Ms KING (12:35 PM) —I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2003-2004, which seeks to appropriate $40 billion from the consolidated revenue for the ordinary business of government. It is obviously much more than a bill about the transfer of revenue; it is also a statement of the government's priorities for the next financial and ensuing years. The Prime Minister's campaign slogan in 1996 was `For all of us'. It has become increasingly clear, over the course of this government, that really the Prime Minister is only `for some of us'.

The government has the responsibility of looking after all Australians. It has a responsibility to distribute the money raised from taxes from the hardworking people of my electorate in a way that makes life better for all of them. It has a responsibility to allocate resources to deliver services to all Australians. It has a responsibility to ensure that all Australians, regardless of their economic background, have the chance to be educated and have access to high-quality health care and job opportunities. It has a responsibility to ensure that those who are worse off in our community are given additional assistance.

However, the budget measures announced by the Treasurer show that the government has failed miserably in this responsibility. It has become, over the course of its time in power, the highest taxing government in our history whilst clawing back on our services. It has looked after the big end of town at the expense of those in the middle and at the expense of those who are worse off in our community.

I support the shadow Treasurer's second reading amendment. I particularly want to focus on the government's obsession with shifting the cost of health and education from the budget to Australian families—imposing not only higher costs of doctor visits on families without concession cards but also a 30 per cent hike in essential medicine prices—and on its willingness to deliver tax cuts to corporate Australia while imposing a record tax burden on Australian families. There has been a great deal of backslapping and grandstanding going on on the other side of this chamber regarding the budget. Government members have stood in this place and praised a budget that will do nothing for Australian families. We have already seen exposed the fact that some of the figures in this budget are wrong. The Minister for Finance and Administration has admitted that Telstra's value has been overstated by $7 billion in the budget papers. It is for this reason that the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, of which I am a member, has continued to recommend that the legal requirement for the Auditor-General to audit the budget outcomes be reinstated.

One of the reasons why the government refuses to do this is that the Audit Office clearly, and in accordance with agreed accounting standards, counts the GST as a Commonwealth tax, and when it is included in the budget figures it clearly shows that this government is the highest taxing government in our history. This is a government that has hit families in my electorate with increased taxes from bracket creep, the sugar tax, the Ansett levy and a plethora of other hidden taxes and levies. This is a government that has introduced the largest tax in Australia's history—the GST. It has introduced a new tax system that has wrapped small business in red tape and reaps $1,478 from every individual in my electorate, from every person in Wendouree West, Sebastopol and Delacombe. Every household from Trentham to Haddon and Clunes to Bacchus Marsh is paying an average of $4,500 more in income tax than when the Prime Minister and the Treasurer came to power in 1996.

What does the government give to Australians after reaping the largest amount of taxation in Australia's history? It gives Australians a commitment to prop up the top end of town. The government proposes in this budget $300 million in tax cuts to multinational corporations. At the same time that many superannuants are coming to terms with the drop in their superannuation accounts due to difficulties in the international share market and investment opportunities, the government gives a superannuation tax cut to the top few per cent. Not ending there, the government deems it necessary to reward the top executives of town who receive those massive golden handshakes and bonuses. Those executives receive tax subsidies on their payouts. All the government can give the majority of taxpayers in my electorate is $4 a week. This is $4 a week from the government that has given $300 million to multinational corporations, and tax credits to corporate executives. This is $4 from the government that has increased taxes of Ballarat families by over $4,500 since it came to power.

I want to turn to the issue of health care. Medicare is the last great hurdle that the Howard government plans to overcome in order to fully implement its conservative agenda in Australia. The proposed changes to Medicare should be of concern to every family in my electorate. There can be no doubt that the Howard government has plans to dismantle Medicare. John Howard is ideologically opposed to Medicare. In successive guises, the Prime Minister has declared his plans for Medicare. As a Treasurer in the Fraser government, John Howard prepared a model that directly reflects his current plans to restrict Medicare to concession card holders and pensioners. When Leader of the Opposition in the 1980s, he sought to destroy Medicare—he said it was a rort; he wanted to rip it up and tear it apart.

As part of his 1987 election manifesto, John Howard took to the election the policy of reducing the universality to concession card holders and pensioners. In that same commitment he argued that free visits to hospitals should be restricted to pensioners and concession card holders, whilst everyone else had the option of paying for their own health and access to health services. Again, in 1993 when the now Prime Minister was part of the shadow ministry of the then Leader of the Opposition, Dr Hewson, the Liberal Party adopted the same proposals for Medicare that we see before the House today.

In 1996 we saw what could be perceived as a miraculous backflip from the Prime Minister, who attempted to reinvent his position on Medicare. The Prime Minister made commitment on commitment that Medicare and bulk-billing would stay. He said to the Australian people and to the people in my electorate that, under his government, Medicare and bulk-billing would not be touched. He repeated this commitment in the 1998 and 2001 federal elections—yet in 2003 the Prime Minister has broken his promise. It is not surprising that he has followed this path; since the 1970s he has been committed to the destruction of Medicare and now his plans have been placed on the table.

However, whilst the plans are now laid out before the Australian people, the Howard government has slowly been eroding Medicare and bulk-billing since it came to power in 1996. When the Labor Party left office in 1996, national bulk-billing rates were at an all-time high—80 per cent of doctors bulk-billed. Figures released in the last couple of weeks show that the national bulk-billing rate has dropped to 68.5 per cent. In all outer metropolitan, regional and rural areas the percentage has dropped even further.

Every year since the Howard government came to power, bulk-billing rates have dropped in my electorate. The percentage of doctors who bulk-bill has dropped to 52.8 per cent in my electorate and is rapidly declining. In December 2000 the bulk-billing rate for Ballarat was 62.8 per cent—a decline of 10 per cent in only two years. There is nothing in the government's package that will stop the decline in bulk-billing in my electorate. Families in my electorate are already paying more for their visits to the doctor—on average, it is now up to $11 a visit.

In its Medicare package, the government has made it easier for doctors to increase their fees by allowing doctors to split the patient rebate from any copayment. It effectively gives the green light to increases in doctors' charges for families in my electorate. If you are a family in Ballarat and you earn $32,000, $40,000 or $50,000, you will be hit by these changes. Visit by visit you will be paying more to go to the doctor. What the government has allowed is for families to take out private health insurance to cover the cost of gap payments of $1,000 or more. This, in itself, is an express acknowledgement that costs for GPs will go up. It is an acknowledgement that this proposal can only be inflationary, and it introduces, for the first time, private health insurance as far as GP costs are concerned.

We know that when people cannot afford to go to a general practitioner they end up in the public hospital system; they can end up in the hospital emergency departments—departments that are already under pressure. The real sting in the tail of this budget is that the government has actually cut future funding to public hospitals in order to fund its Medicare package. A comparison of the forward estimates from the last budget with this year's budget shows funding for the Australian health care agreements, which fund our public hospitals, between the Commonwealth and the states is down by $918 million over four years. So what the government has done is take $917 million from the states to fund its campaign to destroy Medicare. That is lost money for public hospitals in my electorate such as the Ballarat Base Hospital and Dejeriwarra Health Service.

Ballarat has had a strong reputation for higher education over the past 130 years. We have hosted some of Australia's finest higher education institutes. Most recently, the opening of our Camp Street arts precinct in 2001 created a learning space for the arts and an arts campus that rivals other arts campuses across Australia. But in the past 130 years our town has never been under such threat in relation to higher education. Under the reforms outlined by the federal government, the options for Ballarat families sending their children to university are going to diminish. These plans do little more than attempt to remedy the mess the government has created in Australia's higher education system over the past seven years. Since its election in 1996, the federal government has slashed higher education funding by $5 billion, including $50 million that was taken from the University of Ballarat. That is $50 million that could have been spent on scholarships for students from underprivileged backgrounds, that could have been spent on more university staff and that could have gone towards upgrading equipment, including high-speed broadband Internet access for the University of Ballarat.

What this government is attempting to do is create a smokescreen. On the one hand, it removes $50 million from our local university and then puts back just $68 million for the entire country in 2004. This goes nowhere near filling the funding black hole faced by our regional universities. On the other hand, the federal government is attempting to shift the cost of providing a university education from its own coffers onto the shoulders of low- and middle-income families in Ballarat. Under the current federal government, Australian students already pay some of the highest university study costs in the world. Even before the federal budget, student fees under HECS were up an average of 85 per cent from 1996. The proposals outlined by the federal government would allow Australian universities to increase HECS fees by 30 per cent. By 2005 the HECS debt for students and their families could increase by an average of $1,650 per year. This would mean an extra $32 of debt per week for students and their families.

The federal government is also proposing to introduce a five-year learning limit, which will mean that students can only access a HECS place at university for five years unless the minimum length of their course is longer. If a degree is not completed in that time, they will be hit with large fees and a huge debt. So much, also, for the availability of HECS places for mature aged students who wish to return to university for postgraduate study. At the same time, the government has opened the way for an increase in the number of full fee paying places. These places will be open to students based on how much they can pay rather than on their ability. In order to help students and their families pay for these places, which can cost up to $150,000 for medical degrees, the federal government plans to offer $50,000 loans at six per cent interest. Not many families I know would be able to find up to $100,000 to cover the difference between the loan and the cost of full-fee degrees, let alone contemplate having an extra $16,000 in interest to pay on top of the $50,000 loan.

This year 20,000 qualified students missed out on a university place because of the federal government's higher education funding cuts but, instead of addressing the enormous unmet demand, the government's budget adds just 444 new student places. The paltry increase in places needs to be considered in context. Each year 170,000 students enter university. There is no guarantee in this budget package about where the new university places are going to go. The University of Ballarat is currently overenrolled by 350 places and is already in the process of closing courses and reallocating HECS places. Under this government's regime, the university will face harsh financial penalties if it does not cut these places. I want a guarantee from this government that the 350 places the University of Ballarat is overenrolled by will be staying at the university. There is nothing in the reforms that will even attempt to meet the hopes of the talented young Australians who are turned away from Australian universities each year. Their only hope is that their parents can afford to help them buy a full-fee place or assist them to get a $50,000 student loan, a loan that will leave them carrying tens of thousands of dollars of debt for decades to come. There is only one winner under these reforms. That winner is not low- and middle-income families, and it is not the University of Ballarat; it is the federal government as it moves to shift the cost of university education onto low- and middle-income families in my electorate.

Being one of the many members on our side of the House who represent regional areas, I want to focus on what the government has done to regional programs. On the surface of it, in merging the Regional Solutions Program and the RAP and RTC programs into the Regional Partnerships program the government appears to have done a sensible thing. Certainly this was the policy that Labor went into the last election with. But, if you look at the budget papers, you will see that the federal government has slashed $17 million out of those regional programs. Many communities have come to rely on these programs to implement ideas to boost their local economies. We heard during the election campaign how this funding was politicised, with large proportions of the funding available under Regional Solutions going to areas such as Wide Bay, but now it would appear the government has actually cut the program by $17 million.

For people living in regional Australia, one of the most important pieces of infrastructure is roads. Through the heart of my electorate runs a national highway. It is the main transport route from Melbourne to Adelaide. All the towns along this national highway rely on it to keep their local economies thriving. The government, through their AusLink paper and this budget, are signaling that they are going to abrogate their responsibilities for national highways. There is no funding allocated in this budget for the upgrading and maintenance of national highways. I am absolutely floored by the government's hypocrisy as they claim to be outraged by the Victorian state government's decision to use a private-public partnership to fund the Scoresby Freeway—a decision that had to be taken because of the Kennett government's failed public transport privatisation, which has left the state financially vulnerable—at the same time as opening up under their AusLink proposals the very real possibility that any upgrades to the national highway in my electorate could be toll roads.

There are two pieces of transport infrastructure in my electorate that desperately need attention. They are the Deer Park bypass and Anthony's Cutting. We have had 14 people die over the last few years on that stretch of road alone. The government has not earmarked any further funding for this vital piece of road and has opened up the possibility of any upgrades being subject to tolls. It is total hypocrisy of the government to be objecting to tolls on the Scoresby Freeway at the same time as opening up the possibility of tolls on national highways such as the Western Highway.

This government has failed tourism operators in my electorate. Many tourism operators in my electorate are experiencing difficulties because of SARS and the increased terrorism threat globally. One operator in particular, Sovereign Hill, relies heavily on overseas tourists. Close to a quarter of the visitors to this Ballarat tourist attraction are from overseas. What has this government done for this operator? Absolutely nothing. It has not stepped forward with a plan in this budget to address the problems of the reduction in overseas tourism numbers. It has not produced the green paper which was promised for the end of May; apparently it was promised for a few months earlier than that as well. We are looking forward to seeing not just the detail but some funding to go with it.

The Prime Minister said that the further privatisation of Telstra would not be considered until telecommunication services in rural and regional Australia were up to scratch. I can advise the Prime Minister that his plans for the full privatisation of Telstra must be a very long way off, because nothing in this budget will go any way close to fixing the problems of telecommunications in my electorate. The fact that he continues to include the sale of Telstra in the budget figures indicates to me that he does not care a great deal about the quality of the service in rural and regional Australia; he cares only about how much he gets for the asset when he sells it off. There was nothing in this budget to extend mobile telephone communications in my electorate. The residents of Blampied are still awaiting the fulfillment of the promise of a mobile phone tower in their area. Access to ADSL broadband Internet services remains on the drawing board for many of the residents across the electorate.

In his budget reply, the Leader of the Opposition laid down our first down payment for saving Medicare, committing to higher education, cutting tax on superannuation, ending the tax advantage given to companies who grant excessive golden handshakes and saving one of our most important waterways. The AMA, divisions of general practice and health consumer groups have welcomed our Medicare package as a much better alternative to that proposed by the government. Our plan to save the Murray has been heralded as exactly the sort of nation building that is needed in this country. Our plans to cut super tax—and not just for the wealthy—have been widely welcomed. Labor have laid down the first steps to building this country to what it could be. The Prime Minister has laid down a budget that drags this country into his image of how he thinks it should be.

I said at the start of this speech that this bill is very much about priorities. It is becoming increasingly clear that this government has its priorities wrong. It is a government that is consumed by its own self-interest. It is a government that is more interested in looking after its mates than in governing for all Australians. Australians correctly expect that they will have their taxes used to expand opportunities for all, not a narrow, privileged minority in Australia. Australians want their taxes spent on building opportunities, not on limiting them. They want their taxes spent on improving their lives, not on making life harder. The Howard government stands condemned for a budget that delivers neither vision nor commitment to nation building or to the provision of services that Australians expect in return for the taxes that they pay. I support the second reading amendment.