Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—As I was previously saying in this debate, one of the other elements of this budget that is making health care less affordable and less accessible to people is the changes to the Medicare safety net. In a somewhat tricky move the government have put forward a reasonable proposition—they are starting to say, 'Let's have some better targeting of the Medicare safety net,' and it is true that a number of people will reach that safety net earlier—but there is $270 million of savings in that measure, which means that when people hit the safety net they will get less back than they currently do. So the devil is in the detail when it comes to the safety net changes. As I said, whilst we would support better targeting, there are many, many Australians that never ever reach the safety net threshold. Indigenous Australians would never in a million years get to the sorts of costs in terms of access to services that are involved in the threshold for the safety net.

Another area that is affected is the freezing of the MBS items for two years. In essence, this is a measure that translates into more out-of-pocket costs for people trying to access specialists. So again you have to look at the detail of the budget to see where, in every element of it, the government is increasing out-of-pocket expenses for people trying to access health care.

In dental care the government is cutting $229 million by abolishing the dental Flexible Grants Program. That is a program for regional and rural communities in particular to build better dental clinics, to improve access to dental chairs and to improve access to dental training and clinical training spaces. The government has also cut $391 million by deferring the national partnership agreement for adult dental services. Again, this affects some of the most vulnerable Australians in our community. Having opposed the abolition of the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme, the government now seems to be cutting the very scheme that was designed to help low-income people access public dental care. Again, no notice was given to the states and territories about this deferral. Public dental waiting lists are already well beyond what we would expect them to be. They will blow out even further. In every community where those public dental waiting lists have started to stabilise, they will now start to blow out because of the decision this government has made to defer and cut $391 million out of that dental scheme.

The budget also contains structural changes and savings, such as those made through the abolition of the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency. We remember that a huge amount of work was done to undo some of the damage that the Prime Minister had done as health minister when he capped GP training places, along with the lack of planning and investment that had gone into developing Australia's health workforce. We will have a bit more to say about that in a subsequent debate. But there is great concern about the $142 million which has disappeared out of workforce planning in this budget.

The General Practice Education and Training program has been abolished, and something that has been condemned by the Rural Doctors Association and rural doctors at large is the abolition of the Prevocational General Practice Placements Program. We have also seen the abolition of all of the Medicare Locals, when the Prime Minister directly said that there would be no Medicare Locals closing. Every one of them is abolished under this government's plans.

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And replaced.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Every single one of them is being replaced? All 64 of them are being replaced, are they? You might want to check that statement with the health minister.

So there are cuts right across the entire health system, and it all translates to more costs for people out of their own pockets to pay for accessing a doctor; increased costs for accessing pharmaceuticals and medicines that are increasingly expensive; cuts to public hospitals, which means a reduction in services for people; cuts in dental care; and the abolition, pretty much, of the Commonwealth's entire role in preventative health. How short-sighted is that.

What we know from this budget is that this government has its priorities absolutely wrong when it comes to health. Its priorities when it comes to health are all about transferring costs onto patients—making people pay more to see a doctor, making people pay more to access medicines and gutting the agreements with our public hospitals. Shame on the government for this budget on health.

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This budget sets the framework for a sustainable future for our country, and it is absolutely the budget we need at this time. The previous six budgets delivered in this place simply drove us ever further and further away from that fundamental requirement: sustainability. Labor's entire approach to public finances was fundamentally unsustainable. Their expenditure was out of control, and Labor did not care. They remain completely unrepentant for the legacy of intergenerational debt that they have left behind. They show no signs of regret for the legacy of debt that they are leaving to future generations. They show no signs of being prepared to adopt a different path, were they ever to be entrusted with government again.

Each and every budget from those opposite raised hopes and raised expectations, but in reality it was all based on unfunded spending that could not sustain those hopes and expectations. Labor was turning Australia into la-la land, where the cornerstone idea was that everybody could have everything they wanted when they wanted it and they would never have to pay for it. It was the most socially, culturally and economically irresponsible government in the history of this country.

The result was debt and deficit on a massive scale, stretching off way beyond the forward estimates. It put the stupidities of the Whitlam era—and some of those were extraordinary—deep in the shade, and we could consign the Whitlam era even deeper in the shade if the member for Lilley had ever been able to find himself someone like Mr Khemlani! Australia simply cannot sustain the kind of government spending that the member for Lilley directed without a Khemlani. That took the federal government from having $70 billion in the bank in 2007 to having a rapidly looming gross debt, without any remedial action, of $667 billion.

When we came to office, the most fundamental task confronting us was to restructure the public economy, shifting the balance away from recurrent expenditure to investment in infrastructure and skills and the things that drive productivity growth. That is the best safety net there is: an economy in which there is a job for everyone who is capable of holding one and where the need for a safety net for those who cannot gain employment is at a level that those who have a job are able to sustain indefinitely. That is not where we are today. It is where we have to be as soon as we can reasonably manage it. As an inevitable result of that necessity, there are hard decisions in this budget, and there had to be plenty of them, given the way this country had been governed for the past six years. Now, some of the measures will not impact immediately. Several are designed to trim expenditure growth by freezing indexation or tightening eligibility in the welfare sector.

Australia has been drifting too far, too fast towards more leaning and less lifting, under the mistaken impression that we could always afford it. But we cannot, and the proof of that is that this drift was occurring on borrowed money. According to Labor—still in denial—debt in this form of unproductive, unsustainable government does not really matter. But of course debt does matter. Everybody managing a personal budget knows that. The debt projection in this country is a crisis. Labor's debt bill is costing us $1 billion a month just in interest. The first billion dollars raised in revenue each month goes to paying Labor's debt, and that would have kept going until the $1 billion became $2 billion and then $3 billion if Labor were still entrusted with the treasury bench. But, if you do not think that is a crisis, Labor wanted to add to the amount they borrowed to pay interest on the debt while lifting spending even further. The Gonski reforms meant billions more; the NDIS, billions more; foreign aid, billions; defence, billions; health, billions—and none of this expenditure had been provided for. Spending was just going up ever and ever higher, way out beyond the forward estimates.

To make it even sillier, the sources of revenue for this spendathon were works of fiction or worse. King amongst them of course was the mining tax, the magic pudding that never was. It was sliced and sliced and sliced again, all to deliver absolutely nothing. The pudding simply never existed. The carbon tax was even worse, putting a burden on all Australians but not delivering anything that was going to improve our national economy.

The International Monetary Fund recently confirmed that, for the six years from 2012 to 2018, Australia was forecast to have the largest percentage increase in spending of the 17 IMF advanced economies profiled. Labor promised to limit real spending growth to two per cent a year. Instead, during their time in office, they delivered real spending growth of 3½ per cent. Now 2017-18 is coming into the forward estimates for the first time, the medium-term projections from MYEFO show real spending growth between 2016-17 and 2017-18 would have been nearly six per cent—nearly three times what Labor promised they were going to deliver.

So we made some tough decisions in this budget, but they are the right decisions. We will reduce the budget deficit from almost $50 billion in 2014 to $29 billion by next year and to just $2.8 billion in 2017-18. And we are doing it the hard way by reducing expenditure, not the Labor way of raising taxes. Peak government debt will be reduced from $667 billion to $389 billion in 2023-24. That number is still too high, but it does represent a substantial improvement on where Labor would have taken us.

You have not heard very much from our critics over recent weeks on this, but the budget will actually reduce taxes by $5.7 billion in the coming financial year—$5.7 billion less in taxes. The company tax rate has been cut by 1.5 per cent and we intend to honour our election mandate to get rid of the carbon tax and the mining tax. By comparison, Labor lumped an extra $107.3 billion in taxes on Australian families and businesses while they were in government, introducing 944 new revenue measures over that time, more than 90 of which they never even legislated. Around 80 per cent of those measures were increased taxes or increased compliance costs on enterprises, while 77 per cent of our budget improvements come from reduced expenditure and only 23 per cent from higher receipts. So we are moving to make substantial changes. We are moving to make sure that our budget can be secure in the future. We have to make the safety net in our welfare system secure and capable of catching people who need it in the future. We were elected to fix Labor's mess, to deliver better management and to start turning the budget around. We did not hide the fact that it would be tough, and this budget gets on with the task.

We have made some significant reforms to the age pension to make it sustainable. Young people with the capacity to work will be required to be earning, learning or participating in work for the dole. Businesses will receive $10,000 for employing workers older than 50 who have been on income support for six months or more, meaning there will be stronger incentives to hire older workers. The budget takes steps to ensure the government is living within its means and to rein in the age of entitlement. More than 830,000 Australians now receive the disability support pension and that number is growing at 1,000 per week. Some recipients under 35 will have their entitlement reviewed as we want to help everyone who can make a contribution to our society to do so. There will be a temporary budget repair levy. From July, individuals with a taxable income of over $180,000 will pay an extra two per cent. That levy will raise an extra $3.1 billion over the forward estimates period and will help ensure higher income Australians contribute to the budget repair.

But what I think is the most exciting part of this budget is the government's commitment to infrastructure. The government has announced a program of more than $50 billion to build the infrastructure of the 21st century. Our record budget investment will support more than $125 billion of construction activity as part of the government's infrastructure investment program. The key message of this budget is that Australia must contribute and build. This budget calls on everyone and every business to contribute, to join together, to grow the workforce, to boost productivity and help build a stronger economy with more investment.

The road building program covers every state and every territory. It includes a major boost in expenditure, spending real money for real productivity improving roads and rail projects. It will make our transport system much more efficient. There is $6.7 billion to fix the Bruce Highway which is the main artery of Queensland commerce. There will be funding for 45 new projects in this budget and continuing funding for 16 already underway. There is $5.6 billion to complete the duplication of the main eastern states artery, the Pacific Highway. Importantly for right across regional Australia, there is a $2.5 billion extension to the Roads to Recovery program, one of the most important ongoing inputs to regional Australia. This was set in place originally by the coalition government and we remain totally committed to it.

Augmenting that program there is the new $300 million Bridges Renewal Program. There is $450 million for more four-laning of the Princes Highway West in Victoria, $480 million for the North-West and Great Northern Highways in Western Australia, $400 million for the Midland Highway in Tasmania, $90 million for the Northern Territory's Regional Roads Productivity Package, up to $1.3 billion towards the Toowoomba Second Range Crossing, $509 million for the Warrego Highway and $229 million for a new national highways upgrading initiative. This is a massive start to the Prime Minister's promise that we will build the roads of the 21st century.

And those roads are on top of the big capital city project like Gateway North in Brisbane, the WestConnex in Sydney and the $2.7 billion commitment to Western Sydney roads. There is the East-West project to which the Commonwealth will contribute $3 billion in Victoria. There is the South Road in Adelaide and of course the Roe Highway and Swan Valley Bypass in Perth. This is a major roads program.

I have heard some criticism from members opposite that there was no investment in rail in this budget and that in fact as a result of our investment we would be distorting state expenditure away from rail projects and urban public transport onto roads. The facts are that the evidence denies that allegation. There is $3.6 billion in this budget for rail, significantly, for example, for freight rail projects including the beginning of the Melbourne to Brisbane railway line which will make such a difference to east coast freight movements. On top of that, the states have committed or recommitted to $25 billion of urban public transport projects since this government came to office. So our big investment in roads is not taking money away from urban public transport; it has indeed supported substantial investment in urban rail.

The other nonsense we have heard is that this is only a tiny increase, that there are only one or two additional projects. There are dozens of additional projects that Labor had not even thought of including billions of dollars in areas like Western Sydney and the like. Labor has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to infrastructure. There has been plenty of talk but over the last two or three years in particular their actual expenditure on roads was in decline. We will reverse that. There is a substantial 55 per cent increase in road and rail funding in this budget and that will make a difference to our nation's infrastructure.

There are also significant commitments to local regional projects. This is a good budget. It is a rebuilding budget. It is the budget that will ensure that we will be able to get our economy back on track with real money and our national priorities being achieved. This is a change of direction for Australia which will make a big difference to the future of our nation and our capacity to walk proudly with balanced budgets in the future.

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, I am genuinely appalled by the measures which are contained within this government's budget and which we now see in the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-15 and related bills before this parliament for debate.

Of course, it is not unusual for people on either sides of the chamber to have slightly different priorities—to have some different ideas about where we should place emphasis and funding. But it is unusual for us to see a budget of the level of cruelty which we see in this budget: a budget which has so many proposals outlining just how out of touch this government is and a budget that is so full of wrong priorities, of inconsistencies and of short-sighted vicious measures which will affect those who are most vulnerable in our community.

There are many measures in this budget which will have a devastating impact on the area that I am lucky enough to represent in this parliament, being the great seat of Adelaide. I will be taking other opportunities to outline specifically some of those measures that will affect our community, that will affect our local pensioners, that will affect our local families and that will affect all of those who are sick and in need of our fantastic universal healthcare system.

But during this particular contribution I want to focus on one area of this budget where I think it outlines as much as any other just how short-sighted this government are and just how deceitful this government were in the lead-up to the election, saying one thing and now doing the complete opposite. That is in the area of education, because education gets absolutely smashed in this budget. This is from early childhood education—where those opposite are now refusing to commit to ongoing federal funding for our preschool system, despite all of the research and all of the evidence that shows that this is the most effective way to make a positive impact on the life of that individual—to our school system, which I am going to address in some detail in a moment, and right through to the higher education system, where what this government proposes is to lock out those from low- and middle-income families—'Let's shut the doors to our universities'—by pushing fees to skyrocket up and by ensuring that debts increase faster than they previously would have on these now massively increased fees and, to top it all off, to make sure that those massively increased fees that are increasing even quicker due to their indexation changes, need to be paid back more quickly. That is the proposal that we have from those opposite to try and make this nation the smart country that we can be.

When it comes to early childhood education, when it comes to schools and when it comes to higher education I will tell you very clearly what our side of the parliament believes. We absolutely believe that investing in education and having a quality education system is the No. 1 most effective way that you can make sure that children have greater opportunities than their parents had and their grandparents had before them. This is the way that we transform our nation; this is the way that we make sure that we are a smarter, more productive and prosperous nation into the future.

But those opposite clearly take a different view. When it comes to education, this is a budget that very clearly fits the Abbott template. That template is: step No. 1—say whatever it takes to the Australian population before the election; step No. 2—break each and every one of those commitments after the election; and, step No. 3—unfairly punish the people who can least afford it. That is what we have seen all throughout this budget when it comes to education.

Just to refresh: before the election we heard some very different messages from this government when it came to education. We saw the now Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, publicly claiming to be on a 'absolute unity ticket' with Labor on school funding. We heard the now education minister saying to the Australian public, 'You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same funding for your school.' And we saw on polling day at the election booths around this nation huge oversized posters making sure that the last thing that voters learnt before they went into the polling booth was from these posters, which said, 'Liberals will match Labor's school funding dollar for dollar.'

Well, what a disgrace! What a disgrace for you to deceive the Australian public to that extent. Tried to convince everyone of the unity ticket and tried to convince everyone that there would not be major changes and cuts to our schools, to our early childhood services and to our universities, because we were all on the one ticket of believing that we needed to improve our education system. Instead, what do we see just months later in the very first budget from this very same government and these very same individuals, who were out there saying this? What do we see in their first budget? We see the biggest cut to schools in this nation's history! We see the $30 billion to be ripped out of Australian schools, making sure that, in fact, every school and every student will be worse off as a result of the fact that they trusted this government to stay to their word and to improve our schools.

What we have seen is that years five and six of the Gonski funding have been dumped, leaving schools $6½ billion worse off in federal funding alone. This comes on top of this government's earlier measure to rip a billion dollars out of the trades training centres program, building trades training centres in our schools so that we could make sure that this nation was equipped with the skills that we need for our future workforce—a billion dollars already gone, the program scrapped entirely.

Now what we see in this budget is very clearly why when this government has been asked to repeat the guarantees that they were happy to make before the election—when they have been asked in this parliament if they will repeat the guarantee that no school will be worse off—they have absolutely refused to do so.

In this budget we see the reason why they had no choice but to walk away from that guarantee. In this budget we learn that they have not only thrown aside the Gonski reforms, the biggest review into Australia's school system in over 40 years. They have just tossed that aside because, apparently, Education Minister Pyne knows better than all of the experts, all of the academics, all of the principals, all of the teachers, all of the students and all of the parents who took part in the biggest review we have got to find the solutions for our education system. But they have not just thrown aside the Commonwealth commitment. What they have also done is that, whilst they promised they would honour the agreements that were made before the election, they have now come out and said, 'Well, actually, we're throwing away those conditions that said that in order for the states to receive federal funding they had to guarantee that they too would boost their funding to their education systems.' In fact, under those agreements the states had to put in an extra $1 for every extra $2 of federal funding they received. No more—meaning every school is worse off.

They have also let the states off the hook when it comes to guaranteeing indexation rates. So what we see right now is that right across Australia this government, this Prime Minister, has given every state and territory government a green light to start cutting school funding. When we were meant to be in a situation where principals were looking at how they were going to use additional resources to improve their schools, we now have them sitting around scratching their heads and trying to work out what they are going to cut as a result of this government's ridiculously short-sighted measures.

Not content with that, they also want to give a bit of provocation to make sure that those cuts start soon and that they start hard. Just over 12 months ago the now education minister was out there saying that indexation of schools at three per cent was a frightening prospect. He was saying that that it could not possibly assist our Australian education sector to be of the quality that it deserves to be. But what has this budget done? This budget has now set in stone an indexation rate at just CPI, which is currently at 2.5 per cent. The education minister who said the prospect of three per cent indexation was 'frightening' has now outlined just 2.5 per cent indexation for our schools. What that means in real terms is a very real cut. We know that the cost of delivering education is running at over five per cent. So what the education minister described as frightening he has outdone by something that is truly terrifying.

In particular I want to outline one of the measures which I think is the most appalling by this government as it betrays some of the most vulnerable Australians, and that is children with a disability. I know from my discussions with principals right around Australia that one of the most immediate challenges they face and the most common funding concern raised with me is support for children with disability. We know that more and more students with disability are moving into our schools right across the community. This is a wonderful change and one which I hope will continue to accelerate in coming years. But, to date, our school systems have largely failed to properly and consistently identify students with disability, let alone provide them with the equal educational opportunities that they absolutely deserve.

When Labor set out to define the needs based funding loading for the students, adequate information was simply not available. We were up-front with the community about that. How many children need additional support? What level of support do they need? How many teachers are appropriately qualified to deliver this support? What training is needed to get them there? And exactly what resourcing is required to ensure that every student gets the support that they need in every school in Australia? These questions could not and, sadly still, cannot be accurately answered. But in government we set out to come up with a solution to this problem, working with school systems to fix it. We set out to collect the data, to standardise the definitions and implement a properly formed loading to support students with disability from 2015, and in the meantime interim funding was put in place.

Those opposite have said that they support this. They have said it was a bipartisan commitment to the 2015 time line and to delivering the necessary resources once that need had been properly defined. So a new loading was supposedly to be rolled out from the beginning of the school year in 2015 with additional resources. It is interesting to ask: what additional funding did this government then put in this budget to support this? Absolutely nothing. In fact, what they did was they cut the more support for students with disability funding that was in the budget and now they have delayed those crucial time frames, meaning that many of the students out there who most need this parliament to be standing up and fighting for their access to quality educational support have been cruelly left behind by this government that has just placed it in the too hard basket.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Get on to higher education!

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those opposite apparently do not want to talk about schools and are asking me to go on to higher education. I am not surprised that you do not want to talk about schools because you know that schools are angry, you know that parents are angry, you know that teachers are angry. And it is not just because of the Prime Minister's duplicity and deliberate deception, although of course those are reasons enough for a great deal of anger, but it is because of the very real impacts that this government's budget will have in classrooms right across Australia: cuts to extension programs, cuts to literacy and numeracy programs, subject choices gone, sport and music options gone, remedial support gone, support for students with a disability just not there. And not in four years time, as some on the government backbench seem to be reassuring themselves: 'None of this is real yet. It is just something we are saying we'll do later.'

The Prime Minister is goading state premiers into making cuts to our schools right now. Those opposite do not have to believe Labor spokespeople on that, you can listen to your own Liberal counterparts. In New South Wales, Mike Baird described the budget as a 'kick in the guts'. Campbell Newman—not somebody that I would readily quote to agree with much that he has to say—has come out publicly warning that ratings agencies are on the phone looking at state budgets now and that they need to look at the savings they will make. States are being pressured to cut early and to cut hard by this Prime Minister and by all of those that sit opposite defending this disgusting budget. The Prime Minister has helped the states and territories put aside their differences and band together because they have common enemy, and that is this government that is walking away from school funding reform, that is walking away from the opportunity for us to implement the solutions that we know our school system needs.

This is a cowardly, low-rent, hard-cutting and unfair budget. On this side of the House we will not stand for it. We believe that circumstances of birth should not determine destiny. We believe that it is the size of a person's brain, not the weight of their wallet, that matters. We believe that country kids should not be allowed to continue to fall behind city kids when it comes to their schools and their educational attainment. We believe that the two-and-a-half-year gap between the least well-off and the most well-off students is a blight on our country and a threat to our future. We absolutely believe in needs-based funding; that, no matter what school, no matter what schooling sector, no matter what state or territory, every child in this nation should be able to rely on this parliament to make sure that their school is a great school.

This would not be so appalling if we did not have the solutions; but we do. We have just gone through that process. This government can offer no excuse for throwing away the educational opportunities of young Australians and doing so while still putting aside over $20 billion to give to millionaires to have a baby. This is wrong priorities, and we oppose it every step of the way. (Time expired)

John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Obviously every business has to account for itself, hopefully on an annual basis. Whether you are a government or a private business or a public company, there has to be an accounting. Unfortunately, it was left to us upon assuming government to have to do that accounting because it was a long time since the Australian people—the Australian government on their behalf—had done that.

In business terms, if you were starting off in business and were handed a company which was very much in the black, showing around about a $25 billion profit for the year with about another $60 billion in the bank in various forms, you would think: 'How marvellous is this! We can really build on this.' Unfortunately, what the Australian people were left with six years later, and what our new government had to pick up, was an incredible turnaround. Australia, like New Zealand and like Brazil, is basically an economy based on resources. But Brazil and New Zealand did not do a GFC borrow; those two countries pretty much came through unscathed without plunging their country into debt because of the GFC. I have always felt that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government basically saw the GFC as an excuse to borrow money and throw it around.

After six years we are faced with the kind of debt we have now—it is estimated to be heading towards $670 billion. If we are paying $1 billion interest every month now, which we are, by the time we get to $670 billion, we will be well north of $2 billion a month. For a country that seven years ago or thereabouts was in the opposite position, that is quite remarkable. In fact I have always felt it was not easy to borrow and blow the money that the previous government under their various leaders managed to blow—and that includes the current Leader of the Opposition in a big way and most of his frontbench.

I am not going to go through this budget figure by figure but I do think some common sense has to come into the current argument about why it is a tough budget—and about the future. I have quite a few daughters and I have quite a lot of grandchildren and I believe they deserve a prosperous future, not one laden with debt and missed opportunity. If we keep going the way we are going, there is nothing surer than that, as somebody said, 'the issue will not be what we trim; it will be what we close'—whether it is hospitals, whether it is schools, whatever it is. So, having to take a deep breath and say, 'we are not going to bust anyone, but everyone has to be involved', is not that big a deal. I think we can get through this, as long as we do not sit and whinge about it every minute of every day.

The ABC had a program called The Hollowmen.I remember it distinctly and it was quite funny. It was a little embarrassing. I guess it was Australia's version of Yes, Minister. I remember one episode in which the Prime Minister of the day wanted something big to go to the people, something impressive, so they came up with this program which was going to be enormous. It is safe to say that they were incredibly excited about it; it was going to end up $100 billion over the forward estimates. And they were excited. Then suddenly at the last minute they had to turn around and say, 'Well, what is it?'—because the Prime Minister was wrapped; he was really impressed—and they suddenly realised they had not actually worked out what the program was. I honestly think that is how we ended up with the NBN. I think the government of the day watched the show and they were impressed too. I am quite sure that they decided they were going to do this, and they came up with the NBN and Gonski. We all like it, in its intentions, but you do have to be able to afford these things. I do not truly believe that they knew what they were doing. One hopes they were doing it in the best interests of the country, but you do have to have a measure of responsibility about fiscal reality and about business. I guess that is what we have really missed.

I would like to talk for a minute about some of the things in here and why I do not think they are unreasonable. I will go to universities for a start. Universities are incredibly necessary. We have to have people who do the intellectual thing. We need people with university degrees not to build rockets but to come up with better ways of doing the NBN and to do all sorts of things we need. I am quite willing as a taxpayer to fund them to an extent. Only 30 per cent of people who leave school actually go to university and to say that they themselves should fund 50 per cent of that seems to me to be eminently reasonable. The majority of the 70 per cent who do not go to university will get a job and start paying tax almost from the day they leave school. They are paying taxes to give assistance to those who essentially at the end of the day jump the job queue and get far better paying jobs. Having said that, the most successful men and women I know actually did not go to university; they are self-made people—but that is another issue. My point is that I do not think it is unreasonable to expect those who get a leg up in life to pay back half the costs of doing that on behalf of those who have been paying taxes for them from a much earlier time in their lives. I do not think that that is unreasonable at all.

The school issue is that we committed to the four years of funding that Labor committed to. Despite what the member for Adelaide said, they did not commit one cent past those four years. I do not think anyone has ever disagreed that the way schooling is funded could be refined. But to say, 'Simply because we want it, we have to have it,' is like a child in a lolly shop, and that is pretty much what happened for six years.

I am really upset about the way many people in the community, particularly the opposition, have deliberately gone out to frighten pensioners about something they do not have to be frightened about. We have not taken money away from pensioners. We committed that we would not do it and we have not. When you consider that in July when we get rid of the carbon tax and get rid of those things they will get to keep their compensation, I think it is quite desperate lying to try to frighten a lot of people who are past the stage in life when they should have to suffer that kind of fear.

When I talk to people in the electorate and generally everyone acknowledges the need for a responsible budget, a tough budget that is not that tough on any one particular section of the community. I have found that they will acknowledge that, but they say, 'Aren't you being a little bit tough in my area?' I think we all have to be responsible. I actually do find the vast majority of people are incredibly mature about it—more so than I expected. I am very sorry that pensioners have been frightened. They should not have been. They absolutely had no reason to be. The real downside is pensioners were frightened when they should not be.

I have not heard anyone on that side talk about the fact that for the first time in six years—and the ex infrastructure minister, who is at the table, should hang his head—not one cent was put into mobile phones and we have just committed $100 million to mobile phone towers. I do not hear him talking about that. From the day the Labor Party got into office not a cent was spent on mobile phone coverage. It obviously was not an issue. You do not live in the right place to find out where it is an issue.

I want to talk about The Hollowmen broadband—the $100 billion that was such a great spend. I want to talk about that for a moment. I am now referring to my own responsibility in Australia, Calare. Do you know that Calare was not even on the horizon with mobile phone and broadband. It was not mentioned in dispatches for broadband and now we have fixed wireless. We already have about nine towers on their way up and more are to come. Suddenly there has been a little bit of responsibility and suddenly getting better broadband is a priority, not for the middle of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane but for regional people who need it. Those who do not already have usable business-type broadband are actually going to get it. They were not even on the horizon. I actually think Calare is quite happy about that.

Then there is the Black Spot Program. If you drive in country areas you think that is pretty good too. There is extra money. It is rather appropriate for the then minister for roads and infrastructure to walk in at this time. He is trying to say that $50 billion is not any money at all. He is trying to say it is not a huge extra spend on what he was doing. Let me tell you that it is a hell of a lot more in regional Australia than he ever dreamt of spending. The extra money going to Roads to Recovery and the extra money going to Black Spot is way above anything he ever dreamt of. Getting out of central Sydney is not a bad idea—I tell a lie; he did give me a lift to Bourke one day, and I appreciated it.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Orange bypass.

John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Orange bypass is interesting. We shamed the Labor Party into funding that because we promised to fund it and then you had to match it.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You're an idiot. You did nothing. I should have made you walk!

John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Do not tell me that that is not true. It is. Before I run out of time and the shadow minister runs out with a heart attack, I want to say that Calare is a dynamic area. We have had some knocks lately but we will come through it. While I do not like seeing agribusinesses taken over by foreigners, I am very happy to have foreign companies like Nestle, Mars, Ferrero and Thales, who are not coming to government demanding money. They are getting on and investing in themselves. With a new dam in the region, they, with us, will see this through. For my children and grandchildren and everybody else's children in Calare to have a future this budget is necessary because of the last six years.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition had a plan to get into government, but no plan to govern. In opposition the current Prime Minister's only aim was to say no to anything that was proposed by the then Labor government. Knowing that Labor faced the difficult circumstance of a minority government, Mr Abbott sought only to create the impression of chaos by rejecting any government initiative. But during this period, as he wandered around declaring that the sky was falling, the now Prime Minister failed to prepare for government by crafting alternative policies. The first Abbott budget is the result of this extraordinary policy lethargy, this absolute preference for putting politics first and policy second. This is a government budget of ideology. This is not the budget of a government with a well thought out program to build a better nation; it is a mean-spirited budget of cuts and broken promises. It is an attack on fairness; it is an attack on economic growth. It is notable for its lack of any policy narrative beyond scorching the political earth of any trace of the previous Labor government. It is a reactionary budget from a reactionary Prime Minister who lives in the past, in an age of knights and dames.

The real problem is that he wants the rest of the nation to go back there and keep him company. This budget asks us to return to a bygone era where people's access to opportunity, security and even good health depended on their parents' bank balance or what school they attended. The budget smashes the universality of Medicare by adding a $7 co-payment for people to see their doctor. It abandons the Gonski education reforms, which were explicitly designed to ensure equity of opportunity. It cuts $80 billion in Commonwealth grants to states for health and education. It walks away from federal investment in public transport, despite the fact that Commonwealth leadership to deliver an integrated approach to urban transport can significantly boost the nation's economic productivity. While encouraging motor vehicle use instead of public transport, it places even more of a burden on Australian families by increasing fuel prices. It slows down the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and limits future access to the age pension. Yet before the election the Prime Minister told the voters of Australia there will be no cuts to health, education, pensions or the ABC. His promises were worthless.

The starting point for any examination of this budget is its economic context. When this government took office it inherited a growing economy with low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment and with AAA credit ratings from all three of the nation's top agencies. But, despite this, the government has justified its cuts and broken promises with the claim that the nation faces a budget emergency. Let us look at the facts. The latest budget update shows that net government debt for 2013-14 is $191.5 billion, the equivalent of 12.1 per cent of GDP. According to the IMF, the average debt level in advanced nations is 74.7 per cent. It is also claimed that the budget is burdened by unsustainable spending. The budget deficit peaked in 2009-10 at $54.5 billion, or 4.2 per cent of GDP—less than half the average among advanced nations. In Labor's final year in office, the deficit was $18.8 billion or 1.2 per cent of GDP.

The use of the term 'budget emergency' to describe our budget dates from Mr Abbott's relentless campaign of negativity when he was Leader of the Opposition. Having been too lazy and cynical to create a policy program, the now Prime Minister chanted three-word slogans so loudly that people began to believe them. Anyone prepared to be honest about recent Australian history knows that our spending and debt levels increased in the past few years because the previous Labor government borrowed money to fund an economic stimulus package that protected our economy during the global financial crisis. In 2009 the Rudd government was grappling with a crisis—a global crisis, not a pretend crisis of the type confected by the current Prime Minister so that he could impose these mean-spirited cuts. Our stimulus package saved Australia from the recession that enveloped the rest of the developed world and we chartered a path back to budget surplus. Treasury analysis says that our package saved 200,000 Australian jobs. We did not create a crisis, we dealt with the crisis.

The real deficit problem in this country is the honesty deficit in the Prime Minister's office. The only crisis in Australian politics today is the integrity crisis of those opposite and the fact that people were misled by a party that said one thing before the election and another thing afterwards. And if the government had any serious ability to put forward its position in a consistent way, it would not be proposing to deliver an unaffordable paid parental leave scheme. While families struggle to get their children to the doctor, the Prime Minister will give millionaires up to $50,000 to have a baby.

This budget exposes this government's true colours. It attacks the weak, but favours the top end of town. I am all for business prosperity—it creates jobs—however, like most Australians, I expect that prosperity should be shared. Take as an example the proposed $7 co-payment that will apply to visits to the family doctor. It will not affect people like parliamentarians, but it will affect many in my electorate who will choose to go to a public hospital emergency room because they cannot afford to take their kid to the doctor. Labor believes that Australians have a right to the same level of health care regardless of their income, and we will defend Medicare and its universality, which is at the point of its principles.

On education, before the election the Prime Minister said he was on a 'unity ticket' to implement the Gonski education reforms. These were designed to deliver a needs-based funding model to schools and ensure equality of opportunity—and to end the decades-old debate that has occurred around schools funding in this country. But he has walked away from this undertaking. The same goes for university funding, with the government proposing a US-style deregulated system where money matters more than a student's potential. Education is not just about the individual; the nation benefits by being a smarter, more skilled country.

Let me turn to the budget as it affects my own shadow portfolios of infrastructure, transport and tourism. Before the budget the government inflated expectations about infrastructure to divert attention away from cuts to services and broken promises. Under examination their claims collapse. The majority of the government's infrastructure spend was not new but a collection of re-announcements of projects funded by the previous government. Anything new in this budget was funded by cuts to existing rail and road projects: cutting all public transport funding not currently under construction; cutting existing road projects, including the M80 in Melbourne and Tasmania's Midland Highway upgrade; and cutting nearly $1 billion to financial assistance grants for roads through an end to indexation, which will hurt councils in rural and regional communities more than any others. The government has taken the axe to existing projects so that it can falsely claim it has new money for different projects. Indeed, in its glossy, when you look at projects like the Pacific Highway in New South Wales, it is exactly the same graphic that was produced by the former government, with the same projects listed with funding there.

The fact is that Mr Abbott also said that a full cost-benefit analysis would occur for every infrastructure project worth more than $100 million. But none of that has occurred. There is not one single project that has been recommended by Infrastructure Australia as a priority project funded in this budget—not one. In the case of the East West Link in Melbourne, the Senate budget estimates committee heard yesterday, extraordinarily, that the government will give the Napthine government $1 billion in the next month that will sit in a bank account because stage 2 is not due to commence until not this year, not next financial year, but the financial year after that! They say they have issues with finances but they are giving a billion dollars in the next month for something that is not due to commence for another two financial years. Today they say they will ask the Victorian government to pay back some of the interest that they get from that billion dollars—absolutely absurd! It is clearly a favour to help their mates in the Victorian government prop up their budget.

If the fiscal situation is so dire in the national government, why are they propping up their mates in the Victorian state government through this billion dollars for stage 2, for which there are no traffic projections, for which there is no business case, for which there is no forecast, and for which there has been no assessment made whatsoever? Absolutely extraordinary.

In March the assistant infrastructure minister, Mr Truss's errand boy, the member for Mayo, attacked these payments. The errand boy said this:

This represents a massive abuse of taxpayer dollars, with money lying around in state government accounts collecting interest, scandalously underutilised at a time of scarce public funds.

He said that should never happen. And let me tell you that nothing like that happened under the previous administration and, to be fair to the Howard government, I have not heard of any such circumstance occurring like this ever in the whole time that I have been in parliament.

At the same time, of course, Minister Briggs, Assistant Minister Briggs to give him his correct title, the errand boy for the actual minister, spent some $70,000 in public money attempting to kid Australians into believing its infrastructure spend was new.

Mr Chester interjecting—

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw. He actually breached a budget embargo, releasing the presentation well before the budget speech. Yesterday we heard that 2½ thousand people have looked at that video, so it cost almost $40 per viewing. There is value for taxpayers!

The budget also created a $5 billion incentive fund. But the problem with that is that it wasn't new money either. The $5 billion came from the Building Australia Fund and the education infrastructure fund. Paying someone else to do the heavy lifting does not constitute investing in infrastructure. The fact is that the infrastructure package in this budget is a con—a collection of already funded projects and cuts to fund other projects, which have not even been tested by experts to verify that they represent value for money. There are other cuts in there as well, such as the upgrading of remote and regional airports—gone, that program, from the next financial year. The previous government, of course, was concerned about addressing funding in our cities for public transport as well as for roads. The fact is that this government has walked away from those commitments.

I have heard the Treasurer say before that the core of his approach to economics is the idea that if you increase the tide all boats rise. I was reminded of the words of Indian politician Rahul Gandhi, who once said: 'A rising tide doesn't raise people who don't have a boat. We have to build the boat for them. We have to give them the basic infrastructure to rise with the tide.'

That is the problem with this budget. It is a budget which helps those who have and punishes those who have not. It puts in place policies that expose all the prejudices of the existing government. My message to the government is that it is not the fault of the Labor Party that the Prime Minister was too lazy to frame genuine policy when he was the Leader of the Opposition. Nor is it the fault of the poor, the disabled, the sick, state premiers or young people—all of whom are bearing the brunt of the budget decisions. As opposition leader, Mr Abbott clearly took a conscious decision to turn the coalition into the noalition. (Time expired)

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the appropriation bills currently before the House. This budget confirms the worst for ordinary working Australians, it confirms the worst for families already battling to make ends meet, and it confirms the worst for people on the age pension, the disability support pension and the carer payment. It confirms the worst for our young people trying to find work in an ever-changing economy. It also confirms the worst for all Australians who believe in a fair, tolerant and compassionate Australia.

In this budget the Abbott government has revealed to the Australian people their plans for our country: savage cuts to our existing safety net, the roll-back of social and economic reforms like the Gonski school funding and an attack on the core pillars of the Australian way of life.

The budget is made up of cruel measures from a government that can only be described as cruel. They have shocked many, many people and they have broken promises—the lot of them. The impact of this budget on social and economic disadvantage will be far-reaching and hard-hitting. It will also have implications for the investments we make in the future—the future opportunities that we would like to see for our people.

Over the last 100 years a social contract in this country has taken shape. It is based on the pillars of the Australian way of life—access to universal health care and education, a fair and secure pension system, support for people who cannot work due to disability or caring responsibilities, and support for people when they need help to get into work.

This social contract did not just magically appear. It took more than a century to get to where we are today. Successive Labor governments have led the way in strengthening it over the years, making it fairer and more inclusive for all. We have developed a very different approach to the approach of Europe or the United States, and Australians are rightly proud of our smart, fair and uniquely Australian approach. Shamefully, not only does this budget disregard the government's responsibility to maintain and further strengthen these pillars of the Australian way of life, it goes out of its way to tear those pillars down.

Australia's economy is strong. We have low inflation, low interest rates and net debt well below comparable countries. We have AAA credit ratings from all three credit rating agencies. And since the election all we have heard from the government is false claims that Australia's spending on welfare is out of control. We have heard senior ministers cry that Australia is on the same path as countries like Greece or Spain. These claims are just not true.

Earlier this year, independent analysis from NATSEM found that in the last 12 years Australia's welfare spending has, in fact, decreased as a share of total expenditure. Treasury's Intergenerational Report 2010 shows that welfare spending as a proportion of GDP will remain steady over the next three decades. None of this is to say we cannot do things better but it does confirm the current budget's whole platform is based entirely on a lie.

One of the glaring examples is the $7 Medicare co-payment. In the prebudget sell, the government proclaimed that the current universal health system is too expensive and requires a greater patient contribution in order to help prepare the budget bottom line. Yet the budget reveals that not one dollar of the Medicare co-payment will go towards the budget bottom line—nor will it be returned to recurrent health spending. The co-payment will undermine universal health care in our country and, as many health experts have said, co-payments will not increase efficiency. They will hurt the poor and the sick the most.

This budget is a savage attack on ordinary Australians families. It includes cuts of $7.5 billion to family payments. For the first time since Peter Costello introduced them, this budget contains no family impact analysis in the budget papers.

In the last fortnight, expert analysis from independent modelling agency NATSEM has put to shame the government's claims that the burden of this budget is shared by everyone. Overwhelmingly, analysis has demonstrated that those at the bottom are hit the hardest, while those at the top are spared. NATSEM found that around 1.2 million families will be on average $3,000 a year worse off by 2017-18. In contrast, the top 20 per cent of households will have either no impact or a negligible positive impact. Low-income couples with children and single parents will suffer the most.

This budget is also incredibly bad policy. Because of this budget, single-parent families are faced with a huge disincentive to work. This budget creates a new single-parent supplement, which single parents will get when they are kicked off family tax benefit B when their youngest child turns six. This measure actively discourages single parents from work. Once a single parent earns just one dollar more than $48,000 a year, they will lose this supplement completely. These single parents will pay an effective marginal tax rate of around 80 per cent for every dollar they earn above $48,000, taking home just 20c of each of the extra dollars they earn. According to NATSEM, if a single parent's income increases from $45,000 to $50,000 a year, their disposable income will increase by just $1,706. NATSEM has described this as a 'sudden-death drop'.

The impacts of the budget get worse and worse over the next four years. By 2016, a couple with a single income of $65,000 and two school-aged children will lose over $6,000 a year. Six thousand dollars a year is going to come out of the pockets of these single-income families on budgets of around $65,000. That is around 10 per cent of their entire family budget. Nationals Senator Ron Boswell summed it up pretty well yesterday when he remarked to the media, 'There's an equity problem that's falling on the low-income earners more so than the high-income earners.' What an understatement! National Party members and senators certainly should be protesting much louder than that. Many of the low and single-income families hit hardest in this budget live in country and regional Australia.

This budget also makes savage cuts to pensions. All of the people on the age pension, the disability support pension, the carer payment, bereavement allowance, the parenting payment single and the wife, widow and veterans pensions are going to have their pensions cut. The government's decision to increase the pension age to 70 was made on the run, without any evidence and without any policy case. It will disproportionately hurt low-income earners who do not have much superannuation, women and those in manual jobs like labourers and nurses.

Yesterday in this House, senior members of the government—the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Social Services—repeated the falsehood that this budget does not make cuts to the pension. Australians know this is not true. The changes to pension indexation arrangements in this budget are a cut. They are a very direct cut to the living standards of Australia's 3.2 million pensioners. That is how many pensioners will have their pensions cut.

The pension is benchmarked to wages for a reason. It is so that pensioners' standard of living keeps pace with the standard of living of the working population more broadly. John Howard knew that; that is why he legislated for it. If this Prime Minister's indexation arrangements had been in place for the last four years, pensioners would today be around $1,500 worse off each year. That is what this pension cut means in real money. This is a cut in anyone's language and it is about as big a broken promise as you can find. It is clear that the Prime Minister's only plan for older Australians is to make them to work longer and retire with less. And the short-sightedness does not end there.

The Abbott government's policies will see more people reliant on the pension in the future. How else can you explain its decision to abolish the low-income super contribution—a measure that reduces the tax burden for 3.6 million Australians who earn $37,000 or less a year, two-thirds of whom are women? How else can you explain the government's decision to further delay the increase in superannuation from nine to 12 per cent and, at the same time, reverse the proposed changes that we made to the top, to tax earnings over $100,000?

Another cruel cut to pensioners in this budget, one which is relevant to the appropriation bills we are discussing, is the Prime Minister's decision to cut the Commonwealth's $1.3 billion contribution to concessions for pensioners and seniors. Because of this coalition government, the National Partnership Agreement on concessions will be axed from 1 July this year. These cuts will start in just 34 days. This is yet another attack on so many pensioners, who will have their concessions cut for public transport, electricity, water bills, council rates—and the list goes on. You can add that to the $80 billion in cuts this government has made to health and education.

The changes in the budget to Newstart and young people are the most brutal and cruel measures of all. The government is sentencing our young people to potentially an endless cycle of poverty—six months without any support at all, with no explanation of how our young people are supposed to house and feed themselves during these extended periods of time. On top of these cruel measures, there are cuts of around $130 million a year to programs like the youth education programs, including Youth Connections, even at a time when youth unemployment is so much higher than the general unemployment rate, at a time when we need to provide more support for our young people.

Over the last two terms of government, when we were in government, we saw a renewed focus on social investment: the National Disability Insurance Scheme, better schools reform, the development of a comprehensive framework for closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. These were all important investments in our people. If we are to make sure that every Australian can participate fully in our ever-changing economy, we have to make sure that we target our investment in people to those who need it most and where we will get the best value. We need to step outside the neo-liberal view of welfare that those opposite hold and take an integrated view of social and economic policies, to make sure that social policy contributes to our future prosperity in the way that previous Labor governments have made sure it would. Then, of course, we will be able to develop a comprehensive set of policies that support our modern economy and the people within it.

I have spent so much time since the budget with people in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria talking to pensioners and families and young people about the impact that this budget will have on them. I have spent time with compassionate, hardworking, smart people who want to spend time helping those who are disadvantaged. I have spent time with hundreds of age pensioners who are now very afraid for their future and who are upset about having been betrayed by this Prime Minister. The message they had for this government was loud and clear: this budget is based on broken promises and lies. It seeks to destroy the smart, fair and compassionate Australia that they know and love.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The appropriation bills that are before us fit in in a very unusual section under the standing orders where, similar to the adjournment debate and the address-in-reply, a broad-ranging debate well beyond the relevance of the legislation before us is allowed. This is for a very good reason. The bills that are in front of us are what is often referred to as supply. It allows us to be able to understand that, while not bringing the nation to a standstill and not going down the level of irresponsibility that occurred in 1975, it allows there to be a full parliamentary debate that allows the governing of Australia and the bills of Australia to still be paid, without the opposition being in a position where we are compelled to argue anything other than the fact that this is a shocking budget; that this a shocking budget built on lies; that this is a budget that is the opposite of what people were told was coming; that this is a budget that is a result of a confected emergency that does not exist. Even the head of the Commission of Audit acknowledges that there is no immediate budget emergency. Even he acknowledges it, and those opposite should acknowledge it too.

In total, the bills that are in front of us seek parliamentary approval for around $1.3 billion in the current financial year and $88.4 billion for the next financial year. These reflect the ordinary, continuing operations of the government as well as new measures in the 2014-15 budget. Obviously, the ordinary expenditure that is in front of us is not the issue that is of most concern to the opposition in dealing with this budget.

I will start with the confected budget emergency. Peter Costello, to his credit, brought down a principle that we all know as the Charter of Budget Honesty. It was to make sure that governments would never again be able to create a situation where, on coming to office, they could claim, 'Oh, look, the books are in a completely different state to what we thought.' He set that up and guaranteed that the final statement of the economic legacy of a government would be produced and released and signed off on by the Secretary to the Treasury and the Secretary of the Department of Finance, and no politicians would have anything to do with the document. The Treasurer, the shadow Treasurer, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition would all see the document at the same time that it was released publicly—no-one would have advance copies of it.

The new Treasurer pretended that the Charter of Budget Honesty was meaningless. He effectively pretended that everything that Peter Costello, to his credit, had put in place in the Charter of Budget Honesty was of no economic value whatsoever. He changed budget parameters, abolished revenue measures that had been put in place—including measures to clean up a whole lot of international tax avoidance—and sent an extraordinary sum of money across to the Reserve Bank. In doing so, he himself more than doubled the deficit. Then, at the end of last year, he released a new document with the deficit having more than doubled, with spending trajectories going through the roof, and said, 'This document is the one that is Labor's legacy'—notwithstanding that it is the one that is signed off with the names Hockey and Cormann.

The level of deception was used to confect the budget emergency is nothing short of breathtaking, and those opposite who choose to back those figures in should really hang their heads in shame if they want to attach themselves to any of the economic legacy of Peter Costello. The Charter of Budget Honesty was one of the key election promises when the Howard government first came to office. They said they would bring it in and they did and—credit where credit is due—election after election, it has been a good document that has stopped governments from being able to play the game that this government is seeking to play.

Let us make it clear that every time we hear the Treasurer refer to $123 billion worth of deficits or $660 billion worth of gross debt, he is referring—

Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Shame!

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I agree—shame!—because they are the rorted figures.

Mr Whiteley interjecting—

If ever there were a strategic shame possibly confected from our side—and, if the member for Hunter set that one up, good on you—that was that moment. It is an extraordinary thing. Those debt figures are based on the removal of an expenditure cap, a cap on growth in spending. If you remove the cap on growth in spending, what happens? Spending goes up—of course, it does. They are shifts in the change of budget parameters that were put in place by the Treasurer and the finance minister.

In the same way, the Treasurer and the finance minister pretended that unemployment would never return to trend. But, in fact, in years three and four, they have got unemployment under this budget presuming that, for years three and four of this budget, unemployment will actually go up to 6.25 per cent in year three and then to six per cent in year four, notwithstanding that it is running at 5.8 per cent now. So the actual plan that this budget has is a plan for higher unemployment, because, by putting figures like that in, it meant that they could argue that there was a debt problem.

What they did with that budget emergency is completely transparent. They have used that confected budget emergency as an excuse to break promises that they knew that they were going to break. No-one opposite should think that they will get a single week for the rest of this term without hearing the words: 'no cuts to health'—which was a lie; 'no cuts to education'—the same; 'no changes to pensions'—the same; and 'no cuts to the ABC or the SBS—the same'. Each and every one of those has come to nothing. Those opposite claimed that the one thing that they would bring to Australian politics was a capacity to deliver on promises. That ended the night this budget was delivered. Those on this side know that the worst thing is not simply the way they broke the promises but who will be hurt by those broken promises. Those promises that have been broken are levelled squarely at those who can least afford it. They are levelled squarely at those on the lowest incomes. They are levelled squarely at people who will now pay the GP tax and who will now suffer in every way.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43 and the debate may be resumed at a later hour. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.