Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The payday lending processes that are currently being used have very little responsiveness to people who are finding themselves in a debt spiral due to having acted in a space that needs further regulation. In 2016 the member for Higgins called for a review, and in 2017, following the recommendations of that review, the member for Riverina drafted legislation around payday lending. These need to be acted on. The Consumer Action Law Centre has revealed that the number of borrowers taking out more than one payday loan in 12 months grew from 17.2 per cent in 2005 to 38 per cent in 2015—that is, on average, the number of loans per borrower is almost four. It is time the government acted on this. I note that the member for Deakin, who's with us in the chamber today, as the assistant minister, and the member for Cook, the Treasurer, now have responsibility for this. I call on them to take action—in fact, to work with Labor to ensure that the legislation they drafted that is being brought into this House gets through.

Finally, in terms of the appropriation bills, I would say that the most important part—the most outrageous part, in fact—of the government's plans for this country is its plan for $65 billion worth of tax cuts for big business. We're in a period of record profits. We have the flattest wage growth on record. Few companies pay the 30 per cent tax rate. Those opposite keep saying that we have a 30 per cent tax rate, but that is almost a fiction if you look at which companies actually pay that. That comes to us from exclusive ABC analysis. One in five Australian companies have paid zero tax in the last three years. Business investment is at historically high levels, despite the 30 per cent headline tax rate that obviously isn't being paid. This is trickle-down ideology and it is a fail for this government. Tax rates don't matter if you don't pay tax.

At the moment, many people in my electorate are doing it tough. In fact, there are families in my electorate who have four payday loans going because the cost of living keeps going up and up and their wages are flatlining. If you think about my electorate and the number of people caught in casual work, that's where we really start to see families in trouble. They cannot plan and they cannot manage their finances if they can't project their salary from one week to the next. In that climate, we are talking about a $65 billion tax cut for big business under the fiction that it will somehow magically drive the economy. The economy in my electorate needs people to get paid their penalty rates. That would be a boost to our local economy. Our local economy needs people not to be paying a wider gap in their health costs. People in my electorate need to know when they are going to go to work and how much they are going to earn this week. They need to be in full-time, permanent jobs. At 17 per cent youth unemployment in my electorate, this government offers very little in terms of hope for the people of Lalor.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to talk about my home state of South Australia and the impacts the federal government's decisions are having on its future. South Australia is at a point of economic transformation. The federal government's decision in 2013 to withdraw support for the car manufacturing industry has meant that South Australia has had to confront the reality that it needs to develop new industries and very quickly in order for it to prosper.

In the last three decades the advancement of our state has slowed to a crawl, and not a single person in South Australia will forget how former Treasurer Joe Hockey goaded Holden to leave. Now, as a nation, we no longer build cars. That is a great travesty, I believe. Until the end of the Second World War, Adelaide was the third-largest city in Australia. Now it is a distant fifth, with its population growth lagging behind the growing metropolises of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

While slow population growth is a serious concern for my state, a bigger concern is the fact that our young people, our educated graduates and our skilled workers are leaving for the east coast or—worse—overseas. South Australia's population has a median age of 40 years, second only to Tasmania. In my electorate, the median age is 46. There aren't enough jobs for young people, and so our best and brightest move away. They don't want to. Once they move, it is rare that they return. As a result, there are 25,000 fewer young people living in South Australia today than there were in 1981. That's not sustainable for our state.

The challenges facing my state are significant. With these challenges I believe come opportunities. For six years in a row, Adelaide has been ranked as the world's fifth most liveable city. It has the lowest cost of living of any of the mainland state capitals, which means owning your own home is not a pipedream. In Adelaide, there is a chance that you will be able to buy, unlike in the eastern states. From an economic perspective, the South Australian wine industry is booming and its agriculture industry is growing steadily. The closure of the Mitsubishi and Holden plants appeared to be deadly to the state, but from the ashes of those longstanding economic pillars rises an opportunity for South Australia to truly cement its future. We must build on what we have whilst looking for new opportunities. I believe that the future of South Australia rests with its ability to innovate. In the book The Smartest Places on Earth the authors discus how, around the world, rust belts are the emerging hotspots of global innovation. Rust belts are turning into 'brain belts'. I encouraged the Minister for Education and Training to read this book, but obviously it didn't make the summer reading list.

I cannot overstate my disappointment that the federal government decided to cut $2.2 billion from the university sector in MYEFO. These far-reaching cuts have placed an effective cap on student places. While I acknowledge that the demand-driven system has led to perverse outcomes for vocational education and training, a cap on student places without a thorough review of how best to position our education sector shows that the federal government is focused solely on protecting its bottom line at the expense of Australia's, and particularly South Australia's, future.

Many times I have stood in this place and reminded the Prime Minister of his first statement as the leader of this country: 'We want to be innovative and agile,' he said. Well, for a government that prides itself on its innovation agenda, cuts to university funding are not acceptable. And Labor is not blameless on this issue, either. Together, Labor and coalition governments have cut a total of $3.4 billion from the university sector over recent years. This sector, which is the third-biggest export sector in the country and attracts thousands of international students each year, is the sector we want to invest in, not to cut. The way forward is to invest in education, and there is no doubt about that. South Australia is beginning to establish itself as an innovative state. Backed by three world-class public universities, innovation will be the key to South Australia's renaissance. Cuts to university funding put the future prosperity of South Australia at risk, and it is galling that the Minister of Education, who is responsible for these cuts, is also a senator for South Australia. The minister well knows how much this will disproportionately hurt regional Australia and South Australia in particular.

But while the federal government continues to reject its own innovation agenda at South Australia's expense, our universities are doing whatever possible to advance our state. Last month I visited the New Venture Institute at Flinders University, which operates as an incubator particularly for start-up businesses. This facility allows start-ups to access the knowledge and resources of the university and in many cases to take on university students as interns while they put the framework in place to ensure the future of a brand-new business. Since its inception in 2013, a total of 232 start-ups have gone through the program, and these businesses have created more than 60 jobs. Not all these start-ups will succeed, but it takes only one or two brilliant ideas for that money to be repaid tenfold.

This year Flinders is expanding this model to the Limestone Coast in a move that will provide tremendous opportunity to regional South Australia, and cuts to university funding threaten this potential. The Medical Device Partnering Program, which supports early-stage innovation and technological developments for medical devices, is housed at Flinders' Tonsley campus. This program receives no federal government funding, despite crying out for it, and only limited amounts of state government funding. Flinders University invests in this program, yet without increased funding the program has had to turn away medical professionals and members of the community who are coming forward with great ideas. It just doesn't make sense. We are reducing the cost of healthcare delivery, yet neither the state nor the federal government is providing any support. And it's not only the federal government that's threatening the future of South Australia. The federal opposition and the South Australian government are continuing to advocate against Gonski 2.0, an incredibly important reform package that will have far-reaching impacts for South Australian schoolchildren. I was proud to be part of the Nick Xenophon Team in discussions on this bill, because I saw how important it was for the country to get school funding right. I am aware of misinformation being spread by both state and federal Labor regarding our involvement and the package of the reform, and I'm happy to address this misinformation today.

The member for Wakefield stood in this place yesterday and stated that the Nick Xenophon Team did a deal to cut funding in South Australian schools by $210 million. What a fairytale! The truth is that, thanks to the Nick Xenophon Team, Australian schools will see a $23.5 billion increase in funding over the next 10 years. It was the work of NXT that saw funding increase by $4.9 billion over the government's original proposal, and South Australian schools will receive $424 million on top of current funding—not imaginary money, not monopoly money—over the next 10 years. Thanks to NXT, every underfunded school in Australia will reach 95 per cent of its SRS funding by 2023—four years sooner than the government's original proposal—and this was opposed by Labor. Thanks to NXT, each state government will be required to increase its contributions to schools to ensure that no child in Australia is left behind just because they live in a certain state—and Labor opposed this measure. Thanks to NXT, the National School Resourcing Board has been established. This board undertakes reviews of different parts of the Gonski funding model to ensure that states, territories and other approved authorities comply with their funding obligations—and Labor opposed this measure.

The facts are that Labor is basing its claims of cuts that the NXT supposedly made on the basis of funding that they never committed to. It was so far beyond the forward estimates that it was imaginary money. At the time, I said it was like comparing apples with imaginary pears. They are claiming that they are standing up for the real Gonski, when the architects of the original plan—David Gonski, Ken Boston and Kathryn Greiner—all support the proposal that passed last year. Ken Boston has said that Labor corrupted the original Gonski review, and I agree with his assessment. I note that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the member for Sydney, still hasn't committed to meeting the mythical shortfall if the ALP wins government. So, what do we have here?

I would ask the member for Wakefield what possible reason I and the NXT would have for cutting funding to South Australian schools. We are consistently the only party that stands up for South Australia. We don't put party politics first; we put our state first. That's why we will be called SA-BEST. And, while I want to talk about what South Australians deserve, I would be remiss if I did not highlight the government's continual refusal to fund infrastructure projects in our state. The 2017 federal budget allocates $70 billion to infrastructure spends across this country. Not one new dollar was allocated to South Australia. Victoria receives $1 billion for new infrastructure commitments, and there's a new airport for Sydney, at over $5 billion. For South Australia? None. Every time South Australian infrastructure is mentioned we are told to be grateful for the submarines. South Australia's role in defence building is incredibly important; there is no doubt. We're not the only state that's receiving defence building, yet we are the only state to be told to be satisfied with no future for rail infrastructure projects as part of the 2017 budget. It's as though we don't need infrastructure funding.

In my electorate alone, there are several key infrastructure projects that demand federal government support. I would argue that if they were in any other state they would receive that funding commitment. Victor Harbor Road, which travels from the regional centre of Victor Harbor all the way into Adelaide, has long been in need of an upgrade. It needs double lanes. It's an incredibly dangerous road. The RAA in South Australia indicated that between 2012 and 2016 there was a 34 per cent increase in traffic on the road, and 43 people were killed or seriously injured on that road in that same period. The estimated cost to fully upgrade the road is around $600 million. I believe that if this road, with this usage and these accident statistics, existed in any other state it would have been upgraded years ago. Yet, when South Australians look to their federal government, the government turns its back on such infrastructure.

The freight rail line that connects Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth passes directly through my electorate. For years there's been a proposal to build a freight bypass from Monarto so that we can double-stack all the way down to the port—yet, nothing. The efficiencies in transport freight across this country would be significant, especially as the current line is approaching capacity. Regional Development Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island list this project as their No. 1 infrastructure priority for the region. Several local councils and the RDA are putting in money out of their own pockets for a scoping study to assess the full benefits of the proposal. Yet, despite the federal government's massive investments in rail on the East Coast, nothing has been forthcoming about this proposal.

The interchange on the South Eastern Freeway of Verdun currently accepts traffic only halfway. So, it's a halfway interchange: you can't get off the freeway and come through Hahndorf and Verdun if you're coming from interstate or if you're coming from Murray Bridge. It's really ridiculous. We are missing out on so many visitors, and it's clogging traffic through Hahndorf. This ramp was built almost 40 years ago. It's probably as old as most people in this place. It's the kind of infrastructure that our nation needs and that South Australia needs. So, for the last 30 years successive state and federal governments have, I believe, failed South Australia. The message that I'm receiving from my community is that we have had enough. We count too.

The major parties, I believe, use empty rhetoric when talking about South Australia. Several federal ministers and shadow ministers can barely hide their disdain when referring to issues that face our state. In question time we're often the butt of federal government jokes. I have yet to hear a single South Australian member of parliament on the other side refute such callous indifference. Like in the book The Smartest Places on Earth, I believe South Australia has the potential to turn from a rust belt to a brain belt. Our best days do lie ahead. I call on the government to back us in. It's about time NXT was not the only party standing up for South Australia.

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to talk about early education in this debate because early education is a critical part of what government should be getting right and what government should be doing. We know that, if you give children the best start to life, then they will go on to reap those benefits for many years to come. Early education has always been a big passion of mine and continues to be in my role as shadow minister for early education and childhood development. We're hearing a lot from the government about their childcare package and, unfortunately, while there is some good news for some parents, missing from this debate is the benefit for children.

When we talk about early education and child care we have to talk about the children. It can't be just about workforce participation. While that is part of the benefits of access to child care and access to early education, it cannot be the whole picture. It has to be about putting children in the centre. It has been disappointing, as time has gone on, that we've heard the minister—and, indeed, the Prime Minister—constantly only talk about early education in the framework of workforce participation. As a result of this discussion that is only about workforce participation, we've seen the government's new childcare package actually making it harder for vulnerable children to access early education. That is incredibly disappointing because it's the vulnerable children, those who need that extra investment and support, who will be falling through the cracks of this government's proposal. That is because they've made it all about how much both parents work. It's all about the parent who has the fewer number of hours. The more they work, the more child care they get access to. As I said, that's a principle that completely negates the importance of early education.

The government has been trying to argue that it is only well-off Australians who are going to have cuts as a result of their childcare package. But as a result of FOI, from the details of government's own modelling, we know that the majority of the 279,000 families that will either have reduced assistance or have it cut entirely are families in the two lowest income brackets. That is because they don't meet this government's cookie-cutter activity test. This is deeply concerning and something that the government does not want us to talk about.

You'll have heard in question time recently that the Prime Minister said, 'Why didn't Labor get on board?' The reason why Labor didn't get on board with this deeply unfair package is that many vulnerable kids are going to miss out. Indeed, if you look at the top 10 electorates that are going to be worse off, they include Lalor, Rankin and Blaxland. These are not communities that are rolling in money. These are communities that need support for early education. For those families who have a single income and earn less than $65,000, 88,000 are going to be worse off. That is a significant number of families.

The Prime Minister's rhetoric is: 'We want to reward families who work hard.' Of course, child care is part of the package of ensuring that families do get to work. However, the Prime Minister and the minister have failed to recognise that life can be complex, that there is casual and insecure work, and it is unclear how families in those situations are going to meet the new fortnightly activity tests that gives you an entitlement to child care.

The government has said that you'll be able to predict, to forecast, how much work you're going to get. But what will happen if those families don't get that work? What will happen if those families aren't able to meet this strict fortnightly test? Will they experience, as many people have said, a debt to Centrelink? Will there be a robo-debt notice that comes through the post saying, 'Well, you didn't actually meet your casual hours'? 'You can't change your child care; you can't change the hours that you're booked in.' But will the government then be slapping you with extra payments?

This is not what Australians signed up for and this is not helping those who have insecure and casual work. The government's ignoring the fact that there can be complex arrangements in families. There may be one parent caring for a number of children. There might be a child with a disability. There might be an older parent. Once again, they may not be able to meet this government's strict work test, and, as a result, their child will miss out on government support for early education. It's just not good enough.

The government has often been caught bragging about how much they're spending on this new system. I have to say that I wouldn't be bragging if so many families were going to be worse off as a result, but the government has often been bragging about this. Indeed, what was snuck into MYEFO was $1 billion of savings in early education. It is still not clear where these savings are coming from. Are these savings going to come from the many families that are going to see their subsidy cut or abolished altogether? It is incredibly unclear where these savings are coming from. But what is very clear is they are not being reinvested into early education. The government, while it gives with one hand, takes away with the other, and families are going to miss out as a result.

We also heard—and I'm very pleased that there are some regional members in the House at the moment—that the budget-based funding program that has served many regional communities, in early education, playgroups, child care, is in absolute disarray. As a result of the government's changes, the longstanding process and commitment to rural and regional services, when it came to child care, was ripped up. Instead, what the government has said is, 'You have got to compete for this money.'

What the government hasn't understood is that the new program comes in on 1 July this year. These budget-based services, which used to rely on money for a calendar year, have no idea what their fate is, and we are less than 4½ months away from this new program coming in. They have no idea what is in store for them—no idea whatsoever. What we're talking about is 43 rural and remote and Indigenous mobile services that no longer have a clear future. So it's a bit rich to hear those on the other side talking about how much they care about rural and regional Australia, when very isolated children, children who may only access a service once a month or once every six weeks, have no guarantee that that service will even be available.

The government keeps saying, 'It'll all sort itself out. Well, I'll just give one example, Paroo Contact Children's Mobile, based in New South Wales and servicing 36,000 square kilometres, have confirmed that they are facing a bleak future under the new system. Whilst Paroo have explored options to ensure they can provide services to rural and regional communities under the government's new childcare package, they've been advised by the Department of Education and Training that it is unlikely that Paroo would successfully transition to the new childcare system. Families in the communities that this service helps and supports face a range of social, emotional, cultural and geographical isolation and barriers to accessing services that the government's new system fails to recognise.

These services are small—they are not, I guess, the big fish in the system—but they deserve support. They have had support from governments of both persuasions for a long time, and now this government has come and ripped the carpet from under them. I have been speaking a lot to these services, and they are very, very worried. It is time that the National Party stood up for them. Most of these services are in National Party seats, and it's time the National Party stood up to their big brothers in the coalition and actually said, 'Protect these services.' These services are supporting farming families and regional areas. The National Party has gone missing when it comes to the budget based rural and regional remote services—and it is a disgrace. We will continue to give those services a voice and say, 'Please reconsider cutting their funding,' or, 'Just get your act together and let them know what they're going to get and, if they're not going to get anything at all, find a way to fund them. Find a way to keep these services going.'

As I said, this new childcare funding will come in on 1 July. There are still many, many questions about how it's going to work. The government has not provided parents and families and centres with answers. How does the government intend on implementing the activity test? They are yet to come clear on this. It is already February and the question remains as to how families and centres are expected to report their activity to get their subsidy. When they can't navigate their MyGov account will families be forced to wait in longer queues at Centrelink to report fortnightly? There are many questions. How will the centres report activity? Is the government's IT system ready to go? I suspect it's not. Come 1 July I think we'll see the government's system in absolute disarray.

There have been two or three government ministers—I think there might have been three ministers—looking after this area and talking about this amazing package. But they haven't done the hard work of actually working out how to implement these changes. So I think we're going to find families and centres in disarray come 1 July, not knowing how much the subsidy is and not having any certainty around how they report, how they access their subsidy and how the centre is able to support the most vulnerable families. We know that there's a change to those children at risk and how you get the extra subsidy. No longer can the centres go through that process on behalf of families. There is a lot of confusion within the sector and a lot of confusion for parents and families, and it's time the government started to get on with the job. Stop talking about this and actually look at implementation in a way that will meet families' needs.

The government has also missed a huge opportunity when it comes to preschools. The government has recently announced stop-gap funding for just one year for four-year-olds to access preschool. The government had an opportunity to show that they were committed to four-year-old preschool and to support states and territories to deliver that. To do that, it would have been right to put funding in over the forward estimates. However, they didn't. Once again, this has been a hallmark of the government—just drip-feeding a bit of money year in and year out. Preschools need to plan. They need to know what their future holds. Indeed, the minister has made some concerning remarks suggesting that this funding will not be guaranteed into the long-term. This creates uncertainty for families. I'm disappointed that the minister hasn't taken the opportunity to stand up to his Treasurer and to the Minister for Finance and say, 'Preschool for four-year-olds is a priority and the federal government should play a collaborative role with the states and territories to deliver that.' He failed to take that opportunity and, as a result, we now have the drip-feeding of money to preschool with this veiled threat: 'We need to review this.' This program is getting results. Despite the minister trying, under a South Australian election campaign, to argue that we don't have enough four-year-olds in preschool, it is getting results. Progress is being made. We need to continue that and give certainty, so we can make more progress to ensure that children are getting the best start to life.

Of course, the minister continues to brag about how childcare fees are not going up as much as he thought they would. Indeed, four per cent, six per cent—a range of these is seen by the government as a good thing. But families are hurting. This government has been in power for five years. We have seen not one step to provide relief to families when it comes to child care costs; no discussion around access; no discussion around early education. I urge them to think seriously about early education and children. (Time expired)

Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Schools) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to debate on the appropriation bill. I am very pleased to have been here for the contribution of the member for Kingston, the shadow minister for early years education. I'd really like to echo some of her remarks before moving on to some other issues of importance to constituents in my electorate.

The government's failure to support early learning is something for which it stands condemned. The remark she made about the hollow boasting of the minister in terms of fee increases and affordability of child care are one element of a much wider and very, very serious problem. I am also concerned, as she is, that we have only seen a bandaid applied in terms of four-year-old kindergarten, or preschool—it's called different things in different states; kindergarten in Victoria. We know how absolutely vital this early learning is for life opportunities. It is simply unacceptable that the government applies a bandaid and, indeed, offers no sense of certainty for ongoing funding. It's just one example of many of what this government's attitude seems to be to federalism: uncooperative federalism, particularly in the area of education. I'll touch on some issues that go to schools as well. I am deeply concerned, as is the member for Kingston, about the failure to offer long-term or even medium-term certainty for the provision of 15 hours of four-year-old kindergarten.

The issue of the activity test is also of deep concern to me. It is particularly concerning to many Scullin constituents. I think about the way in which this government fails to consider the developmental advantages of early learning. Child care is important for many reasons, one of which is, of course, workforce participation. On this side of the House we recognise that and see that as a very important public policy objective. But workforce participation, boosting employment participation, is only part of the puzzle when it comes to child care and early education. I am deeply concerned that a large number of kids, who start life, by reason of the lottery of life, without the advantages that others do, will not have the opportunity for quality early education and all that brings. They will start school behind. I'm very pleased to see the minister has made it over to hopefully enlighten us on the progress of this debate. I'm sure he was paying very close attention to the contribution of the shadow minister earlier. I hope that he was.

Moving on from early years, I hope he will stick around to hear my contribution on schools and higher education and the failings of the government in those regards as well. What is abundantly clear, as we participate in this debate, is that the agenda of the Turnbull government is a million miles away from the needs of people in Melbourne's northern suburbs. We see this at every level. There are some particular local issues. At the macro level this government persists, despite all the evidence and all the practical reasons, with its so-called Enterprise Tax Plan. This is a government with only one idea for Australian prosperity, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea on its own terms—that has been recognised by a wide variety of parties in this parliament as well as pretty much all the experts. The Prime Minister's contribution on this in question time really said it all. He resorted to low rhetoric and completely failed to engage in what is a really important debate. You'd think, given that he has no other ideas to boost growth to secure our living standards, he'd be up for a proper conversation around this, that he'd be up for joining in the debate about the evidence. What did he do instead in response to the revelations on the ABC? I call them 'revelations', but the reports produced by Emma Alberici, while important and significant, aren't really revelations because they continue to tell us what we knew already—that a very large number of Australia's largest companies are in fact paying no tax at all and also, despite the rhetorical position of too many government members, that the evidence about the link between inbound investment in the Australian economy and our headline company tax rate is very, very weak. There are big debates to be had about how we can boost investment. That is a debate we on this side of the House welcome. Again, it is telling and disappointing that the government is just banging on with its simple, reductive and, frankly, pointless messaging. The Prime Minister compounds this because not only does he fail to engage with this debate; he shoots the messenger. His attack on the ABC, our national broadcaster, in question time today was unwarranted and shameful.

To simply attack the messenger here is consistent with a much wider and deeply problematic attitude of the government to criticism or, indeed, unhelpful commentary at large. We see that in the victim-blaming attitude it extends day in, day out to people who are recipients of welfare payments. We see it in the extraordinary attitude of the government to the question of our charities, where the government will, on the one hand, laud the activities of not-for-profit organisations and, on the other, seek to deny them the financial capacity to carry on their activities. This is a government that won't engage in big debates. Whenever there is a dissenting view, it feels it needs to be shut down. That is the view of the Prime Minister. That is one thing that he has proved to be consistent on.

He's also been consistent in his attitude, to be fair, to these big questions of economic management. He is a neoliberal, pure and simple. He has wavered on just about every other attitude he's expressed—from the republic to marriage equality to pretty much anything you can pick—as he's been pushed around by reactionary elements in his party room and in his coalition partners. But the one thing he's been consistent on in his devotion to neoliberalism. One thing he said in question time today really struck me: he made the extraordinary assertion that company taxes are a tax on workers. You'd think, if he was prepared to make that statement at the dispatch box, he'd be willing to point to some facts to back it up. The truth is—and he should be well aware of this—that the relationship simply isn't there. What we are seeing in the Australian economy is a massive and troubling decoupling of company profits from the returns going to workers. The labour share of the economy is almost at a record low, and what does the government want to do about that? What does the government say to those Australians who work for a living? It says that they should get less reward for that work. The government accepts at a rhetorical level that there is an issue with wage growth but then does nothing about it as an employer, a regulator or, indeed, in its wider attitude to the management of the Australian economy. It simply repeats the same old canards and refuses to debate the evidence.

I want to talk now, briefly, about the government's record in the area of infrastructure, because these are questions that are critical to Melbourne's northern suburbs and vitally important to the people I'm so proud to represent in this place. Of all the failures of this government, its utter neglect of Melbourne, the fastest growing city in Australia and one of the fastest growing cities in the OECD, is absolutely shameful. Victoria has more than a quarter of Australia's population and yet is in receipt of well less than 10 per cent of Commonwealth infrastructure funding. This is particularly concerning in the suburbs that make up the Scullin electorate, with the suburbs of South Morang—which I share with my friend the member for McEwen the honour of representing in this place—by some reckoning the fastest growing postcodes in Australia and also with the extraordinary growth in the corridor from Epping North through to Wollert.

We need very significant Commonwealth infrastructure investment. It's absolutely critical to the wellbeing of the people I represent in this place. It's absolutely critical to the sustainability of our communities. The failure to invest in quality public transport and roads is a huge handbrake on our productivity. About 50 per cent of full-time jobs created in Australia in the last five years have been created in and around the CBDs of Melbourne and Sydney. Getting in and out of those CBDs from the suburbs is an absolute priority, as is finding ways to secure quality jobs outside of the CBDs. That's why the ideologically driven attitude of the member for Warringah when he was Prime Minister, delaying vital public transport investment, has played such a role in holding back productivity growth and in damaging lives in Melbourne suburbs.

There are some projects underway. The Minister for Urban Infrastructure and Cities talks about the M80, which has been delayed for the better part of three years by the intransigence of this government. Similarly, the O'Herns Road interchange project, which is finally underway, would have been completed, but for the attitude of this government, if Labor had stayed in government. This government is unconcerned about the issues that affect people in the suburbs of our major cities. This Prime Minister, in particular, is unconcerned about anything that matters to Victorians and anything that matters in Australia's second city, which is soon to be, as I said before, our largest and fastest-growing city.

The sins, in terms of infrastructure investment, have been compounded by other decisions, such as when former Minister Nash effectively abolished the Northern Melbourne RDA. This was a body that was doing really important work. It was working with local governments across the northern suburbs of Melbourne—communities that represent more than a million people and an enormous amount of economic activity—to build a regional understanding of infrastructure needs and develop a blueprint to secure the future of our regional economy and to secure the wellbeing of people who live in Melbourne's north. Defunding the RDA and amalgamating it into one organisation that will service the entirety of Melbourne is a retrograde step that is already having an adverse impact on the communities that I represent. A government that is serious about its obligation to the people in Melbourne's northern suburbs would reconsider and, indeed, reverse this decision.

Beyond infrastructure, I want to touch very briefly on issues in education that impact on people in the Scullin electorate. I've talked about early learning and the cavalier attitude to funding four-year-old kinder and the impact of the activity test. On the activity test, I should focus particularly on our first nation Aboriginal kids in the Scullin electorate, who are being disproportionately affected and risk being shut out of participation in early learning through the attitude of this government. The cuts to schools will impact very significantly on those schools most in need. Although the minister is no longer with us, it is worth highlighting again the uncooperative federalism that has characterised the attitude of this government to the education portfolio. The blanket rule around only funding 20 per cent of the cost of educating kids in state schools is presenting huge stresses and strains. It will impact more significantly on the schooling system and outcomes in states like South Australia and Tasmania than on Victoria, but in Victoria we are seeing the huge impact of the cuts and the consequences that go beyond them. Some really vital programs will be affected, and the uncertainty that has characterised the government's attitude to this vital area of policy-making from the time they walked away from the bipartisan consensus around real needs based funding has put schools, parents and kids in an invidious position.

It is a particularly invidious position when it comes to the circumstances of students with disability in my electorate and more generally. A significant change, a change that was well intentioned and proper, to move away from a purely medical diagnosis of disability to an approach that recognises judgements about adjustments that are required to support learning has shown an enormous and increasing gap between the Commonwealth funding allocation and the needs of students. I'm deeply concerned that the government is not taking its responsibility to those students seriously. Other speakers on this side have spoken about the uncertainty—compounded, of course, by the swingeing cuts to higher education and the fee increases, which will shut too many of my constituents and my colleagues' constituents out of the tertiary education that they are entitled to pursue.

I will finish on this note: across all of this, as I go around the communities I represent, there is a deep sense of frustration and alienation. We have a government that not only is without a plan beyond a company tax cut for big business, the $65 billion giveaway, but also is simply not engaging with the needs of Australian people. That's a sentiment that is very strong in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. The Prime Minister fails to listen to it at his peril.

Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Cyber Security and Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Canberrans brace themselves for coalition government budgets. They brace themselves because they're used to the cuts. They brace themselves because they're used to the attacks. They brace themselves because they're used to the derision. They brace themselves because they're used to the scorn. They brace themselves because they're used to the contempt. Derision, contempt and scorn for this nation's capital. Derision, contempt and scorn for the Public Service. Derision, contempt and scorn for our national institutions. That's what coalition governments mean for Canberra, our nation's capital.

Ever since this coalition government was elected, it has gone after Canberra, it has gone after our national institutions and it has gone after our servants of democracy. We saw it in 1996. The last two coalition governments have had form when it comes to Canberra—our national institutions, our nation's capital and our servants of democracy. In 1996 we saw 30,000 public servants lose their jobs right across the country; 15,000 of them here in Canberra, the nation's capital. What did that mean for Canberra in the mid-nineties? I was one of those 15,000 who lost their jobs under the Howard government, when I was working in the Department of Foreign Affair and Trade. What did it mean for Canberra? It meant that we went into an economic slump for five years. It meant that people left town. We had three federal seats here. We went down to two as a result of the Howard government's stellar efforts. It's only this year that we've managed to get back to a third seat. My electorate is now the largest in the country in terms of population, with 143,000. My colleague in Fenner has the second-largest in terms of population. The people of Canberra, the people of our nation's capital, are the most underrepresented people in the country—currently with two members in the House of Representatives and two senators in the Senate; that's it.

What did we see in 1996? We saw an economic slump. We saw 15,000 Public Service jobs axed. We saw people leave this city. We saw us go from three to two electorates. We saw the local shops close down. We saw businesses go under. It took us five years to crawl out of the mess that was created by the Howard government. The scorn, contempt and derision that was held by the coalition government in the nineties is held now by the coalition government. We are seeing the same form.

What is so extraordinary and perplexing about this is the fact that the founder of the modern Liberal Party, Sir Robert Menzies, wasn't a big fan of Canberra, but when he realised its potential and fully understood its significance to our nation as the national capital he made the investment. To quote him, he 'became an apostle'. He said:

I cannot honestly say that I liked Canberra very much; it was to me a place of exile; but I soon began to realize that the decision had been taken, that Canberra was and would continue to be the capital of the nation, and that it was therefore imperative to make it a worthy capital; something that the Australian people would come to admire and respect; something that would be a focal point for national pride and sentiment. Once I had converted myself to this faith, I became an apostle …

Those are the words of Sir Robert Menzies, a self-confessed apostle of Canberra. What do we have opposite here? We have people who are hell-bent on tearing down the legacy of Sir Robert Menzies and tearing down those great Westminster traditions of service and duty to the nation—and they do it in so many different ways. In the mid-nineties, they did it through the sacking of 30,000 public servants and, since this government has been in, we've seen 16,000-plus public service positions axed—between 3,000 and 4,500 here in Canberra, so at least a quarter here in Canberra, in the nation's capital. The scorn that this government has for the public service, our servants of democracy, is palpable and it speaks in volumes when it comes to budget times. Everyone across Canberra braces themselves for what a coalition government—the now Turnbull government—is going to deliver for our nation's capital, for them.

I remind people listening that Canberrans are the same as everyone else across this nation. Canberrans have mortgages, rent to pay and car loans. Canberrans have dreams like everyone else in the country. They have dreams of going on holidays and spending time with their families and children. They want to see their children and family members thrive and prosper. Like everywhere, they have the same dreams as all Australians. These 16,000-plus jobs are human beings. The 3,000 to 4,000 here in Canberra are human beings with mortgages, rent, car loans and commitments like everywhere else in Australia. I remind those sitting opposite to remember that and to have a bit more respect for their nation's capital, for the vision of Sir Robert Menzies, for the servants of democracy—the public servants who service you as government—and for our great national institutions.

I want to go over the sorts of cuts that we were dealt with in the budget last year under this government. The Department of Human Services lost almost 1,200 positions—a four per cent reduction in its total numbers. The Australian Bureau of Statistics lost over 400 positions—14 per cent of that agency. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection lost 245 positions, which was a two per cent decrease in staff. The Department of Health lost over 240 people. The Australian Federal Police, despite what the Minister for Justice was saying at the time about investing in that agency, lost over 150 people. The Attorney-General's Department lost 100 people. The Department of Finance lost over 60 people. The Department of Education and Training lost almost 50 people. The Department of Agriculture and Water Resources lost over 40 people. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies lost over 30 people—that meant a 20 per cent loss of that agency's staff. The Australian Electoral Commission lost 24 people. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions lost 20 people. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet lost 14 people. TRA lost 15 people. The Australian Skills Quality Authority lost 13 people. IP Australia lost nine people. The Fair Work Commission lost six people. They are public servants—our servants of democracy.

But what did this government do in terms of our national institutions? The Australian War Memorial, the soul of the nation; the National Gallery; the National Library; Questacon; the National Museum; the Museum of Australian Democracy—the repositories of our national story and history, the keepers of our history, memories and story—what did this government do last year to those national institutions? It cut 20 positions from the National Gallery. As we all know, our national institutions are pretty mean and lean outfits. Twenty positions were cut from the National Gallery, the collector and curator of our national story, by this government. The National Library had significant cuts in terms of Trove. It's a campaign I mounted for a very long time. We had 15 jobs lost at the National Archives and another three at the Australian War Memorial. Again, it is contempt, derision and scorn for our public servants of democracy; contempt, derision and scorn for our national institutions, the keepers of our history and our national story, our national memory, the soul of the nation at the Australian War Memorial. It is nothing but scorn, contempt and derision from the coalition government.

I remind those opposite what that actually means for those national institutions. As a result of this government's cuts to budgets and staff over successive years, in my view you are potentially damaging how we collect and curate our national story, because some functions just have to go. Some collections can't be looked after. So what we have here, as a result of your cuts to our national institutions, is that we're not cutting into fat anymore; we're not cutting into bone anymore; we are cutting into vital organs. Your cuts are affecting our future. They are affecting our memories, our story, our history and the soul of the nation.

National institutions cut; Public Service jobs cut; and then, as if the nation's capital hadn't been insulted or derided enough by those opposite, we get the insulting investment in infrastructure. We had an investment in infrastructure in last year's budget of a paltry $3 million out of a $75 billion national spend. That is less than one per cent for the people of Canberra, for our nation's capital. Then we started to take a closer look at where this $3 million was going. With $3 million you can build a lot of bridges or roads or a lot of fabulous infrastructure that will leave a legacy for the nation's future. So I thought: let's have a closer look at where this $3 million is going. It was quite telling in terms of the respect that this coalition government, this Turnbull government, has for the nation's capital. Because the $3 million in infrastructure investment went to lighting and plumbing at Old Parliament House, a temperature control system at the National Film and Sound Archive, shared corporate services at the National Museum, and a business case for an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial. That is the coalition's interpretation of infrastructure. That is the coalition's interpretation of a significant infrastructure investment in the nation's capital: lighting and plumbing in Old Parliament House, a temperature control system at the National Film and Sound Archive, shared corporate services at the National Museum and a business case for an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial.

Don't get me wrong: these are worthwhile investments, particularly in terms of the preservation and curating and collecting of our nation's story and our history. They are important investments, but, when people think about infrastructure investment, they usually think a bit bigger: a bit bigger than a business case, or lighting and plumbing or a temperature control system. They think bridges or roads. They think that a convention centre would be really nice here in the nation's capital. They also think the sum would be a bit bigger too. Three million dollars in the nation's capital out of a $75 billion spend: less than one per cent.

So, again, scorn and derision from this government in terms of our public service, as we saw in 1996; we have seen scorn and derision from coalition governments over decades. In 1996, 15,000 public service jobs were axed here in Canberra, and 30,000 nationally, sending the nation's capital into an economic slump. We see it again with this coalition government, the Turnbull government—16,000-plus jobs right across the nation, 3,000 to 4,500 here in ACT, and we saw all those jobs lost last year not just in the public service but also in our national institutions.

This speech I make is a constant. I make this frequently throughout the year. I make this, because I cannot believe that those opposite do not listen to the legacy of Sir Robert Menzies— (Time expired)

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

And hear, hear—three big cheers for the member for Canberra for that contribution in defence of the nation's capital, but particularly of the public servants who serve not just the government of the day but the Australian people. It's a topic I wholeheartedly back you on and will have more to say on throughout the year.

I rise to talk about a number of matters. Firstly, international education: this is an incredibly important sector to Australia in many senses, with, economically, $28 billion of export value to the country in 2016-17—and that is just the value of international students studying in Australia. It is now our third-largest export industry after coal and iron ore. It is our largest services export industry, far outstripping tourism now and indeed contributing significantly to tourism numbers through the visiting friends and relatives category—families of students studying here come and spend time here. The statistics show they spend more time per average than other students and are far more likely to leave our major capital cities and support rural and regional Australia, often because their son or daughter studying here has language and cultural familiarity, and the confidence to take them around.

We have seen, in the last 12 months, 16.1 per cent growth from the 2015-16 figures and around 10 per cent growth in recent years. In terms of raw numbers, 792,422 international students were enrolled in Australian education institutions—that includes universities, higher education, vocational providers, private providers and English language courses in 2017. Higher education provides the largest economic share of that, with $19.1 billion of that $28 billion in value, though of course VET, English language and other sectors are important. That's the economic picture summarised.

It is also of long-term strategic importance to Australia. Hundreds of thousands of leaders across Asia—in particular, Asia; our part of the world—have been educated over the last few decades in Australian education institutions. This has proven to be of enormous value for economic development, trade relationships and strategic importance. Australia has also benefited from many highly skilled migrants who have chosen to stay for some years or to build a life in our country. Economically, international students make some of the highest economic contributions to our nation of any migrant. To be blunt, their home country has paid for their primary school years, their health care and their teenage years. They pay for their tertiary education in this country, and then our nation reaps the economic benefit through their working years by their paying taxes and so on. Of course life-long connections form between Australian students and international students that foster research partnerships, and the hundreds of thousands of alumni scattered throughout the world create goodwill and links to Australia.

The third benefit, of course, is the internationalisation of Australian education for our domestic students, the diversity in campus and classrooms, and the opportunities to make cross-cultural connections and friendships. I'll just have a Mythbusters moment—and I hear this; I think others would've heard it. There are some in the community who have this view—misplaced; it's wrong—that somehow international students are a problem because they're taking the places of Australian students. I've heard this. It's not said wilfully, in hatred. It's not said to be mean or to discourage. It's said in ignorance and misunderstanding. The fact is: the economic value of international students and the fees they pay are of enormous, critical and, indeed, growing importance to the ability of our higher education institutions, our universities, in this country to be able to provide facilities for domestic students. Many of the shining new facilities that we see, particularly at the top universities in Australia, are funded through the revenue that universities get from international education.

Shame on this government—and shame on this minister, Senator Birmingham—for using the revenue that international students are contributing to universities as an excuse to cut higher education funding. This is going to particularly impact our top universities, the Go8, over time. We're incredibly blessed in this country to have so many universities in the top 100. That's not just good for the research output and our international standing and reputation and the economic value we get from commercialising that research—and we need to do more. It's also a virtuous cycle, because the reality is that this is a competitive market, and the parents of many students, particularly those from China and other Asian nations, are influential in their choice of university, and they choose Australia because we have these universities in the top 100.

We're seeing competition, globally, increase exponentially. What we considered source countries over recent decades—Singapore, China and other places, from which students were coming here—are now becoming competitor countries and destination countries. So we cannot rest on our laurels. If we want to maintain our position, not just economically but to fuel this critical industry for our economy, we have to maintain our place in the world's top 100, and that means at least maintaining, if not boosting, our contribution of public funding to higher education and allowing universities to value-add and increase their research spend through other sources such as international students.

I'm concerned, though, despite this rosy picture, about some of the worrying signs and problems, and I'll just touch on a few; first, the sustainability of growth. There are some signs of a bubble. In any sector, you do have to worry when you see, year upon year, growth of 10 per cent, 10 per cent, 12 per cent and now 16 per cent in the last 12 months. We've seen this movie before, back in 2007, 2008, 2009, when we saw a completely unsustainable growth in the sector, and a bubble that burst, and we lost some billions of dollars of value. To their credit, the Rudd government recognised this and took hard decisions, through changing some of the migration settings and removing that link between migration and vocational education in particular, to reset the industry on a sustainable path. But transparency and interrogation of this data is critical, and we must not become dependent on international education revenue for our institutions, or, indeed, dependent on any particular source country—China being the obvious one, where China is now contributing in the order of 29 per cent of students overall and around 38 per cent of students to our universities.

The second area is the distribution of growth between states. The latest data, unfortunately, shows an accelerating trend where we're seeing a concentration of growth in New South Wales and Victoria, in particular Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne's my home town, so in one sense we benefit enormously from this economically, but I do worry that the benefits of this sector are not being properly shared between other capital cities and rural and regional Australia. Indeed, from some of my former work, a few extra international students can make an enormous economic, cultural and social difference to smaller towns and regional towns—places like Mildura, Warrnambool and even larger regional centres like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. I call on the government and the parliament to take this issue seriously. It is a bipartisan sector. It's got great support, I think, from both sides of politics, broadly. Refer it to a parliamentary committee to have a proper, thoughtful inquiry about what initiatives the federal government and, indeed, state governments could do to help share the benefits of this sector more equitably across the country.

The third area that is of concern to me and that I want to remark upon is that of the Chinese student experience. My view, at the outset, is that Chinese students are not just important contributors to our country economically; they are welcome. They are welcome in our country. They are welcome in our community. There's been a lot of media hyperbole about Chinese students—some nonsense run, fuelled by some opposite, that they're all spies for the Chinese government or the Communist Party. Those stereotypes are harmful, they're insulting and they're damaging.

We should be able to have a sensible debate in this country, in this parliament, about, for example, foreign interference laws. I think just about every member of this parliament agrees that there is a case and a need to strengthen our laws about foreign interference from all sorts of governments—not just China, as a lot of the media reporting has put forward—and we should be able to make that case and have that debate without making young people living in our country feel unwelcome. I'm also concerned about ongoing reports of the lack of integration of many international students but particularly Chinese students in our campuses and in communities. We need to focus on that as a critical issue. The government must take this seriously—not just because of the economic impact if we get it wrong but also morally. These are other people's children. These are young people, growing up and making their way in the world and they have chosen to come and live in our country and our communities in their formative years. We as a society and as communities have a moral responsibility, as well as the economic imperative, to make them feel welcome.

I will draw the parliament's attention to a few examples of the kinds of things that we could do, which I would back. Two particular policy prescriptions come from the excellent China Matters' publication, released late last year, which explored some of the issues with international students in China. Firstly, I back the call that federal and state governments should jointly declare a national/international students' weekend across the country to encourage Australian families to welcome international students into their home and communities. It's not an unreasonable thing. It's not a silly thing by any means to think about using the power of government to suggest that idea and have families across Australia welcoming international students for a barbecue and into their family and take them around and so on. When I was growing up, my family hosted an exchange student, with whom we have lifelong connection in Sri Lanka, a Muslim family from Kandy. My daughter went there when she was in grade 3 and my mum went there many times. It's been a wonderful relationship for our family. So I think that's a great practical idea from China Matters.

Another idea is that the government needs to work, and may need to provide financial incentives to universities, to lessen the isolation of international students—for example, to build student housing and to look at whether we need tax incentives or other initiatives to encourage the construction of more student housing where international students would be able to live in close proximity to Australian students. I'm appalled about many of the statistics, media reporting and research that say explicitly that the English-language proficiency of many international students actually declines when they have been studying in Australia for a few years. We're finding that students are living in houses with people who speak their native language at home—they are studying maths or engineering—and they speak less English living in this country than they learnt at home when they were studying. That's a shame on us as a community. We should be able to do better than that as a welcoming people, and we take our national image seriously. It is also of critical importance for the sustainability and the future of this critical sector. We cannot rest on our laurels.

Chinese universities are improving enormously. Many of them are leading globally and beat us in research in so many areas. So the incentive, the reason, increasingly in the coming decades, to be really frank, for many international students to come and study here will be the cultural experience, the sense of community, the importance of living in an English-speaking setting, getting internships or work experience, and being able to take that experience home for their future lives, be it in business or other settings.

Finally, I would raise some concerns around the government's handling of the Australian International Education: Enabling Growth and Innovation grants program and the allocation of what is, overall, in the scheme of support for an incredibly important sector, paltry sums of money. There was $3 million handed out last year. Magically, that was handed out on 29 June. Who knew? My understanding—but I'm very happy to have the minister correct this—is that there were no guidelines or open process with these grants and much of the money actually just went to the bodies or the people who happened to be represented on his handpicked international education council.

Given the enormous need for support and the wonderful things that we could do with some creative policy to share the benefits to rural and regional Australia, to make students feel more welcome and so on, there needs to be much greater transparency about how these funds—scarce as they are; minimal as they are—are used. How could stakeholders or providers propose projects for consideration? What kinds of potential projects were actually identified? What was the process for handing out this $3 million? I don't know. I haven't been able to find anything on the website. No-one in the sector that I've spoken to has a clue. The grants magically popped up before the end of the financial year. What were the probity arrangements? What were the evaluation criteria?

In summary, this is a sector which I think has enormous potential for Australia. We can and should seek to maintain and grow our position in a sustainable way. But, increasingly in the coming years, that will rest not just on our rankings and the quality of our reputation and so on but on the ability of Australia and our communities to provide a genuine, welcoming student experience for these young people from all over the world who have done us the great privilege of paying significant sums of money to get their education in Australia and call Australia home for these important years of their lives.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just as individuals and families make decisions based on their values, morals and ethics in terms of how they spend their money, governments do the same in terms of their priorities in their budget, so I'm pleased to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2017-2018 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2017-2018. This is a government which is engaged in what Stephen Koukoulas, a respected economist, calls 'economic and budgetary vandalism'. This is a government which, in opposition, ran a debt and deficit campaign which they ran up hill and down dale with trucks everywhere. But under their watch we've seen $252 billion added to government debt since they came to power in September 2013. What they're effectively trying to do is deliver $65 billion of handouts to multinationals and banks at the same time as they're increasing the tax burden on middle- and low-income earners. This is a government which has its priorities all out of whack.

Interestingly enough, today we've seen some research that the Australia Institute has released in relation to this particular issue. They are not only out of touch with the Australian public—because the polling done by the Australia Institute showed that 65 per cent of Australians believe that funding health, education and other public services is best when it comes to promoting jobs and growth, and only 15 per cent think cutting company tax is the way to go—but also out of touch with their own base, because, according to the research, only 28 per cent of Liberal and National party voters thought that cutting company tax was the way to go. Indeed, a whole 52 per cent of them thought that funding health, education and other public services was the way to promote jobs and growth. If anyone thinks that they're going to get this through the crossbench, the polling done in relation to Greens, One Nation voters and other crossbencher voters shows that they also support the same position that Labor's come to—that you should invest in education, health, public service and infrastructure, because that's the way to promote jobs and growth.

The government has forgone—and I noticed it even in these appropriation bills—any form of income they could have received in terms of revenue from negative gearing, capital gains tax reform or reforms to trusts. They've forgone all of that sort of revenue. At the same time, they're giving a $65 billion handout to multinationals and banks. I commend the work done by Ben Oquist, the executive director of the Australia Institute, in relation to this matter. The benefits they're seeking to persuade the crossbench and the public on are based on farcical assumptions. They're basing it on the idea that multinational corporations are suddenly going to ignore dividends to shareholders and stop avoiding tax. It's an absolutely stupid idea. All of a sudden they're going to be very benign, invite union representatives into the offices of the directors, sit around the boardroom table and say, 'Listen, fellows and women, let's actually give you big wage increases.' As if they're going to do that! I wonder what the shareholders will say at the annual general meeting. That's not the way the economy runs.

It's quite clear, according to The Australia Institute, that only 15 companies will share a third of the benefits of the company tax cut. As the Australia Institute says, companies make decisions on how they invest in the country based on a whole range of issues. And I'm indebted to the ABC in relation to this because I think Emma Alberici has done some great work in this area in releasing the analysis today on the corporate tax cut, where one in five of Australia's top companies aren't paying tax. It's quite extraordinary, when you consider that, as she says:

It's also disingenuous to talk about a 30 per cent rate when so few companies pay anything like that—

It's quite amazing when you consider that some companies such as Qantas is about to clock up its 10th year of being tax-free.

As economist Saul Eslake has said about an analysis that's been undertaken with Canada and Australia:

… it's worth noting that business investment as a share of GDP was 2.4 per cent higher in Australia in 2016 than in 2000, as against only 1.5 per cent higher in Canada, despite Canada's massive cut in company tax.

What is also interesting to note is that none of these companies or the government, in the arguments that they make, take into consideration dividend imputation. Experts, including Saul Eslake, estimate Australia's 30 per cent corporate rate with a dividend imputation raises about as much tax for the government as a 20 per cent rate without dividend imputation, and as the US Congressional Budget Office noted:

Australia's effective tax rate, at 10.4 per cent, is amongst the lowest in the world.

The average rate paid by American companies in Australia is just 17 per cent.

I could go on and on because what the economists and respected writers actually say about this government is that they've got their priorities wrong. They shouldn't be undertaking massive cuts to big corporate Australia, they should be investing in infrastructure and they should be investing in health and education—that's the way to do it. A race to the bottom is not going to achieve economic growth and greater productivity.

The budget is also interesting in terms of my shadow portfolio of immigration, because as part of the 2017 budget handed down in May last year, some nine months ago, the Turnbull government announced their Community Support Program and the temporary sponsored parent visa. Despite being announced in that budget, neither program is underway or functioning. The immigration-turned-home-affairs minister seems intent on gaining a new title but not doing the work involved in his portfolio which is necessary to get these two programs and visas underway.

I have met with people and multicultural groups across the country, and they have expressed their frustration and utter disappointment in the Turnbull government's delays and failure to deliver these programs. At the last federal election, the Liberals followed Labor's lead and promised to introduce a new temporary sponsored parent visa. Given the fact that 49 per cent of all Australians are either born overseas or have at least one or both parents born overseas, large numbers of Australians wish to be temporarily reunited with their parents, especially for the benefit of the grandchildren. It's clear that grandparents and grandchildren are important in the bonding process. Kids need to know and be loved by people who are important to their care, welfare and development, and having these grandparents there is very, very important. But, as is the case with the Turnbull government, they said one thing before the election and they have done another thing afterwards. They announced that children would have to pay, not a bond as they announced before the election, but a fee. The bond became a fee. And in the budget, they announced visas would cost up to $20,000 if families want to avail themselves of the full 10-year—five years by two—option.

They also went ahead and announced that the number of visas would be capped at 15,000 per year, despite the fact that before the election they mentioned nothing about a cap. That came on top of what really is the cherry on the top of the cake: the new temporary sponsored parent visa is limited to one set of parents per household. What a very uncomfortable conversation that will be between a husband and a wife: 'your parents or mine should be reunited with us and our children.' What an awkward and confronting conversation that will be when this visa is established.

As for the Community Support Program, the government has been dragging its heels on its own proposal. Despite being announced in the budget last year, and 'introduced' on 1 July 2017, the government still hasn't announced approved proposing organisations. These APOs are needed to propose humanitarian applicants to resettle in Australia. The government department's own website previously claimed they would be announced late last year, and now the new home affairs website reads, 'The APO selection process has not yet been finalised. This page will be updated as soon as the APOs are announced.' That's another broken promise. 'Individual visa applications cannot be lodged until APOs have been appointed.'

By the government's own admission, community organisations and businesses, churches and not-for-profit organisations, who are ready, willing and able to support refugees to resettle in Australia, have had their hands tied because the government can't get their act together and appoint these organisations. Labor believes any community sponsored program should result in a net increase in Australia's current intake of refugees. By comparison, the Turnbull government will allocate up to 1,000 places from the humanitarian program to their new Community Support Program. If the Turnbull government were serious, if they were serious about humanitarian resettlement, they would match Labor's commitment, which we took to the last election, to increase the annual humanitarian intake to 27,000 by 2025.

It's clear the Turnbull government has failed Australia's migrant communities on these two programs. If this out-of-touch government can't manage to keep their promises in the last nine months, why should we believe anything they say in the next three months? Before you know it, the 2018 budget will be handed down. I doubt that the tick-and-flick Minister for Immigration and Border Protection will get these programs up and ready before the next budget.

In my time remaining I want to talk about one particular road infrastructure project in my electorate, which I'm calling on the government to undertake. We had to shame the government into changing their decades-long opposition to upgrading the Ipswich Motorway. Labor in government upgraded it from Dinmore to Darra, and I thank the members for Grayndler and Lilley for their great support in this project. It was designed, built and completed under a Labor government. We had shamed them into doing the extra $200 million for the Darra to Rocklea section in stage 1. We got ahead of them and they followed us on this. We thank them and the Queensland government. But they had to insist on the Queensland government putting in 50-50, in terms of the money, instead of 100 per cent like we did in the Dinmore to Darra section. So it's under construction. There are 470 jobs being created.

But there's another bottleneck. The government—and I commend them for it—has agreed to a bipartisan approach on the upgrade of the RAAF base at Amberley. There is a billion dollars being spent, 5½ thousand people working at the base and a growing aerospace industry. But, if you want a big aerospace industry, juxtapose the base—as we've seen spokespersons for the government come to my electorate of Blair and talk about—and then you have to upgrade the road; that is, the Cunningham Highway, between Yamanto and Ebenezer Creek at Willowbank. That's a $345 million project that's in the priority list for Infrastructure Australia.

If you want an aerospace industry to bloom, if you want thousands of jobs and if you want to spend $1 billion on the RAAF base at Amberley, which we warmly welcome and give our bipartisan support to, you have to get the road right that leads there. Every time I go to the base and speak to people on the base—commanding officers and senior personnel—or when I speak to military personnel down here, I will mention this, or they will mention it to me. The government has to fix it. It's a real bottleneck. Go there at 7 am to about 9 am, or from about 4.30 in the afternoon to 7 pm. It goes into one lane each way. It's a bane for the people who live in Willowbank and for all Ipswich. There are 200,000 people living in Ipswich, and it also helps those country areas outside, in the Scenic Rim, the Lockyer Valley and the Somerset region. It's really important to get this done. I call on the government to give bipartisan support across this space. We need an 80-20 split. That's the way it's been talked about in the past. I need the Palaszczuk Labor government to come up with its $69 million. This is crucial.

This will be the Ipswich Motorway project on the west side, but it's crucial for the military in the area. It's crucial in terms of the safety. We're talking about 2½ thousand heavy vehicles a day and 17,000 vehicles a day experiencing this heavy congestion. It will be the start of a proper western bypass, bypassing the RAAF base at Amberley and eventually connecting the Cunningham Highway to the Warrego Highway—crucial for South-East Queensland. This is the biggest RAAF base in the country, and it's about to become the biggest military base in the country. I call on the coalition government to end this roadblock and give commitment to the project. I know I have the support of the local state members—Jim Madden, the member for Ipswich West, and Jen Howard, the member for Ipswich—and I know that I've got the support of the Ipswich City Council in this project. This is particularly important for our region. If you want to show your commitment to the military, which you boast about all the time, how about you show it by backing up and supporting the men and women in the military on the RAAF base at Amberley and the Army units and aerospace precinct there? Get behind this project. Support it and fund it in the budget that's coming up.

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

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills, which of course we support, but I don't want anyone to confuse support for the bills with support for the policy and the funding decisions that this government has made. I say this on a day when we've learnt that one in five Australian companies don't pay company tax, yet a key part of this government's budget, which it hasn't been able to progress, is to give companies a tax cut—a tax cut that they clearly don't need if they're not paying tax in the first place. It really underpins the decision-making process that went into the things that we see in this bill. There are many areas that I could speak on, but I'm going to stick to just a few.

One of the big gaps in the budget is any vision for the manufacturing sector. Australians want Australia to make stuff, not just to bring it in from other countries. One area where we know there's nearly $50 million of investment planned in the next decade is in rail investment—rolling stock—with state governments around Australia doing a variety of projects. In Sydney, we have an existing rail network that needs serious investment, and in the longer term we should be building high-speed rail between Brisbane and Melbourne via Sydney and Canberra. Australian steel should be given absolute priority in these projects, but we should also be looking to produce the rolling stock itself, not buying it overseas. It is an absolute disgrace that in New South Wales you've got a government that is buying new trains for the Blue Mountains, in my electorate of Macquarie, which are coming from overseas. That's $2.3 billion of investment not going to Australian businesses. There's the complication that the carriages are too wide and too long for our platforms, and there are serious questions about the suitability of the trains for our early morning commuters.

A commitment by the federal government to develop a national $50 billion rail industry plan wouldn't be a big burden on the budget. It would make a huge difference, though, to have collaboration between industry, governments, training providers and unions. The federal government would not be stumping up that money, but it would facilitate the expenditure of those billions of dollars in Australia. It would lead to more apprentices and a more highly-skilled workforce with specialist skills, which we lost with the demise of the car manufacturing industry, thanks to this government's unwillingness to have any vision.

It's impossible to predict what a workforce skilled in train production might be able to turn its hand to in decades to come, but you could imagine a range of sectors where there would be future transferability. The AMWU, which has seen its members suffer most under the loss of manufacturing jobs, can see the sense of this coordinated approach. In my own electorate, we've got about 500 manufacturing businesses of varying sizes. We have the capacity for growth and, outside of the tourism sector, the manufacturing sector has the most businesses employing 20 people or more, largely in the Hawkesbury. Workers can see the benefit of working closely with industry. Business can see it. It's government that can't seem to see how all this fits together. Investing time and money into building the capacity of local manufacturing would not only produce trains; it's the sort of investment in our people and our future that this government should be making.

Of course, the federal government has a central funding role for education. I want to start with TAFE. That system is fundamental. The latest data shows that Commonwealth funding to the vocational education and training sector has had a $1.6 billion cut. That's a 27.3 per cent reduction, according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, and this is on top of state governments cutting around 13 per cent of funding. No wonder the Australian Education Union describes the VET system as being in crisis. The New South Wales TAFE Teachers Association president, Annette Bennett, says urgent action is needed to reverse the decline. So do we see that from this government? Of course not. The TAFE sector continues to compete in a flawed competition and contestability environment. It means we're destroying the place where young and older people go to advance their careers, advance their skills, advance their future and get training. As the New South Wales Teachers Federation points out, it isn't just unions who are arguing for a stop to the funding attack on TAFE. Last year Jennifer Westacott, the chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, told the Press Club that an effective vocational education sector is essential to the future of our economy and that not one more cent could be taken out of TAFE. The fact that the government's response is to totally fund their training system through a charge on 457 visas shows how little they care about building a skilled and employable workforce in this country.

It isn't just tradies who are being belted by the government's education policies. The government's cut to universities, with a freeze on places, is actually their fourth attempt to reduce spending on university funding. They clearly would like to keep university for the elite, as it was when Labor came to government in 2007. It was a university system that was increasingly out of reach for many Australians. The numbers of undergraduate places were determined by bureaucrats here in Canberra. It failed to keep up with the changes in population or with the changing needs of our economy. I know it's hard to remember back more than a decade, but, because supply was tightly constrained as demand was increasing, entrance scores were extraordinarily competitive. The brutal reality was that, if you had parents who could afford it, you could pay your way into a course with full fees but a lower entry score. That meant a lack of participation in universities from students in outer metropolitan areas like mine. Labor's commitment to a demand-driven system has meant that, over the last decade, 190,000 more Australian students have gone to university, and that has particularly benefited outer metropolitan areas.

The latest attack by this government occurred just before Christmas, just as students were seriously thinking about their options at university. There was the announcement of a freeze in the growth of university places, which will mean that, this year alone, up to 10,000 students could miss out on a university place. Western Sydney will be one of the places hardest hit. The government still wants students to reduce the income threshold at which people will need to start paying back their loans, and it still wants to increase the fees universities can charge. I fear this is not the last hurdle to be thrown into the path of university students.

Schools have not been spared cuts. New data from the Parliamentary Budget Office and the National Catholic Education Commission shows just how bad the funding this year and next year will be for public schools and low-fee Catholic schools. Public schools will suffer a massive 86 per cent of the cuts that will occur. Low-fee Catholic schools will bear 12 per cent of the burden of the cuts, while independent schools, including some of the elite high-fee schools, will get a cut of just two per cent. These are cuts the Prime Minister calls fair. Well, he and I clearly have a very different definition of 'fair'.

One of the key responsibilities of a federal government is to provide funding to the states for hospitals and to ensure that people who are sick can see a GP or specialist. It shouldn't be that hard to do such a fundamental thing, should it? But the government seems incapable of finding in its budget the ability to adequately fund hospitals. My constituents rely on the Katoomba, Hawkesbury and Nepean hospitals, all of which would benefit from additional resources and capital expenditure. I want to talk about Nepean for a moment, which is really the hub of specialist hospital care for our region, even though it can be a bit of a distance from some of my constituents. We are on the fringe of a high-growth area, and there's no equity in the New South Wales government's promise of a half a billion dollars for Nepean Hospital when hospitals in areas with less population growth and less disadvantage are being given $1 billion. This is an area of higher rates of chronic heart disease and diabetes. This hospital is carrying a bigger and heavier load as the population of the west increases.

My neighbouring colleague the member for Lindsay, in whose electorate Nepean Hospital lies, tells me not a day goes by without her office receiving a call from a distressed patient about waiting lists, overcrowding and long emergency times. Certainly the state members find that. The office of the member for Blue Mountains is often in contact with me about these issues. This is in spite of the work of the doctors, nurses and other health professionals—HSU members—many of whom live in my electorate, who are doing an incredible job in an incredibly under-resourced environment. So, is the government doing anything to alleviate any of this pressure? It is doing nothing—absolutely nothing. In fact, in spite of the growing demand for hospitals, the latest offer from the recent COAG meeting is best described as an insult.

The government is also happy for people to keep paying more and more for health insurance. At my mobile office in Lawson on Saturday, an older couple came to speak with me about this very issue. Like many people, they've paid for health insurance for more than 50 years, since they were in their 20s, and they've not used it a lot. Now that they are older, the wife has had breast cancer and the husband has had a prostate operation. That's a not-uncommon combination of illnesses. They are grateful that they have been treated promptly and professionally, but the out-of-pocket costs have been a killer. The gap for the anaesthetist meant thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs. They are wondering why. They don't think they can keep their private health insurance going for another year. It's all because this government wants to keep seeing private for-profit insurance companies keep making record profits. The stats show the pre-tax profits of private health insurers increased by 7.3 per cent in the 12 months to 2017. They earned $1.86 billion before tax. At the same time, out-of-pocket costs continued to soar, and Australians are literally being forced to dump their cover.

This is just more evidence of the need to act to make private health insurance fairer for Australians. Instead of standing up for the budgets of families, the Prime Minister just stands by his private health insurance mates. Australians are paying more and more. We really can't have this continue and the pendulum has to swing back to consumers. Labor will cap private health premiums at two per cent for two years and task the Productivity Commission with the biggest review of private health insurance that's taken place in 20 years. To quote a much-loved phrase, 'It's time.'

It isn't just private hospitals that the government is forcing more and more people to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets for. The government is also continuing to save money by keeping the freeze on the GP Medicare rebates. The consequence for my constituents, particularly in the Upper Blue Mountains, is that it is next to impossible to find a bulk-billed visit to a GP unless you are a pensioner, a child or have a health card. The years of freeze which the GPs have been absorbing are not being lifted with any speed by this government and people are now facing financial pain along with their physical pain. Doctors at Katoomba hospital tell me that they are seeing as a consequence an increase in patients to emergency. People are turning up who are desperate and sick and will go wherever they can afford to go. Now we have come full circle, back to where I started, talking about hospital funding. When we talk about the cuts this government makes, they are such big numbers in the health sector that it is easy to glaze over, but these cuts affect people. People have come to me defeated and dispirited. In their time of need, they feel they are being let down by this government.

Finally, I want to turn to foreign aid. This government has cut $11 billion from foreign aid, and this is having gone to the 2013 election promising to match Labor's investment in aid. There has generally been in the past bipartisanship around foreign aid. In 2013, they were saying, 'Not a dollar difference—we'll support the Millennium Goals'—yeah, right! What has actually happened since then is an $11 billion cut. At the last election they said, 'We won't have any further cuts,' but they put a freeze on foreign aid. That's an effective cut. Costs go up, wages go up and electricity to run your office goes up, but funding doesn't. It's time again to say, 'Enough is enough.' Aid spending now equates to about 22c in every $100 of national gross income—a historic low. We can't continue to see the foreign aid budget carved up by cuts and freezes. I recently met with a delegation from Kiribati and they see Australia as a big sister, but we've been a pretty mean big sister. It is time to reinstate our aid budget. That's something Labor will be committed to, but clearly this government has no commitment to looking after our neighbours.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must apologise in advance for sounding a bit like a cracked record. I thoroughly commend the comments from the member for Macquarie—my twin electorate, if I can call it that, teamed with Macarthur and with, perhaps, Lindsay between. We have similar issues. I rise today to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2017-18 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2017-18. Many may see them just as money-shifting bills, but I see them as another example of where this government's priorities are, and that is with big business in the form of unnecessary tax cuts. This government has no interest in investing the money where it will truly make a difference and change the lives of everyday Australians.

We heard earlier the member for Bradfield boasting about his government's commitment to infrastructure. All I can say is: that is a joke. Despite constant rhetoric from the minister that they're investing significantly in south-west Sydney, when questioned in question time today he couldn't list one public transport investment in south-west Sydney, reaffirming that this government's commitment to infrastructure does not extend to my electorate of Macarthur, in south-west Sydney—where infrastructure is lagging well behind the rest of Sydney—or to other electorates that surround the electorate of Macarthur. Werriwa, Macquarie and Lindsay are all sadly deficient in infrastructure that could be provided by this government and by the New South Wales state Liberal government.

In fact, south-west Sydney has been completely neglected, whether it's by the federal or the state government. It's clear there is a complete disregard for the people of my electorate, and that disregard extends to all the surrounding Labor-held electorates in western and south-western Sydney. It's clearly inequitable and discriminatory. I've spoken extensively about infrastructure in south-west Sydney. I again must sound like a cracked record, but I'll continue to speak about it until we get some equality and equity in infrastructure development and we finally see some action.

There's really been nothing fair about the distribution of infrastructure around New South Wales. My electorate of Macarthur is expected to more than double its population over the next 20 years to over 600,000 people. When I first moved to Macarthur with my family in 1984, there were many farms in surrounding areas. Those farms are now suburbs with names like Gregory Hills, Oran Park, St Andrews and St Helens Park. They're all names of the original farms in what was a farming area. They are now suburbs filled with thousands of people. The developments happened, but the infrastructure hasn't.

My electorate is emerging as one of Australia's fastest-growing cities. We're seeing new suburbs emerge constantly. Everywhere I go there are new suburbs with hundreds of new constituents every month. Late last year, a development proposal was submitted to build more than 30,000 new homes in my electorate along the Northern Road, south of Bringelly Road. That's another 80,000 new residents, approximately. Yet there is no public transport. Our region is bursting at the seams. It's expected to continue growing in population, but we cannot get a commitment to build proper infrastructure that will take into account the projected growth of the area. Despite all these new developments and new residents, we see no action from state and federal Liberal-National Party governments. They've got no foresight. They've got no will.

In addition to the exponential growth of population, we have Western Sydney Airport, which I think will be great for our region, especially for job growth. But this airport will fail unless we have a rail line opening with the airport from day one and road and public transport upgrades that will cater for the airport and the burgeoning population. Yet we have no comment from the minister.

This is a government that clearly spends no time in Western Sydney, because they just don't get it. We get told that they're spending millions in upgrading the roads in the area, but these upgrades are too late even by the time they're built. What we get are roads all feeding into Narellan Road, which is already at gridlock, and a lot of talk about how smart the Turnbull and Berejiklian governments are and what fantastic infrastructure they're providing. We know they're not providing what is required.

There was a recent upgrade, adding extra lanes to Narellan Road. The population growth has already exceeded the capacity of the new lanes. Even worse, the state government's planning to build a truck station along Narellan Road, which is already at gridlock in peak hours. We're not getting what we require. We're not even getting an understanding of what's required.

There has been federal money committed to the upgrade of the Northern Road to build an additional lane each way, making it a four-lane road. But this road's already congested in the morning and in the evening. The roadworks for the Northern Road are completely inadequate and cannot cope with traffic volumes even now. The Northern Road is the one road that connects Camden, Campbelltown, Narellan and the surrounding roads to the new airport and north to the Penrith-Nepean area. This is a road along which 36,000 homes are set to be built, in addition to the new suburb of Oran Park.

The upgrade to four lanes is not sufficient for the additional population, the number of cars that will be using the road and the trucks that will be carrying freight along that road. There has been no commitment to put aside a corridor for public transport, something that I would have thought would be essential with the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to be moving to the area. Yet there has been no commitment from state or federal Liberal governments. It's just too little too late, with a few million dollars spent on roads that are already inadequate.

Our roads are outdated and heavily congested. We really only have public transport to Campbelltown, and our train line is already completely overfilled, morning and afternoon. Trains that are used to service the area are second-class trains, some without air conditioning, something that wouldn't be acceptable on the North Shore or inner city lines.

I can assure the House that there has been no adequate intervention by the state or federal transport ministers to look at how poor the public transport is in the Macarthur area. With the new airport at Badgerys Creek, there is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the correct thing—to put in the infrastructure that's required for public transport. Yet we have nothing from the minister. Everyone's concerned with the new airport. Everyone I talked to, from the Greater Sydney Commission to the local councils that surround the area, state members and the general population agree that we need to have a rail connection to the airport when it starts and that we need to have a connection that connects the south, in the Campbelltown-Macarthur area, to the north, in the Penrith-Nepean area. Yet, despite much goading and prodding, there have been no announcements.

The government continues to say they haven't made a decision. But silence is decision enough for them. What the government doesn't understand—

Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's called a process.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, the process has been going on for decades, and there's still no answer and no commitment. That's what you say, Trent, but look at your own electorate which is overburdened with public transport options. Look at the hospitals in your electorate that are given billions of dollars to expand, yet Campbelltown is given a few hundred million dollars and Nepean is given a few hundred million dollars. There is inequality in the decision-making by your government and the Berejiklian state government. No matter what you say about it, we need action now. You're moving hundreds of thousands of people into the west and the south-west; you're not providing infrastructure. It's time to be honest with people.

Experts and bodies such as Infrastructure Australia see the rail link as a no-brainer, and yet we're going to be left in the position where we'll be retrofitting public transport at a much higher cost and a much lower quality. If the government thinks that the new airport can rely solely on roads, they're sadly mistaken. They're kidding themselves, and I've already spoken about what a disaster our roads are.

There's no real effort in making sure that the rail links are properly planned. There's talk of an underground railway, which we know is 10 times more expensive than an above-ground railway, yet we've been given no real reasoning for why there is a delay in developing the rail corridor.

For people in my electorate, the top priority is public transport. To travel by road from my electorate to where many people work—the inner city, the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs—can take over two hours each way, so people are spending three to four hours of family time travelling because of the lack of public transport. It's time to stop all the talk. The studies have been done and the experts have given their opinion, yet we still have delay. There's money for services to the North Shore, the Eastern Suburbs and the inner city where billions of dollars are being spent on light rail and the northern rail, but there isn't money for south-west Sydney. This is another example of this government's inequity in distribution of resources.

I've seen so many presentations by planners, councils, the Greater Sydney Commission, UrbanGrowth, MACROC, state planning, private consultants, mayors, ministers et cetera who emphasise the importance of public transport, yet we have no decisions. It really is time to make a decision. The language is marginally different, but all the exports agree: we need proper public transport planning for south-western Sydney; and it's time to start doing things now, not later.

We need to stop the unequal treatment of the people in south-west Sydney. It's very rich for the New South Wales Liberal government to continue to say: 'We have to wait.' 'We have to wait.' 'We have to wait.' Yet the people of my electorate and the surrounding electorates are made to pay the all-too-high price for this lack of proper planning for infrastructure. There is no doubt there is a housing boom in south-west Sydney and many people and many companies are making lots of money; however, very little of that money is flowing back into the electorate for proper infrastructure.

The overbudget light rail that the Liberal government is building down the middle of George Street is a perfect example of how the government is prepared to spend money on very wasteful projects but not spend money on vital projects in south-west Sydney. The WestConnex is another issue.

Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So Labor opposes light rail?

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor doesn't oppose light rail, but you need to get your priorities right and you are just not getting them right.

I'd like to talk a little about hospital and health planning. We have the Northern Beaches Hospital and the Berejiklian state government spending billions and billions of dollars on it. They spent close to $2 billion on the North Shore Hospital, yet all they're prepared to allocate to Campbelltown Hospital, a hospital already behind the eight ball, is $600 million, despite the fact that the population is booming—a young population, a disadvantaged population and a population that lacks other resources. Again, we're behind the eight ball. Why is that the case? Why are they only allocating that amount of money to Campbelltown, and similar amounts to Nepean, when they should be spending more money to provide state-of-the-art services in these rapidly growing electorates? It's inequitable by anyone's standards, yet this is happening time and time again in western and south-western Sydney.

It is time the state and the federal governments stood up for the people of west and south-west Sydney and said, 'Enough is enough.' It is time to provide adequate resources to the electorates of Macarthur, Macquarie, Lindsay and Werriwa. Our school infrastructure is very, very poor, very old and in need of revision. It is time to spend some money on the schools in south-west Sydney. I know the buildings themselves would be unacceptable in the northern and eastern suburbs of Sydney. Yet no money is being spent. I have been approached by several principals about the absolutely degrading circumstances in which they have to teach and that their students have to put up with, and yet nothing is being done. We have had complaints regularly about the lack of funding for our TAFE and the way that it has been decimated by the state and federal governments, yet we still lack any commitment to provide upgrades to Campbelltown Macarthur TAFE. This is something that adds further to the difficulties of young people in the Macarthur region.

So there is inequity and inequality in all of this infrastructure development. It's time for this government to do the right thing. We're sick and tired of the questions and reviews and the so-called processes. To quote Mr Zimmerman's words on the infrastructure plan, the time to do it is now, especially with a new airport coming where we have time and a greenfields site to do the right thing. There's no need for any more studies. We know what needs to happen, and it's time for it to happen.

Cathy O'Toole (Herbert, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to make it perfectly clear and to put the Turnbull government on notice that I'm here to fight for jobs for Townsville. Let's look at the history of unemployment in Townsville. When Labor left government in 2013, the unemployment rate was five per cent. Townsville's unemployment rate was below the state and national average. What is the situation now under the federal coalition government? Under the Abbott-Turnbull governments, unemployment in Townsville has almost doubled. This is the impact that the Abbott-Turnbull governments have had on jobs in Townsville. To be quite frank, this is simply what the coalition government appears to do in regional Queensland: they just cut jobs. Where was the Turnbull government when more than 800 workers lost their jobs at Queensland Nickel? Where was the Turnbull government when 580 meat workers were told that the JBS plant would be on an extensive shutdown? Where was the Turnbull government when 300 jobs were lost from Aurizon? Where was the Turnbull government when the LNP Newman state government cut 398 frontline health workers' jobs? Where was the Turnbull government when 197 local jobs were cut from TAFE? Where was the Turnbull government when our local manufacturing jobs halved and our local manufacturing firms also halved?

The big question is: where is our missing-in-action Prime Minister Turnbull? It appears that Townsville is being forced to play a game of Where's Wally to find our own Prime Minister. Not only am I asking where you were, missing-in-action Prime Minister Turnbull, on these job losses in Townsville; I am also asking why you continue to cut jobs in Townsville. Why have coalition governments cut more than 110 Australian tax office jobs from Townsville? Why have the coalition governments cut 50 Defence staff jobs in the last five years? Why have the coalition governments cut 19 CSIRO jobs from Townsville? Why have the coalition governments cut 30 jobs from regional Queensland customs? Why has this coalition government relocated the 38 Squadron King Air fleet from Townsville to Victoria, which translates to 40 jobs lost, with not a word about replacing these jobs? Why has this coalition government closed the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, which has cut five jobs from Townsville? I might add: these were perfect jobs for veterans transitioning from the defence service into civilian life.

Why has the coalition government cut the national partnership on remote housing, which will effectively remove seven apprenticeship jobs from Palm Island—taking seven jobs from young people where, on Palm Island, the unemployment rate is 27 per cent? Why has the Turnbull government cut $14.8 million from Herbert schools, the equivalent of cutting three teachers from every school? Why has the Turnbull government cut $36 million from James Cook University and $38 million from Central Queensland University, which will only deliver further job losses for our community? It is job cut after job cut after job cut under coalition governments. Then there are the job creation projects that would create hundreds of jobs, except the Prime Minister is also missing in action on delivery.

Where is the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in matching Labor's $100 million commitment on long-term water security for Townsville? And where is the Prime Minister in matching Labor's $200 million commitment towards the construction of hydropower at Burdekin Falls Dam? Where is the Prime Minister on commitments towards funding outdated tourism infrastructure in Northern Australia? Where is Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on commitments towards delivering ongoing blue-collar worker jobs? The question clearly is: where is the missing-in-action Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?

The missing-in-action Prime Minister's lack of support for Labor's commitments has cost Townsville jobs and business confidence. By not matching Labor's $100 million commitment on water security and infrastructure, the local turf industry has almost halved, creating further job losses, including apprenticeships. By not matching Labor's $200 million commitment to construct the hydropower plant at the Burdekin Falls Dam, he is also putting at risk 150 jobs that this project would create. Shame on you, Prime Minister Turnbull, because when times get tough for Townsville, you are nowhere to be seen. And the data speaks for itself. Townsville's unemployment has almost doubled under the Abbott-Turnbull governments. Townsville's unemployment rate when Labor left federal government in 2013, as I said earlier, was lower than both the state and national averages. Now Townsville's unemployment rate is higher than both the state and national average and almost double that of the national average. It is clear that the Turnbull government is setting out to destroy jobs in Townsville. The Turnbull government doesn't care that, two years on, there are still former Queensland Nickel employees who are without a good, secure full-time job. The Turnbull government doesn't care that Townsville is drought-declared on level 3 water restrictions.

The facts that I have presented clearly demonstrate that the Turnbull government simply does not care about jobs for Townsville. And whilst the Turnbull government is cutting jobs to Townsville, it is giving big business a $65 billion tax cut. I will fight for jobs for Townsville. I will fight for blue-collar manufacturing, tourism and public sector jobs for Townsville. Townsville deserves better and we certainly deserve better than the missing-in-action Prime Minister that we now have. Townsville is ready, willing and able to work. We want the jobs and we are hungry for them. But, instead, all we are seeing from the Turnbull government is job cuts and losses. It will only be Labor that will deliver jobs for Townsville because it has only ever been Labor that gives a damn about Townsville and North Queensland. Fourteen times and counting, the Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten has visited Townsville since late 2015—fourteen times and counting! The Leader of the Opposition has demonstrated his commitment to Townsville. He's on the ground and he's talking with the people of Herbert, but once again I ask the question: where is Prime Minister Turnbull?

The people of Townsville have very long and very good memories and they will remember that the Turnbull government delivered job losses and, what's more, you were nowhere to be seen when the Newman state government took a sledgehammer to our city and jobs. The people of Townsville will hold this Prime Minister to account for their job cuts and the people of Townsville will remember that the Turnbull government failed to deliver on jobs, water and energy infrastructure. The people of Townsville will remember who was there for them on jobs, and it was, and is, Labor. My message to the missing-in-action Prime Minister is clear and simple: instead of cutting jobs, how about the Turnbull government cuts the nonsense and gets on with delivering the jobs for Townsville because we want to address our high unemployment rate and we most certainly need to reduce our youth unemployment rate, which is sitting at around 20 per cent.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor's going to support Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2017-18, but we do so because we are a party that will not stand in the way of financing the government's ability to keep governing. However, it's legislation that highlights the incompetence of this government. Confidence in parliamentarians is probably lower than it has been for a long time and certainly lower than it has been in my time. It doesn't matter whether you look at this parliament—the national parliament—or state parliaments, or indeed parliaments across the seas, in other countries: there is generally a perception amongst people out there that our politicians are failing the people they represent. I pick it up in public conversations, I pick it up in political surveys, and it's noticeable in the rise and fall of minor parties.

The reality is that, even here in Australia, major parties have a declining number of committed voters. But it's also true that we see emerging new parties capitalise on that voter dissatisfaction. And it would be fair to say that some of the dissatisfaction and the public judgement made about politicians arises from the conduct of the politicians themselves. However, it's more the case that the dissatisfaction arises from the failure of governments to live up to and deliver on their election promises and the expectations that they establish in the minds of voters when they campaign to get elected. That is abundantly clear with respect to this government, particularly the current Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister came into office with considerable public goodwill. He promised the Australian people good government, and he created a perception that he was a man of principle, in touch with Australians—a man who was going to lead this country into the future. He has proven to be completely out of touch with Australians and he is a Prime Minister with no principles. The reality is that, when you set up great expectations for people and then don't live up to those expectations, the greater is the disappointment. This is a Prime Minister who has failed public expectations with respect to economic, social and environmental policy.

I want to begin with the claim that coalition members make in this place that they are better economic managers than Labor governments. It is a fallacy, and the statistics will show that time and time again. Labor kept Australia from recession during the last global economic downturn, which affected almost every other western country that we do business with. Indeed, most of the other western countries that we generally try to compare ourselves with did much worse than Australia when they were in fact probably in a better position to safeguard themselves from the downturn. That occurred because we had a Labor government in office in this country that established the right policies for the time, and those policies did exactly what they were intended to do and kept us out of recession.

We got out of recession, the coalition won government, and they simply haven't been able to manage their budget since. This year the deficit's going to be $23.6 billion. Gross debt has surpassed half a trillion dollars; I understand that it's probably closer to $600 billion. And it continues to rise. And what is the government's response to try to contain the budget deficit and the budget gross debt? It wants to provide $65 billion in business tax cuts while simultaneously cutting penalty rates, driving down wages, cutting welfare payments to some of the most needy people in Australia, and deserting environmental commitments. During a time when corporate profits are at record highs and wages growth has flatlined to perhaps the slowest since the 1960s, this government still wants to provide tax cuts to business.

This is a time when inequality is also at a 75-year high and getting worse. I want to quote from Oxfam in respect to that because Oxfam have put out a press release which says:

Over the decade since the Global Financial Crisis, the wealth of Australian billionaires has increased by almost 140 per cent to a total of $115.4 billion last year. Yet over the same time, the average wages of ordinary Australians have increased by just 36 per cent and average household wealth grew by 12 per cent.

The richest one per cent of Australians continue to own more wealth than the bottom 70 per cent of Australians combined. While everyday Australians are struggling more and more to get by, the wealthiest groups have grown richer and richer.

The argument about a trickle-down effect that coalition members continuously want to run simply doesn't work. The government claims that corporate tax cuts will result in more jobs and that more jobs will, in turn, mean a stronger economy and the like, but that simply won't arise from the policies of the trickle-down-effect tax cuts that this government wants to impose.

The second argument that the government uses is that the Australian corporate tax rates are too high. A US Congressional Budget Office report from last year that compared the corporate tax rates of the G20 countries disputes that because it shows that Australia's about in the middle of the tax rates chart. Indeed, the average tax rate paid by the American companies who invest here was about 17 per cent. The reality, however, is that the government cannot compare corporate tax rates alone if it doesn't compare all of the combined taxes of federal, state and local jurisdictions in the analysis. That's when you can get a meaningful comparison of tax payments by companies.

It's also been revealed that one in five of Australia's biggest companies have not paid any corporate tax at all in the last three years. Qantas has not paid corporate tax for nearly a decade. Its CEO, however, nearly doubled his income from $12.9 million in 2016 to $24.6 million in 2017. I want to quote what someone said about that. Linda White from the Australian Services Union said:

While Qantas workers have seen pay rises of less than 3 per cent on average over the past decade, we've seen the CEO's salary balloon to almost $100,000 a day—much more than most workers earn in a year. It doesn't trickle down—it trickles up, and the rules need to change to give workers a better deal in this country.

Qantas is not alone. Some of Australia's most prominent businesses pay no tax and have not done so for years. So how can a tax reduction increase investment, job creation or higher wages if no tax is being paid at all? There are no savings to these companies if they're not paying any tax. Therefore, there is no likelihood of additional investment, jobs being created or wages being increased.

We also know from previous disclosures that Australian companies use tax havens and low-tax jurisdictions and transfer pricing schemes to avoid their fair share of taxes. The ability of companies to minimise taxes are indeed endless in this country and, in fact, in most countries. Companies utilise whatever tax measures are available to them to reduce their tax obligations. No tax rate is low enough for tax-avoiding companies. It wouldn't even matter if it were down to 10 per cent; if they could avoid it, they would. Lowering tax rates did not produce the trickle-down effect in the UK or Canada when their tax rates dropped.

The government's largest and most reliable income source is from individuals who pay as they go taxes on their wages or pay withholding tax. The government's own documents show that, in 2016-17, $194 billion was raised from pay-as-you-go tax and withholding tax. That represented almost half of the $406 billion the government collected in taxes. Company tax amounted to $68 billion for the same period—in other words, almost a third of what pay-as-you-go tax was paid by working Australians. If you have stagnant wages, then clearly the government gets less tax. If wages increase, the government gets more tax. If you take away penalty rates, that means less wages, and that means lower taxes for the government. It is not complicated logic to understand that a wages increase represents the government's best chance of ever increasing its tax income, because wage earners pay their tax before they even see it in their pockets.

The other matter that the government would have us believe is that increased or higher tax rates paid by companies minimises the level of foreign investment in this country. Again, that is simply not true. Most of Australia's foreign investment came from countries that already have a lower tax rate than Australia's. It is not the tax rate that influences them to invest their money in Australia, it is other considerations. The statistics will show that, because, by value, 71 per cent of the money that came into this country came in from countries that have a lower tax rate than Australia's, and, by the number of countries, it was 97 per cent.

The other matter is that one-third of the government's proposed taxes, according to one report, would go to just 15 companies. The reality is that the government is mainly proposing to reduce the tax burden for 15 very large companies—in most cases, international companies—who are already doing very, very well, turning over billions of dollars, possibly making billions of dollars of profit and paying minimal tax. What the government is proposing to do is give these companies even more money in their pockets, when their years of activity in this country have shown that they are not likely to pass those profits on to employees.

I want to finish off on the matter that was debated in this House this week at length, which again highlights how this government is captive to big business. I refer to the private health insurance increases that were announced recently. We know that private health insurance has increased by 27 per cent over the last five years under this government. We also know that the CPI has been less than 10 per cent. We know that private health insurance is becoming increasingly unaffordable to most Australians. For many Australians, private health insurance costs, of around $4,500 a year, now represent about 10 per cent of their incomes. We also know that in the last three months of last year alone 12,000 people dropped out of health cover, with most of them doing so because they believed that it does not represent value for money anymore—and I suspect in some cases they simply couldn't afford it. Yet when the Labor Party announced a policy of a two per cent cap for two years, the government criticised that policy, clearly supporting, again, big business in this country—businesses that have made considerable profits, $1.8 billion in total last year, on the backs of struggling Australian families who are struggling simply to pay their private health insurance.

On every measure, whether it's climate change initiatives, university funding, school funding, TAFE funding, aged-care services, health and hospital care, science funding, environmental programs, infrastructure funding, the NBN rollout or foreign aid—and I could go on—on every single measure that one assesses this government's performance against, this is a government that has failed to meet the expectations of Australian people. It has not only failed to deliver and failed to meet those expectations; it is a government that has betrayed the trust and the confidence that the Australian people had placed in it.

Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise proudly to make a contribution on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2017-2018. I want to talk about a number of issues today, but I'll start with a couple of local issues that are very close to the hearts of my constituents in Shortland. These issues are road safety, after what has been a terrible summer, and the fundamentally important role of surf lifesaving clubs in Shortland and in all communities around Australia.

All of us would be aware of the appalling road statistics over the summer and last year. They make for grim reading. In the region I represent, 74 people died on the road last year, an increase of 22 per cent compared to the previous two years. This is a truly alarming statistic. Hundreds if not thousands of the victims' families and friends in local communities will be devastated by these senseless deaths. A central role the Commonwealth can play is to support local governments to enhance road safety. It is therefore unconscionable that one of the first acts of the coalition government was to cut $1 billion in Commonwealth assistance to local governments. That, in turn, forced councils to cut spending on roads, which are often their largest budget item.

Huge cuts to funding such as these have had an impact in the real world. In our local communities, some Liberal and National MPs who purport to represent regional Australia should hang their heads in shame after voting for these cuts. One of the most successful programs in reducing fatalities is the Black Spot Program. The coalition has totally neglected this program. In the first three budgets, they committed $220 million to this program. However, budget documents show they have only spent $105 million, less than half what they promised. Not properly funding an initiative which works after committing to do so is so typical of this government. Labor's approach to road safety is in stark contrast to the coalition's. Our approach to combatting the shocking road toll involves building better roads, thoroughly training learner drivers and manufacturing safer vehicles. We have a proud legacy regarding road safety. We more than doubled the Commonwealth's road budget, we launched the keys2drive program for learner drivers, and we introducing tougher penalties for importers and Australian companies who make unsafe trailers and caravans.

They are just a few examples of what a government committed to enhancing road safety can achieve, and, quite frankly, it appals me when those on the other side brag about cutting and attacking the Safe Rates program. This program was designed to stop the race to the bottom amongst truck drivers that compelled them to cut corners and drive for too long, therefore leading to greater fatigue, which leads to a greater number of accidents. In order to save money and compete, they cut corners by not making the necessary maintenance on their vehicles. This was a race to the bottom that Safe Rates was designed to counter. When those opposite brag about abolishing Safe Rates, they are bragging about making truck drivers drive longer and harder and making our roads less safe. I don't say that lightly, because that's a big claim. But, if you look at the foundations of Safe Rates, that is exactly what they are doing.

This is also a time to reflect on the summer just gone. The electorate of Shortland is home to some of the finest beaches in Australia or, indeed, around the world. All of us in this place who represent coastal communities are rightly proud of our beaches. They are a feature of who we are and the way we live our lives. Crucial to our love of the beach is the role of surf lifesaving clubs and the role that surf lifesavers play in contributing to our communities and keeping us safe at the beach. My local surf clubs have had a very hectic start to the year. Indeed, in just two days in early January, surf lifesavers rescued 70 people from the surf at Redhead Beach alone. There were actually 103 rescues in the first two weeks of January at Redhead Beach, compared to just four in the first fortnight last year. This demonstrates just how vital our lifesavers are and how important it is for all of us to be conscious of water safety. I will take this opportunity to recognise the five surf lifesaving clubs in my electorate: Redhead, Swansea Belmont, Caves Beach, Catherine Hill Bay and The Lakes. I pay tribute to the thousands of community minded volunteers who make up these clubs. Thank you for keeping us safe over summer and in the months ahead.

This bill gives me an opportunity to reflect on some of the great priorities that the people of Shortland have. There can be no greater priority than the economic advancement of our people. I have the honour of representing the community of Windale. It is a fine community that, too often, has been accused and maligned just because it happens to be the poorest community in all of New South Wales. It faces grave challenges, like the rest of my electorate. It faces challenges of economic isolation, a failure to invest in education and a failure to provide the necessary support for families and seniors. And all this is driven by the failure of successive governments to invest in the community.

There can be no greater example of this than the government's cut to needs-based funding of schools in their mislabelled 'Gonski 2.0', a policy that was an attack on the needs-based funding model—a policy that cut funding to my schools. Schools in Shortland have suffered an $18 million cut in this year alone because of this government's breach of its promise to implement the full Gonski funding model. This is having a concrete impact, because the early years of needs-based funding were having a great impact in my community. St Pius X Primary School in Windale is the poorest school in all of New South Wales. Their early-years Gonski funding allowed them to put on two more teachers for a school of only 50 students. Imagine that—two more teachers in a school of 50! This was having great results. Warners Bay High School was allocating its early-years funding to additional literacy and numeracy teachers, aiming to lift the literacy and numeracy of the lowest-performing 25 per cent of students so that they didn't fall behind in years 7 and 8 and then have to catch up in years 9, 10, 11 and 12, which is very hard to do. Another school—Lake Munmorah Public School—had invested its money in improving teacher quality through adopting cutting-edge teacher training programs, which were having a direct impact on outcomes in that school. I could go on. This has all been placed in jeopardy because of this government's failure to honour its promise of the 2013 election to implement the full needs-based funding, a failure that has meant an $18 million cut to schools in my electorate in one year alone.

Another attack on education is the higher education funding model announced by the government. This is a funding model that places more and more pressure on my local university, the University of Newcastle—a fine institution. It's probably the best engineering university in Australia, based on global rankings, and it's a university that trains more Indigenous doctors than the rest of the nation combined. It trained the first Indigenous surgeon. This is a uni where 50 per cent of students do not come through the traditional HSC path. Some are later in life retrainees from our manufacturing and mining industries. Often they're people who've had to leave school for a variety of reasons and have completed the HSC through TAFE. These are students that are under attack by this government's policy of increasing debt, increasing the interest rate applying to those debts and requiring those debts to be repaid at a lower threshold. International studies have shown that increasing debt has a greater impact on part-time students and mature age students because they have fewer years to repay those debts. As a university where 50 per cent of students have come from non-traditional paths, my university is under direct attack from this government's higher education changes—more so than most.

I will turn now to the government's ridiculous obsession with lowering the corporate tax rate for big business. This $65 billion tax cut imperils the government's budget. It is a policy looking for a justification, because we've seen record profits around the nation this half-yearly reporting season. In the last few years, profits have increased by 20 per cent, but wages have only gone up by two per cent. So I have zero confidence that a corporate tax cut that increases the profits of large corporations will suddenly lead to higher wage growth. The evidence is just not there. Conventional neoclassical economic theory might posit that. Economic pointy-heads might argue for that. But if you look at the empirical evidence, profits have been increasing at a great rate since 2011 but wages have not kept up, so why would increasing profits automatically lead to higher wages?

This demonstrates the government's obsession with rewarding their mates. They perpetuate a form of class war. They accuse the Labor Party of being class warriors, but there are no greater class warriors than the Liberal-National coalition. They're performing a class war on behalf of their allies at the top end of town. That $65 billion could be spent on so many more deserving projects, whether it's the full implementation of the needs-based schools model; restoring money to higher education; restoring the money that has been cut out of TAFE, which has seen $1.5 billion of cuts by this government; or increasing Newstart to make it genuinely liveable. These are all projects that are much more worthy than corporate tax cuts that will not lead to higher wages for workers in my community.

The other myth peddled by the spruikers of this tax cut is that we need this to compete for footloose foreign capital—that if we don't lower our tax rate we will not attract foreign capital; we'll be uncompetitive. Any economist worth their salt will say that there are a multitude of factors that drive investment decisions, and profit is one of many factors. Other factors include whether the market is large enough to make money, whether it's an innovative place where they can have the real advantages of locating their manufacturing or service facility, whether there's a skilled workforce and whether it's close to other markets. For many years, the United States has had a higher headline corporate tax rate than Australia, but that hasn't stopped Australian companies investing in the United States, because that's where the markets are.

I have proudly voted against these corporate tax cuts—corporate tax cuts that are unaffordable and that have blown a hole in the budget, all to reward the Prime Minister's mates. Governing is about choice, and this is a false choice. It is a poor choice to cut the corporate tax rate while cutting funding to education and hospitals.

There is a much greater challenge that this government should be dealing with: the rise of insecure work. More and more Australians don't know whether they will have the same job in a year's time, or even in a month's time. They are working insecure jobs with very little rights. Often they hold multiple jobs. They could be working in casual jobs, where they could be laid off at the stroke of a pen, where they don't get annual leave, where they don't get long service leave or where they don't get the basic security to be able to purchase a home or take a holiday. They could be part-time workers looking for more work. The level of underemployment in this country is at a very high level. These are workers who either can't find work or want more work and are unable to find it. It all points to an insecure workforce that is leading to stagnating wages, which is reducing buying power in our economy—buying power that we desperately need if we are to stimulate the economy. While the headline unemployment figures might be relatively rosy, the truth underlying them is very worrying and it's something that this government should be focused on. Job insecurity means that families can't plan and can't live their lives with any modicum of security; they live from pay cheque to pay cheque. They live in a world where they are constantly insecure, with all of the accompanying material and psychological impacts of that.

We have a big year ahead. Politics seems to be moving faster and faster, and 2018 is clearly following that trend. Governing is about priorities. Labor's priorities are investing in education, health, secure jobs and giving a dignified retirement to the seniors in our community, whereas the interests on the other side, the choices that this government demonstrates, are in corporate tax cuts that are unjustified and unaffordable; and silly culture wars, whether it's the culture war of coal versus renewables or the culture war around weakening protections in the Racial Discrimination Act. This all points to a government with poor priorities that is rotting from the top and will soon need to be replaced.

Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am appreciative of the opportunity to reflect on, and to pass on some information about, how we're going in the northern capital of Australia. It has been quite some time since a member of the government, a minister, has been to Darwin, so here's a bit of a heads-up on what's happening in the capital of the north. We've got a huge project that many members would have heard of called the Ichthys INPEX project. It's a big gas project that will literally keep the lights on in Japan. It's been in the construction phase for many years now, and this year it's winding down out of that construction phase. About 9,000 people are working on that project at the moment, but that number will decrease to an operational level of just 300—such is the level of automation these days.

For our relatively small capital city, this will be a big hit to our population. Of course, that becomes problematic for us because, whenever we drop in population, the estimated resident population also drops, which leads to a drop in our GST revenue that we depend on so much to provide services to a population that is spread over a massive land mass—one-sixth of the Australian continent. So, out of those 9,000 people, we are going to lose 3,000 to 3,500 locals. Those people will be new entries progressively throughout the year onto the job market in the Northern Territory.

I do not intend for this to be a political or partisan rant, but I'll just stick to the facts. The $5 billion NAIF has not spent a dollar in the Northern Territory. No job-producing projects have been funded under the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. That's why we've launched a Senate inquiry into the NAIF to see what's going wrong, what can be fixed et cetera. We were hoping that that $5 billion facility that the government have been talking about for almost three years now would have had some projects come online so that we don't lose those INPEX workers interstate or to the unemployment lines. Unfortunately, not a dollar has been spent.

The other thing we were hoping is that, like other jurisdictions, like Townsville or Launceston, our City Deal would be signed—confirmed—but it's been nine months. We were hoping that it would be signed so that, again, job-producing projects could start and we could then have those jobs for Territorians and keep our GST funding, which is so essential to providing services. As we heard this week, we're not closing the gap in the Northern Territory in so many ways and, like everyone else in Australia, we want jobs, apprenticeships and work for our kids when they leave school. However, so far, on those two counts, we're still waiting.

To give you an understanding of the size of the hit to our economy, the INPEX project is one of the biggest construction projects in the world and it's been pumping about $10 billion a year through the economy. That hasn't spread across the economy. Some people have done very well; some people have been adversely affected. But that is a large amount of money going into the economy year after year during this project and, for the relatively small revenue base that we do have, it's been very important.

To put that in context, the NT government's infrastructure cash this financial year, which is the biggest infrastructure spend in the Northern Territory's history, is $1.75 billion. As I said, it's a small revenue base for the Northern Territory government to work with; however, that is the biggest infrastructure spend in the Territory's history, so the loss of that INPEX project, moving out of construction and into operation, is going to be a big hit. That's why we're hoping for some, or any, commitment by the Commonwealth to our northern capital and the Northern Territory.

Tourism is also increasingly important as a sustainable source of economy-building development. The Northern Territory government yesterday announced $103 million as a stimulus package for the tourism industry. That is very important. We're trying to grow the Chinese market, so it's great that that commitment has been made by the Northern Territory government, which has put up $100 million of investment, primarily into the Darwin CBD. We are hoping through that city deal process that that will be met by the Commonwealth. The new minister, Minister Fletcher, has said he will come up in early March but has already ruled out signing the deal, which is a shame to say the least. What would be preferable is, should the Northern Territory government have all their ducks in a line and be ready—which I'm sure they will be by the time he comes up in early March—if he meets with the Lord Mayor of Darwin, Kon Vatskalis, and the Northern Territory government and simply lets us get started, signs the deal and makes sure that his boss, the Prime Minister, is good to his word. He promised the people of Darwin, Palmerston and the Top End that this city deal would bring prosperity and jobs, so it's about time that we signed and sealed that deal so that we can get those projects started.

Earlier today, I talked about the tourism campaign. As I said, tourism a very important part of our economy, employing 17,000 Territorians, either directly or indirectly. One of the current initiatives—and I give credit to Tourism Australia for this—is they are really going after the US tourism market. In the way that Crocodile Dundee captured the imaginations of thousands and thousands of Americans in the past, we're hoping that there can be some goodwill and also smarts provided by some investors out there to invest in another Dundee film. Bring back Dundee! I'll just wrap up by encouraging everyone to jump onto the NT News website, where they have started the Bring Back Dundee campaign, and sign that petition. I think another Dundee film would be good for the country.

Mr Byrne interjecting—

I could play the lead. Chris Hemsworth has been part of the ads. I think, on behalf of most Territory blokes, we're happy that he is a good representative of us. He is Thor. He did well in the ads. We have so much talent. We have so many amazing scenic places in the Top End that that film would be a cracker. Jump onto the NT News website and sign the petition to bring back Dundee. We would appreciate that. Warren Snowdon may be having a cameo in there somewhere! It's unsure. Maybe he could be a crocodile-attack victim! But that is yet to be confirmed. I don't want to mislead the House.

I will make a final plea to the government: there are a number of ways that you can assist us and a number of ways that have already been committed to by the government to assist us with job-producing projects that will assist us as we transition out of the construction phase on the INPEX project into operation.

Debate interrupted.