Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You'd think that with $100 billion of spending and $1 trillion of debt there would be an embarrassment of riches in this budget for my electorate, but that isn't the case. Some of it might be secret spending, saved up for those magic election announcements coming out of a $10 billion slush fund. But let's look at a couple of the key areas that I know my community expects this government to deliver on and where this government has failed. The spend falls well short of not just what people expected but what the people of the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury deserve.

I'm going to start with child care. It is always flattering to see a government take large chunks of a policy that we've developed in opposition and present it as their own. So, yes, we're very flattered that that occurred. However, you really can't compare the two policies. One policy supports a very small number of families. Our policy would make a difference to 97 per cent of families with young children. So, to start with, you're not comparing apples with apples. So what's different about the policies? It can be very easy to go, 'It sounds the same,' so I want to spell it out. The fact is that Labor's plan helps 97 per cent of families in this country and in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury who currently face a real challenge with accessing child care and affording it. Of course, it is not just child care; it is early education. We know how important it is to have early education. Quite frankly, as a country it saves us money further down the track the better our early education is. So Labor's plan has a long-term vision that actually provides the structural reform that we need to help people have quality early education for their children and get back into the workforce. Labor's plan doesn't make you wait until you have your second or third child before any savings or benefits kick in. Labor's plan helps every single child get a quality early education and get access to something that they might otherwise miss out on.

I also want to address a myth that the Liberal Party has been peddling, and that myth is that Labor's plan doesn't give as much to low- and middle-income people. Let's be really clear: for every family with one child, which is 75 per cent or three-quarters of families in early education, our plan helps every single one of those families up to a combined family income of $530,000 a year. In addition to that, if you have two children in early education and care, you're better off under our plan. So it has been very disappointing to see that. If someone is going to take your plan, couldn't they at least take all of it? Our plan was really well thought through and contributes to quality early education and an equity of access for people to be able to have their kids looked after in quality care. That's the disappointment about the childcare policy. It's failing to really deliver on reducing the cost of early education for most families.

The second area that there were big expectations and a big build up for was aged care. Of course, we've had a royal commission. After eight years of neglect, people expected and in fact deserved to see some really good commitments here. But the government have failed to take much of the advice of the royal commission and the other 21 reports that they've received. Let's look at a few key areas that were covered in this budget. Nothing in aged care will change without reform to the workforce. There's nothing in this budget to bring about reform for the aged-care workforce. There's nothing to improve the wages for overstretched and undervalued aged-care workers. I speak with them a lot. My father is in aged care. They are really good people. They do a job that I would not like to do. They look after my dad. They give him bright moments in his day. But they know they don't have enough time to spend with him in the way that they would like to and the way that he deserves. So what this government has done is shirk the key responsibility, and that was the key recommendation to increase the mandatory care minutes in residential aged care. I'm going to spell that out so people can hear what was recommended.

The royal commission had two phases in the rollout of mandatory care time. From July next year, the royal commission said there should be a minimum care time of 200 minutes, 40 minutes of which needs to be from a registered nurse. That's per day. A registered nurse must be on site for a minimum of 16 hours during the morning and afternoon. Then there was a second phase where it ramped up even further, and there would be a registered nurse on site 24/7. So what has the government done? They've accepted this recommendation, but all they are funding is phase 1, and phase 1 won't come in from the middle of next year. It won't be mandatory until October 2023. Quite frankly, there are a lot of people in aged care who may not get to enjoy the benefits of this very small improvement. I think that's disgraceful. This is a time when there was a real hope that the government would seriously address such an important issue, and this budget fails.

Also in the funding—and this is what the government will tell you—there's extra money for better food. There is. The recommendations of the royal commission were for a $10 per resident per day increase to the providers to improve the quality of food, in terms of the nutritional value. It's a total cost of $3.2 billion The royal commission was quite specific on what the accountability needed to be for this additional funding. Without accountability, it's a gift to the providers. The accountability needed to include that it would be spent on raw food, preprocessed food, bought-in food, and kitchen staff with costs worked out across the average number of residents. That would all be accountability. But, in fact, all the government has asked providers to do is to let them know that they'll give an undertaking to report to the government on expenditure on food on a quarterly basis, and that's it. That's the only benchmark you have to meet. These are fundamental things that ensure the health and the quality of life for elderly people in aged care where their families have made a big decision to say, 'We can't look after them in their home, but we'd love them to feel at home in the facility that they're in.'

Let's talk about those who do want to stay in their home. One of the other big gaps is the home-care package waitlist of 100,000. I've got a constituent right now who knows that her mother requires a higher level of care but has been told, 'If you apply for more care, you'll just get pushed further down the waiting list,' because this government has not addressed the needs of people on the home-care waiting list. The recommendation from the royal commission is really, really clear: immediately increase the home-care packages available and allocate a package to all people on the waiting list who do not yet have a package or do not yet have a package at the level that they have been approved for. That was to be done by 31 December this year. What has the government funded? They've accepted the recommendation in principle but will only release 80,000 additional home-care packages over two years up until 2023. It's not enough packages and it's delaying even further and, honestly, making people wait longer. Again, we know some people will not live to get the benefit of these packages. Those are some of the giant flaws in the aged-care funding that's been provided by the government in this budget, and there are many others.

I want to move on to infrastructure. There was nothing in this budget for my community to bring forward funding for the construction of the North Richmond Bridge. Depending on who you listen to, the Morrison government calls it a third crossing, whereas the New South Wales RMS, who is actually building it, calls it a duplication, so I think we know where the spin is there. The planning of this duplication goes back to 2010 when the first federal funds flowed to the New South Wales government to start the exploration of what could be done to alleviate the appalling traffic conditions. We're now 11 years on from that and we still don't have anything. We don't have a plan; there is no plan. We don't know where this bridge is going to go, what it's going to look like or how flood resilient it's going to be—and, remember, this is the duplication of a bridge that went under really fast only nine weeks ago.

What this has shown me is that, when I made a commitment in 2010, the Gillard government delivered on that commitment, even though I didn't win the election. They delivered on every commitment I made. There was no underspending in Macquarie, because every commitment was met—every single one of them. The big difference is that this government is very good at making the big promises. You can give them that. They're great at the spin and they're great at the marketing, but there is no delivery, and we're seeing already. There is no delivery on this bridge.

We should put this into context. It isn't just in Macquarie where there's no delivery. The chance of us seeing these budget infrastructure announcements being delivered on is so slim. The Morrison government averages an infrastructure underspend every year of $1.2 billion, and in the last financial year it underspent by $1.7 billion, so it's hard to take seriously any of the promises that are made. Of course, the one in Macquarie is $2 billion for the Great Western Highway. That is for roadworks that the Medlow Bath community don't even want. They want a tunnel, yet that's not what they're getting funding for. So I think we can pretty quickly say that there's not a lot in the infrastructure spend.

It's been eight long years of promises not met—things promised and not delivered. We are still waiting for a headspace in Macquarie. There's been this promise that some money for extra headspaces might be there. We must be one of the communities at the top of the list of communities needing a headspace, yet there's still nothing from this government about that. My community will continue fighting for that. But not only has there been a lack of meeting promises; there's been record low wage growth. Things are tight. We've had natural disasters that make thing even tighter. And what's the promise in this budget? The promise in this budget is that wages will go backwards over the next few years. It's not just that they won't grow; real wages will actually go backwards. That's the thanks that people are getting.

What they're not getting in this budget is any commitment to improve or fast-track the vaccination rollout. There is nothing around that, nothing to make people safer there and nothing to allow more Australians to come home because we have an effect quarantine program. I have one family in my community hoping to get their three-year-old home from India. Through a very tragic set of circumstances, including their business catching on fire, they felt the only thing they could do was allow the child's grandmother, who happened to be out here, to take this child home. But that was more than a year ago, and they've not been able to get permission to get their son back. A decent quarantine system would alleviate the anguish that families are going through. There are families who haven't seen their children. In fact, some of the kids are saying, 'Australia has abandoned us.' They're working overseas or they've had secure work that has now gone. They honestly feel betrayed by this government and betrayed by Australia.

I'm not the only one in this place who has spent years of her life living overseas. I've spent four years living overseas during different periods of my life and I've never felt that I was locked out of my country. I've never questioned that, if I needed to be home, I'd be allowed to come home. But that's what we're doing. That is a first, and this budget does nothing to give people any reassurance that they would be welcomed home. I'm so disappointed by that. I'm beyond angry. I'm at that point of saying that I'm also disbelieving that that could be the case. While there'll be a lot of talk and a lot of bluster about this budget, I think it's just a disappointing budget, and I know my community is going to be feeling that disappointment.

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