Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this proposition on the failure of the Abbott government to deliver a budget that promotes fairness and opportunity. This budget does not support fairness and it does not support opportunity. Mr Hockey, the Treasurer, claimed in a speech last week to the Sydney Institute that we all want a society that protects the poor and strengthens the weak. His budget does exactly the opposite. It does not protect the poor or strengthen the weak—in fact, it builds in the very opposite.

The budget does not support their view that it is the responsibility of government to provide equality of opportunity with a fair and comprehensive support system for those who are most vulnerable. It certainly does not. Since when does dumping young people under the age of 30 onto no income support at all fit with anybody's sense of what is fair? He certainly has a perverse sense of fairness if he thinks that that is fair. How does he think these young people are going to eat, live, put a roof over their head, or turn out 40 job applications a month—or even turn up to the face-to-face meetings they are supposed to have once a month, when they have no money to eat, clothe themselves, catch a bus or own a phone? But it is okay! In estimates, the Department of Employment said, 'You might be able to just ring up.' Well, if you haven't got any money, how do you afford a phone? How do you afford even that phone call, let alone the stamps or the computer or the emails to make those 40 applications a month that you are supposed to be making? And if you miss your face-to-face meeting or do not meet your compliance requirements then, when you are on Newstart nil payment, you get another month of no income support. Since when is that fair? Since when is that providing opportunity? When I asked how a young person was to make even the co-payment of $7, for a start the department got it wrong and said, 'The first 10 are free,' which is wrong. They have got a limit of 10—but that is still 70 bucks. When you have not got any money, 70 bucks is beyond your reach. As I said this morning, the department and the government do not even know how many people under 30 live at home. That is not fair.

People on disability support pension are to be reassessed if they are under 35 and dumped onto Newstart—if they are lucky enough to maintain income support at all. Indexation on DSP is to be cut so that it is indexed to the CPI, which is what Newstart has been at. Newstart, we already know, makes you live in poverty and has not kept up with the true cost of living. Again, that is not fair. Single parents' indexation—cut; the pensioner education concession—cut. How is that fair? As to FTB, even the department's cameo example showed that a single parent would lose $2,000. So there are multiple cuts to single parents. How is that fair? How is that creating opportunity? This budget builds in inequality. Students face $5 billion in cuts. University fees can go up to $100,000, and who is going to be impacted by that significantly? The impact will be across the board but women are going to be the most heavily impacted by those cuts by charging fees. In America now we are seeing that for people who have had to take out these very expensive loans it is impacting on their ability to sustain a mortgage or to take on a mortgage. So we are building yet more barriers to young people's futures and to young people's opportunities, not to mention the fact that this government is not going ahead with NRAS and social and affordable housing. We know homelessness is getting worse.

The government knows that this budget is unfair because they have budgeted more for emergency relief funding, $229 million over four years. They do not know how it is going to be applied yet but they know that young people are not going to be able to live. So you build in emergency relief and they have to go to charities. But unfortunately our charities are already overcommitted. In Western Australia in 2012, where the latest figures are available, 20,000 requests for support had to be turned away. Some charities are now having to put in processes where you can only ask for support once every six months. How is this fair? How is this budget building opportunity? It simply is not. It is building an opportunity for the richest in this country, where we know that one per cent own more wealth than 60 per cent of the rest of the community. We know that we have inequality in this country already. What this government is doing with this budget is building in further inequality.

Let us look at pensioners. The government had this little trick in question time today to say, 'Oh, are they not going to get an increase?' This government knows very well that through cutting indexation they cut the rate of growth of the pension and it increases less quickly. ACOSS has estimated that that builds a cut of around $80-100 a week to pensioners. It is a fairly low rate. I acknowledge it is more than Newstart but it is still a low rate. Ask any pensioner who is trying to survive on the pension whether they are living in the lap of luxury. I can tell you they are not. That builds in barriers to opportunity. A third of the long-term people on Newstart are older Australians. They are facing barriers to employment. They are now going to be in a worse position because the government has not put in measures that significantly address the issues around age discrimination and older workers trying to find jobs. We need to see the plans for addressing that before they raise the age pension to 70.

They are building in measures that affect people across the board. An attack on universal health care is what the $7 co-payment is about, undermining universal health care, one of the fundamentals Australians believe to a fair, compassionate society. That is not fair, that is not compassionate and it certainly is taking away people's opportunity. And who is that co-payment going to affect the most: the most vulnerable in this country, the people with the least money who will not be able to afford to go to a doctor. When people ask will it put them off, yes, it will put them off. Believe me, most Australians think this is not fair. Certainly all the people that have been emailing and coming to our meetings are extremely distressed about this budget. They see what it means to people. They see how unfair it is. They absolutely cannot believe the government is expecting young people to live on no income. That builds in disadvantage. It entrenches poverty, and once you are in poverty it becomes yet another barrier to employment. When I asked the department how people could access even basic things when they are living on no income, would they be able to access the Employment Pathway funds to pay for their co-payment, they could not tell me. Would they be able to access it to buy clothes to be able to turn up to interviews? They could not tell me.

This is an ideologically driven budget where the government confects a welfare crisis, which, as I said this morning, the HILDA report quite clearly shows is nonsense. Less people are reliant on income support than were 10 years ago. That is a confected crisis. The budget emergency is a confected crisis and this is an ideological driven approach to those who are most vulnerable in this country. Far from being fair, as Joe Hockey claims, it is unfair. It will not improve inequality in this country, it will increase inequality. The government were so keen to bring in these cuts that they have not actually thought through what it means. They have not thought through what it means to cut a full-time Disability Commissioner—or maybe they did think that through, because for the people who are going to be affected by this budget, people with disabilities, one of the people they can turn to to make a complaint is the Disability Commissioner. We will cut that out, we will not have a full-time one of those. What is the greatest number of complaints the Human Rights Commission gets? You guessed it, disability. That is what they are up to. (Time expired)