Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today's question time was interesting, to say the at least. The thing for me that connected to this MPI was when the Prime Minister said that he was interested in a unity ticket. Clearly, the Prime Minister has either a tin ear or a very short memory, because I clearly remember the promises about a unity ticket. I know where I was when the government, then in opposition, promised a unity ticket on school education. I know exactly where I was, because I wasn't the member for Lalor. I was a school principal sweating on the Gonski money being delivered to my school for the next 10 years. That's where I was: keenly listening to see if we could get the opposition across the line on that funding. They were making that promise and, today, the Prime Minister has the audacity to use that phrase in this space when he is planning $80 billion worth of tax cuts, a handout to big business in this country. That's what he's planning. At the same time, since they came into government five years ago, they have shifted every cost they can back onto the states. They've moved everything that the former Labor government set up as a partnership around education, health and hospitals. There were national partnerships happening. The Commonwealth, under a Labor government, were taking on their fair share of funding those things for Australians. This government, in coming to office, ripped up those arrangements, ripped up those agreements and shifted all of the costs for the future in education and health back onto the states as fast as they could.

What that means is that $17 billion in tax cuts will go to the big four banks, exactly the same amount of money that's not going to be given to schools—a clear breach of the no dollar difference. That's not going to go to our schools. They've done that. That is nearly $17 million over two years in my electorate for our schools. Ouch! If I ask the people in my electorate whether they think that the big four banks deserve to have some money put in their pockets or whether they want proper education for their kids, I know what they'll tell me. I stand very proudly behind Labor's decisions here.

Let's have a little bit of a think about health, because they've done the same in health. We've heard them, day after day in this place, saying: 'We're spending more on health. Please don't mention the National Partnership Agreements that were there beforehand! Please don't mention the cuts! Please don't mention the breach of faith to the states, which did their planning only to have money ripped away from them.' In my community, we have a public hospital, the Werribee Mercy Hospital. It's going through an $80 million rebuild as we speak. Good on state Labor. Good on Daniel Andrews; Tim Pallas, the treasurer, the member for Werribee; and Jill Hennessy, the health minister, the member for Altona. One of her first acts as health minister was to put money into that hospital to rebuild it so that we could have an emergency room, so that we could do emergency surgeries and so that we could have a modern hospital.

But when it comes to the ongoing funding of that hospital and when it comes to paying the salaries of the nurses, the doctors, the cleaners and the people who work in catering, the state's going to be on its own, because this government has walked away from its promises in the National Partnership Agreements. What it means is cuts, cuts, cuts to public hospitals in my state. What it means is that I've got a state government now committed to rebuilding the hospital, but now they have to find the ongoing money to staff it appropriately. They went into a partnership with the federal government and now they find themselves on their own.

They've done similar things in the MRI space. Labor committed money to MRIs around this country. I heard the member for Chifley talking about this very point earlier, saying they'd suddenly lost the money in his electorate. Labor has made a commitment for MRI licences, for the full rebate. This government needs to match that commitment, because my area, with 250,000 people, needs access to those MRI machines at the full rebate.

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