Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are in perilous times, facing the deepest recession this nation has seen in almost a century. Australia needs a federal budget that does some serious heavy lifting, to drive the economic activity and create the jobs that we so desperately need. Regrettably, this federal budget fails to deliver on both fronts. Despite creating a trillion dollars of debt, it offers no comprehensive plan for the future and leaves far too many Australians behind. This budget has no plan for social housing, no plan for child care, no plan for cheaper, cleaner energy, no plan to address the crisis in aged care and, critically, no plan for jobs. It fails to deliver the stimulus we need to support the recovery process. It fails to invest in so many critical local projects, including some fabulous ones in my electorate of Newcastle. And it fails to drive greater workforce participation by addressing the child care affordability disaster.

Worse, this budget slashes support for hundreds of thousands of businesses and workers at their most critical time of need. The reduction in JobSeeker and JobKeeper tears close to $25 million every fortnight out of Newcastle at a time when many of our local businesses are already on their knees.

The other truly remarkable aspect of this budget is that, despite accumulating an eye-watering amount of debt, it still manages to miss the mark and leave so many citizens without. Women have been left behind. Jobseekers over 35 years of age have been left behind. Australians and their families who rely on aged care have been left behind. Many tens of thousands of businesses and their workers have been left behind. The 2020 budget has been touted as the most important and consequential budget of our history, but, tragically, it fails to deliver what Australia needs to protect our economy and our people. It leaves way too many Australians behind in its very narrow view of the recovery process. Make no mistake, decisions made by the Morrison Liberal government in this budget mean that the Morrison recession will be deeper and longer than it needed to be.

To be clear, there are many tried and tested ways to drive local and national activity and to spur our economy back to life. First, the Morrison government needs to kickstart residential construction and get more Australians into safe, secure and affordable housing by investing in social housing and repairing the existing stock. The housing construction sector is heading for a 27 per cent collapse, and there's a projected shortfall of now almost half a million homes in Australia. There are also 100,000 social housing dwellings in urgent need of repair. Roofs are leaky, mould is creeping and pipes are corroding. Regrettably, the government has instead chosen to splash millions of public dollars on its flawed HomeBuilder scheme, which subsidises private property owners with zero lasting community benefit. It says a lot about the priorities of this government.

Another great way to speed our national recovery is by increasing productivity. Currently, one of the largest handbrakes on productivity is spiralling child-care fees. Child-care fees have skyrocketed by almost 35 per cent under this government, with families now paying, on average, $3,800 more per year. When parents weigh up whether to go back to work, the cost of child care means that it's often just not worthwhile. That doesn't make any sense. That's why a Labor government will introduce a working family child care boost. This will support Australian women and parents to get back to work, to put more money into the pockets of working families. Under Scott Morrison's current child-care system, a family with two kids in child care and a primary earner earning $100,000 will gain nothing in disposable income if the secondary earner works a fourth day each week. But, under Labor's childcare plan, the same family will be better off by up to $2,100 per year if the second income earner works that fourth day. Indeed, Labor's boost will make child care more affordable for 97 per cent of families in the system, and, importantly, no family will ever be worse off. The Morrison government needs to take Labor's lead and to invest more in child care.

The government has also failed to support important infrastructure projects that could be key to our recovery, particularly in regional communities. In my city of Newcastle, there was nothing for a series of key projects that would have diversified and strengthened the entire regional economy for decades to come. The Morrison government turned its nose up at the University of Newcastle's STEMM regional transformation hub, which has a significant job creation potential and the capacity to position our region as a leader in the critically important technology based industries of tomorrow. And it failed to support the Port of Newcastle's $1.8 billion deepwater terminal, despite the fact this project will create 15,000 direct jobs and indirect jobs and transform the regional economy. Of course, the government did not need to stump up that amount of money; the Port of Newcastle actually has a whole lot of dollars ready to spend, but this government needs to provide assistance, to work with their belligerent state counterparts to make this happen.

Instead, the budget provides $360 million to fund the Newcastle Inner City Bypass, a project, I might add, that the state Liberal government had already promised Newcastle. While this is a great project, and it will be good to see it being delivered earlier, the point is: it was already funded. All that the Morrison Liberal government have done is actually bail out their mates in the Liberal New South Wales state government from honouring their promise to Newcastle. Unless the state government come through with the funds that they promised, there will be almost zero net gain for the city. So I do hope that it is a requirement of this Commonwealth funding that the state government must ensure that the money they had promised for the Newcastle Inner City Bypass now gets spent on new projects in Newcastle. I'll be looking out to make sure the Commonwealth holds the state to account in that regard.

A remarkable feature of the 2020 federal budget is that, despite creating towering mountains of debt that will linger for generations, it still manages to leave so many people behind. Women, who have already been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, have been left behind by this budget. We know that the economic impacts of the pandemic have not been distributed equally and that women have borne the brunt of this pandemic. Women were more likely to have lost their jobs but less likely to have qualified for government support through JobKeeper, but this budget offers almost nothing to address the grave structural inequities that face Australian women. There is no new funding for frontline domestic and family violence services—and shame on you, the Morrison government, for ignoring that sector in this budget, when you know full well that we are now facing spiralling increases of domestic violence as a result of COVID-19. There is no new funding to drive down the gender pay gap. There is no new funding to bolster women's superannuation. And, as I said earlier on, there is nothing more for child care. And there's nothing to support women's economic security in retirement. Indeed, despite the budget racking up more than $1 trillion worth of debt, the Prime Minister's rehashed Women's Economic Security Statement—which they had forgotten to print and produce at the time that the Treasurer was doing his budget, which suggests just how much of a priority the Women's Economic Security Statement really was—only allocated $240 million in new funding. For those interested in what proportion that might be of the Commonwealth's budget, that amounts to 0.024 per cent for 51 per cent of the population. For some additional perspective, the budget actually invested more in waste management than it did in women's economic participation measures. Just let that sink in for a little while—for 51 per cent of the population.

Older Australians are another group who has been dudded by the Morrison government as a result of its failure to properly fund our aged-care system. Despite almost 700 older Australians tragically dying from COVID-19 in our aged-care residential facilities now, this budget confirms that the Morrison government still has no plan to fix our country's broken aged-care system. The budget offers no new significant funding for residential aged care, despite the fact that we've seen as a result of this pandemic a desperate need for increased funds and resourcing in this sector. It was needed to protect residents, to protect those families and to protect our most vulnerable residents.

The 23,000 new home-care packages in the budget won't even come close to fixing the current list of 103,000 older Australians who are waiting for home-care packages that they've already had approved. They already know they're eligible for them, they've been approved for them and they're on the wait list. Indeed, we learnt from the aged care royal commission that shockingly only 300 new home-care packages will in fact be delivered by 2024 despite the fact that the Morrison government has announced tens of thousands more. That is not good enough. Nobody in my electorate of Newcastle thinks that is good enough. Indeed, I doubt there is an electorate in Australia that would actually think that is okay.

Likewise, it's not good enough that nearly one million jobseekers over the age of 35 have been excluded from the government's new JobMaker wage subsidy scheme. On this issue, I'd like to share with the House some words from a constituent of mine who lives in my community and wrote to me of his deep worry about his 35-year-old son after watching the Morrison government's budget. On this issue, Mr S—I'll refer to him as—wrote: 'It pains me as a parent of a 35-year-old who has been struggling unsuccessfully through COVID to find employment and fallen between the cracks for JobKeeper support to hear news reports and commentary lumping him and his peers into the less relevant basket. Since when was 35 years old financially comfortable? They are a vulnerable group of still relatively young Aussies. They do not deserve to be left to their own resources again.' I couldn't agree more with Mr S. We learnt last week that more than 100 jobseekers are competing for every low-skilled job vacancy across Australia, and the government expects another 160,000 Australians to join the unemployment queues by Christmas. It's simply unconscionable that the government is abandoning jobseekers when they turn 35.

It's not just individuals who are abandoned by this budget, indeed whole industries have been betrayed. Many in the tourism sector, especially travel agents, saw their revenue disappear overnight and are now facing closing their doors without any support. Similarly, thousands of people working in the arts sector found themselves out of work and ineligible for JobKeeper through no fault of their own. There's no targeted support for these hard-hit industries. Likewise the budget locks in the government's so-called university reforms, which will slash a billion dollars every year from university revenue at the worst time possible. This has all the hallmarks of a vendetta. Indeed, the government changed the rules three times to ensure that universities would not be able to access JobSeeker payments. Universities should be central to the recovery, not left to fend for themselves in the face of multibillion-dollar losses. I call on this government to do more.

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