Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment and Water (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

and you on that side of the chamber are not doing enough to fix it. I hope you go back to your constituencies, back to your states, and listen to the stories of older Australians who are struggling to stay in their own homes. They should be supported to stay in their own homes. Otherwise, they increase the demand on residential aged care. As I said before, this is an unfair budget on women. We know that it is women, in the main, who care for elderly parents in our community. This government's not doing enough to fix those issues. You're underfunding aged care, selling out older Australians, and you're not even honest about it.

Sadly, older Australians are not the only people losing out under this budget. I'm worried about the future of our education system. At a time when we should be growing the investment in our schools at a much higher rate than we are, what you've done is put in place $17 billion worth of cuts to our schools. Our children are losing out under this budget. I know those on the other side will argue that the education budget is growing and that you can prove it's growing. But the simple fact is that we laid out very clear plans and very clear priorities that our schools deserve more growth in funding than what you've given them. That difference adds up to some $17 billion being ripped out of our schools and that you want to hand over in tax cuts to big banks, to big business. The big banks are getting that $17 billion. I find it extraordinary that, at a time when we are seeing the real and devastating and worrying impacts of the conduct of Australia's banks coming out of the banking royal commission, you on that side want to hand them a big tax cut. It's incredibly galling to me that I can see that that money should be going straight to Australia's schools.

It should also be going into our higher education system. I'm appalled to see that this budget locks in previous $2.2 billion in cuts to our universities. Part of this plan is a proposal to lower the repayment threshold for the HELP scheme, with repayments to start when individuals earn just $45,000. I was talking to my own staff and to other young people today about the fact that they're completely galled by the idea that they should be on the same tax rate as someone earning $180,000 or $200,000 a year at the same time as they're having to pay back HELP, HECS and all those kinds of student payments.

It is incredibly difficult to get by as a young person today. These cuts to universities will have a big impact on students, and, indeed, on prospective students, across the country. I also worry about what they will do to the quality of our participation in international education markets. I want to give a shout-out to the National Union of Students Build a Better Budget campaign, because, importantly, they've put many of these issues on the agenda consistently and, rightly, are communicating with students right around the country about what a bad budget this is.

Today we see a budget that persists with $715 million worth of cuts to hospitals over the next two years alone, and we can see more cuts to follow in the next five years. We see that the Medicare rebate is frozen and we see increasing out-of-pocket costs to see specialists. Those opposite failed to fix the health insurance affordability crisis, and I'm very disappointed to see that they failed to adopt Labor's great plan to scrap the discriminatory tampon tax. Rightly, we don't see items like condoms taxed in Australia, and nor should we see items like tampons taxed.

We see that we have a government here that can't be trusted on health or apprenticeships. We've seen a loss of more than 139,000 apprenticeship places under this government. We've seen more than $3 billion worth of cuts in previous budgets to education and training. We absolutely cannot afford to see any more of these cuts. We've seen cuts in remote housing, we've seen cuts in dental care and we've seen women's homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters put at risk.

So today we stand with a clear choice in the lead-up to the by-elections that are before us. A future Labor government is a government that will invest in education, job creation and health care. Or there are the Liberals, who rip money from families, schools and hospitals. (Time expired)