Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

The government have clearly established their ideology in this speech, in which the current Treasurer said:

As a community we need to redefine the responsibility of government and its citizens to provide for themselves, both during their working lives and into retirement.

What the coalition simply forget is that some people cannot find jobs. Some people will never have access to a job to allow them to live in decent conditions in this country. That is just the sad fact, and they certainly will not be able to find jobs under this coalition government. The government go on about supporting small business, and we support the small business package. This Labor opposition, during the global financial crisis, saved over 212,000 jobs in this country because we believed that we had to stimulate the economy to make sure that communities could continue to operate effectively, to make sure that families could operate effectively, to make sure that small business kept an income coming in. When the banks were not lending to them, we, as a government, stepped in to the system. That is what governments are about, and that is why we were one of the few advanced countries in the world to escape a recession during the global financial crisis.

We were so good at it that some of the senators on the other side refused to accept that there was a financial crisis. They called it the North American financial crisis. That is how dopey some of them are over there. They did not understand what was happening to the global economy. They did not understand what could have happened to this economy. When we stimulated the economy, they decried that stimulus on the basis of their ideology. That really goes back to what the Treasurer said before he became Treasurer: you really have to provide for yourself.

Mr Hockey, in his speech in London, went on to say:

You will remember it was Margaret Thatcher who interpreted community entitlements as the right for our children to 'grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so'.

Basically, if you are strong, if you are tough, if you are gifted, it is fine, but for the rest of you who do not have those attributes you can just please yourself. This was a speech that really outlined what the coalition have been about and certainly outlined what they were about in that first budget. Mr Hockey continued in his speech:

A weak government tends to give its citizens everything they wish for. A strong government has the will to say no.

This is a government that has had to backflip on a range of its policy positions, including on paid parental leave of $150,000 for those who were earning significant amounts of money. Now they say to women in this country: if you want to access both the government scheme that was approved by the Productivity Commission and you want to access your enterprise bargain scheme, then you are rorting the system. That is not how these schemes operated—and it is not a rorting of the system.

The Treasurer started talking about Hong Kong in his London speech. He said that Hong Kong is a city of seven million and it is without a social safety net. He said that if you do not have a social safety net then your top personal income tax rate is 17 per cent, your corporate tax rate is 16½ per cent, unemployment is low, inflation is 4.5 per cent and the growth rate is still a respectable four per cent. He said:

… the family unit is very much intact and social welfare is largely unknown.

The problem for the Treasurer is that that is only one side of the coin in Hong Kong. If you do not have a social safety net and you do not have a family that can look after you and you do not have enough money in the bank, like the top 10 per cent in this country, then you have a problem. What he did not say, but what the South China Morning Postone of the newspapers there—has said, is that there are 1.3 million people in Hong Kong living below the poverty line. That is 1.3 million! One in three of the elderly in Hong Kong are living below the poverty line. Two hundred and eighty thousand youngsters in Hong Kong are living below the poverty line. There are no poverty lines for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, because they are in an even worse position. In Hong Kong 15.2 per cent of the population are living below the poverty line—second only to the United States. I have newspaper reports here from a couple of weeks ago about the 'caged dogs' in Hong Kong. The caged dogs are not dogs; they are human beings living in six-foot by three-foot by three-foot cages, because that is all they can afford in Hong Kong. Yet we have a Treasurer of this country who would say that Hong Kong is what we should be looking at for the basis of going forward in this country. Well, Labor says no to that! Labor says that is not the way forward.

What did we get after that speech? We moved to a Commission of Audit—which was dominated by big business—to have big business determine how everything should work in this country. The Commission of Audit basically said to slash and burn across the economy, put an austerity system in and everything will be okay. The same philosophy underpins the Treasurer's ideas that if you do not have family to look after you and if you do not get a decent living then you should just be left without a welfare system. This is a nonsense! I have never heard such nonsense! When you go back and read the speech again in the context of the two budgets that we have had, you understand why that first budget set about to rip away at funding for health and rip away at funding for education and rip away at pensions in this country. Remember that first budget was about taking $80 a week off pensioners! Where did the coalition and the Treasurer get that idea? They got it from Hong Kong and that speech. Someone will look after pensioners; somebody in your family will look after you. Then we can reduce income tax rates. Then we can reduce corporate tax rates. We will just get you out of the welfare system in this country. Labor understands the importance of ensuring that when families are in trouble they have access to government help and government support. You cannot trust this government. If you want to know what they are all about, go back to the Treasurer's speech when he was in opposition, when he was in London, and when I think he let his guard down, so that you can see exactly what this government is all about.

But do not take my word about the government. You only have to look at what their ex-friends in the Murdoch press are saying about them and about this budget. You cannot look at this budget on its own. You have to look at this budget in the context of the first Abbott-Hockey budget and the second budget. And this second budget is about panic; this second budget is about populism; this second budget is about saving two jobs in this country—not anyone else's job but the jobs of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. That is what it is about.

You have Peter van Onselen writing in The Australian; the headline is: 'This is surrender, not leadership'. These are their friends in the Murdoch press: 'This is surrender.' Peter van Onselen goes on to say:

This budget represents a complete surrender: to the Senate, the opposition, nervous backbenchers and perhaps a public unwilling to accept tough fiscal restraint.

Well, they have surrendered, because what they wanted to do was to make sure that those in the top 10 per cent enjoyed $150,000 a year in paid parental leave. They have abandoned that because the public has recoiled in horror at that approach.

Paul Kelly, the doyen of the right in this country—what does he say? 'The real aim' of the budget 'is to save the Coalition'; that is what it is about. He says:

This budget aims to revive the Abbott government's political fortunes, entrench the Coalition base vote with small business, families and farmers and give priority to growth and jobs over budget repair.

The second Hockey budget is driven by two forces: the need to counter the onslaught on the 2014 budget that almost destroyed the government and the $52 billion revenue downgrade since last year.

Let me tell you what is still in this budget—what has not been removed from this budget. That is the attacks on the health system and the attacks on the education system—worth about $80 billion.

In my state, the Premier, a Liberal Premier, Mike Baird, has said that the budget was 'a kick in the guts' for New South Wales. The New South Wales Treasury has estimated that $1.2 billion will come out of the health system every year under this budget.

When I say 'this budget', I am talking about the first budget and the second budget, because you cannot disentangle them; they are the same budget. You just have to look at what is happening in health, not only in the hospital system but also for the doctors. So what did they want to do? They wanted to put on a $7 GP co-payment for everyone who went to see the doctor. I have been on an inquiry into this which has been going around the country, and I was in Tamworth. In Tamworth, there is a doctors business with 15 doctors, and they said that, under the $7 co-payment, they would have to charge those with a concession card $65 to see the doctor and those without a concession card $100 to go and see a doctor. This is what this government is all about: shifting costs from the collective of the federal government back to the individual, because that is the theory that this government has. It is the Hong Kong theory—the theory that you have really got to have your family look after you for the rest of your life, that there should be no welfare system, and that if 15 or 16 or 17 or 20 per cent of the population live in abject poverty then that is okay because you can reduce taxation—you can reduce business taxation. That is the line that the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, was running, and that is basically where the first budget was heading: to rip away at the support systems for families in this country. So health was given a big belting in that first budget, and it is still there.

On education, they ripped away the Gonski approach, and the Gonski approach was to make sure that activity funding was there. If you were in a school with a low socioeconomic background, you got some support. If you had Indigenous children with special needs, you got special support. But what does this government do? It goes back to a position where you will see The King's School and other private schools in Sydney get more money, at the expense of the poorest schools in the country. So private education will get preference over public education. That is what this government is about. You have only got to look—