Post-Budget Speech
We are seeing, post budget, two very different visions for Australia being put forward: on this side, not holding anyone back, not leaving anyone behind; on the government benches, the government has refused to be on the side of Australians stranded abroad, refused to be on the side of Australians stuck in India, refused to be on the side of Australians in the universities sector, refused to be on the side of Australians under 50 who cannot afford a home and cannot even register for a vaccine. This government has refused to be on the side of Australians who are looking for a place to call home. Labor has come up with a practical policy that the government should adopt tomorrow, creating a $10 billion Australian housing future fund to build more social housing, create jobs and change lives. We propose that 30,000 homes be built over five years, including 10,000 homes for frontline workers and 4,000 homes for women and children escaping domestic violence, veterans experiencing homelessness and older Australian women on low incomes. It will fix challenges in my electorate of Perth. For too many years now Stirling Towers has sat vacant, waiting for the funds required to build new homes in Highgate for low-income and essential workers. Orana House have continued to struggle with the challenges of helping women who have come to them at a point of crisis to get into long-term, secure accommodation.
When it comes to helping people find a home, we also need to talk about helping people come home. Every single Australian knows that we needed to get quarantine right, except for the Prime Minister. Australians expected on budget night the Prime Minister to finally show some leadership. Instead, again, this budget fails when it comes to quarantine. Not a single dollar was put forward for new quarantine measures in Western Australia. There was spending like never before, but nothing—not an extra dollar—for one of the most critical pieces of important infrastructure we need. There are 40,000 Australians on the waiting list. We know there are countless more who would get on the waiting list, but they know it's just not worth their time. What have we had since the crisis of COVID came out in another wave in India? Two repatriation flights—just two. This Prime Minister has failed his own citizens. The Perth electorate is housing all of Western Australia's hotel quarantine. That could be addressed if we just had some national infrastructure, some remote quarantine, so that it would be not just inner-city areas and the CBD and the businesses within being hardest hit every time a necessary lockdown came into place. We need more capacity and more quarantine locations.
The only solution we've seen in the last couple of weeks from the government is the vaccine passport. I'm sure this will go the way of every other thought bubble that the government have had. They wanted to open the borders, and then they wanted to close the borders. They opposed Clive Palmer and kicked him out of the LNP, and then they supported him in the High Court. They wanted to help Australians overseas, and then they wanted to lock them up for five years. They put the Liberal logo on their vaccine information, and then they stopped publishing any vaccine information or public information campaigns at all. They promised four million vaccinations by April, and then they said they never promised that. Now we have the vaccine passport, a passport you can get only if you're over 50 years old. Talk about intergenerational inequality! This government has failed young Australians time and time again during this pandemic, telling them to dip into their superannuation and telling them they're going to have to pay even more for their university fees. This is a government that doesn't really care who it attacks. Just ask the Premier of New South Wales. Maybe the Prime Minister just got tired of attacking Labor premiers, and so he decided to go to after one of his own. When the Prime Minister of New South Wales said what we all know to be true—that is, that the government's plans for the vaccine are not ambitious enough—the Prime Minister got personal. He said the Premier was being selfish, that she only cared about New South Wales. Well, speaking on behalf of people from Western Australia, often it seems like this Prime Minister only cares about New South Wales.
When we talk about the vaccine passport and how we've failed young Australians we need also to remember that, at the moment, this government has no plan for what to do with young people when it comes to COVID vaccinations. They talk about giving out a vaccine passport. What does that mean for children who don't have a vaccine? What does that mean for families who want to travel together? The truth is that while COVID, thankfully, does not affect children and young people in the same way, it does affect young people. As of 2 April 2021, 361 children in the United States have died from COVID. In Brazil, as of 15 April 2021, 1,300 babies have died from COVID. In the US, average daily cases for children have risen by over 200 per cent in the last few weeks. So we talk about vaccine passports and this never-ending rush to open up the economy without any plan about protecting people's health, but the reality is that we need to see a plan from the government about what they are going to be saying to young people, who seem to have been forgotten in the debate on COVID and the reopening of our international borders. We know that it will worsen mental health for children if they don't get vaccinated, can't get vaccinated and can't travel. We know that it will increase social isolation for children. We know that it will mean more families remain separated. And it means all these promises from some sort of a snap back to usual from this government will be false.
Younger Australians want a government that has an eye on the future and on the challenges we face in the future. Australia as a whole needs a government with its eye on the future. Instead we have a government that is obsessed with the past. We know that what is obsessing the Liberal Party base right now, including members of the backbench—the Prime Minister's own backbench—is a desire to walk away from the deal that finally secured a fair share of the GST for Western Australia.
As a Western Australian I worry that the federal government will come for a slice of WA's GST. We've already seen this flagged by the New South Wales Treasurer, a member of the Liberal Party. And, just two days after the budget was released, what was the Prime Minister's hand-picked chair of the Tax and Revenue Committee doing? He wasn't out selling the budget; he was out attacking Western Australia's share of the GST. Now, the Liberal Party might say, 'Don't worry about it. Trust us. It's going to be fine,' but as a Western Australian I have no doubt that a government that was willing to side with Clive Palmer against Western Australians in the High Court will have no problem ripping away money from Western Australia.
My message to the treasurers across this country is: hands off Western Australia's GST share. The federal Treasurer can't give in to his Victorian and New South Wales backbench, and state treasurers in Victoria and New South Wales can't see the WA economy and WA's GST as an easy fix to their problems.
The distribution of GST revenue amongst the states requires long-term thinking and a secure, certain approach—thinking beyond just the next boom. But we saw in the budget that the Morrison government is not capable of thinking about the long-term economic future. The budget showed us that. There were so many missed opportunities in this budget, but missed opportunities have become a sort of pattern in the economic and infrastructure statements that we see from this government. There is so much that this government could be doing right now. We should be using this opportunity to build up our tourism infrastructure assets for that time when we do once again welcome people to these shores.
One area where I was disappointed is that the government's Perth City Deal fails to make any headway on a revitalisation of the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is a piece of infrastructure that needs to be refreshed. The managers of the asset, the leaseholders of the asset, want to do the hard work. We know that the public want to see action on the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. It is more than 20 years old. It is becoming one of the oldest convention centres in Australia, and we should look to the opportunity to redevelop that centre so it can be a world-class convention and tourism asset in the heart of the Perth CBD, next to Elizabeth Quay. As they would say in Western Australia—because we fondly refer to the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre as 'the cockroach' because of its unique design—it's time to squash the cockroach and build something new for the 21st century.
The other thing about this budget that disappointed Western Australians was that it had no plan when it comes to wages. There was $100 billion of new spending announced in the budget, projecting that inflation in the 2021-22 financial year will be 1.75 per cent—and already we're seeing warnings that inflation may indeed be higher—but wage growth at just 1.5 per cent. That is a real wage cut next financial year for thousands of working Western Australians. If the government are able to do amazing backflips when it comes to debt, deficit and budget surpluses, maybe it's time they finally do a backflip when it comes to stagnant wages in this country.
I want to share the story of somebody who called my office the day after the budget. His name is Keith, and Keith is a pensioner who lives in the Perth electorate. This government, he says, just makes him a number, and not a number the government cares about. When Keith saw the budget, he was devastated. He said he's worried about winter. He reckons that, once he's paid for his medication, he won't have money left to pay for warm clothes. He asked, 'Why isn't the Prime Minister looking after older Australians?' I think we saw that in the way they threw money into the aged-care sector but require zero accountability that actually ensures higher quality care. We saw $3.2 billion injected into aged care, $10 a day per resident per bed, but no obligation about what is done with those funds. There is no obligation that it go to high-quality food or high-quality care or to a living wage for people who work in aged care—another huge disappointment and another huge missed opportunity by this government.
It's a government that misses out on the big challenges of our future. When it comes to renewable energy, again, the government are tying themselves in knots trying to say that they believe that they might get to net zero emissions by 2050—maybe, if Boris Johnson and Joe Biden make them. But the only reason they're actually doing it is to keep their friends abroad happy, not to protect the broader economic interests of their country here at home.
When Australians look at this parliament, they see one side who've had 20-something energy plans but haven't actually implemented any and a side that has a plan to tackle the big challenges of our future and grab the opportunity to make Australia the energy superpower of the world: transforming the national energy market by rebuilding the grid and modernising how people can pump renewables into our energy grid. Australia has the expertise to do this. We just need the right policy settings to get it done—using Australian steel and Australian workers to deliver cheap, reliable and clean energy. Our current grid was designed in the decades long passed now. We need to bring it into the future and we need to accept that the future lies in community batteries, electric cars and investing in renewables, not demonising them.
We are going to see a bit of a preview this weekend. We've seen the Prime Minister and the Treasurer outline their budget and say that they're now born-again, big-spending, big-government progressives who deliver women's budget statements—something they haven't done for the last seven years. But, of course, in the year before an election, we've gone from the back-in-black budget to the back-to-the-ballot-box budget. That is all this is. But we will see what the Liberal Party truly believes this weekend. The heart and soul of the Liberal Party is descending on Canberra for their federal council meeting this weekend. They are going to be here and they are going to tell us what they really think and how they really want to govern the country.
We know from their previous council meetings what they actually believe. It was only in 2018 when the Liberal Party's federal council passed a motion for the full privatisation of the ABC. It was in 2017 that the Liberal Party of Western Australia passed a motion to secede from the Commonwealth—because that's what they actually believed. They wanted to secede from the Commonwealth when they had a federal Liberal government in office. Life member of the Liberal Party, Clive Palmer, in 2012— (Time expired)