Mr LATHAM (Leader of the Opposition) (3:34 PM) —What we have seen in the parliament this past fortnight is a government with just two tactics. The first of those is to spend money and desperately try to buy their way into the next election. The government say that they have found new issues and problems. The government have been in office for eight long years and they have had plenty of time to solve these problems, and they have failed. They have had eight years to address the problems of disadvantage, inequality and poverty in this country, and they have failed. What we are seeing in this spending spree is a sad old story. Prior to the 1998 and 2001 elections, it was a spending spree of more than $20 billion—and now they are at it again. The truth is that they only care every three years—caring about votes, not people.

Of course, their second tactic is the politics of fear—the politics of trying to scare people about same-sex couples, trying to scare people about asylum seekers, trying to scare people about the Sex Discrimination Act, trying to scare people about taxation policy. That is the rotten, miserable existence of the modern Tories in the Australian parliament. It is the worst of the old politics: the politics of fear; the politics of trying to scare people.

The truth is that this is a fine country. Ours is a great nation, but it is a country with many entrenched problems. As I have moved around the nation over the last three months as the Labor leader, I have seen and heard about these entrenched problems: the difficulties that communities have with health and education services, the difficulties that young people have with opportunities in life with employment and the difficulties that families have in trying to make ends meet. This is a fine country of ours but there are many entrenched problems that this government has neglected and that this government has ignored. Essentially, people do not want the negative politics of fear. They do not want a government that has become one big horror movie trying to scare people. They want solutions—the Australian people want solutions. They want a new politics of positive solutions and answers. They want a bit of problem-solving. They want leaders who are willing to add value to the debate. That is what Labor are all about. We are about the future, not the past. We are about hope, not fear. We are about opportunity, not division. We are about a positive approach, not the tired old negativity of the Howard government.

If we are going to be positive in this parliament and in the leadership of Australia, what is the most important thing we can do for the fairness of our society? What is the most important thing we can do as parliamentarians to live up to the great Australian ethos of a fair go for all? The answer is to tackle poverty and the punishing disadvantage that so many Australians face on a daily basis. The Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs report entitled A hand up not a hand out: renewing the fight against poverty, which was tabled today, shows the way forward. It also shows the sorry record of the Howard government over the last eight years. It reports, with chilling statistics, that between two million and 3.5 million Australians are living in poverty. It reports that 21 per cent of Australian households try to survive on less than $400 per week—less than the minimum wage. It reports that 700,000 Australian children live in homes without a parent, without an adult, in full-time work. We also know from the government's own departmental figures that there are more than 370,000 Australians long-term unemployed—a bigger figure than when they came into government in 1996.

Any fair and caring person would be struck by these figures. Any person with a heart and a bit of Australian compassion would want to do something about the human tragedy of poverty in this nation. What do these figure tell us? They tell us something important about Australia. Yes, we have the economic wealth, but we do not have the social fairness. It has to be prosperity with a purpose. They tell us that growth is good. We want more economic growth. Labor are committed to policies for economic growth and productivity. But growth alone is not enough; there also has to be social fairness and there needs to be a government with a national plan to tackle poverty and disadvantage in this country. Only then will we truly be a prosperous nation. Only when we have a fair go for all and we have all Australians climbing the ladder of opportunity can we regard ourselves as a prosperous nation, a prosperous economy and a prosperous society.

So what are the solutions? The solutions lie in fixing the policy failings of the Howard government. The first of those failings is in the basic question of public administration and governance. The Senate report makes an important point. It emphasises the importance of cooperation between federal, state and local government. It emphasises the importance of cooperation between all levels of government and local communities in solving poverty. In this regard, I have been struck by two pieces of research. The first points to the importance of place management. It is the research that says that, if you take the individual characteristics of people who live in a poor neighbourhood—a public housing estate or an Aboriginal community—and you aggregate all those individual characteristics, they still do not explain the poverty and disadvantage of the place, of the neighbourhood itself. There is something about these places, about these neighbourhoods, that adds to and compounds the problems of poverty and disadvantage. So you have to manage the place. You have to get all levels of government and community working together with one integrated, coordinated plan to break the poverty cycle. You have to have an intensive strategy to end the disadvantage. You need place management.

The second piece of research, supporting the first, says that you are much better off having intensive coordinated government effort than having government heading off in all different directions. If a government department comes in in year 1 and says that it wants to fix up the local school and then it is not until year 2 or 3 that the health department comes in and does something, you get nowhere near the scale of results that you would get if all levels of government put their programs in simultaneously and worked with the community to put their initiatives in concurrently—worked together in a coordinated local way to beat the poverty cycle.

That is what Labor will be doing in government to improve public administration in tackling poverty. We will be listing at our first COAG meeting—we will be putting this at the top of the agenda—a new coordinated, integrated approach to beat poverty in Australia. We will also be working with all the great welfare and community organisations to get results. This is an approach that is particularly relevant to ending Aboriginal disadvantage—the point that the member for Lingiari was making in question time. The problems are so bad and the disadvantage is so extreme that we cannot afford for a moment in Aboriginal communities to have a lack of coordination, to have governments moving in opposite directions and to have differences of opinion about the direction of public policy and community effort. We have to get these regional and community plans in place. Get the services in, yes; demand responsibility, yes; but also have all levels of government working together in a great national task to tackle the crippling problem of Aboriginal disadvantage in this country.

Another strategy, another Labor approach, is early childhood development. Over the last couple of months I have perhaps achieved a couple of things, but the thing I am most proud of is that early childhood development is on the national agenda, where it deserves to be—that we have got the basic commonsense proposition that investing early is the best way of beating poverty. Investing early in our children is the best way of building a fair society. Investing early in the next generation of young Australians is the best way of guaranteeing opportunity for all.

This is the key to beating poverty. You can see it in the little ones. You can see it in their family circumstances. The different pathways of life are opening up at age five. The pathways of advantage and disadvantage are opening up at age five. We need government programs to give all young Australians fair opportunities in life. That is why Labor have their national reading program. That is why we regard early childhood development as the missing link in lifelong learning. It is the foundation stone of a fair society.

Our second strategy is needs based funding for our schools—something this government never cared about and never remembered. Needs based funding is the best way of helping struggling schools and ensuring that all schools in Australia are high-achievement schools. For the poor, there is a special commitment. For the poor, we have to recognise the reality that their passport out of poverty, their ladder of opportunity, lies down the street. All they have is their neighbourhood government school—their best hope in life to get ahead. It is those schools that need additional resources and teacher programs and support to get results. Yes, there are struggling non-government schools that need extra assistance. But, for the poor, it is the neighbourhood school, the government school down the road, that is their best chance in life. It is all they have when it comes to educational opportunity.

Another of our strategies is for a dental program. The sad truth under the Howard government is that we have seen a 30 per cent increase in decayed teeth among adult public dental patients. We have more than 500,000 Australians—most of them elderly—waiting to get their teeth fixed. What sort of prosperity is that? What sort of government leaves more than 500,000 Australians—most of them senior citizens who have served their nation well—waiting and waiting to get their teeth fixed? Labor have a plan, a national dental plan, for an additional 1.3 million new treatments to clear the backlog and substantially reduce the waiting list.

Beyond that, in the health system we need to improve bulk-billing. Again, it is all the poor have in terms of primary health care. The bulk-billing doctor is all-important for fixing up the needs of their children, for ensuring health care and opportunity for all. Under this government, we have had a collapse in bulk-billing—it is down from 80 per cent to just the mid-60s. The truth about this government's strategy is that you only need a safety net if you have given up on saving Medicare and bulk-billing. That is the truth of the safety net: you only need it if you have turned Medicare into a highwire act where the families are going to fall off.

The government might have given up on Medicare, it might have given up on bulk-billing—it is raising up the white flag—but I give this commitment: Labor will never give up on bulk-billing rates. We will never give up. We will never give up on the potential of Australians to access a bulk-billing doctor in their local community. That is why we have a plan to save bulk-billing, why we have to plan to save Medicare. Let us put the incentives in—the Medicare teams and the other support—to say we are never going to give up on the universality of Medicare and the need for available bulk-billing doctors in the community.

Beyond that, there are other big priorities, such as in housing, with the shame that I raised in question time of housing authorities in Hobart having to dispense tents to the needy, to people with disabilities and mental illnesses. The $1 billion cutback in public housing by this government, with authorities and communities having to dispense tents to people in need—that is the shame. How prosperous can we be as a nation as long as those things are happening around our great land? It is a sad thing. It defies the sort of potential we have as a nation. We need to correct it. We need to correct the public policy failing.

This $1 billion cut in public housing has another bad effect in terms of good public policy, because the states are forced to cut down on public housing. They push people out into the private rental sector and it comes back to federal rent assistance. So public housing cuts do nothing to improve the federal budgetary situation and just move the problem of housing affordability around like musical chairs. It is bad public policy. It is a bad outcome for the federal budget. It is a bad outcome for Australians in need.

Beyond that, there is the policy failure of the Job Network—the crisis of the Job Network around this country. Only one in five long-term unemployed today finds full-time work after participating in the Job Network's customised assistance programs. It is not good enough. We need to do a lot better. We need jobs through growth—sure. But we also need jobs through employment services and community based programs that get results for people in need. We need to develop that comprehensive approach to cure the curse of long-term unemployment in this country.

We have a government with a strategy of throwing money at problems in an election year. Labor's strategy is to solve problems, through good public policy. This is a government that needs to adopt our strategies. If you want to be serious about solving poverty and tackling issues of disadvantage in Australia, the Labor strategy is by far the best: the COAG strategy for place management governance, the early childhood emphasis and programs that we have been announcing and advocating, the needs based funding approach for our schools, our Aim Higher strategy for post-secondary education, our dental program and our bulk-billing plan. I say to the Prime Minister: if it is good enough to adopt our policy on parliamentary superannuation, it is good enough to adopt our plan to tackle poverty and disadvantage in this country. If it is good enough to abolish NOIE, if it is good enough to sit on the floor in schools because I told you to, it is good enough to adopt our plan and strategy for ending poverty.

The member for Warringah, Mr Abbott, raised a point in question time a few days ago. He quoted me as saying that you need to be true to yourself in public life; you need to be true to yourself and go to sleep at night knowing you have lived up to your beliefs. I am proud to stand here and say that we in the Labor Party are true to ourselves and to our commitment to tackle poverty. We are true to our commitment to end the disadvantage in this nation. We are true to our commitment to improve social justice for all Australians. We are true to our commitment to a fair go for all. We are true to our commitment to ensure that all Australians—not 70, 80 or 90 per cent, but all Australians—are climbing the ladder of opportunity, with hard work, good government services and the opportunity to do better for their families in the future.