Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

It is the Treasurer who has got egg on his face over the Scoresby Freeway, as the Victorian Liberal leader has now completely backflipped and said, ‘Yes, we will support tolls on the Scoresby.’ The Liberal Party, who were on a great crusade in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne claiming that there was an alternative to tolls on the Scoresby, have now made a miserable little backflip and admitted that all along tolls were the only option. The Treasurer has egg on his face in relation to that matter and he has dudded Victorian motorists.

In my speech on the appropriation bills, I want to speak firstly about the budget context. For the past few years there has been an unprecedented commodity boom fuelled by demand from China and India. I remember that when I was younger people said, ‘If only we could sell a Ford or a Holden to everyone in China—think of how rich we’d be.’ That never happened of course, but now something like that is happening. The budget papers show that the government expects to yield almost $16 billion more in tax receipts in the next financial year than was forecast in last year’s budget for this financial year—just one year on, this is $16 billion more than they thought they would get—and the commodity boom, fuelled by demand from China and India, is a key reason for this.

Then we have the tax cuts. I support the tax cuts but I do not think people should get too excited about them. They are not so much tax cuts as giving back money which the government has been able to collect through bracket creep, increased petrol taxes, GST, HECS, pharmaceutical charges and so on. The budget papers show that even with the tax changes the government’s income tax revenue increases by $7.9 billion, or 4.9 per cent. Just about everyone earning under $60,000 per year gets less than $10 a week in tax cuts, and for many people soaring petrol prices and mortgage repayments soon take care of that.

The euphoric initial reaction to the budget reminded me of the story I heard of the Spanish conqueror of Latin America, Torquemada, who for years was in the habit of torturing and killing the native South Americans in order to keep them under the thumb. When he stopped torturing and killing them—I do not know the reason why—the locals turned around and worshiped and revered him for it. It seemed to me that the applause that the government got simply for giving back some of the mountains of our money that they had accumulated through petrol tax, GST et cetera was in a similar category.

Then we have the superannuation changes. The government made a point on budget night of saying that the superannuation changes would simplify the system and reduce the need for financial planners. In looking at what they have put out so far, an 80- or 90-page consultation paper which raises more questions than it answers, I suspect the financial planners will not be looking for another line of work just yet. In fact, I think their businesses will boom as people try to arrange their retirements and their financial affairs to take advantage of the changes. Those changes which are apparently final include no tax on final super payouts for Australians over 60. Whether this will encourage people to go back into the workforce for a month or so, put money in and then retire without that amount tax free is a moot point.

The cost to the budget of abolishing the exit tax is not great because not many people actually pay it. Indeed, the budget papers show that, even with the axing of the exit tax, taxation revenue from super funds to the government will rise: by $5.9 billion next year, by $6.4 billion the year after that and by $7 billion and $7.6 billion in the following years. The other change that has been outlined is that workers can access their money as a lump sum, a series of lump sums or a pension. I and a number of my colleagues are somewhat concerned that these changes will encourage people to move from annuities back in the direction of lump sums. I have said previously in this place that I support people taking their super as an annuity or pension rather than a lump sum. The horror stories of people blowing lump sums are simply too frequent for me to be comfortable with a lump sum approach.

Then there are petrol taxes. Despite the people of Australia’s petrol pain, the government is again complacent in its reaction to this massive petrol price hike. Its complacency in this regard comes, in my view, from the windfall gains in excise and GST that they take in as a result. On an average tank of petrol the Howard government pockets around $25 and over a year the money made by the government from the petrol used by just one car equates to around $1,500, the price of a cheap used car. Some research that I carried out at the end of 2004 showed that excise had risen from $7 billion in 2001-02 to $7.37 billion in 2004-05 and that GST revenue on petrol had risen by a third from $1.4 billion in 2001-02 to $1.9 billion in 2004-05.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and levies that the petrol price hikes provide to the Howard government, it is no wonder that it keeps mum about this issue. Rather than sitting on its hands and allowing the money to roll in, the government should be tackling our growing dependence on imported oil by moving towards alternative fuels. In particular, it should harness some of our massive offshore natural gas reserves to produce liquid fuels capable of being used by Australian vehicles.

In Labor’s budget reply the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, committed Labor to five key initiatives. The first was on child care. A federal Labor government would provide $200 million to establish 260 new child-care centres on primary school grounds and other community land. This is designed to ease the double drop-off for mothers in the morning.

The second is on apprenticeships and training. Labor would provide apprentices with a ‘skills account’, with a deposit of $800 a year for four years to get rid of up-front TAFE fees. Additionally, we would deliver a $2,000 trade completion bonus to encourage students to finish their courses and produce an extra 10,000 tradespeople.

The third is no foreign apprenticeships. In the last 10 years the Howard government has imported 270,000 foreign workers to deal with the skills crisis instead of training the 300,000 Australians it has turned away from TAFE since 1998. The new foreign apprenticeship visas are simply making this unsatisfactory situation worse.

The fourth is no unfair dismissals. Labor is dedicated to tearing up John Howard’s extreme industrial relations laws and would put a new system in place to protect working Australians from the threat of unfair dismissal.

The fifth and final is on broadband. Labor would invest, with telecommunications companies, to build a fibre-to-the-node broadband network that is 20 times faster than the speeds available today across the country.

I turn now, as I have done previously in this House, to the wheat for weapons scandal. It is one of the worst political scandals this country has witnessed and this government is arrogantly seeking to ride this scandal out. It has chosen to turn a blind eye to what was going on—a case proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by the flood of evidence to the Cole commission.

This scandal took a different turn on 17 February this year, when the Australian newspaper published a story about government members holding AWB Ltd shares. One of those named was the member for Gwydir, Mr Anderson. The story quoted the member for Gwydir as saying he sold his shares on the advice of his family accountant, who suggested he diversify his interests beyond rural investments. According to the Australian, the member for Gwydir sold his shares, and those belonging to his wife, on 10 and 11 October 2005. He failed to declare the sale to the parliament, as he was obliged to do. He did not lodge the required declaration until the day before the story ran.

On 26 February this year, Glenn Milne wrote a story about the member for Gwydir’s share trading. He referred to the fact that the sale took place just prior to the release of the Volcker report, which was highly critical of AWB. In this story, the member for Gwydir denied any advance knowledge of the contents of the Volcker report. He said that he always intended to sell his shares when the price hit $5. This claim contradicted his earlier statement that, on the basis of advice from his accountant, he sold his shares in order to diversify his rural—

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