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

This government is divided, unstable and illegitimate. They seem very much focused on fighting amongst themselves, and they're a chaos and a rabble, but they seem to agree on one thing and one thing only—sorry, besides attacks on trade unions who represent workers in the workplace. They seem absolutely committed to cuts to education, to health and to penalty rates, and they seem to be focused on making sure that working-class and middle-class people don't get access to the kind of services they need. In the last couple of weeks, the Prime Minister, the third one in the last five years, has undertaken a valiant attempt to hide from the previous five years. Paul Bongiorno, a respected journalist, describes it as follows:

The new man at the helm is counting on voter amnesia. He insists "the curtain has come down on that Muppet Show".

It's an extraordinary attempt by this government to just put aside the previous budgets of the then Treasurer, the former member for North Sydney—smoking, joking Joe, as he was on that occasion—and the cuts, as a result of the Commission of Audit, to education, to health, to social security and to a whole range of areas. It's those things which I'm most aggrieved by with this government. We've seen surgeries delayed, we've seen nurse and doctor numbers decline, and we've seen emergency departments under increasing pressure with increasing delays as a result of the $160 million in cuts to public hospitals in my home state of Queensland from 2017 to 2020. That's equivalent to 240,000 emergency department visits, 44,000 cataract extractions, 6,150 knee replacements and 26,500 births.

It has impact locally in my electorate, and that's why I'm so aggrieved. Locally, in my electorate, I want to commend the Ipswich and West Moreton health and hospital services for the work they do. I was recently at the awards night at the North Ipswich railway museum to see the great work that doctors, nurses and other people, including the Queensland Police Service, undertake in the delivery of essential services. The relationship and coordination of essential services like the Queensland Police Service and the health and hospital services are to be commended. But it's quite clear that this government, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, has cut $4.71 million from local public hospitals in my area, including $4.53 million from the Ipswich Hospital. This is the most critical hospital. In the same way the Toowoomba base hospital is really important in the Darling Downs region, the Ipswich general hospital is really critical to people who live in the West Moreton region. There has been a cut of $80,000 to the Esk Hospital, an important hospital up in the Somerset region. In the north, $100,000 has been cut from the Kilcoy Hospital. Every dollar cut from public hospitals is a dollar cut from sick and vulnerable patients. In these country communities in my electorate, people rely on these public hospitals to provide health care and to make sure people get the services they need. Access, as Labor always says, to good health services should not be determined by your credit card but by your Medicare card.

I was pleased recently to catch up with my good friend and mentor Bill Hayden, the former opposition leader, on Sunday. I was pleased to see him in good health and have some of his friends and colleagues commend him, because we would not have had Medicare in this country without Bill Hayden. He was the one who brought in Medibank during the Whitlam Labor government. It is really crucial that that sort of universal healthcare be maintained, and this government doesn't seem to be as committed as it ought to be.

Locally in my electorate there's another issue which is irritating people enormously, and that's aged care. The release of the latest data on home care packages from this government revealed 108,000 older Australians are languishing in the waiting list for home care. I experience this regularly as constituents come and see me or I visit some of them in their homes. That number includes about 88,000 older Australians with high needs, many of them living with dementia, who are being looked after by churches, charities, family members and friends. I was really cross with the current government because they delayed the release of the data in relation to this matter for a long time. We had to wait for it to be released.

The government can find billions of dollars in tax cuts for big banks, yet the budget that was handed down for aged care, which has an impact nationally as well as locally in my electorate, was exposed as a cruel hoax for older Australians. The waiting list grew by almost 4,000 older Australians in three months, but there were only 3,500 new home care packages a year committed to in the budget. Where are these coming from? They came from residential aged care. In my electorate people can wait for many months for an ACAT assessment. They then have to wait many months to get the level of package that they need. These are people who've worked their entire lives and want to settle into retirement, and they need a decent level of care and a decent standard of living. They need a little assistance. That might be Commonwealth Home Support Program assistance, sometimes Meals on Wheels, or home care—help with day-to-day tasks such as cleaning, cooking and laundry, or personal care such as dressing, grooming and showering. All those things are more difficult the older we get. These people deserve dignity in their retirement and they're simply not getting it from this government.

This government really needs to have a look at the funding shortfall in the number of aged-care packages. There are people in my electorate, older people in Ipswich and the Somerset and Karana Downs regions, who are assessed as needing a level 4 package and contact My Aged Care only to be told that no funding is available for their appropriate level of home care package. They're told they'll go on the waiting list and wait another year or two. That is why the government needs to spend more money and put more resources into this area. Waiting for assistance to wash yourself daily, clean your home and cook your meals, or waiting for assistance to install safety aids that could help save your life and certainly would improve your lifestyle, is simply unacceptable. We need policies in this country to create an age-friendly nation and to deal with the growing challenges of dementia. We need to treble our aged-care workforce. But this government seems to be putting it on the never-never.

On top of that, locally I'm seeing a huge increase in the waiting times for people to receive a pension, particularly the age pension. The median processing time for age pension payments has increased from 36 days to 49 days in the past year. In my experience, it's much longer in my electorate. I've come across people in Kilcoy who've told me that they have been waiting up to six months. We've had people in Ipswich who've been waiting four or five. In one case we dealt with in my office it was seven months—seven months! These are retirees living off their savings and the charity of their friends and family while they wait for their pension to come through.

Providing income support is a very complex task, we know. It requires knowledge and experience. That's why Centrelink needs permanent full-time staff with familiarity and experience to manage applications and payments, to recognise when something is taking a long time to process and make the necessary decisions to expedite a person's claim. In this year's budget this government axed 1,180 jobs from Centrelink, which has contributed to the blowout in age pension processing times. The then Treasurer, now Prime Minister, announced a further cut of 1,280 jobs from Centrelink. And 1,250 jobs have been outsourced to labour hire. The Prime Minister will continue the Centrelink job cuts that he started as Treasurer. Piece by piece, Public Service jobs will be taken from experienced personnel and given to the highest bidder. Morale at Centrelink is at an all-time low.

We've also seen huge blowouts in the number of people whose phone calls go unanswered. In the last year, up to 55 million phone calls have not been answered. While delivering the budget in 2017, the Treasurer, now Prime Minister, said:

We must choose to guarantee the essential services that Australians rely on.

You know what? We're still waiting for that. All of this was done, by the way, to attend to the so-called debt and deficit disaster. Net debt for this year, 2018-19, is double what it was when the Liberals came to power: $175 billion compared to $350 billion. Under the Liberals, gross debt has crashed through more than half a trillion dollars for the first time in our country's history and remains well above this level for the next decade: $533.9 billion as of 7 September 2018 and $280 billion in September 2013. Both of these kinds of debts will grow quicker per month under the Liberals than under us when we had a global financial crisis to deal with. So much for the government delivering a budget surplus in the first year and every year thereafter. We're still waiting for this. This is simply not good enough. The government must govern better.