Peter Andren (Calare, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This budget has been described as an ‘election year epic’ by Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald. He says the Treasurer has:

... kept in mind the Yes, Minister definition of gratitude in politics. As ... Sir Humphrey ... put it, “gratitude is merely a lively expectation of favours to come”.

Those favours will come over the coming months as the government dips into its magic pudding, a revenue stream born of a minerals boom the like of which this country has never seen, except perhaps in the gold rushes of the 1800s and the boom times of the sixties. The government is including in this largesse the inappropriate use of funds like Regional Partnerships again, as we saw in the last campaign.

But it is likely to be a false boom, a boom of fool’s gold, unless we recognise that the very extraction of minerals, especially coal, that is feeding the accelerating GDP of China and India in particular could also fuel, in the possible absence of a geosequestration solution, the demise of the modern economy as we know it. We must reinvest that income in truly clean, green energy alternatives that will eventually replace the fossil fuel addiction of the Western world and now, to such a degree, the eastern world. The Treasurer said in his budget speech:

If we lock in the achievements of the past this will help us with the challenges of the future.

However, if the achievements of the past include our almost total dependency on the revenue from the fossil fuel industry then there is no way we can meet the challenges of the future. The government will soon make an announcement on its policy approach to global warming, as it examines the prospects for carbon trading. This budget sadly lacks any serious addressing of global warming apart from an advertising campaign to promote so-called clean coal and, no doubt, nuclear energy.

The doubling of rebates to install solar panels to $8,000 only restores the subsidy that was in place to 2005. Grants of $12,000 for solar in schools should have been expanded to solar panels for every air conditioner installed in homes and public buildings, along with a requirement that they be installed in commercial premises to offset air conditioning energy use—one use that will increase substantially with the warmer summers expected.

Where is the incentive to invest in solar thermal and geothermal technology which have been shown by CSIRO scientists to be capable of providing baseload power if seriously developed? To do this we need to put a price on carbon emissions. Carbon trading will not achieve that in my book. Few believe it offers the incentives needed for the cutbacks required over the next decade. A carbon tax would create that incentive and be far more transparent in its application and understanding by both the polluter and the wider community. On top of this we should have a meaningful mandatory renewable energy target that will act as a true incentive for investment in alternatives, especially wind, solar thermal, geothermal and wave. Recent news of a proposed geosequestration plant in Western Australia sounds good but the technology is in its infancy and is yet to be proven, despite some encouraging results from a similar plant off Norway.

The transferral from dirty electricity to clean renewables is attracting investment and providing new jobs around the world. In 2005 global investment in renewable energy was $US38 billion and growing. It has accelerated way beyond that in the past 18 months. A European Union report predicted an extra 900,000 new jobs in the sector in Europe by 2020. There were already 25,000 jobs in Germany’s wind energy sector alone in 2002. California is leading the way, welcoming Australian-developed solar thermal technology with open arms as it generates around 20 per cent of power in Los Angeles from solar thermal, among other proactive clean, green energy industries. Yes, it has nuclear, but even Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot answer the question of where to bury American nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain waits as the preferred option, but the technology is just not available. Renewables contribute 11 per cent of California’s energy needs and this is growing rapidly, while nuclear provides about 12 per cent—not 27 per cent, as the Prime Minister indicated yesterday—and remains a hugely expensive and socially divisive option that cannot, in its full cycle, be remotely described as clean.

Elsewhere in this budget, the recognition of the need for more dentists trained in this country is welcome, with the announcement of the dental school for Charles Sturt University. Credit for this must go to the Rural Dental Action Group, led by Marj Bollinger and Dr Cath Errey, who have headed up the lobby in the central west for some years. It is a lobby that resulted in over 1,000 signatures on a petition being presented to this chamber by me in 2005 calling for urgent attention to the lack of dental services and training of dentists. The combined pensioners and superannuants in Bathurst and Orange, along with the Australian Dental Association, can also take credit for this outcome.

The other side of the dental equation—the treatment of public patients now under Medicare—has been boosted with up to $2,000 a year now available for chronic dental needs. However, the limited Medicare cover first introduced two years ago by the government has had very little impact on the 650,000 low-income people on waiting lists for public dental care in this country. Because the $200 worth of care on offer was so minimal it seems no-one reckoned it worth their while to seek help. It certainly does not cover root canal therapy or other complicated dental procedures. It seems strange that, while people are lining up to claim the very welcome mental health Medicare cover, for some reason the dental care subsidy, limited as it was, had largely failed to be accessed—and I have that on excellent authority. I hope that the increase from $77 to $125 for the initial consultation and the $2,000 per annum increase per patient will boost that usage.

The tax cuts of $14 a week for incomes up to $30,000 and $28 a week for incomes up to $75,000 are welcome but are rapidly disappearing—into the petrol tanks of the family car—before they have even arrived. This only underlines the fact that the vast majority of people want services before tax cuts—services like dental care, aged care and more allied health professionals such as counsellors and therapists. People like Julie Ridley from Caragabal, near Young, in New South Wales wonder whether there is any commitment to anywhere near sufficient specialist disability funding for people like her husband, who is suffering motor neurone disease.

The use of one-off bonuses is a crude political device that is all about vote-buying, but I doubt it will convince most recipients. Whether it is $1,000 for carers or $500 for pensioners, it is little compensation for the unmet needs of disability carers, disability pensioners or other pensioners never fully compensated for the GST or cost of living increases. The tax cuts for the well paid will significantly widen the gap between the winners and the needy in our society. Just over 10 per cent of taxpayers at the top end of the scale received more than 40 per cent of the $31 billion on offer from across-the-board tax cuts to salaried employees in this year’s budget.

I now turn to spending on Indigenous programs. This budget distributes $236 billion that has been generated by arguably the most prosperous time in our history, but it is a false prosperity—a prosperity that is favouring the already richly endowed in our society, a prosperity that delivers $33 million salaries to some and no dentures to others. An Aboriginal child in Australia is likely to die before his or her counterpart in Bangladesh. The difference in life span between an Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal person is almost 20 years. Last week, the National Heart Foundation of Australia released figures showing why it is so appalling that a mere $30 million extra dollars has been found this year for Indigenous health programs. A prosperity that is born largely of mining, often on Indigenous lands, can find but $30 million extra dollars. As the Heart Foundation points out, when Indigenous Australians are admitted to hospital with coronary heart disease, they have a 40 per cent lower rate of being investigated by angiography, a 40 per cent lower rate of coronary angioplasty or stent procedures and a 20 per cent lower rate of coronary bypass surgery, and they are missing out on lifesaving medications for cardiovascular disease. What is going wrong here? Is our health system ranking clients according to socioeconomic status? What prejudice is at work?

Twenty years ago I saw how Aboriginal mothers were reluctant to take their kids in Orange, many with serious inner ear and other infections, to a baby health centre because of an understandable reluctance to deal with a non-Indigenous health system, however committed the workers were. Indeed, just last week Tyrone Toomey, project officer at the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at Bloomfield, in Orange, called for public health staff to receive training in Aboriginal cultural awareness and for Aboriginal representatives to be available at consultations. Mr Toomey has made recommendations as a way of overcoming a fear among Aboriginal people about using health services. This is in the year 2007, not 1977 or 1967. Why, for heaven’s sake, has it taken so long for this most basic and obvious training and these service requirements to be put into a report, let alone to be taken seriously enough to be widely acted upon?

Several years ago, I watched an SBS program on which Indigenous communities in the Top End of Australia would not accept advice on better hygiene needs for children around dogs and the relentless worm infestation cycle that was prevalent in these communities. The advice was coming from non-Indigenous doctors. However, hygiene practices changed only after they were explained by specially trained Indigenous workers, who handled the situation in a more culturally appropriate and understandable manner. So, too, has the training of assistant nurses and enrolled nurses through distance education within their communities been recognised as a more appropriate way of training. I realise that culturally appropriate training and service delivery is a part of the policy mix in some instances, as with the changes made in that program in the Top End, but it seems that many communities, especially in less remote and regional areas, are automatically regarded as mainstream. Mainstreaming services is not the answer. Specific training delivered by communities and a properly funded Aboriginal health service would seem the only way forward in beginning to address these terrible statistics.

To this end, the extra 1,000 Indigenous scholarships and the extra budget for Abstudy are very welcome. The parlous state of Aboriginal cardiovascular health comes on top of the well-documented poor mental health and drug and alcohol treatment outcomes for these people. Indeed, the Urbis Keys Young report, established by the minister, into the mental health outcomes of the Link-Up and stolen generation programs and counselling services, showed that there were up to 80 clients for each counsellor, compared with the mainstream of 25. The report listed the real health and social consequences of removal policies: ‘Loss, trauma, grief, offending behaviour, adverse life outcomes, substance abuse, higher rates of mental health problems, suicide and violence, parenting problems and poor physical health.’ These are the outcomes and the end results of processes that I believe have failed over many years to address the mental health and social consequences that still stem from the stolen generation shame.

While the mental health outcomes are good in some cases, where sufficient support is available, the Urbis Keys Young report says the program has been poorly coordinated and insufficiently targeted. The minister has promised an extra 22 workers, but New South Wales Link-Up tells me this week that they have up to 200 clients per case worker. I wonder if state or federal governments have really done a proper audit on the extent of the need in this area. On top of this, the AMA’s Indigenous health report card released last week shows that the life expectancy in Indigenous communities remains at the overall national average of 1920—that is, 59 for men and 65 for women, compared with 77 for non-Indigenous males now and 82 for non-Indigenous women.

I will move to education now. While the government centrepiece Higher Education Endowment Fund is prima facie very welcome, it does not disguise the fact that education funding as a proportion of government expenditure has been decreasing every year while other OECD nations have increased their funding. The policy also does not spell out the micromanagement of university policy that access to such funding will entail. There is a reported $1.2 billion maintenance and infrastructure backlog in the universities, and $300 million to $400 million per year funding for approved capital expenditure will obviously be welcome. Extra money for research will also be welcome, but this government has slashed public research funding from 0.4 to 0.29 per cent of GDP in the past 11 years.

Given a worsening skills shortage, the funding of up to five per cent overenrolment in HECS places is a positive turnaround. Increased funding for HECS places in a number of key areas is also welcome, especially in mathematics and statistics. (Quorum formed) Whilst I agree that students should contribute to part of the cost of their education, I do not believe in saddling students with frightening debts of between $50,000 and $200,000 at the beginning of their working lives. An educational advantage should not be a factor of having well-off parents.

The increasing flow of the federal public education dollar to the private sector is highlighted by the fact that nearly 70 per cent of Commonwealth school funding goes to 13 per cent of the nation’s school students, in non-government schools, which now also outstrips public investment in higher education. Thus, while Commonwealth school funding is rising, it is going to the private and, in many cases, the most privileged schools. This is courtesy of the SES, socioeconomic status, formula based on the postcode where the student comes from. It does not take much imagination to see how a child from a privileged background could benefit from the low socioeconomic status of a region from which he comes.

It stands to reason that the most effective way of measuring school needs would be for all schools to use a bar code, if you like, containing the agreed criteria to measure a school’s basic requirements, and for a proper audit to run over each and every school’s bar code. When a red light shines in any category, until and unless that red light is turned to green, there should be no further funding on a general basis until that school is brought up to a level of basic requirements. That should be part of an audit of all schools, but we lack that sort of objective measurement that would satisfy parents and the general community that we have a fair education funding system in place.

The Fairfax press’s Ross Gittins simply suggests that, at the moment, the bias in federal funding is anti public and pro private. I recognise the states and territories are largely responsible for the funding of government schools, but, as Gittins points out, the states still spend three times more than the Commonwealth on schools, despite the Commonwealth holding most of the money by raising 80 per cent of taxes.

The Commonwealth’s refusal to truly support public schooling is complemented by its ill-informed intrusion into the micromanagement of public schools, with performance pay a condition of funding for the next quadrennium. This is ideological nonsense; it is tampering in a process that is becoming divisive. Paying teachers bonus payments is mistargeted. Surely this sort of money should be going to the schools to provide the necessary facilities in line with that objective bar code measure, if you like, of schools having facilities and resources at the standard required.

The government’s contribution to the states and territories for TAFE has actually declined by about seven per cent over recent years, and yet TAFE trains 1.6 million students annually. We see not a cent specifically earmarked for TAFE. What we see is another $83 million for three new Australian technical colleges. And the end result of this $25,000 per ATC student each year? With a 200,000-person skills shortage, the outcome will be 8,400 students by 2009. This is duplication and waste. The $1,000 direct payment to young first- and second-year apprentices is welcome, but the overall funding and targeting of our TAFE sector is quite deplorable and is again driven by some sort of ideological bent and is about usurping the control of tertiary education at a TAFE level by the states.

Elsewhere, spending in regional areas is marked by a proper response to the drought by way of farm support. The $280 million over three years for EC and the interim support pending EC status is very welcome. The additional financial counselling is welcome, but I would suggest that mental counselling is something that needs to be boosted significantly in the bush. I note the bitter disappointment of Regional Arts Australia at the rejection of its request for a four-year $60 million allocation. In all, it was a budget aimed largely at buying votes, not one generally investing in our areas of greatest need. (Time expired)

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