Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was about to say it gives me pleasure to speak to this budget but it does not really, because quite frankly I think for regional and rural people it is a dog of a budget, and I think it is a budget that lets Australian families down. It is a typical Labor budget: high taxes, high spending and targeting groups which are not Labor friendly. There is a forecast of 134,000 fewer jobs and no answer to the growing problems of higher grocery and fuel prices. It increases taxes massively, as it does spending. It plays the politics of envy and shows that Labor does not know what it is doing in running our economy, particularly in regional areas.

Over the past fortnight we have seen on television the drama unfolding of the Lake Ellen Regional Partnerships project in Bundaberg. The government was about to axe 116 Regional Partnerships programs on the premise that there were no signed contracts—quite apart from the fact that it breaks a longstanding protocol. When assessed programs are in the pipeline and there is a change of government, in the past it has always been the protocol that those projects were completed—always. I am not talking about flash-in-the-pan ones that come up just prior to elections; I am talking about ones that had been in the pipeline in some cases for up to six or seven years.

Why do I say that? You have 116 projects, 86 of which are community projects. Communities which would not otherwise be able to have these facilities depend on these projects. The government says that contracts were not signed. What is the process? First, applicants have to go to the area consultative committee; secondly, they have to go to the state office of DOTARS; then they have to go to the Canberra office of DOTARS; and then they have to go to the minister for advice. So there were four levels of scrutiny. Even for the ones that have been criticised and that may not have been the most successful projects, there were four levels of scrutiny.

By comparison with that, the minister has lectured the parliament over recent days about the dreadful, shocking conduct of the coalition government in relation to the Regional Partnerships program. But the government itself has named $145 million worth of projects which have not been subjected to any form of scrutiny—not one iota of scrutiny. They are merely election promises, and for some reason they get a tick. Some of them are not even explained.

We have got these big amounts of money like $5.3 million, $14.9 million and $9.8 million for growth corridors, whatever that might mean. I am not against programs that upgrade roads. I tabled a report last year saying that we need to be spending up to $70 million and $80 million around most of our ports. But growth corridors are such an amorphous thing, whereas there are hard-edged projects that communities and councils want, and they want them now. My colleague the member for Herbert would know that. He has been wanting projects completed in the Townsville district.

I will give some history about Lake Ellen. The project has been rigorously looked into for over six or seven years. The site was changed and the project went back to the department for finetuning on a number of occasions. Finally, a decision was made to go ahead with it. It is a very good project. It is based on the edge of what is called the Baldwin Swamp in Bundaberg, which is an environmental heritage area. The project was to establish a playground which picks up the theme of the sugar industry in playground equipment. It is quite innovative. On top of that, it has play areas for disabled kids. It also has a road safety cycle track where kids are taught what is meant by a stop sign, a give-way sign, a roundabout and all those sorts of things that you would probably not learn until you were going to get a drivers licence. Kids are being inducted into road safety and road rules as part of this park. It is set in the surrounds of what is known as Lake Ellen, which is a small lake. In the great scheme of things, it is not a very expensive project—about a million dollars. The state government has contributed generously. Bundaberg City Council has contributed generously. Rotary clubs in particular, Lions clubs and the business community have contributed generously. There was $235,000 to come from the Commonwealth, and what did we do? Pulled it. It was pulled on the spurious grounds that it did not have a contract.

This project has been going backwards and forwards to the department. It had been publicly announced as going ahead. In fact, the Commonwealth plaques were on the fence; the department required that plaques be put on the fence stating it was a Commonwealth program. Even at that late stage, the project was pulled because there was no written contract, but there was certainly a verbal one. One of the reasons that the written contract was held up was that at one stage the department sought of the proponents that they demonstrate they were fit and proper people to administer the project. Guess who the proponents were: the Bundaberg City Council. You would think that would be a given. So we grind through a whole process of bureaucracy to establish whether the Bundaberg City Council is a ‘fit and proper person’ to administer a project. What mindless bureaucracy! Then they said there was no contract signed.

I commend the government for going back to those 80 programs. They are very important and will make a huge difference to regional Australia, both in coalition and Labor electorates. But I make a plea for some of the private schemes—the commercial ones, if you like. The new government seems to be a little ambivalent about this. I encourage my colleague the Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia, Gary Gray, for whom I have a lot of respect, to also look at industry. One of the great things the Regional Partnerships program did was to encourage industries to locate in regional areas. It was not big spending in the great scheme of things, but grants in the order of $200,000 up to $600,000 could make the difference between an industry locating in a country area and not doing that.

At present there is one in my electorate called AusChilli. AusChilli is the biggest grower and manufacturer of chilli products in Australia, and it is now exporting. Under the Regional Partnerships program, it applied for some very sophisticated equipment from America—for $2 million-plus—that will prolong the shelf life of a number of products, particularly chilli and things like guacamole, based on avocado. It will contribute to import replacement; at present some of these products have to come from Mexico but they can be made in Australia with Australian farm produce. That project was assessed. I saw the sheaf of papers the other day; it is about an inch thick with correspondence and paperwork that has gone backwards and forwards between this company and the department. This was not a flash-in-the-pan project. It is in stage 2—the Commonwealth had previously contributed to stage 1 of this project. The minister at the time, Mark Vaile, went up and actually announced it. There was an expectation in the community that this was going ahead, and equipment was purchased. Now the project is in limbo.

We are not just talking about some community project that could perhaps wait for a year or two. This is a real-life Australian company in the business of creating jobs and selling products here and now. This is a company that wants to get into import replacement. This is a company capable of exporting. This is a company capable of employing people as field workers and factory workers and also employing technical people. We are putting all that at risk because the contract was not signed. It was rigorously assessed; again, there was certainly a verbal contract. I would encourage the government to go back to look at not only the regional community projects but also the commercial ones. I have some fabulous commercial projects in my electorate that came out of this program.

Jabiru Aircraft, the biggest light aircraft manufacturer in Australia, had its international type certification approved under this program. It would never have been able to raise the half a million dollars to do it had it not been for this program. Next-door to them is a company called Microair. They have taken transponders, which in some aircraft used to be a fairly hefty size, and brought them down remarkably in size. It is real cutting-edge stuff. They got a grant under Regional Partnerships. In terms of the environment, we had a scallop replacement project, where you take the spat of the scallop, you breed it in tanks, you take it out to a scallop farm, you distribute it into the ocean and you double or treble your scallop intake for the following year.

These are great, innovative projects. In fact, with the exception of one project in Hervey Bay, which the government demonised—the fisherman’s hall of fame—I have not got a dud in my electorate out of this program. I could proudly take anyone here, coalition or opposition, into my electorate and show them these marvellous projects. Australian Prime Fibre at Childers is building a magnificent factory, a goat factory providing food for the Muslim community and for the frozen food market. There is a whole plethora of these projects. As I said, with the exception of one that was demonised by the government, there has not been one dud in my electorate. I would proudly take any of you there. I would love to take you there, Jennie, to show you—the member for Throsby who has a background in promoting jobs and looking after working people—what can be done. What a huge difference these sorts of projects make to the profile of our communities.

I would like to say a few words about another project that was demonised in the parliament yesterday. It is called the turtle interpretive centre and it is a very good environmental project. It was meant to be an aquarium on the south bank of the Burnett River where the council was doing a big south bank development—environmental, aquatic and various other things. The aquarium was to be a lead-in to a natural hatchery at Mon Repos, one of the few hatcheries in Australia where the flatback turtle comes up and lays eggs. It is a very popular tourist attraction from October to March each year. That project went through a hell of a lot of trouble. It finally got state government funding and council funding, but it fell just a bit short, so they came to the Commonwealth for half a million dollars. A mistake, that we think was departmental, was made and they were paid twice the amount that they had sought. Originally they sought $1 million. When some other state government money—I think it was $700,000—became available, they amended their application to, I think, about $570,000, but do not hold me to that figure. I imagine what happened was that the department mixed up the two applications and paid the earlier one. There was no dishonesty or corruption. There was nothing like that; it was just a simple mistake. The council wrote back to the government and said that they did not need that money. In fact, at an earlier stage in March they wrote to say that they only needed $570,000-odd.

So in the parliament yesterday we had the charade of demonising that project. The mayor, who was quoted yesterday, wanted to step away from the project because the EPA in Queensland would only allow them to put the little hatchling turtles into the tank. No-one is going to come from halfway across Australia to see lots of hatchling turtles in a tank. It is going to be a big aquarium. It should have other fish life in it. It should have full sized turtles. I was down at Darling Harbour just a few weeks ago with my granddaughter. That has a stunning display of sharks, seals and turtles—full-size marine turtles; it is a magnificent display. For some reason, EPA in Queensland said, ‘You can have an aquarium there but you can only have these little baby turtles in it.’ No-one is going to come to Bundaberg to see that. The mayor quite rightly said, ‘If that’s the way you are going to limit it, there is no point in us going on with the project.’ That is the story of what you heard in question time yesterday. That is the background to it. It was never one of the projects that I personally fostered. I did work hard for it, and yet it was heaped onto me yesterday as being something that Paul Neville stuffed up. Well, I didn’t. The history of it is very interesting, too, but I will leave that for another day. I have some very interesting history on this particular project and I think it will be very embarrassing to some of the people who tried to demonise it.

I would like to talk briefly in this particular debate about private health insurance. The government has decided to lift the threshold from $50,000 to $100,000. It will make a loss of $660,000 on one aspect of it and a profit of $960,000 on another, with a net cost on paper of $300 million. But it does not say what the impact will be on our public hospitals. Every public hospital I can think of in Australia has waiting lists for elective surgery and even for emergency surgery—for all forms of hospital service. In fact, the member for Herbert might correct me if I am wrong but I think it was in the last fortnight that Queensland’s waiting list for elective surgery actually slipped. So, on top of that, what are we going to do? We are going to take 700,000 Australians and say, ‘You don’t need to take out private health insurance anymore.’ That might sound very attractive on the surface of things. The government’s estimate is 400,000, I might add, but Treasury and others, and the private sector, seem to think it will be 700,000 or 800,000.

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