Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Despite the enthusiasm of government backbenchers, this year’s budget is really a fraud. This government had the potential to do things that will have a long-lasting, beneficial effect on the Australian economy and the Australian community. The Treasurer has fallen at the first hurdle. The Treasurer fails to understand that if he believes his own spin and that we are going through a period of economic sunshine then it would have been appropriate at this time to do things that will have an effect way into the future, rather than taking measures that are for immediate effect. This begs the question whether these are measures taken in the pursuit of good politics rather than good public policy.

There are many things that the government fails to mention when it discusses the challenges that confront Australia. When it talks about our appalling trade performance, it clutches at things that it believes will lead us to nirvana and get us out of the doldrums. But consistently coalition governments have a view of trade that is stuck in the resources and primary industry sectors. The favourable budget position that the government finds itself in is purely because of the way in which commodity prices are booming. There is no thought given in government discussions to what will occur when that boom deflates and when global conditions mean that the sale of our primary produce is not as favourable. When will the government discover that one of the problems is the decline in our manufacturing industry—the de-industrialisation of Australia, as some have called it? Will it wake up to the fact that the immediate challenge for Australia is to make investments not only in capital but also in our human resources and in the skilling of Australians? Skilling is needed not only for people on the production line and for people who work with their hands but for people who work with their minds. This is something that Labor, from its position in opposition, has been emphasising for some time, and slowly but surely if not the government then the people of Australia have come to understand that this is the challenge that confronts us.

When we look at the number of apprenticeships we see that nationally they continue to decline. That is not good enough. This year there are only 389,000 new apprentices in training—a continued drop in positions in training over the past few years. An electorate like mine can offer the human resources that are needed. Various people are willing to make a contribution and would welcome being given training opportunities which will improve their skills and ability to make a forthright and important contribution to the way in which we develop. These can be our young people, for example. The latest figures from the north-east region show that teenage unemployment is 18.7 per cent.

The member for Calwell spoke in the Main Committee today. In the north-western region of her electorate unemployment is at something like 30-plus per cent for that age cohort. These people have great potential. They should not be put in a basket where they are not given the opportunity to develop skills. It is no good for this government to continually point the blame at everybody else. If it is not the states, it is somebody else. The closest it ever gets to saying that it is partly its fault is to blame its own bureaucrats. That simply is not good enough. It is simply a challenge that this government needs to take on board and it is failing this challenge in spades.

The reason that I am very interested in the plight of the manufacturing industry is that it remains the major sector of employment in the region that I represent in this place. If we are to continue to see about 25 per cent of those in employment being employed in manufacturing, the type of support the Victorian government is giving manufacturing has to be replicated by the Commonwealth government. This will ensure that not only our young people are given the skills to participate but also innovative businesspeople are given the encouragement to investigate not only niche markets in the domestic markets but markets overseas.

I have every faith that through cooperation in the workplace employers and employees can achieve those outcomes. That is why we are greatly concerned about the changes being made to industrial relations under Work Choices. The benefits, not only to employees but to the nation as a whole, are illusory. In their heart of hearts, enlightened employers know that the type of industrial relations regime that this government sponsors is not going to lead to the conditions that are required to ensure that Australia goes forward. That requires cooperation between those who do the toil and those who make the decisions. If we do not have that cooperation, when that commodity price boom bursts we are going to be in a great deal of trouble.

We need government support for skills acquisition and innovation. If we take as an aspect of that the availability of and access to broadband, the government has tended to wash its hands of that. The only impetus for the government having any involvement in this area has been the selling of Telstra, with the government using broadband as a trade-off to certain sectional interests. That has been the only initiator of any proposals from this government about ensuring that our telecommunications infrastructure can take us well into the 21st century and will not keep us stuck a couple of decades behind in the 20th century.

In the city of Whittlesea, which is part of my electorate, progressively the access to home computers, and therefore the access to the internet, has increased. But it has now stalled. The level of ownership of home computers has levelled off at 60 per cent. There is a similar figure for those using the internet. About 60 per cent of households use the internet. Of those, about 54 per cent use it from their home computers and another six per cent have other sources. The worrying thing about those figures is that, after several years of progress, they have both levelled off. If you go to the source of connection to the internet for those households, you would be surprised that, in an outer urban area of a major metropolitan city like Melbourne, 53 per cent are on dial-up connections. If we are to go forward as a nation, we have to do better than that.

There is a need to look at the way in which the national government can ensure that the provision of high-speed broadband connection is possible. In the past, we have tended to talk about connection to broadband through ASDL or cable and talked about speeds which, if we compare them to overseas conditions, are deplorable. That is why I was very pleased that the Leader of the Opposition in his budget reply indicated that a Beazley Labor government would deliver a broadband plan that would ensure that the majority of people throughout Australia would have a high-speed broadband connection available.

As I said, when we are talking about broadband connection, we are really talking about broadband connection that gives us an ability to compete with overseas countries in not only the levels of connection—that is, penetration, the number of people and households that use it—but speeds that are comparable. That is one of the things that has been missing from this debate. We have not compared what we see as acceptable in the Australian context with what other nations that we are competing with see as acceptable.

Looking at the figures, Australia is ranked 17th of 30 countries surveyed by the OECD for the take-up of 256 kilobits per second broadband. The World Economic Forum ranks Australia’s available internet bandwidth at 25th in the world and Australia’s network readiness at 15th and falling. Another survey, by the World Bank, confirmed that Australia had access to some of the slowest broadband in the developed world. That is why the investment that was foreshadowed by the Leader of the Opposition is so important.

I have had cause to remind the House on a number of occasions of the deplorable fact that there are pockets in the electorate of Scullin, which is less than 20 kilometres from the GPO of Melbourne, where people cannot get, even at the slower, deplorable rates, access to broadband as we know it in the Australian context. These are in new estates being built in greenfield sites, and moving into those suburbs are people who will do part of their work from home and people who know the educational benefit for their families of having access. So why do I continue to get letters from people living in an electorate on the urban fringe that say that they cannot get beyond dial-up connections and that their cries are falling on deaf ears?

There was an estate just around the corner from where I live which, because it was 3½ kilometres from the exchange, was told that even on pair gains they could not have a reliable connection. This was an infill subdivision and it was being told that the infrastructure was not good enough. What were they told was the alternative, in a metropolitan context? They were told to buy a satellite dish. What happened was that the Country Connect guidelines were loosened up. That allowed Telstra to sit down as a provider with that small neighbourhood community and they got an outcome.

But this has not helped the businesspeople in semirural suburbs like Yarrambat and Plenty that cannot make the connection to businesses that they might be running in the electorate of the member for Calwell, in Campbellfield and Somerton. There they at least get Australian levels of broadband connection, which are deplorable by international standards. But they cannot get them at home and they cannot connect back and forth between their businesses.

I see this as an area that exemplifies the slothfulness of decision making. It does not envisage Australia going forward well and truly into the future and competing against our near neighbours, even in the area of IT technology. What I would like to emphasise about the budget is that it fails Australia; it fails areas like the electorate of Scullin because it does not recognise the regional disparities in the way in which the global economy is having an impact; it fails to mention manufacturing industry, which will be so important post the commodity boom; and it simply lacks vision and a sense of reality and indicates that the government is out of touch about the major challenges that confront us. I hope that at some stage we will start to see decisions being made by this government that are based not on immediate good politics but on long-term good policy.

See this speech in context