Senator RYAN (Victoria—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education) (15:08): Here we are today witnessing the latest in Labor’s confected scare campaigns about the budget.
Labor had two approaches before last year’s election. Both were cruel. We have seen this right across the budget papers, but today we have seen it in a particularly cruel way.
There was the first approach, which was Labor’s magical mystery budget tour. They made all these incredibly large promises in the future, including in my own portfolio of education, some off the forward estimates, which were dramatically unfunded and they did this with the intention of later running these fear campaigns. They did it with the intention of making promises they knew they were never going to deliver not only because they were not confident going into the last election but also because they knew they never had a way of funding it.
Another plan that Labor adopted was kick the can along so they expired at the end of this financial year or they were kept going only for the first year of government, as they did in some other parts of the budget, providing no funding certainty whatsoever.
If the previous government cared about programs, they could have made them ongoing but they did not. They left these time bombs and landmines in the budget that actually meant, absent any activity from government on either side, the programs were expiring.
In some cases there are good reasons for programs to expire. But right across this budget, the previous Labor government kicked the can down the road, as they did with programs like Youth Connections, and simply tried to pass the problem off to future governments.
If they cared, they would have made the budget allocations ongoing. But they chose not to. And Senator Wong was the finance minister at that time.
Labor are seeking to make Indigenous affairs partisan. They cannot bear the fact that, under this Prime Minister and under this government, we have the most committed leadership to dealing with the problems in our Indigenous communities that this country has ever seen.
We have a Prime Minister who is uniquely committed to improving the lot of Indigenous Australians. But Labor, stuck in the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s, cannot cope with that, so they try to confect a partisan fight with misleading examples of budgets in order to create some partisanship.
They cannot stand the idea that Indigenous leaders stand with this Prime Minister, a Prime Minister of a coalition government, of the Liberal Party, who actually say, ‘We’ve finally got a leader who is dealing with the real problems in our community. We’ve finally got someone who is giving indigenous Australians a unique level of attention.’
Not only has he spent time with them as Prime Minister, including last week when he went up to Arnhem Land, but he has done it for a decade as a minister, when it was unheralded. We have a Prime Minister who is uniquely committed to improving the lot of Indigenous Australians.
But the Labor Party cannot cope with this. The Labor Party seeks to create partisanship here because it does not want this issue dealt with in this way.
The Labor Party is also making its historic error of mistaking money for actually solving problems in communities. If money were going to be the solution to the challenges in our Indigenous communities, everyone in this parliament would agree that there would have been more improvement in recent decades.
There are many reasons that are not related to money. We need complex solutions to deal with complex challenges in our Indigenous communities. I do not think any of those challenges are made easier when the Labor Party seeks to confect partisanship fights.
What is the truth of some of the issues raised today? The children and family centres are able to apply for funding through the Indigenous Advancement Strategy’s funding round, which is currently open to applications. They are able to make applications for that.
It would be inappropriate for the minister to provide answers before those funding rounds are closed. But the number that Labor throws around needs to be put in context. The number that Labor has thrown around does not affect frontline services. It is not over four years; it is over a longer period.
It includes Public Service savings of staff in the public sector here through the rationalisation of programs into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
It includes programs right across government and the savings that come from there. This government is uniquely committed to Indigenous affairs.