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

I'm just trying to remember where I was up to when I last spoke. It was something about the government being an absolute rabble—I think that's where I got up to, and I think I was dead on when I gave that position. I was talking about the budget falling apart overnight. It didn't last from Lateline to lunch. This is a government that has just lost it completely. This government has got no focus. It is still trying to deal with the division and the dysfunction that has epitomised a government now with three Prime Ministers. It's just a terrible situation that we're in.

This budget won't be the silver bullet that makes people forget about how bad this government has been over a period of six years. Here we are after six years—we're probably six weeks out from an election—and I can tell you that a $75 tax cut won't undo the cuts and cruelty that this government has been dishing out over the last six years. As I said, we sought to move an amendment in the House to see the payment extended, because there's no good reason for people on these payments to be excluded. They face the same cost of living and, in many cases, are, in fact, on a lower payment. While Labor supports this payment, make no mistake that, after six years of chaos and cruel cuts, the Australian people will see right through this cynical and desperate attempt from this rabble of a government to save its own skin.

This government must take the Australian public for fools. They must think that pensioners have forgotten what the government tried to do to pensioners. What the government will do today with this one-off payment doesn't undo the fact that this budget is being propped up by vulnerable Australians. Shamefully, this government has built almost a quarter of their projected budget surplus on underspends in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The Prime Minister has counted a $1.6 billion underspend towards the budget bottom line next year. This is a disgrace, not an achievement. It's $1.6 billion in services and support that people with disability will miss out on because the government has botched the NDIS and underspent at every turn.

It comes on top of a shocking $3.4 billion underspend in the 2018-19 financial year and over $6 billion to date. This is a direct result of delays in the NDIS rollout, with over 77,000 people missing out on the NDIS this year alone, and it's a consequence of people being unable to use their plans because services and support are simply not available. People are waiting months and, in some cases, years for basic equipment. People are going without the right therapy and personal support. The NDIS has fallen into crisis under this government. People are getting poor-quality plans, they are not being treated with respect, services are being pushed to the brink and waiting times are completely unacceptable. After six years of neglect, the government's kneejerk announcement on NDIS prices, six weeks out from an election, is too little too late. The bottom line is that Australians with disability are the ones paying so Scott Morrison can bolster his books.

For 834 days, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government tried to cut the pension for over 1½ million pensioners, as well as recipients of Newstart, youth allowance and other payments, by scrapping the energy supplement. The energy supplement was designed to help vulnerable Australians with the cost of power bills. Scott Morrison's plan would have cost a single pensioner $14.10 per fortnight, or around $365 per year, and cut $21.20 a fortnight, or around $550 a year, from couple pensioners. This wasn't a plan for a one-off cut; it was a cut every fortnight, every year for decades. Labor opposed this cut and committed to reversing it.

Pensioners will never forget that in every single budget the Abbot-Turnbull-Morrison government has tried time and again to cut the age pension. In 2013, Prime Minister Abbott promised that there would be no cuts to the pension. Yet in 2014 the Liberals tried to cut pension indexation—a cut that would have meant pensioners would have been forced to live on $80 a week less within 10 years. In that very same 2014 horror budget, the Liberals slashed $1 billion from pensioner concessions designed to help pensioners with the cost of living. In 2015, the Liberals did a deal with the Greens political party to cut the pension to 370,000 pensioners by as much as $12,000 a year by changing the pension assets test. In 2016, the Liberals tried to cut the pension to around 190,000 pensioners as part of a plan to limit overseas travel for pensioners to six weeks. For over three years, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has refused to review and adjust the deeming rates, while the Reserve Bank cash rate has fallen from 2.25 per cent in February 2015 to 1.5 per cent today. For two years, the Liberals planned to scrap the energy supplement, cutting the age pension to 1.5 million pensioners. For four years, the Liberals tried to raise the pension age to 70. Labor has fought each and every one of these cuts to the age pension. We have fought them tooth and nail.

Meanwhile, over the past three years, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has cut and outsourced over 2,500 jobs from Centrelink. During this time, we have seen a blowout in call wait times to Centrelink and wait times to get onto the pension. This government has made it even more difficult for pensioners to contact Centrelink and to access the pension. Labor will boost Centrelink with 1,200 jobs. We will improve the services, reduce the wait times and make income support available and accessible as and when Australians need it.

Try as they may, the government can't gloss over their gaping lack of energy policy with their energy support payment—this miserly energy support payment. After six years, they continue to be at each other's throats over energy policy, with 13 energy policies over six years. They're more interested in tackling each other than tackling climate change or energy prices. Since the Liberals formed government in 2013, wholesale energy prices have doubled. In contrast, Labor have a comprehensive plan to boost renewable energy and put downward pressures on prices. We do have an energy policy.

I would love to know what happened to this bill. How did something that wasn't in the budget last night end up in the parliament this morning? Was there a crisis meeting? When was the crisis meeting? Who was there? Did they deliberately leave out Newstart and other payments or was it an accident? And in the House this morning, the Minister for Social Services, Paul Fletcher, said, 'You're either fair dinkum or you're not. The numbers are either in your budget or they're not.' Paul Fletcher doesn't set the world alight but, I have to tell you, this just shows you all you need to know about this government. The government aren't fair dinkum about people on Newstart or youth allowance or the double orphan pension, because they weren't in their budget last night.

Labor is of the view that it's well past time that the Australian public get a chance to pass their judgement on this rabble of a government, on this government who don't care about families, who don't care about young people, who don't care about the underprivileged, who don't care about the vulnerable in our society. This is a government that are simply about the big end of town, because they were prepared, rather than deal with the issues that are important to the vulnerable in our society, to hand over $80 billion of tax cuts to multinational corporations, to the banks and to the richest corporations in this country. Again, that tells you all you need to know about this disjointed, discredited rabble of a government.

We need a government who understand the pressures that are on ordinary working families. The reason they don't understand is that most of them come from privileged backgrounds, not all of them, but most of them. Those that haven't come from privileged backgrounds have abandoned the working class and formed an alliance with the powerful and the privileged. I've got even more contempt for them than I have for these privileged ponces who sit over there lecturing workers about having to lose their penalty rates. They don't understand what it's like to roll up to the checkout at Woolworths, Coles or Aldi and just pray that your MasterCard won't bounce so that you can pay for your groceries. I've been there. My family's been in that position. We understand how tough it is for people to be in that situation. Blue-collar workers earning 40 grand a year are doing it tough. The cost of living's going through the roof and all this lot want to do is hand $80 billion over to the big end of town. That's exactly what they would do if they could get away with it, because we heard Senator Cormann during question time again raising the lowering of tax and getting the economy moving—trickle-down economics. They are a pathetic mob. They are an absolute pathetic mob. Working-class people need better. Working-class people deserve better. When this government come in and spend the bulk of their time changing leader, attacking each other, how could they ever get it right to actually look after the people who deserve to be looked after in this country?

They talk about equality of opportunity. How can a poor family in, say, Mount Druitt in the western suburbs of Sydney, faced with institutional poverty, faced with intergenerational unemployment, have equality of opportunity? How can their kids get equality of opportunity when this mob want to cut funding to public schools, when they want to hand more money over to private schools, when they won't put proper money into the health system? How can any working-class family in suburbs like Mount Druitt around this country get a fair go? They can't do it under this terrible government. And this is the government that wants to cut penalty rates. Those opposite were in here, day in, day out, arguing that penalty rates were old-fashioned, that penalty rates were not appropriate anymore. Yet, when I worked, my penalty rates at least gave me the opportunity—maybe not every year, but once every couple of years—to save up to take my family on a holiday, if I was lucky. And they just think penalty rates are an old-fashioned institution. No, penalty rates actually put food on the table for working-class families. Penalty rates actually put shoes on children's feet and school uniforms on their back. But, given that those opposite are so remote, so privileged, on a $200,000-a-year base rate, how could they ever understand how hard it is for working-class families to battle?

If there's one thing we need to do, it's to get rid of this coalition government. The National Party, who supposedly represent rural and regional Australia—some of the poorest regions in the country—talk a big game when they're up in the bush, but when they come in here they back cuts to penalty rates; they back tax cuts for the millionaires, the billionaires and the multinational corporations. And then they wonder why they're being abandoned by traditional National Party voters. I'll tell you why they're being abandoned: the public have had enough of them kowtowing to the Liberals. They're the doormat of the Liberals when they're down here. They're not taking the right steps to protect rural and regional Australia on welfare, on wages, on climate change. It's time for a change. It's time for a new government. It's time for a Labor government that looks after working people in this country.