Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was interesting to hear the member for Prospect repeating at least five or six times the word ‘summit’. I well remember the first summit that Bob Hawke called, which was before the parliament had convened. I stacked on a show at the time and said, ‘Why are you going to fill the parliamentary chamber up with non-elected people?’ I was not supposed to be there, so I turned up and occupied a seat for the day. It was the most boring situation that I have ever been involved in; it was a talkfest. If you ever want not to do anything—if the determination of a government is to do nothing—you hold a summit or an inquiry. The Hawke-Keating government was full of it.

I might add that the last Labor Prime Minister since I have been here continues to advise us—and sometimes I think correctly so—that you should never give untied money to state governments. That is a Paul Keatingism: you never do it because it will be wasted. He and I have a generic view about that. I do not restrict it to one side of politics or the other. The great Treasurer of the Labor Party over time, Keating, gives us strong advice about that.

Consequently, whenever we have debates about education funding, it is the wont of the Labor opposition to deal only with specific grants when in fact I can well remember the Prime Minister, in fighting for a sensible tax reform agenda incorporating a GST, made it very clear to the Australian community that this was going to be a growth tax to give adequate resources to the state governments to do their job. Their job, constitutionally as I understand it, is to provide adequate public education, adequate public hospitals and adequate policing and to deal with issues related to land management et cetera. They were the responsibilities the colonies preserved for themselves at the time of Federation. And yet schools are falling down in my electorate.

So the Australian government has to turn to the Australian taxpayer—you would think we manufactured this money to hear some of these people talk. When the government extracted the GST—and I might add that in a political sense we sacrificed about 15 seats in parliament to get it through—the government lacked the support of the present Leader of the Opposition. But when Paul Keating confronted John Hewson on this issue he said, ‘If you vote Hewson in, I will support a GST.’ That is what he said. And he was the first to promote a GST. They had another summit about a broad base consumption tax. Keating was called over to a motel room one night and sitting there was Bill Kelty, the trade union heavies and the Prime Minister, and they pulled the rug out from under the Treasurer. I think he was proposing a 12 per cent tax at the time.

Here we are forcing the Australian taxpayer to pay the GST to fund state governments to do their job, yet we are today debating a bill—which is apparently being criticised for its inadequacy—to give extra money. We had a lecture from the member for Prospect about us all getting together. We are going to have a love-in or a summit and we are all going to love one another. But if you go back and look at the Hansard record you see that the government was pilloried day after day—it is the tall poppy syndrome—about funding non-government schools, sometimes called private schools. We had criticism from the member for Jagajaga, who was lauded a moment ago by the member for Prospect and others, but she identified only the specific grants that we provided to government schools—which, as I will point out in a moment, are very substantial. She totally ignored the GST.

The present Treasurer in the Western Australian government, Mr Ripper—well named—stood up one day and discovered that he had a $700 million surplus. It was a bit of a surprise to him. The West Australian published a table showing where the money came from. When you added it up, 50 per cent of the total revenue of the WA government came from the Australian government—in reality from the Australian taxpayer. That is commonplace throughout the country. So any analysis of the cost of funding a government school, and who provides the money, must be made on that basis. In other words, if it costs—as has been mentioned in the past, and it might have increased a little—$10,000 to educate someone in a secondary school, $5,000 of that comes from the initiatives of the Howard government, including the GST. I quote the remark of Mr Keating, who said: ‘You should never have given them the GST untied, Mr Howard. You should have stipulated every cent.’ We did not believe in that, and you could argue the pros and cons of that for a long time; but the reality is that 50 per cent of the cost of educating and housing, in terms of school buildings and other facilities, is provided through the initiatives of the Howard government. Of course, we are coming to that today, particularly in capital works.

Considering the restrictions on time that I have, I would like to have incorporated in Hansard a list of projects in my electorate of O’Connor which have been funded through government initiatives, including the Investing in Our Schools program. I seek leave from the representative of the Labor Party who is sitting here at the moment to have that list incorporated in Hansard. I am extremely proud of it, and I take every opportunity to attend in those areas.

Leave granted.

The document read as follows—

ELECTORATE OF O’CONNOR

Capital projects (EXAMPLE)

Government 

Mount Barker Primary School, Oatlands Road, MT BARKER, WA 6324

Funding of $2 million in 2006 for construction of new facilities for years 4-7 including a library, cafeteria, eight class rooms and music and art facilities.

Non-government 

Great Southern Grammar, Nanarup Road, LOWER KALGAN, WA 6330

Funding of $275,000 in 2003 for the construction of eight secondary classrooms, student amenities and change rooms, walkways, stores, offices, professional fees, furniture and equipment, fire services and siteworks.

Investing in Our Schools Programme 

In Round One 63 projects for the electorate of O’Connor were approved.

In round Two 53 projects for the electorate of O’Connor were approved.

A total of $4.4 million for both rounds has been approved.

Round Three for Western Australian schools closed on 29 March 2006 with 1180 applications received. 230 applications have been received from the electorate of O’Connor.

The applications have been checked for compliance with IOSP Guidelines and also reviewed by the State Government Advisor. The SAAP meeting to finalise the recommendations of these applications is scheduled for 12 October 12 2006.

Round One approved projects —O’Connor, WA 

Round Two Approved Projects —O’Connor, WA