Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This feels like deja vu—day after day; same old same old—these guys, cutting everything to blazes and pretending they are not doing it: another question time, more unanswered questions and more obfuscation. Today Senator Brandis, the minister in this place, played politics instead of answering the questions put to him. He even refuted the validity of a medical journal. Senator Payne did not quite achieve the outcome she wanted and tried to dance around the issue of rights and conditions of public servants while holding up the next enterprise agreements for human services staff. Despite harking back to the Commission of Audit and alluding to the importance of budget control, Senator Brandis has a very short memory. The fact that the Treasurer has doubled the deficit—adding $68 billion in just 18 months—seems to elude those on the other side. It is a fact from which they run every single day.

There is not a week that goes by, in this place, that we do not hear about some service or other that this government wants to tear apart to fund an ever-increasing black hole. It is hard to fathom how they could be growing the deficit at the same time as cutting health and education to the tune of $60 billion. This is what comes naturally to the government of this day: to cut. The government's green paper that we have been hearing about, that Senator Brandis ran away from as fast as he could as soon as he was asked questions, is less of a discussion paper about the role of federation and more like a Liberal Party manifesto of the things they want to cut.

Cutting the federal government out of education and charging families for public schools was the debate yesterday. Today, we hear more cuts from hospitals are on the horizon; there will be $18 billion per year cut from hospitals. We have just heard the senator for South Wales speak about the fact that John Howard did bring in the GST and the money comes to the Commonwealth, but here we have the Prime Minister saying, 'I don't want to have to pay for that stuff. Good on you states; you're on your own.' Reports today reveal that this government wants to cut nearly $1 billion from early-childhood education. They are considering walking away altogether from funding preschool and kindergarten. This would be an absolutely devastating blow to children's development and a huge hit to family budgets.

Children in preschool and kindergarten are just the latest targets of Tony Abbott's assault on the good things that sustain this nation. Instead of being the mature government they promised to be—answering questions put to them—they hid, again, today behind their hypocritical attacks on Labor, blaming everyone and anyone but themselves and refusing to answer questions, running from them in the most arrogant way.

Today, however, we did see one revelation—a revelation that Labor has known all along but from which the Liberal government continues to hide. Despite the government extending Labor's program of federal funding for preschool and kindergarten, we know that was just to get them past the last election. That was until they could begin to get to a point where they feel they could wipe their hands of that responsibility altogether. The Liberal Party is so despicable in government that they are seeking to hide behind the smokescreen of this green paper so that they can abandon $840 million in funding that guarantees four-year-olds 15 hours of preschool each week, with a $129.4 million cut from the industry in New South Wales. Tony Abbott has already said, 'We have a Federation reform white paper and that will look at the question of who is going to take primary responsibility for preschool going forward,' and this government has indicated at every turn that they are not up for the job of responsibility. Blame they are good at; increasing the deficit, doubling the deficit and running from answers they are good at; but they are not good at telling the truth and they are certainly not good at looking after the essential things that every Australian needs: access to education, access to decent health and access to preschool so that you can grow up in a great nation with a vision for the future. Instead, we see this despicable act played out day after day by a government that has a miserly and myopic view of the future of this nation. It is fear driven. They use fear-laden rhetoric every day, taking away the hope and the business confidence of a generation.

Ninety per cent of the brain development of young people happens in their first five years, but it does not matter to this government that looks like it is set to rip away funding from a vital sector: the education sector of this country.