Senator O'NEILL (New South Wales) (23:00): Perhaps Senator Bernardi might be cautioned to take some of what he reads in the media a little more carefully into consideration rather than taking it at face value. On this cold night here in Canberra I am going to ask those in the chamber to think about a word picture I want to paint of a beautiful part of the country, the northern beaches: sun, sand, surf, seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care and, as I stand here this evening, the seat of power for both the state and federal governments. A bottle of Grange and a forgetful memory have seen fate chance the idyllic surrounds of the northern beaches with a Prime Minister and a Premier of their very own: Tony Abbott, the member for Warringah, Prime Minister of Australia; Mike Baird, the member for Manly, Premier of the great state of New South Wales. Surely the things that the locals have yearned for, the glory days, must have arrived at last! To borrow a well-worn phrase, the good burghers of Warringah and Manly must hardly believe their new fortunes. What a hand fate has dealt them after so many, many years of neglect by the very party and members to whom they have shown such loyalty and they have elected year after year, decade after decade. Surely now will be their moment of glorious spotlight in the Liberal Party ascendancy. Such prospects and possibilities, with power at hand. Finally, there is an opportunity for the northern beaches to be front and centre of the political debate. Such great promise for such a promising area. Amongst the hardworking locals—from tradesmen, business owners, professionals and entrepreneurs to the baristas that keep the whole high-paced show running—it is actually not hard when you visit the northern beaches to feel the sense of pride that power resides just a suburb or two away. To think, they muse, that amongst the waves of Queenscliff, during a lull between sets, the two most powerful man in New South Wales are having a yarn about local schools or health services, perhaps transport or infrastructure, with no doubt the odd quip about the real heroes of the beaches, the Manly Sea Eagles. It is pure Camelot. Royalty by the beach, even. A political union crafted in sand, held together by sea and consummated by surf. A coronation presided over at Manly Beach by Prince William and Princess Kate with little Prince George in tow on Good Friday, no less. From the ashes of a fallen O'Farrell sacrificed on the altar of ICAC rose the golden boy of Manly, and it didn't even take three days. To think that, if not for a bottle of wine, Premier Baird would never have been. But, instead, Mike Baird turned a bottle of 1959 Grange Hermitage into a day at the beach with a royal couple, turning wine into water, and now that really was an Easter miracle. Locals watched with pride and fervour a newly ascended Premier and an avowed monarchist PM tugging politely at the forelock to the prince and princess, the heads of Her Majesty's governments obediently escorting their sovereign's kin through picturesque surrounds. Is it any wonder that Tony Abbott reintroduced knights and dames in such a context? Of course, despite their high office and the pomp and ceremony of such occasions, locals surely hope that, deep down, the hearts and minds of the benevolent rulers have not strayed too far from the area that they purport to serve. At heart, the good people of Warringah and Manly hope—they hold on to a vision—that surely the Prime Minister and the Premier are still just local MPs. Surely they will not forget those who elected them. Surely they are going to focus, at some point soon, on the simple, down-to-earth problems that only a local would know how to solve. The people of Warringah and Manly hope that questions exercise the minds of the Prime Minister and the Premier like: is it really acceptable that the closest public high school for Freshwater parents to send their boys to in year 7 is Balgowlah? What impact will abolishing this school kids bonus have on middle income families in Manly Vale and Dee Why? What impact has the 40 per cent price hike for multi-ferry commuters had on traffic congestion on Military Road and what impacted has it had on the pockets and fortunes of those who have to pay for this increase in services? They hope these leaders in the community might be asking: what effect will abolishing the $6,500 small business tax write-off have on local industries and companies, especially the army of contractors who call the northern beaches their home? They hope that the leaders are able to answer questions like: why is the Liberal Party privatising what was to be the new northern beaches public hospital? The current barbecue stopper is: why am I going to have to pay $7 more every time I go to the doctor, $7 every time I need a blood count, $7 every time I need an x-ray, multiplied by the number of people in my family and our burden of disease? There are countless more questions locals would like to think are being asked by their representatives, whom fate has granted such high office. There is a hope—it is religious belief for some—that those who serve their areas should care most about the issues which face the very people they claim to represent. But, sadly, this is not happening. And it has not happened for a long time. I say to this chamber now what many people on the northern beaches already know: the Liberal Party has taken the northern beaches for granted for far too long. Like absentee landlords they have allowed services to be run down. They have failed to deliver the essential infrastructure, the essential funding and facilities that the beaches sorely need and deserve. Perversely, they have done the opposite of investing in the region—cutting when they should be investing, and neglecting when they should be prioritising. Parents are having their school kids bonus ripped away, making it harder to make ends meet. Families are being hit hard by the changes to family support through the Abbott hits on family tax benefits. Every commuter, every business owner, and every family or young worker on their way to a part-time job is going to be slugged at the petrol bowser. Every time they fill up, Tony's long hand of tax collection will be fingering the hard earned cash in their pockets and drawing the dollars to Canberra in a tax that the Prime Minister promised— The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator O'Neill, I need to remind you that you need to refer to the Prime Minister by this correct title rather than his surname or just his Christian name. Senator O'NEILL: I will endeavour to do that for you, Deputy President. Every time people fill up, the Prime Minister's long hand of tax collection will be fingering the hard earned cash in their pockets and drawing the dollars to Canberra in a tax that the Prime Minister promised he would not inflict on the Australian people, even on the very last day before the election. And they believed him. Everything we have seen since this government was formed is a betrayal of that trust and belief of the people in the very community in which he lives. To add insult to injury, small businesses and tradies are seeing their $6,500 tax write-offs slashed, reducing incentive and abilities for companies to upgrade ageing equipment, and all the productivity impacts that that has. In the next month, as they meet with their accountants—that is what tradies do, come July—thousands of small businesses in the electorate of the Prime Minister will be finding out how hollow his promises are, and always were. They will be discovering the depth of betrayal of trust that this Prime Minister and his government is now showing. That is revealed day after day and month after month. And people are waking up to the deception to which they have been subjected. Funding for schooling, despite the nonsense that we hear perpetrated by those opposite, is being cut by $30 billion. Everyone knows that David Gonski got it right. His independent review was certainly a review of a very different calibre from the one we just heard Senator Conroy speak about. This was not a 'mates-rates, all-in-on-the-con-job' review of the kind we have seen since this government has come to power. This was a genuinely independent review—extensive and truly national. It revealed what caring parents and grandparents, and forward-thinking Australians, know—that more money is sorely needed to help our great principals and teachers undertake the teaching, learning and ongoing professional development that will enable the next generation to be great learners, great workers and great leaders in this nation. The Prime Minister's failure to invest in education, or his determination to rip money out of education, is an unthinkable prospect when you consider that some Northern Beaches suburbs have the highest rates of school age children in New South Wales. Indeed, a question was put to me this last week:—and I have not yet found the answer, but I have a feeling that it was a bit of a rhetorical question—when was the last public school built on the Northern Beaches? I have been led to believe that it has been decades since new infrastructure went into that region. Senator Dastyari made some important remarks this evening about the New South Wales government's push for privatisation. The concerns that surface in terms of how the community might be impacted are real and pressing. Ask the locals of Manly and Warringah. They will tell you that the iconic Manly Ferry has been privatised, and the impact of that means that fares for many commuters have been jacked up by 40 per cent, forcing more people onto already overcrowded buses and increasing the traffic on the car park that is Military Road. Yet the rhetoric and ideological rubbish in support of privatisation continues to spew forth from the local leaders, who let down the people of the Northern Beaches day after day, despite their great trappings of power and capacity to make a positive difference even for their own locals. Even if they neglected the rest of the country, you would think they would look after the people who elected them. I can put on the record the palpable local outrage at what was to be a new public hospital in the region that has been flogged off to the private sector. Added into that heady and unbelievable reality of removal of public access to public health is the threat of Manly Hospital being completely closed and Mona Vale Hospital being downgraded. This litany of concerns has been very clearly communicated to me, and the Prime Minister should be very aware of the ever-deepening community disgust of his disregard for the community he purports to represent. In Western Sydney, or where I live on the Central Coast, if a government had the gall to close and downgrade two existing public hospitals and then privatise the replacement, there would be a riot—and so there should be, within the boundaries of the law, of course; it could be a rioters protest perhaps. Local MPs would be turned out on their ear in the west or the south-west if they acted like the Prime Minister and the Premier are in Warringah and Manly. On the Northern Beaches there has been, for such a long time, an absence of hard questions being asked. The answers are even more spice on the ground. A lack of critical media reporting on important issues like the hospital privatisation and the other matters I have raised here this evening are absolutely unhelpful. The local paper, the Manly Daily, has done much to hold the Liberal Party to account on the issue of the hospital. But the nature of the negative impact of this government, incompetently and arrogantly implementing an agenda that is so far from what they told the electorate prior to the election, is something which demands far greater attention from state and national media. Drawing media attention to these breaches of trust, drawing attention to the lies, the deception and the ineptitude of this government is a challenge. The absence of adequate and fearless scrutiny allows a deafening silence of local MPs in Liberal-National electorates. Premier Baird and Prime Minister Abbott have the esteem of their peers in their skill in manipulation of facts but, for the rest of the community though, their behaviour, policies and inaction on critical life-changing investments in the people and the services of manly and Warringah is simply obscene and it screams of the arrogance that is the signature of this government. Surely, they must be thinking to themselves: we can never lose these seats—not to Labor anyway. That is the only possible explanation for their neglect and disservice every day to the people they are supposed to be representing. People I talked to on the Northern Beaches in my duty electorate, especially traditional Liberal voters, are at their wits' end on how to ensure their area is better served. During recent visits to these beachside suburbs, I picked up a palpable and justifiable anger about this period of neglect that has been long in the making but is even more evident since this government came to power. People happily voiced to me at Manly Wharf, that iconic place, a growing awareness and sense that, because they did not live in a marginal electorate, the area that they love and live in was clearly being taken for granted by both state and federal governments. I was delighted in my time visiting the duty electorate's down there on the northern beaches of Sydney to visit a number of local schools and community organisations over the last couple of weeks. I was able to attend St Paul's sports carnival where I talked to teachers, students and parents who were extremely concerned about the costs of the new government's policy on higher education. I met young people who have invested their energy and their parents who have invested significant dollars in their education at St Paul's. Young people with big hearts and big dreams are being struck down with fear and anxiety about their futures as a consequence of this government's shameful budget. I never thought I would see a time in this country when we had a government that was so obsessed with its own rhetoric and ideology that it would dismantle the university sector as we know it. It saddened and disappointed me to be in conversation with otherwise hopeful and highly gracious young students who are openly questioning for the first time, because of this government's policy, whether they could even manage to afford to go to university. Teachers expressed great concern at the cost of postgraduate study. It will clearly be a disincentive to them to take on further debt. How can the Prime Minister show his face to the world when he is creating the context in his own backyard in which teachers and students wonder and fear that they may never be able to afford to undertake the study that will be part of improving this nation's fortunes? What we are watching the PM do is intolerable and inexplicable in my view and certainly is causing great anxiety to the people in his own electorate. At Brookvale TAFE, I talked to concerned teachers worried about the Baird government's dramatic increase in TAFE fees and the impact this is having on students and will in turn have on the skills shortage. What will that do to our economy? From the Tibetan community in Dee Why, I heard the concerns of that particular group but, like all residents on the Northern Beaches, the Tibetan people let me know about the damage they fear, like over other residents of the Northern Beaches, of the Prime Minister's cuts to health, pensions and education in particular. They asked, 'What will this do to my family? What will this do to my community? Many of us are on low and middle incomes. We're already struggling with the cost of living. How can the man who is supposed to relate to us do this to us?' The Prime Minister needs to answer and he needs to be a lot less self-righteous and arrogant than we have seen him of late. Yesterday he said that his government brought down the budget the Australian people elected him to deliver. That is simply incorrect. But it is an indication of how out of touch with reality this Prime Minister is only nine months into his service. To prove that even more lucidly, I heard the reaction of the Northern Beaches Mental Health Support Group to the experience of being subjected to the disdain of this heartless leader. I heard concern after concern about all the issues that I have mentioned here, but particularly about the $50 million cut to health funding that is now on the record and the lack of a minister for mental health, as well as the Baird government's privatisation. All I can say to the good people in this duty electorate for which I have some responsibility is that I will do my utmost to hold the Liberals to account. I will support you to ensure that the northern beaches have a voice. It is time to send the Prime Minister a message, one that he seems to have consistently ignored, and he needs to stop taking this community for granted. In slashing $80 billion in health and education funding the Liberals really have gone too— (Time expired)