their first home. They talk about their ageing parents and will they be in a position to care for them and what can be done?

They always talk about their health. I was talking to a former member of mine who is an underground miner in northern Tassie. He was going to work, doing a shift at the mine. He had just taken his daughter to the local hospital. She's battling cancer. These are the issues which affect the Australian people and this is what matters to me. This is what matters to the Australian people. This is what matters to the Labor Party. This is what Labor values are about—a fair go all around. The Australian people do not talk to me about the urgency or the importance of an $80 billion corporate tax handout.

I'm privileged to do a lot of town hall meetings around Australia. I have literally spoken and listened to tens of thousands of our fellow Australians in every location. What I want to say to the Australian people is that the issues that I understand and that Labor understand are important are: how are the people on the pension going? How are they making ends meet? Will there be an affordable place for child care? Does the childcare worker get paid appropriately? What to do about the waiting lists in hospitals? The challenge that Tasmanians have that they have to go to the mainland to get medical services that other people take for granted. The parents raise the issue about lack of resources in the schools, especially when their kids are getting bullied. We talk about energy prices in these meetings—they go up and up and up. We talk about the poor administration of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the lack of putting people with disabilities at the centre of these services. We talk about the frustrating search for adequate and dignified aged care. The parents talk about apprenticeships for their kids like the ones they once had the chance to do. Certainly people do talk about the boats with me, but they don't say that the answer to stopping the boats is indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru. People raise the low level of Newstart and whether or not an older Australian has a fair go when it comes to discrimination and whether they keep being sent for interviews manifestly inappropriate and soul destroying for the jobseeker. The workers in the audiences talk about labour hire and how it's used to undermine existing conditions at work, and the people in insecure work talk about the inability to get regular rosters.

Then we talk about housing, and people complain they feel the deck is stacked against them. Some people complain about foreign investors buying residential housing, and others complain that, whenever their kids save up for the deposit, they find the price of the house just leaps the next $200,000 and they've got to go back to the start again. Then there are plenty of people who talk to me not about the inability even to own a house but about the cost of rent, secure housing, public housing and social housing. People talk to me about the job losses in every part of Australia. We hear the government boast about job creation, but they never seem to worry about the people who lose their jobs.

Of course, I hear about the NBN failures—the fact that people have to wait for countless unmet installation turn-ups and missed appointments, and the fact that the service drops out. They talk to me about the fact that as small businesses they get ignored not just by NBN Co but by the government who delivered the policy. They complain to me about the treatment of small business by banks. They do complain about being made to feel second class if you receive a government payment, because of the cutbacks at Centrelink. They certainly ask me why politicians don't listen to them more.

But there are things I don't get asked about by the vast bulk of the Australian people, the people making ends meet and working hard. The small business minister, when he was taunting me, 'Oh, you've ever only signed a mortgage.' Well, whether or not that's true—which it's not—what a patronising statement that people who might have signed mortgages and haven't inherited a lot of money somehow are not as smart as other people! I never get asked about how we do income splitting in discretionary trusts for adult members of the family, and I do not get asked about the importance of wedging Labor on national security, and I don't get a lot of complaints about the ABC, and I do not get asked about buying the Liddell Power Station—although it is fair to say that some people challenge the role of privatisation in energy prices. I never get asked why we aren't giving the banks a $17 billion tax cut.

I am interested in what is real in the lives of Australians, and I know that on 1 July those two important priorities of families and health will take another setback. There will be more stagnation of the standard of living in the country. On 1 July, there are new cuts to child care, which will hurt families; new cuts to family payments, which will hurt families; and new cuts to Sunday penalty rates, which will hurt families. This is on top of the Medicare freeze, which hurts families; the rising private health insurance premiums, which hurt families; and the power bills that keep increasing, which hurt families. This is on top of the longest period of wage stagnation in the nation's recorded economic data. That hurts families.

So today I say to the Australian people: Labor is listening to you, and we know what the real issues are. We understand that, when your family's okay and your health's okay, you have a fighting chance to really start thinking about having quality of life and a decent standard of life. That is why our party will not be deterred by the catcalling, shouting and buffoonery of a government who desperately want to pretend that somehow, if we don't back the tawdry, meaningless, shallow nature of their tax cut agenda, this is not the right thing to do. We will offer Australian workers better tax cuts, and we do, but we will also offer a plan to lift the living standards of families. We will invest in schools, we will invest in hospitals and we will invest in the safety net. We will make sure we pay down this ballooning national debt, but we will not do it at the price of cuts to schools, hospitals and the standard of living.

We can make all of these promises because we've made a choice. We've made a choice not to go with $80 billion of corporate tax giveaways and $143 billion of unfunded personal income tax cuts on the never-never. We understand—and our economic values are very straightforward—that when there is a fair go for all, when this country becomes more equal, then we make progress as a nation. I did say that politics is about choices and values; it's about making hard decisions. I must talk about a senator in the other house, Senator Hanson. She understands it's about choices. She clearly enjoys it. She wants to take her time to savour the experience of making choices. Indeed, she started out in favour; she made a choice to back the $17 billion to big banks. Then she was against it, then she was for it, and now she's against it again. Then she said, 'I haven't tried undecided yet, so I'll give that a go.' People have said she's a flip-flopper, but 'flip-flop' implies changing once, not every few hours. People might say this is an unfair interpretation of Senator Hanson's position. Let's put it in her words. Last night, as she reproved those pesky Labor senators to put them back in their box, she said:

I said no originally, then I said yes, then I said no and I stuck to it.

She stuck it for nearly 12 hours. Post-it notes stick for longer than Pauline Hanson does to her decisions! This morning she said on the Today show, 'I'll change my mind as many times as I want to ensure that I come up with the right decision.' To be clear, Senator Hanson: the right decision is not simply to vote with the LNP 90 per cent of the time. The right decision is to back battlers, not to back the big end of town.

The Liberal Party homing pigeon has one destination in mind, and that is to give the banks a $17 billion tax cut. It's a decision which the people of Australia will understand. If Australians vote for our Labor team, we can promise that the early years of your child's education will be properly funded. We will invest $17 billion in schools and teachers, based upon need. We'll renovate the TAFEs instead of closing them. We'll train Australian apprentices instead of importing skills. We'll make sure kids in every postcode in Australia don't have to rely on having rich parents to get a university education, to get a good job or to buy a house. We will make choices because we know our values and we know to stick to them. The fundamental choice in this matter of public importance for the Australian people is that the Australian people have priorities. Long after people here have moved onto other things, long after the debates are finished, the priorities of the Australian people will remain the same: their families and their health. The Labor Party will make sure that you can raise your family with financial security and dignity, and we'll protect and support your health. That is what the people expect.

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