John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Make no mistake, this has been a horror budget for the nation, with record debt and deficit. It is every inch a traditional Labor budget. A forecast debt of $315 billion—with no guarantee that this will not grow, and it almost certainly will—is something to contemplate. It is interesting that on the same day the Treasurer and the Prime Minister were quibbling over a mere $15 billion. Not very long ago, $15 billion was a lot of money—until the Rudd government started plunging us into debt of the order that we are now facing. Now $15 billion does not seem very much, does it?

Every man, woman and child in my electorate, the electorate of Calare, will owe probably around $14,500—not including interest. I should add at this point in time that interest is not something that one should forget. Over the last 20 years, including the 10 years that it took us to pay it off, the interest on this last Labor debt of $96 billion was something like $108 billion. That was the interest, not the principle. The coalition left the current Rudd government with a record surplus and a Future Fund. In 18 months, that has not only been blown away but a $16 billion debt has been racked up. There has been $23 billion handed out in cash. When the cash is gone, we are still going to have a huge debt: as I said, $315 billion if we are lucky.

The Labor government is addicted to debt. It has no regard for taxpayers’ funds. Once they make the decision to cross the line from surplus into deficit, restraint seems to go out the window. And what happens now when all the bolts have been shot and the surplus has long gone? What happens when infrastructure priorities are shown to be wrong in terms of returning money to the Commonwealth to pay the debt off? The Rudd government is using the financial crisis, it seems to me, as an excuse to spend billions. For the first time they have taken the attitude that they can borrow what they need for their own particular social agenda and nobody will be able to go crook because they are simply saying that they are providing an economic stimulus package.

The $23 billion cash splash would have built infrastructure needed, certainly in regional Australia, as I am sure that the member for Grey would agree, for new highways—in our case—over the Blue Mountains to open up western New South Wales; the Melbourne to Brisbane inland rail; fixed spur lines; and black-topping many hundreds of kilometres. The good thing about all those is that they would have returned productivity, GST tax that would pay this debt off and not leave the huge legacy which we are going to be left with.

Rudd’s debt of $315 billion will also lead to the big issue of higher interest rates. You cannot have the government borrowing—what was it?—$2 billion a week, an awful lot of money, without creating a problem. Who are we competing against? We are not just competing against farmers. We are not just competing against small business. We are not even just competing against big business. We are competing for the same money that mums and dads want to build a house with or want to buy a car with. So everybody is going to end up paying high interest rates. There is one thing that you cannot do: supply and demand says that the more people who want something, the more expensive it gets, and with $315 billion—at least—of debt the government is chasing money and that means they are competing with all those people I mentioned.

Make no mistake, this is a horror budget for the agricultural sector and the thousands of people who are involved in it. We may not be riding on the sheep’s back but agriculture is still almost 20 per cent of our exports, and agriculture, fisheries and forestry industries, whether it is tuna at Port Lincoln, or wool from western New South Wales, or vineyards in McLaren Vale—and I can assure you, member for Grey, we also have some very good wine in my electorate of Calare; it is not all in Grey, though a lot of it is—are very important for all these people and the work and the jobs involved.

This is a budget that totally ignored original occupation in Australia. Agriculture is still one of the most important sectors, particularly from an exporting point of view, and it is compromising farmers’ ability to feed and clothe the nation and one heck of a lot of the world. One farmer said to me the other day, ‘Who would want to be a wheat farmer. Thanks to Labor at the state level and now at the federal level running down our rail lines, there is no way that a big crop can be moved to market.’ Despite the much-heralded spending of $3 million on a committee to review rail lines in our region, now there is nothing in the budget to address that issue. There is certainly nothing in it to address transport issues in Western New South Wales in particular.

In the electorate of Calare—and I looked at the huge infrastructure spending budget that the Minister for Transport, and whatever else he is, skites about, and all I could find in the Calare electorate were two or maybe three truck stops. Given our roads, I guess we should be thankful for that but when one thinks that every man, woman and child in my electorate is going to share in that $14,500 per person debt, one would have thought that we would get something.

Let us look at the agricultural sector again for a minute. There was $2.8 billion in the agriculture budget last year and $900 million less this time. On top of that, 312 jobs are to be chopped. What minister would allow drought, for example, to become the creature of Treasury rather than of Agriculture? We are talking about a Treasury that even hates giving people back tax refunds, and they certainly do not like funding drought. So instead of leaving drought funding with the people who are obviously supposed to deal with it—the agriculture department—you hand all that funding back to Treasury. Has that got anything to do, I wonder, with the fact that on page 60 of the agriculture budget papers it says that past 2009-10 there are no provisions for drought—not because drought is going to end but because drought programs are?

In what can only be described as a national disgrace, there is a massive $35.8 million cut in government funding to Australia’s quarantine and biosecurity programs. This will lead to the loss of another 125 jobs. Cutting the agriculture research budget is unforgivable. Cutting the quarantine budget is criminal. The Rudd government’s legacy could include—and I hope it does not, but it could with this sort of budget—disease, deficits and debt.

At the same time as the government is cutting its contribution to our quarantine and biosecurity programs it is raising taxes and user charges on exporters who have no choice but to use AQIS services, and they are raising those charges by up to over 1,300 per cent, destroying jobs and export income. Whether it is drought—or ‘dryness’ as seems to be the new modern left-wing term—or climate change, farmers will have to do more with less. They certainly do that at the moment, until the drought ends. This is why the cuts to research and development do not only make no sense, they make a joke of everything that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry or the Minister for Climate Change and Water say. And, having slashed R&D funding in this budget, it is the height of hypocrisy for the agriculture minister to be swanning around Europe as an observer to the G8 agriculture ministers’ meeting in April and saying, quite blatantly, in a press release:

Australia has a major role to play in meeting the global food shortage and boosting global food security ... We believe investment in agricultural research will be essential.

He puts his hand on his heart and says that in front of all his mates, the agriculture ministers in the major countries of the world. Then he comes home and what happens? Vital research and development programs are slashed, with a $12 million cut from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and the axing of Land & Water Australia. There is a resultant $45.9 million cut to research. Other cuts to the department include a $12 million cut through ‘identifying lower priority activities that can cease’ within the department. I shudder to think what that might mean.

Agriculture was the only bright light in our economy in the last quarter and it has now been gutted. Another legacy of the $315 billion debt will be a higher Australian dollar; that is inevitable. Today, the dollar is trading at over 80c. Anything over 75c makes it very hard for our agricultural industries to compete in export markets, particularly in Asia and our near regions. But the budget does nothing to explain the effect of the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme. This is a major omission and will have a dramatic impact on the budget’s bottom line. Another issue which is causing much angst is the government’s decision to tighten the non-commercial loan rules. This measure extends the non-commercial loan rules to include payments by way of a licence or right to use real property and chattels. This reduces the scope for private companies to allow their shareholders or associates to use company assets such as real estate, cars and boats for free, or at less than their arm’s-length value.

On the face of it, maybe that is okay. But what it means in plain English is that some farming families will be hit with a new tax—some farming families who are using accepted practice for family companies. I hope the government realises the unintended—I hope it is unintended—consequence of this new tax measure and exempts our farming families from such a tax. Obviously they will pay tax on the result of that.

I can quite honestly say that Calare is one of those electorates which helps to a large extent create the wealth of this nation. We are a major exporting electorate. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to see that this budget does nothing for regional communities—certainly in western New South Wales and I would think it will not do much for northern South Australia either. There is no vision for inland Australia but there are plenty of nasty surprises.

For example, the changes to the eligibility criteria for the independent youth allowance in last month’s budget are guaranteed to make life much harder for those in remote and regional places. We actually do not have in Condobolin, for example, a university to which you can travel every day on the local bus and live at home. That is the cheap option. I am afraid that is not an option for us. Current gap year students who have, in good faith, worked for at least 15 months over an 18-month period or earned more than $19,500 in that time have had the system suddenly change on them. The number of calls in my electorate offices in Cobar and in Orange on this issue is as great as anything I have ever seen. From 1 January they need to work at least 30 hours a week for 18 months in a two-year period. For gap students this obviously doubles the time before they can go to university. As was pointed out in the only daily paper in my electorate, the Orange Central Western Daily, the changes have devastated residents such as Laura Wannon, who took a 12-month job at East Orange post office for the sole purpose of qualifying for the youth allowance. With her parents currently supported by only one income Laura needed the youth allowance to fund her studies away from home at the ANU in Canberra next year. ‘Qualifying for youth allowance was the one reason I took the year off,’ Ms Wannon said. ‘Now there is really no point in having done that.’ She said losing youth allowance would affect her study option for next year and whether she could afford the move to Canberra.

We will do everything we can to try to put some sense into what is in effect retrospective legislation for people who have done like Laura. They have planned their lives over the last 12 months based on what they wanted to do and now suddenly that is swept away from under them. I do not think an 18- or 19-year old person should have to put up with a government changing the rules on them and totally altering their life and what they planned to do with it.

In addition, Labor has decided to abolish Commonwealth accommodation scholarships worth over $4,000 a year and replace them with a relocation allowance of $4,000 in the first year and $1,000 thereafter. I have more rural and remote students than most; they are fantastic people who are up against it from the start. If you live at Wilcannia, university seems an impossible dream when somebody takes away the props that have been put there over many years. They already have about one-third of the opportunity that others have; Labor’s plans will make this disadvantage far, far worse.

Another issue that has come out of the budget is cataracts and the way the budget measures affect people in an electorate such as mine. Somewhere in the region of 10 per cent of people in my electorate are of Aboriginal descent and live out in remote communities in New South Wales—perhaps not as remote as the north of South Australia, Queensland or the Northern Territory but very remote for us. Some of the communities are 1,000 kilometres from the nearest place, such as Orange, where you can seriously get cataracts treated.

Already 70 per cent of cataract operations are done outside of the Medicare system; they are done in private practice—30 per cent are done under Medicare. There are only five eye specialists operating west of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. They cannot work for nothing. What will happen with the halving of the Medicare rebate for cataract surgery is that they will not be able to do the 30 per cent, which they are able to do now because people are able to afford it with the rebate. They will not be able to do those operations out there in western New South Wales. It is going to have an enormous effect out in Bourke, Brewarrina, Cobar and places like that, particularly in Aboriginal communities. I cannot see that continuing.

We have been talking to the surgeons who do these operations. They wonder whether this is an attack on them or an attack on the people of western New South Wales. The man who invented this procedure is buried at Bourke. The man who is known around the world for inventing the procedure for people in Africa—he has been all around the world—is buried at Bourke, in my electorate. There is nobody more aware than the people in western New South Wales that they had an opportunity to have their eyesight fixed. I think the result of this cut to the Medicare rebate will devastate everybody. We have a lot of people who have cataract problems, not just in my electorate but in the whole of western New South Wales—the whole of regional Australia, if it comes to that.

I would like to finish by saying that we have a responsibility in this place not just to today but to future generations. We stand in parliament now and hear the figure of $315 billion being tossed around as though it were not a big deal. It is an enormous deal. We and our constituents are going to pay for that to a level of $14½ thousand per man, woman and child—without interest.

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