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

In speaking about the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2009-2010 and Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2009-2010 I am reminded of the Labor Party branding itself ‘economically conservative’. It is akin to that famous line, ‘You can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig.’ If we want to stay in that idiom, if ever the public has been sold a pig in a poke—lipsticked or not—we were sold one on the night of 12 May, when the government handed down its budget.

Labor’s short-sightedness and irresponsible approach to spending has saddled future generations with crippling debt. Every Australian family is going to pay dearly for many years to come. Somehow in the space of 18 months the Rudd government has frittered away what was the strongest economy in the Western world. The surplus of more than $20 billion has now turned out to be a deficit of $58 billion—all that within a year—and unemployment is on the rise, predicted to go to 8½ per cent. In the not-too-distant future we will have one million Australians out of work—an absolute indictment of the party that prides itself as apparently standing up for the workers.

Under the former coalition government there were more workers than ever before, so much so that we had to import workers. Those people who were workers got to enjoy the benefits of their labours, with affordable private health insurance, superannuation co-contribution payments—partly axed in this recent budget—high wages and a government which put away billions of dollars for the future for education, communications and the superannuation of Australian public servants. Now they face the prospect of unemployment, a weakening small business sector, fewer services, massive debt and debt’s inevitable consequence—and we should never forget this one—higher taxes.

Of course, the Labor government says every single economic decision has been framed by the global financial crisis. Labor is busy telling Australians, ‘Don’t worry about what we are doing in the domestic economy, because we are far and away better off than any other nation.’ That line starts to wear a bit thin when a debt-ridden Labor government starts accusing the opposition of talking down the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Holding a government to account for its decisions and the decade-long ramifications of those decisions is what a robust opposition is all about. This business at door stops and saying in the parliament, ‘What would you do?’—it has never been the responsibility of oppositions: governments are elected to govern. They have control of the portfolios, the public service and they have the levers of the Treasury. It is for them to frame a budget, line by line. It is the role of the opposition to criticise it—not to write an alternative budget.

I also suspect that the financial crisis will end up being the biggest get-out-of-jail-free card that Labor could ever possibly have. That is exactly what this new government is counting on. The shadow Treasurer has pointed out that, while the global recession is the most severe economic downturn since the 1930s, it does not logically follow that it is the worst economic downturn for Australia since the 1930s. We should not be subsumed into that sort of dizzy thinking. The government is simply trying to paint a bleaker picture to try and camouflage its own incompetence.

In the year 2012-13, we can look forward to net public debt of $188 billion, which is double that at the previous Paul Keating peak, and a sum which will rack up about $8 billion of interest a year, even at the current low interest rates. Worse still, Australians are looking down the barrel of an ultimate peak of about $300 billion. Labor’s love affair with debt is a love that dare not speak its name, given that the Prime Minister’s reluctance to utter the phrase ‘$300 billion worth of debt’ carried on for nearly two weeks. With $9,000 of debt for every man, woman and child in Australia, and including those in my electorate of Hinkler, my constituents are now carrying a burden of about $1 billion. That cuts right across the electorate: for example, that breaks down to $436 million for Bundaberg, $496 million for Hervey Bay and $60 million for the Isis shire. The debt cannot be paid off in the short term. It is a burden that will be carried by children and even grandchildren. Having to repay debt along with interest means there will be less revenue to spend on hospitals, schools, roads and the environment. Australians are right to question the government’s competency when it comes to handling our economy.

The government got us into the current mess, but even more concerning is its ability—or lack of ability—to get us out of it. Just last week, the Prime Minister told Australians that he had a plan to pay off the net debt—a sum of $203 billion—by 2022, but this plan hinges on economic modelling which shows above trend growth for six consecutive years followed by trend growth for another six years. This is absolute fantasy. It relies on an unprecedented 12 years of uninterrupted growth or growth well above historical trends. To meet this aspirational target, the government will have to deliver budget surpluses of more than $25 billion a year for at least eight consecutive years. Given that the surpluses have met or exceeded two per cent of GDP on only three occasions in the last 40 years—that is, 1970, 1971 and 2000—what is the likelihood of that dream ever happening? Pretty much none.

The government’s decision to means test the private health insurance rebate is another example of short-sightedness when it comes to looking after the health needs of Australians. In fact, I have six different quotes, some as recently as February this year and February the previous year, from the Minister for Health and Ageing that say, ‘We will not be altering the private health insurance rebate.’ But the government has done that. The Prime Minister said, ‘The buck stops with me,’ yet within 18 months the pledge is broken. More than 9½ million Australians hold private health insurance, contributing more than $10.6 billion to our healthcare system last year and freeing up much needed space in the public hospital system. Now the government wants to slash rebates, forcing people to either leave the system or pay even more for their health coverage. It is estimated that by the end of next year more than one million Australians will have dropped out of private health insurance or reduced the level of coverage while premiums themselves will probably go up by about 10 per cent each year.

That is going to take extra dollars from the pockets of local families who have striven to pay their own health fees. I am sure that Australians will languish on public hospital waiting lists because the flood of people leaving the private health system will exacerbate the public health system. In my own electorate of Hinkler, 51,000 people are covered by health insurance and each and every one of them will be affected by the government’s decision. The health minister’s recent statement that there has been significant development and positive signs of improvements in public hospitals concerns me. I do not know what fantasy land she lives in. If we were to follow her line of thinking, we would be right in assuming that all is well with our public hospitals and that people who are forced out of private health insurance because of Labor’s means testing will easily be accommodated in the public system. For a start, just have a look at the public hospitals of New South Wales. Week after week in the Sydney newspapers we read about one regional health council after another not being able to pay its bills, not even being able to pay its food bills much less its medical expenses, and doctors bringing their own swabs and bandages from their surgeries to the hospitals. This is just Third World stuff.

Mr Deputy Speaker, let me take you to Queensland where I live. As recently as March, the AMA reported that the Queensland health system was still plagued by ongoing problems such as severe shortages of acute emergency and overnight hospital beds, staff shortages, high bed occupancy and declines in the standard of basic workplace facilities. The performance report of Queensland public hospitals for the December quarter of 2008 showed that more than 7,000 people were languishing on surgery waiting lists and that 259 category 1 patients were waiting longer than 30 days for their surgery. This is the system that the Rudd government promised to fix at the last election—that all the interstate rivalries and troubles would be torn down and all of a sudden these hospitals would all come good. How on earth will the public system cope when one million people alone will flood onto it from the private health insurance field?

Another abominable budget announcement, one which will scupper the higher education hopes of thousands of young Australians, is lifting the work requirements to acquire the independent rate of the youth allowance. This is a dramatic and an unfair change which will affect an estimated 30,000 students around Australia. Most members will have been contacted by parents or students who are very concerned about this policy. In fact, it is not even going to be grandfathered for its first year of introduction. Many young people strive to get to a university of their own choice and these new requirements will force them either to put work before study or to put a massive financial burden on their families to subside these studies. Let us face it: kids from the regions do not often have the option of staying on the cheap with the family while they pursue their studies from home. This policy change is going to make their lives—and I am speaking mainly of kids in regional and country areas—and the lives of their parents very difficult indeed.

Currently, students are able to qualify for the independent rate by earning $19,532 per year or more during a gap year. For the next year onwards, students are going to have to work for 30 hours a week for at least 18 months in the preceding two years to qualify for the independent youth allowance. What a nonsense that is, Mr Deputy Speaker. Have you ever heard anything quite so nonsensical? A student is going to have to take 80 per cent of a full-time workload. Do you really seriously think that someone doing that is going to be able to study? To get that 30 hours on an ongoing basis over 18 months is just not going to happen. You would be flat out doing this in the capital cities, but you would have no chance in the regional areas, and you would have even have less chance in a country town. Even assuming you could do that, why would you pick 18 months? Eighteen months stuffs up another year of study because most universities—not all—do not encourage start-ups in the middle of an academic year.

In many universities that will effectively mean a two-year gap. And we all know what happens after a two-year gap: it is harder to get back to study after two years than it is after one. It is hard to get back to study if you are working. It is hard to get back to study if you have bought a car and you are paying it off. So it goes on. I think we will have massive dropouts at a time when this country, and the government itself, are crying out for better academic futures for students. The great education revolution! I ask the members opposite from the government: how does this mesh up with the education revolution? Pray tell, because I cannot see it. From a practical outlook, anyone working at least 30 hours a week and studying is clearly not putting their studies first, and I have said that quite clearly.

The other thing I want to talk about is roads. Roads are very important in my electorate. I have put a lot of time into roads and I was very successful with the last government, but I really find great problems with the new government. The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government yesterday tabled something in the House that absolutely staggered me. Out of what used to be the R2R strategic fund the government has now got this Orwellian concept of the Nation Building Program off-network fund. It is the same fund—for this year anyhow. So out of that $655 million, $540 million is going straight to Labor electorates. You might say that that is just the luck of the draw, but wait a minute. These are not going to be put up to Infrastructure Australia for pre assessment; there is none of that. When asked at estimates what the basis of assessment was for handing out these grants, the government could not say. This is the same government who, in this same House this week, criticised the previous government for having a few dodgy projects under the ACCs Regional Partnerships program. There were only a handful of them when it really came down to it but in this case it is hundreds of millions of dollars that is just being handed out willy-nilly without any pre assessment, without any justification in estimates and without any reference to Infrastructure Australia.

There is another thing that troubles me. I have pushed the idea of extending the Black Spot Program because it is the one that goes into regional, rural and country roads, not the arterial roads. It finds dangerous areas such as badly banked roads, culverts and places where people slip off the road—all those sorts of things that you cannot get round to fixing in one go. It is about going in and taking the hot spots—called the black spots—out. It is a great program. When I heard the government was going to extend it, I was prepared to really congratulate them. But there was a catch. What they are going to do is allow it to be spent on the national highways. That is crazy because the national highways have their own program. It is already a Commonwealth responsibility and it already has its own maintenance program. So the government creates this idea that it is going to provide a great Black Spot Program and then it says it is going to take that much of it and put it on to national highway roads. That is just a spin. That is just a cost-shift on the books that does nothing extra for black spots.

I have a lot of roads in my electorate that I want to see done. I want to see one called The Old Toogoom Road completed. Hervey Bay, which is very similar to the Gold Coast—a long thin city—needs another artery right through the middle; one from Urraween Road through to Boundary Road. I want that done and I want River Heads Road done. They are the sort of projects that the R2R strategic program was meant to cover. What we have actually had under this is money that was dedicated to those sort of regional situations—$540 million of it—picked up and thrown in to election promises in Labor electorates. It is just absolutely outrageous.

Pensioners are always a big worry to me, and pensioners did receive an increase in single pensions—and I applaud that. That was long awaited and it is something that I fought for in my own party for years. But to give pensioner couples $5 per week each is an absolute insult. I recognise the need for having the gap between the single pensioner and the pensioner couple closed up a bit. It was well recognised that that gap had to be filled. But surely to heaven you could have given them 15 bucks each—30 bucks for the couple. That still would have very heavily favoured the single pensioner. But no, that has not happened.

Pensioners do have a tough time of it, and to say that the opposition never did anything for pensioners when we were in office is quite wrong. We brought in a range of things including a utilities allowance. We also brought pensions onto the MTAWE, which the previous government had not done. By the time we went out of power that meant about $45 a fortnight more to pensioners than would have been the case if we had stayed on the Keating formula. It is pretty obvious that I did not particularly like this budget, nor do I think that my electorate will like it. I commend the government on those things that they did do, like looking after the single pensioners, but there were precious few of those moves.

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