Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018 specifically in the context of the Defence appropriations. This is also in the context of the cumulative effect of the budgets during this coalition government. Labor have always said and continue to say that we would be very keen to make sure that cooperation in this place is bipartisan. We all across the chamber, I think, believe in the concept of bipartisanship on national security. Certainly my colleague here in the chamber with me and other members of the coalition and Labor enact that in the context of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security in a very effective way.

I think, however, we have all been disturbed—including, I think, the public and members of the coalition as well—about the degree to which the current Minister for Defence Industry has attempted to politicise this space. He has made some quite outrageous assertions in that context. Certainly I think we could do a lot better when it comes to a minister in that space, and there are many candidates on the coalition side I could suggest, including yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz. What we have seen in this four years has been chaos, confusion and dysfunction in the portfolio. We have had three different ministers—and a fourth seems to be on the way, if you believe the reporting. They have included David 'Canoe' Johnston, who had particular issues. I know part of his problem was dealing with the PMO at the time as well. He was hindered by that relationship with the PMO.

What we have seen is a distortion of the history. Across governments there are always issues with Defence procurement and managing highly complex platforms and technologies. Getting that right has always been a challenge for governments of all colours. So it is not just one government that tends to have these problems but many governments over a long period of time when it comes to managing projects that straddle governments.

The few that I am particularly concerned about getting the record straight on include Land 400, which is the project to replace our armoured vehicle capabilities—the combat reconnaissance vehicle and the infantry fighting vehicle. We have also seen issues to do with shipbuilding projects of concern. When we attained government in 2007 we discovered there were about 21 projects that were in serious management crisis and had serious issues. So we had to create a projects-of-concern process to manage that. By the time we left government, we had managed to remediate that down to about six projects.

But there have been significant disasters, such as the Seasprite, which involved the expenditure of $1.4 billion of public money for an aircraft that we did not get any flying time out of at all and which had to be abandoned completely. Labor remediated that by getting the Seahawk Romeos on board, which are world-leading aircraft now being deployed. There was also a landing craft disaster where $40 million was spent on landing craft that did not fit any vessel we owned at the time or any vessel we were going to acquire. That was quite extraordinary. Of course, they have been dispensed with as well.

But I am particularly concerned about Land 400 and the process for that that is underway at the moment. Under Labor's plan for Land 400 we were going to acquire 1,100 vehicles. We would have been through first-pass approval in March or April 2014. We have had the situation where not only has that time line slipped significantly but also the concept of the two phases—phase 2, the combat reconnaissance vehicle, and phase 3, the infantry fighting vehicle—which were linked under Labor for the benefit of the synergies and the involvement of Australian industry and the possibilities of the two platforms being quite related was abandoned under the Abbott administration, which split those two phases for some unknown reason and pushed phase 3 way out beyond the time lines that were feasible and credible.

For those who do not understand that fact: it is the issue that relates to the fact that the M113s are Vietnam-era platforms, and many could argue they are actually beyond their use-by date now. In fact, you could make the argument that they are not deployable, because they cannot survive in the current complex environments of improvised explosive devices and the like. So we are really now expecting to push those out well beyond a lifetime that is sustainable.

The other issue is the reduction in numbers. As I mentioned, Labor had set a 1,100 target, which related to the current usage of combat reconnaissance vehicles and the ASLAVs and the M113 numbers. Now, the ASLAVs have been flogged in recent operational deployments, from Timor to Afghanistan to Iraq et cetera. They are one of the most utilised platforms in the ADF inventory, now well and truly feeling their age and use, and will probably not be able to be used beyond 2021. We have seen the numbers in the combat reconnaissance vehicle aspect of that project drop from the 253 ASLAVs we currently have down to 225, and the numbers just keep falling in this space, so that is also of great concern.

There is more I could say about Land 400, but hopefully we will determine more out of the Senate estimates process coming up this week. I am greatly concerned that really good defence industries in Australia have been excluded from that participation. Why EOS, a great company that does world-leading remote weapons stations, was excluded from competition in this space I have no idea. It has led to a great deal of anger amongst authorities like Lieutenant General Leahy and others, who well understand this project. Elphinstone in Tasmania, which do fantastic metal bending, really should have been proactively and aggressively worked into this project. Two final bids have been accepted. It is really inexplicable why the GDLS-Thales bid and the Elbit TERREX bid were excluded from competition as well. Much more will need to be explained about that. Also, the lack of numbers in this budget over the forward estimates for Land 400 is mystifying.

Also, I want to address specifically the Minister for Defence Industry's statements that Labor did not commission a single local construction of a vessel in the six years that we were in government. This is incredibly misleading about what it takes to do major fleet unit projects in this nation or anywhere. It takes many, many years of planning and process. Just take for example the Collins project. In replacing the Oberon submarines, the process actually began in 1978. We finally got around to building the actual facilities for the Collins through that 1987 to 1990 period, and construction of the submarines began in 1990. That gives you an idea of the length of the process.

Now, to bell the cat on that, this is the government's own Naval Shipbuilding Plan, and I refer to what it says there about the 12 Future Submarines project, which it discusses, in terms of the truth about those time lines. It says, effectively:

The length of a submarine construction process means that Australia will need to be planning for the follow-on submarine capability well before the twelfth future submarine enters service.

That is the truth of submarine construction, so planning for the replacement of the Collins should have begun well before the last boat hit the water in that 2001 to 2003 period. When we got to government in 2007, absolutely no work had been done on the replacement of the Collins. We also found that there had been no investment in sustainment and maintenance of the Collins, so we were hard pressed to keep one vessel in the water.

We immediately threw $700 million at remediating that sustainment and maintenance issue and got up to very good standards of availability. Also, through that process we delved into issues to do with deep-cycle maintenance and improving that, including hull-cutting techniques and the like, which have placed us well for moving into Future Submarine construction. But trying to claim that nothing was done in that six years—it is a complete myth and a falsehood. Apart from the sustainment and maintenance issue that we addressed, we immediately looked at what needed to be done to replace the Collins.

The first part of that process was to do the service-life evaluation program for the Collins submarine, to work out how long we had with the Collins and whether we could do a local build or we would be forced into a military off-the-shelf purchase. At the same time, we did a due-diligence study of those military off-the-shelf options. We discovered, looking at programs like the Ohio class submarine program in the United States, that, yes, we could get quite a few extra seven-year cycles out of the Collins. With the Ohio class, for example, they extended that program by 10 years. So we knew we could cope with that by extending the life of the Collins.

We immediately then engaged in selecting the combat system—the AN/BYG-1 combat system—which the government has proceeded with, as well. The other aspect—the key aspect that you build a boat around, aside from the combat system—is propulsion, so we immediately set funds aside to do a land based propulsion testing facility to progress that aspect of the project. We also allocated $266 million in the 2013 budget to fund 85 separate activities and contracts to get the whole submarine process rolling. We had Prime Minister Abbott coming in with his famous 'captain's pick' process, wanting to go with a Japanese submarine off the shelf, and was trying to reverse-engineer all of these processes around achieving that, simply because of some vague relationship, or other issues—a submarine that was not suitable for Australian operational demands, requirements and environments. So that just 'blew out of the water', to coin a phrase, the whole process and effectively delayed it by four years.

The competitive evaluation process, we will say, has managed to finally get things on track, and we won't take issue with the selection there, in terms of the technical capabilities of the Barracuda—the DCNS proposal—and we are hoping that that project works out all right. But there are now many question marks around the huge problem that has been created for us in the loss of skills and industrial capacity—industrial capacity that we spent $1 billion remediating. Just to back-track a bit there, for the benefit of history I might also correct some of Minister Pyne's assertions, in that it was Labor that created a modern shipbuilding capacity in Australia by bringing home the last two of the Adelaide class Perry frigates to be built in this country, which then rolled into the construction of the Anzac frigates, which was a great success story and built tremendous capacity in this country. Then, of course, it rolled into the Collins submarine, which set this country up very well in that space as well. These are very complicated systems we are talking about here, in terms of naval architecture, systems management, systems integration and engineering skills. All of that was lost because nothing was done through that period from the construction of the last Anzacs and the last submarines. So we lost a great deal of capacity.

Labor mediated that capacity and got the workforce back up to over 4,000 skilled workers. We made tremendous gains in productivity and quality, and the fact that we were maintaining yards in Newcastle and Melbourne helped us to manage that process. So, when we ran into quality or productivity issues or workload issues we were able to shift blocks around yards, initially take blocks away from BAE while they built up and remediated productivity and quality and then, when workflow became a problem for Forgacs, giving four blocks back to BAE in Melbourne.

What we are facing now is this so-called 'valley of death' issue. Labor had fully intended to address that, and, of course, we produced only shipbuilding planned that was a far more substantial document then this pamphlet I am holding in which, if you go through it, I counted there are at least nine repetitions of paragraphs in it to flesh it out. If you come from a military background and read this, you say, 'That, my friend, is not a plan.' There are a lot of motherhood statements and flagging of skills issues, which would not have existed if the government of Prime Minister Abbott had simply picked up the shipbuilding plan and run with it, because in here we flagged the necessity to move towards a continuous rolling build, which creates efficiencies for the long-term and saves, as flagged in this document I have, tens of billions of dollars for the Australian taxpayer. But those skills have bled out. We were going to address that, particularly by moving forward with an immediate build of the supply vessels. The supply vessels could have been built here. In fact, I have the written recommendations from the Department of Defence to me, which said that 'a full in-country build for this project could provide critical workflow to Australia's naval shipbuilding sector, all across three shipyards, avoiding the costly decline of specialist skills between completion of the LHD and AWD projects and the start of the future submarine'. They said, 'actually moving ahead with this project, not only could we do it we should, because'—and they say it here in this optimisation plan—'it could overcome the imminent impact of the valley of death on the sustainability of the national shipbuilding industry and retention of critical skills. There are no known reasons why either design that we were contemplating at the time could not be entirely built in Australia.' What happened? Obviously, Prime Minister Abbott, in another captain's pick saga, decided he wanted to mend fences with Korea, which he had annoyed over another aspect, which I cannot go into the details of, and also to secure the free trade agreement, decided to ask them to build a Spanish design in Korea, which was crazy in itself. Of course, when Prime Minister Abbott was moved on, the government quite rightly said: 'Well, we won't do that. Let's ask the Spaniards to build a Spanish vessel.' That did make more sense.

However, we are still seeing the consequences now of not pushing forward with those massive vessels, over 20,000 tonnes, which would have pushed us into a whole new category of capability in shipbuilding and, as I mentioned, bridged that valley of death, saving us tens of billions of dollars. As indicated in these plans, when you go back to cold starts in shipbuilding, you are causing yourself a world of grief, and it poses serious questions over the time lines and the skills approach that the government will take. There is a much greater need for an aggressive approach to that skills issue. With the attacks that have been made on TAFEs, the skills needs out there and the time lines that are spelled out there, when we are talking about engaging in a future frigate project, for example, in 2020, there are serious questions marks over whether that will be met. So this is a budget that continues a tradition, and a bad one.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is my great pleasure to speak on the Turnbull-Joyce 2017 budget, which has made the right choices for the nation. It not only balances the need for us to responsibly fund essential services but allows us to live financially within our means and delivers a fair and responsible financial plan to get our budget back into balance—that is, to get the national accounts out of the red, or deficit, and into the black, or surplus. Being in surplus allows us as a nation to start paying back our national debt—or, in common parlance, our mortgage. No longer will we be paying our mortgage by borrowing on the credit card.

As I mentioned, any government needs to responsibly fund essential services like Medicare and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We have the Medicare Guarantee Fund, putting aside the Medicare levy plus extra capital to guarantee Medicare. We have started getting the Medicare indexation out of the deep freeze and thawing it in a staged fashion. The NDIS has a well-documented $5½ billion funding gap that needs to be paid from somewhere. That is why we have a responsible solution, with a 0.5 per cent increase from 2019, when the funding gap appears, on top of the Medicare levy.

Also in the health space we have secured so-called financial headroom of $1.8 billion in savings on pharmaceutical benefits by getting a better price from the pharmaceutical companies for their old, established drugs which are now off patent or ending the period when they need to get that return for the billions of dollars invested. We are putting that aside to allow funding for the new, more novel and exciting but very expensive drugs to come in at the start of their life. That allows us to fund drugs like cancer drugs and drugs for heart disease, cystic fibrosis and hepatitis C. There are extra funds for mental health and cancer research. The Medical Research Future Fund is now starting to pay dividends.

Aged care has also been a beneficiary. There is over $5 billion across the forward estimates to keep our expanded Commonwealth home support packages going. They are allowing senior Australians to age in place, in their own homes. It is much better for them and for their families, and it is also much more cost effective. We have just recently—in the last week—announced out of this budget another $649 million for 9,900 extra aged-care places. Just in my electorate of Lyne, there is over $100 million paid annually into the aged-care industry, which supports many hundreds and thousands of aged-care recipients. In Wauchope, my home town, $8.5 million has been allocated to Bundaleer Care Services for a massive expansion, with 40 new high-care places focusing on ageing in place and dementia care. This will allow a new capital works development, replacing the old Bundaleer nursing home with a new, state-of-the-art building, which will expand the facility to 145 places eventually. It will also mean that, going forward, there will be somewhere for the huge load of aged care required because we have such an ageing demographic in our electorate.

In the Lyne electorate the dementia rates are in fact the second highest in the nation. We have one of the most aged demographics in the nation. We are at the forefront of the ageing phenomenon that is spoken about in this House so often. On the North Coast of New South Wales there is a demographic phenomenon called 'retirement', which has driven a lot of the population growth. That is why we have so many people in that space in their life where they eventually turn to aged care. It is better that they stay in their own homes longer, rather than being in full residential care. Many of us know the scourge of dementia and the various processes that lead to it, whether it is Alzheimer's, vascular dementia or any of the other variants of dementia. It places a huge burden on people's partners and other family members. Many sufferers eventually will need support in dementia-specific aged care, and that is what is going to happen at Wauchope.

This expansion is not unique to Wauchope. The current budget will fund some massive expansions. At Pacific Cape in Forster there is a $40 million project being developed, even bigger than the $30 million project that will be facilitated in Wauchope. Peter Sinclair Gardens at Tea Gardens has just undergone an expansion, with 17 new places, and the Whiddon Group has finished a six-place extension, worth $2 million, in Largs. All these expansions add not only to the suite of possible care but also to regular long-term employment, because in a 50-bed residential care facility the workforce matches patient numbers almost one for one.

Many other good things in this budget have come to the nation. Small businesses, like the 14,000 that operate in the Lyne electorate, will benefit from the 27½ per cent company tax rate. It means the return on small businesses' investments will be greater. People in small businesses are not like wage earners, where the business pays them. For many men and women in small business, the profit that the company makes is their wage, so if they do not make a profit they are working for nothing.

We have also continued the instant asset write-off, which is a great program because it is so targeted. Businesses buy only the equipment that will benefit the business, and they are paying with their earnings, their money; it is not like they are getting a grant. The idea that businesses should pay for stuff without the appropriation of tax is such a sensible idea. We should actually target that in many more things, such as in the transfer payment system. But that is an aside; we will get back to this budget.

We have addressed many other serious problems in the tax base, such as bracket creep. We are all familiar with what bracket creep is. For the average wage earner, now $87,000, rather than $80,000, is the level at which you move into the second highest tax bracket.

We really have tried to look after people in work with our new affordable and more flexible child care and jobs for families package, which means that if you are earning up to roughly $185,000 there is no cap on what you can claim for child care. The more you are working, the more you can claim. Then there is a tiered system where the more you earn after that, the less the rebate is. But we have maintained support so that the most vulnerable children, who would benefit from child care and day care, get access for a minimum of 15 hours a week.

We are also trying to help people to get ahead and establish themselves in life by helping first home buyers. So they can get ahead and get their deposit a lot sooner, we will allow them to salary sacrifice up to $30,000 into their superannuation scheme and then pay a reduced tax when they take it out. Up on the north coast, this will be a great boon to a lot of young families who are just starting of their life, as my wife and I did when we moved up to the north coast 25 years ago. At the other end of the spectrum, we are trying to free up housing stock and let seniors who have worked all their lives and put money into their own homes downsize and put up to $300,000 each into their superannuation. We are also getting people off welfare and into work with our ParentsNext program, our Youth Jobs PaTH program and our Work for the Dole program.

In the infrastructure space, we are delivering in spades for the nation. Not only are we continuing to build the Pacific Highway in the Bruce Highway; we have appropriated $8.5 billion for the Inland Rail, which will be a freight corridor running through Victoria, New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland and into the Port of Brisbane. This will open up the food bowls and resource bowls of all of that massive hinterland, getting products to the markets more quickly and more cheaply. It will get 200,000 trucks off the Pacific Highway and the New England Highway. It will be an economic catalyst for growth in regional areas like Narrabri, Toowoomba, Goondiwindi, Parkes and Dubbo. All these wonderful areas that are so rich in agriculture will actually be able to connect so that all the value-adding businesses will cluster around this critical infrastructure. As we have said before, we have been delivering on dams, and the funding for further dam and irrigation projects continues.

Everyone in Australia wants to be sure that the top end of town is paying its fair share of tax. We have a multinational tax avoidance law and we are extending it to foreign partnerships and foreign trusts. We have the tax avoidance task force, which is embedded into some of the big corporate taxpayers to make sure that there is no strategic or directed tax avoidance. To make our tax system much more integrated and much more reliable, we have a penalty diverted profits tax and we are addressing all these multinational anti-avoidance laws into transfer pricing and antihybrid mismatch rules.

Local government will be happy because we have reindexed the financial assistance grants. The Roads to Recovery program and black spot programs continue. In this space in regional Australia we also have our Regional Jobs and Investment Packages. The north coast is the recipient of one of these funds. We are looking to invest in and help grow critical infrastructure, social programs and businesses. The Building Better Regions Fund is aimed at these sorts of projects as well, as is our Stronger Communities Program, which is continuing.

There are so many good things in this budget that the coalition and the nation should be really proud of. As I mentioned, we have laid out a credible financial path to getting our finances back in order. By 2021 we should be in surplus, and shrinkage of some of the funding in the recurrent spending means we are starting to live within our means. But critical infrastructure that will grow the economy and the things that everyone in Australia who is working and has a family depends on, like Medicare and schools, is getting extra funds. Look at the school education budget: $18.6 billion extra into all levels of the school system, whether it is independent schools, the Catholic school system or state government run schools.

My last comment is just to put paid to the falsity put out by members on the other side that a cut means money this year is less than last year. Money is going up in education to the tune of $18.6 billion. It is not as big as the hypothetical, blue sky promises, but that does not mean a cut. That is just confusing people. There is an extra $18.6 billion going into federal education funding, into all levels of the school system. There will be state government schools, Catholic and Christian schools— (Time expired)

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have returned to Canberra with, I noticed this morning, the one per cent budget bounce the government got in the Newspoll a couple of weeks ago having gone. They are back to another slump in the polls. It is pretty clear why. After a couple of weeks of digesting the reality of this budget, it has dawned on people that this is a fundamentally unfair budget from a desperate government with no narrative and no reason to be.

The ultimate test of any budget should be—must be—how it addresses the big challenges which our nation faces. Key amongst those challenges are sluggish growth and low wage growth, as well as unemployment and underemployment. This budget gives up on jobs and growth, which is perhaps a blessing for those of us who have had to listen to that slogan for near to 12 months. I do not think we are going to hear much more about jobs and growth when the growth projections in this budget are down, wages growth is down and unemployment is up, with 95,000 fewer jobs forecast in this budget.

The budget fails the fiscal responsibility test. I heard the honourable member for Lyne, who spoke before me, talking about a credible financial path. That is what they said in their first budget and their second budget and their third budget, and they are saying it again. Yet, four years on, gross debt is shortly to pass $500 billion, well on track to exceed $700 billion in 10 years, and the deficit this year will be 10 times bigger than was forecast in the Liberals' first budget. That is a credible financial path, apparently. It is sort of magic economics: we vote Tony Abbott in and somehow the budget is going to whirr back into surplus because they are so competent. The numbers tell another story. After so many years of hearing from then-Treasurer Hockey—whatever he is doing now—and everybody else that there is no revenue problem, there is a funny admission. Finally, there is an honest admission that there is in fact a revenue problem, with the bank levy slammed on with no notice and a tax rise for everyone founded on a lie over the National Disability Insurance Scheme funding. But they still will not undertake responsible structural changes over the medium term, which is what we really need for a credible path back to surplus. There is a housing crisis, but this budget does nothing of substance in relation to housing. Indeed, their signature initiative, which we keep hearing so much about, many economists say will tip more money into the housing market and fuel the affordability problems by adding to demand. There is an infrastructure crisis. We are on track for a record low level of investment, with cuts to infrastructure this year and zero new dollars for Victoria. The truth can only be found if you look at what is in the budget papers, rather than believe the spin that you hear in question time and heard in the Treasurer's speech on budget night, because most of the things that are talked about are not actually funded.

Overall, the budget is a tawdry, sad, confused little document. The member for Herbert, who is in the chamber, knows the Hollowmen documentary. This budget is something that you would see produced out of that sort of budget policy process. It has been designed in a focus group. You can imagine people sitting down, saying, 'Where are we vulnerable? We haven't spent enough on Medicare. People think we're pretty bad on schools. We'll just put a little fig leaf—a tick in a box—next to everything and try and band-aid over the truth with a few little gimmicks.' But overall it adds up to nothing. It is an abject sign of the failure of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. I think the newspapers are right in calling him the worst Treasurer in modern Australian history, as they are.

An honourable member interjecting —

I do not think it is harsh; I think it is generous. Budgets are about choices, and the government has made fundamentally unfair choices. We have got tax cuts for the top end—a two per cent tax cut for every member of this parliament; we are in the top tax bracket. On the same day we get a tax cut there are cuts to penalty rates for 700,000 low-income workers. We found $65 billion apparently in the medium term for tax cuts to companies, including big multinationals and the banks. Apparently the banks are going to get back through the tax cuts almost as much as they will pay in the levy. It is a kind of pea-and-thimble trick. This is accompanied by a $22.3 billion cut to school funding when compared to the existing arrangements. There are tax cuts for the top end—that is, for us—and a tax rise for everyone else.

There are a couple of issues I want to turn my remarks to. The first is the degradation of public services. This budget continues and ramps up the Liberal government's sustained attack on Australia's public services and public servants, who work for all of us. We see further cuts of $1.9 billion to core public services through so-called efficiency dividends, plus another 1,188 jobs to go at Centrelink with the start of the privatisation of Centrelink that is quite clearly outlined in the budget papers.

Great societies have great public services—schools, TAFEs, universities, hospitals, health care, defence forces, police, emergency services and aged care. There are even our foreign affairs and trade representatives across the globe to advance Australia's interests and help craft economic and security environments in which we can prosper. To deliver great public services you need great people who are motivated, committed and supported. I am constantly disappointed when listening to many of those opposite—not all, but many—who like to degrade public servants, dragging up stereotypes and talking about people living off the public teat and so on. I think we should aspire to have the best and the brightest in our society taking careers in the public service and we should value the work that they do.

Yet, with no explanation—none at all—this budget inflicts further massive cuts on Centrelink and the Department of Human Services. Buried in Budget Paper No. 4 on page 136 it says that 1,188 jobs will be cut next year. That comes on top of 5,000 or so jobs cut since the government was elected four years ago. Even worse, some may argue, buried in Budget Paper No. 2 on page 147 is the advice that the government is now privatising 250 jobs to call centres. It is a trial. It is the start, but we know it is the thin end of the wedge. There is no advice of course about how much this will cost. If you look in the table and think, 'I wonder how much this is going to cost?' all that is written is 'NFP'. That does not mean 'not-for-profit'; it is not a volunteering initiative. It means 'not for publication'—'We're not going to tell you,' says the government, 'how much this privatisation is going to cost.'

Centrelink of course, as any member in this place who spends any time in their electorate office would know, is one of the most stressed areas of the government. The delays in answering phones are a national joke. There were 36 million unanswered calls last year. We have started to find out how they rort the statistics. When the minister talks about the average wait time, he picks a telephone queue, which is probably one that no-one calls—maybe his office calls a few times—and says: 'It is only 12 minutes. There is nothing to worry about.' The reality is that, if you call and get through and get transferred to another person, transferred to another person and transferred to another person and have been on the phone for one hour and a quarter, that counts as four calls and it is averaged out to lower the call wait times. The hang up times—the 36 million calls where no-one gets through—are not counted in any statistics at all. So the statistics, even the ones that the government publishes, which are bad enough, are wrong. As anyone knows, getting through to Centrelink is a national joke.

There are delays in claims because of the lost staff, delays in disability support pension claims and family payments and, most particularly I have noticed in recent months, delays in age pension claims. I have had to escalate and try to push through a number of claims for people who say: 'It is all very well for Centrelink to say that they will back pay me in three months, four months, five months or six months when they get around to processing my pension, but I have had to retire from work because my husband has got a serious illness and I need the health care card because we go to specialists and we have pathology bills. We do all this stuff every week and we do not get a discount. The doctor does not give us a discount until we get the card. We cannot go to the doctor and get thousands of dollars of medical bills back paid, can we?'

These are the real impacts on the community through taking the human out of Human Services, which is what this government is doing. I encourage everyone to speak up against the cuts. The CPSU, the union that represents public sector workers, has started a campaign that deserves support. Importantly, I encourage people to direct their anger not at Centrelink staff, not at the people on the end of the phone, but at the government. It is this rotten government that deserves the anger of citizens trying to get basic services, not the stressed-out staff who remain trying to do their best.

Of course, it is not just Centrelink. We have heard from the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection that the government are starting to privatise and casualise there too. The government are putting 250 jobs into call centres over the next 12 months in Immigration. This is not just ordinary queries; this often is dealing with people's most personal information. In the case of many people who travel, or where there may be security issues, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is life and death information that these call centres deal with. In the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, already we have 450 labour hire contractors sitting there—not public servants but doing public servant work. I wonder what the overheads and the cost-benefit truly are for that.

The practical impacts, though, are further degraded services for the community and job losses and wage cuts for staff. Casualisation and insecure work are a growing issue. How are you supposed to get a home loan or do the basic things which people working full time would normally expect if you cannot go to the bank with a contract, because you are on week to week or fortnight to fortnight, which is what the government wants to do to more of its own workforce?

This is consistent, of course, with the government's ideology not only about cutting wages, as we see with penalty rates, but also about the EBA negotiations. This is perhaps the most shameful. I think that you can judge a government by how it manages its own workforce. The fact that staff in the Department of Human Services, year after year after year under this government, have had no EBA agreements in place and not one per cent, not a dollar, in a pay rise is bad enough. But do you know what the sticking point is? It is not actually money; it is the fact that the staff there are smart enough to refuse point blank to trade off their basic entitlements in the EBA for flexible working conditions by putting them into policies in which they then have no protection.

I know this from the time when I took the best part of a year working flexibly—I took part-time and reduced arrangements—while nursing my mum, with cancer, at home. With those entitlements—even as a senior public servant, I had the same entitlements—I could walk in and say: 'Hey, I've got personal and family responsibilities. I was raised by a single mum. Helping her die, and die well, at home is important to me.' I had an industrial right—not something that I had to beg for but an industrial right—under the EBA so that I was allowed to keep my job and cut my hours and still meet my caring responsibilities. That is what this government is trying to take away from every public servant through these disgraceful EBAs. I stand proudly with the public servants being attacked day in, day out, by this government. These sorts of measures should be called out and opposed.

In the time remaining, I would say that, if there is one group above all others who should be furious about how they are treated and forgotten in this budget, it is young people. Last week, members may remember that we heard a bit from those opposite about it being 75 years since Sir Robert Menzies's famous Forgotten People speech. Ironically, that was, of course, while Menzies himself was at risk of being forgotten by history, before his second coming when he made his seminal speech. Seventy-five years on, in this Liberal budget, there is no doubt at all that, if there is one group above all others which is forgotten, abandoned by Menzies's party, it is young people.

Those who cannot vote are completely sold out, with a $22.3 billion cut to school funding as compared to the current arrangements. The baseline those opposite use to talk about it as a funding increase is: 'Abbott cut $30 billion, so we've put a bit more back in.' Somehow that is a funding increase, even though it is still a massive cut. The greatest single con is the government trying to present it as an increase. It sells out the idea of equality of opportunity—that any kid, wherever they are from and whatever their family circumstances, has the best chance in life at fulfilling their potential—and it sells out Australia's future by not investing, to the required standard and in a reasonable time frame, the required funds.

I have heard particular anger through my office about the attacks on higher education. The latest cuts over the next two years, another 2.5 per cent out of universities, bring it to a total of around $4 billion cut from core university funding under this government. It is a pretence to say that this will not impact research and that it will not threaten our global standing in our rankings and quality of education. What it does is raise university fees and contributions to amongst the highest in the developed world. Worst of all, from an equity point of view, it lowers the repayment threshold for young people so graduates will be forced to repay their debts earlier. When people start earning $42,000, which is not a lot of money in today's society, they will get whacked to repay. This further undermines the equitable principles which underlie higher education loans programs.

Those opposite and their cheer squads say: 'Don't worry, it's just a few dollars. It's only a few dollars. It's $8 here and $10 there and $15 there.' Of course, if you have rich parents—the Prime Minister's housing policy—it is just a few dollars. But those few dollars make a real difference for ordinary families. These are people—perhaps they are the first in their family to go to university—who are genuinely worried about the debt they are taking on because they know from their friends that it will decrease their chances of getting a home loan until it is repaid, or because of the stories they hear of people deferring starting a family year after year because they cannot afford to repay their debt, and save for a home, and save for a family. We know from what we hear in the community—and from what I heard at Monash University when talking to students a couple of weeks ago, and what I hear from my own daughter, who is at the University of Melbourne—that young people are price sensitive. They are worried about their future and worried about taking on more debt. Just a few dollars here or a few dollars there do make a difference, and they fuel the rising inequality we see in this country.

The government, of course, is always prepared to find very large amounts of money for the top end. There is a two per cent tax cut for people on high incomes—including me—and a $65 billion company tax cut. It does go to priorities and choices. We saw a lot of the so-called zombie measures abandoned in this budget. I dearly hope that the higher education measures become the new and first zombie measures in this budget and will never pass this parliament. (Time expired)

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We hear this occasional argument about the war on young people, and it is worth putting it in perspective. It is a rare thing to listen to a federal debate where there is almost no complaint about the health system from the Labor Party, but that really is a measure of just how well Medicare, the PBS and the PBAC are functioning. There has just been a complete farrago of new drugs approved—I think 1,200 in the last 4½ years. What we are seeing is an exceptionally well run health system, one which the Labor opposition are increasingly finding difficult to take umbrage with. Of course, that is something that has been perennially the opposition's showcase element. When you were in doubt coming into an election, starting a scare campaign based around Medicare was usually the way you got through a campaign and got pretty close to winning government.

I want to focus particularly on young people, who will be watching the debate today. When you clear away the usual boredom of 'Labor said this and Liberal said that', what people are trying to understand—and I do apologise, Deputy Speaker, that I referred to some of this earlier this morning in this very chamber—is where this Leader of the Opposition stands. It is very unusual to see a strongly performing opposition with a leader whom people do not want to come within 50 feet of. That is a very unusual political circumstance in the cycle of history, and it is important to dig down to why it is the case. Obviously, from our point of view, the longer he stays in the job the better. But what we are seeing—without giving any suggestions to members of his caucus—is a situation where, increasingly, for everything he says, he said something exactly the opposite just a few years ago. In this world of social media, it is all recorded. You cannot go to a community meeting and say to people, 'I fully support a public vote on same-sex marriage,' and then make the cornerstone of your period in opposition a vehement fight against the public having a vote on same-sex marriage. I cannot even use different words. It is exactly the same argument, and a complete flip from one position to the other.

That is not something you could really have accused the great Julia Gillard or the Great Kevin Rudd of! For one thing, they were passionate people driven by ideology. But we have moved into a new era of leaders, particularly with respect to your party, Deputy Speaker Bird, driven by the political pragmatism of the moment. A great example is Adani. I know that Deputy Speaker Bird, who is in the chamber at the moment, is not from Queensland, but having the Queensland Premier say, 'We strongly support the job-creating ability of a large company coming here and developing a coalmine where nobody else will'—environmental concerns aside; they obviously have to be met—has a certain public benefit. For the Leader of the Opposition to then run on some inner-city argument, topped with goat cheese and dill, that not a single taxpayer dollar should go towards the funding of the mine shows he obviously does not understand that every resource project in this country since Federation has had an element of taxpayers' money going towards getting it started. It might have been a public rail line, because all rail was publicly built back in those days. Now all we are talking about is providing a loan, which will be fully paid back, with interest, to the taxpayer, to develop that rail line. That is not controversial. The Leader of the Opposition is saying that federally not a dollar of taxpayers' money should go towards the mine, which GetUp!—or 'Get Labor Up!'—is running a campaign on. Talking out of one side of one's mouth sounds great on one side of the street.

But on the other side of one's mouth, of course, you have the same party saying the complete opposite up in Queensland, where you have people just desperate for a job or to have their dependants employed in, of all things, one of the largest coal mine projects. This is a foreign entity that is prepared to come and invest in this great nation and in its infrastructure—I mean, they cannot take the mine home with them if it all goes pear shaped. If the coal market does disappear, we are left with the jobs, with the infrastructure that they cannot fly home—and there is plenty of room for other mines if they wish to start—and with a rail link that looks after the entire sector and basin. It is a no-loss situation, as long as we are a nation that can run its tax system properly. That is why I have been particularly assiduous in looking at the deal where Queensland was going to give a royalty holiday to Adani. This is an issue that this courageous—in this circumstance—Labor Premier staked her career on, at the risk of being taken apart by very ambitious Deputy Premier. But she stood by her guns and said that every other major project has had royalty holidays and concessions in some shape or form. We do it because the global public good is greater. We know that the long-term interest is there. It is a complex calculation. It is beyond GetUp! and the click campaigns. But it is an important consideration for long-term employment, because we know that coal is not going to disappear tomorrow.

This fairly large diversion in this speech of mine is to point out that this federal Labor leader is just running the 'Get Labor Up!' line, which is completely different to the state Labor Premier, and he could not care less. There is no ideological connection here to his party. It is just what works best for the polls. There are lots of people in marginal seats who love the GetUp! click campaign, and this Leader of the Opposition is going to click away with them. But it does not stop there. It does not just stop at same-sex marriage. It does not stop at the NDIS, where we supported the Labor government to raise the Medicare levy because it works right across the board, paying according to need into a service that every one of us could require one day and be grateful for. We had that understanding in opposition. We just said we understand that the NDIS is above all of this. But here is a Labor leader who is now utterly unable to support precisely what he did in government just four years ago. We are not talking amnesic periods of time. We are not talking decades or making comparisons to the Whitlam era. This is the same bloke who was a minister. This entire chamber spoke right here and said, 'We need to raise the Medicare levy as the fairest way to fund something that everybody needs.' It is beyond this individual's ability to do the same thing that he did four years ago: support the same tax change with the same graduations and the same exemptions based on income. It is as if he just was not here four years ago, as if he was not even part of the debate when we followed his government in supporting the NDIS. This is the NDIS, for goodness' sake. We are not funding a chook raffle. This is the most important social intervention in a generation, and one that we give credit to the Labor Party for initiating. Are we in a world now where you just oppose absolutely everything, simply because it is going to be politically useful for your career, personally? We are a better parliament than that.

It does not stop there. It is also about the enterprise agreements. This is a Labor leader who was the architect of enterprise agreements that left up to half of the participants worse off. I understand that an enterprise agreement is a global agreement where some are slightly better off and some are slightly worse off. But Labor Party appointed Fair Work commissioners sign most of them off—120 of them. Then along comes a decision by the Fair Work umpire, four of the five of whom are actually Labor Party appointed, and he pulls up stumps and runs away the minute it comes in. We did not set up the Fair Work Commission. We did not appoint the participants. As soon as this huge amount of work is done by experts in the field, this Labor leader just cannot wait to rush away and oppose the decision. I could understand if it were just political convenience, but this is an individual who hand-designed enterprise agreements that left workers worse off. A piece of evidence is Penny Vickers, who worked late nights stacking shelves and realised she did not even get the award. This is a deal done by unions with big business. This is precisely the job description of the bloke who is now the Leader of the Opposition, who suddenly only hates an enterprise agreement if it is one not done by the union. If the union is involved, it is completely okay to leave workers worse off. We estimate there are around 250,000 Australians worse off due to the actions of a union—out to $300 million of lost wages.

Some EAs are worse than others. Coles is the one that leads, because of the nature of Coles' employment practices. They simply use more people in a position that could be worse off in late night and after-hours employment. But they are not the only guilty party. They all signed up. It appears to be well meaning, but they signed a piece of paper saying, 'No worker was worse off.' The signature is on the piece of paper. That is now being tested in the Federal Court.

My only issue here is that you cannot make a massive issue about a tiny enterprise agreement signed by a small sporting club in Queensland, rip out one worker when every other one of the 40 workers are happily employed and no worse off and make some ambit claim that you are thousands of dollars worth off. You cannot then bring this young woman down to parliament, parade her around this building, do press conferences and, when asked how you can prove that she is thousands of dollars worse off, respond with: 'We took her statement at face value. We did not check the pay sheets. We did not read the agreement and see it was signed off by a Labor New South Wales appointee to the Fair Work Commission.' You cannot exist in a world where there is no evidence to back up what you say.

My point is quite simply this: where precisely does this Leader of the Opposition stand on social policy? It is one thing to have an MBA—the great degree that no-one can fail—but, ultimately, you have to be able to have some discipline and say: 'Does this really stack up with Labor values or not?' If the Labor value is simply to oppose everything that is ever said by the other side, I can understand where you are heading. But we are going to keep rolling out what was said four years ago and contrasting it to what is said today, because you know what, Deputy Speaker—and I respect the difficult position I have put you in—Australians just want straight talk. They do not want to see someone who flips on their tail every time it, not gets tough, so much—I can understand that, as we all can be guilty occasionally of being seen to flip when it gets tough and we get hit with a blowtorch—because this is not tough at all. This is the NDIS. How hard is it to simply say, 'On these grounds, and we have done it before, we will wave that one through with pride.' We will hold our hands above our heads and say, 'We are delighted, as an opposition, to support it.' That is how easy it was to have a fully funded NDIS, but we are still not there yet.

This war on young people, which we increasingly hear has been qualitatively focus group tested and runs very well—getting young people to get upset. Fundamentally, young people have never had such fantastic access to bulk-billed pathology. Young people have never had such high levels of bulk-billing. They are now approaching over 85 per cent for GP practices, over 78 per cent specifically for seeing GPs and well into 83 per cent for all Medicare billing.

In the university debate we are increasingly hearing about how four per cent of tertiary education is funded. It is either funded by the person who gets the degree or it is funded by the taxpayer. Of course, this is where Labor is really torn: 'These students are our cup of tea and our bread and butter. They all roll up and vote for us, so, of course, we have to oppose any change that allows students to pay more.' But the bottom line is: what is the private capital good of a degree? It is worth millions of dollars for a number of degrees. But for most people they are way better off having a university degree than not. You do not pay a cent on the way through until, income contingent, it is paid back afterwards. It is awkward to listen to isn't it? In reality we are debating about if four per cent is paid for by the person who gets the degree when they earn the big bucks. If you do not earn the big bucks, you do not pay it back. It is quite simple—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I accept that interjection—$42,000 is not fair. But currently it is $38,000. We are debating the final four, which represents a six or seven per cent increase on the cost of a degree, and whether it is paid for by the person who gets it or by the family that never gets their child into university. I think fundamentally there has to be some element on the way through of paying for the private benefit of your degree. It is a debate that we accept. We are quite happy for the Labor opposition to say, 'No, these degrees are so important they need to be paid for by the taxpayer.' I am happy to hear that debate and exactly how they justify it, but I suspect that we will not.

Lastly, in this budget there are home savings proposals for young, potential homeowners trying to get their first home. You will see that what you can do is pay additional amounts through your superannuation, an existing structure, into a savings account that has a 30 per cent tax discount when that money is taken out. That was a response to potential homeowners saying, 'I've got the salary. We've got the earning capacity to fund a loan. We just can't get the deposit.' So the solution is to help that small cohort get that deposit together as quickly as possible.

But, of course, Labor gets most exasperated from their urban seats, where prices look very high. Every weekend they go to auctions and they roll their eyes and say, 'No, no. We've got to hit capital gains tax; we've got to hit negative gearing.' It is as if they have never visited a regional town where you are flat out selling your place. Let's go to Goulburn or let's go to—

An honourable member interjecting—

I will take your interjection. Capital gains is the issue. Let's go out and hit a retiring couple trying to sell their home in Moranbah and find their way back to Brisbane where they can retire close to where the kids work. You are just going to knock negative gearing and capital gains tax. That is the one element, the one piece of reward, for holding onto an asset for a period of time. When you are from the inner city and goat cheese is on the menu, it is quite easy to take that view. But, when we deliver policy, we need to recognise that home affordability is heterogeneous problem. It is very different very close to the CBD. It is very different in the outer sprawl where we are developing new homes and we are very reliant on state governments and councils. And it is very different again in regional Australia where—do you know what?—there is no housing affordability issue whatsoever. The last thing that this government will do is allow the Labor Party to come into power and attack those people in the regions for whom buying and selling a house can mean the difference between retiring close to kids or being stuck where you are miles away from them.

At every level we just want to see some clarity from the Leader of the Opposition. It is a gratuitous point that I make, but, if you want to understand why the individual is tracking so poorly despite the party doing so well, increasingly, you have to do what you say and say what you do.

Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on one aspect of the government's recent budget: the $5.3 billion commitment to construct an airport in Western Sydney. They say there is a business plan. It is not public, and I have not seen it. But with a commercial operator choosing to walk away from the project, there would want to be a rigorous plan for something that is going to take $5.3 billion of taxpayer funds over the next decade. There is no transparency on how that figure has been arrived at, nor on what exactly it will deliver. I am not aware of any other single infrastructure project of this size. The only thing that really compares is the NBN, and do not get me started on that.

I am curious about what sort of airport this government is planning to build. There are so many different versions of what it might be. When those in my electorate, especially those in the Blue Mountains, are worried about noise, we are dismissed and told, 'You won't notice.' When we are worried about noise at night, we are reassured there will not be that many flights and they will be able to avoid residential areas. At the same time, we are told that the need for an airport in Sydney to operate 24 hours a day is desperate, urgent. If that is the case, yet there are not that many planes wanting to come in at night, surely a more economic solution would be to allow those few flights to use Sydney Airport. Or perhaps there really are a large number of flights desperate to land at two, three or four o'clock in the morning, in which case, how exactly is that going to work without disturbing residents in Western Sydney? In the same breath as we are being told that we will not notice the noise because airplanes are quieter now, we are told that it will be mainly low-cost carriers and freight that will want to use Western Sydney Airport, and they do not have the latest and greatest aircraft. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has the view that Badgerys Creek needs to be built as a low-cost airport, with facilities suited to these budget carriers. 'It can't be a Taj Mahal,' he has said, 'It has to be cheaper than Kingsford Smith.'

On the other hand, we hear that this is an opportunity to build a state-of-the-art, eco-friendly, super quiet, super smart airport that will lead the world in environmental standards, in spite of the fact that the EIS does not demand state of the art. We are told that it will create tens of thousands of jobs, yet apparently there are not enough people to justify a rail line. We are told that there will be huge benefits for all of Western Sydney while in the same breath we are told that many of the people who work there will live within 30 minutes of the airport—this idealised 30-minute city—without public transport. We are told Badgerys Creek is ideal because no-one lives there, yet the government is talking about building a new city, a third city, an aeropolis, at one end of the runway—or maybe at both ends. Perhaps this is where the people who will work at Badgerys will live. How does that benefit the rest of Western Sydney? Why wasn't that been assessed as part of the environmental impact statement?

We are told that it will create some sort of economic boon, with benefits flowing throughout all of Western Sydney. At the same time, it seems that future defence industry jobs will be sucked out of my electorate at RAAF Base Richmond and into the new whiz-bang precinct at Badgerys. We are told that Western Sydney wants it, yet none of the business people driving this over many years seem to live in Western Sydney. But they know what is good for us! Sydney Airport does not want to build it, but we are told that investors all over the place are itching to get their hands on it. In spite of that, the government is not going to offer it to any of them but will build it itself—gifted, as we know it is, in completing construction projects on time and on budget.

My region of the Blue Mountains has been told there will be huge economic benefits with a massive influx of tourists. But there is no planned investment in local roads or in local infrastructure. We are told that there will be tons of consultation about the flight paths, yet the runway direction is set, and contracts for works are due to be done by the end of the year. We are told that it will have no impact on World Heritage in the fragile Blue Mountains landscape, yet we are also told that it will be as big as Heathrow and will operate 24 hours a day, with 100 per cent of incoming flights needing to traverse the Blue Mountains. And city politicians and businesspeople want it to funnel people into the CBD, rather than improving Western Sydney public transport. So is it an airport that gets people into Sydney, or is it for Western Sydney? Are they building an airport to service the people of Western Sydney where they develop it with Western Sydney, or are they building an airport to flog off to the highest bidder to make money on the back of Western Sydney? Let's unpack some of these contradictions and questions.

I look for equity in things, and lack of equity is at the heart of the make-up of the Western Sydney Airport forum known as FOWSA—rhymes with 'wowser'! It is charged with being the key community consultation process for flight path design, according to the government's own documents. Let's look at the community forum for Sydney Airport. It includes 11 federal MPs, including the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Urban Infrastructure. To be clear, the minister is not there in his capacity as minister but as the member for Bradfield. In fact, SACF includes a spot for every local federal member whose electorate aircraft flies over, including those on the Upper North Shore. So, in fairness, do we see the same make-up for Western Sydney's forum? Yeah, right! There are two federal MPs and one senator—two!—whereas, by my calculations, there are around 11 seats that will be impacted by new or changed aircraft noise, none more so than the now tranquil Blue Mountains, which is set to be subjected to 100 per cent of the flights coming in to the airport 24 hours a day.

It is therefore disappointing that two very strong Blue Mountains nominees for community reps for FOWSA were overlooked. Peter Dollin, current president of the residents' action group, RAWSA, and Jon Rickards, a long-time member of the Blue Mountains Conservation Society, both have serious fears for the impacts of the airport. However, both were willing to contribute their professional expertise to the process. Peter, a long-time director for a global firm, and John, a retired school principal and science teacher, would have brought an ability to analyse and digest the technical information required by FOWSA and also had ready-made communication links to the active Blue Mountains community. To leave them both off FOWSA, when my electorate has been the most vocal in expressing its concerns about the airport plan—with 80 per cent of the nearly 5,000 responses to the EIS coming from the Blue Mountains—is a disgrace. So if you are looking to not only be fair about this community consultation process but also be seen to be fair, this government is failing on both counts.

The west is being told that there will be an economic benefit coming from the planned airport. I have no doubt that somebody is going to make a lot of money. Certainly landowners who have previously grazed cattle will be seeing dollar signs. But I question what economic benefits will flow for my electorate. Defence giant Northrop Grumman has just announced that it will set up at the Badgerys site—possibly good for the southwest, although it would be nice to see them pay some tax! But Blue Mountains councillor Don McGregor has already raised concerns about how irresistible our Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage valleys could be to these makers of drones for flight testing.

But my concern lies predominantly with the implications of the government's announcement of a high-tech defence and aerospace precinct at the Western Sydney Airport site. We already have an investment of defence industries at Richmond RAAF base. Northrop Grumman already has a significant presence at Richmond through its depot-level maintenance, repair and modification of C-130H Hercules aircraft. But what is the future? The Hercs are expected to last until 2030/2035. After that, who knows what will replace them or where those aircraft will be based?

It is no secret that Defence has had questions for decades about the long-term role of the RAAF base at Richmond, with Air Marshal Leo Davies' comments last year reigniting that issue. What I think is concerning timing is that the Hercs' anticipated end of life coincides with the early years of operation of the planned Badgerys, yet there is no discussion about this by the government. When it talks about the economy of the west, it cannot ignore the rest of the west, including the Hawkesbury. Richmond is perfectly placed for an expanding defence industries role. In fact, that could provide the Hawkesbury with the long-term economic driver that it craves.

With the allure of the shiny new Badgerys site, what is the future for Richmond or other parts of Western Sydney? Are we doomed to see all new economic activity sucked into the Badgerys vortex? Let's look at the jobs projections. The information to date is confusing at the very least. We have the federal Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation, Angus Taylor, talking about a city deal that will transform the lives of Western Sydney's two million residents through an aerotropolis that will offer, he says, tens of thousands of jobs. In his budget night speech, the Treasurer said the new airport would create 20,000 jobs by the early 2030s. However, data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development says that by the 2030s the airport is expected to provide 9,000 direct jobs and over 4,000 in on-site business parks. That adds up to 13,000. That is a difference of 7,000 from the Treasurer's own figures. And we are talking about the 2030s, maybe 15 years away. The expectation that a 25-year-old unemployed person in Windsor will suddenly have work coming out of their ears thanks to Western Sydney Airport is a total myth. They will be 40 before the place is operational, and even then there will be no train to catch to get to work. The jobs are merely being shifted from other parts of Sydney—the EIS talks about that and the Northrop Grumman announcement is an example of it. Many jobs could be created without a slab of tarmac as their centrepiece.

Where do robotics and automation fit into this equation? Surely a high-tech precinct will demand a high-tech airport; what would be the point otherwise? What are the consequences for job numbers at an airport where a human being need not be involved in the entire process from check-in to baggage handling to any other routine customer service interactions? This is not the future; this is the now at many airports around the world. Which will it be for Western Sydney Airport: jobs heavy or automation heavy?

Where do the headlines of a jobs boom and a new city in the west leave existing residents of the west? Will we see two Western Sydneys? It has never been a homogenous place, and I do not know why people who very clearly comprehend the difference between the inner west, the inner city, the Eastern Suburbs and the North Shore—in other words, the east of Sydney—assume that we are all the same. But will this create a glitzy, ritzy enclave that works and plays in a flash, high-tech new city, and what will that mean for old Western Sydney? I cannot speak for all of Western Sydney; I would not presume to. But I can speak for my part of Western Sydney—that is, the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. We do not want all of the downside and none of the upside, and right now the downside is all I can see.

Given what I have said, it is understandable that I remain unconvinced of the upside of this project, so let's just recap the downside. There will be the noise, day and night, of a 24-hour airport across some of the quietest parts of our nation, the World Heritage Blue Mountains and heading north through the Hawkesbury. There will be the visual disturbance. Right now you can stand at Echo Point and not see a plane, but that may not be what the future holds. Of course, we will not know this until flight paths are determined, and even then it will not cover holding patterns. There is the unknown pollution impact over time for the World Heritage area. There has been no way to even assess what the impact might be. There is potentially the sucking away of Defence industries from RAAF Base Richmond. That would be a real economic blow to my community.

There are no rail links for people in the Blue Mountains or Hawkesbury to get to the airport. According to the government, they are not interested. There are not even the extra benefits that a north-south rail line would bring whether or not we had an airport. That alone would be an economic boon for our communities and allow people to access jobs in a different part of the city, instead of all being funnelled into the CBD. There will be more traffic on the M4, already one of the most congested roads we have. There are no planned upgrades for the M4. The only upgrade planned for Blue Mountains roads is an intersection at Glenbrook. That is something that has been on the cards for a really long time, but this government has linked it to Western Sydney Airport. It is an upgrade that should have happened whether or not we had an airport.

There is nothing to help the Blue Mountains capitalise on this supposedly new boom in tourism. We are struggling to understand why tourists would want to come to the Blue Mountains—perhaps to watch the planes fly overhead—other than for the reasons they come now, which is for peace and quiet, something you do not get in the city but something you can get as you cross the Nepean and head up into the mountains.

So, really, the question on all of this remains. When people ask me why the Blue Mountains in particular is opposed to the plans for this airport, it comes down to the question: who is being put first here? We certainly do not feel that our communities are having any say in this: you do not put our people on your community forum, you do not give us a way of consulting and you make claims that have no evidence and are not able to be backed up, and you tell us to be grateful. Unfortunately, the approach this government is taking is not one that my community believes is the right approach.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: at what point do we put communities first, people first? If this government and this parliament fail to provide the right plan and then the rigor and scrutiny that a project of this impact warrants—before it is built and not while it is being built—then I have no doubt that we will be rightly condemned by future generations who call the west home.

Ann Sudmalis (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The budget is always such a highlight in the political calendar, and also that of the journalists. There is a buzz of anticipation because most of it is stashed behind closed doors so that there is no unintended economic benefit for some small sectors whose whole life and livelihood is based on the turn of a shareholding or industry investment. I wonder if everyday Aussies understand that that is the real reason behind the secretive stealth of budget information release.

Perhaps we should explain that a little more clearly for those who do not live and breathe politics, and that actually is the majority of people. You do not need to know much about hospitals until you or somebody is ill. You do not need to know much about the Defence Force, the veterans or the need for investment, or why we even have a defence force, unless you are connected in some way. Most Aussies do not really care how Centrelink is funded. They just want to know that if they need that support it will be there for them, and people are ripping off the government will try to stop that happening.

Most people do not understand just how the economy works. They just want to know that they have a chance of getting and keeping a job, getting training, earning a living and maybe at some stage buying a house and, eventually, either living off their own retirement earnings or being supported by a government pension. As a result it is really difficult to explain things in the budget when most people say, 'And how does that affect me?' While I understand the need for people to see how a budget affects them, it is truly important for everyone to see how a budget affects everyone else as well. Most of us have been brought up on the concept of looking after our own family and the home we have or want. But we do not live on an island that has no relationship to the island of our neighbours or our fellow Australians. We are networked and co-dependent in so many ways and we often do not see the web of connection let alone realise it is critical impact, both now and in the future.

We have all heard the line and the criticism that the coalition government understands that the best form of welfare is a job, and it actually is. People feel better about themselves if they are working: it is great to talk to others, our self-confidence builds and we become a better part of the infrastructure build of our nation. When we are working and paying tax we are each delivering our small share of railway and road building, medical funds and education funds. Every working Australian is helping every other one in this small but terribly important way. Right now there are more Australians in full-time work than ever before. Since we came to office employment has increased by 600,000. Today, a record 12 million Australians are in employment.

Part of the budget is allocated to making sure that working-age Australians remain on a path towards employment. There is significant additional funding directed to support services that build jobseekers' self-reliance. This, of course, is balanced by making sure those who are not helping their fellow Aussies, and who persistently game the welfare system will face appropriate penalties.

Some of the stand-out initiatives include the national expansion of ParentsNext, which will assist approximately 68,000 parents of young children at risk of long-term welfare dependency each year. The program assists parents to plan and prepare for employment when their children start school. The expansion will also see 20 additional ParentsNext locations established to directly target support for Indigenous parenting payment recipients. To assist older Australians, we have allocated money towards increased support for training and reskilling, work experience opportunities and building further links with employers.

The coalition government's Youth Jobs PaTH Program will help our young Aussies develop key employability skills through training and internships. While this was announced last year, it is only now that our local businesses can really test the water and trial such employment opportunities so we can fine-tune the operations. We have already got a number of job search providers and possible employers gearing up for this initiative.

No boss will ever take on a worker unless there is a genuine belief that things are going to get better in the economy and the state of Australia. We choose to focus on investing in infrastructure and in particular to secure more and better-paying jobs. We choose to fund essential services for Australians. Part of this means that we have to take practical action to stop the deficit and the growth of our debt and to do all we can to keep our AAA credit rating. Simply, this is important because it is about the costs of borrowing money from other nations. If our banks have to pay more for their money, then our dream of buying a house will become more and more distant.

We have strategies to help small businesses, with a reduced company rate of tax, easier GST payments and another year of instant asset write-offs. We are going to be even more tough on multinationals. We are going to begin the process of making the big banks more accountable, especially the bank executives. It is absolutely time, and I am sure everyone agrees, even those who are bank shareholders, because the impact of this policy on banks is important but not enough to damage the shareholders, despite the rhetoric that is being communicated at present.

In the budget we are delivering a commitment to guarantee Medicare and build the world's best health system. Let us imagine the whole issue of health is like a timber table—solid and dependable, leaning on four solid legs. It is a good image for our long-term national health plan, which is the table top. The legs are: guaranteeing Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, supporting hospitals, prioritising mental and preventative health, and investing in medical research. There is 10 billion bucks in a package to invest in Australia's health system.

Medicare funding will increase by $2.4 billion over the next four years, including $1 billion to get rid of the Medicare rebate freeze. Another 60,000 patients at risk of chronic heart failure will benefit from the listing of new drugs. Medicines Australia will work with the government, and $1.8 billion of new drugs will come in over the next five years.

There is $10.8 million to fight childhood cancer and this includes $1.4 million for paediatric brain cancer clinical trials, $4.4 million for Cancer Australia and $68 million for a proton beam therapy facility. Having met some of the most beautiful families over the last four years, this funding for childhood brain cancer is most welcome. I have seen some of the rarest cancers that did not even have a name. I have seen the strength of those families as they have battled to enjoy every precious moment, knowing that time was running out.

We are continuing to significantly increase current medical research, with $1.4 billion under the Medical Research Future Fund. Every day we see the impact of neurological diseases like Parkinson's, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and other diseases like stroke. Every dollar of well-directed research is a dollar well spent for Australians and our nation. It is our Aussie network working again.

I particularly commend the $5.5 billion extension of the funding arrangement for the Commonwealth Home Support Program over two years from 1 July 2018, which covers services such as Meals on Wheels. Again I thank all those advocates throughout Gilmore who helped me work with Minister Fifield and Minister Wyatt to get this to happen.

Having been able to listen to the planning for the NDIS well before the 2013 election, I knew the scheme originally did not include those affected with mental health issues or those diagnosed with a disability due to mental health, so it came as no surprise at all to learn that Labor left the scheme only half funded. Dare I be a tad political here, it seems to be a pattern of funding commitments from Labor—say whatever and never mind how the program is funded; 'Someone else can take care of that or we will get it from somewhere else.'

We will be delivering a disability package to give certainty to people living with a disability, their families and carers that they will receive high-quality services and are protected. A 0.5 per cent increase in the Medicare levy from 1 July 2019 will, once and for all, ensure that Labor's NDIS funding gap is filled. This is critical. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for people caring for those with a disability to be so concerned about support. We are a nation that cares, and we now have an opportunity to show exactly that. I just hope the opposition sees sense and stops the rubbish and nonsense.

We will finally have a comprehensive reform of working-age welfare payments, which will deliver a single, new, job seeker payment, replacing seven existing payments, including Newstart, which will encourage more people to transition to work. There will be a new, independent national body, the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, to oversee the delivery of quality and of safe services for all participants. Thank goodness! So many who are already dealing with the NDIS are concerned, and there is even more wariness where the NDIS is yet to be rolled out.

I turn now to issues that seem to be causing some confusion. For the past 12 months, some people, dressed in green—no, not leprechauns; me—have been pushing hard for an increase in funding for education, for more than the amount initially put forward in 2014. For two years we have been developing avenues to fund increases to education without blowing the budget. Now we have done exactly that, and Labor keeps harking back to the imaginary figures from before the 2013 budget. Yet where were they? They were completely unfunded. I guess that is where the leprechaun comes in. They were going to fund it with the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We are focused on great education. We are going to ensure that all children have 15 hours of preschool education before they get to school, there is not a single member of the House who does not acknowledge how important that is. We are promising and are committed to long-term funding certainty for every Australian school, and that means for every Australian student, with an increase of $18.6 billion over the next decade that will be distributed according to a real needs based model, not a mishmash of different deals. It is now time to focus on how those educational outcomes will be changed, not just on dumping money into the school and hoping for the best. David Gonski himself will be leading that review. I for one look forward to his very educative response.

A growing workforce is critical for our future Australia. In the dying days of the 2013 Labor government, all the employer incentives for taking on an apprentice were removed. We have seen a slippery slope of apprenticeship reduction since then, so I am very keen to see the introduction of the Skilling Australians Fund, with over $1.5 billion in the next four years to create an extra 300,000 apprenticeships. In fact, I cannot wait. With just the small challenge that we put forward at the beginning of this year, between January and March, we gained a 25 per cent increase in the sign up of apprentices and trainees. The Skilling Australians Fund will deliver opportunities for young people and ensure our economic growth. I hope to see very real outcomes in dealing with this type of government support.

In Gilmore, we have a Navy base, HMAS Albatross, and just next door there is HMAS Creswell. In addition, we have a large contingent of veterans and their families. I am always conscious of them, of the service they have given and of the special care, sometimes, that each and every one of them deserves and we owe them. That is why I am especially proud to note that the budget is continuing to expand the services that current and former ADF members can access to ensure they receive the help and support they need. This simply means we are taking on significant and overdue reform of the processes used by DVA, to make sure that support for veterans is our highest priority.

We will be commemorating significant events of the centenary of Anzac, which will conclude in 2018. All our veterans, historians and locals will be involved in the process. I am really pleased to see that there will be a significant increase to extend treatment under the non-liability healthcare arrangements to all mental health conditions for our service men and women. I wish that was not unnecessary, I really do, but we need to recognise that these days that $9.8 million to pilot a new approach to prevent suicide is critical. Battles, these days, are far more impactful than ever before, and we are seeing how war and combat are changing our service men and women in ways that the rest of us can only imagine. When you talk to service men and women in their battle uniform, when they are training you to do the ops of putting tourniquets on thighs in case of unexploded device and you learn how to do it tightly and they say, 'Yep, you could save a life by doing that,' when you talk to these amazing men and women and look at all the work they do, when you are in Afghanistan, you see the risk and the fear on their face when they get into a helicopter knowing that a sniper on land could bring that helicopter down. They are always alert and always aware. Living in that space all the time, with that risk to them, puts an inordinate amount of stress on these men and women. It is something that is far from being recognised. In the past, there would be a battle. Some people would lose their lives and some people would be injured. Then there would be a rest time. There is no rest time for our service men and women now. They are always alert. This takes a toll on their mental health.

I am so pleased that we are going to be looking into that and taking care of our veterans. It is unbelievably significant and terribly important. For my Vietnam War veterans who have yet to come to terms with the experience that they unfortunately lived through and remain living through, I extend to them my deepest regards and hope that they take up these initiatives and get this funding spent on them because they are just an amazing group of people.

This budget addresses all of the most important issues that relate to people living in Gilmore—health, education, defence, costs of living and social wellbeing, especially including mental health. They are all funded. These are not imaginary dollars. Every single program has a dollar amount that goes with it, so we know with certainty they will happen.

Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to make a contribution on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018 and related bills and draw to the attention of the House the coalition's appalling economic management and their complete neglect of the region and electorate that I represent. The Labor Party have publicly committed to supporting supply to ensure the continuation of vital government services. Whenever I speak on the appropriation bills, I always draw to the attention of the House that it is a historical fact that the coalition are Australia's constitutional vandals. The party that seek to portray themselves as the great protectors of the Westminster convention's provisions are in fact the ones who are prepared to savage the whole concept of responsible government. The party with the majority in the lower house, which the Whitlam government had, is entitled to govern. For blatant political purposes, the coalition parties block supply. I will always remind my colleagues who sit on the benches opposite of this important historical fact. When they talk about our Westminster inheritance and the constitutional monarchy, they need to be called out on the history of the political party that they represent.

I now want to update the House on the coalition's appalling economic record since coming to office in 2013. There is a very misguided narrative in some parts of the media that the coalition are superior economic managers. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the economic indicators for the Turnbull and Abbott governments speak for themselves. Economic growth is down, wages growth is down and, in fact, wages are going backwards and unemployment is up. The gross debt equates to $20,000 for every Australian man, woman and child. One of the most startling facts is the budget deficit. The coalition won office in 2013 saying there was a debt and deficit crisis and only they could fix it. The member for Warringah and the now Ambassador to the United States said to the people, 'Elect the coalition and everything will be fine.' In fact, they promised a budget surplus in their first year and every year thereafter. Well, the deficit today is 10 times bigger than they projected it would be when they delivered their first budget. It totally dispels the notion that the coalition are better economic managers. These appropriation bills provide $21 billion in tax increases. Every Australian is paying for the coalition's fiscal failures.

We all know the coalition have recently discovered that the fair go is fundamentally important to Australians. They found this out from commissioning a focus group to tell them. The Australian Labor Party and the wider Labor movement do not need a focus group to tell us this. It is our abiding aim to ensure economic and social justice for all Australians.

The most striking point about the budget is that the Prime Minister and Treasurer declared it as 'fair', and yet it is not. That is a blatant untruth. It is a budget that increases the Medicare levy for nearly all taxpayers and gives a tax cut to millionaires. It is a budget that increases the pension age to 70. It is a budget that cuts $366 a year from new pensioners, and it is a budget that cuts $22 billion from schools and makes it more expensive to get a tertiary education. One any measure, this is not a fair budget.

The government should not just take my word on the complete lack of fairness in this budget. I recently held a series of budget forums around my electorate, and I want to take this opportunity to thank all those who attended. In the question-and-answer sessions, there was a clear consensus that this budget fails the fairness test. I was asked questions relating to a variety of different policies, ranging from investment in schools and universities, support for renewable energy and action on climate change, and support for jobs and vocational education. Those opposite should know that none of my constituents who attended the forums indicated that they supported the government's budget.

Parents and grandparents want their children and grandchildren to get the best start in life, with a world-class education. They believe in needs based funding for schools and were outraged that the Liberals are cutting $22 billion from schools. In Shortland, public schools will lose over $17 million in the next two years alone. People understand that this will have an impact on our schools and communities. My constituents also noted that tertiary education is so important for so many in our rapidly changing economy and that the substantial increases in fees will deter many from study. This is incredibly significant in my home region. The University of Newcastle is a world-class educational institution. We have the best engineering faculties in the entire nation. We train more Indigenous doctors than the rest of the university system put together. Approximately 50 per cent of our students are mature age. Studies both here and internationally have shown that an increase in fees deters mature-age and part-time students more than most. So my region, with its higher level of mature-age students, will be deterred greater than most by this attack on our university system, which will be worsened by the $3.8 billion in cuts to universities.

The Hunter region has a proud history of mining and manufacturing. The people I represent know the fundamental importance of government support for vocational education and are very aware that the Liberals at both federal and state levels have completely gutted this sector since coming to government. My constituents want young people to have the opportunity to learn a trade at TAFE. They know that conservatives do not care about vocational education and training. This year alone they are cutting a further $600 million from TAFE. This builds on the $1½ billion they have ripped away from this sector since coming to power in 2013.

On this point of support for manufacturing, I want to join with my state Labor colleagues in condemning the New South Wales state government for awarding the contract for the next intercity train fleet to a Korean company, when these trains could have been built in the Hunter. If the Liberals were really serious about jobs and growth, they would not be awarding these contracts to overseas manufacturing plants. You only have to look at what is happening in Victoria, where the Andrews Labor government is reinvigorating its train-manufacturing sector by awarding contracts to local firms.

At the budget forums, I was also asked about government support for renewable energy. Again, parents and grandparents know that decisive action on climate change is vital for the future of their children and grandchildren not just in making sure that the environment is as of good quality in the future as it is now. It is also about making sure that there are jobs for our kids and grandkids. Unfortunately, I had to advise attendees that the government completely ignored renewable energy and action on climate change in the budget. There was not one mention of climate change in the Treasurer's speech, shamefully, and, in fact, there was no additional funding for the centrepiece of the government's laughable climate change policy, the Emissions Reduction Fund, which is due to run out of funding very shortly. We know the reason for this is that the Prime Minister is beholden to the flat-earthers in the radical right wing of the coalition, whose support is necessary for his tenuous grip on the leadership. Again, I want to thank all of those who attended the budget forums. I really enjoyed receiving feedback from my constituents about their concerns and priorities in the week after the budget. I intend to make sure these forums are an annual event.

I will go now to the broader issues around commitment to the Hunter. Labor's commitment to the Hunter is deep, historical and demonstrated, whereas the coalition's complete disregard for the region is also on display. During the last two terms of the last Labor government, there was massive Commonwealth investment in the Hunter region. Labor funded the $1.2 billion Hunter Expressway, a fantastic piece of infrastructure so important to the region's productivity and growth. Labor invested hundreds of millions of dollars in school infrastructure at the time of the global financial crisis. The Liberals always attack this investment, but the reality is that this investment not only provided schools in Shortland and the Hunter region with fantastic new facilities but also kept tens of thousands of people in my region in jobs at the time of the global recession. The response of the Labor government during the GFC is held out globally as world's best practice. It kept 800,000 people from losing their jobs and it massively added to the infrastructure of my region. Many schools in my area had not received new infrastructure since the 1950s. They received great pieces of infrastructure at the time of the GFC.

The last Labor government also provided $40 million for the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources, a great institution doing world's best research into energy and resources. We also provided $30 million to build a new economics and law campus for the University of Newcastle in town, which is almost due to open. Labor also provided $50 million to the Hunter Medical Research Institute for their fantastic new headquarters. The HMRI are world leaders in medical research, and I am proud that we supported the important work they do. We also provided $13 million to Lake Macquarie City Council to begin the first stage of construction for the Lake Macquarie Transport Interchange.

These investments are clear examples of Labor's commitment to and belief in the Hunter Region, and they also stand in stark contrast to the coalition's approach. The Liberals have completely neglected my electorate in the Hunter since coming to office. Not only have they refused to further support the construction of the next stage of the Lake Macquarie Transport Interchange; they in fact cut funding to the first stage. They cut funding by $1 million and have also made it harder for local governments to fund necessary infrastructure by freezing the indexation of the financial assistance grants, a $13 million cut to my local councils.

The Liberals' approach the Hunter Region is summed up well by the former and much unlamented Liberal member for Paterson. At a previous election, in discussing why the Newcastle Knights were overlooked for funding for an upgrade to their stadium, he blatantly stated in the media that if more people voted for the Liberals then the Hunter Region would benefit more. He was effectively holding the region to ransom: 'Either vote Liberals or do not receive any funding.' This is the complete opposite to the principles of good governance, where you fund based on need and policy justification, not on blatant pork-barrelling. Unfortunately, this approach remains the case today for the Liberal Party in both federal and state politics.

A great test for that will be the upcoming New South Wales state budget, where I fear again that the Liberal government will ignore the vital need to invest in the Lake Macquarie Transport Interchange. This project is the most important project for the entire region. All 11 Hunter councils have agreed this is the most important project, and getting 11 councils to agree on anything is a formidable achievement, especially when the project is located solely in one council area. This project will unlock massive growth in my region. For a comparatively low level of government investment, it will generate, for every dollar of government investment, $94 of private sector investment. It will lead to the creation of 10,000 private sector jobs and it really will open up the region. The fact that Liberal governments, both state and federal, continue to ignore its need is a crime, and I do not say that lightly. It is a crime. It is neglecting my region. They continue to waste money on pork-barrelling, including $1 million for a billy cart track further up the coast, but they will not fund the Glendale transport interchange, which would have such a massive benefit for my region.

I want to return to schools, very briefly. The power of the needs based funding reforms are already having a massive impact on my region. I think of schools like Lake Munmorah Public School, which talks about the early additional funding providing quality training for teachers so that they can provide great education for students. I think of Warners Bay High School, where they are using the additional money to put on extra tutors to lift the literacy and numeracy skills of the 25 per cent of students who are performing the worst so that they do not fall behind. Once you fall behind in years 7 and 8, it is enormously hard to catch up by year 12. St Pius X Primary School in Windale is the poorest school in the entire state. The poorest school in the entire state exists in my electorate. It is a Catholic school, and it is benefiting enormously from the early years of needs based funding. For a school of only 50 students it was able to put on two additional teachers to give those kids the best start in life. That is at stake with this government's $22 billion of cuts to education funds. This is at stake because of the coalition's lies before the 2013 election and their continuing mistruths about how they support needs based funding. But all we have seen is them cut $30 billion in 2014. Now they say it is only going to be a $22 billion cut, but it demonstrates a complete lack of commitment to education not just in my region but in the entire country.

So it is very important that we are debating these appropriation bills. We have so many priorities for this nation. Unfortunately, this budget fails all of them. If we look at infrastructure, it is a budget of smoke and mirrors. It is a budget that cuts $7½ billion from infrastructure funding against a 10-year average—not just against Labor's funding—for infrastructure financing this budget cuts $7½ billion. This budget committed to not a single new project. The much vaunted $10 billion rail fund has zero details behind it. It has zero information about how state governments can access it. If this was an infrastructure budget I would hate to see one that was not focused on that, because it is a horrible budget for infrastructure.

Even today, we have seen startling revelations that in spite of the so-called unfreeze of the Medicare rebate indexation most of the services will still remain frozen. That will place even more pressure on our health system. This budget fails the economic test and it fails the fairness test. Yet again we have seen a budget deficit blow out by 10 times compared to what the projections were in 2014. This government are woeful economic managers despite all their myth telling. This budget yet again cements the place of this government as the most incompetent government and as the most incompetent economic managers since the Billy McMahon era.

Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Listening to the member for Shortland, you could have inserted that budget reply speech into any coalition budget over the last 20 years. The reality of delivering budgets is that Labor has never understood how to deliver a budget, what a budget surplus might be, how to get to a budget surplus and how to deal with the debt and deficit challenges that we have.

We have done something very important in this budget, and that is continue to restrain expenditure growth. For members opposite, who do not understand what I am talking about, that means we are going to be spending less, not just this year but every year over the forward estimates. Why is that important? Why is it important that we spend less as a government and we continue to restrain expenditure growth? It is important because we have to retain our AAA credit rating. It is important because we have to ensure that our economy is strong, and restraining expenditure growth is critical to that.

Even this morning, CommSec has recognised that the government's efforts to restrain expenditure growth are right on track. Our AAA credit rating has been retained. In a global economic environment, with the challenges that the world economy faces, nothing could be more important than reigning in expenditure growth in government. At every turn and at every step, as you have just heard, we are opposed by the Labor Party in restraining expenditure growth. In fact, every day they have a new plan to spend not just $1 billion, not just $2 billion, not just $10 billion; we just heard they are going to spend $22 billion more, just on one policy area.

We just heard that, even though it was a Labor government that froze the indexation of Medicare, a Labor government that initiated it under Julia Gillard, they would immediately remove it—a multibillion dollar policy with implications immediately. Rather than the government's sensible, phased approach to ensure that we continue to constrain expenditure growth.

Every single second of every single day the Labor party says, 'We've got a plan to spend more money.' I think people out there are onto this. They understand that you cannot just simply continue to spend more, spend more and spend more, because our budget is already in deficit. Our debt is already ballooning. We need to constrain expenditure growth. This government is doing that, and Labor does not understand it. This will have real implications if Labor is elected back to office, because they continue to advocate for very expensive policies that they simply cannot fund, even in critical areas like health, education—even the NDIS, a flagship Labor policy. The NDIS is a flagship Labor policy for which, in government, it committed to an increase in the Medicare levy, which we have in this budget. It is a reasonable, proportionate response to fund a critical area of government service delivery. This government is proposing a modest increase in the Medicare levy, which will guarantee, secure and underpin the funding of the NDIS, giving certainty to this very important program.

What do we have from the Shorten Labor opposition? We have a commitment to oppose a fair and reasonable increase, even for disability funding. We know that many members of the Labor Party oppose it. Of course Labor members go quiet at this point, because many members in the Labor Party understand that this increase is right. The government is proposing it for the right reasons. It is fair across the board. It is a Labor proposal to fund the NDIS through an increase in the Medicare levy. Ultimately, we know that at that shadow cabinet meeting the vast majority of the shadow cabinet advocated for Labor to support what was a sensible measure to fund the NDIS.

More is going to be said about this in coming days and weeks because the NDIS is a critical government policy that has to be funded. If you do not fund it properly, you cannot deliver it. If you cannot deliver it, you will be letting down the hopes and the aspirations of so many people in Australia with a disability, their families and their carers. It is Labor's job to come forward and say how they would fund it if they are not prepared to do it through raising the Medicare levy, which has support from almost everybody in the sector—every economist and everyone who has analysed the budget. That is because they know that a small, modest increase across the board in the Medicare levy protects the most vulnerable in our society because they will not pay it. We have increased the threshold in response to this. It makes people pay only a proportion of their income in a fair way up the income scale so that the people who can afford it the most bear the greatest burden, recognising that it could be any one of us at any time who needs to rely on the NDIS. It could be any one of our family members at any time who needs to rely on the NDIS.

Once again, it is this government delivering. It is the government ensuring that we have funded the promises that we put forward and that they will be paid for in full without increasing the budget deficit and the debt that Australia faces. Nothing could be more important in this economic environment. For Labor to abandon economic and fiscal responsibility at this time is even more dangerous than when they did it last time when they inherited a budget surplus and a set of books that were in almost perfect working order and took it from that point to where we are today.

I also want to speak about the government's commitment to Western Sydney and all of the different infrastructure and other measures that the government is bringing forward. Nothing is more important, of course, to the future of Western Sydney than the government's absolute and rock-solid commitment to now fund and build the Western Sydney Airport. The Western Sydney Airport will be a key driver of economic growth, hope and aspirations for the future of Western Sydney. It will mean better transport and infrastructure in Western Sydney. It will mean more jobs. It will mean economic growth. It will mean opportunities in the region for young people out of work. It is a solid commitment of the Turnbull government to Western Sydney. I welcome the announcement from Minister Fletcher that we as a government will establish a new government owned company that will ensure the airport is operational by 2026. Nothing could be more important than this commitment to Western Sydney. This is a real plan.

We hear members opposite say, 'There is no commitment to infrastructure in this budget,' but, for the region of Western Sydney—one of the most important economic regions to our GDP in Australia, one of the most important major cities of Australia now and home to millions of people—we have funded $5.3 billion of equity into this company to build the Western Sydney Airport and have it open and operating by 2026. It is, of course, the case that we have the Labor Party's support for the establishment of the Western Sydney Airport. Shadow minister Mr Albanese, a former transport minister, has been clear that Labor's position is to support the building of the Western Sydney Airport. But we also know that there are some individual Labor members in Western Sydney who continue to oppose the construction of the Western Sydney Airport in defiance of Labor Party policy, common sense and the wishes of their electorates.

The member for Lindsay is here, and I note that she is one of the notable ones who opposes the Western Sydney Airport—as do the member for Macquarie and the member for Chifley. Why would you oppose this government building the Western Sydney Airport in a critical region like Western Sydney when it would be a real economic driver of jobs and growth? It is not government that is going to provide the jobs. It is not government that is going to build that infrastructure. It is going to be a key economic driver that provides for the infrastructure for many years to come. The economic zones that we will see in Western Sydney around this airport—the growth that will come with it, the housing, the commercial zones, the zones of excellence and the Defence industry zones that the Minister for Defence announced recently—are a real commitment to the future of Western Sydney. For the member for Lindsay, the member for Macquarie and the member for Chifley to oppose this airport in defiance of their own party policy is a poor approach from them. I would encourage them to get on board with their colleagues and shadow minister Mr Albanese, the member for Grayndler, and all of the other Labor Party members, who do support the establishment of the Western Sydney Airport.

There is a reason Labor is backing the government in building this airport. Those local members need to get with the program, because I do not believe that in their electorates you will find much opposition to this airport. People know. They are realistic, and they want the airport. This would not only be good for transport but also be good for the links—the new roads that will be upgraded. It will be good for jobs, it will be good for young people and it will be good for business. International passengers will be flying into Western Sydney and engaging in tourism in the Blue Mountains. You could go to any one of those Blue Mountains hotels or businesses affected by tourism in the Macquarie region, and all of them would tell you that they would absolutely welcome the Western Sydney Airport. They would welcome international visitors being able to fly almost directly into the gateway of Sydney—there in the Blue Mountains, with the beautiful national parks that we have—and the global opportunity that it represents in terms of tourism and expansion. Of course, there are other important commitments in this budget to infrastructure. We have seen many in Sydney, and that includes the Australian government's equity investment in the Moorebank Intermodal Company for the development of the Moorebank Logistics Park. They are key drivers of economic growth and activity in Sydney to make sure that we have this, and this is welcomed in my electorate as well.

I turn to many of the measures that we have seen the government fund in immigration and border protection, working with Minister Dutton in the portfolio. I was pleased to see that the government's technology rollout continues in the Immigration and Border Protection portfolio. We are modernising our visa systems to facilitate economic growth and strengthen the intelligence measures that we have at the border to counter security threats. It is a good time on the economic side of the immigration portfolio because we have more tourists than ever before in Australia. We have more international students than ever before in Australia. We have more cargo movements than ever before in Australian history. The government, through its free trade agreements, its approach to international education and its approach to the tourism industry has driven real economic growth and growth in movements across the board. With this comes great challenge in the 21st century. We will see, through this budget, important measures in biometrics, important measures at SmartGate facilities and increased use of automation and technology to deal with the rising numbers of people coming for business and other reasons.

Ms Husar interjecting—

The member for Lindsay is trying to interject something. I note that each week Border Force processes more than 600,000 people arriving or departing from Australia—a number expected to increase by 25 per cent in the next few years. It is vital, the investment that the federal government is making in SmartGate technology. It is vital, the investment in biometrics. In the security environment that we do face in today's world, these investments go a long way to protecting Australia and ensuring that the government and the department have the capability to meet the significant new security threat environment that we face with so much movement of people and goods across our borders.

We have also seen changes to the foreign workers program, the discredited 457 visa program, which was really exploited under Minister Bill Shorten in the Labor Party in the last Labor government. Those 457 changes include the scrapping of the scheme and the introduction of a genuine temporary skill shortage visa system on a two-year or four-year basis, with the flexibility for the government to increase or remove occupations as necessary. Those changes mean that this government is really addressing the concerns of the electorate in relation to skills shortages, ensuring that those businesses that have genuine skills shortages—that have searched for Australians and were unable to find them in a genuine way—are able to take advantage of either a two-year or four-year temporary visa for their workforce. There are occupations which have been on the list for too long, that have not been reviewed properly over many years and that have been the subject of many agreements under the Labor Party—I think the fast food agreement, for example, is one. 457s were brought into the fast food industry, and this has been scrapped under this government. There are many examples along this line.

This government is actually implementing right and responsible changes to make sure that the new temporary skilled shortage visa is a temporary visa, that it is for a genuine temporary skills shortage and that it is for a shorter period. We are able then to ensure that Australians are offered those jobs first. If you look at the maritime industry, we have taken ships officer, ships engineer and occupations like that off the list, recognising that there is a downturn in our mining sector. We recognise that there are many Australians now unemployed here who have the qualifications to operate these ships in our waters. Whatever sector you go to, these changes will mean a better outcome for Australian jobseekers who have the skills to do these jobs. It will mean that those companies from overseas who want to do business here will have to look for Australians first and more genuinely. It is, of course, in line with the government's policies to make sure that Australian based companies and people who do business here genuinely offer Australians, whether they be graduates or more-experienced people, those jobs first. That two-year work experience qualification is perhaps the most important element of this program, under which you will not be able to offer to graduates from overseas jobs that you should have offered to graduates in Australia or to people here with similar experience. It will not be the case anymore that graduates from overseas who are straight out of university will be offered jobs before Australian graduates.

Overall, this budget is making the right choices for our future. It is restraining expenditure, which is perhaps the most important challenge of any budget of this era that we live in, with the global economic downturn and the debt-and-deficit challenge that faces this country. We are restraining expenditure. We are increasing expenditure and funding measures in critical areas that people expect us to, such as education, health and the NDIS. At the same time, we are responsibly managing the economy to make sure that there are more jobs, that there is the growth we need to drive our future and that infrastructure critical to the future of our nation, like the Western Sydney Airport, goes ahead, funded by equity from the government in a responsible way that will mean that we do not go into further debt and further deficit.

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

We have heard a lot lately from this government about fairness. This government is a lot of things, but the history of its budget measures over the past four years shows that fair is not one of them. In 2014 we saw the true nature of this government, with its harsh cuts to education, cuts to health, cuts to the ABC and the SBS, and changes to the pension. In the 2014 budget we also saw cuts to community legal centres, which the government has now, finally, backflipped on after extensive campaigning from the legal assistance sector. Make no mistake, this government has not changed. It did not understand fairness then and it does not understand it now. How could it, when it fundamentally believes that tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the less well off is good policy making or that multinationals should not be forced to pay their fair share?

Australians know that only the Labor Party can be trusted to stand for equality and fairness, because that is we have always done. We have fought against every unfair budget that this government has brought before the parliament and we will keep fighting that the most unfair measures in this budget do not pass through the parliament.

This budget breaks away from much that the coalition is supposed to believe in—lower taxes, reducing debt and deficit, and minimising the role of government—yet it is not a budget of social investment. It is neither a Labor nor a Liberal budget. That just leaves open the question: What does this budget mean? What does this budget tell us about the government's plans for the future of this country? All this budget tells us is that the Prime Minister wants to keep his job. He knows that his government is failing to live up to the expectations of the Australian people. He knows that inequality is rising—wages growth is at record lows and people in lower socio-economic groups are struggling. And he knows that the budget deficit has actually widened under this government. It is clear that the government's trickle-down approach is not working.

So now he is trying on Labor values for size. Well, Prime Minister, you are not in the Labor party—as much as you might wish you were—you never will be. This is a Prime Minister who does not understand the meaning of fairness, a Prime Minister who does not understand that equality benefits all of us and that it cannot be achieved by giving handouts to big business. This budget comes nowhere close to being a Labor budget. It does not uphold Labor values or promote equality of opportunity, and it definitely does not do anything for the safety net to make sure that Australians are kept from falling through the cracks.

Only Labor believes in fairness and delivers it. Only Labor is committed to the environment and combating climate change. The Prime Minister will do anything to keep his job, even if it means throwing the next generation under the bus. The government's failure to take any real action on climate change means that they are just leaving the next generation to deal with it. The Prime Minister once said that he did not want to lead a Liberal Party that did not feel as strongly about climate change as he did. But was there even one mention of climate change in this year's budget speech? No. This budget delivers zero new policies or funding to drive down carbon pollution and respond to climate change.

A Labor budget would not cut $22 billion from schools and $4 billion from universities. Labor understands that Australia's future lies in the skills, education and training of our people. Our education is our biggest asset, and we must invest in it if we are going to meet the challenges of the Asian century and bring something to the table in our relationships with China and India. It is clear that this government has their priorities all wrong when you consider that they are giving away $65 billion to big business while cutting $22 billion from Australia's schools. Young people are hurt by this budget and so is our future. Labor believes that every child in every school deserves to have an excellent education.

A Labor budget would protect Medicare. Over the past four years the government has cut Medicare, taxed Medicare and they have tried to privatise Medicare. And now they are backtracking to save themselves, because they know that Australians do not trust them to protect Medicare. And, of course, recently we have come to understand that the lifting of the freeze on large numbers of services for which Medicare pays is not to occur until as late as 2020. So much for the lifting of the freeze.

A Labor budget would provide more funding for public housing, especially for women and children fleeing family violence. This government does not understand that responding to family violence also requires addressing the shortage of affordable and available housing. Domestic and family violence is the number one reason why people access homelessness services. And, of course, victims of family violence need legal assistance. The government's cuts to community legal centres and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services would have caused countless examples of suffering to victims of family violence. Community legal centres are already turning away thousands of people each year, and these cuts would have seen many of these centres actually close their doors. Labor protested these cuts for years because we understand the vital work that community legal services do. Community legal centres provide assistance to vulnerable people to ensure that they do not become stuck in a cycle of disadvantage. These services deserve stability and predictable funding. They certainly do not deserve the uncertainty that they have been faced with because of this government announcing cuts, which it did in 2014, then pausing those cuts with the effect that right up until a few weeks ago—for some three years—the community legal services sector has been forced to endure uncertainty about its funding, and we know the kind of damage that that kind of funding uncertainty does to centres like this. It has meant the loss of experienced staff and, in some cases, the physical closure of centres, because they were unable to keep up their leases. In some cases it has meant the closing of long-established programs, because there was no certainty that those programs were going to be able to continue to be funded.

The government has taken some steps in this budget to address family violence. It has taken the government three years to finally agree, but they are now implementing the Productivity Commission's 2014 recommendation to stop alleged domestic violence perpetrators from personally cross-examining their victims in the family courts. While Labor does welcome this overdue change, we are yet to see how this change will be implemented. Let us be clear: you cannot implement this measure without additional funding for legal aid lawyers, who would need to be ordered by the courts to assist unrepresented litigants. Labor has committed $43.2 million for additional legal aid funding to ensure that parties refused the right to personally cross-examine are not denied natural justice.

Labor will not support the government setting aside $170 million for a divisive plebiscite, which is another measure that we see has come back in this budget. Despite explicitly banking more than $100 million in savings for not proceeding with the marriage equality plebiscite in last year's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, here it is again, a zombie measure back from the dead. The plebiscite was always a terrible idea, and it met with strong opposition from a majority of Australians. This government needs to let parliament do its job and get on with making marriage equality a reality in Australia. That is what Labor would do because we understand what Australian people want, and that is a fair go for all Australians, including the LGBTI community. If we can take one thing from this budget, it is that both Labor and the coalition at least acknowledge that Australians want a budget that is fair. It is just that only Labor actually understand what fairness means.

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Seventy-five years ago, the great Sir Robert Menzies delivered his now famous speech 'The Forgotten People'. Sadly, those people are mostly still forgotten. In that speech he defined a forgotten people not by who they were but by who they were not. Three-quarters of a century later, we might define those people in a similar way. The rich and powerful are not so much forgotten as left to their own devices. They have the means by which to look after themselves, and they are only mentioned in this place when Labor wants to create a division by means of class war.

At the other end of the scale, there would not be a parliamentary sitting day go by without multiple references to the poor, the needy and the most vulnerable people in our community. While a focus on those people and a government that provides support for those who need it most is welcome, these are not the only people in this country. There are those in the vast middle ground that pay for that support. While much of the focus is on those at the bottom of the income scale, the media cycle is dominated by people who are at the upper end of the scale, the elite—the media elite, the cultural elite and, perhaps the least qualified of all the elite, the academic elite. In terms of annual income, some of the agenda setters fall around the upper-middle of the scale, but they are not Middle Australia. They are the noisy, attention-seeking fringe. This fringe often panders to the elite and aspires to be the elite. They co-opt the poor and the needy and hang them out with pride, dangling them over their lofty balconies to demonstrate how tolerant and inclusive they are. They tell the vast Middle Australia that it must give up more of its income to pursue elitist-driven political ideology. Meanwhile, Middle Australia is forgotten, neglected, censored and abused. The forgotten people are labelled racist, bigoted, homophobic or Islamophobic if they do not fall into line with what the elites and the elitist wannabes think is right.

What happened to Australian tennis great Margaret Court over the weekend is a perfect example of such intolerance. Margaret Court made the mistake of publicly saying she believed marriage was between a man and a woman, and that happens to be a point of view shared by millions of Australians. But, instead of whispering her opinion amongst her friends or her church friends or, better still, keeping it to herself, she had the audacity to say this in public! The result was that the media elites jumped all over her, and then social media reacted. The media then fed the reaction back into the news cycle, with a fresh round of headlines to perpetuate the abuse. There were headlines of news reports such as 'Social media went into meltdown' and 'Twitter storm has erupted'. The abuse is a warning to anyone who dares to have an opinion that does not fit the elitist narrative or who objects to having the LGBTIQ agenda shoved down their throats. What would be real news these days would be a headline that said, 'Ordinary Australian was allowed to have an opinion.'

It is not just the LGBTQ lobby, gender theory and identity politics on the fringe; it is the green activists who want to stop all industry. It is the violent fascism of 'antifa'. It is the anti-democracy and anti-capitalist organisations like the 'Occupy Everything' movement and the Socialist Alliance that rents the same jobless criminals to rally in the streets and bash anyone who commits what they think is a thought crime. It is the animal rights activists that shut down the live cattle trade and rejoiced at the death of a hunter, that place more value on the life of a shark or a crocodile than on the life of a human being but get the exterminators in to do their home for pests every year. This fringe is very loud and it works with a very compliant media elite, but it is very far from a majority and certainly does not represent middle Australia.

The concerns of middle Australia—the forgotten people—go mostly unnoticed. They have legitimate concerns about jobs and the cost of living. They are sick of seeing foreign workers with 457 visas take local jobs. They worry about the rise of foreign ownership in land, business and agriculture. They hear news of another $300 million being spent on foreign aid while victims of Cyclone Debbie here at home are denied recovery funds because of a bungle by the Queensland Labor government. They wonder why their taxes are so high when large corporations seem to pay nothing. They watch the banks make millions of dollars and then take a farm off a family who never missed a payment. They have pride in the flag and in being Australian, but they are told they are racist for celebrating Australia Day. They love the Australian way of life, but they are told Australian culture must be rejected to avoid offending fake refugees. They are concerned for their safety, but they are told that such concerns are racist or Islamophobic. In North Queensland, they pay outrageous insurance premiums on houses that have never been flooded and have survived cyclones unscathed. In North Queensland, people want jobs. But the fringe dwellers at groups like GetUp! and the Greens are spending millions of dollars to prevent job-creating ventures, such as the Carmichael coal project.

These are the forgotten people that Sir Robert Menzies set out to represent, and in the 2017-18 budget this government, I have to say, has addressed a good many of the concerns of those forgotten people. The banks will be forced to pay a fairer share. If they want to rebel by squeezing more profits out of customers, those customers will have an incentive to switch to one of the smaller banks, who do not pay the levy and who do not treat their customers like limitless cash cows. I am generally not in favour of higher taxes, but the big banks were major beneficiaries of a government policy during the GFC. I am generally not in favour of expensive interference in commercial enterprise either, but the arrogant behaviour of the banks indicates there is not enough competition and/or not enough regulation. The banks seem to believe they are a law unto themselves and that they can get away with unconscionable behaviour. I had hoped that measures introduced by this government would help to rein in the banks, but my faith in their better nature is still wanting. I do think a royal commission may be required to bring some balance, some competition, and some decency back into the banking system.

Another budget measure applauded by middle Australia is the cut to foreign aid, which would have been a better announcement in the wake of Cyclone Debbie. The savings will be spent on the safety of Australians, with an additional $300 million to strengthen security and boost the ability of the Australian Federal Police to combat terrorism and organised crime. While there is still a general reluctance across the political and media elite to acknowledge the dangers posed by the ideology of radical Islam, we are starting to hear some common sense. We cannot allow fear of being called a racist, a bigot or an Islamophobe to cloud our judgement on issues of national security and immigration. The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection announced earlier this month that fake refugees would have welfare revoked and would have to leave this country, and I congratulate him on having the guts to call out fake refugees for what they are. It is a shame there was not greater support for this move on all sides of this parliament. This is precisely what middle Australia wants and what all of Australia should be demanding.

A measure announced prior to the budget was the scrapping of 457 visas completely. This was excellent news for North Queensland and, no doubt, many other regional areas. Unemployment levels in North Queensland are high, running at above five per cent in Mackay and more than 11 per cent in Townsville. It is very disheartening for locals who are desperate for a job to see foreign workers with 457 visas coming into regions of high unemployment and taking Australian jobs that ultimately should go to Australian workers. Last year I called for the scrapping of 457 visas in North Queensland, where there simply are not enough jobs to go around. The number of 457-visa workers exploded under the previous Labor governments. When the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government was sent packing, the Liberal-National government tightened up the regulations. But the program was still being exploited at the expense of local workers, so I am encouraged to see the government is scrapping that program completely.

I was also encouraged to see in the budget a drug-testing trial for welfare recipients. Many workers in my electorate are forced to take regular and random drug tests as part of their job. If workers have to submit to drug tests to earn the taxes that are then spent on welfare, it is only just that the recipients of that welfare, people who are supposed to be looking for jobs, are doing the same. In a region where so many jobs include compulsory drug testing, job seekers are excluding themselves from the workforce if they are indulging in illicit substances. Newstart is about getting people job ready and into the workforce. A job seeker is not job ready if they have drugs in their system. The drug-testing trial announced in the budget is a very popular measure with the majority in my electorate, and I believe it will be popular across the nation. The idea was not so well received by the elites and the fringe dwellers. The outcry from the so-called human rights activists and the welfare lobbyists was predictable but baseless. They repeated claims like: 'We must give these people free money to stop them stealing,' a claim that is both defeatist and ludicrously laughable. The argument that we must expect and accept failure or crime is an insult to people who are subjected to the same measure in order to earn the money through their own sweat.

It is also good to see in the budget the adoption of the recommendations, the real recommendations, from the Gonski report. The Liberal-National government is implementing a real needs based school funding model as intended by David Gonski. Labor attempted to introduce 27 different models and the only need considered in their needs based funding was their own political survival. They could not even fund their hodgepodge of ideas. We have heard about the 'billions of dollars' worth of cuts,' but if there are billions of dollars' worth of cuts, where is it in your costings? Where is it in your own budgeting?

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'We're not in government,' they say. If you get in government you have to find that money. That is what Labor does not understand. Their so-called funding was never ever there. It will be interesting to see if the noisy fringe will still 'give a Gonski' and continue to attach such political placards to school fences now that a funding model truly reflects the needs of all schools. I caution that Catholic schools are now out there campaigning about this issue, the new model based on student needs, which is supposed to be blind to the nature of the school being public or private. The Catholic and Christian schools tend to take in students from families with limited means as well, and this will be reflected, I hope, in the funding. I will be watching it very carefully. Every child is a student and it is unfair to discriminate against one, and every parent of those students is a taxpayer.

While I welcome more funding, I acknowledge also that money alone cannot produce results. I do not believe that a teacher who might receive $250,000 in classroom resources will get a markedly different academic outcome than one that had $1 million in classroom resources. The great differences come from teaching. I look forward to what recommendations Mr Gonski will make with regard to getting those better teaching quality outcomes.

Labor continues to spruik about cuts to funding, even though funding continues to increase and the size of those increases, in dollar terms and percentage terms, are huge compared with other areas of the budget. I note the Labor lions now criticise cuts to Labor's policy. There are many ways the government can listen to the forgotten people. In particular, we can allow Adani's Carmichael coal project to create 10,000 jobs, and stop GetUp! and one lone Indigenous protestor from holding the whole country to ransom. We can implement recommendations from the parliamentary insurance inquiry to fix the problem of sky rocketing premiums in North Queensland. We can implement recommendations from the food certification inquiry to deal with the concerns that many have about halal certification. We can implement recommendations from the child support inquiry to deal with the concerns of many, many parents out there who think that that system is robbing them blind. We can deal with the family law system, again, where there is concern from many parents about this system encouraging parental alienation—a great form of child abuse. We can expedite work on water infrastructure in North Queensland, including Townsville's water supply and the construction of Urannah Dam. And we can commit to clean coal technology to power the north with a coal-fired generator in North Queensland.

The future of Australia does not lie in pandering to the indulgent whims of extremist fringes who bounce about the echo chambers of the media. It lies in the strength, determination, good nature and hard work of the forgotten people—the people who Sir Robert Menzies talked about and who I wholeheartedly support as a representative in this place.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being approximately 1.30 pm, the debate is interrupted. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for a later hour.

Sitting suspended from 13 : 26 to 16 : 00