The states are squaring up for a fight with the federal government over $80bn of cuts to health and education in the budget.
State, territory and federal leaders will meet at the Council of Australian Governments in July to discuss the cuts, which stem from expiring National Partnership Agreements, changes to indexation and the cancellation of increases promised by the previous Labor government.
Queensland Labor treasurer, Curtis Pitt, labelled the budget a ploy to protect the treasurer’s job while New South Wales Liberal treasurer Gladys Berejiklian also expressed concern.
Berejiklian said the state was pleased with some aspects of the budget, singling out tax cuts and funding for infrastructure.
But she said NSW was troubled the proposed cuts remained in the forecasts.
“The NSW government remains deeply concerned by the commonwealth’s decision last year to cut the state’s health and education funding over the forward estimates,” she said.
Pitt said the cuts would equate to $924m lost from Queensland’s hospitals, $466m from education and an $18bn shortfall in health and education funding over a decade.
“Frankly this budget is about protecting one man’s job as opposed to creating more jobs across Australia,” Pitt said.
“The positive for Queensland is we will get our fair share of GST funding. But “ultimately what Queensland needed was a responsible federal budget that delivered on jobs, and sadly Joe Hockey has failed in this task”.
Pitt was cautious about the funding announced for northern Australia. There was a lot of rhetoric, but no projects had yet been funded, he said.
The Liberal premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, welcomed the budget and said other states were naive if they ever expected to get extra funding for health and education.
“The budgeting for health and education is basically fairly stable and the changes when you get down to the level of Western Australia are quite small,” he said.
“When former prime minister Julia Gillard promised these massive increases in education and health, at the time I thought the other states were fairly naive for thinking that would ever happen.”
Barnett said the budget promised economic growth for Western Australia and was hopeful the state’s economy had “seen the bottom of the trough”. .
Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews said the state would continue to fight against the cuts, which he said would hurt patients and students.
“It cements the really significant cutbacks to health, these are really damaging. We are talking about the best part of $18bn worth of cutbacks from Victorian hospitals over the next 10 years, and that’s just our shares of the cuts,” he said.
“...I won’t accept we should take as a given a funding base that for Victorian hospitals is $17bn less over the next 10 years than before Mr Abbott’s and Mr Hockey’s first budget last year.”
Hockey stood firm on the cuts, saying the states were still in quite a good financial position.
“Some of the states are running surpluses, we’re not running a surplus,” he said. “Don’t shed a tear for the states.”
