Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is our opportunity on this side here to speak about the appropriation bills and, of course, because of the long custom and tradition, we won't be holding up the appropriation bills but it does give colleagues the opportunity to address some of the real issues in the budget that was handed down from that dispatch box two weeks ago today. Deputy Speaker Gillespie, as you know, this is an eight-year-old government. It has handed down now eight budgets. By the time of the next election, it will be asking for 12 years, which is longer than Prime Minister Howard had in office.

One of the remarkable features of the budget that was handed down two weeks ago—the government's eighth budget—was that its primary purpose seemed to be to distract the Australian people from the failures of the first seven budgets. We saw, when it came to investment in mental health or investment in aged care or some of the other areas that have been crying out for this government to do something about for much of the last eight long years, the government finally came to the table with some investment in some of these areas.

If this government genuinely cared about some of the appropriations in this bill, if the government genuinely cared about aged care or child care or some of these other investments, they would have done something about them in the last eight years. In many instances—take skills and training, for example—the government has gone out of its way to make things worse. Even after some of these investments in skills and training, Australia still has 150,000 fewer apprentices than when the government came to office. If you think about aged care, some of the investment in aged care comes after the current Prime Minister, when he was Treasurer, putting out press releases claiming almost $2 billion in savings from the aged-care system, which has been part of the problem that the government now says they are uniquely placed to address.

So many of these problems that the government now says, for political reasons, they want to do something about are problems of their own making, messes of their own making and they now want the Australian people to think, having been the architect of eight years of under-investment in some of these key areas, that all of a sudden the same government, the same characters, can clean up that mess. I think that is an unreasonable request from the government.

The tragedy of this budget that was handed down two weeks ago is that after the Australian people rose to the occasion during COVID-19 this government fell back into its old habits. We see that in the way that taxpayer money is being used not to try and get good economic outcomes or good outcomes for real people and real communities like those that we represent in this place but instead to try and plug the government's political gaps. It is going back into the old habits of slush funds, waste, rorts and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. There were something like 21 different slush funds in the budget two Tuesdays ago—$9½ billion in decisions taken but not announced—to dole out on the eve of an election campaign. We know how this government goes about the wasting and the rorting of taxpayer money, because we've seen what's happened with sports rorts, with dodgy land deals, with community safety rorts and with a billion dollars spent on government advertising and all that money spent on marketing. This is how the government goes about managing and mismanaging taxpayers' money.

This was a budget of marketing and mismanagement and missed opportunities. It was a budget that delivered generational debt without a generational dividend. What it failed to recognise is that the recovery we are in now from the deepest recession in almost 100 years, while welcome, is a tribute not to the government but to the Australian people, who did the right thing by each other to limit the spread of this virus. So the recovery is underway, and that's a good thing, but it's patchy. It's patchy in predictable ways. In the labour market we saw last Thursday the jobs figures for April. There were 30,600 jobs lost in the month of April, the first full month after those opposite cut JobKeeper. There were 30,600 fewer jobs in April than in March. That shows just how patchy this recovery is. Almost two million people still can't find a job or enough hours to support their loved ones. So the recovery is patchy, but it's also hostage to the Prime Minister's incompetence when it comes to vaccinations and to quarantine. It says everything about this Prime Minister's unwillingness to take responsibility for things that are part of his job description—quarantine and vaccination rollout—in the budget. There was no new money for new facilities and nothing to fix the mess that the Prime Minister has made of the vaccination program. He flew into Queensland, into my home state, last week, supposedly to sell the budget. He said Toowoomba was a desert, which was news to farmers on some of the best agricultural land on the planet. He said that Toowoomba didn't have a health system or a hospital. He said that they didn't have a functioning airport. Toowoomba's got a functioning airport and a great hospital, and it sits amongst some of the best prime agricultural land not just in Australia but, I'm assuming, around the world. I think that general area speaks volumes. He's in such a rush to wash his hands of quarantine and also of vaccinations that he came in and said that about the proposal that has been made about the Toowoomba facility.

As I said earlier, this budget was designed to deal with political objectives and not economic objectives, with political problems, not economic challenges that have grown over the last eight years of economic mismanagement. If you don't want to take the word of this side of House about those failures, just look at the government's own numbers in their own budget. The forecasts in their own budget tell a stunning story—a stunning admission of failure—that, even after racking up a trillion dollars in debt and even after a hundred billion dollars in new spending two Tuesdays ago, the government's own budget still says growth will go back to below trend, business investment will go back to being weak and participation in the workforce will fall further, even after the implementation of the government's childcare package. It is a pretty damning indictment of a budget like this that, with money spraying around in all directions and all kinds of marketing and spin and all the rest of it, if you look at the numbers in the government's own budget, they say growth will go back to less than we need, participation will fall and business investment will be weak. All of these problems that we had in the economy even before COVID-19 are to return, despite all of this money that is spraying around.

I think where this is most damning and most stark is when it comes to wages. It beggars belief that the government can spend $100 billion and rack up $1 trillion in debt and, at the end of that, workers will have gone backwards, but that's what the government's own budget says will happen—a cut in real wages in the government's own budget. This is the thanks that the Australian people get for everything they've done to keep the wheels of the economy turning during this pandemic, to do the right thing by each other, to look out for each other and to look after each other. The government says that the thanks they get for that is a cut in their real wages, after eight years of penalty rate cuts and the government trying to make work less secure—not as an accidental outcome but as a deliberate design feature, as the former finance minister said of the government's economic policy agenda. The wages figures in here are a real reminder that, when the government say that their economic policy is succeeding, what they really mean is that deliberate design feature to keep wages screwed down so that ordinary working people don't get a slice of the action in this recovery. That's what they mean when they say that their plan is working.

Beyond wages, beyond the political fixes, beyond the waste and mismanagement, beyond the trillion dollars in debt, I think the other thing that's really noticeable about this budget is that there is a deficit of vision, a failure to understand the opportunity before this country, a failure to understand that the foundation that the Australian people have built together—to make sure that we can come out of this pandemic, that the economy can begin to recover and the labour market can begin to recover—requires the government to understand the gravity and the opportunity of this moment. They have failed to do that. We know that because so much of this budget is about plugging the holes over the next year or 18 months, trying to solve those political problems but failing to understand the moment, failing to understand that the country is crying out for a bit of vision, a bit of a long-term plan about how we make this economy stronger but also more inclusive and more sustainable so that ordinary working people get a slice of the action as the economy recovers, so that working people in this country aren't just talking about trying to get by, but we can help them to get ahead.

What is in this budget for the people of this country who want to get ahead? We've had two weeks now to go through it. We know about all the spending. We know about all the pork-barrelling. We know about all the political fixes. But still that question remains for the Australian people, and it's not an unreasonable question that they ask. What is this government's plan, not just to grow the economy but to grow the economy in the right way into the future as well? That deficit of vision and ambition is something that has characterised the last eight years of this government as well. The Australian people deserved much better than the budget that they got two Tuesdays ago. After all that they've been through, they deserve better than real wage cuts. They deserve better than that deficit of vision. They deserve better than all of those political fixes cobbled together. They deserve better than all that marketing, all that mismanagement and all those missed opportunities in the budget. I think one of the reasons why the Australian people have not gone out of their way to say how great this budget is, one of the reasons why we're not largely talking about it in public at the moment, is that the Australian people have become wary of a government that makes these big announcements and pats itself on the back and tells itself how good it is, but, at the end of the day, the delivery is lacking. That, I fear, is what we're going to see in the aftermath of this budget as well. I move the second reading amendment that has been circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes:

(1) the 2021 Budget includes nearly $100 billion in new spending and racks up one trillion dollars in debt, but still delivers a real wage cut for Australian workers;

(2) after eight long years of cuts to key services, increasing job insecurity, stagnant wages growth, weak business investment, weak productivity, waste and rorts, this Budget was designed to get through an election rather than outline a vision for Australia; and

(3) that the 2021 Budget is a missed opportunity to shape a better, stronger post-pandemic Australia where no one is held back and no one is left behind".

Obviously we're not going to hold up the appropriations bill, but we should see it not just in the light of just of the holes in the budget that was handed down two weeks ago but in the context of those eight years of missed opportunities, mismanagement, political fixes and all the rest of it.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment.

Dave Sharma (Wentworth, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia has been through a lot in the past year. We've been through a once-in-a-century pandemic, which tragically cost the lives of 910 of our fellow citizens; we've been through lockdowns; we've been through social distancing; we've been through personal hygiene measures that have had no precedent in the modern era in Australia; we've had weddings cancelled; we've had attendees at funerals limited; we've had significant days of national occasion, such as Anzac Day, cancelled or restricted; we've had people unable to visit their elderly or disabled relatives in care facilities; and we've had families cut off from one another, both interstate and overseas.

Undoubtedly this COVID-19 pandemic has also had a big impact not just on our lifestyles but also on our economy. At the height of the pandemic, we had 3½ million Australians on JobKeeper. In April last year 1.3 million Australians either had lost their jobs or had their hours reduced to zero, and Treasury feared that unemployment could reach 15 per cent and that our economy could contract more than 20 per cent. It was a time of great fear and great uncertainty in Australia and around the world. But, one year later, Australia is emerging exceptionally well from this COVID induced economic crisis.

Unemployment is now down to 5.6 per cent. There are more Australians in work now, at over 13 million, than there were before this pandemic first hit. Consumer sentiment is at its highest level in 11 years, and business confidence is also at record highs. Over 3½ million Australians have now received their first COVID-19 vaccination, and, by the end of this year—by Christmas—everyone who wishes to receive the COVID-19 vaccination should receive at least their first dose. There has only been one death from COVID-19 in Australia so far this year, 2021. The travel bubble with New Zealand is open. In short, our economy is roaring back to life. As Steven Kennedy, the Secretary to the Department of the Treasury, said last week:

Australia's economic recovery from the pandemic has been stronger than we expected, stronger than we have seen from any downturn in recent history and ahead of any major advanced economy …

This budget, through the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022 and related bills, maps our continued pathway out of this COVID-19 recession.

The world has been through an economic crisis unseen in this generation. We have seen a global contraction of around 4½ per cent, with many major economies contracting by more than this. But in Australia we are starting from a strong position. Our economy has only contracted 2.5 per cent. Our employment numbers are already above where they were before the pandemic struck. Last month, the month that JobKeeper ended, we saw unemployment figures come down yet again. We've retained our AAA credit rating and we've got low net public debt. These appropriation bills will help secure Australia's economic recovery. They'll help create more jobs, they'll help protect our health, and they'll help guarantee our essential services.

These appropriation bills support household incomes through the extension of the low and middle income tax offset. Around 10 million low and middle income taxpayers across Australia will receive up to $1,080 per year if they're individuals or up to $2,160 if they're couples. In Wentworth, in my own electorate, this will benefit up to 60,000 taxpayers. These appropriation bills are also supporting small and medium businesses to invest and grow—important, because eight out of 10 jobs are in the private sector.

We've extended the expanded instant asset write-off, which means that over 99 per cent of businesses employing over 11 million workers altogether can write off in full the value of any eligible asset they purchase. This has seen spending on machinery and equipment increase at its fastest rate in nearly seven years. So whether it's for a new ute for a tradesperson, a new coffee machine for a barista or new hairdressing equipment for a salon, new small businesses can invest and fully write off the value of these purchases.

We're also extending our small business loan scheme, which has already helped more than 40,000 businesses access low-cost finance, and extending the loss carry-back provisions for a further 12 months. All up, some 33,000 small businesses in my own electorate of Wentworth are eligible for the expanded instant asset write-off or the loss carry-back provisions.

These appropriation bills also help improve access to child care by allocating an additional $1.7 billion to support an increase in the affordability of child care. Up to 250,000 families across Australia will be better off by an average of $2,200 per year. This will give parents, and especially working mothers, the choice to take on extra work without being penalised, supporting increased labour force participation and giving working families greater choice.

These appropriations bills are also supporting innovation. They recognise that the nature of value creation is changing and that digital infrastructure and digital skills will be critical for the competitiveness of our economy in the future. We're investing $1.2 billion in our Digital Economy Strategy, we're expanding our cybersecurity innovation fund, we're undertaking a digital skills cadetship trial and we're continuing record spending on our R & D tax incentive. As a new measure we're also launching a new patent box, allowing income earned from new patents to be taxed at a concessional rate of only 17 per cent. Initially, this will apply to patents in the medical and biotech sectors, but we will be consulting on expanding it to the clean energy sector as well. We're also simplifying our treatment of employee share ownership schemes to align with the rest of the world and allow early-stage and start-up businesses to reward their employees in this well recognised fashion without paying a tax penalty.

This budget also has important steps to boost home ownership. We're helping another 10,000 first-home buyers to buy a new home with only a five per cent deposit through our First Home Loan Deposit Scheme. We're allowing people to save more through their super for their first home by increasing the amount that can be released under the First Home Super Saver Scheme from $30,000 to $50,000. We're also supporting single parents to purchase a home with a two per cent deposit under the Family Home Guarantee. This budget also guarantees our essential services. We're looking after our senior Australians by investing $17.7 billion in new funding to improve the quality and safety of aged care in response to the recommendations of the aged-care royal commission. This will increase the time nurses and carers are required to spend with residents. It will provide an additional payment of $10 per resident per day to enhance the viability of the aged-care sector. It will provide for new training places for personal carers and retention bonuses to keep more nurses in aged care. It will also increase to 275,000 the number of new home-care packages available.

This budget will also continue the trend of listing more medicines on the PBS. Since coming to government, we've listed more than 2,600 medicines on the PBS, or an average of almost one per day. In this budget we have measures to list medicines to treat breast cancer, lung cancer, severe osteoporosis, asthma and migraines. In last year alone there were 1.5 million free or subsidised medicines that were delivered in Wentworth, my own electorate, through the PBS, and this number will grow in the years ahead. We're also allocating $13.2 billion over four years to meet the needs of people with disability through increased funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We're providing more funding for mental health services, including an expanded headspace network, increased funding for the treatment of eating disorders and greater access to psychiatrists and psychologists through Medicare, plus establishing a new national suicide prevention office. We've nearly doubled spending on mental health since coming to office, and this is an area that will continue to remain a focal point of this government.

These appropriations bills recognise we live in a more uncertain world, where Australia's strategic environment beyond our borders is changing and where we face new challenges to our sovereignty and our freedom of action within Australia. This budget continues our record investment of $270 billion over 10 years to engage in a once-in-a-generation upgrade of our defence capabilities, and it also provides an additional $1.9 billion over the next decade to strengthen our national security, law enforcement and intelligence agencies to deal with the threats of foreign interference here in Australia. The budget continues to allocate money to look after our environment, with $480 million in new funding including $100 million to protect our oceans. It will provide money to upgrade our recycling capabilities and reduce the waste that's being sent to landfill in Australia. It will support major energy storage projects like the Battery of the Nation and Snowy 2.0. It will also invest a further $1.6 billion to fund priority technologies, including clean hydrogen and energy storage, to continue Australia's pathway and, indeed, accelerate our pathway to net zero emissions.

This budget also contains important measures to improve the safety of women. One in four women in Australia experience violence from a current or former partner, and this number is unacceptably high. This budget will allocate $1.1 billion to measures to improve women's safety, delivering more emergency accommodation, more legal assistance, more counselling, more financial support, including cash payments for those escaping abusive relationships. This pandemic is far from over and, though we can see our way out, it's important to recognise that the journey on the way out may not be linear. Indeed, in Europe, we've seen a double-dip recession; in India, we've seen a terrible further wave of COVID infections hurting the population there. There could be further twists and turns in the road ahead and it's important that we be ready for this. While our recovery to date has been stronger and sooner than expected, we need to be prepared for uncertainty ahead.

Our economy, according to the Treasury, is forecast to grow by 1.25 per cent in this financial year, 2020-21, rising to 4.25 per cent in 2021-22. Our deficit this year is already going to be $52.7 billion lower than anticipated six months ago, mainly because the recovery has been stronger and sooner than expected. But, with that said, our deficit will still reach $161 billion this year, and our net debt will rise to $617 billion this year, or around 30 per cent of GDP. Our net debt will peak at $980 billion, or 40.9 per cent of GDP, in 2025 on current estimates. Whilst this is low by international standards—around half that in the United Kingdom and half that in the United States and one-third of that in Japan—it's important that we look at measures to address this over time.

We don't want to rush to austerity in this budget. Part of the lesson in the recovery from the global financial crisis, particularly in Europe and America, was that, when fiscal policy was tightened too soon, those economies suffered. The way we will get through this debt burden and reduce it over time is for the economy to grow faster. The measures in this budget will allow this to happen. Provided our nominal GDP is growing at a faster rate than nominal interest rates are, then debt as a percentage of GDP will shrink over time. This is how Australia reduced its debt servicing burden but also its net levels of debt in the wake of the Second World War—the last major economic shock.

These appropriation bills provide a way forward for Australia out of this economic crisis, the COVID pandemic. They support jobs. They look after health and critical services. They look after our most vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians, including the elderly, people with a disability and women, and they provide a pathway forward for our economic recovery. I commend these appropriation bills to the House.

Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the budget handed down by the Treasurer this year, we saw, undoubtedly, huge spending. We also saw enormous slush funds, huge amounts of money, described as decisions taken but not announced, and we saw those accompanied by short-term marketing and spin. There is no doubt—as the shadow Treasurer said in his contribution before mine—that, in this budget, we've seen a conservative government hand down generational debt without generational reform. This is from a government that, over its eight years, has presided over not just stagnant wages growth but record low wages growth. Its budget predicts more of the same. This budget predicts economic growth to return to below trend, participation to fall and business investment to be soft. For all of the money that has been spent in areas which desperately need spending, there's a real feeling that this is just trying to paper over cracks and to replace money that has been taken out over the eight years of this government.

For all of the money that is being spent, for all of the announcements and the marketing, what is fundamentally missing from the budget handed down by the Morrison government this year is any sense of a vision for the future—any sense of a vision for the sort of country Australia wants to be. There is absolutely no doubt that economic prosperity, fairly shared, has to play a central role in the national agenda. But as I've contended before, for Australia and Australians to truly thrive it should be embedded in a larger story. As other democracies around the world have done, we should be embedding that economic story in Australia in a story of wellbeing—the wellbeing of people, the wellbeing of places and the wellbeing of the environment that we live in and that we love. But we don't do that in this country. So we've seen missed opportunities, again and again, for budgets to be vehicles for important structural reform in this country. We've had too many piecemeal and temporary reforms. We've had too many failures to build community support for a creative national vision, for a long-term agenda. We've had too many politicians willing to talk about that but, when they have their hands on the levers of power, not delivering it.

That hasn't always been the case in this country. Between 1901 and World War II, Australia built a thriving democracy based on a living wage, supplemented by an age pension, an interventionist state and a nearly universal franchise, which included votes for women—although not our First Nations people. After World War II, we renewed our Australian compact by committing to full employment, mass migration, a huge expansion of housing and the broadening of tertiary education. From the eighties, we introduced sweeping reforms that deregulated and opened our economy, while expanding the social wage—with Medicare, family support and superannuation—and better protecting our environment.

Times of profound national change came with crisis which threatened health, wealth and wellbeing, as we've experienced in 2020 and as we continue to deal with today. Times of profound change require leaders from across the political, social, business and civil spheres of society to work together—to achieve larger goals, to stand back, to agree to a simple, compelling narrative that the population could rally behind, to think larger and longer, to build a nation in which everyone could have a job, to open our nation to the world, to have a consistent frame and direction for the country. We did that over roughly 40-year intervals. We're at another 40-year interval today. We should be doing that now. Instead, we have announcements of COVID commissions. We have national cabinets that one minute are on a war footing and the next minute aren't meeting. We have ideas being floated without background work being done, and we have a lack of vision—national and local—for the future.

What is also strikingly absent from this budget, from a conservative government that likes to say it's a great economic manager, is any agenda for productivity growth. It has an absolute reliance on the unemployment rate apparently continuing to decline and that having an impact on wages growth, but no agenda for productivity and growth. Members of the government use words like 'industry', 'innovation' and 'skills', but there is no comprehensive and coordinated skills, industry and innovation agenda. This is a government that can spend $600 million on a new gas-fired power plant, which every economist in the country seems to say is the wrong course, but can't actually concentrate on a proper agenda for the skills and jobs of the future.

We have relied on the flow of capital and on people and ideas from abroad for our economic dynamism over the years. Things have changed now. Supply chains have been broken. We don't have international talent and students coming in at the moment. We can't have a government that just puts up the shutters on things like climate policy and on developing the Australian wherewithal to deal with those challenges. We need to have a future made in Australia, a future based on Australian capabilities, Australian strengths and Australian investment. It is the time to invest in the skills and opportunities of our people and the innovation of our businesses. It's time to have that as a huge part of an agenda, and a budget that measures the wellbeing of our people, our places and our environment.

We do have the highest debt in our nation's history to look forward to, and deficits for as far as the eye can see, but what will we have to show for it under this government? If it were to be re-elected, how long would it take before we saw this government revert to form and cut essential services at the expense of working and middle-class people? Future generations will have to pay this debt back, so we need to invest in the drivers of growth, productivity and wages. We need to invest in opportunities and skills for people and innovative capabilities of businesses. We have to recognise that there are huge economic shifts happening—not just in our country but around the world—towards a knowledge driven economy, a clean economy and a caring economy. These are areas where we are well placed to lead the world if we have a government with a vision and a plan.

This is a budget that did nothing about the gaps in public and social housing, that trumpeted reforms to child care which go nowhere near what is needed and don't come close to Labor's and Anthony Albanese's policies, that did nothing to help insecure work. A Deloitte survey released today indicated that 47 per cent of women are now dissatisfied with their work, 76 per cent of women have taken on more work since the outset of coronavirus and many are less optimistic about their careers. The budget does nothing to help them. Where is the investment in a vision for flexible working, for wellbeing, for reforms to paid parental leave, for men to have opportunities to do more with their families and women to have opportunities to do more in the workforce?

How long will we have to wait for a real focus from this government and for real action around reporting and dealing with non-inclusive and unacceptable behaviour in workplaces—as the Deloitte survey asked? Perhaps they could start in this workplace and actually do what they said they would do and deal with the member for Bowman.

In my community, we were looking for investment in Dunkley to help us get through the COVID recession, but also to help us build the sort of future that we want. We were looking for investment in social and affordable housing. I received an email just last week: 'Hello, Peta. What can we do to help the families facing homelessness due to being given notice so landlords can sell their properties vacant?' Sixty-days notice isn't working in this climate. There's a single mother in Langwarrin with two weeks left to move. She's spent months looking and applying for rentals and is having no luck. Our renters are suffering. They need help, protection from eviction, and available housing. I went onto the Langwarrin locals Facebook page. There's a post from a woman who says she's getting beyond desperate and running out of time. She's been given notice to vacate. She and her daughter can't find anywhere to live, despite attending eight to 11 inspections a week, one to three inspections every weekday after work, with 80 people at rental inspections. They can't afford the rent. Her daughter goes to a local school. They are two weeks away from being homeless.

There is no investment in social and affordable housing in the Morrison budget, but there is a massive commitment from a future Labor government, because we know it's important for society, we know it's important for the economy and we know it's important for jobs. That's a vision. That's a vision for a budget grounded in the wellbeing of our people as well as the economy.

In Dunkley, we looked for a comprehensive and properly funded local jobs plan, but we didn't see one in the budget. We looked for when car parking that was promised at Kananook and Seaford would be delivered, but instead we heard the money was being removed. We looked for delivery of Ballarto Road upgrades that we'd been promised, and we didn't receive them. We looked for an investment in the proposed Ballam Park athletics redevelopment that the council's been asking for. Nothing. We looked for investment in vital new pavilions at the Emil Madsen Reserve in Mount Eliza, or for the Mornington Peninsula Bay Trail, for cycling and walking. I've been asking the government for funding for that for 12 months. Nothing. We looked for the government to fulfil its 2019 election promise that it was building the extension of the metro line to Baxter with a station at Langwarrin by funding the shortfall. Nothing. We looked for investment in the exciting proposed expansion of buildings and programs at McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, for our cultural lives, for tourism, for jobs. Nothing. In fact, what McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery got was a rejection of their application for RISE funding. We looked for an investment in the buildings and the culture of the local Indigenous gathering place Nairm Marr Djambana. Nothing. We looked for a commitment to more capital funding for our local schools and for more capital funding for community programs. We didn't see it. We looked for investment in local manufacturing and a plan for local manufacturing in our area. We didn't see it. We looked for support for Monash University for the employees who have lost their jobs and the students who are now facing $50,000 worth of student fees to get a degree. We didn't get it. We looked for JobSeeker to be above the poverty line so that people in my community can live in dignity while looking for work and caring for their families. We didn't get it. We looked for targeted support for our local travel agents and for our arts and culture industries that are still struggling post JobKeeper. We didn't get it. We looked for action on aged care. We saw that there is some funding, and we're waiting with bated breath to see what it will actually deliver for our community.

We looked for a genuine commitment to reducing emissions and supporting renewable energy to make Australia a renewable energy powerhouse, to build our renewable energy economy and good, decent, secure jobs for the future. We looked for real action on climate change. We didn't see it. We looked for a strategy for electric vehicles so that Australia doesn't become, as was described in the paper on the weekend, 'the Cuba of the developed world' for cars to be dumped in our country because they don't meet the emissions standards anywhere else in the world. We didn't see it. We looked for an electric vehicles strategy for jobs for local mechanics and manufacturing. We didn't see it.

We didn't see a budget based on a vision for the future, on the pillars of the wellbeing of our community. We saw a budget to get a government through a political difficulty and a tight cycle, and that is selling the people of my community short today. It is absolutely selling the people of Australia short in the future. We want a good government. We want a responsible government. We need a new government.

David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This year is the coalition's eighth budget. Having finally balanced the nation's book—which was an amazing effort—before COVID, we had to deal with a one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, and that's precisely what this budget is. The last budgetary cycle has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as the Treasurer highlighted, this budget is the next stage of our economic plan to secure the recovery that has commenced with a huge bang and make sure that it continues. We lock in this amazing recovery. It also guarantees the essential services, whether it's in childcare, aged care, schools, hospitals, mental health or the NDIS.

There are also personal income tax and business tax incentives, because we need our industries to get the latest equipment to improve our supply chains so that there can be big investments in plant and equipment. The low and middle income tax offset will allow that. It'll allow companies like James Strong, which runs a huge production facility making all pressure-packed cans for the whole Australian market, to upgrade that facility so we can produce more and get efficiencies, and to get a proper efficiency by processing the raw aluminium that comes from the other end of my electorate at the Tomago smelter rather than sending it up to Thailand and then bringing it back again. It will allow a lot of efficiency and growth. To do that, the instant expensing, or instant asset write-off facility, will mean that sort of investment is a whole lot easier, whether it's my small businesses like all the tradesmen that need new equipment or the farmers that really wanted to get all that new equipment so that they can do the latest techniques in carbon sequestration in our soils, or whether it means getting equipment on your dairy farm so that you can put in a biodigester and process all the dairy waste—or at your piggery—and turn that into pure water and really great fertiliser and get rid of all the waste. It's a win-win. These tax incentives for companies to invest in new plant and equipment are going to deliver huge dividends for many years to come.

The government are also investing in new apprenticeships. Apprentice subsidies have already delivered over 100,000 new positions around the nation, but we still need to increase our skills base. If we want to become an independent nation that has its own supply chain, we need skilled workers. We cannot have everyone at university, so we need to grow the trade and skills sector, and these subsidies, along with continued and expanded apprenticeship and training places, will do just that.

Also, the infrastructure the government has announced in this budget will deliver major dividends. For instance, on the Pacific Highway, even though it is duplicated, there are five high-risk intersections, where individuals in cars, people towing caravans, semitrailers, b-doubles all have to dice with death to cross the four lanes of the highway. When it was built, it was just duplicated. When the coalition came to power, we increased the funding for the Pacific Highway upgrade to the 80-20 split. Those sections in the south, north of Newcastle, were not built to motorway standard so they do not have flyovers. I was so pleased to see in the budget the funding for the Harrington- Coopernook flyover. Instead of playing dodgem cars and chicken with four lanes of traffic, when that is built, people between Harington and Coopernook will be able to travel on a grade-separated interchange. There are many more we have to do but this is the start.

The government have also increased our defence capability and expanded the capability of Newcastle airport, which is the major airport for people not only in my electorate but from the electorates around the Hunter, up the North Coast into the New England area. It means Newcastle airport or Williamtown Air Force Base will have an upgraded runway capability that can take Code E aircraft—that means, wide-bodied jets that can fly to the US, up to Singapore and Hong Kong or over to the Middle East in one go. It will truly make it an international airport.

The extra defence capability will mean our Air Force can have those big air tankers, the Joint Strike Fighters, the re-fuellers and re-tankers there as well because the airport runway upgrade will make that a possibility. It will also allow the commercial side of the Newcastle airport to expand. It is already an aerospace hub, but all of the businesses that support the defence capability will be able to expand. It will also have the capability of having hundreds of thousands more tourists when inbound tourism reopens, because we will be able to make it a truly international hub.

Also, all of the exporters from the Hunter and the New England and up and down the coast, such as an abattoir at Wingham that has to ship its exports up through Brisbane or down through Sydney, will now be able to put their products on these Code E aircraft out to the markets of Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, at the Hunter airport. It will be a fantastic initiative, and I am so proud that the coalition government is delivering on it.

We have come a long way in the past year, but I want to take this opportunity to congratulate all my constituents and all Australians. We have really banded together on this but we now have to move on. The pandemic is still far from over. As you can see, there are new variants emerging all the time. A pandemic means it is a rush of a virus or a bug to which the world has no immunity. We are slowly building immunity either through vaccines or exposure, but there will be variants, just like there is a flu variant every year that is slightly different. We have to have systems in place to cope with the antigenic drift that happens in all viruses. It is like a car with a new model: the headlights, the number plate and the grill change and it still looks like the last model but it has changed a bit. So vaccines have to change and treatments have to emerge. This health budget is funding huge capabilities of vaccines in this country.

It is securing our economic future as well as our health future. I mentioned the instant asset write-off but there are other tax announcements that are really important. I have 48,500 taxpayers in the Lyne electorate. To reward them for their hard work, continuing the low- and middle-income tax offset means that an individual in that bracket will get $1,080 more and, if they are a couple, it is $2,160 in their tax rebate at the end of the financial year. There are 15,900 businesses that will benefit from that instant asset write-off.

We have new home care packages. I have one of the oldest demographics in the country, and another 80,000 home care packages means that care will be able to be delivered a lot sooner. We will now bring the total to 275,000 home care packages. The aged-care changes and reforms will mean another $10 per resident per day to enhance the viability and sustainability of the residential aged-care sector. Their workforce is struggling to cope. We have huge spending on the NDIS, but one of the unintended consequences of this spending on the NDIS is that a lot of staff are leaving the aged-care sector to work in much easier jobs in personal care in the NDIS. Some of my aged-care facilities are actually having to shut wards because they cannot staff them. That is another piece of work that I will continue to work on. We are funding 33,000 new training places for personal carers and a new Indigenous workforce.

We have 1,500 apprentices in the Lyne electorate due to the extension of the JobTrainer Fund. This will lead to many more opportunities for young Australians, especially school leavers in Lyne. In the infrastructure space, the Harrington-Coopernook flyover is one of many projects. There is also extra money going to infrastructure to increase the safety along our major highways, and you can see the sound-warning edges to the edge of the Pacific Highway north and south across the Lyne electorate. We are doing so much.

Local health care has changed during the pandemic through telehealth facilities. That has really changed the dynamic for a lot of our patients who rely on their GP but are distance separated from them. During the pandemic it was a great lifesaver that you could have telehealth consultations. That innovation is now continuing across the nation. Just shy of 370,000 telehealth consultations have been delivered in the Lyne electorate since the start of the pandemic.

There are 920 families in the Lyne electorate who will benefit from the changes to our childcare system. It is a really great budget. It is a great outcome. People are getting tangible benefits that they can see. Their family's budget will be better off because of those tax cuts. If you are a young family with two children in child care you will see that benefit on the balances. It is funding upgrades to roads like Clarence Town Road and Bucketts Way; the Brig O'Johnston Bridge at Clarence Town; the Figtrees on the Manning project, the Forster civic precinct; and Taree Universities Campus. All these are funded through coalition budgets. We have committed in earlier budgets to the design, planning and upgrade of the Lorne Road.

The local roads and community infrastructure initiative means that the councils in my area will have the funds to do a lot of those sporting amenity upgrades that everyone has been clamouring for. I might just mention a few examples, starting with the Wauchope stadium, a great place where everyone plays basketball, but it's old and fading. This funding means the council will finally be able to improve the cladding. There's going to be a new netball court at the Laurieton Sports Complex. Kendall Tennis Club has hundreds of children involved with it and will be able to expand its courts. The other big improvement in the sporting space is at Tea Gardens, where disability access is being improved through extra local roads and community infrastructure funding in this budget. The Tuncurry water park, a design change for a really popular spot, will be delivered in the near future. Many people walk up and down the Forster boardwalk, and the council has been aiming to expand this walk for ages. It will become a reality because of this budget. The Wingham CBD upgrade has been planned for at least 10 years and is finally going to become a reality. The Taree Wildcats, whose sporting fields are looked after by the council and the club themselves, will finally get some improved drainage and field upgrades, as well as new change rooms and a canteen.

These upgrades sound small at the national level, but for people in my electorate they are literally going to be game changers. There's also the upgrade of the Gloucester netball courts. I have so many small towns and villages across the 16,000 square kilometres of my electorate, I could fill a whole speech with things that are going to benefit from these tangible initiatives by supporting local governments. I commend all these appropriation bills to the House.

Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are seeing, post budget, two very different visions for Australia being put forward: on this side, not holding anyone back, not leaving anyone behind; on the government benches, the government has refused to be on the side of Australians stranded abroad, refused to be on the side of Australians stuck in India, refused to be on the side of Australians in the universities sector, refused to be on the side of Australians under 50 who cannot afford a home and cannot even register for a vaccine. This government has refused to be on the side of Australians who are looking for a place to call home. Labor has come up with a practical policy that the government should adopt tomorrow, creating a $10 billion Australian housing future fund to build more social housing, create jobs and change lives. We propose that 30,000 homes be built over five years, including 10,000 homes for frontline workers and 4,000 homes for women and children escaping domestic violence, veterans experiencing homelessness and older Australian women on low incomes. It will fix challenges in my electorate of Perth. For too many years now Stirling Towers has sat vacant, waiting for the funds required to build new homes in Highgate for low-income and essential workers. Orana House have continued to struggle with the challenges of helping women who have come to them at a point of crisis to get into long-term, secure accommodation.

When it comes to helping people find a home, we also need to talk about helping people come home. Every single Australian knows that we needed to get quarantine right, except for the Prime Minister. Australians expected on budget night the Prime Minister to finally show some leadership. Instead, again, this budget fails when it comes to quarantine. Not a single dollar was put forward for new quarantine measures in Western Australia. There was spending like never before, but nothing—not an extra dollar—for one of the most critical pieces of important infrastructure we need. There are 40,000 Australians on the waiting list. We know there are countless more who would get on the waiting list, but they know it's just not worth their time. What have we had since the crisis of COVID came out in another wave in India? Two repatriation flights—just two. This Prime Minister has failed his own citizens. The Perth electorate is housing all of Western Australia's hotel quarantine. That could be addressed if we just had some national infrastructure, some remote quarantine, so that it would be not just inner-city areas and the CBD and the businesses within being hardest hit every time a necessary lockdown came into place. We need more capacity and more quarantine locations.

The only solution we've seen in the last couple of weeks from the government is the vaccine passport. I'm sure this will go the way of every other thought bubble that the government have had. They wanted to open the borders, and then they wanted to close the borders. They opposed Clive Palmer and kicked him out of the LNP, and then they supported him in the High Court. They wanted to help Australians overseas, and then they wanted to lock them up for five years. They put the Liberal logo on their vaccine information, and then they stopped publishing any vaccine information or public information campaigns at all. They promised four million vaccinations by April, and then they said they never promised that. Now we have the vaccine passport, a passport you can get only if you're over 50 years old. Talk about intergenerational inequality! This government has failed young Australians time and time again during this pandemic, telling them to dip into their superannuation and telling them they're going to have to pay even more for their university fees. This is a government that doesn't really care who it attacks. Just ask the Premier of New South Wales. Maybe the Prime Minister just got tired of attacking Labor premiers, and so he decided to go to after one of his own. When the Prime Minister of New South Wales said what we all know to be true—that is, that the government's plans for the vaccine are not ambitious enough—the Prime Minister got personal. He said the Premier was being selfish, that she only cared about New South Wales. Well, speaking on behalf of people from Western Australia, often it seems like this Prime Minister only cares about New South Wales.

When we talk about the vaccine passport and how we've failed young Australians we need also to remember that, at the moment, this government has no plan for what to do with young people when it comes to COVID vaccinations. They talk about giving out a vaccine passport. What does that mean for children who don't have a vaccine? What does that mean for families who want to travel together? The truth is that while COVID, thankfully, does not affect children and young people in the same way, it does affect young people. As of 2 April 2021, 361 children in the United States have died from COVID. In Brazil, as of 15 April 2021, 1,300 babies have died from COVID. In the US, average daily cases for children have risen by over 200 per cent in the last few weeks. So we talk about vaccine passports and this never-ending rush to open up the economy without any plan about protecting people's health, but the reality is that we need to see a plan from the government about what they are going to be saying to young people, who seem to have been forgotten in the debate on COVID and the reopening of our international borders. We know that it will worsen mental health for children if they don't get vaccinated, can't get vaccinated and can't travel. We know that it will increase social isolation for children. We know that it will mean more families remain separated. And it means all these promises from some sort of a snap back to usual from this government will be false.

Younger Australians want a government that has an eye on the future and on the challenges we face in the future. Australia as a whole needs a government with its eye on the future. Instead we have a government that is obsessed with the past. We know that what is obsessing the Liberal Party base right now, including members of the backbench—the Prime Minister's own backbench—is a desire to walk away from the deal that finally secured a fair share of the GST for Western Australia.

As a Western Australian I worry that the federal government will come for a slice of WA's GST. We've already seen this flagged by the New South Wales Treasurer, a member of the Liberal Party. And, just two days after the budget was released, what was the Prime Minister's hand-picked chair of the Tax and Revenue Committee doing? He wasn't out selling the budget; he was out attacking Western Australia's share of the GST. Now, the Liberal Party might say, 'Don't worry about it. Trust us. It's going to be fine,' but as a Western Australian I have no doubt that a government that was willing to side with Clive Palmer against Western Australians in the High Court will have no problem ripping away money from Western Australia.

My message to the treasurers across this country is: hands off Western Australia's GST share. The federal Treasurer can't give in to his Victorian and New South Wales backbench, and state treasurers in Victoria and New South Wales can't see the WA economy and WA's GST as an easy fix to their problems.

The distribution of GST revenue amongst the states requires long-term thinking and a secure, certain approach—thinking beyond just the next boom. But we saw in the budget that the Morrison government is not capable of thinking about the long-term economic future. The budget showed us that. There were so many missed opportunities in this budget, but missed opportunities have become a sort of pattern in the economic and infrastructure statements that we see from this government. There is so much that this government could be doing right now. We should be using this opportunity to build up our tourism infrastructure assets for that time when we do once again welcome people to these shores.

One area where I was disappointed is that the government's Perth City Deal fails to make any headway on a revitalisation of the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is a piece of infrastructure that needs to be refreshed. The managers of the asset, the leaseholders of the asset, want to do the hard work. We know that the public want to see action on the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. It is more than 20 years old. It is becoming one of the oldest convention centres in Australia, and we should look to the opportunity to redevelop that centre so it can be a world-class convention and tourism asset in the heart of the Perth CBD, next to Elizabeth Quay. As they would say in Western Australia—because we fondly refer to the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre as 'the cockroach' because of its unique design—it's time to squash the cockroach and build something new for the 21st century.

The other thing about this budget that disappointed Western Australians was that it had no plan when it comes to wages. There was $100 billion of new spending announced in the budget, projecting that inflation in the 2021-22 financial year will be 1.75 per cent—and already we're seeing warnings that inflation may indeed be higher—but wage growth at just 1.5 per cent. That is a real wage cut next financial year for thousands of working Western Australians. If the government are able to do amazing backflips when it comes to debt, deficit and budget surpluses, maybe it's time they finally do a backflip when it comes to stagnant wages in this country.

I want to share the story of somebody who called my office the day after the budget. His name is Keith, and Keith is a pensioner who lives in the Perth electorate. This government, he says, just makes him a number, and not a number the government cares about. When Keith saw the budget, he was devastated. He said he's worried about winter. He reckons that, once he's paid for his medication, he won't have money left to pay for warm clothes. He asked, 'Why isn't the Prime Minister looking after older Australians?' I think we saw that in the way they threw money into the aged-care sector but require zero accountability that actually ensures higher quality care. We saw $3.2 billion injected into aged care, $10 a day per resident per bed, but no obligation about what is done with those funds. There is no obligation that it go to high-quality food or high-quality care or to a living wage for people who work in aged care—another huge disappointment and another huge missed opportunity by this government.

It's a government that misses out on the big challenges of our future. When it comes to renewable energy, again, the government are tying themselves in knots trying to say that they believe that they might get to net zero emissions by 2050—maybe, if Boris Johnson and Joe Biden make them. But the only reason they're actually doing it is to keep their friends abroad happy, not to protect the broader economic interests of their country here at home.

When Australians look at this parliament, they see one side who've had 20-something energy plans but haven't actually implemented any and a side that has a plan to tackle the big challenges of our future and grab the opportunity to make Australia the energy superpower of the world: transforming the national energy market by rebuilding the grid and modernising how people can pump renewables into our energy grid. Australia has the expertise to do this. We just need the right policy settings to get it done—using Australian steel and Australian workers to deliver cheap, reliable and clean energy. Our current grid was designed in the decades long passed now. We need to bring it into the future and we need to accept that the future lies in community batteries, electric cars and investing in renewables, not demonising them.

We are going to see a bit of a preview this weekend. We've seen the Prime Minister and the Treasurer outline their budget and say that they're now born-again, big-spending, big-government progressives who deliver women's budget statements—something they haven't done for the last seven years. But, of course, in the year before an election, we've gone from the back-in-black budget to the back-to-the-ballot-box budget. That is all this is. But we will see what the Liberal Party truly believes this weekend. The heart and soul of the Liberal Party is descending on Canberra for their federal council meeting this weekend. They are going to be here and they are going to tell us what they really think and how they really want to govern the country.

We know from their previous council meetings what they actually believe. It was only in 2018 when the Liberal Party's federal council passed a motion for the full privatisation of the ABC. It was in 2017 that the Liberal Party of Western Australia passed a motion to secede from the Commonwealth—because that's what they actually believed. They wanted to secede from the Commonwealth when they had a federal Liberal government in office. Life member of the Liberal Party, Clive Palmer, in 2012— (Time expired)

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This speech on the appropriation bills being in two parts—one in continuation later on—I'd like to use the last couple of minutes to focus on one particular item in the budget, and that's education spending. Education for the regional city of Tamworth is vitally important. Tamworth has the lowest number of people in Australia currently in tertiary education and the lowest number of people in Australia who have a tertiary degree. So it is essential that we get a university campus in Tamworth.

I want to clarify that the UNE has been incredibly happy with the Commonwealth-funded places to satisfy the New South Wales government's requirement for a $10 million funded contribution to release the state's funds of $26.6 million committed to the UNE campus proposal. I want to commend the work that's been done by the committee, including Mitch Hanlon; vice-chancellor Brigid Heywood—and I'd like to commend her absolute focus on this project; Mayor Col Murray, who has been absolutely resolved to making sure that we bring this to fruition; and local Nationals state member, the Hon. Kevin Anderson. Between this group, we hope that we can land this project, because it's not a matter of whether; it is going to be a matter of when—and we want the 'when' to be as soon as possible.

If Armidale has a university campus, Orange has one, Wagga has one, Lismore has one, Port Macquarie has one, Albury has one, Dubbo has one, Wollongong has one, Newcastle has one and Coffs Harbour has one and, if you go up the coast, Bundaberg has one and Rockhampton has one, then Tamworth, one of the fastest-growing regional cities in Australia, also deserves to be able to make sure that their sons and daughters have the capacity to go to primary school, high school and university in the city that produces the largest amount of animal protein—whether that's eggs, poultry, beef or sheep—in Australia.

Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.