Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to have the opposition's budget reply speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

Mr President, the fundamental test of a budget is how it improves the wellbeing of the Australian people.

My three children are still in the education system and Margie, my wife, works in community-based childcare so my family knows something of the financial pressures on nearly every Australian household.

Since December 2007, the price of electricity is up 51 per cent, gas is up 30 per cent, and water is up 46 per cent. Education costs have risen 24 per cent, health 20 per cent and rent 21 per cent. Grocery prices are up 14 per cent. Since the middle of 2009, interest rate rises have added $500 a month to mortgage repayments while wages have risen just 7 per cent.

Families already know what it's like to tighten their belts. They don't need government to do it for them yet the only certainty from this budget is further upward pressure on interest rates because this government is still borrowing $135 million every single day.

The government boasts that inflation is under control because the price of flat screen TVs has fallen. It doesn't understand what every Australian family instinctively knows: the things we want might be more affordable but the things we need are much more expensive.

Mr Speaker, tonight I want to reach out to Australian families: to small business people, police, nurses, fire fighters, teachers, shop assistants, workers in our steel mills and mines, the people who are the backbone of our society and our economy.

I do not think you are rich. I know you are struggling under a rising cost of living. And I know you are sick of a government that doesn't get value from your taxes.

My commitment to the forgotten families of Australia is to ease your cost of living pressure. Stopping wasteful and unnecessary spending will keep your interest rates down. Stopping or removing unnecessary new taxes will make it easier for you to pay your bills.

My task tonight is to offer people a new direction which restores their hope in the future. It's not to detail an alternative budget but to set out an alternative vision so that the Australian people can be confident that their government need not always be as weak and directionless as it is right now.

I understand that government should live within its means, value the money it holds in trust from you the taxpayer, avoid waste and, above all else, observe the first maxim of good government: namely do no avoidable harm.

Instead, the current government has turned a $20 billion surplus into a $50 billion deficit and $70 billion in net assets into $107 billion of net debt. Then there's the carbon tax that the Prime Minister said would never happen that will just make cost of living pressures so much worse.

A $26 a tonne carbon tax would add 25 per cent more to electricity bills and 6.5 cents a litre more to fuel bills that are already skyrocketing – and that's before it starts automatically increasing by at least four per cent every single year.

A $26 a tonne carbon tax means 16 coal mines closed, 23,000 mining jobs lost, and 45,000 jobs lost in industries like steel, aluminium, cement, glass, chemicals and motor cars. The Prime Minister talks about compensation but there's no compensation for people who have lost their jobs.

So let me make this crystal clear: the Coalition will oppose the carbon tax in opposition and repeal it in government. The Coalition will oppose the mining tax in opposition and repeal it in government.

My colleagues and I will never make things harder for the forgotten families of Australia and people can have confidence in the Coalition because they can judge us on our record, not just on our promises.

The government I served in turned a $10 billion budget black hole into consistent surpluses exceeding 1 per cent of GDP. We turned $96 billion in inherited Labor debt into $70 billion in net assets. We made the most of the China boom, we didn't complain about it. We ended the waste, repaid the debt and stopped the boats. It wasn't a slogan. It was a fact.

As minister, I was personally responsible for thousands of young people doing environmental work in the Green Corps, the stabilisation of the Job Network, the expansion of work for the dole, the establishment of a royal commission into the construction industry, ending the medical indemnity crisis, and bringing allied health professionals like dentists into the Medicare system.

Sixteen members of my shadow cabinet have been ministers in a successful government. They wouldn't have to learn on the job, should there be a change of government, because they've done the job. The challenge of producing lower taxes, fairer welfare, better services and stronger borders would not be beyond us because we've risen to it before.

Now, even from opposition, the Coalition is dominating national debate, as the Prime Minister has admitted to caucus. We're driving a positive agenda too.

My private members bill to allow economic development on Aboriginal land in Cape York comes from a decade working with Noel Pearson on what he calls Aboriginal people's "right to take responsibility". That bill is before the parliament and I call on the government to stop putting the hunt for Green preferences ahead of a fair go for Aboriginal people on their own land.

As mental health campaigners say, it was the Coalition's new deal for mental health patients that finally shamed the government into acting in the budget. As well, the government has actually adopted for itself my private member's bill on assisting the victims of overseas terrorism, arising from the time I spent with the Newcastle victims of the second Bali bombing.

Since the start of the year, the Coalition has committed to a new approach to water management including new dams and a much tougher anti-dumping regime to protect Australian industries from way-below-cost imports. We've offered to work with the government on welfare reform, on finding savings instead of increasing taxes, and on a new intervention into the developing social crisis in Alice Springs and the Northern Territory's other larger towns.

What we'll never do, though, is make weak compromises with a bad government. We respect taxpayers too much to spend their money on make work schemes for extra public servants and on "think big" projects which always end in tears.

The Coalition supports better broadband services but we're not reckless enough to spend upwards of $50 billion on a National Broadband Network without a cost benefit analysis. That $50 billion could fully fund the construction of the Brisbane rail loop, for instance, the duplication of the Pacific Highway, the Melbourne to Brisbane inland rail link, the extension of the M4 to Strathfield, and 20 major new teaching hospitals as well as the $6 billion that the Coalition has proposed to spend on better broadband.

Speeds of up to 100 megabits are already potentially available to almost every major business and hospital, to most schools, and through high speed cable already running past nearly a third of Australian households.

The smart way to improve broadband is not to junk the existing network but to make the most of it. It's to let a competitive market deliver the speeds that people need at an affordable price with government improving infrastructure in the areas where market competition won't deliver it.

The smart way to improve the environment is not to impose a new tax on the way every Australian lives and works but to reduce emissions via common sense environmental improvements that everyone can support: by planting more trees on otherwise marginal land, by boosting the carbon content of soil through better value organic fertilisers, and by turning power station carbon dioxide from a waste product into an input in the production of stock feed and bio diesel.

The Coalition wants to give the planet the benefit of the doubt with practical measures to improve the environment rather than futile gestures that just damage our economy. That's why we'll have a standing Green Army, 15,000 strong, to supplement the land care work of local councils, farmers, and volunteers to eradicate feral animals and noxious weeds and to preserve wetlands.

Mr Speaker, government's job is not to live people's lives for them but to help people to make the most of their opportunities and to ensure that public institutions are more responsive to the people they serve. Australia, Mr Speaker, has great teachers, doctors, nurses and other professionals but our public schools and public hospitals are being strangled by too much bureaucracy.

Principals often can't hire the teachers they want but are stuck with the next person on the transfer list. We'll work with the states to ensure that school councils can appoint principals and that principals can run schools in partnership with school communities as nearly 100 "independent public schools" in Western Australia are now doing.

We won't forget the families who want to give their children the best possible start in life. There will never be an independent schools hit list under the Coalition. We'll increase the education tax rebate for all families to $500 a year for primary and $1000 a year for secondary students and make it available for all expenses connected with education including school and sports fees.

We understand that the parents and carers of children with disabilities have the toughest job in the country. That's why we'll make $20,000 a year available to help the 6000 school children with the most serious disabilities as an important first step towards a wider scheme to give all people with disabilities access to better services.

Mr Speaker, public hospitals often can't order significant new equipment without referring it to head office. We'll work with the states to give hospitals more funding when they treat more people. Public hospitals will be run by local boards, not distant bureaucrats. And if a state was prepared to surrender some of its GST, the Commonwealth would fully fund its public hospitals, thus potentially achieving hospitals that are both nationally funded and locally run.

The Coalition understands the need for strong private hospitals too, that take some of the pressure off the public system. We will never make waiting lists worse by driving people out of private health insurance with counter-productive means tests. We won't turn the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme from a demand-driven to a budget-limited scheme by not listing drugs that have passed an expert cost-effectiveness test.

Mr Speaker, leaving young people on the dole and older people on welfare while so many businesses are short of staff is a terrible waste. I'm all in favour of training but first things first: the best training is on-the-job.

On Noel Pearson's advice, the Coalition would pay a $6000 relocation allowance to young unemployed people who move to a regional area for a job and who agree not to return to welfare within six months. This would be a programme not a trial. We'll pay a $2500 commitment bonus to long-term unemployed young people who take a job and keep it for a year and a further $4000 if they stay off welfare for a second year.

We'll try to shake the cult of youth in hiring by giving employers up to $3250 for taking someone over 50 off welfare and back to work. As well, we'll give mothers real choice to be economic as well as social contributors with a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme that gives nearly all new mums six months with their babies at full pay.

To improve their job skills and work culture, the Coalition will make work for the dole mandatory for long-term unemployed people under 50. The government's "tough love" rhetoric is hard to take seriously because since 2007 it has cut work for the dole numbers by more than 60 per cent.

We'll take the advice of Labor's former national president Warren Mundine and stop dole payments for people under 30 in places where unskilled work is readily available. We'll extend the government's mandatory family income management to all long-term unemployed people, not just those in the Northern Territory, because there shouldn't be one rule for some and a different rule for others.

As well, we'll couple more job search support for people with disabilities with a better designed welfare system that doesn't park middle aged people on the disability pension when they could still be earning.

Now Mr Speaker, the Coalition has a proven record of careful management of public finances. Just two of 12 Howard government budgets were in deficit. By contrast, the last nine Labor budgets, between them, have posted cumulative deficits of $230 billion or almost a quarter of a trillion dollars.

This budget's badge of economic virtue, a wafer-thin surplus by 2012-13, won't be achieved by tough-minded economic reform or serious spending cuts but by assumptions of very high economic growth on the back of the most favourable terms of trade in our history.

If it's achieved, it's a surplus made in China, not Australia. And let's not forget that this isn't an actual surplus. It's a predicted one - from a government which has shown all the forecasting accuracy of Nostradamus.

As we did last year, Mr Speaker, the Coalition will announce a position on individual budget items when they come before the parliament, not before, and we will announce a consolidated list of spending and savings measures in good time before the next election. When we did so last year, the Prime Minister said they were too tough but so far she has adopted $13 billion of Coalition savings.

People can be confident that spending, debt and taxes will always be lower under a Coalition government because we have the record to prove it. People can also be confident that economic growth will be higher and more sustainable under the Coalition. We have the record to prove that too and we take the view that a successful business is serving its fellow Australians, not exploiting them.

A strong economy is the essential pre-condition for effective government so the Coalition is always looking for ways to help small business suffering in a patchwork economy because that's where jobs are created and families get ahead.

For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family. Even the current government paid lip service to this when it promised a "one in, one out" approach to regulation but so far Labor has introduced 220 new regulations for each one it has repealed. Under the Coalition, "one in one out" will be a reality, not an aspiration.

As well, a Coalition government would reduce the regulatory costs to business by at least $1 billion a year. We'd require departments to calculate the costs to business of preparing and making available information, changing their processes and obtaining approvals. Departments and ministers would be accountable for meeting annual red tape reduction targets that the Productivity Commission would verify.

Mr Speaker, Labor can't help treating small business with suspicion as potential tax cheats and havens for non-union workers. The Coalition thinks that small business is more likely to treat workers like family and is the engine of higher employment and greater prosperity. That's why helping small business is such an important productivity reform.

If the ghost of Ben Chifley now hovers over this side of the parliament it's because the Coalition is much closer to workers' real interests than a Labor party that's sold its soul to Senator Bob Brown.

Mr Speaker, this government's character flaws have been abundantly illustrated in the budget. When the government is not robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's transferring money from people's right pocket to their left and congratulating itself for cleverness.

Little in this budget is quite what it seems. The $1.5 billion in new mental health money is offset by a $580 million cut in Medicare psychologist consultations. For all the focus on the forecast surplus there's been virtually no net tightening of the fiscal position since the middle of last year. For all the talk of repaying debt, the actual budget bills increase the government's borrowing limit by another $50 billion.

The government has cut funding for defence and national security while massively increasing funding to manage illegal boat people. The disability pensioner participation changes mostly apply to people under 35 so largely miss the musculoskeletal problems that keep so many older people on welfare. The headline-hogging efforts to get teenage mums into work and delinquent parents to send their kids to school are trials only.

Tradies might get their new utes cheaper but running them will be much more expensive thanks to FBT increases. Government will spend $350 on each pensioner's set top box when Gerry Harvey can supply and install them for just $168. Perhaps this programme should be called 'Building the Entertainment Revolution'. Pensioners and self-funded retirees deserve better than this.

The Prime Minister used to say that detaining boat people on Pacific islands was "costly, unsustainable" and wrong in principle. Yet last Friday she announced that the government would try to reopen Manus Island.

She used to insist that boat people couldn't be sent to Nauru because Nauru wasn't a signatory to the UN convention on refugees. Last Saturday she announced that 800 boat people would be sent to Malaysia, which isn't a signatory either, and that 4000 of Malaysia's arrivals would come here. The policy is no longer to stop the boats but to swap the boats – at a budget cost of nearly $70,000 a person or more than ten times the cost of a Sydney-Kuala Lumpur first class air ticket.

The Prime Minister should finally pick up the phone to the president of Nauru and re-introduce all the Howard policies that stopped the boats. If she wanted to value add, with the Coalition's support, she should introduce mandatory ten year minimum sentences for repeat people smugglers. But make no mistake, a Coalition government will stop the boats.

Whether it's installing and removing roof batts that catch fire, building over-priced school halls, losing control of our borders and detention centres, needlessly digging up people's front yards, threatening to kill the mining boom with an investment destroying new tax, or imposing a carbon tax that won't clean up the environment but will clean out people's wallets, this government always has the same basic failing.

It tries to solve problems that it doesn't understand, refuses to listen to people with good advice and thinks that if it changes the subject people won't notice its mistakes. It makes announcements and moves on without the hard work that's needed to turn creating a headline into making a difference.

Typically, while the carbon tax is not in the budget, the carbon tax ad campaign most certainly is. The mining tax is in the budget too even though its details have yet to be finalised or enacted into law and it's supposed to start on the very same day as the carbon tax.

The Prime Minister can leave the carbon tax out of the budget but she can't hide the damage it will do to struggling families' cost of living, the havoc it will wreak on jobs in manufacturing industry exposed to cut-throat competition, and the fact that it will make no real difference to the environment in the absence of comparable action overseas.

The Prime Minister can't hide the truth: that this is a tax for which she has no mandate. In fact, she has a mandate not to introduce it. The declaration, "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead", will haunt this government every day until it faces up to this betrayal.

Does anyone think that the Prime Minister would now be in the Lodge had she admitted truthfully, six days out from last year's election that, yes, "there will be a carbon tax under a government I lead"? This is the cancer that's eroding the Prime Minister's standing and sapping the government's authority.

As things stand, we have a parliament that can't make decisions people respect, a Prime Minister who looks like she's not up to the job and a minority government that's increasingly seen as an experiment that's failed. If Australia goes on like this for another two and a half years, what is currently a great country with a lousy government could slide into a morass of indecision and paralysis.

The government lacks legitimacy, not because it lacks a majority but because it lacks integrity. This is what should gnaw at the consciences of MPs who support the carbon tax. How can this parliament honourably decide to introduce a carbon tax when no fewer than 144 of the House of Representatives' 150 members are in parties that were committed not to have one?

People are entitled to change their minds but national leaders can't on something as important as a great big new tax on everything unless they validate that change by seeking a new mandate at an election.

On this subject, the Prime Minister has compared herself with John Howard and the GST. There is one fundamental difference between them: the former Prime Minister changed his policy and put the new position to an election; the current Prime Minister had an election on one policy and promptly adopted the opposite one.

The Prime Minister should copy John Howard, not just quote him. She and Bob Brown should finalise the carbon tax details including its impact on jobs, industries and Australians' cost of living and then she should seek the people's verdict before trying to legislate it. Otherwise, the next election won't just be a referendum on the carbon tax. It will be a referendum on governments that betray the people.

That's what Australia needs: not a carbon tax but an election. Only an election could make an honest politician of this Prime Minister. Only an election can give Australia a government with authority to make the tough decisions needed to build a stronger Australia and help Australians get ahead.

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

We have just heard a speech from the Leader of the Opposition which in summary is the soulless talking about sold souls. It is a budget full of promises not only unfunded, and irresponsibly unfunded, but cutting current revenue by, for starters, $11 billion over the forward estimates involved in his repeal of the mining tax. Never in my experience in this parliament have so many promises been made by somebody who is going to cut $11 billion out of the budget without explaining how he is going to fund those promises and who is going to hurt in the process. The one commitment that sum­med up the philosophy of this Leader of the Opposition is that, in set-top boxes, he would give the job to Gerry Harvey at the expense of thousands of small businesses around this country. Where government is allocating money so that pensioners can watch TV without the threat of cutting from their meagre resources, this Leader of the Oppo­sition is a remnant from the government which repeatedly gave $500 cheques to hun­dreds of thousands of Australians as a voting incentive in the run to elections.

Australia is an enormously wealthy coun­try and its economy is booming. It has emerged strongly from the global recession with an economic stimulus package which was backed and improved by the Greens, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Now there is tremendous economic growth on the back of a resources boom, and mining investment will rise to about eight times the level preceding the boom—that is, $76 billion by 2011-12. We have the highest terms of trade in 140 years. So the Greens pose this question to both the government and the opposition: how is it that so few are benefiting from the country's great natural wealth and why is it that there is growing power at the corporate sector, which is the big-winner-takes-all section of the economy? We have a two-speed economy and a two-tiered democracy, and upstairs are the mining barons.

On 2 May last year Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan announced that they would introduce a mining super profits tax based on the Henry tax review. The mining industry campaigned against the tax, spend­ing $22 million on an advertising campaign, and as a result they got $100 billion stripped out of the people's revenue over the next decade to line their pockets and very often the pockets of already wealthy people out­side this country.

Treasury figures show that that will indeed be $10 billion lost to budgets, including the budgets a year or two from now, and then consequent years right through to the early 2020s. What could be worse? Well, the revenue that would be lost if there were no mining tax at all—that is, an Abbott government which would strip $140 billion compared with the Henry recomm­endations, which only the Greens endorse, over the coming decade. So the mining corporations, who employ just two per cent of Australians, would, under the Abbott prescription, deprive the other 98 per cent of Australians of $140 billion in the coming decade.

The companies that are posting record annual profits for 2010 begin in the mining sector: BHP Billiton with $14.9 billion; Rio Tinto, $14 billion; Xstrata, whose Anglo-Swiss parent company is based in Swit­zerland—it is not listed on the Australian Stock Exchange—net total profit in 2010 was $4.9 billion and operating profit $7.65 billion. Then there are the four big banks, which would take 12 per cent of a future tax cut to the corporate sector, which is in this budget: ANZ, $4.5 billion; NAB, $5.7 billion; Westpac, $6.4 billion; and CBA, $5.7 billion. The average worker's salary in Australia is $65,161 a year while the average base pay of CEOs—it is higher in the companies I have just mentioned—across the sector is $2,040,892. That is 31 times higher than the wage going to the average workers in the same corporation. The average worker's pay has gone up 52 per cent in the past decade whilst CEOs' pay has increased 130 per cent. Compare the $65,000 of average Australian workers with the CEO of BHP Billiton—$11 million in one year; of Rio Tinto, $9 million; of Woodside, $8 million; of ANZ Bank, $10 million; of Commonwealth Bank, $16 million; NAB, $7.7 million; and Westpac, $9.5 million.

From the economy of boom let me get back to those who are going to be squeezed. There is a problem in the revenue of this budget, not a problem with spending. It is only the Greens who are looking at the revenue base of this wealthy economy in a mining boom. It has been a missed opportunity by Labor, and would have been set aside altogether had Tony Abbott been in government. As George Megalogenis noted in the Australian yesterday:

The Treasurer should be kicking himself that the mining tax wasn't handled better last year.

Hindsight says the tax should have been framed to collect little in the early years, but crank up in the second half of the decade.

It is too late now because the half-baked Minerals Resources Rent Tax—

that is Labor's prescription—

looks as if it will behave like the fuel excise—falling as a share of GDP, when the budget needs it to grow.

The Greens would reinstate the original 40 per cent mining resource tax, as recomm­ended by Treasury, and collect that $100 billion over the next 10 years. We would drop the cut to the corporate tax rate for big business inherent in this budget, and that would save approximately $18 billion over 10 years—$3.1 billion over the forward estimates. As it is, one-third of this anom­alous tax break is going to BHP, Rio Tinto and, as I indicated earlier, the four big banks alone. That is $3.1 billion in a tax break over the coming four years while the rest of Australians get no tax break at all but a squeeze is put on millions of poorer Australians in what is not only a two-speed economy but a rapidly growing gap between the rich and the poor under Labor, something that we thought would end with the Howard government.

The corporate tax cut should be applying only to small business, and we commend the government for the cut to tax on small business. After all, small business provides 47 per cent of the total employment, or around five million jobs, in this country. Compare that with the mining industry's 206,000 jobs. That tax cut for small business, while not handing over the much more expensive tax break for the big corporations who are already booming, as I have outlined, would bring Australia in line with the US, the UK, Japan and Canada, which have different and often much lower company tax rates for small business.

We would remove the fossil fuel subsidies, which total $11 billion a year, including fuel tax credits, which add up to $5 billion a year—the exclusion there being fuel tax credits for farmers, costing just $680 million of that $5 billion. These tax credits mean that, while ordinary Australians pay 38c tax per litre for their fuel, the big mining corporations pay nothing. So, every time an ordinary Australian goes to the petrol bowser, they know they are paying 38c more than these massively wealthy mining corporations going to get their fuel in the same country. Greens polling shows that 84 per cent of Australians do not consider it appropriate for the big fossil fuel companies to receive such subsidies but consider that the money could and should be better spent on development of clean, renewable energy technologies.

The government has adopted the Greens initiative to reform the fringe benefits tax concessions on company cars, so we will have a flat tax rate of 20 per cent regardless of the kilometres travelled. That will raise $1 billion in the forward estimates. It is something, of course, that the opposition will not go along with in this incredibly irresponsible presentation tonight, which is gifting everybody and costing no-one and which is short most of all on responsibility.

The Greens would establish a sovereign wealth fund. This has the support of economic experts including, if I read him correctly, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stephens and, just in the last week, the International Monetary Fund. There are about 37 countries which have such funds. There is currently $5 trillion in sovereign wealth funds around the world, and this will double to $10 trillion by 2015, but not here in Australia under Labor and not here in Australia under the coalition. But it would be were the Greens to be able to follow through policy responsibly on behalf of the Australian people and their future. It would be able to fund such important future infrastructure as high-speed rail in this country, rapidly carrying Australians in clean, fast, efficient and cheap transport between Brisbane and Sydney or from Sydney via Canberra to Melbourne in three to four hours. The Greens would fund that through a proper resource take from our booming mining industry through a sovereign wealth fund. Neither of the other parties will have the wherewithal to be able to get Australia into the high-speed lane for rail.

Solar power, geothermal and other renewables deserve much greater investment in this sunny country, as does grid infrastructure, which is a critical component of a future clean energy base. The Obama administration has recognised grid infra­structure as a critical enabler for renewables, similar to the way Labor here, backed by the Greens, recognises broadband as critical infr­astructure. We would strengthen and pro­mote our cultural institutions, not cut them as in this budget.

The government has increased the effic­iency dividends on the public sector—that is, the cuts—from 1¼ per cent to 1½ per cent for two years, and that will raise $1 billion in the forward estimates. We cannot put a dollar figure on the savings from these cuts—that is, the impact of these cuts—but the damaging cost of this for some of our national cultural institutions is emerging. Jobs and programs will be cut at the National Gallery. Exhibitions will be cut from 12 to five in the coming years. There will be cuts to travelling exhibitions which will impact on regional Australia. Thirty per cent of jobs are at risk in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Seventeen jobs will go from the National Library and a similar number from the National Museum. Seven jobs and fleet vessels are threatened at the National Maritime Museum and the National Archives. Screen Australia will be hit. So will the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and the Australia Council for the Arts. All these are, totally unnecessarily, facing the razor. Australia's pride in these institutions is unlimited, but they are going to feel the razor from Labor, and of course they would be cut even more deeply under the Abbott prescription put to this parliament tonight. He overlooked them totally. Well, the Greens will be in there advocating for the restoration of funding to these great institutions in the coming weeks and months. On a brighter note, I congratulate the govern­ment on its continuing increase in the overseas aid budget. That has reached 3.5 per cent of gross national income, $4,836 million up from the $4,361 million of the last budget. Particularly welcome is the increased focus on basic education in the countries where we spend that aid money for primary schools and in-country teacher training, as is the $96 million of new funding allocated to ending violence against women initiatives and the doubling of funding that will be delivered, and therefore better targeted, not through government but through non-government organisations.

I thank the government for some important Greens initiatives taken up in this budget. There will be a Parliamentary Budget Office. It is going to be given $24.9 million over the coming four years so that this parliament will be able to readily cost proposals like the Leader of the Opposition's uncosted budget presented tonight through an independent, established Parliamentary Budget Office. With that, we are catching up with other countries, and this will be a real achievement for the Greens which will serve this parliament and give greater prudence to political promises made and schemes offered to the people of Australia for the decades to come.

I acknowledge, along with the Leader of the Opposition, the role played by all parties, but in particular the community sector in the much better spending on mental health: $2.2 billion over the forward estimates, with over the coming five years $1.5 billion in new money for mental health investment. I give credit to, amongst the many people involved here, my colleague Senator Rachel Siewert.

Also from the Greens has come—and it was written into our agreement with the government—a move to better fund dental health care in this country. In this budget there is $53 million for 150 dental intern­ships over the coming four years, but that is just a marker of things to come. The National Advisory Council on Dental Health will be established to provide advice on dental health in this country. I quote from the budget:

Significant reform … in line with the Government's agreement with the Australian Greens, will be a priority in the 2012-13 Budget.

I know from having a medical background that if you give good dental health to Australians, you give them good general health. And if you give good general health to Australians, you save not only a great deal of illness but billions of dollars to the national economy.

Next are some of the worst of the welfare measures in this Labor budget. Payments will be slashed to some single mothers with teenage children by $56 a week. I quote from an article relating to this matter by Adele Horin in the Sydney Morning Herald:

At least 50,000 sole parents with teenage children will be financially worse off, even if they are working, as a result of new welfare-to-work measures announced in the budget.

The chief executive of the National Council on Single Mothers and their Children, Terese Edwards, described the measure, as ''harsh, mean-spirited and unnecessary''.

From January 1, 2013, the mothers of children aged 12-15 will be moved from the parenting payment single to the Newstart allowance, resulting in a loss of $56 a week. The measure will apply even when sole parents are already fulfilling participation requirements by working at least 15 hours a week. Instead of being able to combine part-time earnings with a part parenting payment, they will be entitled to a portion of the much lower Newstart allowance.

The president of the Sole Parents' Union, Kathleen Swinbourne, said the shift was simply a budget-saving measure.

''It's rather feeble when the people who can afford it the least have to help fix the budget deficit,'' she said.

It is cruel, it is unnecessary, and we will be trying to engage the government in ameliorating that item.

The budget also includes a teenage mothers so-called education trial program, where mothers will be required to participate when their baby is six months old and compulsory activity such as education or training will be brought in when the child turns one year old—for goodness sake.

Harsher requirements for the disability support pension will threaten thousands of Australians with a disability. If there is one item we are very attracted to, and congrat­ulate the opposition on, it is $20,000 to the parents of the most disabled children. We expect this will inherently be part of any future program that the opposition brings forward. The Greens are committed to improving this budget, not as Mr Abbott would have it: wrecking the budget. The Greens will scrutinise all of these welfare measures to see if they are necessary and with a view to removing some of the harshest thorns.

The economies of climate change are on the agenda, as Mr Abbott said in his budget reply speech. This budget has to be seen in the context of that huge issue which the Greens—including my colleagues Senator Milne and Adam Bandt, the honourable member for Melbourne—are focused on. This includes establishing a carbon price and ending the destruction of the nation's forests. How Labor must regret having not taken up their former leader Mark Latham's offer of $800 million to end the destruction of forests in Tasmania. We now have an historic opportunity to end that destruction, because the industry is in an economic spiral down with no end in sight. I hope that this government, along with the Tasmanian government—and following on, the governments in New South Wales and Victoria—will take this historic opportunity, which is very similar to the opportunity that the Fraser government took in 1978 to end whaling, to end the destruction of the great wild forests of Tasmania and the south-east of the mainland.

The Greens are intent on bringing humanity back into the treatment of asylum seekers. My colleague Senator Hanson-Young just yesterday successfully moved in this Senate a motion deploring the govern­ment's move to send asylum seekers from this country to Malaysia. We will be doing all we can again to have a more humane regime brought in by this government, and of course that means to offset the even crueller attitude to asylum seekers in this country inherent in what the Abbott speech tonight implied.

I want to come back to the establishment of a carbon price, because that is going to be the most substantial restructuring of the Australian economy in decades. In 2007, the Stern review, described as 'the most compre­hensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change', found that the cost of not taking action on climate change will now be equivalent to five to 20 per cent of the GDP each year later this century. We face, besides the economic and lifestyle destruction inherent in climate change, leaving through our inaction our grand­children with an up to 20 per cent hit on every budget in their lifetimes trying to ame­liorate the impact of climate change.

The cost of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now to avoid the worst impacts of climate change could be limited to two per cent of GDP if it were coordinated globally. Sir Nicholas also said:

… the benefits over time of actions to shift the world onto a low-carbon path could be in the order of $2.5 trillion each year.

That is, it would be better for the economy, better for jobs, better for the environment and better for the security of this nation and the world.

Treasury estimates that Tony Abbott's direct action scheme will cost Australian taxpayers around $30 billion by 2020. It relies on paying polluters $10.5 billion to reduce their emissions, with a further $20 billion for the purchase of international permits to be bought by 2020 to reach the five per cent emissions reduction target he claims. So by 2020 the total cost of Mr Abbott's plan will be $720 per household minus no compensation, leaving househo­lders exposed while the big polluters are understrapped by payments from the taxpa­yers.

We reject this hit on householders, again to the advantage of the big polluters, and would turn that around. The Greens' carbon price plan would put a tax on big polluters, not average Australians. It would use the money raised to compensate householders, build renewable energy and public transport and support industry transition, and, as such, will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. According to a recent report by the Climate Institute on action on climate change, a modest carbon price would create 6,600 directly in New South Wales alone.

This is not a Greens budget; it is a Labor budget. The Greens will deal responsibly with all budget legislation on its merits. We will not block the budget or supply, but we will look to improve it where we can in a fiscally responsible manner. However, in order to ensure stability in government, the Greens will not be supporting any opposition move which aims to wreck the budget. We will not support the destabilising and wrecking tactics of the opposition as we move to improve the legislation.

I want to say this. There is more to the budget reply tonight than a thin veneer of promises to the Australian people. It is a self-invested budget reply from a Leader of the Opposition who is hell-bent on destabilisation of the elected government and the right of Australians to be able to go to an election each three years. We see the strategy in this uncosted cornucopia which does not stand any test of commonsense scrutiny as a move by Mr Abbott to look more like Mr Nice Guy when in fact he is Mr Wrecker. The Greens have his measure.

We have a job and a responsibility in this parliament to ensure that we do get stability, and we will undertake that responsibility with a very careful scrutiny of the budget measures from the government and a dialogue with the government to improve those measures which are unnecessarily harsh or punitive on individuals or insti­tutions. My team of Greens in this parliament—now in both houses of this parliament—are committed above all not to the short-term political gain for self that we see in Mr Abbott's approach but to the betterment of all Australians, not just the big end of town. We will be judicious in our strong response to the government and some of the measures which should not be in the budget.

I have outlined tonight a revenue base which would have made this budget sing for Australians without the harsh, unnecessary lines in the budget which have been required simply because the government wants to give a massive tax break to corporations while not giving it to average Australians. The coming weeks and months will test us all out, but I can assure the people of Australia, who have generally received this budget with agreement—there has been no outcry; there is some lamenting; there has been no dancing in the street. I think, generally, Australians would see this as an average budget.

I gave it six out of 10. That is because I am more Pomeranz than Stratton! But I think that the government could do a lot better, and I will be with my team of Greens working to make it more socially just, more environ­mentally positive, more economically respo­nsible and fairer in the country of a fair go, ending the two-speed economy by making sure the mass of Australians in the slow lane do better—and they will not under this budget, and they would do worse under Mr Abbott—and turning around the growing gap between wealth and poverty, luxury and harshness which we see in this country under our very eyes. We are a humane party, we are environmentally responsible and we are politically savvy. In this milieu of head-butting between the government and a very aggressive, self-invested opposition, we are up to the task of getting Australians all not only a better outcome from this budget but a better outcome from all the work that we are undertaking in this great parliament of Australia.

Debate adjourned.