Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister of Australia said that. Mr Abbott said that. He did not mince his words. He said this was the standard for democratic governments and he has conspicuously failed to live up to that standard. The Prime Minister and his government have set a great precedent—a precedent that he warned against. Before the last election, he declared emphatically and without any ambiguity whatsoever that there would be:

… no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.

Just in case anyone missed the point, he later went on to say that there would be 'no surprises and no excuses' from a coalition government. The people who trusted this Prime Minister were certainly in for a very big surprise—first, when the government unveiled its list of spending cuts in the Commission of Audit's report, and then in the budget, when it announced the cuts that it wanted to make. There were indeed massive cuts to education. There were massive cuts to health, changes to pensions, cuts to the ABC and cuts to SBS. There are $50 billion worth of cuts to hospitals, a $7 GP tax, and a $5 prescription fee. There are $30 billion worth of cuts to schools over the next decade and more than $5 billion to universities, with the very real prospect of $100,000 degrees. Changes in indexation will see cuts to the value of pensions over time. There is a one per cent cut in funding to the ABC and SBS. These are cuts that the Prime Minister said—remember?—he would not make. The government have evasively claimed that there are no cuts to schools—and we heard it again today. They have got more front than Myers to come into this chamber and say that they are not really cutting at all! The Prime Minister and his colleagues have failed to persuade the Australian premiers that that is the case. The government have failed to persuade the Australian people that that is the case. And, of course, we know that the budget has been completely and totally discredited in the eyes of the public right across this nation.

The Australian people know that this budget is fundamentally unfair because it places the greatest of all burdens upon the most disadvantaged members of our community. The budget cuts into higher education have abandoned the ideal of equality of opportunity—the fair go that Australians have had traditionally come to see as their right to expect. These cuts mean that we will no longer have the view that, if you have ability and are prepared to work hard, you can get a decent education in this country. What this government has done is reimposed the great Menzies tradition which said that, if you came from a well-off family, you enjoyed the opportunities of privilege being continued. The whole principle of this government's approach to higher education is to entrench privilege, to entrench wealth and to entrench opportunities for those who already have a disproportionate share of those opportunities. Families will be forced to make choices, all right! They will have to choose: do they take out a second mortgage— (Time expired)