Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australians have come to expect to be disappointed by the Rudd government and its budgets. This is the third budget by Treasurer Wayne Swan and the third time Australians have been let down. The list of broken promises from the Rudd government is almost endless. At last count I think I got up to 47 broken promises. People just do not believe the Prime Minister anymore. They have stopped listening because with a record like that in just the first term it really undermines the confidence that Australians have in their government.

It was a classic budget this year relying on big taxes and big spending measures, and they are going to hurt. Australia is living beyond its means, and as much as people say, ‘Well, our debt as a percentage of GDP is much lower than many other countries,’ everybody knows that in your own family the first thing you do is you pay off all your debt if you can because you are better off because of it. A country is no different. Running a country is no different. I am disappointed when I see $4 billion to $6 billion of interest being paid to overseas lenders now because that is money that cannot be spent on Australians. Yes, there is a case to be made for some level of debt, particularly if it funds long-term infrastructure, but much of the debt that the Labor Party has built up was just a one-off thing and there is nothing lasting to show for it.

There has been a bit of debate recently, members might have noticed, about a great big new tax on mining. All sorts of people had all sorts of views. The government has had a view and the alternative government has had a view. The mining industry has had a view. Economists have had a view, and so it goes on. Treasury has had a view as well. It is sometimes hard for Australians to get to the bottom of what it all really means. Often it comes down to a feeling of, ‘Well, the mining industry was the saviour of Australia in the global financial crisis and why are we now punishing it?’ I thought the Leader of the Opposition made a very good point in question time when he said, ‘Look, if the government is right that this big new tax on mining actually improves jobs, improves investment, then why aren’t a whole lot of other industries clamouring to have a great big new tax on them as well?’ It is a very interesting question. The other thing that many people worried about was is in relation to the threshold where the tax cuts in on profits in excess of six per cent. The question was: which was the next industry that was going to cop a great big new tax on profits?

It has been a great debate in the country and I read the speculation in the newspaper today that we are going to see another great big backflip from the government. It is a bizarre way to run the governance of this country. I worry for my own patch in North Queensland where we rely very heavily on the mining industry. The north-west minerals province in North Queensland is the most prospective minerals province in the world and it very much depends on new exploration, new mines and existing mines. So much of our economy is supported by the mining industry. Yet the government wants to put this penalty on it. I asked in question time yesterday a question on behalf of the mining company Miriwinni, a small family business, who just said, ‘This is going to affect so many sectors of the economy, not just us,’ and that is certainly very difficult for them.

The budget delivers yet another deficit. What is new? Spend and rack up debt is the mantra of the Labor Party, and I guess that the coalition will come back in and clean up all the mess again. I was elected in 1996 when the government last changed and I remember the pain of having to go through and make the savings necessary to get rid of all of the debt, which we then successfully did. I guess we are just going to have to face all of that again.

In a way it is bizarre, too, that the government comes in and has a heyday in spending and everybody thinks the government is wonderful, then the coalition comes in and has this dreadful problem of trying to fix up the problem. It is happening in Britain now, with its new conservative government. Famously, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the outgoing Labour government in Great Britain left a note for the incoming chancellor which just said: ‘There is no money.’ Why does that surprise any of us? The deficit this year is $57.1 billion—still the biggest peacetime deficit in Australia’s history. The deficit next year will be $40.8 billion, the second-biggest peacetime deficit. That makes my point that Labor governments a have long history of leaving debt for the coalition to pay off and clean up. The last Labor government, despite denials, left Australia with $96 billion of debt—and it took them 12 years to rack that up. It took the coalition 10 years to pay it off. The Rudd government has now managed to rack up a similar amount of money in just three years, despite the very healthy surplus left by the coalition government. Economic conservative? I do not think so. And when you look at all the other promises you think, ‘How can people have confidence in the current Prime Minister and his claims of good economic management?’ particularly when he is about to slug the mining industry with this great big new tax.

This advertisement appeared in the Townsville Bulletin this morning. It says, ‘Which North Queensland businesses will be hurt by the government’s supertax on resources? The answer is—all of them.’ People have not quite come to the realisation that it is not only the mining industry that will be affected; it is engineering, restaurants, construction, car retailers, catering, hotels, small business and manufacturing. So you can rightly ask the question: has the government really thought this through? I do not think so. Where there is mining there is more than just mining companies; there is retail, airlines, hotels, car rental, hospitality, construction, engineering, manufacturing—a whole range of industries that make up whole communities. That is all of us; the communities we live in. When the Rudd government introduces the world’s highest resources tax and puts new mining projects at risk, it also risks whole industries and in some cases even whole towns.

The federal government has to think this through properly and it has to consult with the mining industry. It has to put all the issues in relation to this matter on the table for discussion and we have to get a much better outcome. I note that Xstrata has already stopped all of its exploration. It is pretty sad when you have people on the phone saying: ‘I’ve lost my job. What is my family going to do?’—all because the government wants to put this great big tax on the mining industry, so exploration in North Queensland stops. To the government, I say: ‘Hey guys, you are the Labor Party. You are supposed to represent the workers of this country and you are taking their jobs away from them.’ What kind of a party does that, when it is supposed to represent organised labour? It will be fascinating to see how this plays out. I certainly believe that we will see another backflip from the government, and it really does have to happen.

I will turn to a number of other issues. This one is classic of how the Rudd government has behaved—‘Crisis? What crisis?’ As long as I can remember, we have been having front-page articles in the Townsville Bulletin about ongoing problems at the Townsville Hospital. The current problem is the pay saga. Can you believe the Queensland government is not paying the staff at its hospitals properly—sometimes not at all? I heard that somebody the other day, for their fortnightly pay, got a cheque for $72,000. That is the other side of the coin. I suppose it is better to get that than to get nothing at all! That is going on in Queensland, but it is a symptom of a wider issue in the hospital system.

We had the Prime Minister saying, very famously, that, if the hospital systems in Australia were not fixed by June 2009, he was going to take them over. Remember that? What happened? It went on and on, and then in June 2009 there was another round of consultation, which delayed things further, and then, finally, the federal government did not take them over.

See this speech in context