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

Before the debate is resumed on this bill, I remind the Federation Chamber that it has been agreed that a general debate be allowed covering this bill and the four related appropriation bills.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and cognate bills before the House relating to the 2015-16 budget. This is a budget that is pointing in the wrong direction, just like the government that penned it. It looks backwards when it should be looking forwards. It is a budget without vision. It is a budget about yesterday, not a budget for tomorrow. It is a budget that fails to 'have a go' at solving the problems of today and fails to have a go at the most pressing challenges of the future.

As outlined by the Leader of the Opposition in his budget reply speech, this budget does, however, 'have a go' at a number of things—many of which the Abbott Liberal government has had a go at in the past. This budget has a go at schools and universities. It has a go at pensioners and the states. It has a go at working women and working families. It has a go at students, veterans, carers and job seekers. It has a go at the sick and the vulnerable.

This is a budget that still has a go at the same people as it did last year. It unfairly targets families and low-income earners in particular. It is nothing more than a rehashed version of last year's budget—no less cruel and no less deceitful. The same inequity and unfairness of last year's budget remain in this year's budget, with the $80 billion cut from hospitals and schools, with more than $150 million ripped out of the budget of the Hunter New England area health, which services my community; $100,000 university degrees; cuts to family payments, leaving some 7,000 families in my electorate of Newcastle worse off; the $5 increase to the cost of medicines; the cuts to homelessness and domestic violence programs and many more.

In addition to these cruel measures that remain in this year's budget, there are some surprisingly new and nasty aspects that are worth noting. This year we see the deficit doubled in just 12 months. For all of the talk of a 'debt and deficit emergency', this year's budget reports a doubling of the deficit from just 12 months ago, where it was around $17 billion, to $35.1 billion now. Debt is increasing—it is up $40 billion from last year. There are 17 new taxes and charges, with tax as a share of our economy the highest it has been since the Howard and Costello years, and higher than in any year of Labor's recent term in government. Spending is going up and there is more spending than saving, with payments as a percentage of GDP reaching 25.9 per cent. Unemployment reaches a 14-year high and stays there longer than the government was predicting just last year.

And there are many new cuts in this budget, including $967.7 million cut from the paid parental leave scheme; $962.7 million cut from rationalising and streamlining health programs; $651.5 million cut from strengthening Australia's foreign investment framework; $262.5 million cut from the Sustainable Research Excellence program; $125.5 million cut from changing indexation for the Child Dental Benefits scheme; $144.6 million cut from the MBS for child health assessments; $69.6 million cut from dental and allied health for veterans; $72.5 million cut from streamlining health workforce scholarships; $27.3 million cut from the Entrepreneurs' Infrastructure Program; $26.8 million cut from the Cooperative Research Centres Program; $20.1 million cut from the Dementia and Aged Care Services Fund; $16 million cut from the Cadbury grant funding; $13.3 million cut from efficiencies of arts and cultural programs; $3.6 million cut from the Regional Development Australia committees and $1 million cut from the Seatbelts on Regional School Buses program.

Many organisations and agencies have already conducted their own analysis of this budget, some of which I would like to bring to the attention of the House today. One such organisation is the Hunter Research Foundation. The foundation is an independent world-class organisation dedicated to the growth and success of the Newcastle and Hunter region. Since 1956 the foundation has built on partnerships of trust with many hundreds of organisations and individuals. This confidence in the foundation's ideals has enabled it to maintain its core value—independence. So when the Hunter Research Foundation CEO, Brent Jenkins, says:

To say that we were disappointed in this Budget is an understatement, especially in relation to its impact on regional economies.

this government should listen. This is not Labor's analysis of the budget, easily dismissed by those opposite as partisan. This is the view of a credible research institution that is deeply connected to its community.

In the foundation's analysis Mr Jenkins makes it clear that the broader Hunter region, including Newcastle, is experiencing the worst economic conditions they have faced for a generation, including high unemployment and near-record lows of business confidence. Mr Jenkins rightly suggests:

What will define the economic success of regions like the Hunter is the creation of new jobs and in particular high-value jobs.

But this budget offers no such jobs. I agree with the foundation and support their call for genuine job creation in regional economies.

This government should heed the foundation's advice to build increased capacity for innovation through partnerships with SMEs and research institutions like Newcastle CSIRO Energy Centre and the University of Newcastle to encourage growth in new fields and new economies. Unlike this government, the Hunter Research Foundation is looking forward and is very much focused on the jobs for the future.

Independent analysis from NATSEM has also found issues with the budget, including a hidden hit on Australian families. NATSEM, may I remind the House, is another reputable independent agency—an agency that has previously been described by the Prime Minister as 'the most reputable modelling organisation in Australia.' NATSEM's analysis of the budget found that nine out of 10 of the lowest-income families will lose under the Abbott Liberal government's budget, while nine out of 10 of the wealthiest families stand to gain. For all of the claims from the government that this is a fair budget, this single aspect of modelling in itself clearly exhibits that it actually attacks those who need help the most.

NATSEM's modelling also shows that families will be slugged thousands of dollars when the new childcare arrangement measures that are proposed not to start until 2017 are factored in. This includes a family with a single income of $65,000 and two children being $6,164 a year worse off by 2018-19; a single mother with an income of $55,000 with two children being $6,107 worse off by 2018-19; and a family with a dual income of $60,000 with two children being $3,843 worse off by 2018-19.

This is further proof that the Prime Minister's promise not to hurt families was little more than a desperate attempt to save his own job. The impact of the budget on women again failed to rate a mention in the Treasurer's budget speech and papers, but it is an important analysis that has to be done. Gender responsive budgeting is a government's planning, programming and budgeting that contributes to the enhancement of gender equality and the fulfilment of women's rights. It highlights gender gaps in government policies, plans and budgets and analyses that gender differentiated impact of revenue raising policies and the application of domestic resources.

Gender responsive budget analysis was in fact pioneered in Australia in 1994, with the federal government assessment of the budget impact on women. It refers to the analysis of actual government expenditure and revenue on women and girls as compared to men and boys. It is with deep regret that I must remind the House of this government's now ongoing failure to produce a women's budget statement as part of the budget papers. I would have thought that understanding how the 2015 budget will or will not contribute to the long-term social and economic health and wellbeing of women in Australia was something that governments would want to know. So much for evidence based thinking from this so-called Prime Minister for women and his government.

Given this lack of commitment from the government, I am thankful that Labor remains as committed in opposition as we were in government to a gender responsive budget analysis. As chair of Labor's Status of Women Caucus Committee, I was honoured to launch Labor's Women's Budget Statement with my Labor colleagues in Canberra, alongside community representatives from across the nation. It was, however, distressing to relay the many negative and disproportionate impacts that this government's policies and budget measures will have on women.

Of all the new measures in this budget, perhaps the most startling for women was the government's backflip on paid parental leave. First we had paid parental leave 'over my dead body', then the Prime Minister's rolled gold scheme, providing mothers with 26 weeks of paid parental leave at full replacement wage, which he described as his signature policy and indeed took to two elections. Now, however, the government has taken a whole new approach and has gone on the attack, accusing mothers and families lawfully taking part in the government's paid parental leave scheme of being double-dipping, fraudulent rorters.

If the Abbott government gets their way, up to 80,000 mothers a year will be left worse off because of these cuts to paid parental leave. Some new mums stand to lose up to $11,500. This includes nurses, midwives, Defence personnel and police. What this means in real life for mothers and their babies is that those new mums affected will have less time to spend with their newborn babies. How can this Prime Minister ever be believed by any family in this country ever again? He has not a shred of credibility when it comes to supporting Australian women and Australian families.

The National Foundation for Australian Women also raises serious concerns about the impact that this budget will have on women. They have called for the proposed changes to paid parental leave to be abandoned and have noted that the savings measures from the first budget that remain in this budget disproportionately affect people on low and moderate incomes—a group who are largely women.

Likewise, the CEO of the Australian Council of Social Service, Dr Cassandra Goldie, has argued:

The retention of most of the 2014 budget cuts and lack of action to strengthen public revenue tips the scale on the negative side of the fairness ledger as it effectively means that the most disadvantaged and struggling individuals and families in our community are being asked to shoulder the responsibility for restoring the Budget.

When it comes to measuring the impact of the budget on my electorate, a review of the recent headlines in the Newcastle Herald is instructive, from 'Hockey bypasses the Hunter's big projects' to 'Parents to feel pressure' and 'Surplus gets further away'. The Herald's budget feature summed up the concerns of the region when it noted:

At first look, one of the greatest impacts on the Hunter of this budget would appear to be the substantial tightening of welfare, pension and superannuation support instruments, which are destined to hit the less well off and the elderly.

And when it comes to direct infrastructure spending in our region, the Herald notes:

Mr Hockey's first budget a year ago was light on capital works detail for the Hunter … and this document follows suit.

Well, that sums up the mood of my region: no investment in our university, no mention of major community service organisations that are crying out for money. The Newcastle Herald's assessment of the budget matches that of ACOSS, NATSEM and the others. It is all pointing in the wrong direction. As outlined by the Leader of the Opposition in his budget reply, the 2015 budget reflects neither the qualities nor the priorities of the Australian people. The priority of the nation has to be to plan for the future—a plan for the decades to come.

While this government continues to fail Australia, Labor has a plan for today, and we have a vision for a smart, modern and fair Australia. Our vision is grounded with a focus on the jobs and the economy of the future—a future that is more productive and more sustainable. We have a plan to build a new engine for prosperity in cities and in the regions and to turbocharge it with science skills, innovation, infrastructure and education. Under Labor, every young Australian will have the chance to read, write and work with the global language of the digital age. Under Labor, all major infrastructure will be assessed independently and on merit. And under Labor, innovation will be harnessed, supported and sent in the right direction. Under Labor, Australia will have a better future.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today on behalf of the people of Ryan to speak about fairness—indeed, the word du jour. In the five years I have been the member for Ryan I have had the opportunity to meet many thousands of residents in our pocket of suburban Brisbane and to communicate with tens of thousands more. Ryan is a hardworking, community-minded constituency. The people of Ryan look out for each other. They are self-reliant, in the sense that they would rather support themselves and help each other than go cap in hand to the government at the first sign of hardship. In return, what they expect from government is that it does not unnecessarily inhibit their lives, that businesses are not drowned in costly red tape, that mothers who wish to return to the workforce are not financially penalised for doing so and that older Australians, who have worked hard all their lives to save for their retirement, are not burdened with extra tax obligations for which they have not had the opportunity to prepare. What they hope for from government is that it works with them, not against them, that it sets a budget framework that encourages them to work hard, build their businesses, raise their families and save for their retirement. In short, the residents of Ryan want a government and a budget that is measured, reasonable and, above all, fair.

With this budget the coalition government has demonstrated that it understands the concept of fairness. We have heard loudly and clearly the voice of the electorate. For example, small businesses are already benefiting from economic trade agreements with South Korea and Japan, signed off by this government, and the agreement signed with China is in the process of being implemented. However, small businesses have been telling us that times are still tough and they are struggling to invest in the expansion of their business at a time of potential new markets. For small businesses wanting to invest in much-needed capital equipment to grow their business, the budget offers the ability to claim an immediate tax deduction for each and every asset purchased, up to $20,000. And small businesses can apply this $20,000 rule to as many individual items as they wish until 30 June 2017.

In this budget we have lowered the company tax rate for incorporated small businesses with an annual turnover under $2 million, from 30 per cent to 28.5 per cent. As a result of this budget, small businesses will have the lowest company tax rate in almost 50 years. For unincorporated small businesses we have offered a five per cent tax discount, up to $1,000 a year. And to encourage start-up businesses, the budget will allow for professional expenses incurred in the establishment of the business, such as legal expenses, to be immediately deducted rather than being written off over five years.

These initiatives are being very well received by the many small businesses in my electorate of Ryan. The coalition government believes it is only fair that small businesses should be given every opportunity to grow, to employ and to succeed. This concept of fairness extends to the family unit. After all, it is reasonable that parents who want to return to paid employment should not face insurmountable cost barriers in so doing. This not only is fair but is also common sense.

The Treasurer has recently led public debate about the challenges posed by an ageing population that were so clearly identified in the most recent Intergenerational report. One of these challenges will be the need to grow our workforce to provide a sufficient tax base to support the large increase in the number of Australians over the age of 65 expected in future decades. Thankfully we already have a skilled base of workers, mainly women, who are not currently in the workforce or who are underemployed and want to work more. They have the skills, they want to work but they are prevented from doing so by the lack of access to affordable and suitable child care. The government has listened. From 1 July 2017 the new and simpler childcare subsidy will commence. The net effect of this policy will be that working families with household incomes between $65,000 and $170,000 will be about $30 a week better off. For working families on incomes up to approximately $65,000, the subsidy will cover approximately 85 per cent of their childcare fees.

From 1 July 2016 we will end the arrangement whereby parents were able to receive employer-funded paid parental leave and still receive the full Commonwealth paid parental leave. Parents accessing employer schemes will now receive only a partial payment from the Commonwealth, sufficient to bring their overall payments in line with the Commonwealth scheme. While the practice of claiming both payments in full was perfectly legal, it arbitrarily disadvantaged those parents who did not have access to a generous private scheme. The government has restored fairness and equity to these arrangements.

The budget also contained measures to provide equity of access to child care. We all know that for many people work is not nine to five, Monday to Friday. Despite this it is difficult to find childcare providers opening outside normal working hours. For doctors, nurses, police, firefighters, cleaners and other shiftworkers this means that they do not currently enjoy the same access to child care as people working standard office hours. To address this issue the government has committed $246 million to a two-year pilot program to extend subsidy support to home care services provided by nannies. The program is designed to extend services to those mothers who are unable to access current services. In addition to shiftworkers, it will also benefit families in some rural and regional areas as well as parents of children with special needs for which mainstream child care services are unable to cater. This policy is about providing choice. The government believes it is important that if mothers choose to return to the workforce then they should be supported. At the same time we respect the decision of many mothers to take time out of the workforce to look after their children. There is certainly no intention to force women into the workforce. This policy merely ensures that women who wish to work but who are required to work outside standard business hours are not disadvantaged in accessing government support.

Another group deserving of support are older Australians—those who have worked, raised families and paid taxes all their lives. They rarely ask much of government and they represent generations who have always valued hard work and self-sufficiency rather than going cap in hand to government. Most self-funded retirees are reliant on fixed incomes, having spent a lifetime scraping and saving to fund a decent retirement. Unlike Labor, the coalition government respects those who save for their own retirement and we will not increase taxes on superannuation. Let me repeat that: the coalition government will not increase taxes on superannuation. Pensioners can be assured that the age pension will continue to increase twice a year and continue to increase at the highest available indexation rate. A coalition government will continue to exclude the family home from the pension assets test.

In order to ensure that the age pension provides the most benefit to the people who need it most, some changes to the assets test will come into effect from 1 January 2017. For 90 per cent of pensioners this will mean no change in pensions or, in the case of 170,000 pensioners with modest assets, an increase in payments of an average of $30 a fortnight from 1 January 2017. Under the changes proposed in the budget it will no longer be possible for retired couples who own their own home and have additional assets of $1 million or more to claim a part pension.

It is reasonable to expect that such couples have the means to fund themselves without needing a pension top-up. The threshold has been reduced to $823,000. Importantly, people who now no longer qualify for the pension, due to the change in threshold, will continue to be eligible for the Commonwealth seniors health card, which enables access to cheaper PBS medicines.

I turn my attention now to aid for our near neighbours. Australia remains a generous aid donor by international standards. Australia will continue to provide around $4 billion in total official development assistance in 2015-16. This makes us the 13th largest donor in the OECD, broadly proportionate to the size of our economy. This year's budget continues the transition of the focus of our program to our near neighbours, particularly in the Pacific region. Members will know of my strong interest in the development challenges facing our nearest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, which has become the largest recipient of Australian aid. Australian aid will continue to fund vital programs, assisting in the delivery of services across government, including health, education, law and justice, governance, transport and, importantly, gender equality. Across our foreign-aid program we are continuing our policy of requiring more than 80 per cent of aid to effectively address gender issues.

Aid expressed in dollar terms is only part of the story. Aid should really be seen as an investment, and the government is keen to maximise the effectiveness of our aid investments. One particularly effective measure, launched last year—with continuing funding in this budget—is the New Colombo Plan. This is an innovative scholarship scheme that supports and encourages Australian students to undertake study and internships with many of our near neighbours in the Indo-Pacific. Following a successful pilot in 2014, this year it has been expanded from four to 35 locations, expanding from eastern Pacific-island states to Pakistan in the west, with more than 3,100 students participating. I have no doubt they will all gain an enhanced understanding of our near neighbours and forge networks and friendships that will last a lifetime and serve our country in the decades to come.

I return to the concept of fairness. The coalition's view of fairness is to provide support to those who need it so that we can all build wealth and prosperity. Labor's idea of fairness is to take from all those people who have worked all their lives to build wealth and prosperity and to tax that wealth into oblivion. That is the difference between the government and the opposition. We see prosperity as a reward for effort. Those opposite see it as a cash cow to target, to boost government coffers.

Labor's priorities are all wrong. While the current government must still borrow $96 million a day to pay for Labor's budget blow-outs, the member for Sydney and Labor would have us borrow another $18 billion to send overseas as foreign aid. Even Labor's foreign affairs minister, Bob Carr, said: 'You can't borrow money to spend on aid.' Today's Labor just does not understand responsible financial management. It shirks difficult reform, preferring to block $5 billion of its own savings measures, in the Senate, putting partisan politics ahead of the national interest.

I was delighted when the Leader of the Opposition anointed 2015 as Labor's year of ideas—after all, that is what this place is supposed to be about: a genuine contest of ideas about how to make Australia better. In his budget reply speech the Leader of the Opposition had a chance to step forward and announce his platform of great ideas. What did we get, instead?—sadly, more of the same old politics of spite backed up by costings that were not worth the paper they were written on.

Take the re-announcement of their previously failed policy—which they tried and scrapped in government—the writing-off of HECS debt for 100,000 STEM students. On budget reply night the Leader of the Opposition claimed his HECS-debt policy would cost $353 million. The next day, Labor said it would cost $45 million. They eventually settled on a figure of $1.4 billion over 10 years. You would think that with no fewer than three different figures in the mix at least one of them might be right or at least close to the mark. Wrong. The Department of Education has estimated the cost to taxpayers, of the policy, will be upwards of $2.25 billion.

No-one should be surprised. This is the same Leader of the Opposition who continues to peddle falsehoods about non-existent $30 billion cuts to the education budget when a simple glance at the budget papers would show that the education budget continues to increase year after year. It is this combination of reheated failed policies, financial innumeracy and lazy rhetoric that demonstrates why Labor and the Leader of the Opposition are not ready to govern.

Despite Labor's rank opportunism and attempt at cheap populism, the coalition government was elected to lead. We have delivered a budget that is measured, reasonable and fair—a budget that charts a sustainable course to surplus and provides a helping hand to those who need it. I commend the bills to the House.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I really appreciate the chance this morning to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016. Australia faces some very significant economic challenges. I want to start by making the simple point that the budget that was delivered a few weeks ago is not the path to solving them. The government—and I note the comments of the member for Ryan, which are consistent with this—speaks ad nauseam about its economic credentials and the ideas about responsible fiscal management. What I would say about this government—and this is one of the consistent themes Labor has been speaking about—is to look at not what they say but what they do.

What do we see when we look at this budget? We see that debt is up, deficit is up, taxes, after all of the rhetoric that goes on, are up. In fact, the tax take as a share of GDP will be higher under the budget that was delivered by Joe Hockey two weeks ago than it has been since John Howard was Prime Minister of this country—higher than any time that Labor was last in government and higher than during the global financial crisis. We see the same thing when we look at unemployment. This is the No. 1 thing Labor is worried about at the moment. We see under this budget that unemployment will continue to rise. This means more Australians who are without jobs. What I see when I look at the budget is that while the rest of the world is seeing some really important signs of recovery from the global financial crisis it seems that Australia is going backwards.

We did see some reactions in the budget to the economic circumstances that Australia faces. But what I see when I look at the critical reforms in that budget is that they are largely short-term measures. The big one that the government has been talking about is the small business tax cuts. To the extent that there is some extra assistance going to small businesses around Australia, I am very much in favour of that. I have 5,000 small businesses that are doing innovative, terrific things right around my electorate of Hotham. I am really proud of the work that those people who are running those businesses do. Something that is going to help them survive the next few years, a period which looks to be a little bit rocky for us economically, is of course going to have my full support. But I am a little bit disturbed that it is the central plank that the government has put forward in its response to the economic challenges facing Australia. When I am talking about some of these economic challenges, I want to describe a couple of things I am worried about when I look at where Australia is at the moment—particularly in the medium to long term. Again, I come back to this point: nothing in the budget went to any of these important challenges.

One of the first points I will mention is about the declining performance of Australia's education system. We know that while Australia, in looking at its economic history, has had lots of elements of luck that has made us a prosperous country, the critical thing that has driven prosperity in recent years has been the ingenuity of Australia's people. In the past, we have seen Australia's system be amongst the handful of the highest performing education systems in the world. But in recent years the tide is turning. We are seeing Australia's performance on education stagnating. We are seeing year 12 retention rates stagnate. We are seeing the performance across the system as basically the same from year to year—in some instances actually declining slightly.

In the context of Australia's stagnation, we see other countries around the world making massive improvements to their education systems. When we look at the PISA scores, which allow us to assess our system compared with others around the world, we see that Australia is going down—and going down quite quickly. When we look at maths and science, for example, the top seven performing systems in the world are Asian education systems. That brings me to my second point about our engagement with Asia and whether we are prepared fully to embrace that enormous opportunity that lies ahead of us in the rising middle class in Asia.

We know that a billion people are going to join the middle class in Asia over the forthcoming decades.

When you look at the tenor of the debate in Australia about the Asian opportunity over the last, say, 25 years, there has been a real sense that it is a fait accompli for us: 'Surely, since we are very close to Asia and we have a lot of people of Asian background living in our country, we are going to see huge economic benefits from this.' But, when you look at the data on how we are tracking in embracing that opportunity, there is a lot of cause for concern. Sure, we are exporting a lot to Asia, but most of what we are exporting is commodities. Deputy Speaker Henderson, despite you and I being in different political parties, I think we would agree that we want to do more than export commodities. We want to export medical devices, we want to export our great ideas, we want to export more of our education services to Asia's middle class.

As another example, only 9 per cent of Australian businesses are reaching out and doing foreign direct investment in Asia. The vast majority of Australian businesses have no interaction with Asia at all. The reason this is concerning is that, when we look at businesses that have done really well in Asia, it is not something that happens quickly. In fact it can take something like 20 years to get a foothold in Asia. The business environment there is so incredibly different. I was in China just a few weeks ago and the economics of business there are just fundamentally different from what we see here in Australia. I am concerned about that and I see it as an economic challenge facing the country.

Climate change is another issue I am very worried about, but we saw, essentially, nothing in the budget. We know that our climate is going to warm somewhere between two and four degrees. At four degrees, life in Australia could be incredibly difficult. Even at two degrees there will be radical changes to the way we live, to the economics of life in Australia. The budget said nothing about that.

That is a bit of a flavour—three big issues, three big challenges I see facing the country, but nothing serious in the budget about any of them. It is for that reason that I see this as a pretty small budget, small in the sense of having a small vision for Australia and of the things that government can do to help us tackle what is ahead. I will talk a little bit later about the things that Labor is beginning to put into the public arena about how we would deal with some of these issues, but first I want to talk about the details of some of the policies in the budget and how they will affect my constituents in Hotham. The frank reality is that a lot of people in Hotham are going to be quite a lot worse off because of what is in this budget. I want the House to take note of that and to understand it.

I represent a wonderful patch of our country in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Many thousands of families have made their home in Hotham. Some are doing very well; others struggle a great deal. It is those families—the families in my community who are struggling the most—who are being asked to do most of the heavy lifting by this budget. I want to reflect a little bit on the policies that will affect them.

I will start by running through some of the impacts on families in my electorate. The childcare changes in the budget are the ones we have seen the government spruiking the most. All political parties in Australia today agree on something—this is a seismic thing for the nation—that child care is not delivering what we need it to. It is not delivering what families need, it is not delivering us the workforce participation outcomes we want to see and, very importantly, it is not delivering the early learning that will give Australian children the best possible start in life.

Here was an opportunity to take this really important policy area that is so critical to the development of Australia's children and do something really good, make it into a system that really works. But that is not what we saw in the budget. What we saw was some additional funding for families who want to access child care—and that is basically it. Additional funding for families is fantastic, but of course with this government we see that, as they give with one hand, they take with the other. We saw that in changes to two essential programs that support Australian families today, especially Australian families with young children. The first are the changes to the Paid Parental Leave scheme. I was genuinely shocked to see an area where I thought we had finally come to a resolution—government provision of 18 weeks on the minimum wage for Australian parents who are looking after their children during those first critical weeks of their child's life. Labor put that scheme in place and we are incredibly proud of it.

The way the scheme was designed was that there was the 18 weeks minimum and employers could top that up if employees were able to bargain for that. For example, employees at Woolworths and Coles supermarkets had around five or six additional weeks that the employer paid for.

The changes the government has made will mean half of all new mums will lose funding and lose some essential weeks at home in the first weeks of life of their newborn. There is a policy aspect to this which I think is absolutely appalling; it is so short-sighted. The politics of this are awful. The government provides a scheme. It is intended for use with the 18 weeks minimum and employers top it up. And then the government says women who use the scheme in exactly the way it was intended are double dippers who are committing acts of fraud and rorting. The tenor of that debate was absolutely appalling.

The policy outcomes are equally tragic. Most of the developed world provides much longer in paid parental leave than we see in Australia. The United Kingdom provides 39 weeks, Sweden provides 60 weeks and Canada provides 50 weeks. The reason those countries do that is that having a parent at home during the first weeks and months of a child's life is really good for the child's development. That is the reality. The evidence shows us it is very important for infant and maternal health. A longitudinal study of Australian children, one of the only really good longitudinal studies conducted in Australia, shows that mums who spend shorter periods of time at home after the birth of their child are more inclined to experience severe mental distress two years after the birth of their child. So there are long-term impacts and, frankly, long-term costs on the system in restricting the time that mums and, in some cases, dads have at home with their newborns. The government has cut this program claiming that this will save $1 billion. That is very unlikely because the way they have designed the reform fully expects that private employers will scale back on their parental leave, leaving more mums accessing the government scheme. It is bad policy, it was bad politics, and I really do hope the government backtracks and goes back to the old system.

The family tax benefits cuts in the last budget remain in this budget. That will see the lowest income families around Australia some $6,000 worse off a year. The net impact of the Abbott government's so-called families budget is that families will lose about $3 billion overall. That is what we see when we put forward the additional funding for child care but take away family tax benefit and paid parental leave support. I guess that is what a 'families budget' looks like under a coalition government. Besides the new measures in this budget, the most unfair aspects of last year's budget remain in this budget. I really do want the Australian people to understand that this is the same budget as last year but with some additional cuts and some additional unfair policies on top. We will still see average families being $6,000 worse off. We will still see $80 billion being cut from schools and health. We will still see Christopher Pyne's mad idea of $100,000 university degrees. We will still see a $5 increase in the cost of medicine. We will still see cuts to the SBS and the ABC. We will still see cuts to community legal services.

There are really only two things that have been reversed in this budget, and I think Labor has done a terrific job in tackling some of these issues. The first one is the indexation change to pensions. That would have seen pensioners $80 worse off in a decade than they otherwise would have been. Again, we see a bunch of other nasties for our pensioners. These include a lift in the retirement age to 70; $1.3 billion in cuts to pensioner concessions; $20 million in cuts to dementia initiatives; the axing of the dementia supplement; and the $900 seniors supplement with which a lot of pensioners pay their electricity bills and take care of a lot of other essentials.

The second aspect is the GP tax, the $7 co-payment which was so concerning. I think we have gone through three or four iterations of what policy is going to be put in place there.

Instead of putting in place an up-front payment the government is doing this via the back door by freezing Medicare benefits for four years unless doctors charge their patients additional funding. The upshot of all this is that it is the lowest income Australian families who are bearing the brunt of the government's proposals. NATSEM modelling has looked at how the two budgets affect Australian families. NATSEM is one of the most widely respected institutions that does modelling in Australia, and it says:

The results clearly demonstrate that low income families with children are the main family group to be adversely impacted by policy changes since the last election.

This is sad. It is unfair that low-income families are the ones who are bearing the brunt, and a lot of those people will be my constituents in Hotham. I condemn the budget on that basis.

Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great joy to speak on the appropriation bills because I know this budget is the right budget for the constituents of my electorate of Hume, and for all Australians—for small businesses, for farmers, for young families, for pensioners and for those looking to study and contribute. For all those Australians who want to have a go, we should never forget that Australians are aspirational. The only metric the Labor Party can apply to a budget is the metric of redistribution. Yet Australians are aspirational, they want to have a go and they want budgets that support them having a go. That is exactly what we see here. When I get around my electorate I see an outpouring of happiness about this budget—people are delighted that finally, after years of Labor, we have a government that understands aspiration and that understands ambition. Ambition is a good thing—we want to encourage it; we want to encourage Australians to get on, have a go, create jobs, invest and make Australia a better place.

This is the right budget for Hume; it is the right budget for Australia. Most importantly, it is about solving real problems. Government is about solving problems. What I am going to do is a little different from what many others have done—I am going to go through the budget and talk about the problems we are solving.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:47 to 11:02

I was just saying that this is a budget that is seeking to solve real problems, and I thought I would describe the problems we are solving in this budget. I hasten to add that the previous speaker, the member for Hotham, identified a number of problems Australia is facing. She failed to identify that these were problems that emerged under the previous, Labor, government, and of course the first of those problems is out-of-control spending growth. This is not well understood. The fundamental problem Labor bequeathed this government is spending growth well above GDP growth. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to work out that if you have spending growth at close to four per cent a year and income growth at below three per cent then you have a growing deficit problem, a growing debt problem, and that is exactly the situation we were left with.

In fact, the budget deficit we were left with when we arrived into government was about $48½ billion. But we also know that if it was left untouched—if this spending growth of about 3½ to four per cent a year was allowed to continue—we would within a relatively short period of time be faced with debt levels of well over 100 per cent of GDP. That beats the Greeks, it beats the UK, it beats the US. That is where we were heading. And of course in this budget we see that budget deficits fall each year, despite the rhetoric from those opposite—from the $48½ billion I have described to $41.1 billion, $35.1 billion, $25.8 billion, $14.4 billion and in the final year $6.9 billion. So, this is a reduction in deficit each and every year, addressing the problem of rampant spending growth. What is really underlying those figures is that our spending growth level has been reduced from the 3½ to four per cent that we saw under Labor down to one per cent.

So, it is the containing—not cuts—of spending growth that is absolutely fundamental to making this budget work. It is true that we would like less of that to be dependent on bracket creep and more of it to be dependent on other things. But the fact of the matter is that whilst those opposite are reluctant, hesitant—in fact, are avoiding any real discussion about tax reform and spending reform in this country—it is going to be very, very difficult for us to bring the budget down any other way, and that is exactly what we are doing.

But the most important point here is that we have contained spending growth to about one per cent a year, which is an extremely credible outcome relative to what those opposite offered.

That is problem No. 1 that we are addressing. Problem No. 2 is that we are faced with an economy that is relatively soft, where we have not, under Labor, seen the investment and job creation that we would like to see. We recognise that there is a major change happening in the Australian economy, the first of which is something that I saw in my previous career before coming into politics—the increase in the investment spending in mining, going from something like $20 billion a year back in the 2000s up to about $120 billion at the peak, and it is on its way back down again. That extra $100 billion of investment is a gift from the mining industry we should be very thankful for. It was mostly squandered in the Labor years, but the truth of the matter is that is a big kick to take in the economy. We desperately need to stimulate growth, investment and job creation.

At the same time, we are seeing some major transformation in individual sectors across the economy, and nowhere is that clearer—and I see this in my electorate—than in retail, where we are seeing a shift. Retail was only ever a local business. It is now an international business. It is now possible for someone to sell bike parts or clothes or shoes—whatever you like—from the UK, the US or Asia into small country towns. That restructuring of retail is a very major change in the economy that we need to address and that Labor really never got its head around.

Our solution to this problem is very clear, in contrast to the Labor solution, which was to run big, cumbersome, expensive government programs. We have taken the view that every small business in Australia can help stimulate the economy. There are no better shovel-ready projects in Australia than the shovel-ready projects contained in every Australian small business. So what we have said is, 'Get your shovels out, small businesses. Have a go. We want you to stimulate the economy. You know more about job creation, you know more about investment, than any government ever will, and we want you to get out there and create those jobs.'

I am absolutely delighted that in my electorate of Hume that is exactly what is happening. I am watching business after business investing and creating jobs. This has been happening since we got into government, but it has only increased with free trade agreements, the reduction of red tape and a recognition from this government that it is not school halls and pink batts that are going to stimulate this economy, but the small entrepreneurs, the business people of Australia who will do the work for us.

Those entrepreneurs and innovators are the backbone of our economy, they are the backbone of our country, and they will stimulate this economy and get it going. They are not in the public service; they are in the private sector. Ninety-six per cent of all Australian businesses are small businesses. Combined, they produce about $350 billion of economic output and they employ over 4½ million Australians. Nowhere are they more important than in regional Australia and, of course, nowhere is that more important than in an electorate like mine in Hume. Under Labor, we saw the number of small businesses in Australia and the number of people employed actually decline. This was a shocking situation where we saw an erosion of the strength of small business. That is not something we will stand for.

We have heard a lot about the tax deductions and the accelerated depreciation that will have huge impacts on the investments that are being made in regional Australia. There will be a very positive impact on the activity of the businesses themselves. But one thing that is easily forgotten is how much they will stimulate the businesses around them. That second-order effect—the Keynesian multiplier, as economists put it—of a small business buying things from another business and in turn that business buying from someone else will have a very significant impact in regional Australia and across Australia more generally.

One sector that we know has phenomenal opportunity in the coming years is agriculture.

To shore up the strength of our agricultural sector and its robustness to drought and volatility, we are offering immediate tax deductions for new investments in water facilities and a three-year depreciation allowance for all capital expenditure on fodder storage assets. Absolutely fantastic news came yesterday—the government has again listened to rural and regional Australia and has again prioritised rural producers' needs. They told us that they wanted to get on with building fences, dams and fodder storage, and therefore they would like to see this accelerated depreciation come into place immediately. And that is exactly what we have done. In fact, from 7.30 pm on 12 May, that accelerated depreciation for those agricultural investments went into place.

We want every farmer in Australia to be out there investing. Now is the time. With the lower dollar and higher margins, what an extraordinary opportunity we face to get these investments in place and to get all the flow-on effects to the rest of the Australian economy that we will undoubtedly see. And that accelerated depreciation applies regardless of the size of the farm.

For small business more generally, as I said, whether you are farmers or tradespeople or accountants, lawyers or entrepreneurs, from 7.30 pm on budget night there was an immediate tax deduction for each and every item purchased up to $20,000 if the business has turnover of less than $2 million. This is something that we want to see Australian small businesses making the absolute most of. On budget night I sat there with a bunch of small businesspeople who were immediately on their phones, talking to their accountants and their business partners about how they can get moving. They are out there having a go right now. This is not a gift; this is not a handout. They get the tax deduction if they spend the money, and when they spend the money they create jobs, they create income, they create prosperity and they create exactly what we need in this country to stimulate growth at a time of great transition for our economy.

The other part of stimulating the economy is infrastructure investment, and I am absolutely delighted with the infrastructure investment in this budget. We have a $16 million investment under the National Stronger Regions Fund in my electorate, a water treatment plant in Goulburn and a pipeline from Yass to Murrumbateman, which will support the growth of an absolutely extraordinary region. Our time has come in the Hume Corridor from Sydney down to Canberra. This is an amazing part of the world that needs infrastructure investment, because we are seeing thousands of people move out of our capital cities into one of the most wonderful parts of Australia—indeed, one of the most wonderful parts of the world. We need the infrastructure investment to support that, and that is exactly what this government is doing and what the last government consistently failed to do.

The third real problem that we are solving in this budget is the relatively low participation rates of women in our workforce. As someone who has four children and a wife who has worked throughout the time that we have had those children, I understand what a battle it is juggling work with kids every day of the week. More and more Australians battle with this every day. My parents did not, but we do; we need to support partners, two-income families, where they want to work. Not everyone is going to choose to—and nor should they have to—but for those who do choose to, it is absolutely critical that we support them.

We know that in Australia we have lower participation rates for women than in countries like Canada; we are at about 75 per cent, while Canada is over 80 per cent. The Grattan Institute tells us that if we could match the Canadian record, the GDP of Australia would be about $25 billion higher in a decade, so that is exactly what we are proposing to do with the $3.5 billion Jobs for Families childcare package in the budget. Families using child care who are on family incomes of between $65,000 and $170,000 will be about $30 a week better off, and that is a wonderful thing.

On top of that there are a number of initiatives in there to support the more vulnerable families and also to support families that cannot access traditional child care. For those in rural areas where there is not easy access to child care—and I have been in this situation, my family has been in this situation—sometimes the only option is a nanny. The reality is that the support being provided in this budget to those families is absolutely wonderful, and I am looking forward to seeing that pilot working in my electorate. I have no doubt it will be a great success.

The fourth real problem we are solving is: finding jobs for unemployed Australians, particularly young Australians, and I commend the jobs package in this budget to everybody. Youth unemployment rose under the previous Labor government from about nine per cent to 13 per cent in its time in government. That is significant underemployment, particularly of younger Australians. What we see in this budget is a $1.2 billion wage-subsidy pool, work experience for up to four weeks and $330 million to focus on new job initiatives aimed at young job seekers. This is a great budget for Australia. This is a great budget for young Australians, for working Australians, for small businesses and I absolutely commend this budget the House.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I completely disagree with the previous speaker that this budget is about creating jobs. This budget does not. This budget in no way goes to address the critical problem that we have in our community of creating jobs for people who are unemployed. The budget's own papers state that unemployment in this country will rise. In fact, unemployment in this country has not been at these levels since the Prime Minister was the employment minister under the former Howard government. So Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, has a very good track record when it comes to high unemployment. He has a terrible track record when it comes to creating jobs.

The other major problem we have within our community and economy is underemployment. Underemployment in the state of Victoria, where I am from, is up to 19 per cent. Underemployment, for those who do not know, is people who are working in insecure work, people who are getting fewer hours today than they need to help them survive. The increasing number of people working part-time or casual jobs and simply not working enough hours to pay the bills is a big problem in my area of central Victoria and Bendigo.

Another problem this budget drastically fails at addressing is: tackling long-term youth unemployment. Long-term youth unemployment in my area of central Victoria is up to 19 per cent—19 per cent of our young people cannot find jobs. That is one in five. We are not just talking about the long-term unemployed kids who have other social barriers to getting work. We are not just talking about the tough cases, where they do not have the skills they need to look for work and hold work. We are talking about young people who have university degrees. We are talking about young people who have TAFE qualifications. We are talking about young people who finished school and decided they wanted work. We literally do not have the entry-level jobs available today that we had a generation ago. This budget fails to tackle those long-term unemployment issues. This budget does not create jobs.

Locally, the strength of our economy is its diversity. We still have a very strong manufacturing sector. We have a strong health sector, and with the Bendigo hospital being built it will have an even larger health sector. We are a health hub for central Victoria. We have a strong finance sector with the Bendigo Bank. We are home to the Bendigo Bank. We also have a strong education sector. We are home to the La Trobe Bendigo campus and we have the Bendigo Kangan Batman TAFE.

This budget attacks all of those areas. There has been $141 million cut from La Trobe. Those funding cuts will hit Bendigo hard. They will make it harder for the university to run the courses our young people wish to study. When it comes to health, $480 million has been cut from our local hospitals. Whilst it is great that the state Labor government is building the Bendigo hospital, we ask the question: will it have the resources and funding it needs to open its doors? This government—through funding cuts in this budget—will put extra pressure on the states and Bendigo Health. That is how this budget is attacking health in our local region.

This budget is also attacking families—nine out of 10 families who are on the lowest incomes will be hit hard as a result of this budget and that will increase the hidden poverty in our communities. In fact, this budget helps nine out of 10 of the highest income earners at the expense of nine out of 10 of the lowest income families. It demonstrates the priority of this government and this budget to help out those on the highest incomes at the expense of those on the lowest incomes. What is it like for these nine out of 10 families? We have a lot of them in Bendigo; in fact, there are a lot of them living in regional Australia and I am quite surprised that there are not more National MPs and rural Liberal MPs standing up and calling on the government to reverse these attacks. The changes to family tax benefits will hit people on the lowest income the hardest. The cuts to schools will hit those with schoolchildren the hardest. The cuts to health will hit not only their children; it will have an impact on their own health and the health of their parents.

In Bendigo in the week between budget week and this week, I had a chance to catch up with our Eaglehawk seniors and we had a general chat about what they thought of the budget. They raised with me the concern that they had for their children and their grandchildren. They said that the cost of basics is going up and to raise a family today is a lot more expensive than it was in their time. And by 'basics' they mean not just utility bills, which are going up—water is going up, gas is going up, electricity is going up—but also, for example, the increasing costs of education. One grandmother said to me that her young granddaughter really enjoys art but the school sent home a bill of $1,000 for art supplies and said that if she would like to do an accelerated art program the cost is going to be $1,000. How does a family on a low income, the minimum wage, pay $1,000 for art supplies? This is what is happening in some of our schools right now because of the pressures they are under as result of this government cutting their funding.

The Eaglehawk seniors also raised with me other cost pressures like transport—transport is going up, and we are talking not just about public transport but about the cost of putting fuel in the car. This budget still contains an increase in the fuel excise. Let us just take a moment to remember why fuel excise was frozen. When the Howard government introduced the GST one of the trade-offs was that we would not continue to increase the fuel excise—what the government takes from every litre of fuel. Now the government has decided to basically do a double tax on fuel. They will increase the fuel excise at the same time as keeping the GST at the rate it is. Petrol prices will go up and people will pay more for petrol—and we do pay more in the country areas for petrol; the further you are from the metropolitan areas the more you pay for petrol.

Another issue that the Eaglehawk seniors raised with me was the cost of health. It is expensive today to get ongoing and continuous health care, and seniors are very worried that they are going to have to pay more to see their local GP. We have high bulk-billing rates in Bendigo as a result of the former Labor government helping to build GP superclinics—and I know those opposite can be quite critical of the GP superclinics but without these clinics being built in Central Victoria we would not have the bulk-billing rates that we have today. The Eaglehawk seniors are really worried to hear that the Medicare rebates for GPs have been frozen—they will not be indexed or increase—and that puts pressure on their local GPs to introduce some kind of payment or tax. Many of these seniors and their family members regularly need to go to the doctor and so they are worried about the hit that that would have on their own budget.

I met last week with the Bendigo Salvation Army, who are based at the old Gravel Hill primary school.

This week, as we know, we are coming up to the Red Shield Appeal. It is the 50th anniversary of the Red Shield Appeal, and the target for the Bendigo region is to raise about $280,000. All of that money will go back into our local community. What struck me in the meeting I had with the Bendigo Salvos, when we launched the Red Shield Appeal, was that even if we raise $280,000 we will get much more than that from the appeal. The money that comes back into our region is over $1 million because the Salvos work on distribution based upon need, and the level of need in our community is only increasing.

The Salvos are out there doorknocking because the need for help in our community is on the increase, but they also raised the fact that, as a result of this government's funding cuts, they have had about 18 per cent of their food relief budget cut. This is the Salvos—these are people who are apolitical, who make sure that people do not go hungry. Whether it be for financial counselling or support, for a food hamper to help you get through until your next pay cheque, for a blanket or for a hot meal for those who are homeless, these people help those who cannot help themselves—yet this government has cut their emergency food relief budget by about 18 per cent. They were successful in getting the grant for local area food relief, but they have a larger area and less funding. That is how mean this government is.

When it comes to our local community, we are having a conversation about hidden poverty. Hidden poverty is the poverty that you do not quite see. It is not the people who are homeless; it is not the people who need the blanket or who rattle their own tin from day to day. These people are the single mums. These are the people who simply cannot get by. They are embarrassed to take their kids to children's birthday parties because they cannot afford to buy the present. They are our carers—for their birthday, their kids take them out to the movies, or their neighbours take them out for a cup of coffee. These are the people who are struggling to get by day to day, and there is a lot of that in Central Victoria. What we have seen from this budget is more pressure on them and funding cuts.

In one of the areas that I want to touch on briefly the government said, 'Don't worry, we are going to introduce nannies.' This measure, in this budget, is an absolute joke. What they are saying is that they will subsidise nannies—people who are unskilled and unqualified—and pay them by the hour. I have no problem with people using nannies, but it should not be subsidised by this government. It is a silly measure and a waste of money. It is inappropriate expenditure of money to subsidise unskilled people working in people's homes. What is next? Are we going to subsidise cleaners and housekeepers in people's homes? It is simply wrong. If there is any money allocated for early childhood education, it should go towards increasing the wages of skilled professional educators—people who are working with diplomas and certificates in our childcare centres. Yet, rather than funding and properly resourcing our childcare centres, this government is subsidising personal individual decisions to have unskilled people caring for children. It is simply ludicrous and demonstrates how this government is trying to support their mates and not the people who most need it.

Another area that has been hit hard by this government in this budget is the arts—$110 million has been cut from the Australia Council for the Arts. That will have a big impact on regional arts. To this day we are waiting on an answer to find out whether the Castlemaine State Festival will continue to be funded. It is a festival that not only is a celebration and collaboration of local art and arts culture but also is a major economic driver in the community of Castlemaine. To lose that festival and that funding would be a disaster.

Finally, after this speech I am about to go and meet with some of our hardworking government cleaners. They have had a double hit from this government.

Not only are they losing their family tax benefits, not only are they part of the nine out of 10 low-income families that will be worse off as a result of this budget, they are also competing against companies who want to cut their wages. Their current companies which are paying the Clean Start rates of pay, are being undercut by companies which are not. We learnt this week that cleaners who work for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have been hit with a $6,000 pay cut. A $6,000 pay cut because their Clean Start company has been undercut by a company which does not pay the Clean Start rates.

Those are the priorities of this government: the double hits and the double whammies to some of our hardest-working people. The cuts to cleaners' wages just demonstrates how cruel, mean and tricky this government is.

Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is an absolute honour to be able to speak in relation to the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and the related bills. I think that, while she is a friend of mine, the member for Bendigo indicated very clearly in her contribution why the Labor Party will never be able to deliver a surplus and will never be able to show the kind of fiscal responsibility that Australians expect of their mature federal governments.

In essence, the Labor Party are now going around the country as a complaint box for every group who would like more money. They are promising lower taxes, higher spending and a better bottom line outcome for the budget. So that is higher spending, lower taxes and bigger surpluses. Now, if the Labor Party think that Australians are so silly as to buy that then I think they are going to be very sadly mistaken.

One thing that this budget does is that it meets three very important objectives. Firstly, it gives us a believable, achievable and fair path to surplus. Then, it does so whilst also restraining spending. As an earlier speaker made clear, over the forward estimates spending restraint is capped at about one per cent growth a year, compared to somewhere near three per cent when we inherited government. And the third objective that I think this year's budget does quite successfully is to improve confidence in the economy.

In a sense, it is actually quite difficult to traverse those three competing objectives, because they do compete in certain areas. But improving confidence without hitting the bottom line has been one of the great outcomes of this budget. The first area that I would highlight there is, clearly, our small business package. It has been very popular, with accelerated depreciation of up to $20,000 for a piece of capital equipment that you may have had to depreciate over a number of years which can now be depreciated in the year in which you buy it. That means that from budget night until 30 June if a business purchases a piece of capital equipment up to the value of $20,000 they can depreciate it this financial year. That has absolutely reverberated through the small business community and it is delivering confidence in spades.

The beauty of the policy, though, is that whilst it does that there is not a huge budget impact. In a sense we are freeing up small businesses to take the chance, to take that next step and to expand their business. The economic benefits that will flow from that, in my view, will be increased tax receipts that outweigh the costs of the accelerated depreciation. So it is quite an extraordinary outcome and I think it is quite instructive for both sides of politics that we can make sensible budgetary changes—changes that improve confidence in the economy—that do not have a huge bottom line impact on the budget.

I know that goes against the Labor Party's philosophy, which is that government is just one big spending competition—that we run around the country and have a competition as to who can spend more money. As Liberals, we accept that we can never win that competition. If government in this country becomes a competition as to who can spend more money then, guess what? Labor, you will win every time! In fact, we do not want to win that competition. We want to deliver the kind of responsible economic management of this country that frees up individuals and small businesses to do the things that they do best, and that is to create wealth for themselves. A benefit of that is that they create wealth for the rest of the country that we as a government take from them and redistribute to other people.

Let us never forget that. Every dollar that we spend is taken from somebody else. So I think that this budget, in quite an efficient way, manages those three priorities: it has a path to surplus and spending restraint but improves economic confidence.

I have spoken about the small business package in very broad strokes. I want to speak about it in a little more detail for the next couple of minutes. Obviously, the 1½ per cent tax cut for incorporated small businesses is good news for those small businesses that are incorporated. But, given the deep small-business background of many of us in this House, the Minister for Small Business, and, indeed, the Prime Minister and the cabinet, have done an extraordinary job in recognising that lots of small businesses are not incorporated. So there is a tax cut also for unincorporated small businesses of five per cent, up to $1,000. That means that every small business, or a very huge proportion—92 per cent—of small businesses will be receiving a tax cut through those mechanisms.

Of course, accelerated depreciation has been exceptionally popular. I have seen examples of it in my own electorate. Last week I visited a number of small businesses. I visited Cafe Emjay in Ringwood East; Bill and Mary do a wonderful job there and they are potentially looking to expand their business. I visited Daisy's Garden Supplies; they have significant investments in plant and equipment. Anything we can do to help them make those investments—to help them to actually pull the trigger on making those investments—will reverberate throughout the Australian economy.

I also visited Dewar Electronics, a business that is 45 years old; they were very pleased to say that I was the first member of parliament that had ever visited them in 45 years. What an outstanding success story this business is. They are competing on the world stage now—competing against really big global competitors, from China in particular—but they are holding their own. And they are holding their own because they are a small family business where, when times get tough, the wagons circle and they make it work. They get their costs under control. And they have got an exceptionally loyal workforce which provides them with benefits that I think all small businesses need.

Let us remember why we want to help small businesses. Often, small businesses treat their employees more like family than employees. Having grown up in a small business family, I can tell you right now: the rent gets paid first, the utilities get paid second, the employees get paid third, and if there is any money left over at the end it goes to the small business operators. And, for many small businesses, there are months and sometimes years when a payment to the small business owner never happens, because they are reinvesting into the business or times are tough and they are trying to build up the business. They pay themselves last. So anything that we can do as a government to assist small businesses to flourish helps not only them but also their employees because it creates opportunities.

One of the lamentable aspects of our current economy is that we cannot rely on the top 50 or top 100 ASX-listed companies to provide us with the jobs growth that they have in the last 40 years. Many of them are sitting on very healthy balance sheets. They have been able to repair their balance sheets since the global financial crisis. But those investments, certainly in our human capital—in growing our workforce—are not happening at the rate we would like. So this package recognises that the jobs of the future will be coming more and more from young entrepreneurs and small businesses, and that anything we can do to kick-start their growth is going to be good not only for them but also for the broader economy.

In my state of Victoria, we also, in the budget, had a couple of very good infrastructure announcements. I was very pleased to see that $3 billion has been set aside in the budget for the East West Link. This is obviously a very lamentable policy area in my state of Victoria, where we have a state government that has spent up to $1 billion not to build a road. Nonetheless, we think, and certainly my electorate believes, that this piece of infrastructure is absolutely crucial—not only for the liveability of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and not only so that parents do not spend all their time in their cars on their way home from work but actually get to spend some time with their children, but also for the productivity benefits and the 7,000 jobs that will flow. So $3 billion has been set aside by this federal government for any future state government that is willing to build the East West Link.

I think slowly but surely Dan Andrews and the state Labor Party, and hopefully Bill Shorten, will recognise this. The pressure will become too strong and too great for them and they will capitulate and recognise that spending up to $1 billion not to build a road in a city that is growing by hundreds of thousands of people was just the most outrageous decision ever and they will take us up on our offer. They will accept the $3 billion that we are generously putting on the table and they will get the East West Link built.

I do not want to get into the politics of this anymore. I just want to improve the lives of my citizens. I want to improve the lives of people living in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and how can you live in a big city if you cannot get around? How can you actively participate in an economy if it takes you hours and hours to get from one meeting to another? So we have big challenges in dealing with transport infrastructure in Victoria, and I think the $3 billion that has been set aside by this federal government in the 2015 budget will be something that Victorians thank us for in the future, because the East West Link will be built. It will be built, and when it is built I think our residents will be very pleased and will hopefully by then be very grateful for the bipartisanship on the issue which we had for many, many years. The support for the East West Link was bipartisan for nearly a decade.

In my electorate of Deakin, we also had an outstanding announcement with respect to $3 million from the National Stronger Regions Fund for the Realm project, which is an initiative involving the federal government, the Queensland Investment Corporation and Maroondah City Council. It will build an innovation hub in Ringwood, a hub that dovetails very nicely into our small business package. It will offer support for small businesses. As the Minister for Small Business often says, and to borrow a phrase from him, it will help our 'mumpreneurs'—people like my sister who have set up very successful small businesses from home, people who are looking to innovate, people who are looking to invest in R&D, people who are looking to take advantage of the free trade agreements that this government has successfully negotiated with Japan, Korea and China.

It will be an innovation centre that helps them unlock these opportunities, because one thing we know is that 20 years ago a small business had a small catchment in its own area, but nowadays, like my sister's business, a small business has a catchment of customers around the world. So how can we help people like her access those opportunities? The Realm project in Ringwood and the $3 million commitment from this federal government under the National Stronger Regions Fund is going to help them unlock those possibilities. By unlocking those possibilities, we will improve the job prospects for our young people because we will have vibrant small businesses and, hopefully, small businesses growing into medium and large businesses into the future.

Other speakers in the debate on this bill have spoken about our support for families package. Obviously I think every member of this parliament, when travelling around their electorates, would hear the lamentable stories from various constituents about how difficult it is, often but not always, for mothers to juggle work and commitments to children—not only the funding of child care but the logistics of getting them to and from child care. So anything we can do to assist with those challenges I think is important, and this is one thing that the package does.

There is $3½ billion of additional funding to support families, which will hopefully have a couple of dividends for our society. The first dividend will be increased participation. I know this statistic is reeled off a lot by government members, but I think it is very important. If we had a female participation rate akin to the rate in Canada, an economy comparable in many ways, the dividend for our economy would be in the tens of billions of dollars. So we are hopeful and indeed the research indicates that our jobs and support for families package will have that dividend.

Finally, one thing that has not been spoken about a great deal is some of the great work that Sussan Ley, the Minister for Health, has done in this budget, firstly in confirming our support for the Medical Research Future Fund. One of the more depressing aspects of last year's discussion and debate was the negative carping about the Medical Research Future Fund.

Why have Australians enjoyed better health outcomes and higher average life expectancy over the past 20 or 30 years? It is due primarily to medical research. And anything we can do to turbocharge medical research, which is an area of absolute competitive advantage for us, is I think important. So, the $400 million for the Medical Research Future Fund, and indeed an ongoing commitment from this government that we will ensure that the Medical Research Future Fund ultimately reaches its capital amount of $20 billion, will then enable it to fund ongoing medical research, particularly in my home state of Victoria. We are the medical research powerhouse of this country. Sure, I have a parochial interest in medical research as well, but I think that was an outstanding and not-so-spoken-about aspect of this budget.

I congratulate the Treasurer. I think that here we get to meeting the three competing objectives of returning to surplus, restoring economic confidence and exercising spending restraint. I commend the bill to the House.

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

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills for 2015-16 and to talk in general about the challenges we confront as a local community in my electorate and as a country. I am an optimist when it comes to our country's future, and I actually believe that our best days are yet to come; they lie ahead of us. But we all acknowledge in this place that our country faces some economic and security challenges that we must address. We now live in a globally interconnected world that is changing the way we do business and forcing nations to adapt their economies to the 21st century. We are also seeing a growing world of disorder developing, as evidenced by the growing terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State and other geopolitical challenges, such as the issue we are dealing with in China's activities in the South China Sea.

Our nation cannot get left behind economically, because we are looking at nations like Germany, Japan, South Korea and the United States innovating and manufacturing the goods of the 21st century. Our nation also cannot afford to neglect the global threats of terrorism, geopolitical challenges and terrorist threats, as I have said, and the growing world of disorder. Australians are looking for political leadership to address these great economic, geopolitical and national security challenges. Australians are looking for security. They want to know that we collectively in this parliament are working to keep the country safe. Australians are also looking for new opportunities to prosper and to continue to plan their futures with some sense of certainty in the 21st century.

In my electorate of Holt, in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, my community is very focused on our jobs in providing the necessary security and opportunities for people in our constituencies. They want to be kept safe, as a starting point. They want to know that there is some degree of economic certainty so that they can have some planning for the jobs of the future. And they want the necessary social infrastructure—because they pay their taxes—to succeed in this 21st century. They want the guarantees of greater opportunities and security for their children as well.

I want to touch on something that really is a primary responsibility of government and an issue that I am completely and unequivocally committed to, and that is national security. We cannot have a debate in this place, regardless of what side of the fence we sit on, without both sides being unambiguously committed to keeping our community and our country safe. As people know, I am the deputy chair of the intelligence and security committee, and I work—and Labor works, particularly through the leadership of Bill Shorten—hand in hand with the federal government to keep our community safe.

You might ask, Deputy Speaker, why I raise this. Our electorate has been profoundly affected by terrorism events. In my constituency there was an event on 23 September 2014 where an attack was conducted by an assailant on two police officers. They were stabbed and then the assailant was shot. The intent of that particular activity by the assailant was to kill the police officers and, if successful, to proceed to kill others in the police station. The activity was Islamic State-inspired. Associates of that particular assailant have been subsequently charged and there were the Anzac Day arrests, as they are known. I was privy to information concerning the particular activities of those individuals and remain so in my role as deputy chair of the committee and also working with the very brave police officers that service and protect our community, both AFP and Victoria Police, and our intelligence agencies.

What transpired in the discourse in the media with respect to these matters was an implied criticism of the police officers, even the police officers on the night of the event, and the government's handling of national security. I just want to make it absolutely and unequivocally clear to those that may have read that media report that the media reporting was irresponsible, it did not take into account the real events of what transpired on that evening and it was not in the national interest. I also want those police officers—AFP and Vic Pol—and our security agencies to know that I support them, our community supports them, our government supports them and the opposition, led by Bill Shorten, supports them 100 per cent. That support is not equivocal support; it is unequivocal support for the job that our security agencies, the Victorian police and our AFP do. There is not any greater challenge for a government, or an opposition, for that matter, than to ensure that we keep our community safe.

When reading the media reportage, I was quite surprised by the cavalier way that the lives of those that were involved in that incident were dragged, if you want, through the print press in a very inappropriate way. To some extent, it leads me to ask: in reality, in the reporting of these events, and even to some extent in terms of the broad discussion—and it ties into what I observed during the Lindt cafe siege—what role does the media play? In my discussions—which I will touch on a bit further on—with leaders of the Islamic community, who are working hand in hand with us in my constituency to deal with this threat, and with the AFP officers, the intelligence agencies and the officers of Victoria Police, the question we have is: where is the media's responsibility in terms of reporting this?

I would put that to you, Deputy Speaker, to this chamber and to this House, as I did to a meeting that I convened in my constituency on 30 April. I would like to thank the Australian government and the office of the Attorney-General, George Brandis, as well as the Prime Minister's office, for facilitating this meeting. This was a meeting that I convened as a summit between the officers from Victoria Police, the AFP, members of the Attorney-General's Department and our local Muslim community leaders. We collectively sat together to work out how we could deal with this challenge collectively—and I emphasise 'collectively'.

Of course, these matters were not reported because they were not raised. The challenge that we have in dealing with this issue is how do we get appropriate reporting because of the very intensive and understandable sensitivities? It occurs to me, in terms of how Muslim community leaders are portrayed, as well as my direct firsthand experience of the inappropriate reporting of our police officers and their activities and what occurred on that particular night, as well as what I observed in the Lindt cafe siege, that the media—and I will be putting this forward to government—need to have a code of conduct.

I observed with the Lindt cafe siege—as someone who has experience in counterterrorism operations and has had tactical-response discussions—the media filming counterterrorism officers who were in strategic positions. Had the perpetrator seen that, he would have taken some form of action. It is not just me saying this. This is direct feedback I have received about the feelings of officers on the ground whose lives were put in danger by this media coverage. The media were televising a tactical operation while it was being conducted.

It deeply concerned me that the first 60 minutes of that event were taken as a live feed. I will not discuss in graphic detail what could have happened in those 60 minutes, but I say to this chamber: imagine more than one terrorist having had the opportunity to make a point. It would have profoundly impacted on the psychology of the Australian community. Why was that feed allowed to occur? I make no criticism of the TV channel that broadcast it, but I would respectfully submit that this should not have been allowed to occur. While I was watching that live feed and subsequent visual media reportage, of the tactical operation being conducted by our brave officers, people from overseas organisations were contacting me asking what was going on. They asked why this footage was allowed to be shown live and tactically. That, in my mind, had a strong impact on what occurred that day.

I do not seek to blame the media for that, but it is the responsibility of legislators, when they see a difficulty, to ask that measures be taken to protect the people we have deployed on the ground—in this case, the special operations group, New South Wales Police and others who were there. I will be putting forward, through the committee and discussions with others, that we do need a code of conduct on how the media report, where they are situated and what media can be sent.

Unfortunately, those who want to do us further harm have studied that Lindt cafe footage very carefully and have learnt a lot about how we might respond to a terrorist event. Again, I do not blame the media but it is not in our interests to continue to portray or show events of that type. I respectfully put forward that we need to deal with that. I include the issue of reportage of individuals.

I want to emphasise that this meeting was a collective gathering of Victorian police, AFP, members of the Attorney-General's Department and, very importantly, our local Muslim community leaders—it is, in some ways, the way they are portrayed as well. There was agreement across the board that the media should have been very careful about the way they reported the siege. There were pictures of a young man, for example, who was not charged. I thought we had a concept in this country of innocent until proven guilty, so what was the picture of that young man doing there? Do you think that helped the endeavours of our law-enforcement people working collaboratively with security agencies? No it did not.

It raises the point of how we deal with this. Words are bullets. In the space where we are trying to engage local Muslim communities, when we are trying to deal with and support our brave men and women who work to keep us safe, in our security services, these things can damage our coordinated efforts in dealing with this type of issue. I seek not to limit press freedom—but the press have to have a responsibility. There must be some responsibility for appropriate and considered reporting of events. It is our country collectively that is dealing with this threat. We did not ask for this threat to visit our shores, but we can deal with it. How we deal with it is: collectively.

I believe the solution is with our community coming together. Australians are the best in the world—as an Australian politician, I would say that—in dealing with crises: bushfires, floods, things that happen overseas. There is a spirit that runs through the soul of this country which is unique in all of the world. We come together collectively, for the common good, to deal with these issues. I believe we will do the same thing again with this particular threat, but we need everyone involved in that process. We do not need people to be sitting on the sidelines making inappropriate comments about communities or our law enforcement agencies or our agencies. Words are bullets.

So I give a commitment to all of those that were at the summit that I will continue to push for us to solve this dilemma collectively. We will face future challenges—there is no doubt about that—but we can come together for the common good. We can solve this problem collectively. I will do everything within my power to support the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to ensure that that happens.

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pride to rise today as a member of this coalition government to speak on the appropriation bills for budget 2015. I want to begin by congratulating the team that put this groundbreaking budget together: Treasurer Joe Hockey, Minister for Finance Senator Cormann and Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. All have done a fantastic job in putting together a budget that will stimulate economic growth, make life easier for families, increase consumer confidence and of course help small businesses grow, hopefully, into big businesses. This achievement is even more incredible when you see what they had to work with.

The previous Labor government inherited some $70 billion in the bank, $70 billion in cash. The budget of the Howard government had delivered a $20 billion surplus. Using the sort of economic management that only a Labor Party can, they used every single dollar that they could and they quickly turned the surplus into a $27 billion deficit in just 12 months. And the hits kept coming. They overspent $27 billion in 2008-09, $54 billion in 2009-10, $47 billion in 2010-11 and $43 billion in the 2012-13 financial year. They also slapped another $19 billion on the national credit card in the 2012-13 financial year. In the 2013-14 financial year that blew out to $48 billion. What was Labor's Treasurer doing? He was announcing that they were delivering surpluses. He said: 'Ignore what happened last year when I announced a surplus and instead we overspent by a few tens of billions of dollars. This year there will be a surplus.' That is what the honourable member for Lilley said.

If we had a dollar for every time Labor let Australia down with a promise of a surplus, we would not have a deficit. Unfortunately though, it is the numbers on the balance sheet that actually matter. We cannot build roads and rail lines with Labor's empty promises. We cannot pay nurses with the member for Lilley's rhetoric. This is the situation the coalition has been left with. Despite all Labor's chaos, their debt, falling commodity prices and lower tax revenues, the coalition government has faced up to the challenge and delivered a budget that will stimulate economic growth beyond the mining boom and that will build the infrastructure we need. It is a budget that invests in our economy and in education and health for our people. It is a budget that is good for business.

As the member for Solomon, this is a budget that is also fantastic for north Australia.

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about some of the initiatives that the government and this budget will deliver in my electorate of Solomon, which includes all of Darwin and Palmerston and more broadly in north Australia. I have spoken with some of my fellow MPs from above the Tropic of Capricorn and we are all ecstatic; I think even some of the members from the other side would share in our enthusiasm. There is $5 billion being made available to major infrastructure projects in north Australia—that is $5 billion. For the businesses of my electorate, both large and small, this is going to be a huge boost. Construction of major projects will be a huge employment opportunity. Supplying those major projects with equipment, with materials and with expertise will be a huge business opportunity for people in my electorate.

The dividends those projects will deliver will be good for the Top End in the long term by providing better access to markets and better infrastructure for our local businesses. Of course this investment is on top of some of the major works already going on in Solomon with the $110 million on the upgrade of the duplication of the Tiger Brennan Drive and $2 million in road black spot funding that Minister Briggs and I announced a few months ago. With this budget we have taken the talk out of developing the north—talk which has been going on since Federation and that we are now turning into real action. This fund could be the capital which allows us to join the Northern Territory gas network to the national grid; this could be the investment which allows a rail line from Mount Isa to Tennant Creek to become viable, linking the eastern seaboard to Darwin without a train going via Adelaide.

I am absolutely honoured to represent one small part of Northern Australia—the electorate of Solomon—in this place. The people of Solomon are genuinely excited about this budget, and why wouldn't they be? The coalition government's Stronger Regions Fund will contribute nearly $4.5 million towards the upgrading of Parap Pool, which will see the much-loved but very ageing facility upgraded to a FINA approved facility with a FINA approved standard 50-metre pool and a 25-metre pool. There are also going to be some other upgrades to the facility, including a shadecloth. I have spoken many times in this place about my good friend, Tahnee Afuhaamango, who at last count held 21 world records in terms of the Down Syndrome International Swimming Organisation. Unfortunately for Tahnee, none of these world records could be set in Darwin, her home town, because there was no FINA standard pool there; the closest FINA-approved pool is 1,500 kilometres away down in Alice Springs. Graeme Stephenson from Swimming Australia said that in terms of the Parat pool development, this grant will be the catalyst to delivering on what is a very exciting project for the Darwin community, and he went on to say that this would create opportunity for young athletes. I have spoken to my good friend, the Lord Mayor of Darwin, Katrina Fong Lim, about this project many times. When I phoned her with the news that we had got the funding she was as excited as I was, and I am so looking forward to working with her and her colleagues and with the City of Darwin to ensure that Darwin finally gets its FINA approved pool and upgraded facilities in the Parap area.

While talking about athletes and infrastructure, I have great pleasure in reporting that several young athletes in my electorate are showing incredible potential. My latest round of Solomon Sporting Champions include Liam Mulvahil, who does athletics and was recently at a fun run we had in Palmerston; netballer Sally King, who is madly fundraising for her next trip and is keeping her mum very poor; boxer Reed Halicek; basketballer Henry Callander and of course the little squash legend, Chad Blenkinship.

I would like to take a moment here to congratulate all of these up-and-coming athletes and, on their behalf, thank their families who do such great work in support and in making sure that they get to all of their sporting commitments.

My electorate is actually full of people doing amazing things. I have mentioned some of the sporting prowess; I would now like to give a nod to the 7,800 entrepreneurs who operate small businesses in and around the Top End. I have had conversations with a lot of small business owners—tradesmen, consultants, professionals. The recurring question is around the budget. They keep asking: 'What's the catch?' It is good news to be able to say to them that there is no catch. Ryan and Lara Fowler, constituents of mine, who own and operate Champagne Plumbing, will benefit from the lowest company tax since the 1960s. Brandit, a company in the Darwin CBD which creates printing and promotional items, will have access to instant tax write-offs on plant and equipment. At Q Framing in Darwin's northern suburbs, they will find they spend less time on paperwork and more time on artwork, with cuts to red tape.

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker Prentice, small business is the cornerstone of the economy, just as families are the cornerstone of society. This government, the Abbott government, is helping families right across Australia, but particularly in Solomon. This budget is investing $3½ billion in the Jobs for Families childcare package. This has come as a welcome relief to the people of Darwin and Palmerston. Families with incomes below $65,000 will receive ongoing financial support through the childcare safety net. Families with income between $65,000 and $170,000 a year will be better off on average as they will have an extra $30 a week in their pockets. Families with incomes above those figures will continue to receive the same level of support that they do now. This is a comprehensive suite of measures which is a good for all families.

As I said, there are no losers here. For parents who are struggling, there will be increased access to child support and additional support with child care for a parent who wants to re-enter the workforce. For most families on typical incomes, it will mean an additional $30 a week in their pockets—a bit of extra help with the cost of child care. For people in our community who we rely on when things get tough, like doctors, nurses, police, they can now rely on us to help them. There will be $246 million over two years to trial flexible and affordable arrangements such as nannies, where standard child care will not cover the gap. It is another win-win. As you know, this is the recurring theme of the budget: have a go. It is a win-win for everyone.

Anyone needing medical treatment in the Northern Territory will also be better off. Some of those in this place have been involved in a whispering campaign trying to spread a bit of mischief about hospital funding in the Northern Territory. It was particularly telling that a lot of the whispering was going on before the budget was released. Perhaps they were trying to get a story out there before the facts got in the way. After reading some of the press releases from those opposite and listening to some of the doorstops, I was very keen to see the relevant parts of the budget on health and hospital funding in the Northern Territory. This is where it gets interesting.

Anyone can download the PDF of the budget and look at Budget Paper No. 3: Federal Financial Relations. If you turn to page 11, there is a table titled, 'National Health Reform and public hospitals funding'. I scanned that table pretty closely looking for the doom and gloom that the Labor Party had been talking about. I searched for the cuts and cancellations they had predicted. This is what I found: a 28.8 per cent increase in hospital funding in the Northern Territory over the forward estimates—an increase of nearly a third. That is an increase of $44,500,000 a year.

So I get cynical and start thinking like a Labor member and looking for the bad news. Perhaps funding is being restored after a dip. No: funding went up by 17.3 per cent in 2014-15 alone—17 per cent in one year. Then we have the $110 million in federal funding locked in for the Palmerston hospital construction—no change there, despite what they say. Headworks and infrastructure upgrades are already well underway on this site. As I have said, this is a budget that is good for families and good for small businesses and a budget that is fantastic for north Australia. Roads are getting fixed, community facilities are getting upgraded, families are getting access to better and more flexible and affordable child care, fuel prices are dropping, small business tax rates are dropping and small business confidence is soaring. It is an honour as a coalition member from north Australia to commend this bill to the house.

Andrew Wilkie (Denison, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This year's budget is not the horror budget of last year. That was in a league all of its own. It was so bad, indeed, that I, along with one other member of the House of Representatives, felt the need to vote against appropriation bills 1 and 2—in effect in an attempt to block supply— because we thought it was important that the government last year go back to the drawing board and redo last year's budget and make it fairer. Regrettably, that was not to be, because the Labor Party and the Greens voted for supply in that case.

That brings me to this year's budget. It is a mixed bag. But, on balance, I am concerned that it is still not fair, that it is not sensibly funded and that it contains very little joy for Tasmania. There is some good news, and I should acknowledge that and applaud the government for that good news. The government's decision not to go ahead with the changes to the indexation of the age pension is a good decision. Mind you, it is a reversal of a bad decision last year. It was always madness to change the indexation of the age pension, which would have resulted in diminished spending power for age pensioners over time. Regrettably, the age pension is inadequate as it is. There was no sense at all in diminishing the buying power over time.

This year's budget did contain a very welcome boost for small business, and that has been very well received in Tasmania—not least because small business really is the backbone of the Tasmanian economy. The childcare boost is also welcome. Clearly we should do whatever we can to assist people to get back into the workforce. But we should also do everything we can to improve the education of our youngsters. I am persuaded that early childhood education is, on balance, good for boys and girls. It has certainly been my experience with my own two little daughters that they benefited greatly from early childhood education. I was very pleased to see in the budget funding confirmed for the Hobart airport runway extension and also the remaining money towards the rebuild of the Royal Hobart Hospital, which is now going ahead and is desperately needed.

I have given credit where it is due to the government. I will now focus areas of great concern. I think the budget is still unfair. It is very helpful to look at the ACOSS assessment of the report, which also highlights the fact that this year's budget fails the fairness test. In fact, ACOSS identifies that when you combine the 2014 budget savings measures with the 2015 budget savings measures there has effectively been a $15 billion cut over the budget and forward estimates from basic services and support. And that is before you add the $80 billion cut to health and education over the next 10 years. Is that fair? Is it necessary? I do not think so. The fact is that we live in a very rich and lucky country. The federal budget in any one year is in the order of $400,000 million. Surely, with good politicians making good decisions, we can adequately look after the people who need to be looked after. We can look after the very young. We can look after students, the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and the aged.

It is all about priorities, and to cut $15 billion out of the coming financial year and the following three years of forward estimates—to cut $80 billion out of health and education over the next 10 years—is not necessary. There is enough money in the federal budget to look after people who need looking after. It is as simple as that. In fact, ACOSS goes on to identify the combined impact of the two budgets to include things such as the $126 million cut from child dental programs, a $1 billion cut in health funding, $6 billion in cuts to family payments, $1 billion in cuts to vital community services, $500 million in cuts to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services and programs and $674 million to be cut from affordable housing and homelessness programs. I could go on.

Yes, we do need to restructure the budget, because we do need to balance it over the long term. The question is: how do we do it? We do not need to cut in those places. I will offer some comments about how we might afford the budget in the future in a little while. There are a few things that really jump out at me—for example, the government's determination to cut family tax benefit part B. This will hammer low-income families and be very, very problematic for single parents. Why do we go after these people? Why do we go after mainly single mums on low incomes? Their children have just turned six, and they are in school. Why do we go after them for budget savings? Surely single mums with young kids are just the sort of people we should be looking after well in this country. And it is not good enough to say that their kids are six, seven, eight or nine so the single mum can go to work, can rejoin the workforce. When you drop the children off at 9 am and you have to pick them up at 3 pm, and you have travel time as well, to and from work, it is very hard to get a well-paying job and a decent employer who will employ you between 9.30 or 10 o'clock in the morning and 2 o'clock or 2.30 in the afternoon. It is hard for these single mums.

I urge the government again to retreat from this determination to cut family tax benefit part B. It is not fair. So, too, the change in the assets for older Australians who are on a part pension is not fair. I believe there need to be changes to make the budget affordable, but by reducing the assets that a part pensioner can have while still receiving a part age pension they have cut too far. The reality is that we live in a very soft economic time. Many age pensioners or partly self-funded retirees have conservative investments. They might be getting only a few per cent interest from the bank on their investment, or from another form of investment. So, they have cut too far, and it will force these people to draw down their savings too fast.

And you get these perverse outcomes. I will quote Jennifer Hewett from the Financial Review earlier in the week. She gives an example:

Those with $600,000 in savings would get a part pension as well as investment income. The combination of both would be roughly equivalent to just getting the full pension of over $34,000. In contrast, if they had only $375,000 in savings, they could get a full pension plus investment income to add up to close to $45,000 in annual income.

So, I think those exact settings have been ill considered. And what about this whole business about double dipping? Let's not forget: there are 80,000 mums out there, or would-be mums, who have forsaken income rises to have workplace paid parental leave arrangements. This is not double dipping; these are people who have negotiated this additional paid parental leave benefit, and the government now wants to take it from them.

And overseas aid: John Howard, to his credit—not something I have said too often—15 years ago committed Australia to the millennium goal of 0.7 per cent of gross national income in foreign development aid.

At the moment it is under half of that and, with the cuts in this budget, by fiscal year 2016-17 it will be down to 0.22 per cent of gross national income in foreign development aid, less than one-third of what John Howard committed to 15 years ago—a cut that is not ethical and is not in Australia's best interest. Our best interest is served by helping countries in our region to be stable and prosperous and to be developed. That will foster security and open up markets.

I have made the point already that I do not think this budget is sensibly funded. The preoccupation of the government in this budget and in last year's budget is all about savings, and there is very little attention to the imperative to increase revenue. So where is the government's interest in superannuation reform? Frankly, rich people do not need a tax break on super. Where is the interest in finally taxing companies who make superprofits? Where is the interest in taxing them effectively? The banks, for example, make superprofits. Why do we not make them pay a bit more tax? These are the sorts of area that this government, or a future government, should be considering to increase revenue, because that is the real problem with our federal budget at the moment—a revenue shortfall. So stop cutting the people that can least afford it and go after the people that can afford to pay a bit more tax.

There is little joy for Tasmania in this budget. Of course, everything that hurts Australians broadly hurts Tasmanians more, because we have a relatively disadvantaged community. We have a higher unemployment rate, we have lower average incomes and we have the added cost of Bass Strait. So everything in this budget that hurts mainlanders hurts Tasmanians more. We will be hurt just as much as everyone else by the $80 billion cut in health and education spending. That is going to take about $2 million out of the Tasmanian budget over the next 10 years. But we have a very small tax base. We have less flexibility in our economy. We have less capacity to deal with these cutbacks. If we think the cutbacks last year and this year are bad, wait till we see the effects over the next 10 years of the $80 billion cut in federal funding for health and education, including the $2 billion cut in Tasmania.

I am disappointed also to see that only half the money is being provided for Tasmania than was promised for our rail upgrade. We were promised $120 million of federal assistance for our railway upgrade, and this budget contains a little under $60 million. Yes, the state government is recklessly cutting back on its contribution, but I think it would be entirely appropriate for the federal government to deliver on its promise.

I would like to see the federal government do more than show interest in the University of Tasmania's $400 million deep restructure. That is the sort of federal assistance that the budget should include because that is exactly the sort of federal assistance that will help Tasmania grow and be less reliant on federal assistance in future.

Tasmania receives a disproportionate amount of money from Canberra for welfare. We receive a disproportionate amount of money in special purpose payments from Canberra because of all the disadvantages we have in our community. If this government wants to wean Tasmania off that sort of federal largesse, that federal assistance, then Canberra should be investing in things in Tasmania that will grow the economy, that will help the community and that will genuinely create jobs—things like the $400 million restructure of the University of Tasmania, so it can realise its full potential, and funding in education in Tasmania. We have a very low school retention rate. The state government has just cut pathway planners in the schools which help kids in school. You cannot grow jobs and you cannot grow an economy unless you have a well-educated population.

In closing, I have given the government credit for some good initiatives in this budget—for example, the boost to small business, the boost to child care, the assistance with Hobart Airport and other things—but it is still not fair. It cuts $15 billion over the next four years from where it is most needed; helping people most in need. The $80 billion cut to the states over the next 10 years is still in the budget. That is unaffordable. It is not fair. It is not sensibly funded. Tassie does not get a fair deal. We are a rich country. We can afford to do it much, much better.

Debate interrupted.