Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2008-2009 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2008-2009. We are debating these bills during a very difficult time for Australia’s economy, and I want to take this opportunity to express my support for the measures undertaken by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer over the past few months to prevent Australia following the rest of the industrialised world into recession.

Right from the start the Rudd government showed that it understood the gravity of the threat posed to our economy by the financial crisis that erupted in the US in September. The government took two vital steps: the guarantee of all deposits in banks and similar lending institutions, and the $10 billion stimulus package to shore up demand, boost small business and protect employment. Both of those measures had the support of the opposition when they were announced. When the Prime Minister announced the bank guarantee the Leader of the Opposition said:

We welcome this measure, we support it and we will give the Prime Minister every assistance.

One week later, he changed his mind and described it as a ‘catastrophic unlimited bank deposit guarantee’. When the government’s $10 billion stimulus package was announced, the Leader of the Opposition said:

We support these measures and we are particularly pleased about the measure, the payments to pensioners.

Only a few weeks later he changed his mind and said that the package was reckless and ineffective. In fact, as all responsible commentators have acknowledged, both these measures are highly effective. The bank guarantee, which was announced on the advice of the Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia, was decisive in maintaining the stability of our banking system by preventing the lack of confidence that has undermined foreign banks.

In an environment where leading British, American and Japanese banks were failing, where giants like the Bank of America and Citibank were wobbling on the brink of insolvency, Australia needed to move quickly and boldly, and that is what the Labor government did. The opposition ridiculed the $10 billion stimulus package, just as they are now ridiculing the $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan. The evidence is now in and it shows that the $10 billion package was effective in boosting demand and consumer spending in the pre-Christmas period. This boost to spending put money in the tills of Australian businesses and it prevented businesses from laying off staff. The Leader of the Opposition likes to pose as the champion of ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’, but it was the Rudd government that took decisive steps to protect the jobs of Australian workers and it was the Leader of the Opposition that opposed those measures.

Yesterday we saw more evidence of the effectiveness of the Rudd government’s response to the crisis. ComSec’s chief economist, Craig James, said that Australia will still have positive growth in this financial year. That is an amazing achievement when all of our major trading partners are sliding into recession. The Age, in a misleading line, led its story by saying that Australia may get lucky and avoid a recession in 2009. In fact, this achievement has nothing to do with luck. As Mr James said:

The relative strength of the Australian economy is due not to luck but by policy decisions taken by the Rudd government and the Reserve Bank.

He attributed our success to big interest rate cuts and federal government stimulus programs. He said:

No other country has received the same economic boost from all three factors - Government spending, lower interest rates and a cheaper Aussie dollar.

So if Australia does succeed in avoiding recession, there is no doubt where the credit will lie—it will lie with the current government’s timely, bold and decisive actions.

In considering these appropriation bills, I turn to an area of appropriation where state, local and federal governments have worked together to make sure that the parents and children of Melbourne Ports are provided with adequate child care, as per our election promises. I commented a few weeks ago that the Labor government has fulfilled its promise to establish 260 early learning and childcare centres to address unmet demand around the country. This news was of particular interest to young families in the city of Port Phillip, as the electorate is fortunate enough to have been nominated as one of the 38 priority sites in the first round of funding. In fact, we have received funding for two centres: one in Port Melbourne and one in St Kilda. The St Kilda one is already up and running as far as the funding is concerned.

Unfortunately, the nomination of these two new centres gives little comfort to parents at the two ABC Learning Centres in South Melbourne and East St Kilda, who are no doubt feeling less secure about the futures of their children. The incompetence of ABC Learning’s management is no secret and has been well known for quite some time. The two ABC centres in question in my electorate are not exempt from this strain of mismanagement. Despite having an occupancy rate of 75 per cent, both centres are considered by those who have looked at them to be unviable. It seems that unfortunately even the Port Phillip council may not be able to proceed with the preparatory bid that they have made.

The national press has widely condemned ABC Learning—accurately, in my view—for the shocking way the nation’s now-defunct childcare provider ran its business. Now it is alarmingly clear that a hefty number of the 241 ABC Learning Centres classified as unviable have been subject to exorbitant commercial rents. Unless liquidators or the owners of these properties—mysterious entities who will eventually be got to the bottom of—negotiate new rental agreements, the two centres in Melbourne Ports, in the city of Port Phillip, will probably close by 31 March this year.

Most members are aware that 80 of the 241 failing ABC centres are owned by the Australian Education Trust, which is in turn owned by Austock, a company in which ABC founder Eddie Groves has a percentage stake. Lest we forget Mr Groves—the member for Oxley should know him quite well—he was one of the paymasters of the Liberal Party in Queensland. Groves infamously told Canadian television, when it was proposed that that country adopt the privatised childcare system on the Howard Liberal model, ‘Government subsidies make child care in Australia a licence to print money.’ Very subtle! In addition to Mr Groves, the chairman of Austock is Bill Bessemer, a founder of ABC Learning. Austock received almost $48.3 million from ABC Learning in commissions and corporate services and management fees between ABC’s float in 2001 and 2006.

Let there be no doubt: ABC Learning, Mr Groves and Austock let our children’s infrastructure in their privatised centres go down a slippery slope for too long. The ordinary men and women of Australia have helped ABC Learning stay afloat—thanks to the good management of the Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Childcare, Maxine McKew, and the Deputy Prime Minister—but we cannot support all of these centres forever. Many of them are commercially viable, but some of those that are not come up for decision on 31 March. The onus is on the liquidators or the owners to negotiate new rental agreements to make these centres with large occupancies in my electorate viable. I call on members of the opposition and government to pressure the liquidators and owners to do so. It is imperative that we work together to ensure that the parents at our ABC centres in various electorates, including mine in South Melbourne and St Kilda, not be subject to fear and uncertainty over the future of their children’s care and that proper commercial rent be negotiated for these places.

I turn to another area of the government’s appropriation that I have been following very closely. I am very pleased that we have been very active in my electorate in following through the national promises of the new government. A hundred and five thousand Australians spend the night without a home to go to. This figure is much too high. Our new government takes this issue very seriously, and we have acted promptly. We proposed at the last election to reduce homelessness, and late last year the Prime Minister and the Minister for Housing announced a plan to halve homelessness by 2020. The handling of this issue and, I would say, the issue of Indigenous affairs reflects well on the entire ethical standard of the Australian people and the Rudd government. The ethical way in which we have approached these issues reflects very well on Australia.

Shortly before election night, the then opposition leader and now Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, visited the Hanover Welfare Services centre in Southbank in my electorate. I think that visit was very emblematic of his concern with the issue of homelessness. Also in my electorate, the Sacred Heart Mission caters for the homeless. It operates an organised, efficient and successful program which focuses on assisting disadvantaged and homeless people in our borough. Sacred Heart is famous for its healthy lunch programs, which feed hundreds who might otherwise not eat a healthy meal in an entire day. On the day after Christmas, Boxing Day, 600 people are fed at the Sacred Heart Mission. Local schools have programs in place where students volunteer in the preparation of food and the cleaning up afterwards. One of my staff, Francis Ventura, is a former student of Christian Brothers College in East St Kilda, which runs a program whereby students volunteer their time during school hours to assist with the program. The program is very popular and reflects the good intentions of my younger constituents.

Earlier this year, Deputy Prime Minister Gillard, Australia’s first ever Minister for Social Inclusion, and Justine Elliot, the Minister for Ageing, made another announcement with a private Melbourne based organisation, Winteringham, for a further $3 million to provide affordable housing and support services to frail elderly homeless people. This organisation houses around 800 people on a nightly basis in Melbourne, and the extra $3 million will ensure a facility to accommodate 60 people can be built in Dandenong, in Melbourne’s outer suburbs.

Similarly, together with the Minister for Housing, Tanya Plibersek, I attended a wonderful briefing at the Salvation Army last year. They announced plans to build a centre for the homeless in my electorate, right on Punt Road. I hope this centre, which the Salvation Army would like to complete this year and which has received wonderful donations from local Melbourne philanthropists of great social conscience such as the Fox family, will get support from the federal government in the budget and we can look forward to commencing the fourth project to wind back the issue of homelessness in our electorates. This comes on top of the announcement by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Housing in December last year to provide $1.2 billion over the next four years, a 55 per cent increase in funding for homelessness from the previous budget, as part of the white paper The road home. As I said, this plan is the centrepiece of a 12-year reform agenda by the Rudd government, which aims to halve homelessness and provide shelter for 16,000 Australians who currently sleep rough every night of the year by 2020.

I will turn to another area of appropriations which puts in context the two bills, Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2008-2009 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2008-2009, and which the Minister for Finance and Deregulation spoke on when he was discussing these issues. That relates to the funding of the United Nations welfare and relief association. In the past decade, Australia provided $16 million for such agencies, mainly via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, set up in 1949 to provide funds for Arab refugees. Following the recent conflict in Gaza, Australia committed an additional $10 million aid to the Palestinian Authority, of which $7.5 million will be a direct budget support to the PA and $2.5 million will be for emergency food assistance. This brings Australian assistance for the Palestinians to a total of $45 million since 2007.

I remain in favour of humanitarian assistance to Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, but at the same time we have to be very aware of the chronic corruption and mismanagement of the PA and the history of the unaudited expenses of UNRWA. UNRWA is the only UN agency which exists to cater for a particular refugee population. In my view, it has long outlived its rationale for a separate existence and it has been maintained by a majority in the United Nations for political reasons. In its bureaucracy there are many examples of officials who are in its employ who are also members of Hamas, which is officially classified by the Australian parliament as a terrorist organisation. And of course Hamas was involved in the recent conflict in Gaza, including the unprovoked rocket attacks on civilian population centres.

Even if all inhabitants of the camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon were classified as refugees, the Palestinians and their progeny would constitute 17 per cent of the world’s refugees, yet they receive 33 per cent of all refugee funding, 90 per cent of which comes from the developed world. Millions of other refugees in Sudan, Chad, Congo, Sri Lanka, Darfur, Burma and on the Thai border who do not have powerful friends in the United Nations continue to live in the most wretched circumstances. In my view, compared to the UNHCR, UNRWA is overfunded, overstaffed and unaudited. Notoriously, millions of dollars in aid channelled to the PA in the 1990s was diverted for the purchase of arms and into the pockets of the Palestinian Authority leadership.

The European parliament received a report from the German police that €800 million that went to the Palestinian Authority during the 1990s was unaccounted for and unaudited. This is completely unacceptable, particularly from the developed world, which is providing the majority of this aid. Honourable members who want to know more about this should read both Claudia Rosett’s very powerful article in Forbes on the comparison between UNHCR and UNRWA and the article on the British Labour government’s shift in attitude entitled ‘Palestinian power struggle swallows millions in aid cash’ in the Independent on 4 November last year.

Most Western donor countries have been reluctant, for obvious political reasons, to call the PA or the UN to account over what frankly is the theft and waste of our taxpayers’ money in the morass of corruption and extremism of the Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. The European Union has failed to exercise supervision over millions of dollars given to the PA. The British government, as I said, is more interested in examining this issue now. No other international authority that Australia gives money to would have unaudited expenditure.

I have recently read that colleagues in the United States congress are raising the issue of auditing UNRWA’s expenditure. They are not seeking to persecute people who need assistance, but want to ensure that that assistance is being given effectively and that the generosity and humanitarian assistance of the world is being considered in the context of what other refugees need in, for example, Afghanistan, Darfur and Burma. Australia can and should make a useful contribution to this process by assisting those elements amongst the Palestinians who accept the need for a genuine peace settlement and want to end terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, reckless talk of jihad and martyrdom, the endless exaggerated rhetoric, corruption, waste, factional fighting and lawlessness.

I think there needs to be much more open discussion in Western countries, including Australia, about where our aid money is going and whether UNRWA is any longer an appropriate recipient of our aid money. That is not to say money should not go to the Palestinian people; however, I think the fact that they have 26,000 employees and UNHCR has only 5,000 employees and looks after 11 million refugees worldwide says something about the effective distribution of assistance and the work being undertaken by the two agencies. UNHCR covers all of the refugees of the world and UNRWA is the only agency devoted to one lot of refugees. One agency, UNHCR, aims to get refugees out of their current circumstances and assist them to live the rest of their lives in fulfilment. The other agency seems to be focused on keeping people in their circumstances and not taking them to a new stage where their families and children can benefit and move on.

I will make some further comments on what might be useful appropriations for Australia in future military expenditure in Afghanistan. If one looks at the way the Australian Army training team in Iraq was able to train a large number of Iraqi infantry battalions—which now have obviously secured a successful, free and fair election in Iraq—one might think that that would be an effective way of spending Australian taxpayers’ money in Afghanistan. The Afghan ambassador has told us that the Afghan National Army stands at only 63,000 at the moment, out of a population very similar in size to Iraq. The proposal at the moment is to increase the size of the Afghan army to 126,000—that is, double what it is now. In my view, any request for Australia to increase its forces ought to be focused on having an Australian training team, of the size we had in Iraq, training the Afghans to eventually take over their own security. After all, Australians do not want to be seen as continuing foreign occupiers of Afghanistan. This would be a way of Australia transiting out of Afghanistan eventually, while at the same time providing effective, long-term security in Afghanistan through the Afghans themselves. I do not want to speak further on that issue now, but I will return to it and provide some detail on expenditure, as would be appropriate in an appropriations debate.

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