Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's the government's industrial relations agenda to cut penalty rates for the most vulnerable workers. That's a good thing, is it? It's all very well to talk about the incentives for young people—we support those—but what about everyone looking for a job who's over 35 years of age? They get nothing; they've been forgotten. There is casualisation. I heard the member opposite say, 'People just need to take a bit of temporary work if they find it.' Yes—true. Any work is good work, but this budget bakes in the agenda of privatisation of public services. Only yesterday in Victoria, in the middle of a pandemic, with unprecedented demand for Centrelink services, the government cut 420 call centre jobs from Centrelink, half of them in my electorate. Do you know what those people are getting from the government? They're getting nothing—no redundancy; no pay-out—because they're just casual labour hire workers. The government has privatised the Public Service and the government bakes in that privatisation in every agency—tens of thousands of casual labour hire workers. This is the world that the government wants to return to, accelerate and run towards in this so-called snap-back recovery. People in my electorate are worried about the fact that they can't get food. It's all very well for the government to tell us, 'We put $200 million into emergency relief.' Well, that's not landing in the disadvantaged suburbs. There's nothing in this budget that fixes that problem.

The government say to people, in a pandemic, that they should leave the suburb where they can't get food and catch a bus to where those big four charities, which they've loved to hand the money out through, happen to have offices. They're not prepared to reverse the cuts that Prime Minister Abbott put in place from the small local benevolent societies, the neighbourhood learning centres and the local charities, who get nothing from the federal government. They say, 'We put $200 million into four big charities,' which don't service people properly in my electorate, but the member opposite is worried about asset values and investment outlooks.

The member for Werriwa and I were saying, whilst listening to that drivel, that the people in our electorates are worried about having to sell their house at the bottom of the market when the mortgage relief suspension runs out soon, just at the very time that the government is pushing people into poverty by cutting unemployment benefits and cutting JobKeeper. Unbelievable! There's another bill, which we will talk about later, making it harder to get an education. I hope the Australian Electoral Commission roll you at the next election, Member for Moore, and, if they don't, that your party rolls you and replaces you with someone who makes some kind of contribution to this place other than reading out the drivelous platitudes that whoever sends you in here gives you to read out. It's just pathetic.

This budget is a lost opportunity. The big lie is that somehow the economy was strong before this crisis. The economy was weak and tanking before this crisis. Underemployment was at record levels. Over a million Australians were not able to get enough hours of work to survive. Business investment was at historic lows—the lowest since the government was elected. There was no business confidence. They weren't investing. Productivity growth was anaemic at best. The government has now managed, unbelievably, to rack up a budget that's hurtling towards a trillion dollars of debt at the end of this four years, on the path over the next decade to $1.7 trillion of debt, the highest budget deficit ever and the highest in percentage terms of GDP since World War II, with no real plan for jobs and no real reform. That's the thing that really gets you at the heart of this budget. I get the tax cuts. I get them. It's nonsense to say that they're fully funded. They're borrowed. They're on the credit card for the next generation. They're just another instalment of 40 years of failed trickle-down economic theory that somehow, if we give money to people over here and to businesses, a bit might trickle down to the rest of us. It doesn't work like that. It's failed.

The government is running up a record budget deficit, a lifetime of debt, with nothing to show and no real reform. It has no plan for energy, to modernise our energy grid, which is the real reason that power prices are so high. It has no plan for child care, to support women's participation in and return to the workforce. It has no plan for education, except to make it harder to go to university. As Jacqui Lambie said—I agree with her on this—it makes it harder for poor kids, like people from my electorate, and Northern Tasmania and your electorate—

An honourable member interjecting—

Not yours over there, but from Northern Tasmania. The member opposite should be ashamed of having voted for that legislation, which will make it harder for people from her electorate to get a tertiary education. She should be ashamed.

The government have drifted pointlessly, now in their eighth year of government. Visionless, pointless—there is no purpose to this government. They like to pretend that they're all shiny and new. They're on their third Prime Minister, their third Treasurer. They have a lifetime of debt and nothing to show for it. There is nothing on social housing. They hate scrutiny, and that's another thing to talk about. This is not just a lost opportunity. There are active nasties in this budget, very deep in the budget papers. They've refused to introduce a national integrity commission. They announced it three years ago. They love the announcements, but nothing actually happens. It's all about the photo-op. There's no follow-up. Where's the National Integrity Commission? It's not in this budget. 'It's not a priority,' the Attorney-General says.

Unbelievably, not only haven't they introduced a national integrity commission; they don't want their rorts and their waste and their corruption exposed, because they've cut the Auditor-General's budget. They've used COVID-19 and this budget to cut the Auditor-General's budget, to silence the independent watchdog. Make no mistake: this is revenge for sports rorts. It's revenge for exposing the corruption, as it now looks, in paying $30 million to a Liberal Party donor for land worth $3 million. The Defence contracting blowouts, the casualisation of the public service—what's the government's response to this? Cut the budget of the independent watchdog that is exposing their rorts, waste and corruption. Who knows what else they're hiding? It's vengeful and it's pathetic.

The Auditor-General has been in structural deficit for the last few years because of the accumulation of cuts. They call them efficiency dividends. Let's be clear: for a small agency, that is a cut. The efficiency dividend piles up, year after year, and it's cut after cut after cut. Last year he lost $3.3 million and the year before $4.4 million. We're at the point now where the Auditor-General said to the Prime Minister, who's supposed to look after him—he's an independent officer of the parliament, and the Prime Minister is supposed to look after him—'I can't do it anymore. I can't meet KPIs of 48 performance audits a year without fear or favour.'

Auditors-General are appointed for a 10-year term, one term, and their job is to scrutinise whoever is in government. You would think at the very time you're blowing a trillion dollars of taxpayer money on the credit card, and you've pushed government spending to the highest level ever since 1970—if you look in the back of the budget papers, there's this table that says the government is now spending 35.4 per cent of GDP on the economy; that's the highest level I can find anywhere in Australia's history—maybe World War II would have been higher—you would also think this is the very time you'd want to invest in independent scrutiny and make sure you're getting value for money. We want every dollar of taxpayer money to count when you're spending that much. And what's the government's response? 'We're blowing a trillion dollars, but we can't find the $6.5 million for the Auditor-General that he asked for. And, to top that off, we're going to cut another $1.28 million from his budget and make sure his total resources are $14 million less.' This is a cover up. The impact will be that every year there are two fewer performance audits. They're on the way down to 38 at the end of the forward estimates. It's a trillion dollars of Liberal Party debt and avoiding independent scrutiny.

The Public Accounts and Audit Committee, which I'm a member of, is supposed to stick up for the Auditor-General. It's failing in it's duty. The Prime Minister has failed the Auditor-General. The government members should be ashamed. I remember, as a Victorian, when the Jeff Kennett Liberal government tried this little trick on the state Auditor-General. It led to a backlash against the Kennett government, as people caught on and realised what was happening. It was a small issue, it was a small amount of money, and it was a big part of why that government got chucked out at an election that no-one thought they could lose. Labor went to the election on a platform of restoring democracy and restoring accountability, and that built trust, particularly with people in regional areas, who sniff this stuff out.

The other thing I want to call out is that this budget is horrible news for tens of thousands of Australians waiting for their partner visas. When Labor left office, people used to wait about six months for a partner visa. You fall in love with someone from overseas—this is quintessentially Australian. It has been part of the Australian story for decades, that people fall in love with people from other countries and they want a visa so that they can come and build a life here. That's a good thing. Under this government people are now waiting 2½ years, tracking towards three years, for a partner visa. Nearly 100,000 people across the country are waiting for partner visas.

The news in this budget is literally destroying the relationships of tens of thousands of Australians. It's nasty, it's insidious and it needs to be called out. On the surface it looks okay, because they're increasing the number of partner visas from about 40,000 to more than 70,000. That sounds okay, but you have to scratch into it to understand what's really happening. They've cut the number of partner visas each year that have been issued. It's an illegal cut. Section 87 of the Migration Act explicitly says that the minister has no power to cap the number of partner visas. Unlike other visas, the minister cannot cap the number of partner visas. They're demand driven. People fall in love with other people, and they have a right to bring them to this country. The parliament twice, in the 1980s and 1990s, rejected attempts to give the minister the power to cap partner visas, but this government are doing it anyway, even though it's illegal.

So the government have felt a community backlash over the last few months as people have realised this, and we've aired in this chamber and the other place and through the media what's actually going on. The devil is in the detail. What they've said in the budget papers is, 'We're going to issue more partner visas this year.' But they've actually said, 'We're going to prioritise onshore partner visas'—this is for people who are already here, who are already with their loved one; they're just hanging around on a bridging visa for a few years, waiting for the government to get around to issuing a partner visa. The government are doing this to cut the waiting list, to try to get rid of some of their political problems and under the cover of COVID, because they won't show up in the migration headline statistics. All these caps were driven by the Prime Minister's Pauline Hanson racist suck-ups to try to implement a cut to migration. He said, 'I want to cut migration.' He hadn't cut migration. What he'd done was cut the number of permanent visas issued every year. There are more people than ever hanging out in the country on bridging visas. They're here; they're waiting. He hasn't cut migration; he's cut permanent visas, which causes hardship and pain to people who fall in love with someone from overseas.

They've said, 'We will issue the onshore visas.' Well that's good. They should have done it last year, they should have done it the year before, but that's good. Issue the onshore visas. But they've also said they will not prioritise offshore visas, except where the relevant sponsor resides in a designated regional area. The impact of these measures is racist and discriminatory, and I say that very deliberately for two reasons. It's discriminatory because anyone who lives in a city in Australia—like in my electorate or your electorate—who falls in love with someone from overseas will not be eligible for an untold number of years to bring their partner here. Yet, if you live in a country area—undefined—a apparently that's a better form of love, that's a better relationship, than if you happen to live in a city. That's discriminatory. That is disgraceful. I have a letter from the assistant minister, who told me, 'Partner visa applications are generally considered in the order in which they're received to ensure fairness and equality for all applicants.' That's patently not true. For any Australian who lives in a city who is waiting for someone offshore, that's no longer true, is it?

The other aspect which is disgraceful—it's a subtle one but it's disgraceful—is that, if you fall in love with someone who is from a nice white Western speaking country, they're going to get a visitor visa to come here, aren't they? Then they can apply onshore and hang around and wait and they will get looked after—because they're nice. But, if you happen to fall in love with someone from Africa, from the Middle East, Sri Lanka or South Asia, well, we can't trust them to come to the country on a visitor visa, can we? So they can just wait offshore for years. This is discrimination.

How do you think Australians who fall in love with people who happen to have a different skin colour or happen to be from a country that the Immigration department is a bit suss on feel about this blatant discrimination buried in this budget? It is disgraceful. So just to be clear with the government: this remains a mess. People will try to bring their partners here to apply onshore but they will continue to fight. People are angry. The government talk of keeping Australians together, but they are keeping and breaking couples apart. (Time expired)

Sitting suspended from 12:56 to 16:00

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