Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last night I spoke of the collapse of consumer confidence from 123.9 points in May 2007 to 89.8 points in May 2008. I think that this is hardly a vote of confidence in the new government if, only three months into the new government, Australians have already become pessimists rather than optimists. It has not come to pass that Australians are saying, ‘Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister; everything will be okay.’ No, the exact opposite has occurred. Australians have no confidence that this government can improve the economy and the lives of all Australians, and the evidence is there in the consumer confidence index.

But why is it so? Why do Australians have no confidence in the future? Is it because petrol prices continue to climb rapidly? No-one would deny that fact. Last week I filled our car at the local petrol station at 155.9c a litre, so that was around $90 to fill the tank. The Hazebrouek family in Cowan just bought a four-wheel drive so that the family can travel around Australia for their big trip of a lifetime: $230 to fill that vehicle up. Then there is the Pugh family in my electorate. Anne drives a Ford Focus, a very small car, but she said they now think a lot about where they drive and whether it is absolutely necessary to go there. Luckily, Steve Pugh rides his pushbike a lot.

But let us leave aside the narrow focus on working families. The truly tragic part of this is: what do pensioners do? The majority of pensioners cannot hop on a pushbike. Some of them cannot even walk very far. Those who can drive would be in, for example, 1.5-cylinder vehicles with a fuel tank of 45 litres. With petrol at $1.50, that is $67.50 per tank; at $1.60, that is $72 per tank. So filling a petrol tank is a difficult cost for a single pensioner on $546.80 per fortnight, especially after rent, which can be as much as $300 per fortnight in Perth.

It was not this way in the past. All the hype and expectations of the government have not seen any reduction in petrol prices, or gas or diesel prices. Of all the people that come to my office, email or speak to me in the street about fuel prices, not one has ever said that the prices reduced with the arrival of the Rudd government or even that the increases have slowed with the arrival of the Rudd government. I really have trouble finding a family, couple or person living by themselves in Cowan that feels that any progress has been made under the Rudd government. Even the Prime Minister, when talking about petrol and other costs of living, said of his government:

We have done as much as we physically can to provide additional help to the family budget …

It is clear from these words that the tax cuts provided by the good economic management of Peter Costello, the one-off payments made to pensioners and the childcare rebate are all that there is. That is all that the government have for the people of Australia. They have had 100 talkfests, committees, inquiries, reviews, forums et cetera, and they are out of ideas. That is it, is it? I wonder what would have happened if Brendan Nelson had not fought the government over the one-off payments for pensioners. If it was not for Brendan Nelson, this mean government would not even have made that payment. If the previous government had not created the original childcare rebate scheme, I really wonder what this current government would have come up with. The only positive move was on an idea of the former government that was saved by Brendan Nelson.

We have seen that the price of petrol continues to spiral, while the government is out of ideas that it can steal from the previous government. That is not the end of the harsh reality for Australian families, couples and singles. The price of bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, fruit and meat continues to rise. Percy Bleacher, a pensioner of Marangaroo, showed me a couple of lamb chops priced at $20 a kilo, so even lamb is becoming a luxury for older Australians now. At my local supermarkets, milk is up around $3.50, on average, for two litres. None of these reviews or inquiries have put the breaks on these very real price increases in basic foods, so it is no wonder consumer confidence is at its lowest level since Paul Keating was Prime Minister.

Moving on to more specific impacts that this government has had in Cowan, I need to talk about housing. This is a challenge that requires vision and lateral thinking, yet, for all the talk by the ALP before the election, not once before or since the election has the ALP confronted the shortcomings of the state governments with regard to land releases, stamp duty, state charges and public housing management. With regard to state housing, I note that the waiting list in WA has now blown out to 17,000—17,000 individuals or families without access to public housing. That is without consideration of shifting the eligibility criteria for state housing, given that there are families that earn too much to qualify for state housing but not enough to pay for private rentals. I mentioned before that some pensioners are paying up to $300 per fortnight or more in rent, and I would like to mention the very real circumstances of Mr Ronald Pomphrey. He pays $240 a fortnight in rent. He shares a house at a rent of $480 per fortnight, and he gets $71 in rent assistance. There is a big difference there.

The official interest rate is now up to 7.25 per cent, which is 0.5 percentage points higher than at the election. The promised big spending cuts did not materialise. The tough talk was nothing but an illusion. Real cuts became increased spending, with plenty more to come in the future, and future spending will come from the interest and the capital of the infrastructure fund and the higher education fund. Some families and individuals are doing it very tough at the moment. Since the Rudd government was elected, the only thing that has gone down is confidence, while the cost of housing, petrol and food continues to increase. What should also be of great concern is that this budget forecasts an increase in unemployment. An additional 134,000 people are expected to be out of work in the next financial year. I do not want anyone in my electorate to lose their job, because being unemployed will make their lives far worse with the cost of housing, groceries and transport.

Beyond the individual hardships which have not been fixed by this budget, I also wish to speak on a number of absences and changes to existing programs in the budget and on the effect that they will have on Cowan. I would like to start with the ALP’s election promises for Cowan, which I cannot find anywhere in the budget. I cannot find specific reference to the Hepburn Avenue extension at Ballajura, at $5 million; the dual carriageway upgrade of Hepburn Avenue at Alexander Heights, at $5 million; or the $10 million for the overpass at the intersection of Alexander Avenue and the Reid Highway. I note that the Premier of Western Australia suggested in July last year, after this promise, that work could start in the first half of this year. I note that Premier Carpenter is very silent on the matter these days. It is not there. I also note that it is a struggle to find reference to a $2 million grant for a stadium at Woodvale Senior High School or a $500,000 grant for a drop-in centre for youth in Ballajura. The other commitment was for a footbridge at Banksia Grove at $1 million—which the local residents, like community leader Geoff Westlake, do not actually want; what they do want is a solution to the safety problems for schoolchildren crossing Joondalup Drive. I find it very disappointing that these commitments were not funded as line items in the budget and I will, of course, continue to remind the voters of Cowan about all the shortfalls in promises made in the election.

The next matter that I would like to refer to is the axing of the highly regarded Investing in Our Schools program, or IOSP. As part of the election campaign, the Howard government committed to its extension. While the now Prime Minister spoke well of it at the time, IOSP did not survive the Rudd government. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to Janine Egan, a P&C member at the new Hocking Primary School in my electorate. Janine was telling me how disappointed they were that IOSP was cut by the Rudd government. The parents wanted to install air conditioning or cooling in the school. As anyone who has visited Perth can testify, the place gets very hot in summer. Air conditioning is not provided in Perth schools by the state government, and therefore P&Cs have to raise funds to provide it. For Hocking Primary’s P&C to raise $100,000 or $150,000 to cool the whole school, it will take them around 10 years of sausage sizzles and other fundraisers to get the job done. By way of example, IOSP came through for the South Ballajura Primary School in 2006, providing $150,000 for cooling. The P&C in South Ballajura would never have been able to raise that amount of money. The other losers from this decision will be the new high school at Darch, Greenwood Primary School, Neerabup Primary School and Tapping Primary School, which could have achieved much more under a continuing IOSP.

Often IOSP provided funding to deal with the heat problems in Perth, so it is appropriate that I move next to the solar panel rebate decision by the Rudd government. It has been a theme of this government that they wish to precisely define who is rich and to ensure that they pay more or get less from the government. It started with persons over a specific amount of income not getting the whole of the Costello tax cuts. The Rudd government put a figure out to define the rich there. Then there was a figure put out for the family tax benefit eligibility. Then there was the supposedly luxury car tax, or ‘Tarago tax’, which included people movers. If you want a car worth over $57,000 then, again, you are rich according to the government.

But it is with regard to the solar panel rebate being capped to only those under a joint income of $100,000 that this defined rich list becomes totally ridiculous. I have been approached by the Mackay family, who tell me that they signed up on budget day for $20,000 worth of solar panels—or one kilowatt of production power. With the rebate they could have afforded it; they wanted to make a contribution to the fight against climate change. They cannot now afford the whole $20,000 and so have cancelled the contract. I also received a message from noted and well respected environmental volunteer John Chester, whose e-mail said:

Means-testing the federal government’s $8,000 rebate on grid-connected photovoltaic systems is a most regressive step. Rich or poor, we all need incentives to move toward an environmentally sustainable future. The only outcome that matters in the long run is the continued and preferably accelerated uptake of photovoltaic systems by all households throughout the country. These systems produce their energy without burning fossil fuels and therefore don’t add to greenhouse gas emissions and also take considerable pressure off the country’s overloaded power distribution and generating infrastructure, particularly during daytime peak load periods.

Given John Chester’s comments, I say that this Rudd government decision is wrong, it is bad for the environment and should be reversed immediately.

From the solar panel fiasco, it is appropriate that I move on to another concern for the environment. I speak to this point on behalf of the Friends of Lightning Swamp and their president, John Williams. John and I have been speaking about groundwater contamination issues in the south-east of Cowan, but on this occasion he emailed me about the impact of the Rudd government’s Caring for Country program. He tells me that under the Howard government there was important funding for the Swan Catchment Council. The SCC undertook critical water monitoring to check the health of drainage flows and streams which pass through environmentally significant bushland, wetlands et cetera. Yet the funding for this work has been cut because the Rudd government’s Caring for Country program has replaced the former government’s program. The state government has used this policy as an excuse not to allocate any further support funding. The services provided by the regional catchments, such as SCC, benefit the state, yet the state in this case will not provide support funding with these changes at the federal level. John Williams believes this Rudd government decision will result in the funding for water monitoring programs being halved from July 2008.

Another undesirable outcome will be that, due to the cut in funding, only one SCC officer will service the north and south catchments—Lightning Swamp is in the north catchment. The consequence of these limited resources and funding for sampling will be a substantial reduction in the number of sites to be sampled yearly, and there will be no possibility for any additional sites to be included. The water monitoring programs are vital and the great success of the previous government’s programs was that the money was provided to organisations to have people on the ground doing the critical jobs. This is another budget failure for the hard-working individuals and environmental groups doing excellent work out there in environmentally sensitive areas in Cowan and in Australia.

There is an often referred to line from Shakespeare, which has been slightly modified for modern language. It says ‘all that glitters is not gold’. I do not think too many people really saw this budget as glittering in terms of an improved life for your average Australian, but perhaps the glitter was to be the responsible budget that was to deal with inflation. Yet spending has increased across the estimates. This budget has stimulated the economy so, with what I have covered earlier, this budget has failed because it has not reduced inflationary pressures. But to come back to my point at the start of my speech, running an economy has to have an outcome on the streets of Australia. Aged pensioners like Ronald Pomphrey and others like Agnes Smith and Doris Arena in Girrawheen have to be better off. The budget must leave them in a stronger position after recognising the costs of living. Self-funded retirees like Marie Westlake and Bonnie Hull must be better off. Families like the Loubikis family in Girrawheen and the Pugh family in Warwick must be better off. This is the real test of an economy: are the people really better off once all the factors of cost of living and employment are considered? The answer to this budget is no. The consumer confidence index shows that Australians are very worried about the future—and they should be, given this budget has failed to improve the lives of every category of people in this country.

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