Grievance Debate

State Liberal Government

Ms HILDYARD (Reynell) (15:05): I rise following the release of the latest Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, which shockingly articulates that wages growth is at a standstill in this country, that people's standard of living is not improving and that for Australians on low incomes, and indeed for those not working, meeting the cost of living has become even harder.

The report found that Adelaide is the mainland capital city with the lowest median income and highlighted a trend across the board towards increased depression and an increase in poverty. This shocking report has landed during a period when we have had the Liberal Party in Canberra working as hard as they possibly can to cut penalty rates and to attack unions and stymie ability to support workers to negotiate decent wage increases.

This period of stalled wages growth and economic stagnation is the environment into which those opposite handed down their first budget all about cuts, closures and privatisation and their second, which was also all about cuts, closures, privatisation and higher costs. Each of the budgets from those opposite completely lacks vision, does not articulate any plan to better support South Australians in this current climate, and commits our state to ongoing, unprecedented debt.

Those opposite are bizarrely focused on higher costs and fewer services, evidenced by the extraordinary increases in their budget to the cost of living in almost every aspect of a household budget: new taxes, fee increases and charges on your rubbish, to your metro ticket, to your car parking, your rego and licensing and everywhere else. We did of course have the chance—well, sort of—to ask about a number of these issues during estimates.

And what did we find out? We found out that a number of ministers are really not keen to answer questions from their relevant shadow at all. We found out that others could not. We found out that some are very obsessed with finding a page number or line item repeatedly and for a very, very long time, rather than being accountable, and that others were happy to further justify their cuts, their closures, their higher costs and their privatisation agenda.

We found out that a number of backbench members were very happy to go along with their ministerial colleagues' appalling cuts and higher costs—well, once they found out about them. We found out that the Minister for Sport still does not understand that people play sports other than football, cricket and netball. I suspect that if the Liberal Party are watching sport on TV and accidentally switch on SBS, they change the channel to keep ignoring diversity.

We also found out that he still does not understand that a $24,000 program with no requirement for council or club contribution is not the same as a $5 million per annum program that does. We also discovered that he still does not understand the difference between equity and equality, nor what making change rooms female friendly means for clubs. We found out that the Minister for Transport still commutes with training wheels on and that his friend the member for Waite still really, really wants to get some ministerial training wheels on too.

We knew it already, but we found out that those opposite continue to have a problem with women, evidenced firstly and starkly by the number of women or lack thereof available to ask questions in estimates. We discovered that the Minster for Trade, Tourism and Investment thought it appropriate to enlighten us in estimates that Ms Sally Townsend, South Australia's Trade Commissioner for Japan and Korea, is:

…married to a Japanese gentleman up there. For those of you who have met her, Sally is nearly six foot tall and has blonde hair, so she stands out quite nicely in the Japanese market.

It remains unclear what her height and shade of hair have to do with her skills and experience to do the job.

Thirdly, I really do not understand, and I am not sure that I want to, what the Minister for Sport was getting at when he said that he is 'more excited' than his wife would like about the women's tennis event coming to South Australia. Fourthly, our understanding of the importance that this government places on the status of South Australian women—

Ms Stinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Badcoe, stop interjecting out of your seat.

Ms HILDYARD: —was very clear when I was afforded just 16 minutes for questions on this important portfolio, a situation that left me unable to inquire about the cuts to the Equal Opportunity Commission that will diminish the ability for South Australian women to seek support in relation to matters of sex, discrimination or sexual harassment.

We learnt that the Premier apparently loves multicultural radio and thinks that 'we are very fortunate in South Australia to have various ethnicities with their own or shared radio'. We learnt that despite this he will continue with the cruel cut of $22,500 of funding that 5EBI, which connects with 44 different language groups, has received for 20 uninterrupted years.

Time expired.