Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank you for the opportunity to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-15 and cognate bills today. There is no hiding the fact that there has been some very highly vocal and predominantly negative reaction to the budget both before it came down and at the time it came down. I had concerns as well. In hindsight, I think we could have handled it better. I made this very public argument that we could have focused on a lot of the positives rather than on just the negatives, because people are genuinely concerned. But there is no doubt about it that the reason we are now in government and not the other side is that people realised that it had got out of control. They were desperate for somebody who was responsible to come in and clean up the mess and get the house back in order.

We had a similar challenge back in 1996. This budget is a tough budget, but it is a fair budget. We did it back in 1996 and I am confident that we can do it again. At the end of the day, as I say, when the party is over somebody has got to come in and clean up the mess. And that is what we are doing now. I believe this is a responsible budget. The previous government ran up five record deficits and left $123 billion in future deficits and, without policy change, our debt was going to reach about $667 billion. We are certainly repairing the budget and, in so doing, will strengthen the economy.

Instead of having Labor deficits of more than $30 billion in 2017-18, it will be down to less than $3 billion. That in itself will be quite an achievement. I recognise that the saving measures that we are putting forward will affect every sector of our society. By sharing the load, we certainly lighten it for everyone.

I have been asked a number of times what the budget means. My honest answer is that, as Chair of the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia, the coalition's commitment to the development of Northern Australia fills me with a great deal of confidence. When we put down the report—and the white paper will come out at the end of this year—there will be a requirement for infrastructure funding. What chance would we have had if the deficit continued to go north? What chance would we have had if our government debt continued in that $600 billion northern spiral? Everything is coming down, which gives me a great deal of confidence that, in the 2015 budget, there will be something there for infrastructure to get the Northern Australia white paper becoming a reality. I can tell you now that there are many people in our region who are really looking forward to that. This budget sets the theme, if you like, to allow us to provide significant funding to make it become a reality.

When you look at what is in the budget now, there is another big difference. The others were throwing around promises like confetti, with $200-odd million for the peninsular development—all this money was going everywhere. But when you looked behind it there were no dollars there. It was no more than a piece of paper.

In this budget we have recognised projects of great significance and great importance. The first one is $6.7 billion for the Bruce Highway. I know you have also been actively involved in this campaign, Mr Deputy Speaker, with the eastern seaboard members. Now the money is actually in the tin and ready to be spent. It includes $46.4 million for the Cairns Southern Access Corridor from Robert Road through to Foster Road. There is money to complete the job which was incomplete when we came in—they did not have enough to complete the job, so we are putting money into that as well.

We have actually put the cash in the tin now for $210 million of Cape York infrastructure. These are little projects which are very important to us. The Mossman Botanical Gardens is something Alan Carle and Peter Wood and their team have been working on. It is a fantastic initiative to set up botanical gardens in a little place called Mossman, north of Port Douglas, basically featuring all the flowering trees of the Daintree Rainforest. We have put in $1.4 million to allow them to acquire the site. Again, it is money in the bank, not hollow promises which never materialise.

It is great to see that we got the    Black Spot funding. It was our initiative and has had an amazing impact on safety on our roads. In the Roads to Recovery program, bitumen has been laid throughout local authority areas—again, a coalition initiative which we continue to support. With the remote airstrips program, I got a call today from the CEO from Pormpuraaw very concerned because Senator McLucas had put out a press release saying that we are going to cut it. It just shows you how little the other side understand what budgets are all about. We had actually budgeted the funding for 2014-15 and then we will be looking at priorities after that. Of course we are funding that. At the moment, Kowanyama air strip is in the final stage and that is all they have to look at—their next-door neighbour. They are doing the work. Lockhart River is doing the work. Again, Senator McLucas and shadow minister Albanese are scaremongering about it. But people know better. They see what is happening on the ground.

There is an investment of    $42 million in the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at JCU. That money is now in the bank. We have budgeted for it, we have made the commitment, we have now locked it in. Cairns and the Torres Strait will benefit from a large chunk of this funding. Money is in the bank for the seawalls I have been talking about for the last three years, in spite of the fact that the other mob had promised it for years and years. Even when they eventually put out the press release, there was absolutely no money. That money is in the tin and they are starting the work right now.

We have been raising insurance for a long time. The response from the other side after the flood inquiry at the beginning of 2012 when there were nine recommendations—if they had taken the nine recommendations at the time, the problem may well have fixed itself. Rather than that, they played politics with it and blamed the state government. Then they said, 'Let's fix it with stamp duty for state governments.' That was the only recommendation they took out of it. They said, 'We'll have a look at it,' but they made it so constrained that nothing could come out of it.

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As another Queenslander sitting on the other side, you should be ashamed. Three years we had to wait until we got into government before we started to do something about it. Now the $12½ million will be going through to allow strata titles and body corporates to assess their properties and to shop around for insurance—a major step. The government actuarial report coming out I understand in the next couple of weeks will show very clearly the insurance companies in a very bad light.

There are a number of other initiatives that we are putting in there as well, that I have no doubt at all about. The aggregator website that is going in there was very effective when it was used in Europe. I am assured that these will actually make a difference. I can assure you that we have a lot more in our back pocket. I put the insurance companies on notice. They had better start coming to the table, because there is a lot of other stuff that will come there. If they are not prepared to play ball now, there are a lot of other things that will be legislated to make sure that they do. It would be nice to see the other side actually taking it a little bit more seriously. In the middle of an election campaign we had the former Prime Minister walk into Townsville and say, 'Insurance—there's a problem. I will make another promise.' But what did she do about it? She did absolutely nothing. I can assure you that one way or another we are going to fix this problem.

Mental health is another one which has been one of my babies for a long time. It is great to see that I was able to get the funding to continue the Cairns Mental Health Carers Support Hub, which has been finally sorted out. Adrianne Hicks has been absolutely brilliant. I would also like to congratulate Jeremy Audas, the CEO of the Mental Illness Fellowship North Queensland, based in Townsville. He has been a fabulous advocate. It is great to see. This will allow us to get a clubhouse established in Cairns and to fit another piece in the jigsaw of mental health. We also have additional funding for headspace—$14.9 million to establish another 10 headspace sites and carry out another two-year evaluation. We also have $18 million to establish—and this one is very important—a National Centre for Excellence in Youth Mental Health, an area where we desperately need some help.

In the Torres Strait—instead of taking assets out of areas, as we have seen with border protection and the mess that the other mob created—we are moving back into these areas and securing these borders. There are three new vessels being built to deal with the problems up there. They will deal with the current challenges. It is great to see the Customs and Border Protection Service moving to establish a northern coordinator role effectively as one operation, because there has always been a problem with agencies talking to each other and bringing a level of coordination. It is about time, and I congratulate the minister on bringing that together.

Youth unemployment is another issue. We have record youth unemployment in our area. The budget includes $146 billion in welfare spending; $12.2 billion will be spent on assistance for the unemployed and the sick. While we have higher unemployment in our area, let me tell you that there are lots of jobs there. A lot of jobs, though, are filled by backpackers coming into the area, in dairy, fruit-picking and areas like that. There is no reason why our young people cannot be expected to go up there and do that work. Okay, it is only temporary work, but at the end of the day it allows them to get something in their resume to show they have actually turned up and done a day's work. It does not necessarily need to be full-time. Employers look at that to say, 'Yes, they are work ready.' That encourages them to do something else.

In Cairns there is a major problem for a lot of our young people. My son is in the same situation. He is 20 years of age and in university there. He cannot get a job for the love of money. Why can't he get a job? If he was under 18, he would be a junior and have a chance McDonald's and places like that. But if he is over 18 and he can only work on weekends or public holidays or at night-time, because of the inflexibility in the working arrangements—we are predominantly a tourism area, which means we have to be open when the tourists want us to be open—they cannot afford to employ people like that. So another area that we need to continue to work on is flexibility in the workplace, to allow young people like my son and many others to get an opportunity to do a bit of work.

I can say to you without a doubt that there are a lot of opportunities outside the region. I started my working life cleaning toilets in a railway station. It did not worry me at all. I did it well and it provided me an opportunity to do something else. We need to encourage people to do that. It is great to see that we have a Work for the Dole program going in Cairns. That is another way for people to get in there and start their working program, to get their work ethic established. It is fantastic to see that we are giving them a hand up and encouraging people to get in and to do this work. I am very excited about that.

There is also a lot of other work there. There is a scare campaign about the age pension, but the age pension is not being touched. And the pension supplement is not being touched despite what Labor says about that.

There are a whole range of other initiatives. Consolidating Aboriginal affairs and bringing it under the umbrella of a much smaller group means there will be more money on the ground instead of being blown out through bureaucratic processes.

Tourism funding is great news as well. In the 2014-15 budget there is $130 million in base funding for Tourism Australia and $13.5 million towards Asian marketing. Tourism Tropical North Queensland, Tourism Australia, the National Tourism Alliance and the Tourism and Transport Forum all agree that the government understands the economic importance of their industry. Of course, there is money in there as well for the Great Barrier Reef, which is also important. There are a small items like the $400,000 for CCTV in our community, which I think is important.

The Rudd-Gillard government's six years of chaos, of waste and mismanagement, delivered higher taxes, record boat arrivals and debt and deficit as far as the eye could see. I think our economic action strategy, delivered through the budget, will strengthen the economy. It will create jobs and it will reduce Labor's debt to almost $300 billion. We need to take action now or an even greater burden will fall on our community in the future. We are committed in this budget to clearing up the Labor Party's mess. I commend the bill to the House.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a budget that was built on lies and broken promises. But what is really disturbing is that it has perhaps hurt the Australian psyche and the Australian community to the point where there really is no faith and trust in the political system. Before the election Tony Abbott made it his tenet in his life, of his whole being and reputation, that he personally would restore faith in the political system. He went out to the Australian people and said, 'I'll restore faith. There'll be no broken promises.' This was not a man playing at the edges. Sometimes people make promises, believing they will carry them through, but circumstances change. Sometimes through compromise and negotiation in the political system what you intend and set out to do does not end up being that way. Sometimes that is called a broken promise, and I can understand how the community feel about that.

But with this budget I think the Prime Minister set out with no intention of doing this. It is clear to me from the myriad broken promises, the vast number of broken promises, that the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, did not have an intention of ever keeping any of them. He wilfully and deliberately went out and just said anything. It just did not matter. There were the three word slogans 'we'll restore faith' and 'we'll not break any promises'. How can you say you will not break any promises? How can anyone ever say that? How can anyone say, 'We will not break any promises'?

I remember when the Prime Minister gave an absolute ironclad guarantee that promises would not be broken—and then he turned around and broke them. I think that has done grave damage to the Australian psyche, the Australian community and public perceptions of our institutions. But that is nothing compared to the damage done to ordinary people. This is a government that promised to help people, to do a whole range of things, and it has not done that. It is a government that promised to deliver so much but delivers so little. It is a government that has broken its promises to the elderly. It has broken its promises to students. It has broken its promises to pensioners. It has broken its promises to families. It has broken its promises to workers. It has broken its promises to the sick. It has broken its promises to small businesses and to superannuants in the protections provided through the Future of Financial Advice legislation. It has broken its relationship with the states. You can ask the states if they think there are some broken promises. I think the Liberal states will tell you that Tony Abbott lied to them as well. They were not of the view that there would be broken promises of the magnitude—or broken promises at all—

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would just remind the member for Oxley that, when you are making allegations about a particular person, there are substantive motions that can be used for those sorts of things in other parts of the House. Just be very carefully about how you are saying things.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Absolutely, Mr Deputy Speaker Jones, I will. I think it is a matter of public record and a matter of many speeches in this place.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is about how you are phrasing it.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, and it will be. I will be careful. In fact, I do not have to be too careful because I am being accurate; I am not doing or saying anything other than Tony Abbott lied to the Australian people. He did it—

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would caution you very strongly about that and it could be taken—

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would not be the first person to have said that.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just be aware that you are warned there.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And I do recall a time when many others in this place have said similar things. Tony Abbott and the government broke their promises on education funding, on schools, on universities, on hospitals. I know it is difficult for people to hear this; I know it is hard. The truth is sometimes the hardest thing to hear. When it is just presented to you in cold, hard day light, you look at it and ask: how can this be? How can so many promises have been made—that there would be no broken promises, that there would be no cuts in school funding, that there would be new taxes without an election—and then broken? Well, it depends, if you redefine what a tax is, but the Australian people have no question as to the definition of what all of these things are and they are all broken promises.

One promise I remember was the returning of adults to the parliament. I am yet to see the adults come in. That is a pretty big broken promise. Tony Abbott promised to return the adults to the parliament. Where are they? Where are the adults? We see the farcical nature of what happens with the conduct of the House be it with the Speaker of the House and the concern that the Labor Party has in the conduct of the Speaker or whether it be the conduct of ministers, the Prime Minister or others. I do not think this promise was made to the Australian people nor do they think it is the promise that was made to them. I cannot see the return of the adults. If we just focused on that one promise, I would be upset enough and I am sure the Australian people are. I cannot remember before the election a promise to introduce a fuel tax. I do not remember that promise but, if that promise was made, it was kept and it would be the only promise that was kept. But I am sure you could scour through all the words that were said and that promise was not kept. There are some things that are promises or are not promises. There are some things which just are Orwellian in nature. For example, in Australia we all know colloquially if you are short, you are called tall; if you are tall, you are called 'Shortie'; if you have got red hair, you are called 'Blue'; and if you are Prime Minister, you are called the Prime Minister for women—and I think that says a lot.

Even the Liberals and the Nationals are nervous. They are very nervous; we can see it in their eyes, their speeches, their actions every single day. They are nervous about this budget because they know when they go out to their electorates they can use whatever words they like but when Liberal Party members and Nationals members go out and talk to real people in the street—their electors—their electors say, 'You broke promises.' That is what they say. The Liberals and the community know that this is not the budget that Tony Abbott promised at the election. This is not the government that Tony Abbott promised at the election either.

Where are the adults? Where is the consumer confidence that was promised? Let me tell you a very startling statistic, which I checked yesterday. Consumer confidence after the budget hit 99.3 on the scale. To understand what that means, it means it has gone below the neutral point. That has not happened since the GFC. It has not been that low since the GFC, May 2009. During our time in government, the Labor government, it averaged around 113. It averaged on par or above average. Consumer confidence was actually good, which meant the economy was strong, which meant people were in work, which meant businesses could stay open. I remember Tony Abbott promising that consumer confidence would be up. There would be a miraculous turnaround and that we were open for business, but why are doors shutting? Why is consumer confidence down, business confidence down? Why is confidence down in this Prime Minister and in this government?

Unemployment at the election was 5.8 per cent. Unemployment today is 5.8 per cent. It is not good enough; it is about the same. In a budget emergency maybe there would be some change, maybe there should be some difference. I remember Tony Abbott the Liberals promising a miraculous turnaround. It would be lower. It does not seem lower; it seems the same. Is what the government saying is they cannot do any better?

Is that what they are saying: they can't do any better? When we left government last year, interest rates were at 2.5 per cent—historically low; very good. That is really good. Why is it good? Because it means that people get to pay their mortgages and, as long as they have a job, at lower interest rates, people are fairly safe, and that is a pretty good thing. Interest rates today are at 2.5 per cent—they are the same; they are not lower; they are just the same. And I suspect that they will stay about the same, give or take a little bit, over the coming while. Could it possibly be that Tony Abbott is no better at interest rates than we were? So what does that mean—that he is no better at the economy? He is no better at something.

Turning to consumer confidence—here is a difference: consumer confidence is down. It is down markedly. When we left government—and this is a very telling story—government debt to GDP was 12 per cent. But today, miraculously, it is much more. Today it is 13 per cent to 14 per cent. What has changed in eight or nine months? What could possibly have changed to make debt worse, to make debt more? It is that the government has deliberately added to debt. They have deliberately changed the assumptions on debt. They have actually made our economy worse by making it worse themselves. What does that do? It makes things worse. Does it make it look like there is a budget emergency? Not according to the Parliamentary Budget Office or Phil Bowen. It does not actually make it worse. He says that there is no budget emergency—his words: 'no budget emergency'.

So what we have in front of us is a government and a Prime Minister willing to say anything and do anything—to swing the wrecking ball. They have, for the past three years, just wrecked the joint. It was a simple proposition: wreck the joint; wreck everything; destroy consumer confidence. Even with all of that, we managed, with a hung parliament, to succeed in terms of keeping the economy strong, keeping people in jobs, keeping interest rates low, making sure that students had opportunities and making sure that small business grew.

And guess what? There were actually more small businesses during our time in office than there had ever been in the past. The number grew faster and there was an addition of small businesses. But what was even more startling about that figure was that there were more small businesses actually making more money than there were small businesses making less money.

That was the case because Labor understood that, if you are going to help the economy grow, and you believe in small business—you believe that they are the engine room of the economy and the employer of people in the economy—then you assist them and you assist them directly. You make sure that at key, critical times you are not wasting money on them; you are investing in small business. If you invest in small business, they get to employ people and keep their doors open and keep our economy strong. We did that, through some very good and deliberate things.

Labor has got a fantastic track record on that. I know that that might sound strange, particularly to the Liberal Party. But what did the Liberal Party do when it came to government? The first thing it did was to attack its friends, the small business people. It ripped away $4 billion worth of direct assistance. It took away the tax loss carry back. It took away a whole range of assistance that was there and, even worse, it not only said, 'We are going to take away, directly, money and assistance that helps you to operate and employ people,' but also it took away services and programs—important ones.

Who in their right mind would ever cut Commercialisation Australia? This is the group charged with helping small business to get from entrepreneurship and innovation to the next big step forward. Every time you hear any member in this place talking about innovation they always go, 'It's great; we're great innovators but we can't get to commercialisation.' Well, that was Commercialisation Australia's role, and it did it really well. Take the Innovation Investment Fund—innovation investment: surely that is a good thing for the economy? Surely you would invest in people? Then there was Australian Industry Participation, because industry came to us in government and said, 'When there are really large contracts, it is foreign companies that come in; they get the lion's share and Australian industry misses out.' We said, 'You will need to compete and compete fairly, but we might set up a program which means there has to be a participation plan.' It was well accepted. It was a good program, by the way—really good. Gone! Enterprise Solutions—gone. Industry innovation councils—gone. Enterprise Connect—gone. Industry innovation precincts—gone. What does this tell you about this government, as to all this innovation and enterprise? One, that they do not care about it, and, two, that it is not one of their priorities.

In the few minutes that I have left, I will talk about—as painful as it is, because it is painful—how it is the ordinary people that pay the highest price. It is the elderly. It is those who will be paying an extra $7 as a new GP tax—a tax that no-one heard about before the election—every time they go to the doctor, get a scan or pick up their prescriptions. It is students who will have to pay a lot, lot more, pay it back quicker and pay higher interest rates. Getting the budget back in order does not mean you have to slug students, who are some of the poorest citizens in the country. Certainly you would not be slugging pensioners. Certainly you would not be using tricky words. The Prime Minister or the government would not be using tricky words around pensioners because pensioners, in my view, are a no-go zone for these sorts of changes. That was the promise that was made before the election, that there would be no change for pensioners—nothing, no touching pensions. That promise was clear to me and I think it was clear to every single pensioner in this country.

It was clear to families that nothing would get changed in terms of family tax benefit A or B. Guess what? They are getting slugged as well. The sick, the elderly, workers and people looking for a job are too. We are supposed to be helping people. Isn't that the idea? If you want a strong economy, 5.8 per cent unemployment is too high—whatever the figure is, it is too high—but people will have to keep working. The reality is there are people out there looking for work and they want work. The problem is there are not enough jobs to provide for all of them. In the meantime, government have a duty as does the community, because we are in a good society and we have a rich country, and we should acknowledge that. I am sure plenty of people around this parliament could look and go 'tut, tut, tut' and all the rest of it, but the reality is we do have great country.

I just cannot wait for the one time when Tony Abbott as Prime Minister of this country stands up and backs Australia, in a speech here, overseas or anywhere, and says something good about the country, something good about the economy, something good about workers, something good about pensioners and something good about all the people who built this country. My challenge to the Prime Minister is to go out there just once and say something good about Australia—back your own country when you go overseas and say good things about your country. This is a disgraceful budget and it should be condemned.

Peter Hendy (Eden-Monaro, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the five appropriation bills before the House. It gives me an opportunity to speak about the government's plan for jobs and to build a strong and prosperous economy. These bills are the core of the budget that was delivered two weeks ago. Some may disagree, but the fact that the budget is still a matter for debate and remains a key national focus is a good thing. Normally budgets recede very quickly from the public debate. Sometimes they disappear within a matter of a couple of days. The fact that this one is still front page news means that the media and the Australian community regard it as important to debate economic issues and the state of the Australian economy. As an economist, I think that is a good thing. As the member for Eden-Monaro seeking to implement good policy on behalf of my constituents, I also think it is a good thing. I first worked in the federal Treasury 30 years ago and I am probably one of the few people in Australia who has read every federal budget for the last 30 years. This budget is one of the most purposeful and strong budgets I have seen for 30 years. It is a true watershed in the economic management of this country.

The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments' six years of chaos, waste and mismanagement delivered higher taxes, record boat arrivals and debt and deficit as far as the eye can see. Labor's debt is already costing us about $1 billion a month in net interest payments, and that is borrowed money. No country can go on paying the mortgage from the credit card. One billion a month, or basically $12 billion a year, would be better spent on what the people need. It would fund, say, more than 10 new base hospitals a year—that is year on year. I would prefer it if we did not spend that on interest but on health, education or social services, the sorts of things that the people of Eden-Monaro want.

The problem is that if we do not fix the problem now it will worsen. It would rise to $2.8 billion a month in 10 years time. This is the problem that Labor left us. You cannot keep borrowing on the credit card to pay the interest on the mortgage. You cannot keep paying interest on the interest. We are pushing on and, in the absence of any alternative, we expect parliament to support our plan, otherwise the situation will just get much worse in the future. The tough decisions we are taking now are necessary to avoid even tougher decisions having to be made in the future. Under Labor, the jobless queues grew by over 200,000, a stark contrast to the growth in jobs of more than 250,000 under the Howard government.

The measures outlined in the budget are absolutely necessary to secure Australia's economic future. The budget outlines a clear plan—in fact, the only plan—that will address Labor's debt and deficit disaster. Instead of having Labor's deficit of over $30 billion in financial year 2017-18, it comes in at under $3 billion. We have taken, up front, a lot of tough but vital decisions for the country's future.

Let's remember the problem that the government is trying to fix. When the coalition last left office in 2007, Australia had a $20 billion surplus and $50 billion in the bank, but over six years Labor squandered this and ran up five record deficits and a further $123 billion in projected deficits and gross debt headed towards $667 billion. Now the Labor Party is desperately trying to scare people by spreading untruths about the budget. For example, they will not tell you that funding for schools and hospitals increases each and every year under our budget and that the rate of the pension will continue to go up twice a year, every year.

I want to address a few issues that have been part of the debate in the last fortnight. There have been ridiculous claims about so-called cuts to education and health spending. Nothing would be further from the truth. The budget does not cut funding for health. Annual federal assistance to the states for public hospitals will increase by more than nine per cent every year for the next three years and by more than six per cent in the 4th year. This is a 40 per cent increase over the next four years. We are increasing funding for states to run public hospitals by more than $5 billion or 36 per cent from $13.8 billion in 2013-14 to $18.9 billion in 2017-18. Overall, annual health spending will increase by more than $10 billion or 16 per cent from $64.5 billion in 2013-14 to $74.8 billion in 2017-18. The government is also putting the growth in health spending on a more sustainable trajectory from 2017-18, but every year it will continue to grow.

Let me also say a few words about GP co-payments. From 1 July 2015, previously bulk billed patients will contribute $7 towards the cost of standard GP consultations. Ten years ago, we were spending $8 billion a year on Medicare; today we are spending $20 billion. So we are asking everyone to make a modest contribution to ensure that Medicare is sustainable for the long term. A strong safety net will be put in place. Concession cardholders and children under 16 will only pay the contribution for the first 10 visits each year. The government will not waste this money. Every dollar of savings in health expenditure in the budget will be re-invested back into the Medical Research Future Fund. But there is a very important point to make here. The government is not introducing a co-payment as much as re-introducing it. Prime Minister Bob Hawke actually introduced it in the 1991 budget. He and his health minister, Brian Howe, fully supported it. Someone else who has supported it is the member for Fraser, who also happens to be the shadow Assistant Treasurer. He is supposedly the brains trust for the Labor Party's economic team. When he was studying for his PhD, which he got in 2004—not that long ago—he argued in relation to a co-payment that, to quote from a 14 April 2003 article in the Sydney Morning Herald:

A just doctor's fee will aid the needy but deter the frivolous.

This article is worth quoting at length. He said:

But there's a better way of operating a health system, and the change should hardly hurt at all. As economists have shown, the ideal model involves a small co-payment—not enough to put a dent in your weekly budget, but enough to make you think twice before you call the doc. And the idea is hardly radical. Countries with a co-paying public health system include Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

He went on to say:

In 1991 Australia introduced the perfect co-payment system—$2.50 …

He further wrote:

Converting the 1991-92 scheme into today's money would be equivalent to $3.50.

That was in 2003. One would say that 10 years after that article was written the figure might be, say, $7. What a coincidence. Finally, he wrote about our co-payment:

It would be enough to deter the GP visits but not enough to limit genuine preventative care. Everyone, including pensioners, should pay.

The Shadow Assistant Treasurer says that he no longer supports this policy and that he was a naive university student back when he wrote those comments. He does himself a disservice. For my sins, I have also done a PhD. Can I tell the House that a PhD usually involves a minimum of four years research where you grapple with the subject day after day, coming to grips with every argument, every nuance and every alternative argument. And after four years you come to a considered decision. It would appear that in the space of four weeks the shadow minister has dumped four years of careful consideration. Political expediency will do that to you.

Let me now turn to education. Commonwealth funding for our schools will continue to increase each and every year. Students and schools will benefit from the government's record funding investment of $64.5 billion over the next four years. We are putting in place other reforms to improve the quality of teaching, because money is not the only answer to better schools. From 2013-14 to 2017-18, total Commonwealth funding to all schools in Australia will have increased by 34 per cent, a $4.6 billion increase. This is over $1.2 billion more than Labor would have spent over the next four years. From 2018 there will be a stable and sustainable system for schools funding based on the CPI plus growth in school enrolments. But every year schools funding will continue to go up and up.

Our proposed deregulation of universities will ensure that Australia's higher education system is not left behind by global competition. Our goal is to ensure Australia has one of the very best higher education systems. Our higher education reforms expand opportunities for students. For the very first time, alternative pathways to higher education are provided by providing direct financial support to all students studying diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degree courses. This will open up higher education to around 80,000 more students by 2018.

Finally, let me make some comments about Labor's scare campaign. Even if you are prepared to swallow their rhetoric, you have to ask the salient question: if they are saying we have cut $80 billion out of health and education funding then please tell us where on earth is Labor going to find the $80 billion to meet such fantastic election promises? Are they going to make $80 billion in expenditure cuts? Are they going to raise $80 billion in further taxation? Or are they going to simply raise $80 billion in increased borrowings? That is the question for the Leader of the Opposition and his team. The time is fast running out when they can hide behind rhetoric.

I listened very carefully to the Leader of the Opposition's and the shadow Treasurer's speeches in reply to the budget. Neither offered any alternative plans to deal with Australia's debt and deficit problems. Indeed, they are in complete denial. We know they are opposed to most things proposed by the government. A week or so back, the Treasurer produced a detailed list of $40 million in budget repair measures that Labor is opposing in the Senate. Since then, the deputy opposition leader has reconfirmed that the Labor Party will meet a 0.5 per cent of gross national income target on foreign aid. That will be a trifling $16 billion in additional expenditure over four years. Where is that money coming from? At the National Press Club the shadow Treasurer rabbited on about the innovative world of crowdsource financing. I can tell the shadow Treasurer: that is not going to fix the debt situation hurtling towards $667 billion or $25,000 for each man, woman and child in the country.

The fact that Labor does not admit that there is a debt and deficit problem is mind-boggling. They have learnt nothing from the chaos in the last six years. They still have not realised that the fundamental reason they lost government after only two terms is that the people of Australia did not trust them with control over the budget and the economy. Until they accept that, they will simply be a destructive force in our polity and not a positive one working in the national interest.

In conclusion, let me say: the government is making decisions that repair the budget, strengthen the economy and prepare Australia for the long-term challenges before us. As I said earlier, these bills are part of the recovery plan to put the budget back on track and to reverse the growth in unemployment. I support the bills before the House.

Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak about the impact of this budget, across the country and particularly in my electorate of Richmond in northern New South Wales. I want to talk about how it is going to impact regional areas, where I feel it will be very harsh and very severe. That has been the feedback I have received from many people since the budget was first announced.

It is a budget of many broken promises, and I will run through some of those in detail a bit later on. Many locals were concerned about the many broken promises but they were also concerned about the number of really cruel cuts and unfair increases in the cost of living. It has impacted a lot of people in my region; some people are really quite terrified of how it is going to affect their day-to-day living and their cost of living. They feel quite betrayed by the budget, as I said, because of the broken promises. There were commitments made by the Prime Minister of no cuts to health or education or changes to the pension, and that is why many locals in my area are now quite concerned about it.

Pensioners particularly are doing it really tough, as are local families. This budget will impact them quite severely. People in my area feel that betrayal not just from the Prime Minister but also from the National Party. The area has traditionally had quite a lot of National Party members—indeed state-wide and throughout the North Coast there are National Party members. They feel betrayed by them. People are saying: this is what we see Liberal-National governments do; they cut services and pensions, and increase taxes. So they feel betrayed and they are also quite distraught.

I have been inundated by so many people who are concerned about the budget that we are now holding a very large public rally. People want an opportunity to voice their concerns and to pass them on to the Prime Minister, to the Liberal Party and to the National Party. This rally is called 'Fighting for a fair go for the North Coast'. We are holding it on Thursday, 12 June at 10 o'clock at the Tweed Heads Civic Centre. We have been inundated with many people who are keen to come along and talk about the impacts of some of these changes, particularly things like the GP tax, the petrol tax and the cuts to pensions and family benefits. As I said, a lot of older people are particularly interested. But many families are also going to be coming along to this rally too. I welcome anyone who wants to come along, from right around the area and outside the electorate, and I will be happy to pass on all of their concerns.

I would like to read an email I received only last night, from a gentleman in Kyogle. Kyogle is a town outside of my electorate of Richmond—it is actually in Page right next door, an electorate currently held by a National Party member—but I felt that parts of this email really reflected the concerns of many people on the North Coast. This fellow said:

The Liberal federal budget cuts to pensions, concessions and lowering to CPI will cause me to be unable to pay rates, afford car rego, electricity and phone. I am already living at the bare minimum, and this will cause me to be homeless by having to default on bills and council rates and have the council resume my home and be awarded costs, leaving me to live on the street, without even a car to sleep in as rego will be unaffordable.

He then goes on to talk about the impact of the GP tax; the impacts of the cut to Newstart for his niece and nephew; and the grave concerns he holds for his mother and how it will impact her. He also talks about how the petrol excise will make it even harder for him, because it will become a lot more expensive to run a car in a regional area. Reading through that email, it was quite distressing to see how it was going to impact this fellow and his family. I asked him if I could read some of this letter out today so the House would be aware of how people are feeling genuinely worried about some of these cuts. So I thank that gentleman from Kyogle who raised all of those concerns with me.

It is a budget of broken promises. I would like to run through some of those broken promises and what the actual announcements were in comparison to the commitments we had before the election.

First of all, we had the Prime Minister, back on 6 September last year, saying, 'No change to pensions.' Yet now, from the budget, we have a new indexation system for pensions. We know that indexation will change to CPI and that will also include age, disability, carers' pensions, parenting payments and veterans' payments.

Those pension cuts are really going to impact people, particularly in my electorate, across all of those areas, but especially with the age pension; these people are living week to week. And let us remember that these are the people who built our nation. They are very concerned about these cuts to their pension and are also very concerned about the freeze to the means-test thresholds on pensions. They are very worried, particularly because there was that previous commitment.

Also, when we get to taxes there is a lot of worry in my area, particularly about the petrol tax. Of course, in regional areas you are impacted even more because you often have to travel further distances, no matter where you may be going or what you might be doing. We heard the Prime Minister, back on 20 November 2012, say: 'We're about reducing taxes, not increasing taxes. We're about getting rid of taxes, not imposing new taxes.' As I said, that was in November 2012. Yet with this budget we are seeing this new tax in the petrol tax which, again, really impacts regional areas, and the House has to understand how severely it will impact there.

Health is a very, very big concern in my electorate. Again, we had the Prime Minister say on 6 September that there would be no cuts to health. So to see the expanse of cuts to health has been really distressing, again, for many seniors. I think it is across a whole range of issues. We have the ripping out of $50 billion in relation to hospitals which will flow on in terms of the services that they can deliver. Who knows what imposts there might be in terms of seeing emergency rooms or the number of beds that are cut? There are a whole range of concerns there. But, without a doubt, it is the $7 GP tax or 'doctor tax' that people will have to pay that is of concern. We heard the Prime Minister say that it is just a modest amount of money. But I think that shows that he is out of touch with these concerns. These people are terrified. These are elderly people with sometimes complex health needs and they are having to pay this money when they go to the doctor, or get X-rays or blood tests. They are really worried about that because, obviously, that is the time of your life when you do have increasing health needs. Our families with young children are just as worried as well, when they have to go to the doctor or access some sort of health care; they are worried too. In fact, I hear, right throughout my electorate, of people actually cancelling appointments with the doctor because they are concerned that it is already in place. If people do not access that important primary health care it can have a huge flow-on effect. It could lead on to very complex problems. People are also worried about the increase in PBS co-payments. Again, for everyone, but particularly for elderly people, that can mean a huge amount in terms of the money they will have to be paying. So those broken promises on health are devastating, and particularly devastating in regional areas.

We also see cuts to schools and education. This is, quite frankly, heartbreaking. Again, we had the Prime Minister, on 6 September, saying, 'No cuts to education.' Yet now we will see over $181 million cut from education over five years. We see this reduced indexation, also, of federal government payments. That is just devastating for kids, again in regional areas, particularly when you compare it to when we were in government, and the massive investments we made in our schools, whether it was through the Building the Education Revolution or through the many plans or through the Gonski reforms. They were wide-ranging. It was about recognising the value of education and making sure that all kids, no matter where they lived, had access to all those very important educational outcomes that they should be able to get. We understand how important that is.

Let us look at another cut, which I think is devastating—the cut to family payments. Again, I will quote the Prime Minister, when he said, in May 2011, that a dumb way to cut spending would be to threaten family benefits or to means test them further. Yet we are seeing cuts to family tax benefits A and B, and we are seeing reducing eligibility for part B as well. This of course, again, will also be devastating for families, because we know how important those payments are. So there are many cuts in this budget that will impact on families right across the board, from family payments to health.

Another cut which has had a big impact and which a lot of people in my area are concerned about are those cuts to the ABC. We are seeing cuts not just to the ABC but also to the Australia Network, which provides a very vital service. I do want to focus, when it comes to the ABC, on how it could potentially impact on areas like mine and on the regional ABC, which provides an outstanding service. The ABC within my area is very vital, as it is to many communities. I hear frequently in regional and rural communities how important it is. There are major cuts: we are looking at over $232 million to be cut across the board from the ABC. I am very worried about the potential impact on our local ABC and what that might mean.

I would like to move to some of the cuts that impact young people in my area across a range of issues. First of all, the cuts to programs like Youth Connections are really devastating. At a time of rising youth unemployment, we are seeing cuts to programs designed to help young people get into the workforce and prevent them from slipping through the cracks. We saw cuts to Youth Connections and a number of other programs as well. Indeed, the cuts that will impact the Byron news service were highlighted recently in the Byron Echo. It is an outstanding service that supports young people. Cuts to a program like Youth Connections impact programs like the Byron news service and the great support that they provide to people that are at risk of disengaging early from school to transition into vocational training and work. We are very worried about those particular cuts, and I think it will have a huge impact in my area as well.

It is just devastating when we look at some of those cuts to youth training and the billions of dollars that have been cut from apprenticeships and training and from the National Workforce Development Funds as well. All of these programs that are about providing support, services and training for young people are all gone, which will be quite devastating.

The deregulation of university course fees particularly worries me. The change on the interest payable on some of those loans will be devastating for young people, again, from regional areas. It can be quite difficult if you are from the country to get to university. I feel this makes it almost impossible for many of them now. They simply will not be able to afford these increases in university fees. Some of the amounts we are seeing are staggering. I hear from families whose dream was for their kids to get to uni and it is just not on their radar now. They know that it is not possible. I think that is particularly devastating for regional areas. We want our kids to be able to go to lots of universities and come back to these areas and stay in these areas but, for a lot of those kids, they will not be able to do that now. Again, I think that is a major cut. We saw the education minister say back in August 2012 that the coalition had no plans to increase university fees yet in this budget that is precisely what we saw. It is another broken promise that has upset many people throughout my area.

Some of the cuts will really impact senior people in my area. The termination of the National Partnership Agreement took more than $1.3 billion from rates and other discounts that pensioners get in relation to their public transport, electricity and water bills. For an area like mine, this is going to be absolutely devastating, particularly in the flow-on for seniors and some of the discounts they get for their rates. I will give you an example. In the Tweed Shire there are more than 8,000 pensioners who are eligible for rent rebates of more than $400. That is all under threat now with this particular national partnership having been terminated. Again, these people cannot afford increases with their rates rebates potentially being cut on top of everything else that I talked about today like the GP tax and the petrol tax.

I think the cuts to councils are even more devastating when you look at what has happened to the Financial Assistance Grants Scheme as well. For example, from an area such as Bellingen to the Tweed, right up to the border, you have got nine local council areas on the North Coast. They will lose $20 million in grants under these cuts in the budget. That is devastating for those rural and regional council areas that really rely on those financial assistance grants. It is a huge amount, $20 million. That money goes to vital services that local councils provide. Potentially, what option will these councils have? It may be that we will see rates rise because of the Abbott government's cuts to the Financial Assistance Grants Scheme. The end result may be that rates go up in all of these rural and regional areas. These are increases that people cannot afford on top of the many other cuts that we have seen. It is particularly devastating because these councils do a good job and having that cut will just devastate them and the services that we really need to see. Contrast that with when we were in government and the massive amount of investments we made in regional and rural areas to assist a whole range of projects. Without a doubt that is one of the big concerns. The budget really is a bit of disappointment for farming communities, particularly with the budget reducing Landcare funding. That is pretty devastating for many regional areas as well.

What we have seen is a whole range of broken promises and cruel cuts. The Labor Party is very committed to making sure we are fighting much of this. We are fighting to protect Medicare; we are opposing things like the petrol tax—we understand how devastating that will be. Right at the centre of that, as I say, is making sure that we preserve Medicare, which is so important throughout the country, particularly to areas like mine.

In conclusion, all of these budget cuts and broken promises have been of deep concern to the people of my electorate of Richmond, so much so that they were very keen to have a public rally, which, as I said, we are having on Thursday, 12 June at 10 am at the Tweed Heads Civic Centre. That is a great opportunity for people to come together and for elderly people to voice their concerns. They have asked me to pass those concerns on to the House once we have had that rally. As I said, those concerns are very wide ranging. We in the Labor Party are very proud to stand up for those people, all of those people who have been impacted severely by the budget, whether it be in health or in education. We will certainly stand with them and fight these very cruel and unfair budget cuts.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to speak on the appropriations bills. In the brief time available to me this morning, I want to make three points. Firstly, what we have before the House is an honest budget offering a credible path to surplus. Secondly, we have a budget which deals with the growing debt problem that we have been left as a legacy by the previous Labor government. Thirdly, we have a budget which introduces some strategic measures to deal with the volume of entitlement spending.

Let me turn firstly to the proposition that this is an honest budget offering a credible path back to surplus. That is a bit of a change, because we have had six years of dishonest budgets from the member for Lilley. Who can forget the 2012-13 budget, where he proudly said:

The four years of surpluses I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy—

et cetera et cetera. He continued:

This budget delivers a surplus this coming year, on time, as promised, and surpluses each year after that, strengthening over time.

This was, I am sorry to say, only part of his miserable track record of wildly missing his promised outcomes, year after year. In March 2008, the then Treasurer, the member for Lilley, promised a surplus of $21.7 billion. The final result for 2008-09 was a deficit of $27.1 billion. For 2010-11, he was up to his old tricks. He promised a deficit of $40.8 billion. He delivered a deficit that was $47.8 billion. In 2011-12, he promised a deficit of $22.6 billion. He delivered a deficit of $43.7 billion. And in 2013, of course, he promised a surplus of $1.5 billion and delivered a deficit of $18.8 billion. When Swannie delivered his budget speech in May 2012, we were coming to the end of the 2011-12 financial year, in which the federal government recorded a deficit of over $43 billion, yet he was promising, as he stood up at the dispatch box, an implausible turnaround of roughly $45 billion in just one year. Surely, even as he was delivering his speech, the member for Lilley could not have believed that he was laying out a credible plan, a plan he seriously thought he could deliver on.

By contrast, the 2014-15 budget does lay out a measured and credible path forward. It starts by recognising that we have inherited a legacy of spending dramatically ahead of revenue, with the latest estimates of the 2013-14 outcome being a deficit of around $50 billion. So that is the starting point that we have inherited from Swannie. This budget, delivered by the Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, lays out a four-year path to steadily reduce the deficit each year so that by 2017-18 it will have fallen to $2.8 billion. Over that four-year path, the underlying cash deficit is projected to be $60 billion over those four years, compared to the $123 billion it would have been had we stayed on the path that we inherited from Labor.

And, of course, the other key reason why this is a credible plan—as opposed to the series of completely implausible projections and plans delivered by the member for Lilley when he was the Treasurer—is that it is being delivered by the very same team, the very same side of politics, which in the Howard government years started out with a deficit of $6 billion in 1996-97, again inherited from the previous Labor government, turned it around and was soon delivering, year after year, a steady stream of surpluses and, in turn, gradually whittling away Labor's debt. It is a credible budget with a credible plan—a stark contrast to the dishonest fantasies perpetrated by the member for Lilley, year after year, during that grey and dismal time when this country was unfortunate enough to have him as our federal Treasurer.

Let me turn to the second proposition, which is that a core feature of this budget is that it seeks to come to grips with the debt problem that we have inherited from the previous government. The Labor Party left the Abbott government to deal with a huge debt legacy, with a debt projected to rise in gross terms to $667 billion by 2023-24. By contrast the path which is laid out under this budget will see gross debt in 2023-24 dramatically lower at $389 billion. But it is not just the numbers that matter here, it is the underlying attitude of the two sides of politics to the ballooning government debt which was Labor's plan. There is a fundamentally different philosophy on this side of the House about the importance of getting debt under control. By contrast, Labor's attitude is: 'Let's just keep putting it all on the credit card; we will worry about it later.' 'And why should we worry,' they say, 'because total debt to GDP ratio is low compared to many OECD countries.'

The opposition leader, in his budget reply speech, claimed that 'Australia is fundamentally strong and so is the legacy Labor left behind, with net debt peaking at just one-seventh of the level of the major advanced economies'. And doesn't that word 'just' do such a lot of work in that particular quote! Let me highlight three reasons why Labor's 'why worry?' approach is misguided. I argue that government debt matters very much, and that is why this Abbott-Hockey budget is taking the right approach. The first point of course is that, once you start to build debt, it gets harder and harder to turn it around. You know you should do something about it, you know you should tackle it, but you keep putting it off, you keep having deficit after deficit after deficit, and the debt keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government saw precisely this growing loss of discipline. Let us compare what the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government delivered and budgeted for over the period 2012-18 and what was achieved or planned for in a range of other countries. We saw government funding increase in real terms by 16 per cent, much higher than most comparable countries. For example, New Zealand had a seven per cent increase over that time, Sweden had a 10 per cent increase and Japan had a mere three per cent increase, yet here, under Labor's plans, we were merrily increasing spending by 16 per cent. Equally importantly, over that same period, we saw the Labor government planning for Australia's net debt as a percentage of gross domestic product to increase by some eight percentage points; it was going to get worse by some eight percentage points. That is a considerably worse performance than the US, Canada and Sweden and much worse than a wide range of countries where, over the same period, the ratio of net debt to GDP actually fell, actually improved. Of course, the countries in that category included Greece, Korea, Germany, Belgium and Austria.

The second reason why debt is fundamentally important, why Labor's 'why worry?' approach is so misguided, is that, as debt grows, the burden of serving it grows each year. This year our total interest-bearing liabilities are estimated to be $358 billion and the total interest expenditure for 2013-14 is going to be $14.4 billion. That is $14.4 billion that cannot be used on schools, roads, hospitals and all the other essential spending requirements faced by government. Let us remember that this money has to be repaid by individual taxpayers. According to the 2011-12 taxation statistics, the most recent ones published, there were 9.7 million individual taxpayers who each paid an average of $16,270 in tax. If we project that forward to 2013-14, we can estimate that covering that interest bill of $14.4 billion would use up all of the tax paid by 917,000 taxpayers. In other words, almost a million taxpayers are paying tax for no other purpose but to cover the interest payments on the debt that Labor has racked up. The other reason why debt is so important is that as your debt rises you are more vulnerable to a rise in interest rates. We are in a historically low interest rate period now but that will not last; these things never do. If rather than a 3.7 per cent interest rate or funding cost assumed in the current budget the rate had been five per cent then the interest bill for 2013-14 would have been nearly $20 billion.

The third reason why it is so important to get debt under control is that if you do not you risk getting yourself into a hole you simply cannot get out of. A magisterial piece of economic research was the book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Reinhart and Rogoff, released a year or two ago. They had this to say:

… excessive debt accumulation … often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom.

They went on to say:

… again and again countries take on excessive debt in good times and without enough awareness of the risks that will follow when the inevitable recession hits. Many players in the global financial system often dig a debt hole far larger than they can reasonably expect to escape from.

If only Swanny had read that book before he did some of the things he did.

You need only look at the difficulties faced by nations like Greece and Ireland when the financial markets insisted on austerity measures to get their ballooning debt under control. This budget is not an austerity budget, despite the overblown and hysterical claims from the Labor Party, but the best way to avoid being forced into drastic cuts in public expenditure is to keep your debt under control. I want to quote from an article in the Independent, the UK newspaper, which had this to say about the Greek government's austerity measures:

Greece's public hospital budget was cut by 25 per cent between 2009 and 2011 and public spending on pharmaceuticals has more than halved. … Rising unemployment in a country where health insurance is linked to work status has led to an estimated 800,000 people lacking either state welfare or access to health services and in some areas international humanitarian organisations … have stepped in to provide health care. …

We never want to be in such a position in this country, and that is why we are taking the actions we are taking in this budget.

That brings me to the third major point I want to highlight, some of the strategic measures being taken to deal with entitlement spending and ensure that that does not get out of control. Take, for example, the age pension, which constitutes almost 10 per cent of total Commonwealth expenditure. For many years the entitlement age for age pensions was 65, an age originally set by the German Chancellor Bismarck over 100 years ago at a time when only a very small percentage of people lived to that age. That became increasingly unviable as more and more people, happily, survived longer and longer. That is why a previous government took the wise decision to increase the pension age to 67. We have built on that reform direction in this budget by gradually increasing the age pension age to 70 by 2035 and by linking pension indexation to CPI movements from September 2017.

There is a range of other measures we are taking. For example, all payment eligibility thresholds will be maintained for three years from 1 July 2014 for non-pension payments and from 1 July 2015 for private health insurance rebate. There will also be a three-year temporary budget repair levy payable by individuals with a taxable income above $180,000 at a rate of two per cent. We would love to be able to say to the Australian people, 'We don't need to do any of this. We can just keep spending ever larger amounts of money in major program areas such as age pension without considering the long-term impact.' But the frank reality is that we just cannot keep going as we were. We need to take some strategic decisions to get our deficit and debt under control and this is vital to protect the capacity to continue to deliver very substantial spending on health, education and welfare and all the other incidents of a prosperous and civilised society. Bear in mind, despite the misleading claims from Labor, we are continuing to spend in these areas. In health, spending will rise from $64.5 billion this year to $74.9 billion by 2017-18.

Let me conclude by observing that this is a budget in which the coalition is demonstrating a responsible and determined attitude to manage our resources so that government can continue to support all who need its support but in a way so that we are not continuing down an unsustainable path of ever rising deficit and debt and an ever weaker capacity to sustain the social spending which government delivers. From Labor, we hear mere opportunistic political bleating. On this side, we are taking the responsible decisions that must be taken to secure our nation's future.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The previous speaker in relation to the budget spoke of entitlement spending and the fact that we should not let it get out of control. I want to say that one of the little commented upon aspects of this budget is the structural damage that the previous Liberal government did to the long-term budgetary situation in this country; of course, there are a variety of sources that we can cite in regard to this. Stephen Koukoulas noted in 2013:

If the current Labor government delivered growth in real government spending during its first five years in office at the same pace the Howard government had in the years from 2000-01, government spending would be almost 6% (or around $20 billion) greater in 2012-13 than is the case.

…   …   …

Had Labor spent at the same pace as the Howard government did from 2000-01, there would be no chance of a budget surplus in any year of the forward estimates out to 2015-16. The level of government debt, to the extent it matters, would be more than 50% larger by 2014-15.

He further noted:

Never once did the Howard government deliver a cut in real spending in any of its 12 budgets.

He also noted:

In simple terms, the facts show that in the five years from 2000-01, the Howard government increased real government spending by around 23%. In the five years from 2007-08, when Labor has controlled the budget purse strings, growth in real government spending has been a tick over 17%, including the 12.7% increase in 2008-09 when the GFC was bearing down on the Australian economy …

Quite clearly, that quote makes two points. The first is the reality of the global financial crisis. Paul Volcker, the former chair of the US Reserve Bank, had to put a book out in the last few months, apologising to the world for his understating of what was going to occur in the US due to the housing credit market collapse. He actually did notice a global financial crisis. Southern Europe is still enduring those problems. In Australia, a government had to act to protect jobs, to make sure people were trained, to make sure that when we did actually try to counter this international crisis that it was done through worthwhile construction. Koukoulas's comments, as I say, go to one point—the question of the previous Liberal government's contribution to our current economic problems, and the fact that the Labor figures have to be seen in the context of the global financial crisis and countering it. He is not the only person to make this point about a liberal dereliction of duty in regard to government expenditure.

The IMF—not necessarily a favourable institution to Labor Party philosophy—commented that real government spending grew faster in the last four years of the Howard government than at any time since the 1990s recession. The IMF noted statistically that only one spending decision of $1 billion or greater was made in the first Howard government budget but that somehow, miraculously, for some unknown reason, by the final budget they had reached a number of nine. One thinks somehow that this was perhaps due to the electoral cycle.

The profligacies of 2003 through to 2005-07 have been noted as among the worst instances of government spending in this country historically. That is from the IMF. They actually favour cutting back on welfare and support market deregulation and many other initiatives that are close to the hearts of those opposite, but they have said, in being objective, being analytical, looking at the real facts, that the long-term budget problems in this country have much to do with what happened during that period when the Howard government, for re-election, basically expanded the entitlements that the previous member talked about and extended them to people whereby the average Australian would find it quite questionable. On 11 January 2013, Leith van Onselen commented on the same matter that:

The Howard Government presided over the biggest private debt boom in Australia’s history and, in its later years, one of the biggest terms-of-trade booms.

That is fact. That is part of why there was, supposedly, such a miraculous effort by this government and how they could, in some ways, balance budgets. Not much to do with their IQs, or their education or their competence, but more to do with the realities of the Australian economy which were beyond their controls. Van Onselen went on to note:

These two events meant that the Australian economy grew strongly and fostered strong growth in both employment and incomes. Importantly, it also flooded the Government with tens of billions of dollars worth of extra taxation

…   …   …

They … looked like sound managers by virtue of the fact that their revenue base expanded inexorably and their budgets remained in surplus, despite a raft of questionable (and costly) spending decisions.

That is a series of people with some credibility making that point. On 18 May 2011, Ross Gittins spoke of the questionable decision for superannuation payments to be tax-free for those aged over 60. He cited the baby bonus; he noted the 30-per-cent tax rebate on private health insurance—which by 2013 had grown to $5 billion a year, a policy to subsidise a product that many people in the Australian electorate do not want; a deliberate policy by this government to help those companies, basically favouring a particular product that people do not desire; and he talked about the minimally tested Family Tax Benefit and the augmentation of that to an income level of $150,000.

We have a series of writers who have spoken of a profligate policy by the government, and a situation where the government had boundless money coming in—not from revenue from the minerals boom; not because of their own expertise—and they were able to do enormous long-term damage to the Australian economy. This budget to hit poorer Australians is very much based around a scare campaign, and around an argument that, 'if we don't do this, it is the collapse of Western civilisation'. The member for Fairfax is one of many people who have cited the reality that the government debt is at around 12 per cent while the average government debt in advanced countries is around 73 per cent. I remember Peter Costello saying for years that Labor was comparing this country to Malawi, to Botswana and to Burkina Faso—but that is what the coalition are doing now. If we look at the reality, in the advanced countries the level of government debt is far higher than in this country—because they believe that society is worthwhile, and that people should have decent health, transport, education, et cetera. What we are seeing here is a massive change of direction, being justified by this scare campaign. And I am not the only person saying that this is class-based: we have NATSEM modelling, cited in The Sydney Morning Herald on 23 May, which makes this point: 'the poorest 20 per cent of households would contribute $2.9 billion over four years to the government's fiscal repair effort, while the richest 20 per cent would contribute $1.8 billion'.

Mr Abbott says it is a tough budget but, quite frankly, it is tougher for people in south-west Sydney, in seats such as my own and the adjacent seat of Macarthur. It is tougher for unemployed people; young people in particular. And I have been surprised that one of the ready-ups I have had from this budget has been the significant number of older people—who often don't have too much sympathy for younger Australians, particularly when it is their kids—coming to my office and raising the precarious situation young people face. One person last week spoke of his son. He has bought a house for him; the father is not too badly off. But his son is a person who has a very poor employment record because of problems that he faces. The father is setting up a small business for him to try and make sure he is not dependent on paid employment, but he is coming to me and asking me about the outcome for his son, who is facing this spiral: six months with no pay whatsoever, and then six months of working for the dole and, possibly, if he misses a few interviews—and he does have disability issues—another two months because he missed interviews and then, maybe—because he did not get a job—going another six months without anything. We know that other people in youth unemployment have had their incomes slashed from a miserable $13,000 a year to about $10,000—a 20 per cent reduction in their incomes, when this government argues simultaneously that the big end of town is suffering so much—which is, as we know, for a very short period and a smaller proportion of their income—because of this so-called debt tax. That person is concerned about what is going to happen to him and also for his chef son-in-law, who just got a job in a restaurant. 'What happens if the restaurant burns down?' he is saying to himself. They are the situations that the people in the real world in south-west Sydney, long distant from this parliament, endure because of this budget, which is based on a false premise, an overexaggeration of the importance of government debt.

In that article in The Sydney Morning Herald, it was further noted by the Prime Minister's office that the 'average family will be $550 a year better off when the carbon tax is scrapped'. I just want to say on that that I have just had a delegation from the Edmund Rice Centre: Maina Talia from Tuvalu, Teresa Nakankwien from Papua New Guinea and Tebby Tiannere from Kiribati. They are really questioning where this government is going in regard to foreign aid in the Pacific and in regard to climate change. One of the only things that they are really emotional about is the 'nonexistence' of climate change and the idea that it does not affect them. Last week, international experts said that the western Antarctic ice area is totally collapsing.

Further on the question of whether this budget is class based, I refer again to Ross Gittins in The Sydney Morning Herald on 21 May. He says:

It works out that low income-earners—generally the old, the young and the unemployed—are heavily dependent on government spending, and genuinely middle income-earners with dependent kids are significantly reliant on government spending.

This question was further elaborated upon in The Australian Financial Review of 23 May, this time from a different source, the Grattan Institute. It noted:

The group worst affected by bracket creep is the 1.2 million earning $38,000 to $46,000—

I repeat those figures: those earning $38,000 to $46,000 a year—

who will pay an extra 1.4 per cent of their income, or $565 a year, by 2016-17.

Those on $46,000 to $56,000 will pay an extra 1.1 per cent, but will face the same increase in dollar terms because of the way marginal tax rates are structured.

In the article titled 'Analysis confirms that poorest of families will pour $1.1b more into government coffers than the richest', we again have comments from the National Centre of Social and Economic Modelling, whose finding is cited:

Families with school-age children are the hardest hit. Across all income groups, they will lose $15.9 billion over four years, more than 90 per cent of the total.

So there is a systemic analysis which says that this budget, which is based on this overexaggeration of the crisis to justify very real cuts to poorer working class families, will make sure that they find it very difficult to go to university, with enhanced repayments for fees and deregulation of the universities. This will certainly undermine the University of Western Sydney as opposed to the leading eight universities. There is a massive reduction in rail expenditure in this budget, more than halving the rail transport budget for people in south-west Sydney, who, because of their distance from Sydney are more dependent than others on transport. The deal they have in life is that they get out there and get a cheaper house, if they are lucky, but in return they will be extremely distant from employment centres. In this budget, not only have the government increased the price of petrol in reality but they have dramatically cut rail transport expenditure.

Look at the realities in that region. The south-west Sydney region has 9.1 per cent unemployment currently, and there is only one urban region higher than that in New South Wales. The youth unemployment rate there is 20 per cent. Just going back to transport, the actual figures in rail are $1,025 million in 2012-13 down to a miserable $319 million in 2017-18. In only four of the 28 districts in Sydney are the unemployment rates above eight per cent. As I said, in south-west Sydney, it is 9.1 per cent.

I want to particularly say that, whilst there has been much concentration upon the reality that pensioners face, a new indexation scheme, the government say they have not reduced the pension, but we know that for the average pension it is realistic to understand that, long term, this change in the way it is indexed means that pensioners are going to receive less money for their attempts to live in this country.

We have got a situation where people in the manual trades are being asked to work to 70 years of age. It might be very comfortable for clerical workers and it might be very comfortable for university lecturers and people in the finance sector, but to ask people in the manual trades, after years of hard labour, to go this long is very questionable.

The budget has hurt many people. It has hurt those people who aspire to go to university, it has hurt those people who are unemployed, it has hurt those people who are dependent on public transport, it has realistically meant major change in standards of living for these people, and, as I say, it is based upon a premise that it is necessary, which has not been substantiated by a government whose ancestors basically created the problem. (Time expired)

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In life, in business or in government, one of the most difficult things to do is to admit that you have a problem, particularly when you did not create the problem in the first place. Then once you have admitted that you have a problem and have then thought through and planned what you need to do to fix that problem, the second most difficult thing to do is to take that first often tough and confronting step to fixing the problem. This is exactly what Labor when in government and now in opposition have failed to do. They failed to admit they had created a problem and are now failing to be part of the solution. This is why the Australian economy needs strong leadership after six years of failed fiscal Labor policy.

Let's take a look at the legacy of those years of economic failure. The last five years saw cumulative deficits of $191 billion. Uncontrolled and irresponsible spending by Labor saw gross debt blow out to $360 billion and net debt pass $200 billion. This debt left to the government by Labor will cost us $12 billion in interest—that is, nearly $1 billion a month in interest being borrowed or $33 million a day being borrowed to pay interest or $1.4 million an hour. In fact, for the duration of my short address alone, the interest bill being paid by the Australian government is $347,000. We are borrowing every cent of this. It really does make you think about where the nation was heading.

We were heading, if we were to endure another Labor government after the September election, for even bigger deficits, a projected $123 billion in the next four years. We were also heading for record increases in debt projected to peak at an astounding $667 billion dollars of gross debt. Double the debt and double the interest cost. Labor would be paying that interest, how? By more borrowing—talk about paying off your mortgage with your credit card. Labor was planning to just keep on with reckless uncontrolled spending at unprecedented levels. As the IMF and PBO stated, Labor's spending trajectory was the highest in the OECD, a 16 per cent increase in government spending. We know that even Iceland, with all of its challenges, has lower spending increases of just six per cent. If debt was allowed to spiral out of control to the levels predicted under more Labor government, it would take generations to pay back, leaving our children and grandchildren to pay back the current Labor legacy of debt. What a legacy to leave. That is what will happen if we in government as the coalition do not take serious action.

The National Commission of Audit identified that, if left unchecked, government expenditure would explode from $409 billion to $700 billion within a decade. If anyone here inherited a private business with this set of books, what would you do? You have just got to look at it as it is and face it. You have no choice but to take action. And the coalition government is doing exactly that. We could have taken the easy Labor way out. We could have just floated along like Labor has for the past six years, literally throw taxpayers' money around like confetti and spend it without a care in the world.

With Labor members clearly it is one of two things: either they believe that there is no problem with continuous spiralling debt and deficit or—and this is the other Labor option—they are simply taking the easy political popular option of pretending that there is no problem, keeping their heads in the sand like ostriches and simply wishing that the problem would just go away. Perhaps they all share the views of the Labor Treasurer, the member for Lilley, whose response, when asked what he was going to do about the debt limit, was: 'Well, that will be someone else's problem.' That is the Labor way: rack up billions in debt and deficit and simply expect the coalition to fix it. After all, they are repeat offenders—remember the 1996 debt and deficits? Once again, we will make the necessary decisions. The Australian people know that we will make those tough decisions. We have done it before and that is what we are doing now.

We are reducing the deficits projected through to 2017-18 by $43.8 billion. We are reducing gross debt from the predicted Labor outcome of $667 billion by nearly $300 billion. This is not easy to do, and this is a tough budget. But we refuse—we simply refuse—to just pass on that debt and burden to the next generations, as Labor is clearly so determined to do. We will make the tough decisions and, as I said, this is what Australians have come to expect from us. They know that when Labor comes to power they can expect uncontrolled spending to be covered by debt, and they know that they will need a coalition government to fix the problem. This is a continual cycle of government in Australia. Labor repeatedly makes a financial mess and the coalition has to clean it up.

The coalition government has, in the budget, presented a plan for the future, in which everybody has to contribute to balancing the budget. And no-one should doubt our resolve, because, firstly, we did pay back Labor's debt and deficits in 1996, and we also put the nation in a very strong position, and, secondly, we have said we would stop the boats and we are well on the way to delivering this. These are just examples of how we do what we say we will do. It is the same with the carbon tax and the same with the commitments to delivering infrastructure to drive productivity in this country. We know that higher income earners will contribute through a three-year increase in the top marginal rate of tax paid by those earning over $180,000. Parliamentarians and senior public servants will have their wages frozen for a year. And everybody has to take responsibility for Labor's debt crisis, and everybody will have to contribute, because that is what Labor has left us with. Labor has cast everybody in these roles. We have no choice but to share in the cost of their debt and deficit. The public sector will see a reduction in staff in offices and will have to find further efficiencies. Businesses will see cuts to industry assistance programs. As to pensioners, the Labor government was moving to increase the pension access age to 67 by 2023; this will now be extended to 70 by 2035 and pensions will be indexed to CPI. However, pensions will continue to rise twice each year. States and territories will also have to contribute. And of course it is true that blurred lines of authority and action between state and federal departments have caused unnecessary and costly duplication. Having areas of responsibility clearly delineated and funding attributed accordingly is an obvious step towards efficiency in the federation.

But this budget also identifies growth and productivity priorities. This is a key part of the answer to some of our problems. The infrastructure growth package will take the government's transport investment to $50 billion by 2019-20, and, as a result, total infrastructure investment from Commonwealth, state and local governments, as well as the private sector, will build to over $125 billion by 2019-20. Major infrastructure projects in Western Australia such as the Gateway WA, Swan Valley bypass and Great Northern Highway projects are important, but I was particularly pleased to see additional investment in road safety under the Roads to Recovery and Black Spot programs. Increased funding in both of these programs with an additional $550 million in total will contribute to road safety around the nation and will be of great value in the electorate of Forrest.

The government will also create the world's largest medical research endowment fund, the $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund. Contributions will come from a new patient contribution to health services and from other health savings. This endowment fund, when mature, will double current direct medical research funding, with an additional $1 billion a year. How on earth could anyone be opposed to improved health research and health outcomes?

I am also glad to see the government taking the issue of farming and agricultural research seriously. The budget contains $100 million in election commitment to new funding for rural research and development. This is critical for the long-term future of farming and the contribution it can and will make to Australia's economy. It has also allocated $20 million to improve and enhance our biosecurity and quarantine system. This long-overdue investment is one I am particularly proud of, having spoken often in this House on this issue. On top of this, the budget provides $15 million to help small exporters with their export costs. It also provides $8 million to improve farmers' access to the products they need to grow food for the world.

In another area I have worked on for many years, the government is honouring its election commitment to provide $10 million to enhance online safety for children. This funding will be spread over four years to support the government's policy to enhance online safety for children. The budget provides $2.4 million to establish and operate the office of the children's e-safety commissioner. The commissioner is to take a leadership role in online safety. Having a coordinated and centralised approach to cybersafety is long overdue. It will also provide $100,000 to support Australian based research and information campaigns to online safety.

However, I was especially pleased to see $7.5 million to assist schools to access accredited online safety programs. I am particularly pleased that children's online safety is a priority for this government. I know the risks our young people are facing online only too well. For years I have personally delivered online safety sessions to students in schools, for parents, for community groups and for businesses throughout the Forrest electorate. These number well in excess of 150. This is where I get the information: nothing highlights for me the risks more than listening to our young people talking about the issues they face online. Yes, the internet is the most fabulous tool, and I know they will be using it forever. However, I also know that we need to do more to protect our young people online—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Proceedings suspended from 11 : 43 to 11 : 50

Recent research from the Australian Communications and Media Authority indicates that around 21 per cent of 14- and 15-year-olds report being cyberbullied. I believe, based on my discussions with young people, that this is an extremely conservative estimate. In my view, this is just those who have reported the bullying, not necessarily all those who have been bullied online.

Many parents and schools feel ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of protecting children from online dangers. The e-safety commissioner will administer the funding of $7.5 million for online safety programs in schools and $100,000 to support Australian based research and information campaigns about online safety. The commissioner will also be responsible for improved coordination of the content and messages provided to Australian children, families, schools and child protection agencies. This is a great outcome for students and parents, and I am very proud to be part of a government that takes cybersafety seriously.

I will finish by saying that one of the greatest concerns I have when I meet these wonderful young people using what is a fabulous tool, the internet—and it will be their highway it will be what they use for the rest of their lives—is the number of young people who will actively admit that they have physically gone to meet people in person that they have only met online. The children who often admit this to me are primary-school age. So the e-safety commissioner in my view is a really important one-stop shop type approach, a central point, in relation to online safety.

In looking at the challenges ahead and the opportunities ahead, yes, this is a very serious and tough budget. But that is what we were elected to do; that is what people in my electorate were saying to me in the run-up to the election and since. They understand very graphically the serious situation Australia finds itself in. They will not necessarily agree with every single thing we do, but they understand the need to make tough decisions. And that as a government is what we are here to do.

Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the appropriations bills. To say this budget is built on broken promises is unfair; that would be quite frankly a gross understatement. This budget was crafted in a sense of fear and panic in the so-called budget emergency.

Before addressing the inherent unfairness in the distribution of pain and punishment inflicted by this budget, I would like to take a look at the true state of the Australian economy. Despite what was said by members opposite, Australia at the moment is one of 10 countries in the OECD that is AAA credit rating. We are AAA rated by the three credible world rating agencies. That is a privilege never before held by this country, and one that we maintain. Our debt to GDP ratio is a tad over 12 per cent. When you compare that to the average debt ratio of the OECD countries, which is 75 per cent, our economy is still buoyant. As a matter of fact, during question time yesterday the Prime Minister conceded that the Australian economy remains strong.

Those opposite keep referring to the budget deficit. But at no stage—whether it be during the Prime Minister's response, or while the Treasurer was introducing the budget, or when they made their contributions during the appropriations debate—has any of those members dared mention the reason why there was a budget deficit. It is true that it fell to Labor to meet the challenges of stimulating the economy to keep the Australian economy out of recession and create thousands of jobs when much of the world was going through the worst financial crisis in over 60 years. I would remind members opposite of the response by Julie Bishop, who at that time was shadow Treasurer. When met with the recommendations of the Australian Treasury being implemented by the Rudd government, her position on behalf of the opposition was that we should 'wait and see what happens' in terms of the world's economies. If we had done that, we would have lost many, many Australian jobs, with the contraction of many of our industries, and that would have made the recession very difficult to recover from. It would have been the same as the recession that hit most other countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, most European countries and advanced countries such as Japan and South Korea. Most international economists wrote that Australia deployed the right fiscal stimulation to ensure that our country remained recession-free.

I am very fortunate to represent the most multicultural economy in the whole country, a community with a lot of colour, a lot of vibrancy and a lot of diversity. But, regrettably, my electorate has significant pockets of disadvantage. The median personal income in my electorate is around $20,000—that, by the way, is what the age pension is at the moment. The median household income in my electorate is just a tad over $55,000. So despite being multicultural and all the things we celebrate in my community, my community is not rich. My community has to work hard to make ends meet. Since this budget was announced I have had the opportunity of speaking with many pensioners, families and young people—the most vulnerable people in our community—who are expected to wear the heavy burden flowing from this budget. Frankly, it is quite clear that life will only get tougher for many of these people.

My constituents will have to rethink whether they visit the doctor because they will now be required to pay $7 per visit and $5 for the medications that they need. The co-payment will cost Western Sydney families alone over $100 million each year. They will probably be the hardest hit region in Australia. Seven dollars means a lot to these people. The Treasurer was insensitive when he explained that this was not a huge impost by comparing it to a couple of middies and saying for the price of a packet of cigarettes people could go to the doctor three times. Given the levels of disadvantage that many of us in this place are working hard to overcome, that insensitivity shows elements of a ruling class bringing down a budget like this. We must not allow the quality of health in Australia to depend on wealth. The equity and affordability of our health system is the envy of the world, and those opposite seem intent on destroying it.

Last week I had the honour of attending the National Seniors Association meeting when they met in Cabramatta at their Fairfield-Liverpool branch. They had representatives from various areas throughout the region including their state and federal representatives. The atmosphere at the meeting, I have to say, was tense. Many of the local seniors in attendance expressed fear in not being able to afford the basics of living. They certainly thought that we here in Canberra—putting 'we' collectively—just do not understand the pressures on the elderly. That arose out of a discussion about the change to the indexation rate of the pension.

The purchasing requirements and living requirements of old age pensioners in particular are vastly different than other households. To change the calculation rate from the total average male weekly earnings to the CPI directly impacts on that. If for the last five years pensioners had been calculated on the CPI indexation rate as opposed to the total male average weekly rate, at the moment they would be $1,670 worse off. The government did not just do this because it was a nice neat way of doing a new indexation—just call it the CPI and have consistency across the board—they did it because it saves money. They did it because they calculated out over the estimates that they could save $400 million on this alone. So this is taking money off people who can least afford it and trying to bank that. It is money off people who cannot turn up the next week and say, 'I will work another shift,' or 'I will do a bit of overtime to overcome this.' People living on a $20,000-pension do it tough.

My 85-year-old mum lives with me. I know how often Mum needs to go and visit the doctor because I take her. I know how often I have to go and get medications when medications change and all the rest of it. I know that because I go and get them as well. My mum is lucky; my dad was a police officer so she is on the retired police superannuation. But the vast majority of elderly in my electorate are not superannuants; they are pensioners. They are on $20,000. If the amount of times I have to take my mum to the doctors and all the rest of it had to be paid out by people on $20,000 it will be a significant impost on people who can least bear it in our community. At the National Seniors conference they said, 'Don't people get it in Canberra? Don't they see the reality?' The reality being they need to see doctors more often than young fit people. I have got to say they were properly stating the obvious. The way this budget is crafted, the part about the co-payments and doctors, we say, is quite clearly an attempt to destroy the universality of the health system. The way they have done it puts the major impost on people who need the system more than ever.

By the way, I did attend a meeting of local doctors the other day. They were up in arms because they said, 'Canberra is now treating us as another taxation.' These are bulk-billing doctors who service a working-class community, pensioners and low-income families. This means that all of them can no longer be bulk-billing doctors. They fear that this is going to exacerbate price adjustments within the medical profession. And they also are very fearful for the patients that they service and care for because they know people will have second thoughts about whether to visit a doctor.

I have also got a lot of families in my electorate. As a matter of fact, I have got 15,500 families on family tax benefit part B. They are going to feel the impost of having family tax benefit B withdrawn when their youngest child turns six. They are on family tax benefit B because, again, they are not wealthy families. By the way, when we are talking families, the vast majority of families in my electorate get that family tax benefit. That is not saying they are welfare dependent; they are low-income families. They need a degree of support.

One of my colleagues happens to be a paediatrician and he made some comments about discouraging people or people thinking twice before taking a child to see a doctor. He said that we are coming into winter, the cold and flu season, and it is not uncommon for a child to be sweaty and have a runny nose, high temperature and a headache. If mum and dad just decide: 'Okay. These things happen, so we won't go,' he said that they are also the same symptoms that would present for a child with meningitis. If that goes untreated, it can have a profoundly high death rate. His position was that we should not be doing anything that discourages families—a price disincentive—from seeing a doctor in cases like that. From a person who spends their life treating children, we are hearing: Don't play God and think it is just a high temperature, so go and have a rest. When it is a child, doctors do not muck around because they know the mortality rate when it comes to meningitis.

This budget tries to force those at the lower end to bear the brunt of the heavy lifting as we have been told by the Prime Minister. I spoke a little while ago in terms of the temporary tax relief measures that are being imposed. The increases are going to be applied to those who, fortunately, might earn over $180,000—you will not find too many people in my electorate affected by that; nor will you find too many people affected in my electorate by the impost on the fringe benefits tax. If you are earning $180,000, it is going to be a two per cent tax increase over three years. Similarly, the fringe benefits tax will go from 47 to 49 per cent over a two-year period. It is not permanent. After that period, it reverts back to what it is today.

What is being imposed on pensioners, low-income families, on people who are unemployed—young people who are on Newstart, those under 25 and those who are out of work now at age 30—are significant but permanent adjustments. Whilst these are incentives to get people working, the other thing this budget does is very cruelly cut the finances for many of those organisations that help people find suitable work. This budget is built on lies. It is built on deception and it affects those in my community harshly.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this bill. Governments are about doing what is right; governments aren't always about doing what is popular. This budget bill is certainly about that. We often hear in lots of different areas the word sustainability, whether it be environmentally, with food production or using natural resources. Sustainability is an important word and it is an important term—something that we have to look at and acknowledge in relation to everything. What this budget is about and what unfortunately we don't hear a lot about from the other side sometimes is financial sustainability. We need a system that is sustainable. We hear things like: 'We want to help pensioners', 'We want social welfare programs,' and 'We want spending from government in this area or that area,' and we do. What we need it to be is sustainable. If it is not sustainable, the people who will be hurt the most will be those on pensions and others relying on different welfare mechanisms.

We need our education spending, our defence spending and our health spending all to be sustainable. This budget is about making sure that they are at levels which are sustainable. We have seen many examples in other countries where the spending has been increasing at levels which are not sustainable, and some of those governments are now under great pressure not to have things increase at the levels that they are and also to cut them. We are certainly not doing that.

When you are a government, I suppose you look at two sides of an equation. You look at the expenditure side and say, 'How can we keep our expenditure sustainable?' On the other side, you have tax revenue. Tax revenue has to be sustainable as well, Mr Deputy Speaker, because, whether you like it or not, we are in a globally competitive world. If we have tax levels, especially company and corporate tax levels, that are not competitive, as we have seen, companies will move offshore. We have to keep our tax levels competitive. Therefore, getting the balance right between what we are spending the taxpayers' money on and how we get that taxpayers' money has to be sustainable. It is a very, very delicate balance. I think this budget is getting to that level.

It is very easy for a politician to walk around the countryside—and we have certainly seen that in the last six years—promising money. It is very easy to do and be everybody's friend—'There's some money for this and there's some money for that'—without being accountable for it. We have heard some previous speakers talk about the absolute level of debt, and they say that it is not a problem. They say that our debt levels are not a problem relative to other countries. Do you know why, Mr Deputy Speaker? It is because for 11 years we were the adults were in charge. We had the best set of figures that any Western country in the world had. What did we see in the last five or six years? We saw the fastest growing debt of any Western country in the world. That, unfortunately—and as much as it might make you popular as you walk around throwing the money out—is not sustainable.

The deep debt levels that we are seeing in some of the European countries—and I even include the US in it, too—are getting to the stage where the interest payments are absorbing most of their income tax. We do not want to get to that stage. In terms of our interest bill—and let's go back six years—no interest was paid on the debt by the Commonwealth government because we had none. The previous government, the Howard-Costello government, had also put public money, taxpayers' money, in to fund the unfunded superannuation liabilities of Commonwealth public servants. Again, it was a good measure to make sure that future taxpayers did not have to pay for that.

We now have a level of debt—again, one of the fastest growing debt levels that we have seen in the Western world over the last five or six years, because it is lovely to walk around throwing money out and being popular but not necessarily sensible—where the interest on that debt is $1 billion a month. It is obviously not hard to work out that that is $12 billion a year. What would $12 billion a year build? Imagine the schools, the hospitals, the roads and the highways that $12 billion could build a year—a lot. But we know that this year it is going to go in interest. Where this is a problem is that you then pay it again next year. If you keep running deficits, the interest bill will get higher and higher. With the trajectory that our debt level was on, we would have soon been at levels, when we are talking about $600 billion, where our interest bill would be five or six times what it is currently. That is what we are talking about. We are the friends of people on welfare. We are the friends of the health system. We are the friends of the education system and the people who rely on government money. Do you know why, Mr Deputy Speaker? Because we want the budget to be sustainable. We want it to be at a level where we can always say, 'We have the capacity to do this.' We are seeing other countries rack up big debt levels that are not sustainable and that is when people who rely on those types of measures are in trouble.

Speaking positively for both sides of politics, we have been a country that has been relatively well served by both sides of politics over the last 20 or 30 years. I think that some of the measures of the Hawke-Keating governments were admirable. The Hawke-Keating governments made decisions that were not necessarily popular. They made reformist decisions. Things like tariff reductions were not necessarily popular decisions. They sold off some government assets. They brought in things like HECS for university students. They made decision that were not popular decisions but they were good reformist decisions because they brought things to a sustainable measure.

What did the Liberal-National parties do when the Hawke-Keating governments brought in those reforms? We supported them. We could have been populist. We could have gone out there and said, 'This is terrible for you,' knowing that we might win some votes at the next election for that particular section of the community that may not have liked some particular reformist legislation. I acknowledge John Howard and the leaders of the opposition during that time. If they saw a bill and thought it was good for the country, they supported it, even though they could have been populist and opposed it. That reform obviously continued under the Howard government. We saw the debt repaid that the previous Labor government had left. We saw things like the Future Fund. We saw tax lowered again. This side of politics know that the more money that individuals have, that households have and that business has to invest and spend, the better it is for the economy.

We saw some good reforms from the Hawke-Keating governments, which we supported as an opposition even though we could have been populist. We then had the Howard years when those reforms continued. What has happened since then? Since then, we have had valueless government, the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, which were not good for our country. They certainly were not reformist governments. They were about being popular. They were run by opinion polls. They were run by what they thought would win them votes not what is right nor what is sustainable. Now we have a difficult decision. We have a populist opposition with no values. It would be the good for the country if we saw the next Hawke or Keating on the other side of politics, but they don't seem to be there. Those opposite do not seem to have a values driven or a principled politician on their side. They are simply populist.

If they do not support this budget, what is the solution that they are offering? If they do not want to get the budget back to a sustainable level, what do they want? They just want to run up the debt. Let's just keep spending money and let's keep running up the debt then interest payments will obviously go up and up. When the interest payments of $12 billion a year grow three, four or five times, which was the projection for the debt levels, what services would they cut? What services are they going to cut in five or six years time? That is what I want to know. What services are they going to cut when we cannot afford them? When our interest bill goes from $12 billion to $40, $50 or $60 billion, besides just being populist, the other side of politics need to tell us what services or what programs they would cut when the debt gets to that level. Again, this is about doing what is right, not what is popular.

I congratulate the Treasurer on this bill. I think that this has been a well-considered bill, with everyone across the board putting in their fair share. It is about sustainability. When I think about this bill I think simply about sustainability. That is the theme that I think this is about. This is about us being on a sustainable footing and the government of our country being able to afford to pay their bills over the next number of years.

It could sound as if we are not spending at all, but actually the government is still spending an enormous amount of money. In fact, we will be spending more money this year than we were last year. We will be spending more money in health and education, and more across a whole lot of fields—as we should.

The other element of this budget that I just want to note in closing is the massive spend on infrastructure. A lot of new infrastructure projects have been put into this. There is a $40 billion to $50 billion infrastructure spend planned for the next number of years. This is about us again becoming a more efficient and productive country. This is about us being able to produce goods and services and move them around the countryside, and money not being spent or lost with things being stopped on highways and stuff.

Just in my electorate, we have the continued duplication of the Pacific Highway. Again, the previous federal government wanted to lower federal funding on that from 80 per cent to 50 per cent. We said that we would maintain the funding of that highway at 80 per cent, and there will be well over $5 billion spent by the federal government on that over the next few years.

There will be increased spending again in rural and regional communities. We understand the importance of roads. We understand the importance of being able to get your product around. We are going to increase the funding for Roads to Recovery to local councils. We have a Black Spot program that is also going to have increased money.

Also, for two LGAs in my area, the bridge renewal program will be very important. In the Kyogle Council area and the Clarence Valley Council area in my electorate there are enormous numbers of old wooden bridges. They can cost anywhere up to $1 million to repair. Often cattle trucks and other produce-type transport goes over those bridges. They need to be maintained and repaired. This is a new program. It does not exist right now. We are going to go fifty-fifty with them. That is another exciting program.

So we do want this budget to be sustainable—we do want the federal government to be able to afford to continue to pay its bills because we want people who rely on that to be guaranteed that they will get it. But, besides that, this budget also has some great projects in it, like the ones I have just mentioned, to increase the value of and spending on infrastructure programs around the country, especially in rural and regional communities like mine. That is very important and will add, as this budget does, to economic growth, to jobs growth and to the continued growth of this country.

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This speech about the budget bills is inspired by the millions of people angry at a budget that threatens this country's way of life. Amongst them, there are many who always feared that this budget was exactly what Tony Abbott would do if he ever got his hands on the reins of power. But there are also many who never expected that an Australian government would charge sick people more to see a doctor while Gina Rinehart gets taxpayer-subsidised fuel. There are people who never imagined that a government would give away billions in tax breaks to the wealthy while forcing people under 30 to live without any income at all because the government had taken it away. There are many who believed that, although it was under pressure, the compact underlying our society—which says that if you are young or old, if you get sick or you fall on hard times, we will look after you—would endure. There were probably even those people who were just so sick of Labor infighting that they voted for Tony Abbott just for the sake of any alternative. There are also those who believed Tony Abbott when he said that there would be no cuts to health, education or pensions.

Wherever people came from, one thing is now crystal clear: whoever people voted for last time, no-one voted for this budget. Tony Abbott has sucker punched the Australian people. He said whatever he had to to get into office and then turned around and delivered to this country's one per cent. He is doing the bidding of people who think it is okay to take away the income of a jobseeker under 30 and force them onto the street but who will squeal like stuck pigs if you suggest taking away their $11 billion in fossil fuel subsidies and making them pay the same for petrol as everyone else in this country. Tony Abbott has delivered for the people who believe it is fine—

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

Order! I ask the honourable member to refer to members by their proper title.

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister Tony Abbott has delivered for the people who think it is fine to raise the GST or cut the pension but who howl with outrage when the Greens suggest a tax on the big banks or the big polluters that would raise the billions we desperately need to fund the services expected in a decent society. We could balance the budget by asking the big miners, the big banks or the big polluters to pay a bit more, but instead the Prime Minister has savagely rounded on the rest of us. It takes guts to stand up to the wealthy and raise the revenue to fund a caring society, but a coward takes the axe to the young, the sick and the poor. This Prime Minister is a clear and present danger to the Australian way of life. We do not have a budget emergency; we have a government emergency.

I first got involved in politics when I was at uni. My dad was the first person in his immediate family to go to university, and his dad before him spent his life working in the post office. My dad went to uni because he could afford it, and my mum and my dad ensured that I got a good education. But it was when the then Labor government started hiking education fees that I got active in politics because I could see that it was going to get to a point where people like my dad would never be able to go to university. I now see thousands like me taking to the streets regularly to demand that everyone in this country has the right to go to university no matter what their background.

I also know that education is vital for our democracy because when everyone can learn, regardless of their wealth, our country is stronger for it. But when education is the privilege of a wealthy few they will govern for those wealthy few. Now that they themselves have had the benefit of free education, the Prime Minister and his associates are pulling up the ladder behind them, turning around and saying a big 'stuff you' to everyone else in the country.

This budget will ruin gen Y and all who come after them. People already face the triple burden of global warming, insecure work and unaffordable housing. But now the divide between the haves and the have-nots and the secure and the insecure is going to become permanent. TAFE or uni will leave you with a debt the size of a small mortgage. Youth unemployment in Melbourne at the moment is 14 per cent, and in Ballarat it is 26 per cent. If you are lucky enough to find a job after having been forced to endure poverty, imagine what kind of workplace and appalling wages and conditions people will be expected to put up with, knowing that if they speak up and get sacked or leave they will go months with no income at all. This is not the kind of country we want.

The Prime Minister has no mandate to create an underclass in this country, and we must now force him to submit his poisonous recipe for a divided country to the judgement of the Australian people. When it comes to attacking young people, lifting university fees or dismantling Medicare, the Greens commit to blocking these budget bills. The Greens relish the chance to remove the Prime Minister before the end of this year. But we cannot do that by ourselves. We need an alliance for a new election. These bastards cannot be kept honest, but they can be kicked out. If the Greens, Labor and the Palmer party accept our significant differences but agree to work together, we can block this budget and have Tony Abbott out of office by Christmas. If the other parties are up for it, we can try to make it happen.

I want Clive Palmer's coal business to stop and for fossil fuels to stay in the ground. I want Labor to stop punishing refugees and adopting the Prime Minister's appalling climate pollution targets. These differences will persist, and I will not give up until this country is grounded on sustainability, compassion and equality. What I also know is that Australia has a chance to become a country we can be proud of if we kick the Prime Minister out first.

I also know that Australia only has a chance to become a country we can be proud of if first we kick out the current Prime Minister. We need an alliance for a new election. We must all agree to block this budget and try to force the Prime Minister to a new election this year. If this budget is passed, Australia may be irreparably damaged and the people know it. Right around this land we are witnessing the people of Australia starting to reclaim their country.

We hear talk from the government that we have to take these measures because there is an emergency because we no longer have the revenue we need to fund the services Australians expect. One answer to that could be to increase our revenue. We could start by keeping the price on carbon. The carbon tax brought in $6.6 billion, which this government now wants to take away. The $6.6 billion currently being paid by the big polluters will, if this government gets its way, have to be paid by people every time they go to see a doctor. We could keep the mining tax. We could get rid of the $11 billion in subsidies going to the likes of Gina Rinehart and, instead, keep education affordable for everyone.

As we have seen today, if this budget is allowed to pass and the Prime Minister prevails, we will be going back to the Dark Ages. We have already seen CSIRO face massive cuts and plans to shed over 700 jobs and closing down entire sections of research. Astronomy and astrophysics now face an uncertain future. One crucial area which could have provided energy security and job security for people in the Latrobe Valley, geothermal energy, is being axed completely. Never mind: there is always enough money left for coal seam gas and for unconventional fuels, but when it comes to a potential, renewable power source, where the hot energy from under the earth could power our lights and warm our buildings, no, we cannot find money for that. We will take the axe to CSIRO. Potentially we have forgone the next Wi-Fi or the next flu vaccine because of this government's short-sightedness. It turns out that knights and dames were not just a distraction; they were actually a real vision of the medieval, antiscience society this Prime Minister has for the country.

We are about to have a situation where someone who has very little money will think twice about getting the lump on their leg checked out because they might not be able to afford the doctor, where people will think twice about taking their family or their kids to the doctor because they know that each time they will have to pay a fee and, if the doctor sends you off for a test, you are going to have another fee, and if there is a prescription, you will have to pay a fee on that as well. Multiply that by your number of family members and it starts to add up.

Why is it okay to have a debate and say that maybe we need to raise the GST or maybe we need to raise doctors' fees for the bulk of the population but we cannot have a debate about asking the big banks, the big miners or the big polluters to pay just a little more? If we had to take this budget to an election and ask the Australian people, 'What do you think is a fairer way to balance the budget, asking Gina Rinehart and the big banks to chip in or taking the axe to the sick, the young and the poor?' I know what the people would say.

We are seeing the government's short-sighted agenda writ large when it comes to the question of funding roads. In this context there has been debate about a proposed increase in the petrol excise. If it helps cut pollution, then lifting the relative cost of fossil fuels can make sense. If it helps the shift to cheaper, quicker and cleaner transport by trains, trams and buses, then indexing petrol excise can make sense. However, making petrol cost more just so the government can build more roads makes absolutely no sense at all. The Liberals should not assume we will help their road-obsessed agenda. This Liberal government is giving $3 billion to a polluting east-west tollway which will wreck inner-city Melbourne and has o business case but then cuts federal funding to public transport. Building more roads to cure congestion is like loosening the belt to cure obesity—it will not work. Lifting the excise on petrol to fund public transport is one thing but using it to build more polluting roads makes no sense. We will be looking very closely at the government's petrol tax legislation. Around the country one thing that cannot be denied is that in response to a government that is attacking the young, the sick and the poor, people are rising up to say, 'Not on my watch.' Angry at a budget that continues the handouts for the big miners, big banks and big polluters, people are defending the common wealth of Australia.

The millions in this country want a society based on compassion, sustainability and equality. We want Australia to be a place where everyone can get to a doctor or a hospital when they need it and a place where, if you do find yourself sick, the first thing that the paramedics and the doctors check is not your credit card but your Medicare card. We want Australia to be a place where people can live with dignity after they have contributed, not be forced to work until they drop and then eek out a grim existence in poverty. And we want Australia running on renewable energy, not polluting fossil fuels. We want Australia to be a place where people under 30 are not kicked out onto the street by their landlords because the government has taken away their income. We want an Australia where people who are already under pressure because of unaffordable housing and insecure work are not left on their own. Because we know that if we leave people on their own and throw them to the wolves, life will just get harder.

To everyone who stands with us, I say that you are the defenders of the true heart of this country, not this government but you, the people. You are the defenders of the spirit of care, of looking after each other and you are looking after the Australia that binds us together. You are the real protectors of what is good about Australia. What people are doing in the streets and around the kitchen table in their homes right now is vital and could change the course of history. The Greens stand right beside you and we will be your voice in parliament. If we work together and defend not the privileged but the common wealth of Australia, we can bust this budget.

I conclude by reminding people that last year the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, came to Melbourne and said 'these Greens are having too much influence in parliament. So I am going to make a captain's call and say I would much rather there be Labor people in parliament and I am going to direct you to put the Greens last.' He said that because on the things that mattered when it came to standing up for a caring society and for raising the revenue Australians need to fund the services they expect, he knew that the Greens would fight him tooth and nail. And so it will be with this budget. We will be the real opposition to this government's cruel and heartless agenda that will make Australia a meaner place. I say to the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, if you want to come and make a captain's call and say put the Greens last; well, game on, Captain. We are up for this and we would relish nothing more than to force you to take your poisonous recipe for a divided society to the judgement of the Australian people and we cannot wait until there is a change of Prime Minister.

Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want you to have a listen to this report:

A witness to a fatal collision that claimed the life of a Mackay truck driver has described a blazing inferno and screams at the scene of the horrific crash.

This is an extract from the Daily Mercury after a semitrailer and a fuel tanker collided on the Peak Downs Highway. The Peak Downs Highway is the main inland route from the coast to central Queensland's coalmining belt in the northern part of my electorate of Capricornia. The fuel tanker erupted and sprayed fuel over the other truck, which caught fire. One person was tragically killed. The fuel tanker rolled into another vehicle towing a horse float. Two people in the vehicle were airlifted to hospital with burns, and a horse from that float also died.

Unfortunately, accidents like this happens all too often on the Peak Downs Highway. That is why I am pleased to inform you that the Abbott government budget will provide measures to help make the Peak Downs Highway safer. We have committed $120 million to fix up the Eaton Range on the highway. As the coalition gets on with the job to develop a stronger regional economy in Capricornia, last week I attended road transport in Mackay with BP, Caltex and Shell to 200 fuel tanker drivers who deliver fuel to the inland mines of Central Queensland and they were pleased to hear the news.

People should never underestimate the importance of spending money on roads in regional Australia. Our highways are the arterial veins extending from the cities and from shipping facilities to inland mining and agricultural areas which are the heart of our regional economies. That is why it is significant to our nation that the Abbott government's first budget will invest up to $50 billion across Australia over seven years to deliver vital transport infrastructure for the 21st century. I am pleased that fixing up the Bruce Highway along the Queensland coast from Brisbane to Cairns forms part of this plan. The highway runs directly through my electorate, and people in Capricornia will benefit from a $320 million safety package for the Bruce Highway, including $110 million of federal money for more overtaking lanes and continuing progress on upgrading the Yeppoon flood plain at the gateway to Rockhampton City. We are spending $296 million on stage 2, and 80 per cent of this project is being paid for by the Abbott coalition government. This is very significant for Queensland because the nation's heavy transport fleets delivering goods up and down the state will be able to get to Rockhampton when floodwaters are up and keep the economy rolling.

These projects create safer highways, lead to construction jobs and more efficient transport times, and will serve to significantly boost the Capricornia economy. In fact, this entire budget is like getting the family car back on the road. All Labor did was drive Australia hard until its tyres went bald. We inherited an economy that was akin to a broken-down car. You have already heard that, if the coalition took no action in this budget, Labor's projected debt would hit $667 billion. Every month, Australians are paying $1 billion in interest on Labor's debt alone. In Capricornia we could build the equivalent of four Bruce Highway Yeppoon flood plain upgrades per month with money like that. Labor's debt equates to $25,000 per person, or $100,000 per family of four. But just changing the cars tyres will not fix it. Without an engine overhaul, some oil and a new battery, Australia cannot move forward on a sustainable journey—and that is what this budget aims to achieve. If we do not get the economy tuned up, in five years time we will be having a conversation about which hospital to close, which schools to shut down and which nursing homes to close because the nation cannot afford to live with Labor's debt.

I understand that some people are doing it tough. At one point in my life I had a marriage break-up and found myself a single parent; things were not easy. During this time my five-year-old daughter had to have open heart surgery to save her life, so I know about stress and how this adds to pressures on the household finances when your young daughter's life is at risk. I know what it is like not having enough money to pay the rent and having to decide which bill to pay this week while facing enormous family medical decisions. So despite the criticism, verbal intimidation, threatening emails, yelling and abuse from Labor, there are people on this side who know what it is like to do things tough.

The issue here is that Labor has offered no solutions to fix their mess. Despite the misinformation Labor spreads about this budget, there are families with young people who are 100 per cent behind the Abbott government. Here is what one mother in my electorate, Sarah, told me:

Michelle, just wanted to say I support the new budget that the coalition has given Australia. I can definitely see why we need to do this, and I am willing to make small sacrifices for my daughter's generation as they will be the ones who will benefit from this in the long run. It is great to see a party that actually wants to help Australia get rid of debt and not put us in more debt. I fear for Australia though and feel that Labor may get in again if another election is held and then spend all that money again. Make sure you shake Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey's hand for me because you have my support.

And here is some more feedback. June is a lady in her 80s and her husband is in his 90s. June phoned my office to support the federal government. She wanted the state Premier to remember that it was the Labor Party that created the financial mess Australia now finds itself in.

There is much good news in this budget that will continue to help people like June and her husband in the future. This budget has delivered on its promise to provide $300,000 to Meals on Wheels to help provide a new kitchen facility in North Rockhampton. Up to 1,000 meals are provided to mostly frail, aged clients and people recovering from hospital stays in the Rockhampton area each week.

In this budget the Australian government has also recognised the significance of Capricornia's beef cattle industry by providing $2.5 million to stage Beef Australia 2015. The event is a significant boost to Capricornia's small business sector, including the motel and hospitality, transport, tourism, communication and livestock industries. Beef Australia showcases the industry to the world and attracts more than 85,000 people from 26 countries. By providing funding, the coalition government is delivering on a key election commitment, which in turn helps to build a stronger rural and regional economy.

What did Labor do for our beef sector? Oh, yes. You might recall that Labor snuck in one night and axed Australia's live export trade. Families, small business and farmers are still feeling the impact of that decision, years on. I say to the Labor Party: if you want proof of what it is like to be a battler, then talk to a farmer. I directly ask the Leader of the Opposition: do you know what it's like to have to shoot a breeding cow, because the drought is so bad it would be inhumane to let them suffer? The psychological trauma of being forced to do that, while facing grim financial pressures, is immense on rural families. But the Labor Party doesn't recognise these people as so-called battlers. Do you know what it's like to be a farmer and to walk out into a putrid, black bog on a dam in the drought, to rescue livestock? Weak sheep get stuck in tar-like mud, as they struggle to reach the only bit of water left. In the sky, the crows circle, waiting to descend. They begin firstly by pecking the distressed animal's eyes out. These people return home from this devastating scene to face the growing bills and calls from the bank, threatening foreclosure. These are battlers too. But Labor doesn't care. This government does care .That is why this budget delivers on our promise to provide some of the $320 million in drought assistance, as announced by the Prime Minister earlier this year. The National Farmers' Federation says the Abbott coalition government has largely delivered on its election commitments to the agriculture sector.

The coalition government will also axe the carbon tax. This will save households, including pensioners, on average $550 a year in energy costs. And local Capricornian industries will save millions of dollars that could otherwise be diverted to other parts of their business that could create more jobs. If Labor really are serious about helping families, I challenge them now to vote to end the carbon tax immediately. Teys meat works is one Rockhampton's' largest employers, providing jobs to more than 1,000 people. This is what the company said when it wrote to me:

We maintain our support of the Government's commitment to remove the carbon tax. The cost imposed on our Rockhampton facility in the first year of Carbon Pricing included a direct liability charge of over $900,000, in addition to an approximate $270,000 increase in the price of utilities.

This Rockhampton facility will save over $1.2 million when Labor's carbon tax is axed.

I want to tell you about a visit I undertook last week to the Ted Malone Rural Skills Centre in Sarina. The centre has links to Sarina State High School and gives young people who may otherwise have dropped out of education the opportunity to undertake Certificate II in Agricultural Practices. These young people learn a diverse cross-section of skills from aquaculture to permaculture, livestock and egg production and metal fabrication. I met delightful students like Jaylen, Alex, Jade, Lindsay, Minka, Erica and Emily. It was a pleasure to visit them and meet their manager, Bob North. Thanks to the Abbott government's budget, if these students successfully complete their studies here, they have the opportunity to access assistance if they make the transition into trade and training fields, including apprenticeships, down the track.

The government's new Trade Support Loans will take effect for apprentices from 1 July. These loans will encourage more young people to take up a trade and complete their qualification. Loans of $20,000 over four years will ease the financial burden and help increase apprenticeship completion rates. For the first time ever, the Commonwealth will also provide direct financial support to all students studying higher education diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degree courses.

In my maiden speech last year, I undertook to highlight the diversity of Capricornia, and I am accomplishing this. Aside from our important beef and sugar and mining sectors, Capricornia offers many more niche industries. We have highlighted the local pineapple industry, which satisfies 45 per cent of the nation's appetite for fresh pines. I took Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce to a hydroponic lettuce farm near Emu Park run by the Wilson family. This small family operation supplies gourmet lettuces to Coles, Woolworths and IGA.

CQ University has trials underway near Rockhampton into dryland rice crops for northern Australia. Fresh, chemical-free garlic is even grown around Eungella, in the northern part of my electorate. My recent Facebook post about this attracted nearly 4,000 views.

Enterprises like this need a strong regional economy and good transport infrastructure to aid their growth and development. The key goal of this budget is to fix Labor's budget mess and get on with the job of developing a stronger economy, because, when we strengthen the economy, small businesses succeed, families have less pressure on them and jobs are created.

Sitting suspended from 12:50 to 16:00

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I asked a question in the House on the day of the budget. Household electricity prices over nine years of corporatisation have soared from $860 to $2,100. Petrol prices following the refusal to mandate ethanol soared 50 per cent above prices in Brazil and America. The price for petrol at the bowser in the United States as we talk today is 105c a litre. It is 95c in Brazil and 149c in Australia. And, whilst it has the world's cheapest land, Australia pays the world's highest housing prices.

The answers here are very clear. Let me be very specific and give a very specific example. If you lift the speed limits from Caboolture, north of Brisbane, back to Brisbane to 125 kilometres an hour and extend the highway at five kilometres a year back to Woodford, then you can bring in 200,000 blocks of land, with two acres for each block of land. You do not require curbing, channelling, sewerage, stormwater drainage or any of those cost add-ons. Simply the delivery of electricity, water and median-strip bitumen would provide all of those blocks of land for some $50,000 to $60,000 a block, versus some $200,000 a block at the present moment for quarter-acre allotments in Brisbane. And you would still get to work in some 30 minutes, which is a hell of a lot shorter time than most people take to get to work now, with very little outlay.

The Queensland government have gone in the exact opposite direction. They have released the zoning areas which you can subdivide. I do not know the hide that they have got. Somehow in Australia we have come to the conclusion that the Crown owns all the land. Well, the Crown does not own the land; the people own the land. I always recommend very strongly that people go and see the Russell Crowe movie Robin Hood, because it is the lead-up to the Magna Carta. If you read the Magna Carta, there are three clauses that very distinctly say, 'No, Mr King, you do not own the land; we the people own the land.' If we choose to subdivide it into 200 blocks, that is our right, and you have no right to stop us. But of course your interference has driven the price of land and housing to the highest price in the world. The country with the cheapest land on earth—about $80 a hectare is the average price of land in Australia—has the highest priced house and land packages in the world. Houses are very cheap actually; it is the land that costs the money. Malcolm Turnbull, no less, presented an excellent paper on this fact some years ago.

Farm incomes are falling disastrously while food prices rise and rise. Australian farmers are paid far less than any other farmers in the world—they receive 40 per cent less than the average price throughout the world—yet our food prices are moderately high; we are in the medium-high range for food prices.

Can the Treasurer explain why these the real issues will not be addressed in the budget? The budget has passed and I can say now that none of these items have been addressed. Under corporatisation—which is sort of like half-privatisation—electricity prices for the average household have soared from $860 to $2100; so what full privatisation will do to electricity prices I will leave to your imagination. On that basis, within the next four or five years we will be looking at paying $4,000 or $5,000 per year for electricity. I do not know how a retired couple will get on having to pay that amount of money when their income is around $20,000 a year. If you add up their insurance, which is about $3,000 a home in North Queensland, their rates, which are $2,000 or $3,000 and their electricity costs, which are $2,000 or $3,000, I do not know how they are going to eat.

But the main costs of living are none of those things actually; they are housing, health, food and petrol. This budget, by putting up the price of petrol, will increase the cost of food very significantly. With the $7 you will now have to pay when you go to the doctor and the $5 you have to pay at the pharmacy, health prices will dramatically rise. As for the cost of housing, there is nothing in this budget that addresses that. And petrol, of course, is going to rise significantly. These are four of the most expensive items that any household has to face, and all of them are going to rise.

In government we act collectively; by acting collectively we can achieve truly wondrous results that we would not be able to achieve individually. The Prime Minister told us that this was the greatest infrastructure budget in Australian history, with $10,000 million for infrastructure. Well, I suppose it is about how you define infrastructure. When we were in government in Queensland in the eighties, what we meant when we used the word 'infrastructure' was that we were going to put in another railway line and another port and create 2,000 mining jobs. When the federal government uses the word 'infrastructure'—and I would like to think I was the first one to use the term 'tunnel vision', but I noticed a very prominent economist using the term last week; maybe he dreamt it up himself—what we have is tunnel vision. Clearly Queensland is the greatest example of tunnel vision. The Queensland government is supposed to be bankrupt—it sacked 15,000 public servants because the ALP bankrupted Queensland—but it has been able to pluck $5,000 million out of the air to build yet another tunnel, which will bring the total length of tunnels in Brisbane to 23 kilometres. Brisbane has about 1.2 or 1.3 million people; Sydney has over five million people and has only 14 kilometres of tunnels. So, when I say 'tunnel vision', you cannot see beyond getting to work and getting home from work five minutes earlier to watch the television—that is your idea of infrastructure and development for your country!

Let me paint the picture that the KAP, the political party to which I belong, sees as the future of Queensland. What should have been in this budget was not the taxing of ethanol but the introduction and mandating of ethanol. I have said continuously that the only country on earth now that does not have ethanol in its petrol tanks is Australia.

The reason that people introduced it is to save lives. To quote no less a person than Morris Iemma, the former Premier of New South Wales, 'I can't go another day with the deaths on my hands of people who simply don't have to die.' And, to quote the President of the Australian Medical Association, 'More people die from motor vehicle emissions than from motor vehicle accidents.'

The minute that that landmark report came out in California, the Americans immediately moved to pass an act on air quality, introducing oxygenation of their petrol—in other words, introducing ethanol into their petrol tanks. Take Brazil—60 Minutes did a report on Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo is the cleanest city in the world. It has 23 million people—more people than live in Australia—and it is the cleanest city in the world, because they are on 60 per cent ethanol. It appears to me, on the latest figures I have seen from America, that there they are on 20 per cent ethanol. By law, every single European will be on 15 per cent ethanol. So all of the Americas, all of Europe, all of Asia—and China has just announced 15 per cent ethanol—and India, the Philippines and Indonesia are on ethanol.

So why is Australia not on ethanol? It is because our governments are owned by the oil companies, of course. Whilst that sounds cliched and as if it might be old leftist rhetoric, it is simply a truism. How else can you explain that, outside of Africa and, of course, the oil producing countries, the only country on earth that is not on ethanol is us? This government has decided that it is better to send $23,000 million a year to the Middle Eastern oil producers than to send it into rural and regional Australia. Nine years ago this country was self-sufficient in oil, but, according to the NRMA report done by the Air Vice-Marshal, there will be no petrol produced in Australia at all within three or four years. The refineries are closing. Our oil wells have run dry. Yet we are a country absolutely perfectly set up for ethanol.

We have giant water resources in Australia. Half of Australia's water comes out of the Kennedy electorate, the electorate I represent. I represent only seven per cent of the surface area of Australia, but I have got over 50 per cent of the water. I can tell you how much of it we are using: about 0.0001 per cent of it. Not only is this very, very bad government but it is also immoral. In a country where our nearest neighbour has 80 million of their population going to bed hungry every night, we are sitting on water resources that could provide food for 100 million people, easily, in the Gulf of Carpentaria and the surrounding areas that have been my family's homeland for the last 150 years.

Our little tiny party might be very, very small, but we do have one thing to offer: a big vision for our country. What we say to you is: put the ethanol in and your country will be $23,000 million a year richer. Instead of putting in a tunnel and building overpasses and superhighways in our cities to give you five minutes of extra television time, you should build a railway line, as we did in Queensland, into the Galilee Basin, and provide 50,000 jobs for 150 years. That is development. That is infrastructure. It is not about building some overpass or flyover, whirligig or tunnel in Australia's major cities.

I come from the bush of Australia. We understand that you can spend money extending the homestead and putting in air-conditioning or you can spend the money on putting water into the far paddock. What we have decided to do is to spend it on ourselves and have a nice flash homestead. In the meantime, the far paddock has no cattle in it because there is no water there.

The Galilee Basin provides 12 thousand million dollars a year in income for this country. Ethanol can provide 23 thousand million dollars a year in income for this country. If the Queensland state government would have got in and agreed to the ALP government's $320 million offer—the ALP government in Queensland rejected it; so it was bipartisan in its rejection—we would have 10,000 million dollars a year coming out of the North West Queensland Mineral Province. We have no electricity, so we cannot open up those mines. Here is the great vision that will provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for Australia—a rich and prosperous country. Instead of that, we are out there buying votes. We are spending the people's money on buying votes so that we can get re-elected at the next election while our country continues to lose its manufacturing base, its motor vehicle base and its agricultural base. (Time expired)

Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-15 and cognate bills. These are significant bills that will set the foundation for Australia's future prosperity and will ensure this government has the ability to govern effectively and efficiently. Simply put, this is about money and the financial workings of government. This is about creating stability for Australians not just now as a short-term measure but for all future generations. Australia simply cannot afford to continue the atrocious legacy that was left behind by the former government—a legacy of waste and a legacy of cash-grab policies that were not only ineffective but hurt the hip-pocket of every Australian, their businesses and our major industries, including mining, agriculture and manufacturing.

This waste left every Australian with five record deficits and $123 billion as a future deficit—a deficit that at the election in September this government committed to fix, and through these appropriation bills it will do what it said it would do and deliver on those commitments. Last September, the Australian people made a choice—a choice to elect a government that stands up for each and every individual, our businesses and our industries and is a responsible government which will get our country back on track. If we took no action, debt would have hit $667 billion. That is why these bills are so important throughout Australia, but in particular for my electorate of Durack. Durack is the largest electorate in Australia; so, needless to say, I am very focused on securing a prosperous Australia for my constituents and on fighting for the key issues that affect them.

Regional health, in particular, has been a key focus of mine since being elected in September and it is something that I will continue to strive to improve. Regional health should be a concern for all those who sit in this place, if we want every Australian to have equal opportunity and access to these services. This government is one that lives in reality—a reality where no-one in this place or outside it is immortal. That is why, despite the type of access or level of service provision, every Australian will require access to medical services—and, as we know, some more than others.

This need for medical services will only continue to increase with Australia being faced with an ageing population, with 23 per cent of the population being predicted to be 65 and over by 2050. This will continue to place greater pressure on our welfare system and our health system. Strategic decisions have been made in each of these portfolios to ensure that Australians continue to have access to these much needed services but are not completely reliant on government support—to do so would be completely unsustainable and irresponsible.

To put it in perspective, by 2050 the number of people paying tax to support the payment of old-age pensions will be almost halved. Between 2010 and 2050, the number of people aged 65 to 84 will more than double and those aged 85 and over will more than quadruple. In Durack specifically, this ageing population is of particular concern with over 25 per cent of the electorate's population being over the age of 50 according to the ABS 2011 Census data. Given these pressures, government spending on many health programs will only continue to grow at an unsustainable rate unless fundamental changes are made and they are made now. That is why this government is committed to health and to ensuring that we can meet the growing demand for health care in the future.

We simply cannot rely on revenue from the Medicare levy and Medicare levy surcharge to offset the increase in cost to health care, particularly when the combined revenue from these sources is less than 20 per cent of total Commonwealth health spending. Health is a key area of spending growth with 4.1 per cent of GDP currently being spent within this portfolio. I am pleased to say that, despite this government's need to cut unnecessary spending and cut red tape that was implemented by the former government, regional health remains a key focus for the Minister for Health and for our Prime Minister. That is why, despite the Labor Party's false claims that the budget is cutting funding for health, overall health spending will in fact increase by more than $10 billion over the next four years through the implementation of this government's budget measures. It is because this government understands the health needs of Australians and wants to ensure that we are best placed to improve health services that a key budget measure from this government was the establishment of a $20 billion medical research future fund to find the cures of the future.

By making the health system more sustainable and by investing in medical research we are ensuring that Australia remains the best and healthiest place in the world to raise a family and to care for our loved ones. On top of this, the government has also committed to increasing annual federal assistance to the states for public hospitals by more than nine per cent every year for the next three years and by more than six per cent in the fourth year. That is a 40 per cent increase over the next four years, or more than a $5-billion-a-year increase in spending on hospitals.

Over three years, $13.4 million will also fund an additional 500 nursing and allied health scholarships with a value of up to $30,000 each. These will target workforce shortages in rural and remote areas. In addition, a very important regional service which has received a significant funding commitment of an additional $6 million in the budget is the Royal Flying Doctor Service. This is a key service that delivers extensive primary health care and 24-hour emergency services across the Durack electorate and to the furthest corners of Australia's rural and remote regions.

This health service delivery will go hand in hand with an additional $35.4 million over two years for the General Practice Rural Incentives Program, which provides incentives for medical practitioners to work in under serviced rural, regional and remote areas. Regional areas are continually faced with a shortage of medical practitioners with newly graduated GPs often conducting their internships in regional areas but leaving once their placements have concluded. I welcome this government's funding commitment to not only provide an incentive for medical practitioners to work in regional and remote areas but to keep them there as well as its focus on improving the lives of Australians who live in these areas through the provision of this funding and other related funding measures.

Over the years we have seen significant increases to the level of services being provided in regional and remote areas in Western Australia. If we look back 10 to 15 years, medical practitioners in towns such as Port Hedland in my electorate of Durack only had access to basic services such as X-rays, with more sophisticated examinations requiring patients to travel to Perth. This is despite the town having a well-established hospital with permanent medical practitioners. Fortunately, funding such as this has allowed medical treatments to progress with a substantial increase in the number of doctors based in regional and remote areas, including specialists and the growth of corporate medical clinics.

One significant development particularly for Durack's Aboriginal communities is the provision of local dialysis services for those suffering from kidney disease. The delivery of this service is particularly important to Durack, with the electorate having the third-highest proportion of Indigenous residents, or some 16.3 per cent. In fact, I recently welcomed more than $56 million in new Commonwealth funding for health services across regional Western Australia. The funding was part of the Bringing Renal Dialysis and Support Services Closer to Home project and will see expanded and new health services in Geraldton, Carnarvon Port Hedland, Roebourne, Broome, Kununurra, Derby and Fitzroy Crossing. This includes new 20-bed hostels in Broome, Fitzroy Crossing and Derby, while an eight-bed hostel will be established in Kununurra. Renal patient accommodation will also be provided at all four sites. In addition, we will also provide four much-needed renal dialysis chairs to be installed at Fitzroy Crossing and Roebourne. A five-bed hostel will be built in Carnarvon, which will also get renal patient accommodation, while clinical offices for regional support teams will be built in Geraldton and Port Hedland.

To encourage healthy living among Aboriginals from a young age, this government has also committed $13 million over the next four years to establish an additional 3,000 places for Indigenous students to take part in the Clontarf Foundation's sports academy program. The Clontarf Foundation has contributed much to the growth and development of Indigenous students across the Durack electorate through education, health and lifestyle initiatives. Clontarf's vehicle for achieving this is Australian rules and rugby league, and I note that basketball is included in that suite of sports now. It uses these sports not only to attract young Aboriginal boys and girls to school but to keep them there as well. The foundation has continued to grow since it opened its first academy for 25 boys on the campus of the Clontarf Aboriginal College in Perth, Western Australia, in 2000. In 2012 alone, the foundation opened nine new academies, including one in Fitzroy Crossing, which is in my electorate of Durack. There are also eight other Clontarf academies in Durack.

This government's commitment to regional health is also extended to key funding for aged-care services through a 10-year aged-care reform package. These reforms are aimed at offering choice and flexibility for older people living in the community and residential care, which will give consumers more choice, easier access and better care. A key focus of this reform is to improve the way home-care places are allocated across Australia under the aged-care approvals round, or ACAR, to better meet community demand and give providers more certainty. We have committed to residential, home-care and flexible care providers, who, under this budget, will receive an increase in funding of 2.4 per cent for their basic subsidy from 1 July 2014, while eligible programs such as the Commonwealth Home and Community Care Program will receive a 2.4 per cent increase in their funding.

Regional, rural and remote providers will also gain from a 20 per cent increase in viability support payments from 1 July 2014. These payments aim to improve the capacity of small rural aged-care service providers to offer quality care to residents. Providers do not need to apply for the viability supplement; it is simply paid automatically to eligible providers every month. It was only last week that I had the pleasure of welcoming the opening of the next aged-care approvals round. This round continues to expand the home-care package program, which provides individually tailored packages of home-care services to help older Australians remain independent, with residents in Western Australia now able to apply for 1,058 additional residential places and 672 additional home-care places.

This funding announcement goes hand in hand with my own recent review of the aged-care sector throughout the Durack electorate to gain on-the-ground feedback from relevant local government bodies and key stakeholders on the reforms that are needed to improve regional aged-care services. The focus of these roundtable meetings was to listen to the aged-care issues faced in these towns to find out how they could be improved by a collaborative effort between the three tiers of government and primary providers and to ensure that any existing plans or concepts are understood and included in our overall strategic review of Durack's aged-care sector. We have already identified key issues in the provision of aged-care service delivery in these regional towns, including: a significant increase in demand for aged-care services in towns which are considered 'aged-care friendly'; the need for an increase in high-end service delivery—it is, however, important to note that, as I have previously mentioned, the Commonwealth HACC program is still making a significant contribution to aged-care services and will continue to do so; and a lack of service providers in regional areas. By identifying the key areas where services are lacking, as well as the types of services that are needed, my aim is to ensure that any long-term plans to increase aged-care services in Durack are considered and implemented strategically.

It is clear that this government is committed to improving the lives of every Australian; in particular, of those living in regional and remote areas. This will not be an easy task, particularly when faced with a population that will increasingly become more reliant on our health services as that population ages. The only way forward for Australia is for each of us to contribute to savings, and get our economy back on track.

To pay for new hospitals and to provide all Australians with access to first-class medical facilities and practitioners, we need to balance the books—the same way each household has to balance theirs. The more we slide into debt, the harder it will be to pull ourselves out. That is why this government is taking the necessary steps to cut red tape and to implement cost-saving measures that will improve the lives of every Australian in the short and long term, but in particular for those in rural and regional areas.

I commend this bill and all cognate bills to the House.

Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise with pleasure to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2014-2015 and cognate bills Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2014-2015, Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2014-2015 , Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2013-2014 and Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2013-2014.

Reflecting on the budget brought down by the Treasurer just over a couple of weeks ago, what immediately struck me—as someone who represents a large constituency in the outer suburbs—is the disproportion of the bulk of heavy lifting that has to be done by those in the outer suburbs to address the budget crisis that this government talks about. But what also struck me is that I recall that the previous government paid a very heavy price for a broken promise. That broken promise, in the public's mind, was that there would be no carbon tax. I was discussing this with a colleague the other day: this budget contains not one broken promise but 20. I have never seen a set of circumstances where a government has misrepresented the facts so brazenly and so often, and has come to the community and said, 'well, you are expected to make this sacrifice'—particularly those people in the outer suburbs. One of the things this budget does is that it is a complete contradiction of the Howard government legacy. I think, in many ways, John Howard got it right. John Howard got it right when he recognised the need to remove the fuel indexation excise in 2001, and to increase family tax benefits to many families in my electorate.

When we got into government, we further developed the infrastructure needed for people that live in the outer suburbs. We did this through the BER and National School Pride programs; through grants to areas such as the Chisholm TAFE in Cranbourne, the Casey RACE aquatic centre, and the Casey Fields athletics track and playground; through additional funding for much-needed roadworks; and through emergency payments to emergency relief providers such as the Cranbourne Information &Support Service, the Casey North Community Information & Support Service, and the Casey Cardinia Community Legal Service. We created a headspace centre in Dandenong and we approved and were implementing a headspace centre in Fountain Gate, with a planned early intervention psychosis centre coming over the top of those two. We were also committed to building multicultural community harmony. We did this through grants to the multicultural communities in my electorate. John Howard and Kevin Rudd understood that there is a risk when you move out to the suburbs, which are developing and growing, but they do not have the social infrastructure that is required. Often they do not have the roads that are required to sustain the population increase. And to illustrate this point, if you look at a facility like Albert Park, for example, in Melbourne, with its Olympic swimming pool, soccer field, elite track, wonderful lake, golf course, gymnasium precinct and picnic grounds—no such combination of facilities exists in my area, with the exception of a laudable attempt by the City of Casey in the form of the Casey Fields precinct.

This budget is saying that if people make the journey in the outer suburbs to build a new life for themselves and their kids, they are being disproportionately punished. Frankly, they don't think that is fair. Instead of building up and strengthening our local communities, this budget has cut people's entitlements and level of security whilst curtailing their opportunities. One thing that John Howard always talked about was the aspirational class and creating opportunities.

There is no doubt that the Australian economy faces challenges in providing new levels of security such as funding the National Disability Insurance Scheme and providing new opportunities for young people under the Better Schools Plan, particularly when there are revenue shortfalls. The answer to these challenges is not to destroy people's confidence in the Australian economy, not to eliminate opportunities but to create them and grow the economy and constrain expenditures in areas that do not threaten that growth and families' capacity for opportunity.

The biggest concern out of this budget relayed to me is that my electorate comprises manufacturing workers, retail workers, trade workers, construction workers, which accounts for almost 40 to 45 per cent of employment in my constituency. These people use cars and they do not get the fuel rebates that the mining or the agricultural industry get. They do not get rebated for the petrol that they use. In 2001 John Howard, knowing that he had a problem in the outer suburbs, removed this fuel excise indexation. Do you know what would have happened had he not removed it? A very illuminating paper from the Parliamentary Library said that 'the current rate as it stands at the present period of time of this fuel excise'—customs duty, if you want to include that as well—' is now 38.143c per litre.' If the fuel excise indexation had continued before John Howard intervened, it would now be 55c per litre.

So is that what this government wants, because it is now reinstating that fuel excise indexation? How on earth do you think that a price increase over that period of time in petrol from 38.143c to 55c per litre benefits people who rely on cars and utes to get their families around and for employment opportunities? It is just crazy thinking. If you look at the total revenue for it over the forward estimates period, it is about $4.15 billion but, as I said to you, $1.8 billion of that is rebated. I do not represent a lot of mining workers; I represent tradies, I represent construction workers, retail workers and other workers and a lot of mums and dads. They are driving their kids around the place. They are not going to get a rebate. They are just going to be slugged with this fuel excise increase.

It disproportionately involves people from the outer suburbs. It is effectively reinstating an outer suburbs tax. I do not think that is fair and I think the government should seriously be reconsidering it because the constituency that I represent is not silly. It is a wise constituency and it knows when it is not being told the truth, and they certainly do not believe they are being told the truth with respect to the budget overview macroparameters but also the reasons why they have to be targeted in this particular way. They just do not accept it.

Another issue that was raised right off the bat was the introduction of the $7 GP tax. As I said, I have a lot of families in my area and they need to go and see their local doctor. You raise the price of petrol but then to give them an additional burden, an additional tax, you put a $7 GP tax on their visits. Notwithstanding some pretty interesting comments from those opposite about Medicare being overused and overserviced, that is not what people in my electorate think when they have a sick child. They need to take the child to a GP. If they have two sick children, they have to go to the doctor's twice. They do not think they are being overserviced by their GP; they are trying to make their kids well. They are trying to make sure that those kids do not infect other kids if there is an issue.

We have tens of thousands of young people in my electorate. When your have outer suburbs growth-belt areas, they of course have a disproportionate call on general practitioners. They need those general practitioners, because there is nothing more important than the health of their children. I have two children and we have had to use GP services. Was I overusing the service? It is quite a stunning, values based statement to be making. It is a statement that could be made by a party that represents those living in the inner city, not the outer suburbs. I have spoken to GPs in the area and they are mortified about this particular introduction of a new tax. I have spoken to Dr Ariane D'Argent, Dr Stuart Rumble, psychologist Stephaine Chu and a constituent Helen Jolliffe about this. They say it affects everybody. It absolutely does affect everybody and there is no compensation for it, regardless of what is being said.

In addition to imposing this new tax on doctor visits, the Abbott government has decided to make the Medicare safety net less fair from 1 July 2016 by cutting $270 million and transferring these costs onto families. The elderly, who are a group who have sacrificed much to make this country the country that it is, are already not going to the doctors. These are the people that need to go to their doctors to ensure that their ongoing use of medications continue. You save as much money by people going to a general practitioner and picking up an early diagnosis of an issue in that age group.

What are you saying to people with mental illness? If you are going to the doctor and are trying to get an assessment or a diagnosis, you do not want to go to hospital because, believe you me, going to an emergency ward seeking some sort of understanding of what your condition might be is not the best way to go. Our whole health system channels us towards a general practitioner as the gate keeper to the entire medical system. So young people with mental health issues going to doctors are then having to pay an additional $7. The implication is, according to the government, if they keep on going to the doctors then they are using the system. It is a horrible, values based suggestion to make and it disproportionately affects people in my constituency.

Locals in Holt have also found out that they are going to have an additional $100 charge to see a medical specialist, which is another hidden nasty. In outer suburbs, in growth spot areas, they rely on public hospitals. What we see in the budget in 2014 is that it cuts funding for three local hospitals that service residents in my electorate. Between 2014 and 2018, the Monash Health network of hospitals stand to lose $122,536,072, which includes funding to the Casey Hospital, the Cranbourne Integrated Care Centre and the Dandenong Hospital.

Last year, in 2013, the previous Labor government had a $107-million funding shortfall for all of Victoria. There was a disagreement between the Liberal state government and the federal Labor government about funding. Do you know what it did as a consequence of $107 million shortfall for the entire state of Victoria? It started closing hospital emergency wards. They started basically going down the pathway of shutting people's access to hospital emergency wards. So if three critical hospitals in a growth network were going to be closing their emergency wards when a much smaller amount of money was going to be taken out of their system, you will have a substantial problem on your hands when they get told that they are going to lose $122 million. Again, what do I say to people that I represent in my constituency? If you get sick, do not go to a GP because you are going to get charged $7. And if you go to an emergency ward at Casey Hospital, it might be closed because they are the measures that are going to have to be contemplated by the state government because of this health funding shortfall, and the precedent occurred last year. The precedent occurred when $107 million was taken out of the system and then, by the way, the federal Labor government reinstated that $107 million to ensure that emergency departments were not closed. So this is not going to be the case with the Abbott government.

Medicare Locals being abolished was another broken promise. They were told they would not do that. I have a great Medicare Local called the South-Eastern Melbourne Medicare Local—I call it SEMML. It basically was awarded the budget for headspace in Dandenong. It got it up and running in four months and it is a great enterprise.

What has happened as a consequence of the Medicare Locals being abolished is that the SEMML was awarded a tender to establish a headspace in Narre Warren at Fountain Gate. We have a real problem with youth suicide in my area and that is why I have campaigned relentlessly to ensure that there was a headspace in Dandenong and a headspace in Fountain Gate. I was very confident, given that SEMML had been awarded the contract for headspace in Fountain Gate, that young people that I represented were going to get a community-friendly service that they desperately needed and deserved. What has happened with the abolition of this excellent Medicare Local who has successfully been running the program and the headspace in Dandenong has resulted in uncertainty because it has been delayed.

To the health minister: given the level of youth suicide that we have had to endure in our area and after campaigning to get a necessary facility that was promised by the government, if you think we are going to accept delay you are delusional. That is just not going to happen. Young people in my area deserve these services. We will campaign day and night until they get the services that they deserve, that they need and that they were promised. This government is now callously delaying it. That is unacceptable and we will continue to campaign until that gets fixed.

We talk about pensioners. They have sacrificed and laboured for our country's good and they are being told that people shifting into that age by 2035 are going to have to work until they are 70. That sounds great, but not if you are a construction worker, not if you are a tradie, not if you are someone who works with your hands like so many to in my area and not if you work in manufacturing. This is a budget of broken promises and lost opportunity which disproportionately affects people in our suburbs. I ask the government to reconsider some of the more pernicious measures that have been introduced in this budget.

Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Central Coast is one of the most important and beautiful regions in the world with people who are passionate about seeing it grow and thrive. From the bustling intersections in Gosford to the tranquil beaches of Avoca, there is a unique mix of families, commuters, young people, veterans and senior Australians and more who have all made the Central Coast their home. We are proud of our region and rightly so. But under Labor, the Central Coast was a place without a vision. Only the coalition went to last year's election with a positive plan, our growth plan for the Central Coast.

When I am out doorknocking in suburbs such as Woy Woy, Niagara Park or Erina, I am reminded every day of the importance of what we are doing in government. Through this budget and through our positive plan for the Central Coast, the coalition government is working to ensure that the Central Coast is a region where people can tap into the wealth of future employment and educational opportunities that may one day be available right in our own backyard. This is a tough budget, but it is a fair budget and it is a responsible and visionary one as well. It takes real action to address Labor's legacy of debt and deficit, and we are taking responsibility to deliver this real action for the sake of future generations of Australians.

The previous government ran up five record deficits and left $123 billion in future deficits. Without policy changes, our debt would have reached $667 billion. If we want to create for the Central Coast a future of hope, reward and opportunity, we need to take action now and not put it off for our children and our grandchildren to deal with. Labor's debt is already costing about $1 billion a month in net interest payments and that is borrowed money. It is simply unsustainable and more needs to be done. Something needs to be done. To make this transformation possible, we need to start in our region with more jobs.

I am proud to say that this government have already acted on our growth plan for the Central Coast by announcing, as part of our budget measures, that 600 Commonwealth jobs will be located in Gosford CBD. This is a game-changer for the Central Coast. In our growth plan, we actually committed to 250 to 300 jobs and now we actually have doubled that. The Australian Taxation Office will make up around half this number. This is a boost for the area not only with these 600 jobs but also because it will help to drive even more activity to local cafes, local restaurants and local businesses. It is a game-changer because it will help our young unemployed people and we have an incredibly high rate of youth unemployment on the Central Coast. They will have more access to local employment opportunities. It is a game-changer because it will help our university graduates with more opportunities for pathways into great jobs locally on the Central Coast. It is a game-changer because there are 600 more opportunities for families who currently commute, leaving early in the morning and returning home to their families late at night because the job opportunities are in Sydney or Newcastle. This is a game-changer for our families on the coast as well.

I am pleased to advise that planning has already started for a purpose-built facility in the heart of our city's CBD, and this is going to boost investment and provide secondary employment through increased economic activity. It will also help create jobs in its construction phase. Gosford City Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Ali Vidler has said that the new purpose-built facility will have a huge effect on our local business community and that it is a positive leap forward for the growth of the CBD and its future. Central Coast New South Wales Business Chamber Regional Manager Daniel Farmer has described the announcement as a catalyst for growth and, in his words, a 'coup for the Central Coast'.

Gosford is also one of the suburbs to benefit from the coalition's $50 million Safer Streets program, also provided for in this year's budget. Our investment of $680,000 in Robertson will install more CCTV cameras in Gosford, Woy Woy, Umina, Ettalong Beach, Kariong and Kincumber. It is great news for local shops, because it is helping to reduce antisocial and unlawful behaviour by helping to stop it in the first place.

So we are delivering jobs, and we are enhancing security—but I know that people on the Central Coast need more. Every day I am asked by people in my electorate about what we are doing to build roads and infrastructure. I am proud to respond by saying this government is building the roads and infrastructure of the 21st century. Our Economic Action Strategy includes a record investment in infrastructure in New South Wales, which will create thousands of jobs, slash travel times and boost economic growth.

Part of this is a $405 million investment to help build NorthConnex, which will mean shorter commuting times of up to 15 minutes, reduced congestion and safer roads. Building this missing link between the M1 and the M2 has been talked about for decades, but it is only a coalition government that is actually delivering this. For people on the Central Coast—for people like my husband, Chris, who leaves early in the morning at a quarter to seven, and often does not return home to our two kids, aged three and five, until eight or eight thirty at night—and for the thousands of families who have those daily experiences, this means less time in the car and more time around the dinner table with their families.

We are also fixing accident-prone black spots. One of these, at the intersection of Langford Drive and Woy Woy Road in Kariong will receive $675,000 allocated from this year's budget. We discussed the benefit of this funding recently with the Kariong Progress Association and some local residents from Kariong, together with the Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development, Jamie Briggs. The progress association, led by Peter Pauling, together with Kariong resident and community advocate Fiona Lloyd, have been tireless advocates for this project for more than two years. Putting the safety of their community in first place, they have been determined to see this dangerous intersection fixed. Fiona Lloyd told me that there has been a large growth in the area in terms of traffic volume and pedestrians, with a new high school, playground and childcare centre. Receiving this funding will allow Gosford City Council to work towards providing the safest solution for both pedestrians and vehicles, which will greatly improve the safety of residents in Kariong.

This is a 'contribute and build' budget. But it is also a budget that supports our community in fair and decent ways—unlike what you hear from many of the myths that Labor and the Greens are peddling at the moment. There are more than 9,000 people in my electorate on the part or maximum pension rate. I am regularly out and about, meeting with pensioners on the Central Coast. In fact, I was at the 25th birthday celebrations of the School for Seniors on the peninsula recently. There I met so many genuine, honest, loyal people who believe in the value of community, and who believe in the value of our local community. I know that from their own life experiences they also know how to ask straightforward questions. And on the issue of pensions, we have a straightforward reply. I can confidently say that the coalition are making no changes to the age pension payment in this term of government. The coalition government will continue to increase the rate of the age pension every year. In March and September it will go up every year. In September 2017 it will continue to go up by CPI. And pensioners will keep important Commonwealth concessions and benefits.

This government has made responsible, long-term decisions to ensure the age pension system is sustainable and able to meet future demand. Simply put, if we do not take these steps, the cost of the age pension system is projected to increase by 70 per cent, from almost $40 billion a year now to $68 billion a year over the next decade. Importantly, pensioners will be better off when the carbon tax is scratched. We are determined to abolish the carbon tax. It is a $550-a-year hit on families in my electorate. When the carbon tax is gone, pensioners will benefit from lower bills. My concern is that, if this toxic tax is not repealed, I may start hearing some of the same stories that I did from before the election about people in my community who were too afraid to turn the heating on in winter because they dreaded the possible cost.

The former member for Robertson, now a senator, is part of the reason the legislation is being blocked. Labor said they were terminating the carbon tax, and now they are refusing to repeal it. I ask them to listen to Australian people, to listen to the people on the Central Coast and to help us scrap this tax for good. In the meantime, the coalition government is delivering record funding for hospitals. Annual federal assistance to the states for public hospitals will actually increase by more than nine per cent every year for the next three years and by more than six per cent in the fourth year. This is a 40 per cent increase over the next four years, or more than a $5 billion a year increase in spending on hospitals. Yes, we are asking people to make a modest contribution in terms of the GP co-payment, while, at the same time, having a strong safety net. It is wrong to suggest that there is such a thing as free medicine, because it is not free for the taxpayer. The co-payment contribution that we are asking for will be capped at 10 visits a year for Commonwealth concession cardholders and for children under 16.

Importantly, the government will reinvest every dollar of savings from health reforms in the budget into a new $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund. This future fund is expected to become one of the biggest medical research funds in the world. The future possibilities from this investment are endless, but let me take one local example. Some of the bravest people I have met on the Central Coast are those with Huntington's disease. I was invited along to the monthly meeting of a support group at Niagara Park to meet with the families and patients with Huntington's. I am pleased that, as a result of our honest decision in this budget, I can tell them that Australia is investing in world-leading research on many of the challenges that we currently face in health.

Our government is also delivering visionary policy in the area of higher education in ways that have the potential to be a game-changer for the Central Coast. Our reforms are about delivering world-class universities to Australia, and I am determined to see the Central Coast become one of the hubs where the best minds in the world can embark on producing breakthroughs in every field. This budget enhances these sorts of possibilities by setting up our nation to have the right economic conditions and the best possible culture for our young people to be able to earn or learn. Graduates earn on average 75 per cent more over their lifetime than school leavers. At present, students pay on average only 40 per cent of the cost of their university education and taxpayers pay the remainder—60 per cent. Surely, it is reasonable that students who will benefit from this university education—and I personally have benefited from an outstanding university education—make a fair contribution to the cost of their education. The reforms that we outlined in the budget will provide a bedrock for the right environment for students in my electorate on the Central Coast to gain access to the best possible educational opportunities.

We are conscious of providing more opportunities for students. That is why we are extending Commonwealth support to all Australian higher education students, not just students enrolled at the established universities but also students enrolled at registered higher education institutions who are studying bachelor degree courses or diplomas. This means more choice and opportunity for students and greater competition. It is about helping students on to a stepping stone towards real advances in their education.

For students who need it most, there are also generous scholarships. Universities will need to invest $1 of every $5 of additional revenue for students from low socio-economic status backgrounds through our new Commonwealth scholarships. We have thousands of tradies on the Central Coast, many of whom are forced to travel down the M1 to get work in Sydney. This budget helps them as well, through Trade Support Loans for apprentices. Starting in July, these loans encourage more young people to take up a trade and to complete their qualification. Like the Higher Education Loan Program for university students, the Trade Support Loans will only be repayable once apprentices are earning a decent income. Coupled with the government's record education funding investment of $64.5 billion over the next four years in schools, we are delivering an education system that takes care of students from the moment they first put pen to paper.

This is a not just a budget about reducing debt and deficit so we can have a strong and prosperous economy. It is a budget that is about investing in more jobs, better infrastructure, education and health. Our government has a plan for the Central Coast that we can rightly be proud of. It is a budget that is enabling us to build together for our future, with confidence. It takes real action and real commitment to be able to deliver a budget that has been laid out to deliver a blueprint for the future, a blueprint for the Central Coast. I know that it is going to deliver real outcomes and real opportunities for what I know to be the best part of the best country in the world to live in.

Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about the 2014-15 budget, and I acknowledge my colleagues in the room. I begin by summarising the results of my budget impact tour, the process I have undertaken to listen to my constituents during this budget process. It is one of the delights of being an independent that I am able to do this. Since the budget was delivered, I, my staff and a large group of volunteers have been travelling around Indi undertaking a budget impact tour. We have held talks and listened to the views of people and interest groups in all parts of the electorate, asking them for their three budget priorities and suggestions for revenue raising. We have seen more than 300 people face-to-face, and 250 people have contacted the office by phone, email, social media and website. As I speak, a team of volunteers are recording this data, tracking where the respondents live, what topics they are particularly concerned about, and their ideas for changes and improvements to the budget. I anticipate that the full detailed report will be available in early June. In the meantime, I am using the material gathered during this tour to strongly represent my constituents in this place. I am making speeches, moving amendments to budget bills, and negotiating with parliamentary colleagues, staff and crossbenchers.

So what have the people of Indi been saying? We have heard positive things about the budget, especially about the government's move to reduce debt and the deficit and to build strong road infrastructure. Generally speaking, the people of Indi believe something had to be done. They were willing to tighten their belts, and they recognised the role—indeed, the responsibility—of a new government to review long-term strategy and set direction. They appreciate that the government delivered on all their election commitments to the people of Indi: for planning for the Bright hospital, for roads in Indigo Shire and, together with the MP for Farrer, for funding for the cardiac laboratory at Albury Wodonga Health. They also acknowledge government funding for their election commitments to the Roads to Recovery Programme, Bridges for Renewal, $100 million for mobile phone coverage, $100 million for agriculture research and development, inland freight rail planning money, and further funding for mental health and Headspace.

However, rural people do understand money. They understand budgets and they understand the need to economise. There was no shortage of alternatives and additions that people offered to me to increase the revenue side of the national budget. But, like many other communities in Australia, a significant percentage of the people were disappointed in the budget. They thought it had an urban bias. They thought it failed to take account of circumstances in country areas and regional cities. They thought it fell heavily on the shoulders of the poor. And they thought it lacked a strategic vision for the future of the nation. They specifically mentioned the social impacts of the budget on low- and middle-income families, older people and especially young people seeking work. This was because of the impact of the fuel excise, the GP co-payment, reduction in council funding, decreases to pensions, changes to Centrelink payments, long-term cost shifting in health and education funding, increasing defence spending, and the deregulation of university fees and the increase in costs to students.

These are serious concerns and I will be talking about these extensively with all my parliamentary colleagues, particularly those in the Senate. However, in this speech I would like to focus on the impact on rural and regional living and on young people. In country areas access to communication infrastructure is essential, and the government's telecommunications budget allocation failed to acknowledge the complexities for regional living. Instead, NBN coverage and quality of coverage has been reduced. $100 million for mobile phone towers is not nearly enough. Research indicates that $100 million will at best only pay for an estimated 200-250 new or upgraded mobile sites across the whole country. In Indi alone, my local councils estimate that 200-250 mobile black spot towers are needed. Many of these are needed in areas severely impacted by the bushfires and many are needed for long-term safety of the residents.

Access to travel is also essential in country areas. The fuel excise will impact on all people who live in rural and regional Australia but particularly so on those who do not have access to public transport. To live their lives, to earn, to learn, to lift for the country, as the Treasurer has asked us, we must drive. Constituents constantly told me that petrol is already more expensive in the country, and now it will be even more so. Access to a doctor is essential in rural areas and the GP co-payment adds to fees that many people in Indi already pay. The national bulk-billing average in Australia is 75 per cent and in many metropolitan areas it is 85 per cent. In Indi it is 65 per cent, which means that 35 per cent of people already pay large amounts of money to go to the doctor. So the compound effect of these fees—for GP visits, for medicines, for blood tests and for X-rays—will be significant, particularly for people on fixed incomes such as our older people.

In rural areas local government services are essential. The National Local Government Grants Program was designed specifically to make up the shortfall in funds rural and regional councils often have in their revenue stream. It enables them to provide services that equal their metro cousins. The freeze on indexation of the payments to councils will mean that rates will have to rise or services decrease. The importance of councils in rural and regional areas cannot be underestimated. While it is true that many in Indi accept that something had to happen, there was a strong consensus that from a social perspective the collective impact of these policies will impact most severely on rural and regional living.

Support for young people in rural and regional Australia is essential. Young people are the future of Australia and they are particularly the future for rural and regional Australia. Many of the young people I spoke to felt that the budget would not help them. They said they felt they were being blamed for not being able to get work, or blamed for not getting into further education. As one young woman said, 'I am trying, but it's so hard and it will be even harder with no money.' The cuts to education and to financial support for people under 30 on youth allowance and Newstart will have a significant impact on a whole generation of young country people. Young people in Indi are not lazy. They do not want to be unemployed forever. They want to undertake education. There are just not enough local opportunities to earn and learn. Much of Indi has a youth unemployment rate of 17.5 per cent, which is 11.5 per cent higher than the average unemployment rate in this country. Many parts of Indi have no local further education options, and those that are there exist in the northern parts of the electorate. Altogether we have approximately 5,000 further education places. However, there are well and truly over 5,000 people already on Newstart or youth allowance in Indi.

This makes for a very difficult equation. How can we expect young people in Indi to earn or learn when there are insufficient jobs and insufficient education opportunities for them? The options are limited. I believe the unintended consequences will be severe and long lasting, and I will be doing my very best to have this part of the budget changed. We need to support and encourage our young people to remain in rural and regional Australia, and we need to support and encourage their parents, their families, their friends, community organisations and businesses to create local jobs and education opportunities.

There are solutions to many of the issues identified, and many people in Indi were keen to be part of a national discussion. How do we grow the economic pie? How do we maintain a fair social welfare safety net? They said they were prepared to tighten their belts, even to pay more, if they had a sense that the budget would build a stronger and more resilient country. A constituent in Wodonga—male, retired, over 60, reasonably well off, who owns his own home, whose children are all in jobs and who is still healthy—told me that last year he received an income of over $400,000 from his self-managed super fund, and he said: 'Cathy, I pay no income tax at all. That's just not right.' And I agree. He was one of a number of people who were happy to discuss with me how they personally would be willing to pay more for their fair share.

With this feedback, yesterday I moved an amendment to the debit tax levy that it be extended to 2020-21, as I too believe that people with more, such as me, should pay more. How disappointing it was that the government and opposition voted against this amendment.

In Indi, we listened, and we heard the diversity of voices that can be found across rural and regional Australia. Rural people do not like the ongoing blame game. They do not like hearing that it is always someone else's fault. They do not want to be told that they are untrustworthy or lazy or just too old. The resounding message from my budget impact tour was that people want their government to give them genuine leadership and vision, especially in rural and regional areas where they live. Australians are looking forward to a debt-free future, but not at the cost of a lost generation of rural youth, not at the cost of viable regional communities, not at the cost of equality and certainly not at the cost of disengagement from the political system.

I believe that many of the social aspects of this budget are unfair, especially for rural families. I also believe that this parliament has the knowledge and the talent to offer better, more fair alternatives. To both sides in this public place: my constituents ask that you please stop focusing on the past, that you stop focusing on blame and negativity. It makes people feel disengaged from this place. It does not build this country. My constituents ask that we start working together—as, on both sides of the House, you proved today, to my enormous disappointment, you could come together and work to block my amendment in this House, which would have made more money available from those who are able to pay. My constituents ask that we work harder and we work better together for this country, because we know we can do better. We know we must do better.

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

The recent budget week here in Canberra proved that we as a coalition are up to the test that has been left to us as a result of our election at the last federal election. On that night, the Treasurer laid out a blueprint for our economy and the budget that we want passed by both houses of parliament so that we can get on with the job of fixing the budget mess that was left to us. We are not prepared to see the responsibility passed to another generation to pay back the debt that has accumulated with seven years of Labor administration. To put the debt in perspective, much of the forward estimates show that the debt will continue to rise. It is unsustainable. One of the worst aspects of this, apart from it being unsustainable, is that the very interest we are paying on that debt—$1 billion a year, which we borrow to pay the interest—is just dead money. Imagine just what we could do with that extra $1 billion, or $12 to $13 billion a year, if we were not spending it—borrowing it—to pay the interest on our debt, as we must.

We have a plan, and we want to make sure, as we go through this budget not only to the end of this parliament but also in this session, that we will see some initiatives passed in the lower house and sent up to the upper house, so that we can see the upper house pass them before 30 June. One of those I would like to see the Labor Party support us on, which has already passed the lower house, is the abolition of the carbon tax—that tax that cascades throughout the system. If we do not get it passed by 30 June, it will then start to apply to the fuel tax bills of the trucking industry around Australia. As part of an arrangement where they a pay a road user charge, and get a credit for part of the excise which the motorists pay—but which they do not have to because they have a road user charge, we will start to see the carbon tax apply to those in the trucking industry. For my constituents, as many in rural and regional Australia would appreciate, the tyranny of distance is a very big factor. If we are to do anything about reducing the impact of the cost of transport in this country, we have to start to bring down their costs and see greater productivity. The benefits to regional and rural communities and, of course, to our competitiveness as an exporting nation, should be clear for all to see.

One of the issues that is terribly important for my community in rural Australia—and I must say I represent and I am the voice of 42 per cent of the land mass of Queensland in this place; I say that I am the voice for the people who don't have the voice in this place—is this: based on research that has been done by Monash University and the Centre for Remote Health, if two babies were born today, one in a capital city and one in the west of my electorate, there could be a difference of up to seven years in life expectancy—merely because of the postcode of the place where they were born. That is up to seven years. That means that for those in rural and remote Australia, if they live their life at the postcode they are born at, as compared to those in the city, there could be a difference of seven years in their life expectancy. The other thing is that life expectancy is increasing 20 per cent faster for urban Australians than for their counterparts out in country areas. So that gap is going to widen, unless we are going to do something about it—and we do in this budget.

I am very happy to be working with my state colleague, the Minister for Health, Lawrence Springborg. His constituencies are all contained within the boundaries of Maranoa. The Queensland government are already are making a significant difference in relation to access and in the way they are running the hospitals in Queensland, which are their responsibilities. He has already announced there are going to be some trial sites set up for telemedicine, running as hubs in my electorate—in Roma and Charleville for instance—with hubbing to the smaller communities, and supporting those smaller communities from bigger hubs. It is a great initiative, and I am certainly looking forward to working with the state health minister on this issue. I want to say that the annual assistance to state public hospitals will increase by more than nine per cent every year for the next three years. So whilst we are dealing with the debt situation, trimming the budgets and making sure that we continue with our absolute responsibilities in very key areas, health being one of them, we will continue to see that funding rise for the next three years, and by more than that in the fourth year. It really means that there is something like a 36 per cent increase, over the next four years, in health funding to the states. States run hospitals, and the private sector runs hospitals; the Commonwealth does not run hospitals—we might run one in Tasmania, but we do not run hospitals. We do provide, importantly, health funding.

The co-payment for a visit to a GP is an important element of the budget, because as part of the savings that will come through that process we want to establish— and the Treasurer announced this as one of the key planks in his budget on budget night—a future fund for medical research. We want to see that medical research centre grow to the tune of some $20 billion, given that we have some wonderful research going on now. But it will need money.

A great example of medical research is Professor Ian Frazer, from Queensland. He invented the Gardasil vaccine, which is a vaccine against cervical cancer. What a wonderful breakthrough that was, but it required research money. With an ageing society in Australia, as well as people living longer, research will be a critical factor if we are to ensure that people have a better quality of life as they grow older and make the most of their time on this earth. So that medical research fund is critical. I think it will also attract brains to Australia in the area of medical research—a research community. We in this country should see ourselves as pre-eminent in research, as pre-eminent as some other countries in the world, with old sandstone universities that have great reputations. We also have that capacity in Australia. Professor Ian Frazer has given us an example of that capacity, as have other researchers over the past decades. So let us make sure we can do something about establishing that fund. This budget does that.

Education is, for anyone, one of the great tools in life. Without it, it is a tool that you will miss. I believe everyone in Australia, regardless of where they live, have the right to have access to good, affordable primary, secondary and post-secondary education opportunities. With respect to the Australian participation rate for students at universities, in 2010, 18 per cent went on to university. In 2006, it was 18.08 per cent. It is not rising. Yet in our capital cities, university participation rates for students from metropolitan families have increased over the same period, from 28 per cent to 35 per cent. That demonstrates that, if you live in a city or a big regional community, where you have access without necessarily having to leave home, you get that access to a post-secondary education opportunity.

One of the terrible results is that, in remote Australia, the participation rate in post-secondary education is as low as one per cent, compared to the rate in cities, where 35 per cent of students go on to university education. One in remote Australia! We have to fill this gap. In this budget we start to address that issue. It is not only about access; it is about affording the access to go to university. We are planning to extend the opportunities so that more people can attend university. We are planning to extend the access, particularly to disadvantaged students in rural, regional and remote Australia.

Whether it be through HECS-backed diplomas and the pathway courses or increased support for young people wanting to take up a trade, this government is making it easier for them to learn now. As the Minister for Education quite clearly said in question time today and since the budget was announced, our plan is to support more than 80,000 additional students each year through these new measures.

In many ways, diploma students will be the big winners out of this budget. Students from low socioeconomic groups in regional and rural areas will have more opportunity than they have had before. I have outlined the percentage of participation now. It is about affordability and access, because they all have to leave home to gain access to university or, in some cases, maybe TAFE. So often, it is not affordable for the family.

New Commonwealth scholarships will be available to support those students. This is the important plank: higher education institutions will be required to spend $1 in every $5 of additional revenue they get from fee deregulation on Commonwealth scholarships and other forms of support for those from low socioeconomic backgrounds in regional and rural areas of Australia.

The minister at question time today outlined the example in the United Kingdom of what happened there once they started to deregulate the fee structure for universities. I think we can draw on that example of what we could expect here in Australia, which I say will give these students from rural, remote Australia—disadvantaged families—the opportunity to gain access to university.

The trade support loans are also terribly important. My electorate of Maranoa has got the coal seam gas industry—one of the largest investments in Australia with all apologies to Western Australia; we have got a massive investment. This is a $60 billion coal seam gas investment that will be delivering great results to Queensland and Australia by this time next year.

Apprentices will have access to some $20,000 over the entire period of their training with more support provided during the initial years when it is needed most. If they complete their four years, it will come in four tranches—$8,000 in the first year of the apprenticeship; $6,000 in the second; $4,000 in the third; and $2,000 in the fourth. If they successfully complete their apprenticeship, they will then get 20 per cent written off their loan—that is $4000.

What does that mean for people in my electorate in the coal seam area—the tradies, who need those apprenticeships and the training? We need better skills for workers who are in these industries. Now they have an opportunity to be funded, albeit a loan, but there is an incentive to complete their apprenticeships. Far too many apprentices start the day and drop out with the lure of better money, and do not complete that apprenticeship.

Even under the trade support loans, I notice shearers will be able to access this money. One area that is missing at the moment—and I am going to be discussing this with the minister—is the agricultural sector. I want to see it included in the criteria to access these loans, because agriculture is going to be critically important as we look to the opportunities to our north and Asia to continue to grow food for not only our own but global food security.

I will quickly touch on infrastructure—the $508 million for the Warrego Highway. I have already written to the state minister for transport who has responsibility for planning. I want to see the first $49 million starting in July 1 this year go to the upgrade of the Chinchilla to Warra section of the Warrego; some more passing lanes urgently needed on the Warrego east of Chinchilla; and the safety issues in the township of Chinchilla at the railway crossing and a pedestrian crossing addressed.

At the Warwick end of the Eight Mile where the New England meets the Cunningham's Gap road, we desperately need a safety upgrade. There have been 10 fatalities there in the last five years. It is a black spot. I have also written to the state minister to get it on their agenda as they have the responsibility to make the application to the federal government for that money. The money is in the budget. It is now up to them and the minister. I hope that these areas that I have highlighted will meet their approval to get on with the job.

In conclusion, the money for drought support, pest management and also water as a result of the drought package is very much needed and certainly appreciated. I am hoping that the $10 million spent across three states and the money going to Queensland will be used for hard infrastructure such as permanent fencing rather than just ongoing programs which may work. I want to see some hard fencing, so we can start to rebuild our sheep and wool industry in western Queensland. The dingoes, the wild dogs, have almost decimated us. It has had an economic impact on the loss of shearers and the economic flow-on to our country towns. I thank the House.

Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriations bill being debated before us today. We in opposition will of course support the passage of these bills through parliament. We have got a bit of history with oppositions playing games with supply on this side of the chamber. While it was before my time in the House, there are still a few sore feelings on our side of the chamber.

The budget that these appropriations are built on is bad for Melbourne's west, bad for our society and bad for our nation.

Mr Deputy Speaker, my friends on the other side of the chamber would like you to believe that they are the saviours of a 'budget emergency' that is infecting the Australian economy. The truth is that the Australian economy and the Australian federal budget are both in good shape, and they were left that way by the previous Labor government. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Labor devised an economic stimulus package that was deemed by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to be amongst the best in the world. That is why in Australia we call it the global financial crisis rather than the great recession, as they do in the United States and the United Kingdom, because, thanks to the Labor government at the time, we did not experience a prolonged recession as other countries in the developed world did.

During this period, we did incur budget deficits, but once the crisis was over the deficit was steadily reduced to $180 billion in prudent savings and taxes on those who could afford them—for example, the mining and carbon tax. By the 2012-13 financial year, the deficit in that year's budget was $18.8 billion or nearly 1.2 per cent of GDP, less than a quarter of the 4.9 per cent average for advanced economies in that year. That budget added to an overall debt of $191.5 billion or 12.1 per cent of Australia's GDP. This figure was small by international standards—less than one sixth of the 74.7 per cent of GDP that is the average for advanced economies around the world.

This was a strong economic record. It was enough to secure our AAA credit rating and a stable outlook from all three credit agencies, putting Australia's budget in the company of the 10 strongest in the world. In this context, it is just not credible for the Abbott government to take these objective figures, these facts, and claim that there is a 'budget emergency'. But as the truth of stable economic management did not fit the political narrative of the Abbott opposition, they pursued a policy of pointing at the total debt figures and shouting 'emergency' over and over again in order to create one out of thin air. Once in government, they then sought to inflate the deficit to $68 billion—doubling the deficit in six months through a combination of spending decisions and a change in the economic assumptions underpinning budget calculations. It was political spin, not fiscal policy, which led to the deficit that we see before us today.

The Abbott government has used this confected budget emergency as a justification for the budget currently before us, containing some of the harshest cuts in Australian history. We have all heard over and over again the Prime Minister's mantra before the last election of 'no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS'. The then opposition leader also repeatedly assured Australians that taxes would always be lower under a coalition government. But in this budget, handed down within the first 12 months of the Abbott government, the coalition has broken every single one of these promises, except for the GST—and we know that one is in the mail.

Let us look at some of the ways in which the budget has broken the promises that the Abbott opposition made before the election. Starting with changes to the tax system, as these are the changes that will directly hit the hip-pockets of those in Melbourne's west, the loss of the schoolkids bonus means that Australian families will lose $410 for every primary school student and $820 for every secondary school student every year. The freezing of family tax benefits A and B for two years is likely to leave the average Australian family worse off by thousands of dollars a year. Moreover, family tax benefit B has been restricted, available now only to families with children under six and with earnings of under $100,000 in family income. When justifying this change to the entitlement to family payments to the National Press Club, the Treasurer made a vague reference to the fact that 'your children do grow up'. Maybe they do, but they do not get cheaper.

Next are the two areas in the budget where the Abbott government's ideological agenda is most plain to see—health and education. The introduction of a $7 GP tax marks the biggest assault on Medicare since the Fraser era. Let us be clear: this tax is not being used to make up a shortfall in healthcare funding. The bulk of the funding instead goes to medical research—a worthy cause, true, but this is a tax designed as a disincentive for people to go to the doctor. If Australians cannot go to the doctor without a credit card as well as a Medicare card then health care in this nation is not free. It is not just the $7 GP tax either. GPs who bulk bill concession cardholders and children will be losing a $6 incentive payment per patient. With the loss of $11 per patient in total—the $6 plus the $5 for the GP tax—if they continue to bulk bill, GPs will not be able to wear this overall shortfall.

The Australian Medical Association warns that small medical practices will lose up to 25 per cent of their income if they continue to bulk bill in the context created by this budget. There will be a significant incentive then for GPs to additionally increase fees, considering that they will already have mechanisms in place to charge Australians for their visits anyway. And when Australians leave the doctor, life will continue to be expensive with a $5 increase in medicines under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. There are also significant cuts to health programs around Australia, including the axing of Medicare Locals, $390 million from dental services and $360 million from the abolition of the National Preventive Health Agency. This is not delayed pain. These funding cuts will have an immediate impact, with 1, 200 hospital beds around Australia affected from this July.

But the Abbott government have not just attacked our health system in this budget; they have also broken their promise of 'no cuts to education'. Some of the most significant changes in this budget are the cuts to our schools and the higher education system. With all these broken promises, it should not be surprising that the Gonski reforms will no longer be delivered, despite the Prime Minister promising he would do no such thing, despite promising that Labor and Liberal were on a 'unity ticket' when it came to education and despite the Prime Minister's statement, 'We will make sure that no school is worse off.'

In this budget, we will see the indexation for school funding stripped back from six per cent to 2.5 per cent. That is more than $6.5 billion ripped from our schools over the next five years. Most significantly, the allocation of this funding removes the needs based funding distribution model at the heart of the Gonski reforms. This funding model meant that school funding was targeted towards the kids that needed it most. It focused funding on schools with particular student needs, such as students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, Indigenous backgrounds, non-English speaking backgrounds and students with disabilities. The schools of Melbourne's west would have disproportionately benefited from these changes. They would have received the funding that they deserved to give the best quality education to the kids of Melbourne's west. Now, however, we see a budget that has not only slashed the amount of education funding but erased the needs based distribution model that was the cornerstone of the Gonski reforms.

The most ideological budget changes, however, are those applying to the university sector. If you are a student starting university after 14 May this year, you are going to enter a system where the market, not merit, determines whether you go to university. The deregulation of university fees will allow universities to set the fees charged for courses according to demand. The Abbott government is combining this with a $1.1 billion cut in funding for Commonwealth supported places. Universities have already admitted that they do not know how much degrees will cost now that they can charge what they like for them. The chair of Universities Australia, Professor Sandra Harding, was on the radio last week saying exactly this:

Universities therefore are being asked to set fees in an unprecedented market environment... we have to have a stab and make a decision about what we think the market might bear...

The result is a predicted rise in university costs of up to 30 per cent across the board and undoubtedly more for prestigious courses such as law and medicine. Postgraduate students already pay over $110,000 and $250,000 at Melbourne University for these degrees. With demand for the courses still high, there is no reason that other universities will not charge similar amounts. Amidst all this doom and gloom, it is good to know the Abbott government found room to expand the school chaplaincy program to $250 million over five years. I will let you draw your own conclusions about the Abbott government's priorities in this respect.

Pensioners too will feel the sting of the budget before us today. Despite promising clearly before the election 'no changes to pensions', the Abbott government has betrayed pensioners by bringing in a new indexation system for pensions. Instead of tying pension rises to average male weekly earnings, the pension will be indexed to inflation, leading to a decrease in the pension over time. There has also been a freeze to the means-test thresholds on all pensions. This means fewer of our pensioners will be able to continue to receive the pension.

To add to the pain, the seniors supplement has been taken away from Commonwealth seniors health card holders. The Abbott government is also making it more difficult to qualify for the Commonwealth seniors health card by including untaxed superannuation income in the income test. These changes will result in pensioners paying an additional $876 for singles and $1,320 for couples per year.

The Prime Minister has left few promises unbroken from his time in opposition, even his promises to make no cuts to the SBS and our beloved Aunty. The Bananas will not be receiving new pyjamas anytime soon, with a $43.5 million in 'efficiency savings' cut from the ABC and SBS. And they may not be receiving a pay cheque either after the ABC and SBS efficiency study forecast for next year reports. The ABC and SBS have tightly controlled budgets. They will not be able to wear significant cuts to their funding. ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has stated this emphatically, warning that these cuts will lead to job losses at the ABC and an overall reduction in services. We know from Mr Scott's evidence today before Senate estimates that this threatens some of our children's beloved figures such Peppa Pig. If the parliament thinks that university students were poorly behaved protesting the Abbott government's cuts, they have not seen what toddlers are capable of doing.

Commuters, too, should feel betrayed by this year's budget. The indexation of the fuel excise in line with inflation will hit Australian families to the tune of $2.2 billion a year. This increase is being justified for investment in the many road projects included in the budget. But the budget has also slashed all the previous Labor government's investments in public transport, redirecting this money for building roads. This means no money for Melbourne metro, which is crucial to increasing capacity for the train system in Melbourne's west as it grows into the future. This is despite the fact the Melbourne metro was ranked by Infrastructure Australia, an independent body, as a 'shovel-ready' project and the most important infrastructure priority for the state of Victoria. It is only one of the many public transport projects across the nation that have been cancelled as a result of this budget. As the member for Grayndler so brilliantly put it: under this budget, families will not only have to drive more, but they will have to pay more to do so.

What does this all mean for my community in Melbourne's west? Well, in Gellibrand, the cuts will hurt and they will hurt right across the community. Thousands of residents will be impacted by the changes to the Newstart allowance. We will have almost 17,000 pensioners hurt by the changes to the pension indexation and other cuts to concessions for pensioners. The impact on health in our community will be significant. Apart from the potential closure of the Macedon Ranges and North Western Melbourne Medicare Local, which funds important preventative health programs like the Sons of the West men's health program that I am currently participating in, we will also see significant cuts to our hospitals. An estimated $58 million will be cut from hospitals in the west, including Western Hospital in Footscray, Williamstown Hospital and Sunshine Hospital. The hit to local families via the GP tax will be approximately $6.3 million.

The Abbott government has been spruiking the proposed equality of the budget, and argued that we are all doing the 'heavy lifting' together. But economic modelling from both NATSEM and ANU demonstrate that the bulk of the budget burden falls disproportionately on the less well off. It is true that an individual on three times the average wage will be hit by an additional $1,492 a year, which is less than one per cent of their disposable income. But the impact of the Abbott Government's budget cuts will have a far greater impact on less well-off families on $95,000 a year, cutting about five per cent of their income.

Cruellest of all are the cuts affecting our unemployed youth, who are already suffering through one of the toughest job markets in recent years. Youth unemployment in Melbourne's west is currently at over 13 per cent. That is a figure significantly higher than most other areas of Melbourne and the nation. An unemployed young person facing this unfriendly job market, however, will lose $6,944 a year from an income of $13,273. That is over 50 per cent of their income. A person cannot absorb that sort of reduction in income without making drastic changes to their life.

So while the Abbott Government may argue the purpose of the budget is to reducing debt and deficit, and to all share in the pain together, if you look at the detail the real truth is easy to see. This is a budget aimed at creating a crueller, colder and more unequal Australia in line with Tony Abbott's vision of smaller government. It is a budget that uses the concocted justification of a 'budget emergency' to end universal health care, create a US style higher education system, and destroy the safety net in place for us all. Australians did not vote for this, and they do not want it.

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Addressing this piece of legislation that is before us tonight, I would like to quote Dickens because I think Dickens sums up what this budget is all about. He succinctly put it:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

That is what this budget is all about and that is what the debate tonight is all about. On that side, they are happy for us to place generations upon generations further and further into debt. On this side, we know we have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to be able to look our children and our grandchildren in the eye and say to them, 'We are not stealing from your future.' It would be irresponsible for us to do anything else.

What were we faced with? We were faced with a budget which, heading into the future, was going to see the debt of this nation reach $667 billion, with not a solution in sight as to how we were going to address it. We were left with a situation which already had us paying an interest bill of $1 billion per annum. We were left with a solution from those opposite which basically said, 'Let the spending continue. Let the spending reign and let irresponsibility reign.' But we were not going to stomach this. We knew that we had to be the adults in the room, that we had to be the responsible ones, that it was up to us to act—and act we have in this budget.

We have almost halved the net debt situation, the future generations we will face in seven or eight years time. We have taken the action to make sure that key parts of our economy are placed on a sustainable footing—our health and our education sectors in particular. For those opposite to still stand and say that there are cuts to health and education shows that they have got dizzy from their own spin. If you look at the forward estimates it states extremely clearly that health and education spending continues to go up over the forward estimates of the budget.

We have before us a budget which is responsible, a budget which says to future generations, 'We will not burden you with our debts.' As the Prime Minister so brilliantly put it in question time today, we will not be accused of stealing from future generations. We will not allow this generation to do that to future generations. What does this budget provide? It provides record funding for infrastructure, record funding for roads. I know, Mr Deputy Speaker, in your electorate that would be extremely well met. I am sure it would be in other members' electorates, especially in regional and rural areas. In Victoria alone we are seeing record investment in road infrastructure. In country areas it is worth noting the increased funding for Roads to Recovery, the increased funding for the Black Spots Programme and the increased funding for projects in my electorate, like the Condah-Hotspur Road, the upgrade of the Great Ocean Road, the extra money going into the Western Highway and also the money which will ensure the duplication of the Princess Highway to Colac. These are all productivity-building infrastructure investments which will improve the economic output of this nation.

There are also other areas which will benefit from this budget. One of the things which has not got much currency because of the frightful fear campaign being run by certain sectors in the opposition is what we have done in aged care, and in particular what we have done for the aged care sector in the regional and rural areas. We have increased the funding for those vital institutions which provide in small regional and rural communities the ability for older people who have lived in a community to stay in those communities and to spend the last parts of their lives there. Once again, this would not have occurred unless we had this very sensible budget which thinks about all Australians, whether they live in regional or rural areas or whether they live in the capital cities.

This budget also meets everyone's local election commitments. All the commitments that were made to the people of Wannon have been committed to in this budget. I can go around my electorate and look everyone in the eye and say, 'The promises that we made in the lead-up to the election have all been met in this budget.' That is incredibly important. That ranges from CCTV cameras in Maryborough, to the road infrastructure that I have already mentioned, to the lights which will go into Melville Oval at Hamilton, to the regional cancer centre which will go into Warrnambool. There is a $10 million investment by the federal government in that $30 million project which the community has demonstrated the need for so remarkably. They got the state government on board and raised funds themselves, and we have a federal government commitment to go with it. The result is a $30 million regional cancer centre. All this is confirmed in this year's budget.

But this budget is not just about responsible spending; it is also about real reform. It has been remarkable to see the reaction to this real reform by those opposite and how they have sought to demonise it in an almost abhorrent manner. If you look at education, we see outlined in this budget the most major reform in higher education since the Whitlam reforms of the early seventies. These reforms will enable universities, for the first time, to openly compete for students. This can have real benefits for regional and rural students because universities in our regional and rural areas can offer a lower cost of living than their urban cousins and they can also now compete for the first time on the price of the courses being offered.

It is worth examining the experience in England with the deregulation of its higher education sector. There we have seen a 12 per cent increase in students from lower socioeconomic areas accessing higher education. That is worth repeating: in England we have seen a 12 per cent increase in students from lower socioeconomic areas accessing higher education. And, if you want to, you can juxtapose that with what is happening in Scotland. But I will not go into that detail; I will just make that statement about what has happened in the UK.

For students from regional and rural areas in Australia, who do not access higher education like their city cousins, these reforms give them the ability to more readily access those important institutions. I have said to the Minister for Education that he is making incredibly important reforms and we have to make sure we get the implementation right because, if we do, these reforms can be ground-breaking, especially for regional and rural students.

If we look at health, we will now have a price signal for Medicare. This was tried before by the Hawke Labor government, which put forward some very good cases as to why it should be done. We are once again seeing a small price signal put into the health system so that we can have a sustainable Medicare system. This is about ensuring the long-term future of Medicare; it is not about anything else; it is about ensuring that we can have a health system which is sustainable in the future. In the past decade we have seen a $40 billion increase in the health spend. What we have to do is ensure that health spending is sustainable. For those opposite, I reiterate that, over the next four years of the forward estimates, health spending goes up; there are no cuts; health spending goes up.

To make sure health spending is sustainable we are putting in a small price signal. In doing that, we are not saying this is money which we will then put into general revenue to spend on whatever; we are actually saying we will make sure that that money goes into medical research. So, once again, we are being extremely responsible with the actions that we are taking. We are putting in place real reform which will benefit the nation over the longer term. It is worth reminding those opposite that in other areas of the health system we do put in price signals and they have supported the putting in of those price signals. So it seems passing strange why they will not agree and see as sensible that we put in this small price signal when it comes to Medicare.

There is another question that the budget has put out, and it is a pretty big question. What it has done is honestly and transparently laid out the future of the nation's finances. But what we are yet to hear from those who are critical of the economic plan we have putting in place is what is their solution. What is their alternative? I say to the Labor Party: come into this place and present to us your alternative plan. How are you going to rein in the spending, or are you happy to sit here or stand here tonight and say, 'We are happy to put the budget on a course so that we will have $667 billion worth of debt in the next seven to eight years.' What is your plan to deal with the $1 billion of interest we are currently paying on the nation's debt? Tell us. Are you happy to go on paying that $1 billion a year on that debt? Are you happy for that to increase over time? What is your economic plan? It is all right to sit there and be critical of this and be critical of that and spin this and spin that. Why don't we see the details of what your path is to get the nation's finances back under control?

So far we have heard absolutely nothing. We saw the budget-in-reply speech—not one initiative laid down to say, 'This is what we would do to fix the situation.' If you cannot come up with your own solutions and you do not start doing the work to come up with your own solutions, you are going to get a very rude awakening as the next election approaches. You will be left looking like the emperor that has no clothes. When the Australian people ask what is the alternative there will be nothing there. So rather than spending your time naysaying and trying to disrupt everything that we are doing with regard to our economic plan, why don't you spend your time focusing on what your alternative will be. I look forward to hearing about it.

It is a pleasure to rise here tonight and talk about this considered and honest budget. It is honest especially for the voters of Wannon because every one of our election commitments has now been honoured and clearly spelt out in the budget. I look forward to hearing from those opposite about their economic plan.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the appropriation bills required to implement the stinker of a budget that is the 2014-15 budget. It is one budget but it creates two nations. It is the most extreme and divisive budget in memory from the most extreme and divisive Prime Minister in memory. It seeks to divide the country into haves and have-nots, pitting Australian against Australian, placing the burden unfairly on families on low incomes, on those living week to week, on the pensioners, on the sick and on the disabled. It is a budget that asks the most vulnerable in our community to do the heaviest lifting and as a result it will make our country sick and poorer, less fair, less equal and less educated.

The member for Wannon just said that everything about this budget can be found in Dickens. As the member for Hotham said before, that is right, it is all about Hard Times. This budget is about Hard Times. The people of my electorate are furious, and for good reason. This is a budget built on broken promises and lies and twisted priorities. It is a smash-and-grab raid on my community and on the good people who live week to week who just want to make ends meet and raise their kids. It is a budget that will contribute to a bleaker, more inequitable future for Australia, and it is one that is founded on extreme ideology and not economic strategy.

The cruel and unnecessary cuts to schools and hospitals, pensions and payments, and tax hikes on petrol will stretch household budgets in my area, in my electorate, to breaking point. Analysis done since the budget has shown that my community in Rankin will be harder hit by this budget than any other community in Queensland. This is also borne out by the NATSEM data that I will discuss in a moment. But, as important as that modelling is and as credible as that modelling is, the people in my area do not need economic modelling to tell them that this budget is a direct attack on them and their families.

To me, the effects of these broken promises and twisted priorities have an entirely human face. It is the pensioners who stop me in the street, worried that they will not be able to pay their bills anymore or that they will have to choose one bill over another. It is the parents already fighting to make ends meet, who fear that they will not be able to afford the kids' new uniforms when they grow out of the old ones. It is the high school students who cannot see a path to university in a world of uncapped fees. It is people like Kerri Morris, whose home I visited with the Leader of the Opposition last week.

Kerri is a single mother recovering from cancer. She has been battling to make ends meet to provide for her kids. She had to step aside temporarily from her job to focus on her health and her family. She is in and out of GP and specialist clinics all the time, and she has to pay not just for consultations now but more for prescriptions as well, and of course for fuel and parking. We calculated what the budget hit would be for Kerri from this budget. When the measures come into full effect, they will hit Kerri's annual household budget by something like $3,800 a year. That is something like $75 per week—$75 a week less that Kerri will be able to spend on the essentials, on medicines and on giving her daughter and her other kids a good start in life.

Kerri, along with millions of other Australians on lower incomes, has been targeted by this budget for no good reason, and they will be bearing the brunt of this government's cruel cuts and new taxes. Sadly, her story is not the exception in my area; it is the norm, and that is why locals are white-hot with anger about this government and its budget of broken promises.

One of the most heartening things from the reaction in my community, whether it be by email or at the mobile offices I have been doing, getting out and about, is that people are saying that even the measures that do not directly impact them trouble them because they are worried about their neighbour, their family member, their friend, their schools and hospitals, the teachers—they are worried about all kinds of people in the community. That says something very good about Australians because it says that, if you attack one member of our community in this way, you attack every member of the community in this way. In attacking one, you attack us all.

This budget will also have an impact on small businesses in my community and right around the country. People will not have the same level of discretionary spending that they had before this budget, and that will have a real impact on small businesses, how many people they can employ and whether or not they keep their head above water.

Last Friday, I was very pleased to welcome the shadow Treasurer to my electorate, and we had a function with the Logan Chamber of Commerce. We also went and saw the good people of Simply Beans, at Underwood, to talk about some of these issues around the budget. We also talked about the huge slump in consumer confidence brought about by the budget and by the ham-fisted way that it was previewed. The ANZ-Roy Morgan consumer confidence report measured its fastest slump since the beginnings of the global financial crisis in 2008. Consumers are worried that they will not be able to afford the essentials anymore, and small businesses will take the hit as a result.

So this budget is a stinker for small businesses in my community, and it is devastating for local families trying to make ends meet. The NATSEM analysis that I mentioned before measures the budget's full impact on families, and it really goes to this point. It reveals that the poorest 20 per cent of homes will see their annual income fall by almost 2.2 per cent, while the richest quintile will lose only 0.2 per cent. A couple with two kids, together earning $60,000 a year, suffers a hit of $6,350 a year, more than one-tenth of their income.

A budget like this can only widen the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest paid in our economy. The depth and scale of the cuts in this budget make it clear that its political architects see rising inequality not as a challenge to overcome but as an objective to be met. Unfairness is no mistake, and it is no side-effect in this budget. The attack on low- fixed- and middle-income earners is not accidental; it is not unavoidable and it is not inconsequential.

It is a deliberate strategy that is particularly out of place given that right around the world the international economic policy environment is increasingly reducing inequality and supporting social mobility. I have spoken in this place before about mainstream economic thinkers like Miles Corak and Michael Ignatieff, who are working in this space and who argue that inequality in one generation breeds inequality in the next. Even the notoriously dry Economist magazine has described growing inequality as 'one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time'.

Traditionally, Australia has been interested in addressing these problems. Since the Eureka Stockade in the 1850s and the birth of Labor in the 1890s, we have spent a lot of time as a nation talking about fairness and inequality. So much so that the 'fair go' has worked its way into our national identity and is cited by all sides of politics—but only by this side with any credibility.

This budget is the Abbott government's most recent attempt to tear at the social fabric of egalitarianism and a fair go that has long defined this country. That is why Dr Cassandra Goldie from ACOSS has described it, accurately I think, as 'a budget to divide the nation'.

Sadly, its impact will be felt long into the future. It not only magnifies inequality today, it will ingrain inequality for many years to come. The cuts to health, schools and higher education make it harder, not easier, for our nation to develop the rich and deep pools of human capital needed to feed productivity and social mobility in the decades ahead.

The member for Wannon spoke before about being able to look our kids in the eye and not steal from their future. I cannot imagine anything that would more devastatingly steal from their future than cutting $80 billion out of schools and hospitals and putting university out of the reach of more and more kids from low SES households.

We cannot accept a budget that drives greater inequality in Australia. We cannot accept a budget that condemns the poor to life as second-class citizens in our own country, with no prospect of improving their lot in life. We cannot accept a budget that embeds disparities that drive people to feel that their society and their democracy are loaded against them. We cannot accept a budget founded on the twisted priorities of this government who will take from the most disadvantaged to pander to the sectional interests that saw them elected.

Let's not forget that this is a government which will impose a $7 fee on the sick while at the same time paying millionaires $50,000 just to have a baby. It is a government who will rob hundreds of thousands of families of the family tax benefit part B, but will reinstate superannuation tax concessions for the wealthiest 20,000 Australians. It is a government who will radically decrease the indexation rates for age pensioners, meaning less money for them in years to come, but can somehow manage to find $20 million to pay for a marriage counselling scheme and $100 million for a union witch-hunt. The only way to describe this budget is as an ideological attack on low-income Australians.

What makes it particularly galling is that it is an attack from a government and a coalition who have long shrieked and moaned about class warfare from the Labor Party. The people of Australia are watching as this government and this Prime Minister don the battle armour of class warfare themselves, with their sights set firmly on our most vulnerable and most disadvantaged. I want to reassure people right around the country and around my own community that we will fight against this budget and against this government who hurt them and sentenced our nation to growing inequality in the years ahead.

Those on the other side of the House try and justify this destructive budget by concocting an absurd 'budget emergency'. Let me be really clear: the budget emergency is a con. Those opposite can choose their opinions but they cannot choose the facts. The facts absolutely torpedo the so-called budget emergency. The government inherited an economy from Labor with a AAA credit rating and a stable outlook from all three major credit rating agencies, something never achieved by any Liberal government in the past, including that with Peter Costello as Treasurer. It was a budget which had gone through some substantial structural reform to the tune of $180 billion in savings over the last Labor government, with lower levels of debt than almost all comparable international economies. This government, particularly its Treasurer, worked very hard to feed the public his budget emergency con. He piled billions of dollars into new spending in the MYEFO last year, doubled the deficit, gave the Reserve Bank money they did not ask for, came up with the most pessimistic economic forecasts he could—all to try to whip up this hysteria about a budget emergency, which was just a big excuse to swing the axe harder at working people.

The good news is that Australians are seeing through this con. They are on to those opposite. They are seeing right through a government which claims to be worried about the deficit but then spends $21 billion giving paid parental leave to millionaires. They are seeing right through a government fighting to deny themselves billions of dollars in revenue from the carbon price and the resources tax. They are seeing through a government willing to finance billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy and to multinational corporations. People know these are not the actions of a government gripped by a budget emergency.

The truth is that the government is in denial about this budget, and now they are in disarray. Backbenchers are bagging the budget in the paper almost every day, and they are in denial about its impact. How many times has the Prime Minister said he is not cutting schools and hospitals? Then you look at page 7 of his own budget overview and it says exactly that: $80 billion is being cut out of schools and hospitals. So Australians are finally seeing this government for what it is, and seeing the budget for what it is: an ambush on a type of Australia and the type of Australians we love.

Of course the Labor Party will not be blocking supply in the parliament. I want to thank and acknowledge the many people who have written to me and urged another course, and I am sure the member for Newcastle has been getting those emails too. I appreciate that input. But we will not be engaging in the Tea Party tactics of government shutdown and thrusting the nation into constitutional crisis. We will not be blocking supply, but we will be opposing the cruellest aspects of this budget, including the GP tax, the devastating changes to the family tax benefit and the unacceptable hit to future indexation of pensions.

Members on this side of the House are here in politics to help our citizens to lead happy and fulfilling lives with real opportunities for upward social mobility. For this reason we cannot support measures that ingrain and magnify inequality. We cannot support budget measures that deny Australians a fair system of health, education and a basic safety net, and that denies Australians tens of billions of dollars of desperately needed money for their schools and for their hospitals. We will not be part of that. That is why we will be fighting this budget and making the case for an Australia where fairness is part of the future and not just part of the past.

This is Labor's reason for being. Budgets like this are our reasons for being. And it is the reason I was sent here by the community I was born in, grew up in, live in, and love.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking to the appropriation bills, may I say that the moneys required to be appropriated from the consolidated revenue fund as part of the 2014-15 federal budget are part of the government's Economic Action Strategy to build a strong, prosperous economy, boost productivity and create thousands of new jobs. In addition to funding the day-to-day operations of the Commonwealth, the bills provide for the government's hallmark $50 billion infrastructure plan.

This budget was not framed in isolation but rather in the context of an increasingly competitive international environment with emerging economies in our region gaining prominence in the global marketplace. This is characterised by unprecedented competition for resources, energy and commodities. Never before in history has there been such a fluid flow of goods, services, trade and investment capital across international borders. Merit based economic performance increasingly defines a nation's strength. Our nation must adapt to this new paradigm through increased productivity in order to secure its long-term economic standing and maintain the standard of living for all Australians. The government's Infrastructure Investment program will provide economic benefits for all Australians.

Increased workforce participation is a key tenet of the budget. Currently, it is estimated that one in five Australians rely on welfare payments by government as their main source of income. Each year the government spends more on welfare than we spend on the education of our children, the health of our people or the defence of our nation. With an ageing population, this statistic has been projected to reach one in three people in the community reliant on government payments as their main source of income in the future. Clearly, it is unsustainable to have every two people working to support a third. Those of working age who are able to work must be expected by society to be engaged in productive employment. I do acknowledge that at times it may take time to find employment. However, I believe that there are many people who could work but are not currently engaged in employment.

From 1 July 2014, employers who hire mature age job seekers aged 50 and over who have been recipients of income support for at least six months will be paid a subsidy of $10,000 over 24 months. Employers who hire mature age job seekers on a part-time basis of between 12-29 hours per week will also be eligible for a pro rata subsidy.

The budget provides adequate opportunity for young people and mature age people alike to study at university, complete vocational education, training and apprenticeships through student loans schemes. The sum of $820 million has been allocated to expand access to higher education. For the first time, the government has extended direct financial support to include diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degree courses as eligible courses under the loans scheme. This is an extension of the scheme that has been available to university students for many years.

Apprentices are also able to access concessional trade support loans of $20,000 to assist them with their courses over a four-year apprenticeship. In my electorate, access to this new assistance program will benefit students attending vocational training facilities, including the West Coast Institute, Trades North Campus in Clarkson, the Motor Industry Training Association automotive training centre and the Electrical Group Training facility operated by the National Electrical Contractors Association. In doing this, the government is investing in a skilled workforce of the future to drive economic development.

Education is never completely free. The taxpayers of Australia ultimately bear the cost. Failure to exercise prudent management of the higher education loans scheme has seen billions of dollars written-off in potentially unrecoverable debts that ordinary taxpayers will ultimately have to bear. Through better management of the student loans system the government is exercising responsible stewardship of taxpayers' funds.

The budget delivers significant infrastructure spending at a national level as well as for my home state of Western Australia. Over the next seven years, $50 billion will be invested, including $11.6 billion of new funding through an infrastructure growth package which includes $5 billion under the asset recycling initiative and $6.6 billion in new infrastructure investments. Western Australia will benefit from a record $4.7 billion in funding between 2013-14 to 2018-19 which will build the infrastructure of the 21st century.

Congestion in our towns and cities costs the economy billions of dollars every year in lost productivity. Better roads mean less congestion, faster travel times and lower fuel costs. The government's investment in Western Australia will improve freight transport linkages to key domestic and export markets which will promote economic development for the benefit all Australians, including those living in my electorate. For example, there are future plans to connect the Neerabup industrial area to the Swan Valley bypass, which is a new $615 million highway extending from the intersection of the Reid and Tonkin highways in Malaga to the Great Northern Highway in Muchea. Construction is expected to start in late 2016. This will provide heavy vehicle access, linking the local industrial area to the mining industry in the Pilbara and Kimberley region and practically all the way to Darwin.

Similarly, the Gateway WA project is a major upgrade of the roads around Perth airport, in particular around the southern access to the airport which includes the widening and new upgraded interchanges at the Tonkin and Leach highways. The government is also committed to the $1.6 billion Perth freight link project to provide a high standard road freight connection to Fremantle port and will work with the Western Australian government to attract private sector investment in the project. The government will provide a further $350 million per annum in funding to local government authorities to assist with the upgrade and maintenance of local roads as part of the Roads to Recovery Programme, with a total investment of $2.1 billion over the five years to 2018-19. In addition, the budget provides for Black Spot funding of $500 million over the five years, targeting dangerous sections of local roads through safety improvements such as traffic signals and roundabouts. The cities of Wanneroo and Joondalup within my electorate will share in the $280.9 million in Financial Assistance Grants to local governments. These grants are untied, allowing local councils to spend the grants according to local priorities. They consist of two components: a general purpose component distributed according to population on a per capita basis, and an identified local road component distributed according to fixed historical shares.

The budget provides for an increase in defence spending to safeguard our nation's security and to secure our economic assets in a region where neighbouring nations are also increasing military spending. The budget brings forward $1.5 billion in spending from 2017-18 into earlier years, with a plan to increase defence spending to two percent of GDP.

The cost of health care is rising due to advances in medical treatment and care, as well as an ageing population with greater longevity and lifestyle factors. The recent Commission of Audit report has projected that over the next decade, Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme costs will grow by 5.4 per cent per year; Medicare Benefits Schedule costs will grow by 7.1 per cent per year, and hospital costs will grow by 10.4 per cent per year. It is therefore important that the government ensures that the public health system is sustainable in the long term. The introduction of a copayment is intended to moderate the number of visits, by acting as a reminder that each bulk-billed visit costs the taxpayer $36.30. It is important to note that the budget does not change the current safety nets that are in place for those in need who hold concession cards. The funds generated from these reforms will be used to establish a $20-billion Medical Research Future Fund to increase investment into medical research to find more effective treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases. Unfortunately, the resources only stretch so far, and the public health system is under a great deal of cost pressure. Therefore it is essential to take responsible measures to keep the health system sustainable.

An increase in life expectancy by 25 years and an ageing Australian population mean that, without policy change, the cost of the age pension is projected to increase by 70 per cent over the next decade. There are no proposed changes to the age pension in this term of government. The budget provides for the existing six-monthly indexation increases to continue as normal. However, it is proposed that from September 2017 the six-monthly increases in the age pension will be linked to inflation rather than wages.

Only through responsible fiscal management and effective monetary policy can the government build a strong economy and maintain our nation's AAA credit rating. It is important to maintain a low inflation environment and to keep interest rates low. Households with mortgages and consumers with debts will be adversely affected by rises in interest rates, which will increase the cost of living and dramatically reduce disposable income. In contrast to the Howard government's record of delivering ten consecutive budget surpluses, the Rudd and Gillard governments burdened the nation with five cumulative budget deficits of $123 billion—the largest deficits in Australian history. Peak government debt is projected to reach $667 billion within a decade. This equates to $25,000 for every man, woman and child. Servicing the interest on that debt is estimated at $1 billion per month, growing up to an estimated $3 billion per month if remedial action is not taken.

Based on data from the International Monetary Fund, without policy change Australia would record the fastest spending growth of the top 17 surveyed advanced economies and the third largest increase in net debt as a share of the economy between 2012 and 2018. As a result of the coalition's strategy, debt in 2023-24 is projected to be nearly $300 billion lower—$389 billion as opposed to $667 billion. This debt reduction will reduce our interest bill by around $16 billion a year in 10 years time, meaning more money for health, education, roads and support for families and seniors. The Australian economy is to a great extent reliant on mining, energy and commodity exports. These markets can be volatile, leaving our economy exposed and vulnerable to external shocks. It is therefore prudent to limit our national exposure to foreign debt. Currently it is estimated that $700 million a month is spent in servicing foreign debt.

In summary, these appropriation bills are part of a fiscally responsible budget which is linked to the government's overall economic action strategy to build a strong, prosperous economy, boost productivity and create thousands of new jobs. It is a budget which is framed for the long-term needs and challenges for the Australian nation.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a dreadful and disappointing budget was handed down by this government on 13 May. It is a dreadful and disappointing budget because it is filled with lies and broken promises, and it has been so seen by the people of Australia right across the country. Parents, young people, pensioners—anyone that uses the services the government provides can see now what they got when they elected the Abbott government in September last year. Just as the bunting around polling booths said, 'He wins, you lose,' now Australians can see just how right that prediction was from the Australian Labor Party. Tony Abbott did win the election and Australians lost in so many ways.

We have seen from the way in which this government has tried to explain their budget to the Australian people a continuation of their empty slogans and their misrepresentations and misleading statements about the true state of the Australian budget, about the true state of the Australian economy, about the true state of our national finances. I could start by pointing to the way in which this government is wanting the comparison in their budget papers not to be, as it should be, with the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the document written on the eve of the election by the secretary of the Treasury and the secretary of the Department of Finance, which is the proper comparison, but rather with the false document prepared by this government which they published as the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, a mid-year economic and fiscal outlook in which they chose to give to the Reserve Bank of Australia $8.8 billion that the Reserve Bank of Australia had not asked for and a mid-year economic and fiscal outlook in which they chose to add to the budget deficit by almost doubling it. They achieved that by removing assumptions, removing spending caps and changing the way in which the figures are produced. It is nothing to do with Labor; this is their Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, not Labor's. And it produced their other false figure of the $667 billion they have been quoting. I am sure we heard much of this from the member for Moore, who I heard reciting some of the government's lines in the speech which immediately preceded mine. Of course, that is another false figure. It is a figure that the government has produced solely for political purposes, because this is a government that can do nothing but play politics with every single aspect of the administration of the Commonwealth. It is a government which can do nothing but play politics.

This false figure of $660 billion which the government likes to tout is a figure that is said to be the level of the deficit in 2023. They never mention it is in 2023—10 years time. Of course, one would only get to it if the governments between now, 2014, and 2023 were asleep at the wheel. Perhaps this government is planning on being asleep at the wheel. There is no other way that we would get to $660 billion other than by successive governments—not merely the current short-lived government of Tony Abbott but every government between now and then—ignoring any issues about spending and ignoring, in particular, the revenue side of the budget.

What we have had from the government in this budget is not merely the falsity of their pretending that they are doing something about the deficit—and they are pretending, because in their budget papers we do not return to a surplus earlier than predicted by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of the Department of Finance in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. We return one year later. That is how much of an effort this government is making to deal with deficits. There is no 'debt and deficit disaster' in Australia—not a jot of it. There are issues about the collection of revenue in Australia. These issues have been building for many years and they are issues which we saw writ large over the course of the six years of Labor government, because it is the case that, over the last 21 years of Labor's budgets, all of them produced a lower tax to GDP ratio, under 22 per cent, than any of the Howard government budgets—any of the budgets over the 11½ years of the Howard government.

This is why at every turn you can see—and Australians are beginning to understand—the falsity of the approach to the economy that is represented by the Abbott government's budget, the falsity of their three-word slogans and the falsity of their slogan about a debt and deficit disaster, when there is nothing of the kind. You could only say that if you were prepared to wholly ignore the fact that we have continuing growth in Australia. We had continuing growth right through the global financial crisis, which of course the Liberals never want to mention. This is the global financial crisis that the Rudd and Gillard governments managed Australia through, with great economic skill and sound economic management. We had continuing growth, relatively low unemployment and, compared to the whole of the rest of the Western world, the whole of the OECD, relatively low debt to GDP ratio—about a seventh of the OECD average.

The government does not want to state the true picture to the Australian people. The government never wants to state the true picture to the Australian people. It wants to pretend that it kept its promises to the Australian people. What a nonsense! And the Australian people have seen through that. They have seen through it because they remember that, before the election, Tony Abbott and his ministers said that there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no new taxes, no cuts to the ABC—and no change to pensions; I almost forgot. What have we seen? This is just a selection of the false promises that were made before the election by Tony Abbott—

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

The member for Isaacs will use proper titles.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by the person who is now the Prime Minister but who was then the Leader of the Opposition. The Australian people have seen through the false promises of the Leader of the Opposition, who is now the Prime Minister, before the election. They have seen through the false promises made by the gang with whom he made all sorts of promises to the Australian people. They have seen through them because, far from there being no cuts to education and health, there is an $80 billion cut to education and health. And this have been recognised as such by the Premier of Queensland, the Premier of New South Wales and the Premier of Victoria—all of whom are Liberal premiers. That is why the Liberal Premier of New South Wales said in response to the budget that it is a kick in the guts to New South Wales. That is not the Labor Party talking; it is the Liberal colleagues of the member for Moore and the federal Liberal Party saying that it is a 'kick in the guts to the people of New South Wales'. Well might a senior Liberal, who was quoted in the media on Monday, have said that this budget is a 'stinking carcass' around the neck of this government. It is a stinking carcass around the neck of this government and it is going to remain a stinking carcass around the neck of this government right through to the next election, which cannot come soon enough.

I want to say a few things about the disgraceful cuts in the two portfolio areas that I have responsibility for, which are the Attorney-General's portfolio and the Arts portfolio. I am not by any means hoping to achieve in the six minutes which remain to me a comprehensive list of all the disgraceful cuts we see in both these portfolio areas in this budget, but I want to start with the further cuts to legal assistance—how disgraceful at a time when there is rising demand for legal assistance. I am talking about the services provided by the eight legal aid commissions of the states and territories; the legal services provided by the 138 community legal centres that are funded by the Commonwealth of Australia; the environmental defenders offices, which have been defunded by this government; and the legal services that are provided by the eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services and the 14 family violence centres, all of which are wholly funded by the Commonwealth of Australia because they serve the Indigenous community of our country. All legal aid services suffered cuts in the Mid-Year Economic and Financial Outlook in the face of the current Attorney-General having said in the lead-up to the election how much he supported the legal assistance sector.

Well, the legal assistance sector now understand just how much that implied promise of support meant. They understand only too well the attitude of this government to legal assistance. This is an Attorney-General who has not even deigned to visit community legal centres across Australia. He went to Caxton Community Legal Centre, in Brisbane, to do a book launch and then said at the last Senate estimates that he thought that it had a large Indigenous practice—which it does not. That is how much he knows. He has declined to meet with the peak bodies in the legal assistance sector—the National Association of Community Legal Centres and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services—because he is not interested. And that has been reflected in this budget by a further cut of $15 million from the state and territory legal aid commissions. This is an extraordinary policy decision at a time when all people associated with the legal assistance sector or the legal profession, or any clients of the legal profession—which of course is potentially all Australians—know that there is unmet legal need. Everybody knows that there is a rising demand for legal services and everybody knows that the disgraceful changes to criminal laws by conservative state governments across Australia have increased the need for legal services. That is not the time to be cutting the legal assistance sector; it is a time to be increasing the services which are provided to Australians.

I will not dwell at length on some of the other cuts and some of the other agencies that are going to be abolished in the proposals that we see in this budget. The government has ripped $10 million out of privacy and freedom of information services and announced that it is going to abolish the Office of the Information Commissioner and, with it, the Freedom of Information Commissioner. Apparently those functions henceforth are going to be provided by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal as to merits review, the advice function is going to be handled by the Attorney-General's Department and the complaints function is going to be handled by the Commonwealth Ombudsman, none of which has been given any additional funding. That tells you all you need to know about the attitude of this government to freedom of information and, dare I say it, to privacy. The Privacy Commissioner has survived the axe but is to be sent off to work somehow at the Human Rights Commission, which has also received no additional funding; in fact, it has received less funding in this budget. We have learnt that not only is there to be a full-time Human Rights Commissioner—Mr Tim Wilson, who was appointed by this government before Christmas without any advertising and without any search process—but the commission has been told that it is to receive no new funding in this budget; in fact, there is a cut of $1.7 million. So the Privacy Commissioner is being sent to the Human Rights Commission, which has been told that it has to make do with less.

Part of that, disgracefully, is that there is no longer going to be a full-time Disability Discrimination Commissioner, a role which has been filled by Graham Innes with such distinction over many years. He has done an outstanding job over the last several years as Australia's first ever full-time Disability Discrimination Commissioner. I record the thanks of the people of Australia to Graeme Innis for that good work he has done for so long. He has been an extremely powerful advocate for people with a disability. He has worked hard every day to ensure that people with a disability have access to the same rights and opportunities as all Australians.

In the 1½ minutes which remain to me—I am going to be speaking about this elsewhere, and I already have—I come to the slashing of the arts budget in this budget. Senator Brandis has had the gall to suggest that the arts budget and the arts community of Australia in fact did very well—that is the way he put it—out of this budget. His Prime Minister tried to back him up with this at the publisher's dinner last Friday night in Sydney, saying also that if it had not been for George Brandis's advocacy for the arts sector then the cuts would have been worse. Contemplate that. That is what this Prime Minister wants to do to the arts community of Australia. He wants to make more cuts, and he is saying that George Brandis held him back. I do not thank Senator George Brandis for his efforts in this regard.

Labor provided an additional $200 million to the arts in the 2013 budget to accompany the first national cultural policy that we had seen in this country for 20 years, something that was welcomed by arts communities across Australia, and the response of this new government is to slash and burn. We have seen cuts to the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, a cut of $25 million from Screen Australia, the complete abolition of the Australian Interactive Games Fund—how shortsighted is that—the abolition of the Get Reading! program and the abolition of the Indigenous Languages Support program. What a disgrace. (Time expired)

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was very interesting to listen to the member for Isaacs give a long run-through of things that have been cut. But he does not seem to get it. He does not seem to understand that the budget we have inherited forces this government to find $1 billion every single month just to pay the interest. Imagine what could be done with that billion dollars every month. In a single day that is $33 million, every single day. In the 15 minutes I have to speak, the interest bill this country would have paid would have been $350,000. That is the legacy we have inherited from six years of the previous Labor government: the obligation to find the money to pay that interest. Seventy per cent of that money actually goes out of the country because we have borrowed that money from foreigners. We have borrowed that money from overseas. So every single 15 minutes we have to raise $350,000 just to pay the interest.

Instead of members of the opposition coming into this chamber, standing at the dispatch box, apologising for their incompetence and apologising for their waste, we get these diatribes of complaints. The most concerning complaint that I get is the absolute hypocrisy we hear about when they whinge about the cuts, especially when they are blocking the repeal of the carbon tax which will put $550 per annum back in the pockets of the average household in this country. We hear about how terrible the $7 co-payment is. But they are blocking a $550 cut. If the average household has 80 trips to the doctor, that is what it would pay for. That is what the repeal of the carbon tax would cost. Instead we get them coming in here whingeing away about these cuts when they themselves refused to repeal the carbon tax.

In the time available in this debate on the appropriations bills I want to go on about one of the effects of the carbon tax in my electorate of Hughes. We know that the carbon tax forces up electricity prices, just like a whole other range of great and well-thought-out green schemes like the RET and other variable schemes.

The fact is the carbon tax is a tax on electricity and that forces up the price of electricity. So what do consumers do when the price of electricity rises, especially when they have to heat their homes in winter? They simply look for alternatives. One option is people elect either to heat their house or to eat. There is another option: in a case that happened recently in my electorate, a family could not afford their electricity bills so what they did was get some coal and they warmed their house with coal to try and keep the kids warm. But they forgot to open the windows and these young kids were poisoned by carbon monoxide. They had to be rushed off in a critical condition to Liverpool Hospital. These young children could have died. This is the effect increasing electricity prices has.

The other option people have, especially in the west and south-west of Sydney, when their electricity prices go up because of the taxes that the previous Labor government put on and refused to repeal, is to go out to the bush, grab some wood, bring it home and burn it in their open fireplace. When you burn wood, you release what is known as particulate matter. Particulate matter are the very fine particles of ash and dust and soot that go into the environment when you burn fossil fuel or when you burn wood. In fact more than 50 per cent of particulate matter in Western Sydney is caused by people burning wood in their fireplace at home. Why is particulate matter of a concern? It is only recently that the World Health Organization has declared that particulate matter is carcinogenic. We know from health experts that particulate matter causes lung cancer, it causes cardiovascular disease, it causes asthma, it causes as bronchitis—a whole range of different illnesses and diseases. We also know that children are the most susceptible to particulate matter pollution.

Particulate matter pollution is of particular concern in Western Sydney because Western Sydney has a unique topography. It has the mountains to the west, high ground to the north and the south and that simply makes the air pollution worse in Western Sydney because it gets trapped, it accumulates and it circles inside the basin for several days. In fact, it has been said that if you were designing a city, for air pollution Sydney would be one of the last places you would decide to put a city.

We have some statistics of the harm that particulate pollution was causing before the carbon tax came in. Back in 2003 the New South Wales government stated that particulate air pollution in Sydney causes between 643 and 1,446 deaths in Sydney alone. That is up to 1,400 deaths in Sydney caused by air pollution and they said that was a conservative estimate. To put an economic price on it, as well as 1,500 deaths they are talking about close to $1 billion or up to $6 billion per annum. That was almost a decade ago. What has happened the air pollution readings in Western Sydney since the carbon tax has come in? We know people are going out and they are looking for alternatives. They are burning more wood.

I went to the air quality monitoring reports which are produced by the New South Wales government and particulate matter is measured in two ways: there is what is called PM10 and there is also what is called PM2.5, which is the smaller of the two. What we found was that since the start of the carbon tax, particulate matter PM10, as measured in Liverpool in my electorate, has increased by 25 per cent. But it is even worse for particulate matter that is measured in PM2.5—that has increased by 40 per cent. So what the carbon tax is doing is making the air quality in Western Sydney worse. The carbon tax is polluting the environment in Western Sydney.

It is concerning how high those increases have been and how high are the levels we are at. The World Health Organization has a recommended standard for particulate pollution of an annual average of no more than 20 micrograms per cubic metre. That is what you should not exceed. In Liverpool, here in Western Sydney, we are now at 21.1 micrograms per cubic metre—so the constituents of my electorate are now breathing air that is over and above what the World Health Organisation standards recommend for PM10. The other one is PM2.5, which the World Health Organisation says is more dangerous. Since the increase of the carbon tax, with more people burning wood to keep themselves warm in the winter, we now have PM2.5 measurements that are at dangerous levels. We have a standard here in Australia that says that the annual average should not be more than eight micrograms per cubic metre. With that big increase in air pollution, we are now up to 9.5 micrograms per cubic metre for PM2.5. We are above the levels that the World Health Organization and the Australian standards recommend—because of the carbon tax and these other schemes that are forcing up the electricity prices. This is causing pollution, it is causing disease and, given the previous statistics and given the substantial increase in levels, I am in no doubt that it is also causing death. And yet the opposition refuse to meet their election promise to repeal the carbon tax—to eliminate the carbon tax. Shame!

In the time left, I would like to briefly comment on some of the other terribly misleading statements that we have heard from members of the opposition. We in this place have an obligation, and the obligation is that we have to make sure that we enact policies that ensure we pass our nation on to our children and to our grandchildren in a better condition; with more freedom and with more opportunity than we had when we inherited it from our forefathers. But what we are doing is loading them up with record levels of debt that have never before been seen in this country. We talk about that billion dollars that goes out every month. But if nothing is done, we know where the trajectory is taking us. In 10 years' time, that debt—if nothing is done and no changes are made—will blow out to $667 billion. And then the interest payments we have to find will not be $1 billion a month; they will be $3 billion a month—$36 billion a year. That is what we are passing on to our children and to our grandchildren: to have to find the money to pay the interest on the debt that this government racked up, and that this opposition wants us to continue to rack up.

I would also like to quickly comment on some of the changes that have been made to education and to HECS fees. I received an email today which was very disappointing, about a lady in my electorate who had been misled. She wrote to me and said we were stealing her children's future; we were taking away their future—because she had listened to all the propaganda from the opposition.

Going and getting a university education is the best deal that you could possibly get. We have to remember: when these changes are made, the average student will still pay only half the cost of their education. We hear that the average HECS debt today is around $20,000. We admit that that is a significant amount, but the figures show that, over their lifetime, someone who gets a degree will earn a million dollars more than someone who leaves in year 12 and goes on with no further education.

So here is the deal that we are offering students today. You can get into a university without paying one cent upfront. You do not need one dollar. The government will lend you that money, and when you start to work and you are earning above $50,000, you will then have to pay it back—but you will not have to pay it all back; you will only have to pay back half of it, on average. And for that, over your lifetime, you, on average—and there will be people who will do a lot better than that—will be able to earn $1 million more.

This is an opportunity that any young kid should be grabbing with both hands. But we have the opposition whingeing and whining, and misleading young people by telling them that they cannot have this opportunity and that somehow what we are doing takes away that opportunity. It does the exact opposite. The changes we are making will give 80,000 more places by extending that same deal to people who want to do diplomas or who want to obtain a degree from a non-registered university, and also to people who want to do a trade course. We are extending opportunity to the young people of our country. And Labor are telling young people the complete opposite. They are telling untruths.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 1 9 : 00 .