Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Several years ago in this House the honourable member for O’Connor, in his ministerial portfolio at the time, raised the point of the relevance to Australia in this day and age of having state governments. It is a theme I picked up and canvassed throughout my electorate of Gilmore. The response was hardly surprising. The greater majority of respondents indicated that they thought the system of the three tiers of government was redundant. They said it did not suit the times and hardly reflected a system of government for Australia on the global stage. I agreed with them then and do more so now, particularly after seeing the details of this year’s New South Wales state budget. It is back in the red once again and no amount of creative accounting could disguise the fact. But that is apparently okay. In the Illawarra Mercury of 7 June Arthur Rorris of the South Coast Labour Council is quoted as saying that in his view—and I have to assume he is reflecting the prevailing Labor policy—there is ‘a ridiculous preoccupation with balanced budgets’. The state member for Kiama, with desperate aspirations to hold his redistributed seat, is also saying the budget is okay, even though commentators are unanimous in their opinion that it delivers very little to his constituency.

After years of cultivating the spin under the directorship of Bob Carr, the unfortunate Iemma government have been handed the poisoned chalice. I thought we were supposed to be working together for the benefit of our constituents, but this budget looks very much like a rearguard action by a government in danger of losing votes. I opened the Illawarra Mercury the next day and on pages 6 and 7 a huge banner headline proclaimed ‘Budget in the red but blue skies ahead’. Now, there is a supremely optimistic statement. Why am I reminded of the old Monty Python song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life? Incidentally, in the movie Life of Brian that song is sung by a choir of the crucified. Although the irony of that vision probably escapes many of the supporters of the New South Wales Labor government, the expectation that the Iemma government can contain a deficit to a single year requires a quantum leap of faith. The Sydney Morning Herald reports the response of Macquarie Bank’s Chief Economist Richard Gibbs:

“They haven’t got a hope in hell,” he said. “I just don’t think that will be realised.”

He also said:

A collapse in small business confidence in NSW, revealed in the Sensis Business Index earlier this week, did not bode well for the state ...

A preschool director from Wollongong who was commenting on the funding allocation for preschools summed up the position succinctly. She said, ‘They’re saying all the right things, but they haven’t backed it up with adequate funding to do what they say they’re going to do.’ That is the hallmark of the New South Wales Labor government. It is almost their personal anthem: just tell the folks what they want to hear. They hope that, by the time the election rolls around, all these unpleasant observations will have disappeared and they can then start sugar coating the electorate come February next year.

If it was not so pathetic it would have been amusing to hear tell how wonderful their budget is. The $15 million we gave to assist in remedial works along the Princes Highway, south of Nowra, has not been matched. It will sit idly, depreciating in value—like the money we gave them for Main Road 92—so that, when they finally get around to it, they can only produce a fraction of the intended outcome. Eight years after we gave $15 million, their budget has finally allocated $22 million of their $34 million for Main Road 92. It took them eight years to get there.

The South Coast Register reports that the member for Kiama, Matt Brown, who incidentally is the Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Minister for Roads and the Minister for Transport, said, ‘Overall, I think the budget was good for Kiama and Shoalhaven.’ Really? This is a tourist destination, but I am informed by my colleague the Minister for Small Business and Tourism that funding allocation for tourism in New South Wales is a million dollars less than it was five years ago. So what is Mr Brown’s definition of ‘good’? Is it the fact that tourism funding is not down by $2 million? We ought to be grateful. Mr Brown went on to say, ‘Just recently, the state had its AA credit rating confirmed.’ In the Sydney Morning Herald, the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s warned, ‘Large and persistent operating deficits are not consistent with a AAA rating.’ Obviously, Mr Brown considers a second-class rating acceptable, which suggests that there may be more deficits to come in future New South Wales budgets.

The New South Wales government claims the budget will return to a modest surplus in 2007-08 and to healthy surpluses after that. However, the predictions of a turnaround are based on breaking with a 10-year history of  government spending, which has grown at an average rate of 5.9 per cent per annum. Standard and Poor’s said:

There are some risks to the Government’s financial forecasts, in particular whether the Government, which has had difficulty with cost control, can deliver the promised program efficiencies.

Mr Brown must be the eternal optimist to make statements that are at odds with the prevailing view held by people who actually understand economics. Incidentally, the headline for that article reads ‘Spin now, pay for it later’. How apt a description of the opportunistic approach favoured by the New South Wales Labor government for the last 10 years.

Rail transport is another neglected area that concerns many residents in my electorate, about which the New South Wales government has done nothing. The rail system between Kiama and Bomaderry can best be described as fundamental and getting worse. Buses often replace trains and now, with the rescheduling of the timetable, it takes longer to get to your destination—and services are less frequent. In the Southern Highlands, it is a similar story. The Southern Highland News said:

... despite a $10 billion capital works program, the budget does not include any funding for any significant infrastructure projects for the Southern Highlands.

Even the proverbial blind Freddy can see how services are slowly but surely being downgraded as the costs of propping up the Carr Labor government for all those years are being realised—and this is despite the record collection of revenue from the GST, which has far exceeded all expectations. As soon as they got it, they blew it. Now it appears that they are resorting to blowing it even before they get it.

The reason I have grave concerns about the performance of the New South Wales Labor government is that they are dragging the rest of us down with them. No matter what we do at the federal level, the New South Wales government seem to mismanage the funds we give them. Whether it be for schools, hospitals, roads or police, no-one is safe. Even our local water supplies are under threat as the Shoalhaven River and aquifers in the Southern Highlands have been plundered to supplement Sydney supplies. Do they care? It seems not, because they keep on ignoring what the people in regional and rural communities are calling out for. Instead they focus on their metropolitan seats, where the bulk of the money is being spent. As the member for South Coast, Shelley Hancock, often says, there is more to New South Wales than Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong.

The division of responsibilities between federal and state governments is difficult to delineate and, for those who have little to do with government and the way it works, it is difficult to understand. As far as the average constituent is concerned, if there is a problem they do not care who owns it—they just want it fixed. To explain to someone that we give money for health, education and social services but often do not get a say in how it is spent is a concept few people comprehend. To then have parallel agencies administering these services is truly confounding.

To allow such a system to prevail does not make good sense. If the average Australian is confused by it all, how do overseas visitors see this arrangement? What I have witnessed in my electorate is a state government playing one against the other. Whenever there is a failing on the state government’s part they immediately resort to the ploy of blaming the federal government for not giving them enough money. But never do they offer to help the federal government by responding in areas such as social security, immigration, foreign affairs, trade and defence. They seem to prefer to adopt an adversarial role rather than a cooperative one.

We have seen in New South Wales evidence of what happens when the state government get more money. The commentators who have responded to this year’s New South Wales budget have seen through the tactic. The New South Wales government is in the red, and the belief that this is only a glitch for this year alone is wishful thinking. New South Wales is going downhill—thanks to the mismanagement of the New South Wales government, which has had their hands on the reins for over 10 years. It is time to either get rid of the state government altogether or put people in who genuinely act in the interests of the community they purport to represent. Either way, we should be looking towards the future. Clearly the system and quality of the state government we have today has exceeded its use-by date.

See this speech in context