Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make my contribution to the debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2020-2021 and related bills. Budgets are about making choices, whether it's family finances, the budgets of corporations and small businesses or those of governments. This government again has made choices, deliberate choices, which do little to assist the people of Werriwa. In fact, they have the potential to do real harm. If, like one of my constituents who contacted me last week, you're in your early 60s and have been made redundant and you have little hope of getting another job, you'll limp towards the pension age of 67. This man is a proud, hardworking Australian who thought he'd done the right things, followed the advice and planned his future finances. He now finds himself staggering towards the age pension, with the only viable option selling his house to keep his head above water. I note the Prime Minister's words in this place: 'If you're good at your job, you'll get a job.' Well, I invite the Prime Minister out to Werriwa, not for one of the sheltered photo ops at Western Sydney Airport but to tell this hardworking Australian, to his face, that the reason he faces financial ruin is that he's no good at his job. I also invite him to speak with another constituent of mine. She's in her mid-30s, with three kids and a mortgage. She was let go from her job in April and has been applying for dozens of vacancies ever since, with no success. These are but two stories from my electorate. There are thousands more.

The budget was an opportunity to pull Australia out of its first recession in 30 years, the worst downturn in close to a century. But the decisions made by this government will see some of our best and brightest, with plenty still to contribute, left behind. It will see our most vulnerable thrown on the scrap heap and it will see the opportunity that lies hidden in this once-in-a-century crisis slip away. This federal budget was an opportunity to steer Australia towards a fairer, more prosperous future, a chance to learn the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic—that there are forces beyond the cut and thrust of politics, forces that will not be bent to the will of the 24-hour news cycle. This virus has showed us up and has exposed our weaknesses. In doing so, it has challenged us to do better—be a better society, a better nation, a better planet. Global supply chains have been smashed, entire industries shut down overnight, society and culture turned upside down in a matter of days. The budget was a unique opportunity to tackle these historic setbacks. It was a chance to revive local manufacturing; fix child care, aged care and social housing; invest in technology research and health to ensure we are better prepared next time; and promote and incentivise the best parts of community building and human nature that we've seen over the last seven months.

By all measures, this government has failed and failed miserably. Decisions taken by the government will see this recession become deeper and longer than it needs to be. The government's major contribution to fixing unemployment is the JobMaker hiring credit. The program hopes to give businesses the incentive to take on new employees, but it is limited only to people aged 16 to 35, and, as I explained earlier, getting a job over the age of 35 can be difficult, and, for those over 60, it's near impossible. There are 900,000 people aged over 35 currently on unemployment benefits. There must be safeguards for all Australians. Regardless of those this is intended to assist, it's merely a short-term fix.

Like investment in education and health, investment in social housing is a long-term investment in Australia's future. It's also an investment right now in our tradies. It would create thousands of jobs for brickies, electricians and carpenters. As we saw during the GFC, every dollar spent in construction will flow through to the rest of the economy several times over. Labor's social-housing plan will invest half a billion dollars to fast-track urgent repairs in social housing. But, like so many other urgent crises facing this nation, the government continues to ignore the problem of housing and homelessness in Australia. Shamefully, the budget does not include a single dollar for social housing while 100,000 homes, or 25 per cent of Australia's social housing, need urgent repair and maintenance. Some of these homes are unfit for human habitation. They have severe problems like mould, leaking roofs and water damage. Meaningful investment in social housing would provide a win-win. It would generate work for local tradies and fix the many homes that need to be fixed.

Housing is a human right, yet too many Australians experience rental stress, overcrowding, couch surfing and sleeping rough. In my community there is a 20-year wait for social housing. During the GFC, the Labor government kept the nation out of recession by providing $5 billion towards 20,000 new social-housing dwellings, and repairing 80,000 others. Social housing provides a roof over people's heads and much needed work for our tradies and builders. It also gives people dignity, improves the educational opportunities of their children, and helps them find jobs and stay in jobs. This pandemic has emphasised the need for everyone to have proper access to housing. You cannot stay at home if you don't have one. My family benefited from social-housing policies of the late 1950s, policies that allowed my parents to buy the house I still call home. My life would have been far different without this certainty of secure housing. This budget was an opportunity to give that chance to a new generation of working Australian families, and the government has failed.

One of the hardest hit demographics during the pandemic has been women. Women have been hit hard because they are often in insecure part-time or casual roles, which were the first to disappear this year. Women are also more likely to be employed in those frontline essential worker positions. They account for 87 per cent of registered nurses and midwives, 87 per cent of aged-care workers, 96 per cent of early-childhood educators and 60 per cent of retail workers. The women working on the frontline have carried Australia through COVID-19, and have been thanked by experiencing the brunt of the adverse economic and social implications of the crisis.

I recently met with aged-care workers, cooks, kitchen hands and cleaners. These workers were not eligible for the aged-care retention bonus, but were still critical parts of the aged-care facilities they worked for. To ensure they don't get sick they have, for the best part of nine months, kept away from family and friends who they don't live with, and strictly limited their retail shopping to essential shopping only. Why do they do this? Because they think of the residents in their facilities as their families, and when families were not allowed to visit, they felt as if they should provide much needed support. They don't mind that this has happened, but it is unfair that, unlike others in this sector, they weren't entitled to the retention bonus.

This budget has failed to produce a meaningful plan to make sure women don't go backwards as a result of the pandemic. The Morrison government is racking up $1.1 trillion of debt, but the Women's Economic Security Statement contains just $240 million in spending promises over five years, without a plan to improve the participation of women in the workforce. The budget contains nothing to address the significant job losses in industries dominated by females.

The member for Bruce recently said that the response to the pandemic has been outsourced by the government. The number of people who felt the need to take money out of their superannuation funds just to survive is criminal, and this is because the government was slow to put in the help they needed and quick to wind it back. Accessing your superannuation when you are a woman with, on average, a 14 per cent pay gap compared to your male counterparts means an already difficult retirement becomes harder.

There is nothing new for domestic and family violence services. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks in Sydney more women's lives have been lost at the hands of current or former intimate partners. Without proper investment in options for housing, financial security and policing, and with relationships under increasing stress, I fear that we are destined to continue to simply send our condolences instead of keeping women and children safe.

Werriwa is the home of Western Sydney airport, a significant infrastructure project that, along with the development of the Aerotropolis, is destined to provide significant jobs and opportunities for people of south-west Sydney. But this opportunity will only be realised if the projects are well-managed. The ANAO report advising the federal government paid $30 million for a parcel of land not needed until 2065 and valued at $3 million is, to put it bluntly, appalling. As the Member for Werriwa, the home of the Western Sydney airport, it's also heartbreaking. That $26 million in additional taxpayers' money has a significant opportunity cost for my community. Here's a list of badly needed yet still unfunded projects in Werriwa that could have been funded with this gross overspend: $5 million for the upgrade of Middleton Drive to provide a second access into and out of Middleton Grange, easing the significant gridlock that residents face each and every morning and afternoon; $9 million for much needed improvements to parks and playing fields, upgrades to canteens, car parks and playing facilities at Amalfi park, Ash Road, Bill Anderson Park, Blamfield Oval, Hoxton Park reserve, Landa Park, Ron Darcy Oval and Winnall Reserve; upgrade for the lift at Macquarie Fields; and an upgrade at Cambridge Avenue so that the smallest rainfall event doesn't send significant traffic on a 25-minute detour.

The south-west of Sydney is one of the key growth areas in Australia and is on the cusp of realising its economic and cultural potential. It's critically important to the success of Western Sydney airport and the Aerotropolis that world-class transport links are built and built now. The south-west rail line extension from Leppington through to Western Sydney airport provides the quickest and most cost-effective solution. The land corridor is already preserved and would easily and quickly connect the airport to Liverpool, Campbelltown and the rest of Sydney via the existing rail network and also connect, more importantly, to Kingsford Smith airport. The project is sadly missing from the failure of a budget.

Universities have been left out by this government. Before the COVID shutdown, education was Australia's third-largest export industry, yet the Morrison government have provided very little in the way of support to this important sector, a sector that not only employs hundreds of thousands and brings in millions in export dollars but leads the world in research—research like finding a vaccine for COVID-19. And how is this sector rewarded? It's excluded from JobKeeper and, of course, just last week, an astronomical increase to the fees for humanities degrees. The decimation of the higher education sector is criminal. The loss of talented educators, researchers and students from the sector will be long felt—talented people from a range of disciplines that we will need to tackle our present and future challenges, disciplines like epidemiology. I wonder if it would be different if academics wore hardhats

A common word used to describe the last seven months has been unprecedented. However, that's not to say we didn't see something like this coming. Over the last century, we know there has been the potential for what is happening with COVID-19 now. There was the Spanish flu at the end of the First World War, and in recent memory there has been SARS, MERS, swine flu and Ebola. That's why a future Labor government has committed to establish an Australian centre for disease control. Our health, our lives and our economy all depend on us getting our response to pandemics right. It is a sad indictment of seven years of coalition government there's been no preparedness training since 2012. Medical stockpiles were so rundown at the beginning of the pandemic there were not enough masks for critical workers and a limited supply of gloves, and, worse still, most of these things are imported. I pay tribute and thank all Australian small businesses who leapt to the cause and pivoted their operations to produce respirators, masks, gloves and sanitiser. The Leader of the Opposition said it best during the budget reply:

creating jobs for today, and training our people for tomorrow; making quality child care a right for all, not a luxury for some; rebuilding our manufacturing sector; and powering our recovery with clean energy.

This budget was an opportunity to deliver on these things, and the government has failed.

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