Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate condemns the Government for its failure to rule out cuts to health and education programs, instead making it clear, when the Commission of Audit was announced by the Treasurer (Mr Hockey), that no area of the budget was ruled out, declaring that there are 'no restrictions' for the work of the commission.

The reason this particular motion is on the agenda paper is that we believe we should start the way we are going to continue, and that is: when promises are put out, we are able to discuss them here, not in a way of yelling across the chamber and saying, 'You did wrong,' but by looking at exactly what the promises are and the context in which they are made. Members in the chamber and, I hope, members in the community would understand the interest there is around the ongoing issues of health and education. If there are areas in our budget that people who may not work through budget papers do understand, they are health and education, because those areas impact on them every day.

It is a common practice—and I think most people in the community understand this practice—that there can be a change of government as a result of an election. It happens. Some of us are very unhappy and actually question the role of democracy in this process but, nonetheless, governments change. Consistently over the last 20 years—and, yes, Mr Deputy President, I have checked to see that this is a factual statement—we have had a process with government changes across this country where a new government comes in and immediately there is concern about the budget they have inherited. Seemingly, all the questions and all the figures that have been given in the previous term suddenly have to be re-examined urgently because it is 'obviously worse than they were told'. This is not peculiar to any particular flavour of government. It is standard practice that when you come in you create some sort of review, and the term 'commission of audit' has become popular. It has not always been the term used, but it has become very popular in the last, say, 10 years.

With the new government that has come to power at the federal level in Australia there has been a determination that there will be a Commission of Audit to do 'a review', and I quote the Treasurer when he announced his Commission of Audit at the now-standard press conference, surrounded by worried-looking officials looking as though there is 'something here to be found'. They stand around the auditorium and they say, 'Yes, everything is on the agenda—we are appalled, devastated, amazed at what went on before,' despite the number of questions and debates that people have had in various fora. They are seemingly fearful about what is going to come out when they have this new look at a budget. In this case, talking about the federal government, I cannot remember a day when there was not careful investigation of the budget and the figures and what was going on. I know that, through the periods of Senate estimates, every single dollar was examined and looked at very closely to see exactly what was happening. Nonetheless, I do not actually question the issue of having an investigation in the process, so we are doing that.

But on that day, throughout the widespread media coverage that was put through the community, it was clear that every element of government spending was going to be on the table, just in case anyone thought they were safe. There was an absolute commitment that that was going to happen. However, when you make that commitment you have to balance it against what was out there—you need to be very careful about what other commitments have been made. So you see the point of this particular motion: what we are saying is that there is already a commitment, a guarantee, a promise that was made by the then Leader of the Opposition, as the opposition went through the election process, that the areas of health and education would not be subject to any cuts. So it is very difficult when you have a promise made in an election process. We all know that many grandiose promises are made through election processes and then, when we come into parliament, we see what is going to happen and how we go through them. But when you have a promise that these two major components of our budget are going to be quarantined from expenditure cuts—that was the commitment to the Australian people—and at the same time you are implementing a Commission of Audit which has as its core function to the community that nothing is going to be quarantined, there is a bit of a dynamic there. I understand the tension, because as soon as you guarantee something you are making a commitment that you will have to keep on stating over and over again.

But the particular reason this motion is on the agenda today is that I, as a Queenslander, have a little bit of personal experience about what happens when an opposition promises there will not be cuts, when it guarantees to elements of the community that there will not be cuts in a particular area. I am an ex-public servant, though I still consider my job to be a public servant. But as an ex-member of the public service I know that in Queensland one of the promises and commitments that were clearly made was that there would not be any job cuts in the public sector as a result of the change of government. So we had that commitment and then, just after the Queensland state election, we had the dedicated press conference, with a number of very sad-looking people standing around looking worried and saying, 'Because of the awful position the budget is in, we will now have to institute our own commission of audit.' In that case the commission of audit was headed by someone who is very familiar to people in this chamber, and that is the ex-federal Treasurer, Mr Costello.

So after a period of time and, as with the promise that has been made by the federal government, quite a short period of time; it was not, for example, a six-month, careful way—and I am just losing the words that have been said about the way the current federal government is going to work; I think it is in a very 'staid and controlled way' but I do apologise, I should have those adjectives in my brain and I will get them, I feel sure—but in terms of the process we were going to have a relatively short investigation and then do what we had to do to save the budget.

In Queensland, despite those commitments before the election and in line with what was said that nothing was going to be quarantined in terms of what could be affected by the commission of audit, there have been massive cuts across the state. We could argue whether they were necessary or not because of the budget, and I am sure that there are people from across the chamber who would bring out arguments about the last 73 years of government in Queensland and why there had to be this investigation. But nonetheless, the intent of this notice of motion is that when you say two quite different things to a community and to a parliament you have to understand that there is some confusion and some worry. What I can tell you is that in Queensland many, many people who actually believed the commitment that their jobs would be safe and that the areas in which they were working would be safe, many in the health and education departments across regional and rural Queensland and in the capital cities, do not have a sense of security now when they see identical promises made by the new federal government.

So why we need to ensure, as I said, that we start the way we need to go on is that there needs to be transparency. There needs to be a sense that we are sharing full and open information not just with the parliament, though of course we need it in the parliament, but also with the community. We have a book full of rules about the way this parliament operates, which determines that there will be complete transparency and free and open exchange and set periods about when a budget should be made public and what kind of questioning there can be. But it is not just to the parliament. The important thing is that transparency about what is going to happen and the intent behind commitments made are transparent, and that link is made with the Australian community. Guaranteeing that there will not be any reductions or cuts in the whole area of health or in the whole area of education is a very big call.

I fully understand that there have been comments made since the original statements that if any savings are found they will automatically be redirected within the portfolio area, and that is the current position. But similar statements were made in the Queensland area and I feel certain that similar statements were made in Western Australia and Victoria about knowing what was important. We need to understand that when you start cutting people and resources within agencies, such as we have seen in Queensland and already at the federal level in these very early days in terms of other statement we have heard—and there is a series of statements beginning to build up, and we have to carry around enormous files trying to remember who said what and when—there are serious consequences. Already we have had another statement by the new government talking about what they are going to do to the federal Public Service. This statement was made during the election but it is continuing to be made as we move through into the government taking up its responsibilities. We do not know exactly how many will be affected or where.

I particularly enjoy that wonderful statement about 'natural attrition', that there will not be compulsory redundancies or slashing service delivery. I consistently say—and I may have said it before in this place—that when I hear the term 'natural attrition' I consistently think of something going through the air conditioning, that it will go through these large empty buildings of public sector workers and there will no longer be workers there doing the jobs that they need to do to provide services.

That may seem frivolous, but in many parts of Queensland now if you go to buildings that are still under state government lease, you will go through floors and rooms and areas that still have desks and sometimes computers, but what they do not have are people. We say that promises have been made, however we need to see that service delivery continues, and so too commitment to the people of Australia in those areas. This particular motion is actually around the areas of health and education and we need to be absolutely sure, almost on a weekly basis, that if you are going to remove staff who are currently working in education, or if you are going to remove staff or change the conditions of employment of staff who are currently working in the health area, either within delivery of health services or the extraordinarily important areas of supporting people who work in health developing their policies and their areas, how will that actually result in a commitment to no cuts in health and education?

So it is important that we understand what is happening—and I am just looking around to check on timing as I have a certain period of time, and I hope someone is watching! In terms of the motion, I think it is important that we have input from across the chamber. That is really the intent of this part of the afternoon in our parliamentary week, that we hear from people across the room—from government and the various people in opposition—who are looking at an issue of importance about how we are going to operate as a parliament together and maintain that trust with the community. In this first week of this current government when we already have, as I have said, a growing list of commitments that are being made not just in the election process when people do—and I use the word quite deliberately—have aspirational views about what they intend to do in government, we then have to cut to how people provide the services that our nation depends on. There are two areas, as I have said, on which that dependence is probably greater than any other—the federal government's role in education and the federal government's role in health.

I hope we will be able to have statements from the other side that will make not just me but all of those people currently working in health and education feel a little more secure. From the Queensland perspective, when the people who worked beside those who have already been impacted by the first wave of necessary Commission of Audit reductions—the people working in the Nambour hospital, the people working in the Toowoomba regional hospital and the people working in various schools in Queensland, where class sizes have now become a very important issue and the schools have been slated to close to help fund the necessary processes in education—hear again that there is to be a Commission of Audit that will look at everything to ensure that the budget is balanced, they will have necessary fear.

I am not saying that there should not be commissions of audit and I am not saying that there should not be reconsideration of programs under the process of a new government; what I am saying is that, if you have made a commitment that there will not be a reduction in services in health and education, that will be the expectation of people who rely on those health and education services. If you come back in the next three years and have had to make those cuts, you should understand that people will be upset. That occurs. I am not saying that that is not the process of government; what I am saying is that governments—particularly new governments that have come in after many years of throwing questions and considerations across the chamber to the previous government about how they were handling programs in the budget—should take their words extraordinarily seriously and try, every time there is a budget change, to ensure that people understand why and accept that their interests are being protected.

We will continue to go through the processes already set out in the parliamentary program. We have these opportunities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. We have the extraordinarily valuable Senate estimates program that goes for several weeks over the year looking at areas of the budget. On those occasions people will have the opportunity to ask questions and to hear where the budget is being spent and where services are being affected. I am not saying that the current government will be automatically slashing services; I am saying that we will be able to find out through the processes of parliament where the amount of money has been amended, where the resources have been changed and what the impact will be on services.

I trust that there will not be any more limitation on when we will be able to have that exchange of information. It seems as if we should relocate the sitting of the Senate to Fridays so we will be able to get answers to questions in the immigration area. That seems to be the exchange of information that we have been having this week when we asked specific questions about what is happening in that department. When we are having open discussion, which is the basis of our parliamentary process, I hope there will not be restrictions on how information is exchanged. Clearly that is an issue that has been raised all the way through my time in this place, both on this side and the other side of the chamber. Issues of transparency and trust are paramount.

Where promises, commitments and guarantees have been made but have kind of been pulled back from a little bit, there needs to be a continuation of the ability to share information and to treat each other with a little bit of respect so we understand what the rules are and that the issue is not a personal attack on individuals but actually getting information. I hope that when not just we but other people ask questions through their community activities there will not be any restriction on the kind of information that they get as well. An absolutely important element of our parliamentary process is that through the freedom of information process, through the Senate estimates process and through ministerial briefings we are able to find out the detail and are not pushed aside and given reasons why the information cannot be shared. When people now seek information about what is going to happen in the areas of education and health there should be an absolute commitment that there will be open sharing of information. Whether the government wants that knowledge and whether it actually reflects its original guarantees is immaterial. The important thing is that the information exchange is clear. (Time expired)