Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

It is a measure of just how resilient our Australian democracy really is when the political upheaval of a change of government occurs with dignity and without rancour. We need to be particularly proud of the fact that Australia is the sixth longest continuing functioning democracy in the world. Other countries would indeed relish the freedoms and the lack of civil strife that are synonymous with our country and its history. The new Labor government will be judged in time on whether it has moved beyond the surplus of circuses which have so characterised its first few months in office and whether it actually makes the hard decisions to plan for the future of the Australian people and this great nation of ours.

I want to speak on a number of issues raised in the Governor-General’s speech as well as some other issues pertinent to my electorate of Indi. Prior to and during the recent election campaign, I made a number of local project announcements that a re-elected coalition government would honour. Since the election, I have sought assurances from the new government that these projects will be supported and delivered. The new government has apparently informed us that it is currently reviewing some of these previously approved projects, projects approved well before the election. This has caused some distress and some uncertainty amongst many organisations in my electorate in north-east Victoria because they had relied on the word of the government that it would make good its grant of certain moneys.

These projects include grants such as the medical infrastructure funds for a new medical centre at Violet Town, infrastructure funding upgrades at HP Barr Reserve in Wangaratta and enhanced medical facilities in Myrtleford, Bright and Mount Beauty. In addition, I have been seeking confirmation from the new government of vital infrastructure projects, such as the Nagambie Bypass project, along with the $45 million allocated to the Wodonga Rail Bypass and whether the new government will continue with the grants to local governments under the Roads to Recovery program, which is a very popular and much-needed local funding program. I have had some positive news on only a couple of these projects and I eagerly wait to hear positive results on some of the others. Just because there is a change of government, it does not mean that the needs of our community change. It does not mean that the needs of rural communities change. I will continue to stand up for the needs of the people of my region of north-east Victoria and continue to fight for our fair share.

At the top of the agenda is water and water security. And nothing is closer to people’s minds in the north-east of Victoria than state Labor’s plans to pipe our region’s water to Melbourne. This is a callous plot that will undermine water security and sustainable water practices in our region. CSIRO’s Ovens-Murray climate change report provides another reason for the Labor Party to plug their pipeline to Melbourne. The best estimate of the report is a 13 per cent reduction in average end-of-system flows from the Ovens system into the Murray River by 2030. In addition, the state Labor government will flush even more water to Melbourne. This is equivalent to a 228 billion-litre reduction in flow to the Murray per year and comes in addition to a series of warnings from the Bureau of Meteorology of already stressed water supplies.

We already live within a water catchment that is severely stressed, and which Labor’s own report says will be stressed more in the future. The system simply cannot sustain piping water to Melbourne. It is not surprising to realise that, if inflows drop, outflows must also drop. In this reduced water environment the correct response is to do what we can to increase the water in our region, not flush it down to Melbourne. Creative and innovative lateral solutions are required for the Melbourne catchment area—and indeed for metropolitan Melbourne—not knee-jerk panic reactions from governments that do not look to the future and that think they can sacrifice rural and regional Victoria because, in the interests of their survival, they see more votes in Melbourne. That is short-sighted, and if this pipeline goes ahead they will be damned forever into the future for such a disastrous short-sighted policy.

The Bureau of Meteorology recently restated:

The deficiencies discussed above have occurred against a backdrop of—

multi-year—

rainfall deficits and record high temperatures that have severely stressed water supplies in the east and southwest of the country.

In announcing the report, the federal Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, claims that she is ‘committed to securing water supplies as we deal with the challenges of climate change’. If this is more than a Rudd-inspired political slogan couched in empty symbolism, she needs to secure our water supplies by stopping the pipeline to Melbourne. It is also concerning that the CSIRO report recognised that local towns will have more frequent mild and severe water restrictions under all but the wettest scenario, yet the Labor Party is doing absolutely nothing to secure our local water supplies. This is on top of the news I received via correspondence recently to the new water minister that the new Labor government will not be enforcing the previous government’s restrictions on Lake Mokoan’s decommissioning. As I warned in the past, the Labor states will continue to treat the federal Labor team as a collective patsy. The states say, ‘Jump,’ and the federal Labor Party says, ‘How high?’ As my colleague the shadow minister for water security stated only this week, by allowing the states to set their own allocations, Minister Wong has simply given the green light to the Brumby government to pipe unlimited water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. It is simply nonsensical to have state Labor spend $750 million of taxpayers’ money to pipe water out of the basin when the Australian government has committed to spending $10 billion to increase flows to the Murray-Darling Basin.

The government flaunts its so-called education revolution, but this term is a misnomer. Within two months of its election, the Rudd government put the boot into one of the most innovative funding schemes that our education system has seen: the Investing in Our Schools Program. This was despite the now Prime Minister saying before the election, ‘It’s a useful program worthy of bipartisan support, you bet.’ Well, I suppose until after the election result was known! Last month I attended the Middle Indigo Primary School, in my electorate, for the formal opening of their new toilet block. This school was subject to an investigation by the Age education supplement in 2005, which reported the following:

... Middle Indigo Primary may have the dubious claim to the worst school toilet block in the state. The school of 16 has done its best to brighten it up with a cheery beach mural painted by the children.

The horrors are on the inside. Orange paint on the walls warns where asbestos has been exposed. There are no locks on the doors and no electricity. The toilets are also used by the staff. In the boys’ toilets, the urinal runs into the soil.

Parents say they have been told by local Education Department authorities that the toilet block is a low priority.

It was a low priority that would have continued to be a low priority under the state Labor government. The children and teachers at that school were totally abandoned and ignored. It was only when the school received a $103,787 grant under the Investing in Our Schools Program to repair their dilapidated toilet block and replace it with a new environmentally sensitive block—which more adequately serves the school community—that the school got the basic hygiene services that those students and teachers deserved. It is surely not much to ask for school students and teachers to have access to appropriate toilet facilities.

It was not only Middle Indigo Primary School that accessed the Investing in Our Schools Program funding, but many hundreds and thousands of schools across the nation which had received underinvestment in basic capital grants and basic maintenance. They have managed to upgrade their facilities and provide a decent environment for children to live in and learn in. By gutting the Investing in Our Schools Program, the Rudd government is saying that schools like Middle Indigo Primary School should fend for themselves, irrespective of budget surpluses and irrespective of serious state government neglect and dismissiveness. There are numerous examples of state Labor neglect in our government schools, and the Investing in Our Schools Program filled that gap. It filled that gap as well as it could and it made a real difference to those school communities. It empowered local school communities to seek funding for essential works for their schools to suit the needs of that particular school community. It bypassed the neglectful states who contributed to such a blatant disregard for school infrastructure under their watch. Despite its rhetoric, and far from delivering an education revolution, the new government has delivered an education dereliction—a dereliction of duty and responsibility.

As I just mentioned, its first major decision in education was to cut a popular and important capital works program for schools. But it looks as though things will get worse. Not content with leaving carers and pensioners hanging in the wind, the Rudd government now wants to cull the $700 reading tuition vouchers for students, the initiatives promoting professional development for teachers and important reward schemes for schools who improve their literacy and numeracy results. The Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday that she wanted every Australian child to read and write, and that unfortunately the statistics are giving us all cause for concern. Amazingly, though, Labor believes that the way to confront this is to cut the literacy and numeracy programs initiated by the previous government. My colleague the shadow minister for families and community services yesterday proclaimed—quite rightly—that the government ‘is suffering from compassion fatigue after just three months in office’. We have seen how things change. Gone are the pious platitudes railing against market fundamentalism, gone is the paean to Christian socialism and gone is the railing against Howard’s so-called Brutopia that we saw so hypocritically in the Monthly article in 2006.

This Prime Minister has failed his own parameters of decency and compassion. He can talk the talk in the style of a true bureaucrat, but there are people whose lives are impacted by the weasel words and subterfuge that we have seen in recent days in relation to payments for seniors and carers. Here is a word from some of Rudd’s forgotten people. I read from an email which I received last Friday from two of my constituents who live in Wodonga:

... by removing the carer bonus it will make people worse off than they are. The Labor government said that pensioners and carers would be looked after ... the low income earners are having enough troubles with food prices rising, electricity prises rising, gas prices, fuel prices and now to reduced further by the government.

After I responded to my constituents over the weekend, they again wrote back to me saying:

we are sorry to have to annoy you, but what’s a person to do? The people advising kevin rudd should wake up to themselves and try living in the real world.

That is the word from the street in downtown Wodonga.

If the government has time to apologise to Indigenous Australians and cut education spending, then surely it has time to honour the job and look after those in our community who need the most support—those people like our carers and seniors, who do so much for society and take the burden away from government bureaucracies. Who would have thought that in Australia in 2008, when a new government has inherited a surplus likely to be in excess of $20 billion, we would be debating whether or not carers or seniors will get their hard-earned bonus payment? This is the new era of Rudd Labor—symbolic gestures replacing good policy. Senior ministers cannot raise a peep without sanction from the Prime Minister. It is leadership of the one-man-band variety and it is starting to come unstuck. The honeymoon will survive  for some time, but the Australian public have already started to see through the cracks of the well-orchestrated sideshow we see from the Prime Minister. The last three months have been a triumph of PR and spin but a defeat for the politics of accountability and good policy. The opposition will continue to hold this government to account, as the Australian people rightly demand and deserve.

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