Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know you are very aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, that International Talk Like a Pirate Day is not until Saturday, 19 September. I know it is a big day in your calendar. I know that the member for Lalor is very passionate about it and also that the member for Herbert is very passionate about it. I foreshadow it because, even though we are a long way from International Talk Like a Pirate Day, this speech is chock-a-block with maritime metaphors. So I foreshadow that in this grievance debate.

The Abbott government has been at the helm of the 'Australia' ship of state for over 18 months. In fact, we have crossed the equator. We have gone through the doldrums and we are well and truly into the second part of the journey towards an election. Obviously, this ship of state has collected more than its fair share of barnacles. Many have suggested that it has got quite a few leaks. We see that pretty much every other day in the newspapers. It is a bit of an understatement to say that the ship of state has leaks. A few weeks back—in fact, here in Canberra—we heard whisperings of a mutiny below decks. This is cause for concern, because, whilst it is only a maritime metaphor, it will impact on the Australian people, particularly the people in my electorate. Even though this ship is listing to port at an alarming angle, we need to work out what is best for the Australian people.

We are only 39 days away from the second budget of the Abbott government. We are waiting to see it announced in May. All of the people in my electorate, especially the most vulnerable, are concerned about what this budget will hold.

As passengers on this Australian ship of state they should be worried. We saw the last time around that we had a budget that was directed fairly and squarely at the poor and at those that are doing it tough in our society. It asked a little bit of the rich but asked most of the poorest people in our society. It was a very un-Australian budget. It was the first time an Australian history that we had an un-Australian budget, that attacked those most vulnerable in society.

Let's have a look at the economic state of affairs under Prime Minister Abbott. Obviously, things have not improved. The budget is in a much worse state now than when the coalition came to power. Amazingly, we have managed to increase the debt and deficit, and hit families at the same time. It takes a special kind of incompetence to do that as a government. This is a government that is all at sea. We have seen the cost of living rise. In fact, despite all of the promises made to the Australian people about power prices and removing the carbon price, power prices are 17 per cent higher in my electorate under the coalition government.

Business confidence—the real indicia, the engine room of the economy—is at rock bottom. Unemployment is the highest it has been in more than a decade. In fact, the last time unemployment was this high, the member for Warringah, Tony Abbott, was the employment minister. Sadly, in an economy that is growing, we only have half the jobs being created under the coalition government than when Labor was in office before the last election. So the employment situation is deteriorating, particularly amongst youth.

Let's look at who has been the hardest hit. Sadly, it has been those in our society who are the most vulnerable. These are the people who have been left high and dry by this government: the pensioners, the dementia sufferers and carers, the homeless and victims of domestic violence. To have a government with a Minister for Women and a Minister for Indigenous Affairs—who is also the Prime Minister—supervising cuts to women's shelters, cuts to community legal centres and cuts to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal centres is shameful. I am sure anyone with a community that has significant numbers of Indigenous people would recognise this. Sadly, we also have seen this coalition government supervise attacks on families.

So, whilst the government is prone to hoisting up the big announcements, when we look closely at what they have announced there is nothing but smoke and mirrors basically. We hear the Prime Minister say, 'We're going up to the Northern Territory to spend a few days in an Indigenous community'—a few days in an air-conditioned tent—with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But he also supervised cuts of $530 million.

We see him working out in a gymnasium with the Defence Force people, but he delivered a pay rise that is effectively a body blow to members of our Defence Force. It is not as bad as the punch on the jaw that was actually a pay cut, but it is still a body blow to anyone that has a significant military presence in their electorate. Yesterday, we saw the coalition government announce they will continue funding for homelessness and domestic violence services, but it is too little, too late.

This is in the context of an Indigenous Affairs Minister and Prime Minister who actually said, 'It is not the job of the taxpayer to subsidise lifestyle choices', when talking about remote Indigenous Australians and their connection to land. This is a connection to land that might go back 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 years. This is a Prime Minister that takes a VIP jet to a party with a Liberal Party donor, but then he is able to lecture Indigenous communities that are doing it tough at the best of times, saying their connection to land is a 'lifestyle choice'.

The government announced it would continue funding for homelessness and domestic violence services—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I notice the interjection from those opposite but I did quote the Prime Minister completely accurately.

So we see a cut to domestic violence and homelessness services. This funding should have been renewed months ago.

These vital services were left hanging for months and the employees did not know whether the services would continue. Staff were being told that they probably would not have a job and many of them left yet they have mortgages to pay, children to feed. But this government would delay it and delay it. So now the government will let this vital funding for services get underway yet they are still suffering from a $44-million cut imposed by the coalition government last year.

In February, I was taken aback to see the government announced the funding of the severe behaviour response teams to assist older people living with dementia. However, the coalition government, the Liberals and Nationals, had left dementia sufferers and their carers in limbo for eight months after axing the dementia supplement previously introduced by the Labor government, a Labor government that knows how to care for those most vulnerable.

There is no indication from the government that the next budget is going to be any less unfair than the last one. So batten down the hatches, here comes the next ship of horrible. The Abbott government has already made it quite clear in the next budget they have plans for: a GP tax; cuts to Medicare which will cost families more than $2 billion; hiking up the cost of medicines, which will cost families $1.3 billion; overseeing large increases in private health insurance premiums while ripping money out of public hospitals and Medicare and the states will suffer; $100,000 degrees at universities leaving school leavers unable to afford to obtain a chance to show their skills; pension cuts—in real terms over time the budget papers reveal this; and a petrol tax unannounced that will cost families more than $2.2 billion.

So the Prime Minister has cut and run from his 2013 election promises, those promises made to the Australian people before election night. The Abbott government's intergenerational report confirms that the GP tax, the $100,000 degrees, the cuts to education, the cuts to training and pensions are all in the offing. The intergenerational report contains eight pages about the future and 80 pages about the past and that really sums up the coalition government's current approach to policy.

The experts have decided to give this intergenerational report a wide berth. Instead of thinking up new fairer policy ideas, the coalition keep rehashing the same unfair policies that were in the last budget, not policies that were announced before the last election. This is a classic example of the coalition government being defined by what they are not. All they can do is talk about the past and Labor because they are defined by being 'not Labor' rather than having a core reason for existing. Sadly, as we saw in the last budget, they say in education terms that the best indication of future behaviour is past behaviour—so we will see this budget in 39 days—(Time expired)

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

We have some major challenges in front of us as a parliament. I was in this chamber earlier when the member for Corangamite was talking about 'let's move beyond the rhetoric'. I was actually in your chair, Deputy Speaker, and I was sitting there talking about this and thinking to myself. I went back to my divorce. Whenever my children, my two girls, would come to me and ask a story about what actually happened when they were little and when I was married to my first wife, I said, 'There are three sides to the story: there is my side, there is your mother's side and somewhere in the middle there is the absolute truth. So what you have to do is speak to me, speak to your mother and then you can work out where it fits you.'

What we see in this place at the moment and what the member for Corangamite was talking about earlier was this pervading wall of political rhetoric at the moment. It just seems that politics is the only game in here whereas I would like to move to the world of parliament. To use a cricketing terminology, it just seems to be very 'hard hands' at the moment. There seems to be no nuance around the place. There seems to be no areas of grey on either side. I am not casting aspersions at those opposite. I was in opposition last term and I know exactly what they are doing. It is good fun sometimes. But at the end of the day, we have some very real challenges in front of us. The problem we have at the moment is that Labor will say we doubled the deficit when we came in. What we will say is that all the big decisions were put off till way beyond the forward estimates or outside the forward estimates so they been would not have to be taken care of. So, when we came to government, we had to have a look at the state of the books and we had to readjust so that we could get down to those sorts of things.

A friend of mine is a partner in a city legal firm in Brisbane. His statement is the one I love the most: 'Perception is neither right nor wrong; it just is.' I understand from the Labor Party's perspective why they are doing this. I understand from our perspective why we need to do this. What I would expect from both sides is, no matter which way you look at it, no matter which way you frame the debate, we have got some work to do. One of the things that we always threw at former Treasurer Wayne Swan was that he did not have an income problem; he had a spending problem.

What I try to say in my electorate of Herbert in Townsville is that I am a politician for five weeks of the term and the rest of the time I try to be a parliamentarian. I try to tell them exactly what the problems actually are. We do have a spending problem. We are spending much more than we are getting in. The member for Lalor is sitting across the chamber. She has run a school and she understands about budgets. We all understand the consequences of going over budget all the time. So we have to consider what we are trying to do in this space. As the member for Moreton, who was just in here, was saying, our first budget addressed a lot of this. What we have to do is curtail spending. Those of us who have been doorknocking or doing listening posts or community forums will realise that everyone out there knows that we have a problem, and everyone has a suggestion on how we can fix it. Most people believe that, if we could just make politicians work for nothing, we would be back in surplus before tomorrow. That is not going to happen and it is not right, either. Most people will tell you where we can take money from, but it does not affect them. Paul Keating, my political hero, always said that, in the race of life, you back self-interest, because at least you know it's trying.

I think that we have to move past this. This year, we have tried to present ourselves as the government of delivering. We went to the last election saying that we would axe the bad taxes, that we would stop the boats, that we would build the roads of the 21st century and that we would fix the budget mess. We have axed the bad taxes, with pensioners keeping the compensation for that. We have stopped the boats—we have had one boat. What we have done in this space is very, very good. We have announced over $150 billion worth of roads and infrastructure spending. As Treasurer Joe Hockey said in a speech last year, that is the equivalent of eight Snowy River schemes. And I think we ought to move past using historical analogies as well, because when I talk to my kids they do not know what the Snowy River scheme is.

But we do have the problem of fixing the budget. It is not just the GFC that put us here. All the hard work and reforms done by the Hawke and Keating governments and in the first two terms of the Howard government were based on productivity. Everything we did was based on productivity. I was not a member of the party before 2009-10, and I can say with great honesty that after 2001 the Howard government got lazy. The money was coming in and they did not have to do anything. So we spent the surplus. We still had lots of money, but John Howard had given away billions and billions of dollars in tax cuts. Labor came in and had a fantastic set of books, but, with family tax benefit part B, with the tax cuts, we had spending issues. We had the money in the bank at the time to handle it, but there was no sunset clause on it. Come the GFC, even the most pie-eyed person, even the blackest of black or the whitest of white, has to admit that mistakes were made. There were some serious mistakes made. The first round of stimulus we backed. The second round of stimulus we did not back. It was the second round of stimulus and all the issues that came out of it that really dug the hole deeper.

We have some very real issues to come through. So we have tried to be a government of delivery. We are talking about those things. Just after Joe Hockey was announced as Treasurer, he spoke at I think the Australia Institute and said that you have to do three things: you have to tell people what the problem is, you have to tell them what you are going to do about it and you have to take them with you on the journey.

I honestly thought that, because we had spent the previous three years in opposition talking about debt and deficit, the problems we have had with spending, the structural issues around the budget and the fact that we have this line of spending commitments coming at us—we are like a freight train, where we do not have the money—that that would be enough. But it turns out that we have to do more. Now, as well as being the people who deliver we have to be the people who discuss.

I love this thing, the Intergenerational report.I think it is a great document. It is a great conversation starter because it looks at the long-term trends and the issues that we are going to have to face. Everyone knows we have got an ageing population and everyone knows we will have issues around that. What we have to do is to find out what we are prepared to do about it. What am I prepared to do for my grandchildren?—although I have none at the moment. Am I prepared to make that sacrifice?

So we sat down and asked: how will Australia change over the next 40 years? How will governments budget over the next 40 years to prepare for the future? I think Joe Hockey was 100 per cent correct when he said that you have to ask the questions, even about the GST. Will we have a consumption tax? Will we have company tax? With capital being so mobile, there are some very real discussions to have.

In property there are the three p's. The three p's in property are position, position, position; that is all you have to worry about. With the Intergenerational report the three p's are population, participation and productivity. The key for me is productivity. It is what a succession of parliaments, since 2001, have let go. We have to see that everything we do is about participation and productivity, about doing more with less and being smarter in the way we do it.

We are a great country. We are a country that really prides itself on innovation. We have to back our innovators; we have to do the right thing there. We have the Intergenerational report and wemust work that information into the taxation white paper and the federation white paper. We have to have meaningful, productive, well-paid work. And, more than anything, we have to have opportunities for people. I have a 13-year-old son who really wants to be a marine biologist. His marks at the moment tell me he is going to be anything but a marine biologist, but if he applies himself I want him to be in a space where he is able to take up that opportunity.

My City of Townsville is an outward-looking community. We see opportunity and we want to go for it. We want to be introduced to people where we can close the sale. We want to have an organisation of parliaments—state and federal—that will back us as a community to do what we have to do. This is a great country and this is a great institution. What we have to do is to move past where we are at the moment. We have to have these conversations and we have to be better than we are.

We hear people saying that something is a budget bill when everything is a budget bill. Everyone knows it is a budget bill. The HECS legislation was not an education bill; HECS was a budget bill and it was passed because it was the right of the government to pass it at the time, because of what it meant to the government's budget.

I want this place to be a better place. I want us to be better people, and I want us to be better parliamentarians. I thank the House.