Mr STEPHEN JONES (Whitlam) (12:18): Outside the gates of parliament right now there are several hundred aged-care workers who've come to Canberra. Many of them got up at about five o'clock this morning and travelled from the Illawarra, my electorate, on buses up Macquarie Pass and up the rickety Picton Road, and it was their expectation that today they'd be celebrating a budget that looked to the future of aged care and provided some relief for the crisis in aged care. It was their expectation that the budget would provide relief for the crisis in aged care. No such relief was provided. These are workers who are working 10-, 12-, 14-hour days and double shifts because the rosters can't be filled, because staff are leaving, because staff are falling sick, because the lack of decent pay in the sector means the employers can't attract new workers to the sector. They are doing backbreaking work and sometimes dangerous work. They're doing it because they love our elder Australians, but they are not being rewarded and recognised for the hard, essential work that they do day in, day out. They may be locked out of Scott Morrison's budget, but they're not locked out of Labor's plans for the future of aged care. It tells you everything you need to know about this Prime Minister. He has delivered a budget which is all about the next six weeks and not the future of the country. Whether it's the crisis running through our aged-care system, whether it's the climate crisis and the resulting floods up and down the east coast of Australia—two floods in a month; the desperation of those people in northern New South Wales in South East Queensland is unbelievable—there is no part for these people in the budget that the Prime Minister delivered last night. Instead we got a budget which was designed all about a short-term political fix instead of the long-term challenges for the country. We were told yesterday morning that this budget was going to herald a new era for wage rises for the workers of Australia. But, like everything this government does, when you look at the detail, you see that they say one thing but they do another. Baked into this government's economic plan for Australia is a real wage cut. This year alone, wages are going to go back by 2.5 per cent. At the end of this financial year, workers are going to be 2.5 per cent worse off than they were at the beginning of the year. This is not an accident. This is their plan. And they never catch up—not next year, not the year after, not the year after that. Under the economic plan that Scott Morrison is presenting to the people of Australia, workers cop a 2.5 per cent wage cut and they never catch up. They will be worse off by over $1,350 a year, and they never catch up. Like everything this Prime Minister does, he tries to distract them with a few things over here while the real damage is going on over there. We'll allow these bills to pass through the parliament posthaste, because we want motorists to get some relief from the soaring price of petrol increases and we want workers to have a few extra dollars in their pockets to ensure that they can pay the increase in grocery bills. But let's not kid ourselves that these are dealing with the underlying problems. The workers of Australia need a pay rise, and Scott Morrison has promised that under his government they will never get one—not in year 1, not in year 2, not in year 3. Under his budget, they go back by 2.5 per cent and they never recover. It's not just wages that is the problem under this government. We know the issues of cost of living—yes, it's petrol prices; yes, it's grocery prices—but the things that working families are struggling with are the big, lumpy bills that hit them once a month or once a quarter. They live in panic that they're not going to have enough cash on hand to meet the costs, whether it's their childcare bills, whether it's their insurance bills, whether it's the very real threat that interest rates are going to go up and up and up when they are mortgaged to the hilt and they can't afford to pay for it, or whether it's the threat that the $3 billion worth of secret cuts is going to hit them in health care, is going to hit them in education, or is going to hit them in family benefits or some other area which this Prime Minister won't fess up to until after the election. In complete contrast to this guy over here, Labor has a plan to deal with those big, lumpy cost-of-living issues. Under our plan for child care, the overwhelming majority of Australians won't have to panic about that childcare bill, and they will be able to make a decision between the mother and the father, between the parents of that child, about whether one stays home from work, or they both stay home from work, or they share the burden or they both return to work, knowing that the cost of child care is not going to be the deciding factor. That's how you deal with cost-of-living issues, and that's how you increase participation rates in our workforce, dealing with the skills crisis by ensuring that more men and women who are having families can return to work as and when they want to. We heard a lot of talk about housing. I've got to say we see some merit in providing additional support for first home buyers to cover the cost of their mortgage insurance. Indeed, we were pleased that the government copied the policy that was announced by the member for Blaxland and the Leader of the Opposition on Friday of last week in my electorate. We are pleased that the government has copied this, because it's good policy and it means that people in regional Australia who are seeking access to the housing market will be able to have that peace of mind. But when rents in my electorate have gone up by as much as 50 per cent over the last 12 months, and that's if you can get a house—to hear the Prime Minister say, as he did this morning on national television, 'Don't worry; if you can't afford the rent, just buy the house.' This is the reality that this guy lives in. Rents are going up and up, there are people living in cars or sleeping on couches, there's overcrowded housing, and the Prime Minister's solution for people who cannot afford to pay their rent is to say, 'Don't worry about it; just go and buy the house that you're living in.' What planet is this guy living on? It just goes to show that this man is so out of touch, so absolutely out of touch. Labor understand that the answer to the housing crisis is multifaceted. Yes, helping first home buyers into the market by covering the cost of mortgage insurance is part of the solution, but, unless you're dealing with the supply side, you're just going to see prices go up and up. You do not need a crystal ball to work out whether this is going to happen; just look at the last three years. There's been a 20 per cent increase in house prices in capital cities over the last 12 months, and a whopping 26 per cent in regional Australia. In fact, the policy that the government announced in the budget yesterday probably won't work in a lot of regional places around the country, because you'll struggle to find a house for under $800,000. That's why, under Labor's plan, one of the first things we would do is review those caps. The fact of the matter is that this government doesn't have a comprehensive plan for housing, for aged care, for wages or for skills. It's all short-termism: 'What can we announce that people will forget about the next week, in our rush to the election?' I want to say something about the secret cuts that are embedded in this budget. I want to see the minister, in his summing up, come to the dispatch box and come clean to the people of Australia. What is it that you are going to cut? It is extraordinary that, in a budget on the eve of an election, they've secreted into the budget a $3 billion whack to services. I want to put that $3 billion into context. It's about a quarter of what we spend on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It's a little less than 10 per cent of what we spend on Medicare. So this is not a small amount of money. Is it a 10 per cent cut to Medicare? Is it a 25 per cent cut to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme? Is it a cut to family payments? Are the government going to delay some of the other things that they've promised Australian families? The government must come clean. Where is the $3 billion slash and burn to services or benefits that the government has budgeted on but won't come clean about to Australian families? Can I say a few things about some initiatives in my local area. The member for Cunningham and I have worked hard over the last five years, campaigning for upgrades to Picton Road. It's absolutely critical in my electorate. People travelling from the Southern Highlands down to Wollongong, as many do to go to university or to go to work, will tell you that this is a death strip. We're very pleased that the hard campaigning on the Picton Road has seen over $90 million allocated to improvements to the interchange. It's a good start. More will need to be done. There are still too many black spots on that road, there are still too many places where separation and hard barriers are needed, and some of the absolutely deadly spots on that road need to be fixed, but we welcome the $90 million. I also want to say something about domestic violence and domestic violence services. For the last five years the women at the Illawarra Women's Health Centre, led by the force of nature Sally Stevenson, have done an absolutely outstanding job in putting together a proposal, getting it researched and getting it market tested on how we meet the big gap in trauma recovery services for domestic violence. The one thing we know is that we have almost met some of the needs in emergency services. More needs to be done to provide counselling and more needs to be done to provide emergency housing services, but the one area that we are not even touching the sides on is long-term trauma recovery for women and children who are victims of family and domestic violence. So I am so excited about the fact that the budget has allocated $25 million to the Women's Trauma Recovery Centre, with the proponent being the Illawarra Women's Health Centre—but they've formed an alliance with other women's services, the University of Wollongong, the University of New South Wales. I expect it will get support from local councils and local businesses as well. It's a first-rate proposal. It will probably serve as a model for other services around the country. So I'm delighted, and I congratulate Minister Ruston for allocating the funds. To the members of the Prime Minister's staff who took our meeting when I brought a delegation to Canberra: thank you for taking this issue seriously. Frankly, the issue of domestic violence should be above political partisanship. I genuinely thank all of those who have been involved in advocating for this and bringing a proposal forward, and I'm delighted that it has been funded in this budget. This budget is supposed to be a plan for the future of the country; it is not. It's a plan to let the Prime Minister race to the next election in the hope that the people of Australia will forget about the neglect of the last eight years and reward this Prime Minister with a second decade in government. The people of Australia deserve much better than that. They deserve a government which is as good as they are, a government with a vision for the future for the country and the interests of ordinary Australians in mind, not these nakedly political stunts which we saw revealed when the Treasurer stood at that dispatch box yesterday evening. I commend the bill to the House.