Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to congratulate the member for Ryan on her own goal. Moving this motion today points, yet again, to the cuts of $80 billion in health and education that are being imposed on state governments by this conservative federal government, which will smash the social safety net when it comes to affordable and accessible health and education in this country over the next decade. There is a day of reckoning coming with this $80 billion cut sitting there in the budget papers, in the Budget Overview on page 7: $80 billion—$50 billion in health and $30 million in schools. I congratulate the member for Ryan for coming in here and pointing to this essential fact. I know that she is ambitious. I know that she wants to reach greater heights, but she needs to demonstrate far greater depth than she did today in the presentation. So do all the other conservative members, because Queenslanders, in particular, now face a double whammy of not only these future cuts of $80 billion but also the abolition of the final two years of Gonski and those increases as well. As the member for Rankin said before, that is the equivalent of one in seven teachers across Queensland schools. That is before you get to the cuts in health, which are going to be savage in significant hospitals in or near my electorate: Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Prince Charles Hospital and, in particular, Redcliffe Hospital. Fifty billion dollars is a lot of money out of health in the future. It is a lot of nurses, doctors and wardies who go down the tube. It is a threat to the quality of care.

What is this all about? I think we saw, over the weekend, what it is about, with the speech from the Prime Minister about the future of the Federation. What it is really about is moving to that long-held objective of the Liberal Party of Australia, which is as old as any of the governments that we have seen since the 1970s, and that is to wind back the social safety net, to wind back health and education, to jack up the GST or indirect tax base and to provide more power and money to corporates. It is a shift in the tax mix. What they are going to do now, as these cuts flow through the system Australia wide—a threat to quality health and a threat to quality education—is they will mount the charge for an increase in the GST simultaneously as they open up huge holes in the tax base for corporate Australia, and they will say, 'If we want to provide quality health and education, we're going to have to jack up the GST, jack it up on punters; working people pay more and corporates pay less.' That is what goes to the heart of the speech given by the Prime Minister at Tenterfield over the weekend, and it will go to all of the positioning that we will see.

I say this: tax reform is about a lot more than jacking up a GST and lessening the burden on corporate Australia—a lot more. It will take a lot more than the threat to health and education to bring the Australian people to support such a change. But make no mistake; that is what is behind the trifecta of trickery that we have seen from the government since the budget early this year. First of all, it is behind their false claims of an economic emergency. It is about false claims about spending and the increase in the rate of spending, and it is about false claims about debt being unsustainable. All of that is to create an environment in which it may be acceptable for the Australian people to accept $80 billion worth of cuts, ripping the heart out of health and education and the social safety net, the GP co-payment and all of those unfair burdens which are currently being put on working Australians, particularly in my home state of Queensland, where, once again, there is a double whammy, because every one of these federal cuts is accompanied by a state cut and they are felt much more keenly in my home state. Of course, when you look at education, the government are going to cut something like $6.2 billion from Queensland schools and over $190 million from the schools in my electorate of Lilley. As I said before, that amounts to something like one in seven teachers. Then of course you get to health. I spoke in the House about that last week. There are savage cuts impacting on the quality of care in hospitals like Prince Charles and the Royal Brisbane. But all that it is about is a fundamental dismantling of the social safety net in this country by the conservatives in this country, who have always, always been very weak at taxing the strong and very strong at taxing the weak. (Time expired)

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