Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Excise Tariff Amendment (Aviation Fuel) Bill 2010 and the related bill. I want to respond to what the honourable member for Wide Bay, the Leader of the Nationals, has just said in the debate. One of his comments was that the government had a casual approach to the issue of safety. I reject that. Nobody in the government has a casual approach to the issue of safety. In fact, safety is the basis of these cognate bills. One could say the previous government had a bit of a casual approach to policymaking in general. I was constantly surprised at how little policy work I saw. We are talking about the machinery of government—resourcing authorities like CASA so that the machinery is there so that they can do their job.

Listening to the honourable member for Wide Bay’s contribution, it was as though all was perfect, all was well, all was working, and that is a ridiculous notion—it clearly was not. There are things that have to be done to ensure that a premium is put on our safety. The honourable member for Wide Bay also outlined how a number of people were unhappy, because we are talking about excise, which is a tax. You can always find people who are unhappy when you talk about taxes—that is not hard to do. I think it would behove the honourable member to spend less time on trawling around finding people who are unhappy and more time on working on policy options and working with communities. But the former seems to be an inbuilt trait of the National Party as to how they operate in the community and also they say one thing in here and another out in the electorate, adding to the confusion. Another comment that the honourable member made goes to the issue of mathematics. I stand to be corrected, but I was sitting here listening and I heard him say that 97 additional staff safety specialists would be hired with this additional excise- and customs-equivalent duty. Then he said that would only cost—(Quorum formed)

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