Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are six months from a general election. The Australian Labor Party will go to the polls campaigning on the theme that the Howard government has failed the future test. This will be an easy case to make. Where has this exhausted government failed the future test? The government of Australia is about the welfare of the Australian people and the future of our nation. It is not about a career for leading ministers or the Prime Minister’s desire for waterfront living in Sydney. This government, after 11 years, is now principally concerned with its own survival. It has reached this point because it has stopped being concerned about Australia’s future.

The House knows of my passion for electoral fairness. It knows also that this government is currently involved in an attempt to rob many scores of thousands of Australians of their right to vote at the coming elections. For generations it has been the practice to call an election and then close the electoral roll a week or so later. These extra days always witness many tens of thousands of Australians, mainly young Australians, rushing to get onto the roll so they can vote. Voting is both a duty and a right in Australia, and so it should be. Legislation introduced by this worn-out government will oblige the Australian Electoral Commission to close the rolls as soon as the election writs are issued. A government which is afraid of the future will effectively disenfranchise many thousands of young Australians because it knows young Australians generally vote for future-oriented policies, which means a vote against the Howard government.

There is a difference between the government’s claimed need for huge sums of money to be spent on advertising as communication in the lead-up to the federal election and the actually budgeted amounts of advertising, as outlined in Senate estimates, for the Australian Electoral Commission. There is a marked contrast between the AEC expenditure and the vast amounts of money that the federal government is spending in other areas. The ongoing advertising budget for the Australian Electoral Commission was put at $18.2 million over five years. Of that, $12 million had been allocated specifically to increase ‘awareness’, a key word in so many of the government’s spurious claims about the purposes of its advertising. These were for changes in electoral enrolment requirements, the most significant changes to electoral laws in a generation. This is a retrograde initiative of this government which will affect many hundreds of thousands of Australian voters.

For these changes, to which we on this side are implacably opposed, the government has provided $12 million for advertising. So the government has spent $850 million of taxpayers’ money since the last election on government advertising—to ram down our throat its inaction dressed up as action, its abhorrent policies such as Work Choices—but has a paltry few million to advise Australians about major changes to the electoral laws, and that is being funded out of the normal AEC budget.

The next area in which I believe this House understands the Howard government has failed the future test concerns its foreign aid tricks. Australia is a very wealthy country. It will get wealthier. We can afford to be honest in our public declarations concerning foreign aid. However, this government slowly filches about a third of our $3 billion annual aid package and uses it to pay all sorts of bills here in Australia. Many of these bills involve the most disgraceful parts of government policies, like payments to Nauru for its shameful collusion in keeping people incarcerated there under its so-called asylum policy, and $600 million to settle the unpaid debt of Saddam’s Iraq—$600 million that any responsible government would never have lent knowing it would not be repaid.

I have spoken many times in this House about the payments irresponsibly made and insured by the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation. Basically, they are just a subsidy to the National Party. Australia irresponsibly sells vast amounts of wheat via the Australian Wheat Board to various countries, including Saddamite Iraq—and I am not talking about bribes that we allowed to take place via the Australian Wheat Board; I am talking about the up-front giving to these regimes of vast amounts of produce like wheat and then having the Australian taxpayer fund them via the EFIC arrangement. The $600 million that we let the Iraqis off was requested by the international conference for the current government of Iraq, but it was accumulated during the period of Saddamite rule in Iraq. What kind of a government would lend or give Iraq vast amounts of wheat and allow the Australian taxpayer to effectively pay for it, knowing that that hard currency would be used by that regime and other regimes that we give this wheat to as a subsidy to the National Party for hard currency purposes that none of us approve of?

The facts surrounding these abuses of government procedures in the foreign aid budget have been brought to our attention by an NGO, Aid/Watch. It was that group that brought the Treasurer’s brother, Mr Tim Costello, on to public radio to denounce the tax office’s attack on the charitable status of Aid/Watch. Who told the ATO to do this? The Howard government.

My next example of this government’s failing the future test concerns the Department of Defence. What in heavens name is going on there? Barely a month has gone past since 2004 without some story about mismanagement involving this department. At a time when Australia has its biggest military and naval deployments abroad in 40 years, we are afflicted with bungling on a grand scale. The future disposition of our armed forces will not lessen with the coming decade; it will increase. We have many serious complicating factors facing us in the South Pacific and our responsibilities under the ANZUS alliance. That the Australian Defence Force needs well trained and funded forces that we plan for conscientiously in the future is apparent to all of us. Yet, despite the extra $1.8 billion in Defence funding, we are still placing significant budgetary constraints on our forward-planning capabilities. As ASPI pointed out in its budget brief this year, there is a very disconcerting ‘absence of funds to cover all additional personnel and operating costs of new equipment to be delivered in the upcoming years.’ This includes the 737 early warning aircraft, the armed reconnaissance helicopters and air-to-air refuelling aircraft, which are scheduled to be delivered in 2009—delays in projects that will also lead to a delay in deferral in funding. We cannot keep putting projects off.

The Minister for Defence, Dr Nelson, must take responsibility to ensure that Defence projects are completed on budget and on time. Simply shuffling money further down the track to avoid election scrutiny is not good enough. As the ASPI report on the Defence budget states, ‘what makes this year easier inevitably makes future years harder.’ The professional men and women of the ADF deserve more. Australia needs more personnel to help defend this country—we do not dispute that. ASPI states that over the last three years to 2005-06, the strength of the permanent ADF fell by 929 people at a time when the goal was to increase the size of the force by a similar amount. For this reason the increase by 325 in the last year is good news, but simply engaging in expensive television advertising is not enough to increase defence recruitment.

My deployment during the RIMPAC 2006 exercise on HMAS Manoora has made me keenly mindful of the need to nurture not just young recruits but existing personnel. With an election on the horizon, the government has ignored the holistic planning of the ADF. The assessment by ASPI of the current cycle of investment being piecemeal is a view I share. It fails to deliver long-term capability that we need to take consideration of.

A major problem seems to be in Defence procurement with the Seasprite helicopters—an absolute fiasco. Eleven wasted years under this government have seen the Australian Navy not having a helicopter that it can use with confidence on its ships. We are told that the government is concerned with safety and technical matters associated with this flying lemon. Here is a piece of free advice: you settle these matters before you buy. A 10-year-old buying a bike would make sure that it worked to his satisfaction before he handed over his $100. This level of common sense eludes the drones squatting on the front bench who have been representing us in Defence. With this black hole project, minister after minister, from McLachlan to Reith to Hill to Nelson, have failed to take responsibility to ensure the project was completed, deployable and on time.

A lack of planning means the government’s automatic position is to throw money at projects. The Minister for Defence has recently announced his intention to spend an extra $100 million on the Seasprite project, which has already had a billion dollars spent on it. With our Sea Kings temporarily grounded, this effectively means that 20 key helicopters in the Australian Navy used to project power are completely out of commission. It is now crystal clear that we have lost more soldiers in helicopter accidents in this term of parliament than from enemy fire. The Howard government is not interested in the future or doing a proper job in Defence and, in my view, is just dawdling along, yawning, signing cheques for yet more dud equipment. I am not surprised: duds attract duds—more Hill, McLachlan, Reith et cetera. What would you expect under their ministries?

My fourth point about future test concerns is our economic policy regarding China. China is a great business partner. The government of China is working hard to lift the mass of people from poverty; it is having some success. The Chinese government, though, in its currency is cheating economically. In a wider world of international economics, currency is freely convertible and the international market sets the price of a nation’s currency. This is refused by the Chinese government. They do this because they seriously undervalue the yuan, enabling China to unfairly compete in the sale of industrial goods. I can only agree with Mr Fred Bergsten, the director of the Institute for International Economics, who said in a recent report:

China is …overtly exporting unemployment to other countries and apparently sees its currency undervaluation as an off-budget export and job subsidy that … has avoided effective international sanction.

This unfair behaviour has enabled China to accumulate $1.2 trillion in foreign currency reserves. This rate of accumulation cannot continue indefinitely.

It is long past the time that Australia should have joined the US in putting sustained pressure on the Chinese government to join the real economic world. The Chinese resist this pressure because it is a cheap way for them to make money. But it is only a short-term palliative for their problems. The current Shanghai Stock Exchange resembles Wall Street in 1924. All sorts of activities, financially unsecured and counting on the profits of next week to pay for the debts of this week, are raging. Australia is a major factor in the Chinese economy. We supply them with many resources. This economic windfall for Australia is being steadily undermined by the disconnect emerging between the value of the Chinese currency on paper and its real value in the real world. The gap is about 20 per cent.

A 20 per cent collapse in the Shanghai Stock Exchange would be a terrible blow to Australia. Innumerable Chinese firms trading with Australia would crash. This would have a knock-on effect in Australia. All this is growing like a bubble in front of us because of the false value given to the Chinese currency by its government. There should be some revaluation but, of course, we have not heard a peep about this out of our own Treasurer. The Howard government like to pretend they are brilliant economic managers. They are not. Our current marvellous economic good fortune is based essentially on cashing Chinese cheques given for resource purchases. These cheques will slow very fast when the inevitable correction occurs in China.

In evaluating the political effect of this budget, in my view, ever since the Prime Minister became leader of the government he has had an incredible run of luck. Despite his failure as opposition leader against Bob Hawke, he regained the leadership after Andrew Peacock, John Hewson and the current Minister for Foreign Affairs proved to be duds. He did so just at the point when the public mood for change, after 13 years of a Labor government, emerged. Even then, he was only able to win by pledging to ‘never, ever’ bring in the GST, which voters had rejected in 1993, and promising a more ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia. Never were more insincere promises made by a major party leader—although Malcolm Fraser’s promise to retain Medibank comes close. The Liberals always fully intended to bring in the GST, and pursuing a divisive policy of class warfare against working people and the millions of Australians who are represented by unions was always their plan. This guaranteed to make Australians anything but relaxed and comfortable.

The PM’s luck continued in 1998 when Labor polled 51 per cent of the two-party vote but failed to get the swings in the crucial marginal seats. This was the worst result for a first-term government since the Great Depression, but the PM scraped home. The voters once again rejected the GST but the PM was able to get a spurious mandate and do his rotten deal with Meg Lees to get the GST through the Senate. It was the Democrats who took the blame for this and who are rightly headed for total political oblivion.

In 2001 the PM’s luck held again. I have no doubt that, had it not been for the September 11 attacks and the Tampa affair, the honourable member for Brand would easily have won the election and become a great Australian Labor Prime Minister. It must irk the government that its electoral bacon was saved by Osama bin Laden and by the shameful manipulation of xenophobic sentiment involved in the Tampa affair. This was on top of the disgraceful dishonesty of the ‘children overboard’ affair.

After the honourable member for Brand’s retirement from the Labor leadership, the PM had a further run of luck, facing an opposition led by two successive leaders who failed to win the support of the Australian people. Underlying this was the continued strength of the Australian economy, the product in part of the great economic reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments and, in part, of the resources boom fuelled by a demand for resources from China. The PM and the Treasurer cannot claim credit for either of these. Their sole contribution to the Australian reform agenda has been the GST, whose benefits are far from clear and are probably minimal.

At the 2004 election the PM achieved his ultimate ambition: winning control of the Senate and getting the numbers to pass his industrial relations legislation, the so-called Work Choices, the policy that dare not speak its name. Obviously no-one told the Prime Minister to be careful what he wishes for, since he might not like what he gets. Now the government’s luck has finally run out. The IR legislation has stripped away the Prime Minister’s moderate facade and exposed him as a lifelong class warrior and champion of social division. The Australian people have rejected the IR legislation from the start, and that is why the coalition is now 10 points behind in the polls.

It is very clear to me that many of the people described as ‘Howard’s battlers’ are working people who, with their overtime and allowances, were able to earn extra income to pay their mortgages. They are now being very solidly confronted with the fact that the Howard government is saying to them: ‘Okay, you were our supporters. Now take a $20,000 wage cut overall from an $80,000 salary.’ In Western Sydney and in regional Queensland many people who previously supported the Howard government understand the terrible effect of this Work Choices legislation and have made their decision not to risk voting for the coalition. I think the opinion polls are consistent and they will stay consistent, probably going down and becoming a bit more moderate before the next election.

I have never understood the chorus of commentators who have praised the Prime Minister as an infallible political genius. His judgement of the mood of the Australian people has frequently been poor: on the GST, on Pauline Hanson and now—hopefully fatally—on industrial relations. He has appointed a series of dud cabinet ministers: John Moore, who was asleep at the wheel on defence; Peter Reith and his gulf mercenaries on IR; Senators Patterson and Vanstone. That is not to start on the National Party and the Australian Wheat Board’s scandalous funding of the tyrant Saddam Hussein with a huge amount of cash that that regime had at its discretion—hard currency to buy weapons and to pay for suicide bombers. It was an absolute scandal that a country like Australia paid for that.

In 1995, when the public was tired of the Labor government, the honourable member for Bennelong was able to persuade the Australian people that he had changed from his divisive and confrontational old self and that he was a new John Howard. This was a con, and the con has now been exposed for all to see. There was no new John Howard at all, just the same old ideologically obsessed Prime Minister of the 1970s, aided by a great deal of cunning and trickiness. I remember it was Senator Brandis, who is now a minister, who said it was rodent-like cunning that informed the Prime Minister’s political views.

Now the wheel has turned full circle. Now it is Labor who can offer the Australian people a real leader, committed to a new style of politics and a new standard of honesty. Since December last year the Leader of the Opposition has won the trust and admiration of the electorate. No rabbit in the hat, no throwaway budget—

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