Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

We've heard that before: magically, the pie becomes bigger. Twenty-three point six per cent. You've locked in spending cuts in your budget and the only way you can avoid that conclusion is the interjection you just made, Senator Cormann: the economy is going to be bigger. Well, that's going really well on your watch at the moment. We've got an ailing economy. In fact, the Grattan Institute has calculated that, in order to get to the projected spending levels, real spending growth would need to average 1.3 per cent per annum over the decade, and 1.8 per cent if the economy performs better. Either way, this is substantially lower than what any previous government has achieved. What this government is locking in is, in fact, in real terms, a fall in spending for things like dental health, tertiary education, family payments, social housing, potentially defence, and veterans, but it won't tell us where it is.

Let's just talk about health for a minute. Health expenditure grows faster than the economy and health expenditure grows faster than inflation. And, whilst it's not as high as it was five or 10 years ago, I think that in the last year it was at 4.5 per cent per annum. According to these budget figures, guess what health expenditure grows at: 0.7 per cent. It's currently growing at 4.5 per cent. You're going to make sure it grows at 0.7 per cent as the population ages and more health expenditure is required, and you say that isn't going to require cuts to public hospitals or cuts to Medicare?

Of course it will. It is the inexorable logic of numbers. Four and a half per cent declining to 0.7 per cent at the same time as the population ages—there is only one way you fund that and that is through expenditure cuts. When was the last time anybody's private health insurance bill only increased by 0.7 per cent? With this stage 3, the government is locking in—and refusing to be up-front about it—cuts to health and cuts to education, cuts across the board, and you have a mandate for none of it. You have a mandate for none of it.

I commend this amendment to the chamber. It is disappointing that Senators Patrick and Griff and Senator Lambie have fallen for the hostage trick, where a government is today holding tax cuts—which I think everybody in this chamber agrees with—hostage to what is actually an ideological argument about what happens in five years time. There is an opportunity for the chamber to require the government of the day to actually be up-front about how they're going to pay for their tax cuts, rather than locking in a permanent reduction in government expenditure and a permanent reduction in health expenditure in five years time as a consequence of this tax cut.