Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If the Abbott budget were to be summed up with one word, that word would be 'unfair'. Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey have unfairly attacked Australia's most vulnerable citizens, through a whole series of measures in this budget, and in doing so they have knowingly broken their election promises and sacrificed the interests—and, indeed, the wellbeing—of young people, older people and people already living with disadvantage. To make matters worse, they have manufactured a 'budget crisis' in a pitiful attempt to try and justify these savage cuts. This manufactured budget crisis is a serious and committed attempt by them to mislead the electorate and justify the enormity of the cuts that they are seeking to put through in this budget.

It is also a budget that, I believe, attacks the values that Australians believe to be perennial values. Often, as major political parties, we are challenged about being too much alike. I certainly know that we get that from the cross-bench. In some parts, a universal commitment to free education, to investing in education, and a universal commitment to the sustaining of public health care are things that people, I think naively, took for granted—not from the Labor Party but from the coalition, who went to the last election promising that many things like this would not change. They went further, promising explicitly that their commitment, for example, to our education reforms that came about through the Gonski review would not be touched, and would not change, and that they were going to stand with the Labor Party in the commitments to those education reforms. I will talk about higher education shortly. But, as I said, this budget does undermine the fundamental values that I think many Australians—in retrospect, naively—thought that the coalition would also stand for once they attained office.

The inequality of this budget and the fabrication of the budget crisis is a reality and, I think, has been now realised by the Australian people. In recognising this, there is a great deal of anger in the community, and I, like many of my colleagues—and, I am sure, many coalition senators—have been contacted by voters who placed their trust in the Liberal Party at the last election and feel mind-blowingly betrayed. Voters looked at their policies—as I know many people in my constituency do—very closely. They looked at them from their own perspective, for sure, but they also put them to that general decency test, as they put every government to when they consider casting a vote for them.

I believe that, in the area that I represent, the Australian Capital Territory, the inequity and unfairness of this budget is more apparent than ever. I know that all around Australia people are concerned. They are angry. They are very worried about their future, their parents' future and their children's future. But here in the ACT we are being asked to carry a disproportionate cost in relation to job cuts coming about as a direct result of these budget cuts. It is not just jobs. It is also about health and education. For example, cuts to the states' and territories' health funding mean that the ACT health budget will take an instant hit of some $47 million on 1 July 2014. This is the equivalent of 390 nurses' salaries and more than 2,800 elective surgeries. This is the first instalment of a $240 million reduction in health funding flagged to hit Canberra over the next four years.

To put this in perspective, the New South Wales government is also losing $1.2 billion in health funding over the next four years, which works out, if you want a simplistic analysis, at about $165 per person. In the ACT, the $240 million worth of health cuts is equivalent to the loss of $627 per person in health funding, approximately four times that of the state within which the ACT sits.

Education is also taking a hit in this unfair budget. We have 62,500 primary and secondary students here in the ACT whose education outcomes have been put in jeopardy—and not just theirs but those of the future generations of students who will move through our education system as well. We know the cuts to higher education in particular are going to disproportionately impact on Canberra again because we have a high proportion of higher education students. There are 37,000 higher education students here in Canberra. That is one in 10 Canberrans engaged in one form or another of higher education. Each one of these Canberra students contributes to our local economy both as a consumer and very often as a casual or part-time worker. They are also carers and contribute to community and family life. These students are facing a double whammy of increased costs and greater debt.

The coalition's proposal to deregulate university fees and their plans to raise interest rates on HECS debts while at the same time lowering the minimum repayment threshold will cause university fees and debts to rise. It will inevitably lead to a situation where students will weigh up how much debt they are prepared to incur and how long it will take for them to repay it when deciding whether or not to undertake tertiary education at all.

This is an attack on the values and system established firmly by the Whitlam and Hawke governments of the past, sustained by previous coalition governments. It is a system built around the principle that someone's merit rather than their wealth is what should determine their opportunity for higher education. Cuts of this magnitude are reminiscent of the previous Liberal government's cuts after the 1996 election. But back then the principle of maintaining one's ability to access higher education based on merit was not undermined to the extent that it is in this budget and these budget proposals. I remember Senator Vanstone having stewardship of the portfolio of higher education at the time and the way in which across there, probably not too far from where Senator Cormann is sitting now, she announced stewardship over a substantial raft of cuts to higher education research and development funding. So for someone like me who has been here now for quite some time, including in the first term of the previous coalition government from 1996 to 1998, it is like deja vu. It is like deja vu seeing this first round of budget cuts emanating from a government that has abandoned the principle of education in this country being based on merit rather than on personal or family wealth.

As there was back then, there was an explicit commitment by the leader of the coalition that there would be no changes to government funding for higher education. Now, like then, we see that commitment being completely abandoned, seemingly without a second thought and certainly without a peep of protest from either the frontbench or the backbench of the coalition government. This is a sad indictment on politicians representing the coalition who I know believed the rhetoric that they heard from their leader, which was that a promise was a promise and promises would be honoured. All around the electorate we heard them make much of those promises and now we see example after example in this place of those promises, principles and values being recklessly abandoned. They stand up here and make no apology for that.

I am also very worried about young Canberrans who are not in higher education but have decided—I think very wisely—to devote themselves to developing their skills in vocational programs, such as apprenticeships, to go into a multitude of trades. Before the election, Mr Abbott promised the 9,000 apprentices and trainees who call Canberra home that under his government they would receive more financial assistance to learn their trade and find employment. But, instead, the Abbott government has cut over $1 billion from programs that supported apprentices. Tools For Your Trade payments, currently to the tune of $5,500 for each apprentice—and you only need to go to the local hardware store to understand the costs incurred by young tradesmen and tradeswomen if they seek to kit themselves up for a life in their chosen trade—have been abolished in the budget, as have numerous mentoring programs that supported apprentices from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is a continuation of the litany of broken promises.

Of course, there is more. Another area of significance for the ACT economy is the commitment to research, development and innovation here in the ACT. I acknowledge the ACT is a substantial beneficiary of the physical location of organisations such as the CSIRO. I think our whole society benefits from the presence of so many scientists among us. But the CSIRO is going to be cut by $115 million. This will cost the organisation some 420 staff in the next 12 months and an estimated $49 million in external revenue. The CSIRO Staff Association believe that, in response to these cuts, management will cease research in neuroscience and geothermal energy as well as cut back research into astrophysics, radio astronomy and carbon capture. Surely in just this short list of five areas of scientific research you can see the folly of such a cut. All of these areas are likely to produce not only great scientific outcomes and benefits to our industry and our society but I suspect some really strong export revenues as well. These are the areas of scientific research that will drive our future economic growth and yet this thoughtless cut, this broken promise, is going to undermine our very capacity as a nation to leverage our brains in this knowledge economy and to create an optimistic and prosperous future. As I said, the CSIRO have a strong presence here in Canberra and the impacts of these cuts will be felt throughout the community.

Research for information technology has also been savaged in this budget—eight programs which support Australia's continued innovation within the information technology sector. It is hard to say 'sector', because information technology is the core of every sector these days. In attacking information technology investment in R&D and innovation, the government is actually attacking the heart of every sector, every business place, from the public sector right through to mining. It is IT that drives their business processes; it is IT that sits beneath the data that is used, whether it is for exploration in our offshore oil and gas fields or whether it is environmental data being collected so we can assess the prospects for our agricultural sector. This data, this information technology that empowers every sector to be smart in the way they do business, has been attacked. This includes Commercialisation Australia—a $213 million grant program for start-ups—and the Innovation Investment Fund, which co-invests and supports our capital venture sector to make sure that our smart start-ups find their way into the market. Without these programs, which were designed through successive governments to address a market failure in the Australian economy, I am concerned that this market will fail again. Commercialisation Australia, for example, has supported over 500 companies and provides that vital lifeline to start-ups that have proven technology but need to expand their ability to prove their product, take it to market and start deriving the kinds of growth revenues and export revenues that allow our economy to continue to grow.

I have spent a fair bit of time looking very closely at the IT and related industries, and we are in so many sectors the best in the world. There are bright Australians all around the world, leading the way in technology—and here we are, through this unfair budget, spiking the very foundation of where our brightest people come from. We are denying Australia the opportunity to build these successful companies from scratch, and we are saying to these bright people, 'We don't want you, go and find your fortune and your success offshore.' In this way, these measures in this unfair budget are directly contributing to the brain drain that we all stand up here and lament on a regular basis.

NICTA is another casualty. NICTA will be defunded from 2016 under this budget. I hope that all those PhD students and all those clever people who are now working to create new wealth-creating companies based on fantastic Australian technology can, between now and the 2015 budget, convince the Abbott government cabinet to continue funding for NICTA, because they deserve it. NICTA was a product of the Howard government, and it came about as a response to the lack of consolidated and focused effort in driving PhD student opportunities and driving opportunities for commercialisation specifically of IT start-ups in the Australian economy. It was a coalition solution to a market failure that prevented Australia from capitalising on what we were great at—IT. Now this government is saying it is not going to fund the very response to a national need to grow our economy that they came up with in the first place. What folly! Surely on the coalition side there is someone with a little depth and a little corporate knowledge that understands the stupidity of these measure and the damage they will do.

I turn to the Public Service. In the last 24 hours we have heard further reports from the CPSU about another attack on the very conditions of Australian public servants. The Australian Public Service is one of the strongest performing in the world. We know that despite the misinformation promoted by the coalition government it is one of the most efficient public services in the world, and it is one of the most effective. We know, because of our experience in government, that you need a strong and efficient and effective Public Service to get the job done and to serve Australians' needs. We had a program in government of making sure the Public Service was extremely efficient. The Labor Party does not accept that our proposed measures to extract those efficiencies in any way led to the magnitude of job cuts that constitute yet another broken promise by this government. Senator Seselja, my fellow ACT senator, said on 4 July 2013 on ABC local radio with Adam Shirley:

The Coalition have been good enough to put their policies on the table and that policy is to, across Australia, reduce the size of the public service by 12,000 through natural attrition. Now my job should I be elected to the Senate will of course be to hold the Coalition to that promise … that's the way it should occur—that's what the Coalition has said in their policy.

Of course we know that Senator Seselja has failed, and we now know that there was never an intention to limit job cuts to natural attrition. We now know that the job cuts on the books extend to 16,500 and what we know from the analysis from the Community and Public Sector Union and evidence gathered through the commission of cuts, or Commission of Audit Senate select committee, was that the CPSU believes that could be as high as $25,000.

This is a double hit for many people in Canberra, because we are also enduring a hiring freeze. Combined with the attacks on conditions, this is an arbitrary—and I believe, an ideologically-motivated—effort to shrink the public sector on some misguided belief that you can say: 'Click your fingers—smaller government. That is what we believe in.' The real world is not like that, and perhaps after a few more months in government you will find that you cannot actually do the things that you say you will do, because you do not have a workforce capable of doing it.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank the ACT government for their thoughtful and clever budget in making sure that, in response to an unfair and disreputable federal budget, they have been able to mitigate much of the damage that has been done. (Time expired)