Page 1453 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 14 May 2014
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What makes all of this worse is that the Liberals will not even be honest about what they are doing. What they are doing is implementing their vision for a small, selfish, cutthroat Australia.
Instead, this budget has been sold as necessary in order to supposedly end the federal government’s debt. Let us look at this claim for a moment. Australia’s debt is only 12 per cent of GDP. Compared to similar countries in the OECD, debt to GDP is around the 70 per cent mark. During the GFC the federal government put people first. It kept people in work and that people-centred approach means that now we have the sixth lowest debt and the fourth lowest tax-to-GDP ratio in the OECD. If we do not have a debt crisis, what do we have? We have got a politically manufactured crisis being used as an excuse for an ideological agenda that devalues our community and our national culture of a fair go.
This budget is cruel. It is not about paying down debt; it is about shaping our society into a user-pays economy. It is a choice by this federal government to slash our safety net and tighten the screws on community life. But there are those of us who believe in a fair society and we refuse to sit back and let this budget shape the culture of our city. There are those of us—unions, charities, community groups, political parties like the ALP, the Greens political party and hundreds and thousands of Canberrans—who are happy to do their bit to ensure that we all enjoy Australia’s prosperity.
I know that we will continue to support good schools and education. We will continue to support people with a disability and fight to improve access to lifelong health. We will invest in infrastructure projects and develop the digital economy, because we know that we all benefit when we keep our city working. Most importantly, we will continue to invest in the fabric of our community because we know the kind of country we want to live in and it is not the small and selfish one contained in the pages of the 2014 federal budget.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (12.03): I think it is a good day to be having this discussion and reflecting on the nature of last night’s federal budget and the impacts it will have both on Canberra residents and Canberra as a city, because I think it is important to reflect on both of those, in light of some of the changes we have seen. The 2014 federal budget certainly does have a direct and long-lasting impact on the economy of the ACT and on the people of the ACT. I believe this is a budget that, contrary to the words of the Treasurer in his speech last night, impacts and leans on the poor to lift the rich. I do believe this is a budget that is not fair. I do not believe that the load has been evenly spread.
There is a thin tissue of alleged burden on high income earners and big business, but I believe many of those measures will be easily abated or will have little contribution to the budget bottom line, as those on the highest incomes organise their affairs in a way to minimise their tax liability. And what we will actually see is that the vast bulk of the heavy lifting in the budget is being done by those who can least afford it.
The biggest hits in this Liberal-National Party budget are on the young people looking for work or studying, those who need regular access to health care, the sick and the vulnerable. The budget will hit Canberra hard, with the extensive cuts to the public
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