Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010

I am reminded of the delivery of the budget back in May, when I went to a briefing by KPMG after the event and they were giving their assessment of the budget. At the briefing I asked the question: when did the government expect to pay off the debt? A Labor member who was sitting close to me muttered around the table: ‘In 2016. Why don’t you read the budget papers?’ In fact, that is not when the debt will be paid off; that is when Australia stops going into further debt. The debt will still remain. That is when, according to the government’s forward forecast, the books will balance, but we will still have the $150 billion to pay off. So, in fact, I think the government can be likened to a bunny sitting in the headlights. They are paralysed and can only watch the headlights of unsustainable debt bearing down on them. They just hope that perhaps the truck will make a deviation and go around them.

So what will the electorate make of a government which has taken us from a net savings position of $60 billion and is now planning to be in net debt of $150 billion?. The government has not had the intestinal fortitude to face the long line of people and organisations in the electorate to whom it has promised largesse and tell them that the party is over and that its stimulus program is not well targeted, is not adding to Australian productivity and is undermining our ability to compete in the future. We have had the appallingly managed ‘pink batts’ scheme, now officially also a dangerous scheme; the equally appallingly managed Green Loans scheme; and the borrowed billions to put $900 cheques in people’s letterboxes. The government has tried to convince the general public that borrowing money to give to taxpayers to spend as quickly as they can was a stroke of economic genius. I wonder whether, if the government had explained that the $900 cheques will ultimately have to be repaid with interest, the public would have been so pleased with it.

We have had the Julia Gillard memorial school hall project. While it is to be expected that most schools will welcome any assistance, not all have been happy with the funding guidelines; in fact, some are extremely resentful of the autocratic direction behind the project. Local communities, in many cases, are bewildered by the blow-out in costs that they know are not justified. A number of small schools who qualify for the $255,000 assistance have chosen covered outdoor learning areas, or COLAs. They have reported to me that they know these glorified haysheds should be constructed for well under $100,000, when in fact they take the full $250,000. These people are not silly. They come largely from rural communities. They know a shed when they see one, and they know what it is worth.

I might point out also that a number of these schools have been told that, as part of the $250,000 construction, they will install rainwater tanks. One would think that that is a very worthy cause, except that they may not use the water out of these rainwater tanks and they have to be plumbed to the mains supply so they can be kept full at all times. It is a nonsensical suggestion. They are supposedly put there for fire water supplies, but in many cases adequate fire water supplies exist within a very short distance. One would think that, if we are going to put rainwater tanks into schools and capture rainwater—which is a very good idea—we would actually use the rainwater, not just let it sit there.

This government is accumulating the biggest failure on electorate commitments seen in modern government in Australia. Financially inept, the government is prone to grand announcements, having never given a thought to how it might deliver. I refer to an article in the Adelaide Advertiser by Ben Packham, published last Thursday:

An analysis of Labor’s 2007 election commitments reveal many have been quietly axed or are far from being met.

The Prime Minister apologised to the Stolen Generations and signed the Kyoto Protocol, but just one of 2650 promised trades training centres will accept students this semester.

Of 260 child care centres he pledged would be built in schools and TAFEs, only one has opened its doors. And just two of Labor’s 31 promised GP Super Clinics are fully operational.

Promised Healthy Kids Checks have failed to make an impact on pre-schooler health, with GPs seeing just 62,823 children so far.

Plans to attract retired nurses back into hospitals have also bombed, with just 752 accepting a $6000 return-to-work bonus. Labor hoped 7750 would take up the offer.

And 52 of a promised 2500 new aged-care beds have been opened within two years.

Labor’s original election policies have been removed from the ALP website, but a copy of the website as it was on election day has been preserved by the National Library of Australia. Promised A-E grading of childcare centres, listed on the site, has been dumped.

A replacement grading system will use terms such as “unsatisfactory”, “operating level” and “national quality standard” to assess childcare standards.

The much-vaunted “education revolution” is taking its time putting computers on desks—only 28 per cent of promised computers have been delivered halfway into a four-year program. The Government’s biggest broken promise was largely outside its control as it pushed the Budget into deficit to fight off recession.

But its move to scrap its $4.7 billion National Broadband Network was deliberate. The five-year plan was replaced by a $43 billion eight-year project. The Auditor-General yesterday—

this was published last week—

revealed the aborted tender for the project cost … $30 million.

Other—

big-ticket—

promises such as Grocerywatch and Fuelwatch have fallen by the wayside, while the Government is yet to take Japan to court to save the whales.

I did not write that; that is what others are saying. It is a sad story; it is a story of unfulfilled commitments.

Now I have another broken commitment to bring before the House: the saga of a committed magnetic resonance imaging machine for Port Augusta. It is not just for Port Augusta but for the whole region, including Port Pirie, Whyalla, Port Lincoln, the farming areas of the mid-north and the Eyre Peninsula and the growing mining region in the far north of South Australia. This machine, along with another 12, was committed to by the Howard government in the second half of 2007, and its strategic placement in Port Augusta would see it service 75,000 people. Tenders for the installation and operation of the service were called and were due by mid-November 2007. I have since found there were three tenders.

On the election of the Rudd government, the Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister Roxon, affirmed the new government’s commitment to delivering this service, and I welcomed that. Tenderers initially expected decisions within six months, but they have suffered no fewer than three extensions, eventually being informed in September 2009—almost two years after the tender was lodged—that the government had decided that none of the tenderers were suitable and it was cancelling the project. At no stage had the tenderers been asked for additional information or to make any alterations. Nor had it been adequately explained to them why they had been rejected. In fact, the one tenderer who has confided in me said that during a debriefing after the rejection he was told that his submission ticked all the boxes; it was an excellent submission.

The tenderers have had their lives on hold for almost two years, financially committed to property so they could deliver what they had promised, only to be informed at the end of the process that the government was not interested. It is a pity that other parties, namely the government, would not keep their commitments. Tenderers were required to meet a number of prerequisites, including public access, professional standards, business plans, staff training programs et cetera. I have since the election inquired of the minister on a number of occasions as to when we can expect this service to commence, and have continually been referred to the minister’s statement of January 2008 affirming her commitment to the establishment of the service.

Following the news of the cancellation, I contacted the minister’s office and sought a meeting as a matter of urgency, and I was pleased that she granted me an audience. At the meeting I explained that I believed her department had made an error of judgment and she committed to review the process. She also asked me to in the interim not publicly attack her and to work with her on the process, to which I agreed. On 22 December, after the country media had gone to sleep for Christmas, I received information from the minister’s officer reaffirming her decision to slash the project. I had by this time been privy to one of the tender documents. While it requested start-up finance, it clearly stated that if it were not forthcoming then the proponents were prepared to meet the whole cost of establishing the service, the building, the machine, the staff—the whole lot. What a deal for the taxpayer: no money, no risk.

All the proponents are asking for is the operating licence and the Medicare fee-for-service payments—the same as for every other MRI machine in Australia. The financial risk is all to the proponents. If their business were to fail, what would be the cost to the taxpayer? It would be nothing. The taxpayer has not funded the machine or the premises. Surely this decision must just be a bureaucratic stuff-up. I wrote twice more to the minister, asking her to take personal interest in the issue. My last correspondence was on 18 January. I have made repeated attempts since then to elicit a response from her, and last week was told to wait another two weeks. My patience is at an end: I have appealed to the minister in the most reasonable manner on this issue and been repeatedly rejected.

If the minister believes that this is a cost-cutting measure, it is a disgrace, because if we assume these services are delivered anyway—in this case, in Adelaide—then there will be no increase in the number of MRI scans, just a displacement. It just means that South Australians living in the region will not have to travel thousands of kilometres to access services others take for granted. If the department does assess this move as a saving then that is an admission that we in regional Australia are underserviced, and that is even worse. That decision would infer that we in country Australia are second-class Australians.

It is a sorry tale of promises abandoned to go with all the other commitments this government is running away from on the day. There may be some light on this particular project, but it comes not from the government but from the party for all Australians, the Liberal Party, which has always recognised the worth of regional Australia. Last Saturday, the state Liberal leader, Isobel Redmond, committed $2½ million to establishing this service, and the voters of South Australia will have the opportunity in six weeks time to make that happen. It is an opportunity to get rid of another underperforming, smug, out-of-touch Labor government, but the central question will still remain: will the health minister stand by her 2008 commitment and supply the operating licence. If she does not, it will not matter who pays for the installation; it will still need the operating licence.

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