Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On listening to the member for Parramatta run through her list of election promises fulfilled for the electorate of Parramatta, I only wish and dream that perhaps I would be standing here today announcing that we would be doing something about the Sandy Point Community Centre, which was an election promise we could not fulfil because we did not win the election. We would be announcing some funds for the Sustainability Centre at Koonwarra. We would also be announcing other funds in our Regional Partnerships program which would have been terribly important to the electorate.

The role of a member of parliament does not change greatly going from government to opposition. In that process we are still representatives of our electorates and we are still a bridge from the people to the executive. That is why I said to the parliamentary secretary at the table that I will be attending his autism breakfast tomorrow morning along with many others. You would be surprised who attends that sort of function, because there is such a concern. The job of a local member continues on, addressing the issues, such as the miseries of autism and allied conditions that affect the community.

I will start with a positive: this government has allocated $190 million to begin to address this issue and I am supportive of the government of the day that has heard the concerns of many across the community on both sides of the House and is prepared to give charge to the parliamentary secretary to tackle that problem on behalf of families. But I will call the member for Parramatta to account, along with the rest of the government, in regard to inflation, interest rates and unemployment figures. I will defend the economic credentials of the Howard government over nearly 12 years of good governance in this country, good economic management on behalf of the community that enabled us then to deliver the benefits that are being spent now by this government. In fact, generally over the whole of this budget what we are seeing is very much of the Howard government’s abilities in economic management for this government to be able to deliver, even though slightly changed. There has not been great change in this budget. There have been some different allocations but not great change.

What I register in the community is a broad disappointment. You talk about working families, but let us talk about living pensioners. People are concerned about petrol prices or grocery prices and the rhetoric of the Rudd group before the election campaign. What we have to do as a community and as a nation is call governments that come into power like this to account for the rhetoric that they had before the election. They led the nation to believe that they could do something about petrol prices. They were going to do something different for pensioners. They were going to do something different on the environment. They were going to do something different in education. They were going to do better than the government of the day was doing.

But what has actually happened in regard to petrol and pensioners? We have a situation now where the Rudd government is right up that well-known creek rowing that very well known barbed wire canoe. This week the Prime Minister said: ‘I can’t do anything about this issue on petrol. I can’t do anything about it and I have given up.’ That is a terrible admission. I would have thought he would have said, ‘The rise in petrol prices is a tragedy and it is difficult for the nation to deal with, but we will spend every day with every minister putting every bit of energy they can possibly put into keeping those things at the lowest price we can.’ I do not think they have done that. They have really just given up on that issue straightaway. They are not prepared to continue to work to find a way. There are things like what the Howard government did on petrol prices. If the Howard government had not acted on fuel excise, fuel would have been 17c dearer today, if not more. The Howard government was shown to be flexible. I will continue to defend the Howard government’s record. It should not be diminished, particularly in the area of community support.

That brings me to Regional Partnerships, which has been sold by the new government as a previous rort—going back five years ago, looking at a report. Therefore, for purely base, political reasons, they axed the whole project. What my community is telling me is that these were very good projects. Let me talk about the Warragul RSL project, which should have been signed off on last July. This issue did not need me to go to our government and talk about it because the issue was done and dusted—signed, finished and over. There were other requests that we had in on Regional Partnerships that we were working on to get funded. I will admit that, after raising an issue about a federal Labor government promise on ABC radio the other day, all of a sudden a phone call came through that the minister was coming down to give them $190,000. I will be writing to the Prime Minister to say—as I had written to Mr Howard in the past and received support—that there are some issues in some programs that actually need to be addressed.

The commitment by the Howard government last July to fund the Warragul RSL through Regional Partnerships was because of its community base and what it does within the Warragul community. These diggers have been sadly and unfortunately let down, only because there was an act of political bastardry in regard to these Regional Partnerships programs. The government had not thought it through. They wanted to make a statement—an attack on the coalition, an attack on the National Party, an attack on what they saw as a rorting program—but in truth, they should have looked at it closely and looked at how many of their own members had received so many Regional Partnerships grants. They were not even in the regions, but they had access to these funds.

What did they tell me? They said, ‘Write a letter to your Premier and see if they will top up the funds.’ It is a struggle for us to get any money out of our state governments, because they keep putting it on the federal government to pay so much. There has been so much cost-shifting going on. Now there will be cost-shifting wars between state Labor governments and a federal Labor government. We have to consider the genuine people of the Warragul RSL—and I am talking about a whole lot of programs across Australia. I am talking about the recreation centre at Druin. I am talking about the recreation program in place at Traralgon. I am talking about the $2 million promised by Simon Crean when he was down with the Moe people. The Latrobe council now have a letter to say they are not going to get it, but I dare say that, after I have said this tonight, that will be fulfilled as well. I made the commitment that I would come to this House and I would call on the government to fulfil its election promises, as outlined by the member for Parramatta and as has been outlined by the member for Bass. That was more like a Christmas benefit, the member for Bass listing her election promises and what will be fulfilled over there. It was unbelievable. I have never experienced such largesse by a government in the whole of my life. That was amazing.

See this speech in context