Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am at a loss—and you may be able to help me—in trying to work out what we are actually supposed to be debating here. As far as I knew, I was coming up to debate the government’s Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills. But today and previously—but particularly today—I have had to listen in when we had a compact little group of government ministers and a parliamentary secretary speaking on the appropriation bills. For all of the time that I have been a member of this place, bills Nos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6—this year for the year 2006-07—are about appropriations for the Commonwealth budget. But what I have heard instead, particularly in the last few speeches, are arguments about what happens later in the year when we get further appropriations. I wonder why it is that from the member for Dunkley—a government minister—we had an extended argument about a project in his electorate and whether or not it should be funded, with the  member calling on the federal government to make appropriations to support that project.

It is bizarre to have one government member after another—ministers, parliamentary secretaries and backbenchers—making adjournment speeches rather than appropriation speeches. I may as well turn my speech on the appropriations into an adjournment speech and congratulate the greatest soccer team that this country has ever had. The Socceroos 3-1 win last night is something that I have waited my entire life for. I played soccer until 1966, when I was 15. In that year I sat in one of Bankstown’s then existing theatres—a bit like the tax office and the immigration office we lost when the government took them away; the government was not responsible for taking away the cinema just as it is not responsible for the Socceroos win—and watched what the English did. The Socceroos have just done the same, but this time I was able to watch the event on SBS TV, a government instrumentality.

It brought me enormous joy to see Australia score not only the first goal but also the second and the third goal, a better score than ever achieved before by an Australian team. The Socceroos have shown in their game against the Netherlands—not in the first half but certainly in the second—their capacity to pin down and deal with the third best team in the world. They shortly will take on Brazil, who are regarded as the best. I wish all the best to all players, managers and supporters, including my two nephews who are lucky enough to be at every Australian game because they decided to go over early.

But I digress. I have made this short adjournment style speech as part of my appropriation speech because every government member whom I have seen talking today has made an adjournment speech. That tells me generally that this government is completely terminal. You make an adjournment speech when you are on your way out. In the House on Wednesdays between 7.30 pm and 8 pm, if we are rising at the normal time, or on Mondays and Tuesdays between 9 pm and 9.30 pm, if we are rising at the normal time, we have a series of adjournment speeches from government members. We normally do not have a series of ta-ta speeches or ‘I would like this before I go’ from one government minister after another.

In my experience, through most of the 10 years that I have been in this place—or at least I will have been come the 15th, which is in two days time—I have seen government ministers speaking on appropriations trying to defend appropriation bills that are part of their purview. I know that we will be going to consideration in detail and they or the parliamentary secretaries will have to front up and answer in that regard. But to make it so personal, so electorate driven and, in the case of the member for Dunkley, to talk not at all about ministerial appropriations in this area is bizarre, unless they are entirely terminal—and I think the indications of that being the case are in this series of appropriation speeches.

I will give another indication. If you want to do a bit of research into what is going on around the place, you can go to the Parliamentary Library. I thought our Parliamentary Library would be better resourced—but, by my reckoning, we now are in the middle of June and the budget came down on 9 May. If you look for material on the 2006-07 appropriations, what do you come up with? Seven pages on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and seven pages on Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2006-2007. There is nothing on appropriation bills Nos 3 and 4, which are the substantial bills regarding where the money will be paid out. Then again that may be because we have gone from cash accounting to accrual accounting. The fact is that you cannot find out what the government has done. Perhaps government ministers do not know even now what they are spending or not spending. Perhaps it is at the point where this government’s transparency has become so opaque that its ministers do not even have a clue or cannot even speak up and argue directly about what is proposed. So I went to the Parliamentary Library thinking, ‘What have they done?’ I could not find out from appropriation bills Nos 1 and 2 and there is nothing in appropriation bills Nos 3 and 4. If you look at the budget papers and remember the way in which the Treasurer presented the budget, this was a budget for just about everybody—maybe not everybody—a terrific budget, from which people would get so much money.

I know that the people in my electorate basically got the same out of this budget as they got out of the one in 2004: a $10 cut to their tax—10 bucks a week. The shadow Treasurer quite simply asked: ‘What do you get for that? You get one hamburger and one milkshake.’ He made that point time and time again; he has made that point over the last couple of years. What do the people of Blaxland get out of this budget? One hamburger and one milkshake. What do people on $100,000 get? What appropriations do they get out of this budget, in effect? They get 10 hamburgers and 10 milkshakes—10 times the amount that the majority of people in my electorate will get.

The Treasurer has said that in this budget he has done wonderful things in superannuation. I can remember him saying this: the greatest revolution in 20 years or more in Australian superannuation! What a complete load of tosh. I know this is a government given to exercising mendacity and some are more mendacious than others, but the simple reality is that the fundamental reforms in superannuation were made while Paul Keating was Treasurer and Prime Minister. The foundations were laid for nine per cent for the entire workforce—for guaranteed super—during his time as Treasurer and then as Prime Minister.

We have not got 12 per cent; we have not got 15 per cent, which is really the minimum that you need to guarantee to ordinary working Australians, whatever their situation—whether they are forced off awards or pushed out of enterprise agreements and onto AWAs in this government’s future, if it lasts. That is, if they are not as terminal as these adjournment speeches rather than appropriation speeches would suggest. What is here is a piece of overselling—of a simplification of superannuation rules—where they complicated them in the first place. They made them a lot harder to understand with that whole stack of things that they brought in. When they say, ‘This is a tremendous thing,’ what have they really done on super? According to Taxpayers Australia, the only thing in this budget that could be regarded as ‘reform’ would be the super area. What have they done? They are not going to tax it on the way out. Well, wacko! They are still going to tax it on the way in, and they are still going to tax it throughout the whole life of that money being invested. But they are not going to tax it on the way out. How terrific! It is a lump sum and it is your super, as long as it is from a taxed superannuation fund.

It is not often you will get a federal Treasurer—particularly a conservative one—of whom Taxpayers Australia says: ‘This is really overdone; this is a flummery. There is not actually much to it.’ I would like to, I think for the first time in 10 years, quote its overview of the budget. It indicates the highlights, and we know what they are: changes to personal tax, increased family benefits, a plan to simplify and streamline the taxing of superannuation and changes to depreciation rates for business. You will not be surprised to know they get a tick for the last one. It talks about the plan to simplify and streamline and it talks about the increased family benefits, but it says this in general:

While the Budget contains many proposals and changes, it is only the proposed changes to superannuation that could be considered as ‘tax reform’. The rest are merely continuing changes in line with political and budget imperatives.

I would hazard a guess that, if Taxpayers Australia got the message about what this budget was really about, and if there is some indication that the Parliamentary Library could not even get into bills 3 and 4 because there was not enough in them, and if the other indication was listening to government members when they could not find all that much in it, then there really is something substantial here in terms of just how vacuous this budget was and just how much of an attempt it was by the Treasurer to set himself up. The Prime Minister has had a lot of practice at setting the Treasurer up—I think he is doing it at the moment—but the Treasurer himself has set himself up because he has been fundamentally profligate in trying to win the accolades of people on higher incomes.

Taxpayers Australia says:

The changes to tax rates are welcome, but they do no more than return some of the bracket creep built into the system. It is noted that the budget surplus for 2006/2007 is forecast to be some $10.3 billion dollars. However, if the forecasts of the last few years are any indication, it would not be surprising, assuming economic conditions proceed as forecast, that we still get a budget surplus of $13 to $15 billion.

That was promulgated on budget night and then a couple of days after it by the tax association and others. Already the forecast surplus for next year is something in the order of $11 billion. But to argue that going from 47c to 45c and 42c to 40c is the most major and significant change you could make in the tax regime is an oversell. What this government has done, as it has consistently done before, is jack up the tax-free threshold and jack up the actual amount at which that level of tax is imposed. Those people released from those higher levels are released from the effect of bracket creep for a while, but they are not totally released, because it is utterly and completely true that they do not get full compensation for existing and previous bracket creep. They have put in, but they have not got back. Certainly they have not got back what they need and deserve. They have not got full measure from this.

With regard to super, the Treasurer touted this because, like the Prime Minister, he wants to go and grab something. If you have an economy fundamentally changed and completely transformed, that is run well and that is structurally dramatically different from the economies that conservative governments ran for most of the 20th century—and they have the bulk of time in running governments, in the order of 66 per cent of the time—you face the situation where the taxpayers association say about super:

The mooted changes to superannuation are also welcome, but it is emphasised that they are no more than part of a comprehensive proposal for the taxing of superannuation and it remains to be seen whether or not they are finally adopted.

Sorry? I do not normally repeat things, but:

... it remains to be seen whether or not they are finally adopted.

I was here on the night. The Treasurer was straight up. I did not expect him necessarily to be mendacious, but maybe he was. Maybe he was not really saying it as it was. Why do the taxpayers association say that? They go on to say:

The Government invites submissions from the public by 9th August 2006.

This is the Treasurer’s grand plan: we are not going to tax you on the way out. Big deal. He says: ‘We might do this. We’re not sure. It could be so significant and so difficult, we’re not sure. You tell us what you think of it. Write in: “Dear Pete; Dear Treasurer; Dear member for Higgins” Tell us: do you agree with this or not? Tick: do you want more or do you want a little less?’ I actually think that the terminal throes and the indications of that are reflected in that kind of approach as well. Treasury do not do this sort of stuff. They do not say: ‘Here’s a change. We’ll think about it, and we might do it, but it depends on what you say in the letters to the editor or, in this case, letters to the Treasurer.’

It is astonishing. Maybe this is an adjournment speech on behalf of a Treasurer not about to go to higher things but to exit stage left or right, whichever he chooses, because he has attempted to oversell something that is in essence a flummery—something where you get minister after minister in this government making adjournment speeches rather than appropriation speeches. My time is foreshortened, but this government is terminal.

See this speech in context