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

The only thing that young people in Melbourne and indeed right around the country have got from this Liberal budget is the middle finger. If you are under 35 in this country, this government has helped to sell you out yet again and continues prosecuting its war on the young. The biggest single area of cuts in this budget is from students and universities. Students are being asked to pay more, to go into further debt and to pay it back earlier, and the universities that are giving them their education will have less money because their budgets have been cut as well. Unemployment is forecast to go up. For all the talk of jobs and growth, the government did not tell you that hidden in the budget papers are forecasts that unemployment is going to keep going up, more than expected, and it is going to hit young people the hardest.

And if you are trying to put a roof over your head, the government has squibbed it on housing affordability, pretending that it is not a problem, and has refused to tackle the billions of dollars in taxpayers' money every year that is going not to help people buy their first home but to help people who already have a home to get their second, third or fourth homes through subsidies for negative gearing and capital gains tax. So students and universities are paying billions so that property investors who have three, four, five or six homes can keep getting a subsidy from this government.

And what do the government do? They turn around and blame young people for not getting jobs that are not even there. On one hand the government say, 'Unemployment's going to go up and jobs aren't going to be there for you and we've got nothing there to give you a job if you're a young person.' But, on the other hand, they say, 'We're going to blame you for it by kicking you off your welfare.' The government say that the very, very meagre amount that you get if you are unemployed in this country—thanks, in part, to some of the government's decisions—is now at risk because the government say they are going to start randomly drug testing people. If you, the government, actually believe it, then start with your own. When the government front up and say they are prepared to breathalyse every MP or minister before they come in for a speech or a vote then the Australian public might take them seriously. To turn around and say to poor people, 'We are now going to infringe your rights by subjecting you to a random drug test, just because you happen to have the misfortune of not having a job,' when unemployment, on the government's own terms, is forecast to rise, is reprehensible. People will understand that you—the Turnbull government—are not addressing the real problems of youth unemployment and instead are trying to blame the people who cannot find jobs. Those jobs simply are not there. The government have been mugged by reality and have pinched the Greens proposal for putting a levy on the big banks, but they should put that money into education and making housing more affordable, instead of lining the pockets of property investors and donors to the Liberal Party.