Ms ROSOL (Bass) – Deputy Speaker, I rise to speak in response to the interim Budget and to reflect on it through the eyes of Tasmanians who are watching the government, looking to the Premier and his Cabinet to create the environment and circumstances they need to live well. Tasmanians are watching. I’ve been approached by many people since Thursday’s Budget, all of them asking me what I think of it. I have to confess to describing the Budget and this government’s approach with f-words; fantasy, fairytale, fanciful, and I’d go so far as to say fraudulent and false. There is no way Tasmania is looking at a surplus, even a miniscule surplus, by 2028-29. It’s simply impossible, yet the Treasurer wants us to take his Budget at face value and believe him when he says it will all be okay soon.
I haven’t been in this place for very long, but in my experience Tasmanian budgets are impenetrable, and deliberately so. Any real detail of government spending is buried in broad budget lines that provide no indication about exactly what is being funded where. We are left to pry open what may or may not be funded with a virtual crowbar, or do sums to track where the money has gone from one budget to the next.
This Budget is no different. It’s as opaque as ever. Even given that, it’s not hard to tell a budget surplus is impossible. It’s a fanciful fairytale, fudging the figures over forward Estimates to create the impression of a surplus where there will be none. You can’t fund food relief and resilience for four years as an election promise and expect the problem to go away and take that line out of the Budget forever more.
You can’t put two years of extra funding into integrated family engagement services and then take it away to clear out that budget line when community service organisations haven’t been able to keep up with the need for years. You can’t give a temporary uplift to child safety services and tick that box and remove the line from the Budget after a couple of short years as if it’s all fixed, when child safety services have been underfunded for literally decades. You can’t give foster carers an uplift in their support for a year and think you’ve permanently fixed the problem of carers not receiving the reimbursement they need to care for children in a cost-of-living crisis.
The Treasurer is dreaming, whipping spending out of forward Estimates to create a fantasy in an attempt to convince us, or maybe those in the other place, that everything is ultimately going to be fine, so go ahead and sign off on that gigantic stadium that’s going to add $2 billion to the state’s debt burden and mean payments of up to $70 million a year solely on interest that will accrue and accrue and accrue. It’s all going to be fine, a surplus is coming, let’s get on with our terrible decision-making. As well as dreaming of impossible surplus castles in the air, the Treasurer is doing a whole lot of blaming.
The Treasurer has a silver tongue. I’ve been listening to him and watching him since I came into this place. He has a gift for quick, witty lines and clever repartee. Sometimes he throws a smidgin of charm into the mix and maybe he provokes a little laugh, but it’s a forked silver tongue the Treasurer has. He speaks words that seem to show interest in Tasmanians, but his very careful, deliberately chosen words reveal the truth of what he’s thinking.
In his budget speech the Treasurer described the financial forces we are up against, and he said one of those forces is ‘the ongoing cost of meeting community expectations for essential services’. He’s talking about the cost of people’s expectations, not the cost of essential services but the cost of Tasmanians’ expectations that they get essential services, as if somehow their desire to have an ambulance available when they need it, or that they can get surgery within clinically recommended times, or that they can get food and support when they’re hungry is somehow excessive and unnecessary and a terrible burden on the state. It’s as if Tasmanians are being selfish and it’s their selfishness that has thrown the state’s finances into such disarray.
I’m quite frankly appalled at such language. Tasmanians have every right to expect essential services to be there to catch them when they fall and to suggest otherwise is to blame Tasmanians for the state’s financial position rather than taking responsibility for 11 years of budget mismanagement.
The Treasurer revealed what he thinks of older Tasmanians in the wording he chose to answer a question yesterday morning. Talking about the need for more federally funded aged care and disability beds in the state, he said that on 2 September there were 101 bed-blockers in our public hospital system and that ‘that amounts to three wards with bed-blockers’. No-one is denying we need more facilities for older people and people living with disability, but ‘bed-blockers’ – seriously?
The Treasurer is dehumanising and stigmatising vulnerable people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to be accommodated in homes or facilities that are better suited to their needs. The Treasurer is at it again, blaming Tasmanians for problems that are not of their making but are due to systems failure. Again, I’m appalled by the Treasurer’s word choices and what they reflect about what he thinks of Tasmanians. It sends a chill through me.
But wait, there’s more. The Treasurer isn’t done with his dumping on Tasmanians. He’s also got it in for those Tasmanians who work in the public service. ‘Does anybody want to downsize the public service?’, the Treasurer asked yesterday in question time, before saying, ‘Of course not, but when you know that 46 per cent, rounded up to 50 per cent, of the Budget is employed or used for public service wages’ – the Treasurer laid it on in his budget speech ‑ ‘public sector wages contribute over 46 per cent of total operating expenditure, wages is the single largest operating cost of the general government sector.’ There’s the pejorative again – those pesky public servants working for all Tasmanians; they cost us so much.
I’ve worked in service provision for much of my life, right back from my early days on the checkout in the local supermarket through to today, and the joke with colleagues was always that the supermarket would run so much more smoothly if we didn’t have customers. Nursing would be so much easier if we didn’t have patients. Here we have a treasurer who seems to think the public service would run better without public servants, or more cheaply, anyway. Is it any wonder we are all expecting deep cuts to public service jobs? There is a constant thread of devaluing and demeaning Tasmanians in the Treasurer’s words, and it is deeply troubling. Our public servants do valuable, capable, much-needed work that we all benefit from.
I mentioned earlier that the Treasurer’s words sent a chill through me and I’m not the only one getting a nasty shiver down my spine when I look at this Budget. I’ve been speaking with people in both the public sector and the community sector. There is deep worry about what next May’s budget will hold for these sectors. Many are holding their breath. Right now, they are just hanging in there with the funding they currently receive. They cannot sustain an efficiency measure, a budget squeeze or a reduction in funding. Any cuts will mean cuts to services that Tasmanians are relying on. Many of those services are in health, where we certainly cannot afford any cuts at all. Reading through the performance information in the Department of Health 2024‑2025 Annual Report, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack to find a performance measure that meets its target. Here are a couple of particularly egregious failures:
- Less than 50 per cent of Emergency Department patients were seen within the recommended triage time. The wait can be so long, patients give up and go home without being seen ‑ something I’ve heard from patients directly. It’s yet another measure the government has failed to meet its own target on.
- In the area of mental health, the government try to tell us they are keeping up with demand, but their Department of Health report shows that less than 25 per cent of mental health patients are admitted through ED within eight hours of arrival. We’ve all heard the reports of people waiting up to 90 hours for admission to a mental health ward. It’s not good enough.
- Over 10,000 people are waiting for dental appointments and more than 1200 are waiting for dentures.
It’s very clear that Tasmanians are already struggling to get the healthcare they need, and staff are working their hardest under incredibly difficult conditions. Rather than acknowledge the problems, the government prefers to boast that it is spending more on Health than ever before. Well, it would be a bit of a worry if they weren’t. Costs go up every year, so of course Health spending must go up in parallel. It’s perfectly normal and expected for Health funding to increase, and so it should. Inflation is everywhere and more so in Health, so it’s not that special or particularly generous of the government to have put more into Health. It’s simply what must be done, but it’s certainly not meeting the level of need within our community.
Cuts are not tenable, and yet that’s exactly what the government plans – 2800 job cuts, ‘efficiency measures’. Their Efficiency and Productivity Unit, aka DOGE, is up and running, searching out every dollar they can shave off the budget. They’re crowing about 258 suggestions already coming in from public servants. Well, I spoke with a group of doctors last night who have been making real, effective suggestions for savings for months. Their suggestions have been ignored while Health Department managers have imposed decisions from above, but those decisions are costing the Department more. There are efficiencies that can be found within Health ‑ staff do know that. However, the efficiencies won’t work with a top‑down approach that is not grounded in the knowledge of clinicians who see, every day, how the system works.
People are doing it tough in our state. They can’t afford essentials. Last week we heard, from Foodbank’s Hunger Report, that close to a quarter of Tasmanians are skipping meals or going without food for whole days. More and more people are turning to neighbourhood houses for support and these houses are doing an amazing job of responding to this need all around the state, as are many other community service organisations.
I will quote from a community service provider who attended the recent TasCOSS Budget information session. The quote highlights the situation of many organisations:
We are already operating at full stretch. There is simply no room left to squeeze more from the service without risking its integrity. Government needs to fund, support and strengthen the community industry ‑ not dismantle it.
Yet here we are, with the government signalling cuts to the community service sector. Once again, Tasmanians in need are being deprioritised by this government.
Priorities are also on display in the Corrections and Rehabilitation budget. Capital investment in Corrections tops out at almost $95 million over the forward Estimates. Some of this is stated as being for critical infrastructure maintenance, and the Greens don’t dispute the importance of this. What is startling is the amount of money allocated to buildings compared to new money budgeted for rehabilitation: almost $40 million for a new maximum security prison compared to $500,000 for education, rehabilitation, and therapeutic support.
It’s almost like this government prefer locking up people to rehabilitating them, which might be okay if locking people up worked, but it doesn’t. We have one of the highest rates of recidivism in the country. That means people who return to prison within two years of release for a previous detention. Locking people up leads to more locking people up. That’s a large part of why the government believe they need to build more prison space.
There are other ways. There is plenty of research about this and there are many people in Tasmania with expertise in this area. We could be investing more in rehabilitation and actually making a difference to the lives of people in our prisons. Those people want change. I have spoken to many in prison who are desperate to access rehabilitation and education programs, but they can’t. This Corrections and Rehabilitations budget is a choice, and it speaks volumes about the way this government views people who muck up and get caught up in crime, often because their need for support wasn’t met when they needed it, especially if they experienced trauma and poverty as a child.
That brings me to Children and Youth. It’s good to see funding allocated for the yet‑to‑be‑established Commission for Children and Young People and ongoing funding for the offices of the independent regulator and implementation monitor. What’s concerning is the way commission of inquiry (COI) funding is so hard to find and track in this budget. The government tells us it’s still there, but it’s hidden in those vague budget lines I talked about earlier.
The way this government presents their budget speaks to what they value, what they want us to see them funding, what they want us to believe of them. Hiding COI implementation funding suggests they would rather us not see exactly what’s going on, and if I’m wrong on that, then name it up. Let’s see what’s being funded and where, because if we can’t see it, we are left guessing, wondering and doubting, looking for signs in other budget lines ‑ things like the temporary uplift in funding to children’s services that need permanent uplifts. Temporary funding that isn’t followed through on, that’s a cut. That’s where the cuts are hidden in plain sight in this budget and that’s where the fantasy comes in, because the forward Estimates in this budget are not achievable. Cuts will come and they will hurt.
There are two more hidden messages in this budget I want to draw attention to before I finish ‑ the government’s attitude to women and disability. Where are women in this budget? Where is the usual gender impact statement that accompanies the budget? It has completely disappeared, which tells us all we need to know about this Treasurer’s attitude to women and how the budget effects them. What a shame we aren’t evaluating the impact of this budget on women and ensuring we are lifting them up onto an equal footing in our state.
Regarding disability, we know foundational supports are coming down the line as a shared state responsibility. That should have started by now, but we still don’t know what’s happening in the disability space. It’s another contributor to the fairytale of this budget. We know those costs are coming, yet there is no indicator of this anywhere. When state contributions to foundational supports finally kick in, they will have to be reflected in the budget, and yet we have no indication of what the government is planning to do and how it is going to pay for them. We really need to be planning for this change and factoring it into our thinking about the future.
Finally, there’s the biggest fantasy of all: the idea that Tasmania can afford a new stadium that we don’t need. The stadium is why this government are looking for cuts and efficiencies wherever they can. They need to save dollars here and there to pay down the debt that’s coming. Tasmanians will be paying for this stadium for generations to come, not just with dollars from the budget, but with services and supports gone from their lives. Tasmanians will be missing out for years to come for the glory project of this government, because they refuse to face the truth that we can’t afford it. It’s not how it should be. We should absolutely be prioritising Tasmanians and the things they need. Shame on this government for getting their priorities so wrong. There is another way. We don’t have to do it like this. We could make different choices. We know that because it was outlined this morning by Greens Leader, Dr Woodruff.
I would urge the government to swallow its pride, embrace the collaboration it constantly extols and says it’s doing, and seriously look at the Greens’ plans for both budget repair and meeting the needs of Tasmanians. Our plans provide a genuine, real and achievable way forward for all Tasmanians. That’s what we need.
