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

I would be delighted to, but unfortunately for you, you are dragged into this matter, Madam Deputy Speaker, as a government member, so you have to answer some of these questions. But I respect your right and I will do that. My reference to ‘you’ was very much to the people who are here, who are going down the road of borrowing money and saying: ‘Don’t you worry about that. It’ll all come good and we’ll pay it back.’ The record of Labor governments in my living memory is that they have never paid a debt back. They let it accumulate. That is the other point. There is an item here—the home units—that is worth $6 billion. How soon will the interest bill be $6 billion, ongoing? And when will it be $10 billion, ongoing? Where, then, do you find the money for the schools and everything?

Let us go back to the commencement of this government. We had a thing called the Investing in Our Schools program. That was dreadful. That was a program where individual school principals and their P&Cs assessed their schools and made an application for money—up to $150,000 for any school. I have got 150 schools in my electorate and many of them thought $10,000 was enough. Others took the lot. One purchased their own new classroom. They bought computers galore. They bought musical instruments for the kids. But they did not all think they needed $150,000. So now they are going to get $200,000. Is that good public policy? The locals worked out what they needed; it was free and there were no strings attached, other than that the state government over there in Western Australia ripped 17 per cent out of it by insisting that it manage the money for them. I thought that was pretty outrageous. That program was cancelled, and now we have a look-alike—and under which label? Not ‘good public policy’ but ‘saving the nation’—a crisis response.

And then, of course, we had Regional Partnerships. The scheme was rotten and absolute daylight robbery! There were thieves! Let us say that a couple of the projects did not meet proper standards. I created that program, and I received a letter from the Auditor-General saying, ‘Not under my watch.’ However, the reality is we have a new Regional Partnerships. But there is no basic managing of the money. It is just ‘hand it out and hope they will spend it’. Is that good public policy? No. What do we have now? We are going to build all these new houses, but we have not yet built the ones that were previously funded—I do not think they are out there for rent in any number.

The Minister for Education—and just about everything else—has lectured us over the year about all the money that she has put into education. But when the shadow minister stands up and asks where the things are that have been so funded, the answer is that they are not there yet. In fact, on one very significant trades’ training issue, there are five around Australia that have been approved. So they still have the opportunity to contribute to the stimulus and give some jobs to workers. But, when you look at it, I agree with our leader. Firstly, tax cuts would have been the better stimulus and, whatever the cost, they flow through. When we were in government, we introduced tax cuts for about three years and delivered a surplus as well. So, all this argument that you cannot have tax cuts in a surplus is defeated by history.

Nevertheless, when you get down to it, why would you borrow all this money for such mundane tasks? If we really and truly wanted to do something—for example, give those 1,800 miners that I represent down at Ravensthorpe a job—why would we not put in place a major production project? When the much quoted Roosevelt addressed the problems of the United States during the Depression, he built the Hoover Dam. If anyone reads the public works history of Western Australia, nearly every water catchment and every dam in our state was built during that same period. It gave people work but there is still a lasting benefit to the community. Now we have a few lousy millions to put pink batts in buildings. However, nobody has told us what the carbon footprint of manufacturing that sort of insulation is. If it is rock-wool then there is an awful lot of heat that goes to burning rocks into fluff. But that does not matter! It looks good.

The money that was allocated before Christmas for the Christmas party could have been put into one renewable energy project—utilising the tides of the Kimberleys. The interconnection of that energy on a two-way basis with the coalfields of Western Australia, Victoria and Tasmania could have been done for less than that $10 billion. I have circulated that information widely. It would have been job creating now and, of course, it would have left a wonderful legacy—4.2 gigawatts initially—of electricity. That is 10 per cent of Australia’s total generation and 120 per cent of Western Australia’s. And if the government had paid for the infrastructure, the electricity was free. How much would that have helped the elderly and the needy? And, of course, what would it have done for our environment? These are the issues that a competent government would have looked at: major construction projects.

Housing, of course, is a responsibility of government 365 days a year. You do not have a cop out and go for these sorts of fancy schemes under the farrago of a package to save the economy. It is just silly. It is a mixture of all those things, and there is no credit to the government at all in the course they have taken. Yes, they could have had these opportunities. What about flow-through taxation provisions for the mining industry? Unemployed people could go out mining because there are people who will invest for the tax deduction that can flow through to them from the company that is losing money looking for minerals. They would have a job now, and whatever they find we would be able to program and project into our future monetary needs. There are all these good options, and the ones that the government has presented us with have no credit whatsoever. (Time expired)

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