Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

When looking at this budget one realises what a thin, pathetic document it really is. Not only did we have a Treasurer who could not mention the fact that it had a $57 billion deficit—it was completely omitted from his speech—but we also had the farce that ensued where he and the Prime Minister could not say the word ‘billion’ for the next week. This is really evidence of the fact that the major blow-out and the cause of our deficit and debt was money committed before the budget was even delivered.

We have criticised the $42 billion expenditure for very good and sound reasons. We have called it a splurge of money, because it delivers nothing for the future. We are experiencing a very difficult time; there are no two ways about that. When the first stimulus of $10.4 billion was spent before Christmas, you could see some rationale there. You could see that small businesses, for instance, had ordered their stock for Christmas 2008 in about July, when the dollar was riding high, almost at parity with the US dollar. They paid 20 per cent, and by the time they got to pay the remaining 80 per cent before Christmas the dollar had taken a plunge and unless they sold those goods in the Christmas market there would have been an enormous difficulty for very many small businesses. So it was sensible that there was a stimulus to ensure that they could survive that period.

What we could never see was why it was $10.4 billion. Why was it not $8 billion; why was it not something else? There were never any figures released to tell us why that amount was picked. The $42 billion splurge looked like real panic spending. There was nothing for the future. The rebuilding of school halls and libraries is important, but it is important work that they are supposed to do all the time. The building of social housing is important, but where is it going to be built? Dare I suggest in marginal seats that will prop up Labor’s vote? And if the answer to the question is ‘pink batts’, it had to be a hell of a question.

If we look at what we could have spent money on, at what would have been a realistic proposition that would have been of value for Australians for the years going forward, I would like to suggest a couple of things. Firstly, we seem to not have in this country a policy which we desperately need to have, and that is a food security policy. We hear all this talk about the Murray-Darling Basin, and the Darling itself and the Murray itself, and the need for water for South Australia. We hear about buyback plans; we hear about the enormous sums of money that Senator Wong wants to spend taking water rights back from farms, which will in fact turn those farms into nonproductive areas and the towns that depend on those populations and those active farms will also become desolate places. So, again, it is a policy which is misdirected—and it could cost anything up to $12 billion if you add in compensation for the collapse of those towns. I am talking about those towns particularly in and around the Riverina.

All these splurge payments of $900 went out, as we well know now, to deceased estates, to people who live overseas—which will not benefit our economy at all—and to people who are in prisons. And, as I said, there was spending on often important infrastructure but not on things that are going to give a benefit to the country in the long run. As I said, building school halls and libraries is a state responsibility which we were addressing. We were assisting them to do that through our Investing in Our Schools program, which was a targeted program which allowed refurbishment and new buildings to be constructed according to need, and not simply by saying ‘Here is the cash, go out and spend it’. Of course, that program was cancelled by the incoming Labor government and replaced by another, which really amounted to a rebadging, and then the additional expenditure was added through the $42 billion.

Let us look at what we could have done. Let us look at the problem of water in this country and the fact that water is in abundance in Northern Queensland and we desperately need it in the south. There is a program being put together that I have been privy to. It has been put together by some people called T. Bowring & Associates, who have experience of moving water in the United States. They have proposed a program which, I think, has enormous merit and needs to be thoroughly looked at. They propose that we could take water from the Burdekin Dam in North Queensland and bring it down to the Darling River. That would allow flows and increased productivity, certainly in those areas which under the water buyback program are headed for desolation. It could increase our ability to export both dairy and beef and the benefits for the future could be enormous.

These people have done reasonable costings and you could basically say that for about $9 billion you could put in place such a project. It is not a piped project—everybody knows it is difficult to pump water. It is harder to pump than gas or, indeed, other commodities that we might wish to pump. But water can still be transferred through cement-lined, open canals where the evaporation loss is said to be around four per cent—not a huge evaporation loss.

But there was another quite exciting part of this program that could be developed, and that is to use as a cover a thin photovoltaic film which could generate full canal power needs while reducing water losses. The solar power could be stored by varying the daily canal water levels to maintain a 24-hour flow. It is an innovative program and it is one which would offer a tremendous benefit for this country for the future.

If we look back on how we feel in Australia about the Snowy Mountains scheme, what an innovative thing that was to do. The Australian people really supported it. Australian people know that in a land of our size where so much water is wasted as it flows into the sea, innovation is needed. A government that would say, ‘We are going to capture that water and deliver it to people so that they are able to prosper and their lands are going to prosper again,’ would support that plan. If you translate the cost of the Snowy Mountains scheme into today’s dollars, I am told that that ought to come out at about $10 billion. So we are not talking about something that is beyond our ability to do. When we are talking about the need for a stimulus, we have always said that there is a need for it to be something that would deliver for the future.

But I would just like to say in the short time that is available to me a couple of things about that very slim and core budget document itself. I hear Labor Party members talk continually about the importance of education and about how they are going to put more money into education. Somewhere along the line they do not practise what they preach. Hidden away in that little budget is evidence of how hypocritical their attitude to education really is. The coalition set up a $5 billion Endowment Fund for Higher Education. That fund of $5 billion, which has now grown to about $6.2 billion, was subsumed by this government’s Education Endowment Fund. It had a slight change of name, but they took the money out of the fund we had created and put it into their fund, and said, ‘We are going to grow that fund to $11 billion, and the first additional payment of $2.5 billion will come into that fund by 30 June 2009.’ The trouble is it was even legislated for. The trouble is that, when the budget document came down, it negated that. The government said, ‘That $2.5 billion will no longer be put into the education fund; it will go into an environmental fund.’ So we have this whole plan of the great Labor government: the Minister for Education, the Deputy Prime Minister, is building an education revolution. You can drive a revolution, you can incite a revolution, you can do all sorts of things. But I do not know how you build a revolution. Nonetheless, that is what the minister said. But money is needed. She said, ‘We’re going to have a bigger and better endowment fund than you are. We’ll take the money that you put aside and we’ll add to it.’ Well, she didn’t. As I said, it was legislated for. That $2.5 billion was to go into that fund before 30 June this year, but the budget overrides it and says, ‘No, no, that money will not go to education; it will go to the environment.’ So where is the real commitment? This is pea and thimble stuff! And there are more examples in this tricky little budget of the government saying one thing but actually delivering something else.

It is quite clear that it is the coalition who are the good managers of money. We left an economy with a $20 billion surplus. We left it with a Future Fund of over $60 billion. We left it with an education fund, established with $5 billion, which has now grown to $6.2 billion. We left no debt. It took us 10 years to pay off the last Labor government’s legacy of a $96 billion debt. We left no debt, which meant that we were saving about $10 billion a year in interest payments, which was money that could be returned to the Australian people either through tax cuts or through services. That is good management. But this government has a budget deficit—and it took just 18 months—of $57 billion and a debt which will peak at about $315 billion. How long will it take to pay off that debt? How much hardship will there be to pay it off? That is the legacy. With all the talk about a temporary deficit, all I can say is that the only way it will be a temporary deficit is if this is a temporary government.

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