Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Moreton locals, like most Australians, have had quite an unexpected year. Some who recently retired told me they expected to be travelling and enjoying some well earned leisure time. Some found themselves stranded in far-flung parts of the world. Others have not been able to start their travels at all. Some residents who started new enterprises could not possibly have had business plans that contemplated a hit to their revenue from COVID-19 restrictions. Young people who graduated from school, university or training back in 2019 face an almost jobless landscape, and those completing year 12 this year have had to endure so many hurdles to get to their final exams. Hopefully, they will develop resilience in spades. More than 40,000 families in Moreton have had to negotiate schooling their children from home and the confusing changes associated with childcare arrangements. For those in aged care and their loved ones, the tough but necessary restrictions on visits have been heartbreaking. For the almost 8,000 locals who have found themselves unemployed and on JobSeeker, some for the first time in their lives, this year has already been an extremely stressful year.

There's no doubt that 2020 is a stinker. We're in the midst of a pandemic and the Morrison recession, one of the deepest and darkest recessions for a century. I hoped that the budget this week was going to give some relief and some hope to my Moreton constituents, I hoped that creating jobs would be a central platform of the Morrison budget and I hoped that JobSeeker would be boosted, but the Morrison budget failed to outline a comprehensive jobs plan and, worse, their wage subsidy excludes almost a million Australians who are aged over 35 and are on unemployment payments. Those over 35 on JobSeeker now will have the added burden of competing for jobs against a subsidised younger workforce.

For the 80,000-plus women in Moreton, I'd hoped that this budget would have a plan to close the gender pay gap and a real plan for child care to help women get back into the workforce and to get the family budget back on track. But there is no plan for women and no plan for child care. In fact, of the $600 billion spend in this budget, only 0.0385 per cent is actually targeted at women. Disgraceful! I'd hoped that there would be a plan for young people wanting to go to university, especially for the class of 2020 about to emerge from one of the most difficult year 12s ever, but the only plan the Morrison government has is to make it harder and more expensive for those young people to go to university. I'd really hoped that the budget had a plan to fix the train wreck that is our aged-care system. The neglect we've seen in our aged-care homes is a national tragedy—but there's no fair dinkum plan to fix aged care.

This budget will rack up a trillion dollars of debt. That doesn't require a debt truck; it needs a debt convoy. Nevertheless, all of that spending—and this Morrison budget—still leaves too many of my Morton constituents behind. Much more work needs to be done. This government needs to try a lot harder.

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