Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

There are a number of issues I would like to raise on the appropriation bills. Firstly, in a tactical sense, I congratulate the government on the surplus budget. I think it is always healthy if you are in surplus rather than in deficit. I will make a few comments later in my speech about some of the other positives of the budget.

There are a number of issues that I think need to be highlighted in this place. I made a speech in the other place only a few moments ago where I highlighted a number of examples where I believe the coalition government is not addressing the issues that a lot of people would like addressed. I think that demonstrates some of the slippage that they have been experiencing in the polls of recent months. I made mention of the member for Macarthur and the member for Lindsay and a number of comments that they have made in recent days. I suggest to the government that it sits down and listens to what those people are talking about.

One of the big issues that is raised in this place from time to time is fuel. I was disappointed that the last speaker, the member for Aston, did not go to the issue of fuel. Fuel pricing is an issue that is affecting people on the ground. It is affecting real people who have budgetary constraints to deal with, real people who are raising families. If you ask anybody in the street, they know the impact that fuel pricing has. It is not reflected through the indexation processes for pensioners, for instance. It is not reflected in a lot of the cost rises to small business and other activities in the economy.

I keep hearing this incessant message from the Prime Minister, and I heard it again today from the Assistant Treasurer, who made the comment again that fuel pricing in Australia is all because of international factors. He may believe that, the Prime Minister may believe that and there may be other people in this parliament who believe that, but people in the street do not believe it. They do not believe it because they know what the facts are: 38c a litre excise tax or fuel tax. Road tax, it used to be called. How much of that goes back on to road and rail and bus shelters et cetera? About 12c a litre. Every cent that is raised in fuel taxation raises about $368 million.

When we see an extension to Roads to Recovery of $307 million, or whatever the number happens to be, out of the last budget, people go weak at the knees in gratitude. But it is not even a cent a litre in terms of the bowser price. We pay 38c a litre in tax. I note some of the community college people coming into the room—people who are very concerned. I am sure if they were to have a vote at the moment they would put fuel prices as a major issue in their daily lives. We pay 38c a litre in fuel excise. As I said, we get about 12c of that back through road, rail, bus stations et cetera. Another 11c approximately, depending on where you are—it is more in the country and less in some of the city areas—is goods and services tax. So for the Assistant Treasurer, and the Prime Minister for that matter, to consistently say that the price of fuel in Australia is all about international factors is a nonsense. And people know that in the community. If the coalition are looking for reasons why they are slipping in the polls, I would suggest that running that sort of farcical message out there is probably one of the underlying reasons. A lot can be done in terms of fuel taxation. As I said at the start, I congratulate the government on developing a surplus budget, but we have a situation where we are raising excess money from fuel taxation from all Australians, from small business, from big business and from regional people, because they do not have the advantage of public transport and other options in the country—and the member for Gilmore, for whom I have a tremendous amount of time, would be fully aware of some of these issues.

It is time that the government really addressed that issue. To achieve that sort of taxation level—and I think it is running to nearly $14 billion a year—to give something like $3 billion or $3½ billion back to the road and rail system, to come out with all these bonus payments for people, $500 here and $500 there, and then to argue that to create a productive economy you have to be prudent in terms of cost outlays et cetera makes a mockery of the debate. When you are taking that amount of money from fuel taxation, returning a small proportion of it and then lauding the fact that there is a surplus budget, I think there are some contradictions that need to be addressed.

There are some other issues that I will address, too. There is the issue of homeownership and the price of housing at the moment. Even in communities such as Tamworth and Armidale the price of homes has escalated, though nothing like the extent to which it is happening in Sydney, for instance. We have had discussions in the parliament in recent days and there are allocations in the budget in relation to drought funding—the money for rural counsellors et cetera—and that is all very welcome, for I think the drought has been running for about five years now. But we hear constant noise that there is a massive amount of money allocated to the farm sector through drought funding, the exceptional circumstances assistance et cetera. When you actually break that down over a period of time, you get a different picture.

There was some conflict in the parliament yesterday as to whether $1 billion or $1½ billion had been spent and then the minister said, ‘Well, say $2 billion,’ and then someone else said $3 billion. But the reality is that it is probably about $1½ billion. Most of it has been spent, essentially, on Work for the Dole payments—social security payments. Somewhere between $350 million and $500 million has been expended on interest rate assistance through the exceptional circumstances arrangements. So when the government says there has been a massive amount of money poured out to the farming community over five years, we need to understand what that entails. Anybody who is unemployed or not collecting an income—such as farmers in this particular time of drought—is entitled to some household support, and to bracket that together with the interest rate assistance and exceptional circumstances arrangements is, in my view, not telling the truth in terms of the total expenditures. If we assume for the moment that about $500 million has been spent on interest rate subsidies to the farming industry over the last five years, that comes out at about $100 million a year.

What are other communities doing? Take the building industry, for instance, and the GST. When the goods and services tax came in, I think, in 2000 or 2001—it has been in existence a little bit longer than the drought—the First Home Owners Scheme was put together at the time to address the explosion that the building industry said they would have to deal with of a 10 per cent increase in the price of housing and the impact that would have on the cost of housing and employment levels et cetera. The government, coming into an election period, decided that that was potentially a political problem and put in place the First Home Owners Scheme, allegedly to encourage young people to buy their own homes. In fact, it has escalated the price of housing and in some cases, particularly in the cities, has put people into a debt situation that they can ill afford.

If you look at that subsidy to the building industry—which is essentially what it is—in that period of time it has totalled $6.2 billion, or a bit more now. Drought subsidy to the farming industry—a massive contributor in terms of export income—has been about $1.5 billion. If you take away the household support, which is unemployment benefits, it is back to about half-a-billion dollars. So when people say—and the Treasurer says this—‘If you cannot compete in the world, you should get out,’ there is industry support going on under this government as much as under any other government. I am not suggesting there should not be, but this argument in which the farm sector is occasionally singled out to be some sort of poverty trap where there is an endless supply of money going in is in my view not the truth.

There are some other issues that I would like to raise. In terms of housing and the problems that young people are having, it is a tragedy in this large nation that we now have young people who are paying $3,000 a month to afford their first home. I cannot believe it. I know the state government has some problems there in terms of some of the cost issues as well. But one of the other issues is that neither the state government nor the Commonwealth government have any effective regional development policy. We have an economy that is based on big cities and we have a house price economy that is based on continued pressure on those big cities. We do not have a regional development policy under which, if you were paying $500,000 for a $150,000 home in a city, you could go somewhere else.

The government policy message that we are giving is wrong. And I know why it is based that way: the western suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are where elections are determined. I can understand the logic of that, but I continually hear rhetoric in this place about us doing everything we can in terms of regional development. What we have is what I call a ‘feedlot economy’ in which the most cost-effective way to house the largest number of people in a nation is to put them in a ‘feedlot’. If that feedlot is a high-rise in which you can use gravity to some advantage, it is a more productive housing arrangement than having people on small blocks. I do not agree with that, but that is what the policy message is: the most effective way to house as many people as possible is to put them in a ‘feedlot’. I think that is a disgraceful policy message to be sending in a country of this size with all the advantages that many of our rural towns have.

Telecommunications is always an issue, and it is mentioned in the budget papers in a number of areas. One of the problems at present is a great concern about the change over from CDMA to the Next G network. I raised that issue with the Prime Minister yesterday in question time—and you might be aware of this, Deputy Speaker Somlyay, because I know you pay a lot of attention in the parliament—and asked him about what he believes equivalence of service to be. I asked him that not only in relation to equity of access to services for country people but also—and this phrase has been used by the minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority—about when you switch one off and turn the other one on. The arrangements that are currently in place are that the CDMA system will not be turned off until there is equivalence of service. I know that the member for Riverina is also very concerned about the equivalence of service issue.

As I understand it, there is going to be a truck running around Australia—and, according to the Senate estimates papers the other day, that truck will not bother to go to the western half of Australia; it is going to run around the eastern half of Australia—to assess the CDMA network randomly. So not every site will be assessed. Later on in the year, that same truck, which apparently will be running around on secret roads, will go around the same area and test the Next G reception and make reference back to the minister and the government as to whether there is some form of equivalence of service.

There are a lot of bullet holes in that. I refer members, particularly country members, to the Senate estimates Hansard, because there are some very important points being made there that could impact particularly on country consumers. I have one of these Next G phones at the moment, and I cry at night for my old CDMA phone. I will not do a live radio interview on this phone, irrespective of where I am, because it just falls out. Even in this building there are bad spots in the Next G network. I believe that some people in the government—and I congratulate them—are questioning the advertisements that Telstra are running that Next G is everywhere you want it. I know where I would like to put it occasionally! It is not everywhere you want it, and that, in my view, is misleading advertising, at the least.

I call upon the Prime Minister again to look very closely at this issue, because there is political damage in it if he does not. I would rather see our consumers get equity of access. If you remember back to the sale of Telstra, equity of access to broadband and phone services was paramount. I remember the leader of the National Farmers Federation supposedly had a document which was a guarantee from the government or the minister that there would be equality of access to broadband and basic phone services for country people. No-one has ever sighted that document, but that document was the basis of Senator Joyce’s changing his vote in the Senate. That document has not been sighted, but I think the government has an obligation to make sure of this issue. The future-proofing arrangements are supposedly in place and a massive amount of money was supposedly being allocated to future-proofing telecommunications, and the government has an obligation to make sure. This is the first test, because Next G was not around when the sale took place. This is the new technology, and the government gave a guarantee that country people would not be disadvantaged by new technology and that new technology would be future-proofed.

I have an absurd situation in my electorate, in a little place called Yetman on the Queensland border, where a lot of professional people have come back to the area wanting to run international and national businesses using broadband services. Telstra Country Wide said to them—and I went to the meeting: ‘If you are prepared to find a block of land, build a road, put the tower up and maintain all of those things, we might look at putting an aerial on top of that tower so that can you have basic mobile phone service.’ That is atrocious. They have this formula which says that if you cannot return the capital outlay within three years you are non-viable.

That is not what the government said on sale day. Someone has to stand up on this issue; otherwise we are going to have a two-class system. Telecommunications in this century are the road and rail network. Telecommunications infrastructure is what negates distances being a disadvantage of living in the country. Telecommunications can turn this concentration of city dwelling back on itself so that it is more cost-effective, more productive, to live in the country than in the city. So this government has to start to address a number of policy initiatives. You cannot keep sending these pro city messages. You are sending people into the city supposedly to find jobs, when you have all these other advantages sitting out there. The telecommunication arrangements are a classic case where the message is not being delivered.

If we based our society on viability of basic services, Bourke would never have seen an electricity pole. Some people would suggest: who cares? Well, I care. We are talking about infrastructure almost daily in this place, and there is a role for government to be much more positive about those sorts of infrastructure needs, not only about road and rail. There are about 15 other items that I wanted to speak about, Mr Deputy Speaker—water policy, coal and the various AusLink arrangements—but, seeing that time has expired, I will have to bore you another day.

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