Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There was much fanfare and self-congratulation in this place on Tuesday night when the Treasurer handed down his 12th budget. We waited in anticipation: would this be a budget that would deliver on the big challenges of our time—climate change and water—a budget that would help struggling families, lock in access to health and education or make the tax system fairer? With more than $16 billion extra a year to spend, anything was possible. But what we got was a grab bag of cheques in the mail: $700 vouchers to parents to spend on tuition for their children; a $500 one-off cash bonus for most of the over-65s; $1,000 and $600 for carers; a childcare rebate of up to $8,000 cash—two years worth all at once; apprentices to get $1,000 to top up wages; $5,000 to move to where the jobs are; an $8,000 rebate for buying a solar photovoltaic unit; and a top-up of up to $3,000 for superannuation contributions. In fact, if you have a pulse, you will be likely to qualify for a windfall of some description. There were also minimal tax cuts for the lowest income earners and bigger cuts for those on middle to high incomes; very modest sums for Indigenous health and housing; a partial answer to poor dental services; tiny increases in childcare support, mental health and obesity; some handouts for farmers; $5 billion parked in a future fund for universities; and big spending on defence.

This budget has one purpose: to buy the Howard government’s way back into office and to kill off what must be for the Prime Minister an unsettling rise in the polls for the Labor opposition. What an extraordinary place to be in Australian political history, and what an extraordinary opportunity it presented—an economy at full strength, low inflation, coffers overflowing! We probably have to go back to the gold rush to find a time when governments were rolling in so much money from mining and taxes. In the boom more than a century ago, the money was spent on major infrastructure—on rail and road networks, sewerage and water systems, town halls, universities, parliaments and ports—but not so in this budget. Even as the Treasurer beamed with self-satisfaction at his own largesse, there were plenty outside thinking: ‘Shouldn’t some of that serious money be spent on tackling the really serious challenges we face?’

Federal government revenue next year is set to reach a massive $245 billion, excluding GST. However, the rain over the last week or so does not necessarily signal an end to the crippling drought, personal debt has grown alarmingly, housing is less affordable and rates of obesity and alcohol use loom as huge costs to health. And, despite coal exports worth $26 billion a year, Australia’s foreign debt keeps growing. The budget papers predict that export volumes will be up by five per cent next year but—here is the rub—imports will rise by 6.5 per cent. Our current account deficit will reach $66 billion—a staggering six per cent of gross domestic product. If the country settles back into a pattern of extremely low rainfall, if another big storm wipes out a whole sector in agriculture, as it did bananas last year, and if oil prices keep going up—and they have almost returned to the highs of late last year—then the Reserve Bank would have to act. This budget assumes a growth rate of 3.75 per cent, consumer prices to rise by 2.75 per cent and wages to go up 4.25 per cent—all of which nudges us closer to an interest rate rise and disaster for those families who are up to their eyeballs in mortgage repayments.

In its indecent haste to bribe its way into office, the Howard government again failed to tackle Australia’s most urgent threat—climate change. The United Nations Security Council, the UK and Pentagon defence experts now say that climate change is a bigger security threat than terrorism and is more complex than the Cold War. So what did we get on Tuesday night? Defence got an extra $2 billion and land transport $22 billion, but climate change did not even rate $1 billion. It is in fact wagging a finger at the most menacing threat of our time. For all the fanfare, the solar rebates will put barely 15,000 PV systems on rooftops, and these will be completely swamped by new housing—housing that for the most part will have pathetically poor energy efficiency. Add to this Australia’s record for having the world’s worst energy standards for appliances and equipment and it becomes clear that the grants were headline catching but totally ineffective in dealing with the enormity of this problem.

Where were the triggers for big investment in markets for energy savings and renewable energy? Where were the policies that industry and business were pleading for? The World Bank estimates that $55 billion was invested directly in renewable energy in just three years. Renewable energy investment is growing globally by 50 per cent a year, but not in Australia. From a purely business perspective, this is a global market that Australia should not be missing out on. As one of the most wasteful countries in the world, we need to ramp up energy efficiency initiatives. It is shocking that Australians who want to do the right thing are being betrayed by cynicism and deceit: being told that cuts would ruin the economy and that only coal and nuclear can provide baseload power. It is wrong and the government knows it. Yes, solar panel rebates are welcome, but this limited number will not solve the enormous problem we face. Fifty-three million dollars for stickers telling households how to save energy will not cut it either. The $170 million for adapting to climate change is in fact the white flag in this budget. It is easier to surrender than to act, particularly if your horizon is the next election.

Of course, the Howard government sceptics remain firmly in denial that catastrophic changes to our lives and our environment are upon us and will worsen unless we act now. One hundred and seventy million dollars will not be enough to adapt to the impact of climate change. In fact, the cost of adapting will be 20 times greater than the cost of taking action now to avoid the worst of it. But I am guessing the Howard government will have a road to Damascus moment as polling day draws closer. Its emissions task force will conclude that policies to lock in emissions cuts are required after all. The government will suddenly and resoundingly accept what the international scientific community has been telling it for years. It will swoop in just before the election with a multibillion-dollar handout for more so-called clean coal and nuclear reactors—perhaps even dam the few remaining wild rivers for hydro.

The reality is that this government believes that climate change is just another political problem like child care and dental health—problems that can be solved by funding just enough money to deliver a political advantage. But this is not every other problem; this is about the spectre of catastrophic climate change which may threaten our very civilisation. The Democrats, again, call on the Howard government to abandon political manoeuvring and to act now on climate change.

In every budget there is something that makes me really angry. This time it is a broken promise—a longstanding one to the Democrats and a recent one to Warren Entsch, other Liberals and to millions of Australians. Mr Howard has reneged on the undertaking he gave that this budget would recognise interdependent relationships for Public Service death benefits. Cabinet apparently knocked it back, saying it would increase unfunded superannuation liabilities by $2 billion. This is absurd. Superannuation liabilities increase all the time. In any case, what is the purpose of the Future Fund? The fact is that miserable and mean conservatives also opposed equality for women, the end of slavery and every other cause of the dispossessed and the disadvantaged. Mr Howard, if $2 billion is the price of equity, pay it. You have got the money—we all know it.

For years—decades even—Democrats have argued for long-term, sustained and sustainable commitments by successive governments to the nation state’s basic underpinning—its people and its land. From preschool to workforce entry takes nearly two decades. It is a very long time before you get a social and an economic dividend. Australia is paying for the coalition’s underinvestment in the last decade in the land—infrastructure, water, energy—and in our people: skills and making work worth while. There is supposed to be a labour shortage in this country. The crazy thing is that we have plenty of people available—combining the unemployed and the underemployed, over 1.5 million—but too many of these people do not have the skills or the incentives for the jobs that are available. To maximise productivity and skill creation you need a high level of sustained investment, and it has to be by governments. Productive investment needs long-term thinkers, not user-pays obsessives and hands-off economic rationalists. I think the coalition only woke up in the last year to the need to invest in the supply side—in education and in skills and training of all types. How is it that a budget to answer Labor’s education revolution could exclude the TAFE sector? Mr Howard, we do need plumbers and electricians and it is good to give young people help to enter these worthy careers, but that is not all there is to fixing the skills shortages. What is left of manufacturing in this country needs brains, not brawn.

The other aspect of the skills supply side is making work worth while. That means tax reform. It is true that participation has lifted as effective marginal tax rates have lowered, but not nearly enough. Real wages have lifted, but again not nearly enough and at nowhere near the rate of increases in profits. It is true that there have been tax cuts for the last five budgets. It is true that the low-income tax offset lifts the effective tax-free threshold substantially, but what a complex system we have. It is no wonder that it is not a good motivator to get people into work. ‘You will pay X dollars of tax, but, wait, we will give you Y dollars back.’ For goodness sake, we say: do not tax these people in the first place.

We have always agreed that top thresholds and rates had to be cut, but not without first helping the lowest-income Australians to shift from welfare to work. But always, for the coalition, the wealthiest got theirs first. We understand the rationale. Tax cuts to richer people are often saved. Tax cuts to the poor are spent and can endanger the economy, overstimulating it when it is near full capacity, as it is now. That is why the Democrats argue for phasing in structural tax reform over the medium term. Raising the tax-free threshold to the poverty line of $12,500 would apparently cost over $35 billion over four years. But can someone please explain why we income-tax people who are below the poverty line? Tax reform needs a plan but Mr Costello has no income tax plan; he just has an annual show bag at budget time.

Thank goodness for elections. At least vote buying means that lower-income Australians get a slice of the $31 billion in tax cuts over four years, even if it is only $2.88 a week, which is $50 less than someone earning a quarter of a million dollars. Nonetheless we applaud the return of funds to taxpayers whose tax bills are increased each year by stealth through bracket creep, and whose pay packets have recently been cut by Work Choices. This is money owed to them, taken without notice and without permission by a system which forces working men and women into a higher tax rate even as their real wage remains the same or goes backwards.

We acknowledge the Howard government’s stewardship over a buoyant economy and the many positive things they have done, but they are unable to grasp the idea of eliminating bracket creep by indexing the tax thresholds, a position that is widely supported, not least by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The Treasurer, it seems, does not get this essential equity principle. He expects praise for giving back tax revenue that he should not have in the first place. That is not good economic management. That is the Treasurer slipping his hand into pay packets and helping himself to more, while the government rolls in money, and the wages of many remain stagnant or go backwards. Had the 1980 lowest threshold of $4,041 kept pace with earnings it would now be about $15,000.

Any advocacy for struggling workers is incomplete without reference to those predatory IR policies which involve taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Work Choices is the poster boy of exploitative workplace legislators. The reality is that any money now being given back to low-income earners as tax cuts is limited compensation for wages driven down by the poisonous Work Choices, a law which punishes those without power, influence or wealth. At a time of healthy surpluses and soaring revenues, this was the opportunity to make the tax system simpler, fairer and more transparent.

The Democrats say it is not good policy to maintain a system of tax churning by taxing lower-income Australians and then instigating a complex system of returning bits of what was taken at various later dates in the form of benefits. We call on the government again to lift the tax free threshold over time, so that low-income earners do not pay income tax until they get to $20,000 in earnings. This will take at least two million people out of the income tax system, the vast majority of them women and part-timers. So you want greater participation in the workforce? Try this one, and let us pay for reform by getting rid of welfare for the wealthy and rationalising inequitable, inefficient and outdated tax concessions. It is called base broadening.

The budget earmarked $5 billion for the Higher Education Endowment Fund from which it is intended will flow perpetual funding to universities for capital works and research facilities. The Democrats welcome extra funding for universities. They are simultaneously starved of funds by government and lauded as the places where Australia’s future lies. We welcome the boost for capital works and research facilities, but those buildings and facilities must be filled with students. Bricks and mortar and a lick of paint do not help students struggling to pay their fees and rent, or for their books.

We acknowledge the Howard government’s decision at last to extend rent assistance to Austudy recipients, a measure the Democrats have campaigned on for years. We acknowledge there are other student income support initiatives but they fall well short of what is needed. And equality of access to university education has been ignored. In fact this budget actively paves the way for more rich students by removing the cap on full fee paying places. We oppose this regressive policy absolutely. Why would we want to lock in a system of inherited privilege rather than merit and intellect as a pathway to university education? Poorer, brighter students will be crowded out in favour of those clutching a fistful of dollars or those prepared to burden themselves to a life of crippling debt. It is obvious that cash-starved universities will err towards full fee paying students. Already universities are flagging another rise in HECS fees for those business courses which copped financial cuts in this budget. The Howard government’s higher education policies are designed by zealots who do not care that some are already paying more than $200,000 for their degrees. It is policymaking which is elitist and divisive.

In this budget the government has tried to placate those families struggling with child care, but what is on offer will do little to solve the real problems. We are pleased to see the government is finally moving to fix the absurdity of the 30 per cent childcare tax rebate so that families will receive the money more quickly. This was criticised by us and many others at the time; waiting 18 months was not helping the families who needed it most. And we are pleased to see that low-income families are now eligible. But the childcare tax rebate is still inflationary and a poor response to the sector’s many problems. The Treasurer is talking up the ‘up to $8,000’ that families could now receive but of course that is for two years; at most it could be up to $4,200 a year but almost nobody gets that. In fact the average payment will $813 per child.

The 10 per cent increase in the childcare benefit on top of indexation will help low- and middle-income families but it is a once-off. Childcare costs went up 12 per cent in each of the last two years.  If this pattern continues—and we have no reason to think it will not—people will be in the same boat they are in now in 12 months time. It would have been good to see the level of childcare benefit linked to the real costs of child care on an ongoing basis. Nor did we see any acknowledgement of the difficulties in finding places for the under twos. More affordable care does not help if you cannot find a place for your child.

There is not much vision for early childhood care and education here despite our poor position internationally on funding for this area. There is no sign either of removing FBT for employer provided child care and nannies are still not brought into the system. We need to see a national long-term plan for reform of child care and of the way that we provide early childhood services. We need better staff-child ratios; we need improved training and qualifications for all childcare staff; we need mandated age-appropriate learning and development program and national planning controls to make sure centres and services are equitably distributed, including operational subsidies for some areas And of course what is most missing is a national paid maternity scheme.

Australia’s 2.6 million carers will welcome the one-off bonus of $1,000 and the increases in respite funding. Nonetheless, this $341 million in handouts is peanuts compared to the $30 billion that family carers save the economy every year. The work that is done by carers often comes at great personal cost to their own physical and mental health, not to mention the pressure on their other relationships and the impact on their employment and financial situation. And what about the government’s commitment to people with disabilities? The response to the Senate’s unanimous report of a couple of months ago recommending substantial additional funding was obviously missing.

People may wonder who got the seriously big money in this budget. Well, let me now turn to defence. Defence gets another surge—this time to $2 billion, bringing the budget to $22 billion in 2007-08, with major new spending on mostly high-tech assault equipment like the $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter-bombers. Another $228 million is to be spent marketing the services as employers of choice. It is little wonder that this is needed when the treatment of returning men and women has been so shabby. All of this, and the money wasted on Iraq, may ingratiate us with President George Bush, but it is money that would have been better spent on climate change or on health and education or even on peacekeeping and good relations with our neighbours in this region.

Or let us for a moment imagine what a fraction of that money could have done for Indigenous Australians. The Democrats are extremely disappointed that, in a budget brimming with pre-election bribes and one-off handouts, so little for Indigenous people has been provided—even though this government has acknowledged time and again that they are the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised group in Australia. The failure to act on one of our most pressing national problems at a time when we can easily afford it is immoral. The most generous reading of the budget figures provides $135 million over four years, or less than $35 million extra a year, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These are the ones with a life expectancy of 20 years less than the rest of us.

The $300 million for Indigenous housing, while welcome, is likely to be wasted by the irksome conditions attached, like funding only houses that can be transferred to state housing authorities or made available for purchase by individuals. Nobody is against providing more opportunities for Indigenous people to own their own home, but that should not be to the exclusion of other effective options. This appears to mean that Indigenous community housing organisations will only receive funding if they relinquish control of their housing stock. Despite the highly distorted picture the government has been presenting about the state of Indigenous housing, even the minister acknowledges that some Indigenous community housing organisations have been very well managed. A one-size-fits-all solution makes no sense in locations where the private home ownership market is unlikely to work. We can look forward to Indigenous people again being blamed for government failures. The statistics for health and housing for Indigenous communities show a sorry neglect. We challenge the Rudd opposition to bridge the gap in Indigenous health, employment and housing, and to do so without a paternalistic agenda.

To conclude: we looked for inspirational leadership to deal with the menace of climate change; we got dust thrown into a powerful and growing storm. We looked for tax reform; we got money returned to low-income earners from whom it should never have been taken in the first place and nothing to protect them from it being nicked again. We looked for childcare and school funding that would cut to the heart of the problems in those sectors; we got a spray of surgically enhanced early payments and subsidies. We looked for funding that would ensure all of our best and brightest would have access to university, regardless of their income; we got a fund that will improve the look of facilities but little to finance the students who populate them. And Indigenous Australians continue to be treated in the same shameful way they have always been treated.

This is a budget which cements old prejudices and bribes voters. Its centrepiece? Truckloads of money. It could have done so much, but actually did so little. Sure, the Treasurer threw back to us some of it and, like kids in a lolly shop, we are expected to scramble for our share. But you can bet your bottom dollar that we will all end up paying for it in a multitude of ways and in the not-too-distant future. If you missed Tuesday night’s budget, do not worry: there will be another: ‘2007 Budget: the Sequel’. Just before election day, another large stash of money will be found and another round of  promises and spending will commence. And I am tipping that the sequel will be just as show-stopping as the first: a daring taxation robbery; a dramatic fight scene in which the key players alternatively fall away and then claw their way back; lots of special effects; and a winner-take-all scene at the end. But whether you will see reparations made in Indigenous communities, a lid on interest rates, a commitment to tax reform, access to higher education or a real response to climate change when you finally get out of the theatre remains to be seen.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a pity that the 36 of the 38 government members were missing throughout the presentation by the Leader of Democrats on this all-important budget night in reply here in the Senate. This year’s budget is more about greed than green. The Treasurer and the government have a huge ethical responsibility in spending the nation’s money and in ensuring its future. That ethical responsibility was not met in this budget. The massive tax cuts were for spending now. But the government failed in its higher responsibility to tackle the greatest threat to this nation’s future and to the lifestyle of our children and their children: climate change.

The Treasurer began his speech by saying that this country of Australia has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Well, it certainly has. It has got hotter, it has got drier and it has become more threatened by the arrogant failure of this government to address the environmental crises, and to make this country safer, more secure and happier for this generation and for the generations yet to come. The Greens have markedly different values and priorities from the government. The priorities for a Greens budget would include halting climate change, conserving water resources and protecting the environment, ensuring the 650,000 Australians on dental waiting lists receive the care they need, urgently funding measures to reduce the 17-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and of course increasing education funding to meet the OECD average education spending levels—where Australia should be, if not well in advance of that.

On climate change, security analysts from the Pentagon, along with ecologists and the world’s preponderant scientific opinion, know that climate change stalks our global community’s future more fearsomely and less discriminately than terrorism. With Tuesday night’s budget, however, came the dumping not just of Australian’s hopes but of Australian’s expectations that our government would at last tackle that climate change nemesis. The environment budget barely budged—just $281 million more, or two per cent of the unprecedented budget surplus of $15 billion. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the same Treasurer and the same government just last week that the world has less than 10 years to turn around the accelerating pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases or we face catastrophic consequent changes for the planet, and that of course means for Australia.

Climate change is not a future event. It is here, now, with a monumental impact. That is why the Howard government budget outlines a $10 billion federal-state rescue plan for the Murray-Darling Basin, including the buyback of overallocated irrigation licences, which have left the rivers run down, incapable and stressed. Seventy per cent of the great red gums lining the river’s banks are suffering, dying or dead. But the Treasurer fails to act. Inexplicably, his plan for buyback of those excessive licences which are sucking the water out of the river systems does not begin until the budget of 2009-10. He has put it off for two more ruinous years. The Greens would immediately fund measures to address overallocation in the Murray-Darling Basin. We know, the farmers know and the public know that this cannot wait another two years.

The Treasurer, however, has decided on an immediate $31 billion in tax cuts over the next four years. This comes after the $25 billion largesse, including tax cuts to the rich, in last year’s budget. This year’s $31 billion, we are told, is for across-the-board cuts for salaried workers. Well, yes, it is, but the board is skewed. Once again, the rich get much richer at everyone else’s expense. In fact, 10½ per cent of people get 44 per cent of the money. Those on over $75,000, get the lion’s share. Those so poor they do not pay tax, including Australia’s 1.2 million pensioners, get a one-off $500 payment, and then after the election nothing. Carers, who save this government billions of dollars, get a meagre $1,000, and then after the election nothing. The budget is top heavy. Far from fostering a fair Australia, the big end of town is once again left clutching a big fistful of dollars. The Greens will support the across-the-board tax cuts, even though they are regressive. Unlike Labor, we will vote against the provisions for huge special cuts—some $10 billion over three years for the highest income earners beginning next year.

With that $10 billion, we would move to make Australia the energy efficient nation. I doubt the Treasurer or the Prime Minister know what energy efficient means. They are so stuck on the much less effective, more expensive, more dangerous and, for now, unavailable option of nuclear reactors. Yet energy efficiency could slash Australia’s coal consumption by a massive 30 per cent. That would mean a rapid cut in greenhouse gas emissions in a way that dangerous nuclear power simply could not emulate. Already, Australia’s 250 biggest corporations, which effectively consume 40 per cent of our electricity, are doing energy audits. We would regulate to require that the audits’ recommendations be implemented. We would extend the auditing to the rest of business in Australia and to Australian homes over the coming years, offering government funding as needed to ensure that audit figures are implemented.

Environment Minister Turnbull’s $8 million allocation to change light bulbs will eventually reduce greenhouse emissions by four million tonnes per year—that is equivalent to taking eight per cent of cars off the roads in Australia. But handing out light bulbs is like handing out sand buckets during a bushfire. It is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for investing in the fire brigade. However, implementing the energy audits of those 250 big companies would save roughly 84 million tonnes, which is more effective than taking every single car, truck and bus off the roads of Australia. In addition, if all of Australia’s 5.5 million homes were fitted with a solar hot-water system, which is one of the cheapest ways most of us can substantially reduce emissions, another 23 million tonnes of emissions would be saved. Solar hot-water systems cost about $3,000 more than the old electric water heaters, but they pay for themselves through lower power bills within five to eight years.

These are just a few of the many untapped energy efficiency opportunities this country has but which are being missed by this government. The Greens want the government to bring in energy-efficient building codes and retrofitting, for example, with insulation of existing buildings for energy efficiency. The government budget allocates just $30 million per annum for solar panels. Look at that on the back of an envelope: $8,000 per roof means that just 3,750 roofs per annum will be fitted with panels—not enough to fit the roofs of Dubbo. So it would take up to 2,000 years to realise the aim of converting every roof in our sunny country to a mini power station. That is Howard hopeless.

The Greens will pursue real national action, not Howard government tokenism. In the absence of government action on energy efficiency, but with the tax cuts, let me give some advice on how Australia’s working families might combine the two. If a householder spends one week’s worth of tax cuts on two compact fluorescent light globes then she or he can convert the $14 into $100 worth of savings, because one compact fluorescent globe saves around $50 to $75 in its lifetime. If a householder takes the $14 worth of tax cuts for two years—that is, $1,500—she or he could spend $150 on a home audit and/or replace all the light globes at home with compact fluorescents, because a pack of five costs $20, and invest in insulation, which costs $1,000 to $2,000 for an average home, or solar hot water, which costs $2,000 to $5,000. This could save around $500 a year—hundreds of dollars off household power bills year after year into the future. So the invested tax cut is repaid to the householder in three years and there is a $500 bonus year after year following that.

The Australian Conservation Foundation is calling for five per cent of homes to be retrofitted for energy efficiency each year, which means that within a generation all Australian homes will be energy smart. This should start with low-income and disadvantaged people and in particular target rental properties, which are usually the least well insulated. It is a proposal that the Greens urge the government—or, if the government cannot do it, the opposition—to take up, work out and implement.

Two other great opportunities would be grasped by the Greens. The first is to end the broad-scale logging and burning of Australia’s old-growth forests. This is destroying the nation’s wildlife and needlessly polluting the atmosphere. There are 1.5 million hectares of plantations in Australia. That is more than enough to supply all of Australia’s wood needs for paper, home building and furniture making. But Prime Minister Howard’s commitment, echoed by opposition leader Rudd, is to keep needlessly cutting and burning Australia’s biggest carbon banks: its old-growth forests. That has to be altered and the logging and burning of forests committed, like whaling, to history. It is extraordinary that the budget has $197 million to begin the task of ending the slash-and-burn logging of the forests of Indonesia, but in the last two years $100 million has been spent on forest intensification, logging and burning, of the great forests of Tasmania to the south. The second opportunity the Greens would grasp is to transform Australia from being road dependent to using rail and sea transport for freight, with fast, clean and efficient public transport systems. One small component would be to abolish the GST on public transport, thereby cutting ticket prices on rail, bus, tram and ferry passenger transport by an immediate 10 per cent.

Summing it up, with good regulation and part of the $10 billion tax cuts for the mega-rich diverted to a national energy efficiency program, Australia could indeed make deep cuts in its infamous greenhouse gas emissions—as much as 30 per cent. We could go from being the worst polluter amongst the developing countries to the most advanced, cleanest, most efficient, most job prospective, most export oriented, resource renewable, energy efficient, ecologically transformed nation.

Contrast that with what the government has proposed. Just yesterday it was joined by Labor in voting down a Greens motion to end the logging and burning of Australia’s old-growth forests and wildlife habitat. Acting Deputy President Troeth, you will remember that this morning both parties voted down Senator Milne’s motion to back global scientific opinion that, to prevent catastrophic climate change, we should aim to keep global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius or less. Into that prescription read: the coal industry, with its puppeting hands over the big parties. We could not even philosophically aim for a target that the world scientists say we must aim for if we are going to avoid catastrophic change. When I say ‘we’ I mean Labor and the coalition. The Greens would put that aim absolutely on centre stage and achieve it in the interests of our children and the grandchildren of Australia.

An unfortunate reality is that there will be more natural disasters in our region. The tsunami in 2004 showed all Australians how vulnerable we are. The scientific consensus is that climate change will result in more, and more destructive, cyclones, bushfires and epidemics. Australia needs to be ready to react more quickly and more effectively to natural and man-made disasters in our region. Tonight I renew the Greens’ call for a disaster relief centre for the nation which has the capacity to deploy people, equipment and aid to those in need inside and outside our country when disaster strikes.

The Japanese had a team of doctors and nurses on the ground in Indonesia within 24 hours of the tsunami. The French had aid in New Orleans within a day of Hurricane Katrina because they had predeployed materials in the Caribbean for exactly that purpose. The one thing preventing Australia from having such an international, regional and domestic relief centre is political will. I am ashamed that, when a ferry sank in neighbouring Indonesia’s waters earlier this year with the catastrophic loss of some 500 lives, this government did not pick up the phone, did not offer assistance. That is something we must redress, and having a national and international relief centre may well do that where that political mind is closed and the political will is missing.

On the topic of our responsibility to the region, the Greens believe that Australia should immediately increase our aid budget to the 0.7 per cent of GDP recommended by the UN. That recommendation, which we agreed to, goes right back to the beginning of the last decade. Australia is a rich country and we can afford to show leadership on such an important humanitarian matter. Instead, the government’s budget affords the poverty-stricken billions of our shared world only half of that target commitment.

The government continues down the path towards an American style two-tiered health system. The Greens would abolish the health insurance rebate scheme and divert that $3 billion into the public health system instead. The current scheme serves the nation so badly that the taxpayer top-up for this private, exclusive system blew out by $283 million last year. That comes from the taxpayers and it is more than the entire extra spending on the government’s environment budget for 2007-08.

The Greens policy is to have a ‘denticare’ system paralleling Medicare. No Australian child or adult—to paraphrase someone else—should live with dental caries by 2010. Yet this government torpedoed the $100 million concession card holders dental care program back in 1996, its first year in office, and now there are an estimated—can you believe this?—650,000 Australians on dental waiting lists. Some elderly or disabled citizens wait two to three years to have their dental problems cared for. That is unforgivably heartless and a dereliction of duty by a government with a $15 billion surplus it has trouble spending.

Childhood obesity is estimated to cost Australia tens of billions of dollars in the coming decades as record rates of diabetes and heart disease debilitate our children and our children as adults down the line. In the Senate right now, the Greens have an amendment to the food standards act that would see all food advertisements banned during children’s viewing hours. However, the government has failed on this issue, and its failure is difficult to fathom. When it comes to the $4,000 that new parents get, young mothers are not allowed to receive the lump sum because it is feared that they might spend it all on televisions and cigarettes. But when it comes to junk food advertising—you have to look for the unseen hand of the big food corporations here—we are told that it would be patronising to suggest that parents are not in a position to decide what to let their children eat. The costs of junk food and obesity, like the costs of climate change, will dominate public debate in the coming decades. If we took decisive action now—and it appears this government will not—we would not just save money; we would save lives and raise the wellbeing of the nation for decades.

Only two years ago, the government was in the midst of another reaction to public fear in the form of bird flu. While the media may have lost interest in bird flu, the world’s epidemiologists have not. The threats to Australia, and to the rest of the world, remain as high as they were in 2005. A recent report from the Lowy Institute found that even a mild pandemic influenza outbreak would have significant consequences for the global economic output. In this scenario, it predicts that there would be 1.4 million deaths and that approximately a third of a trillion US dollars would be shaved off the global economic output. Yet the government has not allocated any new funding measures to this threat in the budget. Where is the public education campaign to sensibly prepare Australia for a bird flu pandemic which could leave not 180 but 180,000 citizens dead? Instead of funding such public preparedness for an epidemic, Mr Howard is infamously diverting up to $60 million to explain his so-called Work Choices backflip. This inverse priority is staggering and politically corrupt.

Aboriginal health and housing is grossly underfunded and misdirected in this year’s budget. It will not go anywhere near far enough to address the 17-year life expectancy gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The focus of the government’s budget measures is on regional and remote communities—and no doubt they deserve much more funding. However, the majority of Aboriginal Australians live in urban communities where their life expectancy is just as bad as those in remote communities.

Health experts agree that $500 million per year is required to lift Aboriginal health standards to those of non-Aboriginal Australians. Taking this figure, Tom Calma, the social justice commissioner, has proposed a plan to address the gap in life expectancy within a generation. The Greens back him. It is appalling that rather than $500 million this budget allocates only about $30 million per annum to this nationally urgent responsibility.

A further $2.3 billion is needed to catch up on housing levels, but the Costello budget actually takes money away from Aboriginal housing in urban areas, focusing on remote and regional areas. Having taken the funding from urban Aboriginal housing, the government has done nothing to ease housing affordability, leaving the majority of Aboriginal Australians worse, not better, off. Despite recent international attention on Australia’s record as the worst in the developed world on Indigenous health and development, the government has yet again failed to deliver on meaningful reform. The blinkers are on, the eyes are down and the back is turned on the first Australians.

The Greens’ goal is for public education to become a full-time, not just a pre-election, priority for the federal government. Treasurer Costello’s budget was big on headlines but notably short on a plan to bring public education investment and outcomes up to world’s best standards. That would need $7 billion more in annual spending. The Treasurer’s $5 billion, one-off trust fund for universities will provide less than $400 million per annum—seriously short of 10 per cent of the required investment for Australian education to catch up with that of similar countries around the world.

The Greens call for the needed $7 billion dollar boost in public education from the Commonwealth. It is a national investment plan from preschool to university. It starts with building public preschools, paying preschool teachers a fair wage and guaranteeing two years of free public preschool to every Australian child. That is what is required. That is more than Labor committed to tonight. But let me praise Labor for the commitments made tonight by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, after so many years of serious neglect and decline in the funding of Australian education by the Howard government. There is no single more important and far-reaching education measure that the nation’s government could take than providing much more funding for early childhood education.

The Greens also recognise the vital importance of TAFE not only to the skilling of our nation but also to social and community infrastructure. Not a single extra penny was spent on TAFE in this budget. The Greens would return funding to 1996 levels in real terms, $750 million, and work towards returning TAFE to permanent staffing, so ending this government’s cheap casualisation of the TAFE workforce.

In this week’s budget another step was taken towards the university sector being privatised and Americanised by this government. The Greens would abolish HECS and full-fee degrees, boost core funding for universities per student, and realise the aim of accessible, high-quality, equitable public education for all Australians. This would have been easily achievable had Mr Costello thought education was more important than the $55 billion in tax cuts of the last two years.

The Australian Greens will go to this year’s election offering a much more far-sighted plan for Australia than either the coalition or Labor. Besides our priorities for public health and education, we would keep Australia’s uranium in the ground and not in nuclear reactors in Sydney, Beijing or Mumbai. Unlike Labor and the coalition we would get the chainsaws and firebombers out of Australia’s great wild forests. And, unlike the coalition and Labor, we would prioritise clean energy efficiency over the expansion of coal-fired power stations in Australia and coal exports to the rest of the world. We all share the same atmosphere wherever that coal is burnt.

The Greens would move not just the dollars but the philosophy of this nation. We are the values party and so would implement triple bottom line accounting—budgets measuring and allocating not just the nation’s wealth but also its social and environmental wellbeing.

Prime Minister Howard still thinks politics is a fight between the economy and the environment. It is not. World’s best practice shows that good environmental policy is fundamental to good economic policy. You cannot plan Australia’s future, let alone assure intergenerational equity, if you do not guard its environment. The Greens’ regard for Australia is wider, longer and deeper than this old Howard view.

Ten years ago, coalition senators laughed at me in this chamber when I warned of the dangers of climate change. They are not laughing now. Ten years from now, this nation will be transforming. To do that, it needs a different hand at the helm. My job, our commitment as Greens, is to accelerate that transformation. Long after this week’s tax cuts are forgotten, the program I have outlined tonight on behalf of the Greens will remain part of the prescription for a new, safer, more responsible Australia in the 21st century.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Family First welcomes initiatives that are good for Australian families and is pleased the government has provided some help for families in this budget. But this budget is a budget of missed opportunities for the Howard battlers. The Howard battlers are the Australian families in the outer suburbs and regional areas who are struggling to make ends meet. They are families reeling from soaring petrol prices as well as increasing grocery costs and electricity and water bills. The government has missed its opportunity to provide real relief to these Australian families where they need it most—at the petrol pump.

The government has also missed its opportunity to provide real relief to Australian families with respect to child care by giving all families genuine choice about the type of child care that best suits their needs. The way to do that is to treat all parents the same instead of giving a lot more to those who opt for institutional child care. If families want their children to be cared for by a grandparent, friend, neighbour or nanny in a family home, why should they miss out? Give all parents the same benefit and then let them be the judge of who is best to care for their children.

This budget of missed opportunities for the Howard battlers confirms that the Prime Minister has failed the families who have put their faith in him. This is a budget that puts the market first, that puts the market ahead of families. It is a budget that looks at the childcare issue through the lens of how we can get more mothers into the paid workforce. Instead, we should be focusing on what is best for our children and what is the best we can do for all parents so they have genuine choice about whether to stay at home or enter the paid workforce.

Let us turn to petrol, an issue the government has turned its back on, despite the fact that soaring petrol prices are crippling Australian families. Only this week, a survey of more than 5,000 families revealed that one in every three families declared high petrol prices as their main challenge when trying to make ends meet. For a year and a half Family First has been calling on the government to cut petrol tax by 10c a litre, which the Prime Minister yesterday said would cost $2.8 billion. The government’s stubborn refusal to cut petrol tax again shows how out of touch it is with families in the outer suburbs and in regional Australia who are today paying up to $1.40 a litre for petrol. Family First will continue its campaign, because cutting petrol tax is affordable and commonsense, because it provides real relief to families and small businesses and because it takes pressure off inflation and interest rates.

Now consider the much debated childcare issue. The Treasurer trumpets how the focus of the government’s childcare policy is to get mothers back into the paid workforce. ‘It is very important to encourage mothers back into the workforce,’ he said. Not only does this remark devalue the role of stay-at-home parents, who are very much part of Australia’s workforce, albeit not paid; it is revealing that the government’s No. 1 focus is on serving the needs of the market, as opposed to serving the needs of our kids. The key question is not ‘How can we get more mothers back into the workforce?’ but ‘What is in the best interests of our children?’

Family First supports parents returning to work if that is what they want to do, but childcare policies must be driven by the interests of children, not of adults. We need childcare policies that are family friendly, not market friendly. While the government has provided more money for child care, it has failed to reform a flawed system that benefits only parents who opt to send their children to institutional child care.

Family First regrets that a government that claims to be pro family still refuses to give families real choice by giving all families the same funding, even if they do not opt for institutional child care. It is a fact that many Australian parents prefer to look after their own children, particularly when they are young, or to entrust their child to a family member or friend in a home environment rather than to a childcare centre.

Parents who send their children to childcare centres can claim childcare benefits of up to $7,500 per child per year, while also pocketing up to $4,000 per child per year in childcare tax rebate. But if parents prefer that other people look after their children in a family home—say, grandparents, the next-door neighbour, a close relative or a friend—they can only claim up to about $1,300 per child per year and they are denied any childcare tax rebate. It is a big difference—a huge difference, in fact. Enrol your child in a market-friendly childcare centre and you can line up to claim your financial bonuses, but bypass the commercial option and have your child cared for by a friend or a grandparent in a family home and you will miss out. The government is providing a clear financial signal as to where its priorities lie: for the Howard government, the market always comes first.

It is also fascinating how the government’s childcare system is so focused on helping middle- to high-income professional couples, certainly not the Howard battlers. How many Howard battlers can really afford to pay large out-of-pocket expenses on child care in the first place to get the rebate? The childcare tax rebate assumes families can afford to pay these expensive out-of-pocket childcare expenses up-front. To claim the maximum $4,000 rebate, parents would have to be spending about $12,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenses. Most families that my wife, Sue, and I know would struggle to find just $500 for out-of-pocket expenses. How many Howard battlers can afford that sort of money?

Let us turn to other aspects of the budget. Family First welcomes the additional funding to fight illicit drugs but is disappointed there is no extra funding to tackle the $7.6 billion alcohol toll. Australia has a culture of binge drinking, and alcohol is second only to tobacco as a preventable cause of death and hospitalisation in Australia. Furthermore, 40 per cent of police resources are tied up in alcohol related problems. Australia has tackled the road toll, the drug toll and the tobacco toll. We are well overdue on tackling our alcohol toll.

Also, Family First believes the government missed opportunities to genuinely help the Howard battlers by lifting the tax-free threshold for all taxpayers from $6,000 to $8,000 this year, rising to $13,000—equivalent to subsistence income—in future years as the budget allows. Family First regrets that the government did not provide a further increase in the tax-free threshold of $1,000 for each dependent child.

Finally, Family First condemns the government for failing to provide any budget money to upgrade the Princes Highway, ignoring the greatest need of families in south-west Victoria. The budget listed the Geelong bypass, the Calder Highway and the Pakenham bypass for funding, which is welcome, but did not allocate one cent to the Princes Highway. It is ludicrous that the main route from Melbourne to south-west Victoria and South Australia, which provides trade, transport and tourism, is not considered a road of national significance.

This budget is an attempt to buy votes but a budget of missed opportunities for the Howard battlers.

Debate (on motion by Senator Colbeck) adjourned.