Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Treasurer touted this budget as being about fairness, security and opportunity from a government that is innovative and agile. I see none of that. I see a budget that takes some Labor ideas and skews them to suit the Liberal agenda. Where are the ideas like the NBN, the NDIS, Medicare and superannuation? I hear those on the other side say, 'What about Snowy Hydro 2.0?' Well, to be fair, Snowy Hydro 2.0 was an innovation—those who designed and built it were innovators. They were made of sterner stuff. Snowy Hydro, incidentally, was an initiative of Ben Chifley and the Labor government. Help us if buying Snowy Hydro all these years on is an innovation.

Where are the good ideas, the policies, the instruments to help people? We should be helping young people have a great education through properly funding education. We should be helping people in all phases of their life so that they are able to buy a home or at least rent somewhere that does not gobble up most of their income and so that they are able to have a meaningful job or train and educate themselves. Are we really going to penalise some of the brightest people in our society by charging them more to go to university? These people are the innovators. Universities are the centres where things are created and thought out, and we are going to make it harder for people to be the innovators of the future. What about people who want to have enough superannuation for their retirement—if they get there at 70, such a long time to have to wait to get a pension—or have a decent life on the pension? All of these things are the tenets of a good life.

This budget will not go down as a great, innovative budget. It will fade into history as some sort of desperate lurch by a desperate Prime Minister and his government to hang onto their jobs. It does not do anything to help people have a better life in Australia. In my electorate of Paterson, the government came to the table kicking and screaming and gave us funding for Testers Hollow, which has taken 90 years. I am pleased for that funding, but it is just a tiny sliver of what our region needs. The government has offered some small solutions to the people who have been contaminated at Williamtown by PFAS, but it is still not enough to help those people who want out.

As my colleague the member for Hunter highlighted, the budget funded some things, but not enough. It did not go far enough. There is not enough for our region in the Hunter. There is not enough for my seat of Paterson, and the people of Paterson will see through this budget for what it is. It is a poor effort, a 2.0 version of what could be really great.