Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was not 20 per cent either. I think it was 15 per cent. It would have been a clean change and Labor thought there were votes in doing it the other way around. But we do not notice any suggestion today that they would roll it back. So what are we looking at? We are looking at some pretty interesting situations. As someone who has been here a lot longer than anybody else sitting in this chamber at the moment—and some are so new the drips are still coming off their ears—I remember standing in this place, on this side of the House, pleading with the government of the day to save the private hospital and private health insurance industry. I served a term as shadow minister for health and I could see what was happening, and it was happening deliberately. The Constitution forbids an Australian parliament commercially conscripting doctors, dentists or others in those professions. Of course, therefore, you cannot have the British National Health Service by government determination, but you can sure get it by default. If there had been another three years of the Keating government, there would be no private health industry today. People were deserting in droves. All the good risks—insurance is about matching good risks with bad risks—were giving up, and that escalated the premiums. Then another group would give up. It was beyond the resources of most elderly people who needed access to the private system to get their elective surgery.

You can talk about throwing money at state governments until you are blue in the face, but let me tell you: any hospital that runs on a budget treats patients as a liability—‘you can’t have too many of them, because you haven’t got enough money’. The private health system is the only backstop for people. Again, to create an opportunity for all the good risks to desert guarantees, above all else, that thousands of other people in need will not be able to afford private health insurance. You did not tell anybody at the election that you were going to pull this trick and we know why: because you would not have been able to be elected on this issue. People know that the only way to keep private health insurance and private hospitals viable is to have a system that people can afford. If they cannot afford it, they have no choice. You will never be able to fund a public hospital system to the extent that meets the private needs of people. As I say, I have been to the conferences and I have heard honest health administrators say that waiting lists are part of the management processes of public hospitals. That is a conspiracy. It is not generous and it is bad policy.

Let us talk about fighting inflation. There are two opportunities to fight inflation. The one chosen by this government is the blunt instrument: you raise taxes, you accumulate the money and you take it out of circulation. You start to starve the economy into submission. Looking over your shoulder is the Reserve Bank, independent admittedly, with another blunt instrument: forcing up interest rates to achieve the same reduction. You do not try to grow your economy on firm foundations; you turn around and starve it into submission. Anybody that consults the history of this place will see that every time government tries that intervention, unfortunately, it ends in a recession—the last one famously called ‘the recession we had to have’. You cannot use those instruments successfully.

So what are the alternatives? The alternative is to keep nominal wages low but buying power high—the evidence of the Howard government was an increase of close to 20 per cent in real wages with not very significant increases. Why is that? Because there is no such thing as a free lunch. You can increase workers’ wages. My father earned £6 a week. He raised four children, bought a house and never had his wife in paid employment. Today his wages would be $1,500 a week as a motor mechanic and if his wife were not working he could not afford a house. And we call that progress. The reality is that the first part of addressing inflation is to keep wages properly linked to productivity and to let the market prevail. I nearly laughed when I heard a very prominent labour leader, a union leader, saying that people coming out on section 457 visas should get market wages. They have convinced the Labor government to review 4,000 wage awards—for ‘market wages’ read ‘AWAs’. That is what they are. When it suits their rhetoric they think it is a good idea. What do you want? Do you want to regulate the labour market, with all the constraints that places on growth, and then try to kill growth off with interest rates and taxes, putting money into funds where it cannot be spent when it is needed? If you have not addressed the shortfall in the supply of labour, then you have got a problem.

We had 457s, and when it became an opportunity to win an election they were criticised as stealing Aussie jobs. What Aussie jobs? We have four per cent unemployment—which, when I was studying economics, was considered full employment. We have high participation rates. You are going to build all these schools, but I do not know where the kids are coming from to fill them. You cannot materialise people. The Deputy Prime Minister stands up here day after day, waving her hands around and telling us, ‘I’ve got the answer; we’re going to increase skill training.’ That is a good idea, as long as you have someone to teach.

What is the history of Australia? Where have most of the voters come from for the Labor Party? They have come from immigrants—the 10-pound Poms and all the other people who came out here, the Vietnamese and others who filled the jobs that were available and all trained their kids in skills. Yet we have the trade union movement out there fighting bitterly against bringing people in on 457 temporary visas now, and I laugh about it.

In my electorate the other day, a $40 million piece of premanufactured equipment—a ship-loader for iron ore—turned up on a heavy-lift vessel. The vessel picked it up and dropped it on the wharf, and the only work available to Australians out of that $40 million was to connect up the electricity and the conveyor belt. How many union members did you sign up where that thing was built? How much tax, payroll tax and expenditure in small business did we get from that? Why was it built somewhere else? Because there are not enough people here to build it.

The greenies complain about exporting live animals. The major reason is that we have not got the human capacity in my electorate, at the established meatworks, to slaughter those animals. And we say they have to be skilled! Have you guys ever looked at a meat chain, where one bloke stands there with a knife and cuts and the next animal comes along and he cuts? There are people in the boning room and that sort of thing who need some skills, and they should be upgraded. But why don’t you let them in? They might even join the union. They just might. But you do not get them over there in the Middle East or wherever the animals go. I just cannot understand your reasoning. When they got a few people into the meatworks in my electorate, the local sports store sold out of pushbikes the next day. They all bought one to ride to work. They do not do that in the Middle East. They do not do that in other places. Yet there is this stupid belief that, if you can tighten up the wages movement and the supply, you will get all these wage increases and that they are going to deliver a benefit. They do not. When you double the wages of some kid at McDonald’s, what happens to the price of the burger? Do you think McDonald’s say, ‘Tough luck for us’? No, they put the price up. That is inflation.

Then there are all the infrastructure issues. Your government has decided to sideline all this money. Now, we sidelined money to pay the unfunded superannuation of public servants. That is a legitimate reason for a Future Fund. But your reason is that, if you spend the money, there is nobody to do the work because you have a culture of stopping people coming here to work—unskilled as well as skilled, and at ridiculous wages. Then you say, ‘Don’t pay them the award,’ which we believe in. You think we have not got a problem. But what is the window of opportunity? It is great to see a new mine open in my electorate just last week—a huge one for nickel—and to hear Don Argus, the chairman of BHP Billiton, say that they anticipate that the current boom is lengthy. I hope he is right. But, with the way you as a government are planning to upstage the infrastructure, it could be over by the time the benefits are achieved.

Let me give an example: your determination to get AWAs out of the road. AWAs were first invented in Western Australia by the Court Liberal government. They revolutionised the iron ore industry. The big companies invested in their infrastructure; they did not ask the taxpayer to do it. And what was the outcome of that? The outcome was that you do not see capesize vessels queued up off Port Hedland for any period of time. They are in and out, they are loaded and no longer do the people who buy the iron ore have to wait six weeks, as I remember, while they had a strike over the colour of the tablecloths in the mess hall. When AWAs came in, that industry became viable. But what happened here on the east coast? You are stuck with awards; you are stuck with government provided infrastructure or the lack of it. And what an embarrassment you have got! When Queensland—the previous speaker comes from there—decided to privatise the Dalrymple Bay coal loader, they would not respond properly to their request for an increase in rates necessary to fund expansion, so it did not happen. There are more ships parked off there. Billions of dollars of revenue, available now, is not coming to Australia. There are no extra taxes—nothing.

This budget chose the wrong option. It chose to try and strangle the economy instead of addressing the fundamentals. I know you are going to bring some more immigrants in, but we should have had a massive increase in labour being imported. I like the temporary component because I think that means that you have options, if things slow down in later years, as far as retaining jobs for living Australians goes. But you killed it. You frightened the hell out of our side at that time, which I think was also a shame, and I do not think we gain any credit from doing it. But fancy going out and saying, ‘You’re stealing Aussie jobs,’ when everyone is looking around for an Aussie. You cannot get them. Of course, unskilled people should be brought in, as they have been historically, and historically they educated their kids to be doctors, lawyers, skilled IT people et cetera. It is a bad budget because it has gone the wrong way about fighting inflation.

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