Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Don’t get too excited! I will be supporting this package. But what needs to happen now, and it has to happen on both sides of the parliament, is to redebate this, and if there is some room to move, if the Leader of the Opposition does have a good idea—and he probably does—I think the Prime Minister should look seriously at that argument. The opposition leader made a mistake when he dealt himself out of the game at the start by saying, ‘I oppose it.’ That was a massive mistake, but he is saying now that he will liaise with the government and talk about this agenda. Maybe there is some room, but if you bring it back to $20 billion what does that do? Does $30 billion achieve nearly the same number? I do not know, but Treasury officials would probably understand some of those issues, and I hope that is why they have gone for the higher number. That is something that has not been really addressed by the parliament.

But there seems to be another agenda built into this, and that is this latent hope that the policy fails. I do not hope it fails; I hope Ken Henry and the Prime Minister and others have got it right, because if they have not got it right they may be out of a job but a lot of other people will fail within our economy. I appreciate the debt situation, and that is what I would be focused on if we were talking about a normal global economic situation; but this is not normal. So we should not talk about Gough Whitlam and Labor debt and those sorts of things in this type of environment. This is different. We have got to try and design a strategy that actually smooths those bumps out. Forty-two billion dollars will not cure the ills but it might put us in a position where we can come out the other end quicker than if we did nothing or did not do enough. I think that is really what we have got to discuss in terms of this agenda and I urge the Prime Minister: talk to the Leader of the Opposition and try to work something through in relation to this, because the people will have much greater confidence if the parliament endorses something. If that is not achievable, voters will make their own arrangements and we will see what happens.

I would like to say another thing in relation to the Senate. I went to the Senate today and listened to the final debate. I have great sympathy for Senator Xenophon because he is in an extraordinary position. I was in a hung state parliament for four years. I can understand some of the pressures that he is under and I can understand that real frustration in terms of the issue that he has in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin. But what I would say to Senator Xenophon is: this is not the time to run that agenda. It is not the time. Maybe there is a compromise where some funds can be injected and can get into the economy. If you base the whole reason for doing this on the premise that we have got to inject some funds into the economy within a nine-month period, if there are ways that money can be brought forward for the Murray-Darling that will be injected in that particular time frame, let’s do it.

I live in the Murray-Darling. I cannot see how you can possibly inject that amount of money into that area of the Murray-Darling in the timescale that Senator Xenophon is asking for. It is an impossible thing to do. I do not deny that it is worth doing over a period of time but, with this package, it is not in my view the correct time to play this particular card. I have been as frustrated as anybody with the way in which governments generally have treated the Murray-Darling, but the previous government spent $8 million on natural resource and water policy, most of which went into the Murray-Darling, and what has it achieved? Just because you throw money at something does not necessarily mean that there has been an improvement. I think Senator Xenophon really has to take a look at that. The Howard government promised another $10 billion; this government is doing a similar thing. Really we have not seen much improvement in any shape or form from anybody. So an injection of massive amounts, billions of dollars, in a very short term does not necessarily have the desired effect and, particularly, will not have the desired effect on the reason for the strategy.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that if these were normal circumstances I would not be supportive of this, because I do believe that in normal times this would be too much money on the table. But this is not normal and we really do need to do something abnormal. I hope like hell that the government gets it right because, as I said earlier, if it does not, we suffer. I do not hope that it gets it wrong for political reasons, because then we all suffer. We will come and go and, as the Leader of the Opposition has said, we will not be here in 10 or 20 years time to take the blame for what we do.

I think we have to work on the assumption that some of the advice we are getting—and there are politics being played on both sides—about the economic scenario says that if we do nothing, we get hurt. That says to me, let’s do something. There are a number of areas out there; the schools obviously need money spent on them and this can be spent quickly. Money can be spent on local government quickly right across the nation. It is not tied into one big project, another Sydney Harbour Bridge, where all the money goes to that, so in that sense, I think the targeting is correct. But if we continually argue about the size of this particular package and forget what we are trying to achieve here, we will all suffer in the way in which our people look at the parliament. What I would urge the parliament to do, particularly the leaders—and I was wondering today whether we would have a different outcome if we had female leaders; come on women—

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