Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the senator who spoke before me. I will not speak with the same level of energy and passion, so I apologise in advance to the Senate. There is nothing fair about the budget that is being proposed. There is nothing fair about a series of measures that fundamentally affect working Australians, that fundamentally attack the social fabric of our society. To assess the unfairness of the budget proposals that have been presented, you have to look at some of these measures and start to appreciate just who these measures are going to target, just who these measures are going to hurt.

I think one of the most outrageous of the measures that have been proposed is the $7 increase for GP visits, compounded with a cut to hospital funding, particularly beyond the forward estimates. The biggest losers out of this budget are going to be working families, those who are struggling to make ends meet, those who have two or three kids. We all know, and especially those of us who have young kids know, that they all tend to get sick at the same time. The financial burden is going to be considerable.

Sitting suspended from 18:30 to 19:30

As I was saying earlier, among the big losers in this budget are the sick and the needy. Before the dinner break, we were discussing the failure of the Abbott government to deliver a budget that promotes fairness and opportunity. I was speaking in particular about the impact of the $7 increase for GP visits. The fact is that we are not all as healthy as Senator Williams, who is sitting here today, who I note was born on 16 January 1955. We are not all fit and healthy 59-year-olds! There are a lot of people who go to the doctor repeatedly. They have young children, many of whom get sick at the same time. This just places another financial burden on them.

University students will be losers in this budget, which simply is not fair. University fees will be higher because of deregulation and because of the 30 per cent increase in university fees. Senator Williams might remember a time long ago, when he was going through university, when access to university was provided free by the government. That came after a period where it was provided under a scholarship. Frankly, we have moved too far away from that.

The losers in this unfair budget will be those across the world, who do not really have the voice that we have in this chamber, with a proposed cut of $7.9 billion in the foreign aid budget over five years. There is no fairness and no opportunity in a budget where 16,500 Public Service personnel look like they are going to be losing their jobs. Where is the fairness and opportunity when you cut family tax benefit B, when you raise the pension age from 67 to 70 and when you cut concessions? Young unemployed people under the age of 30 will face a six-month wait for a reduced dole. All Australian motorists, every time they get into a car—or, in Senator Williams's case, a tractor—will have to pay an extra fuel levy. Where is the fairness in a $500 million cut to Indigenous programs over five years? Nearly $1 billion is going to be cut from local councils and local government grants and the support that will be provided over the next four years. And what I am really concerned about is that, while there appears to be a cut of only $43.5 million to the ABC and the SBS, the government have made it very clear in the language that they have used that they see this as only a down payment. What worries me is that, in that space, there will be more cuts to come.

There are some measures which I think are a good thing: the pay freeze for politicians and senior public servants and the axing of the gold travel pass are things that should have been looked at as part of this budget. But there are big losers in this budget. There has been a failure to provide any opportunity, equity or fairness. What do we have here in this budget? A debt levy of two per cent has been stipulated for those earning over $180,000. That is really just a fig leaf to cover the horrible cuts that this budget will inflict on low- and middle-income earners. We have heard speaker after speaker in this chamber, today and on other days, talk about all the great things in the budget and who the real winners are going to be. Let's have a look at who the proposed winners in this budget are. The government likes to talk about the $20 billion medical research future fund. But let's be clear how that is being paid for: it is being paid for by middle-income Australians having to pay a levy every time they see a doctor. It is a win for big pharma, a win for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. At this stage, what is so concerning is that there are still no details and there is still no actual plan; all we have is a couple of words—