Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Four billion dollars—and a mining tax that is going to cost at least $6 billion to the budget deficit. How can you introduce gigantic big new taxes and actually end up with a deficit? Only Labor can run financial affairs like that. It takes an extraordinary feat of economic incompetence to create two new massive taxes that actually exacerbate an already woeful budget position. There are two great big new taxes but the nation's finances are $10 billion worse off despite these new taxes. And what is going to happen after the Treasurer delivers his government in crisis minibudget next week? It is always families that are going to foot the bill, with debts and deficits driving higher interest rates.

From the middle of next year the carbon tax will drive up the cost of everything, making next winter especially hard for Australian families as they struggle to pay the increased electricity bills or are forced to suffer in the cold. Labor should not claim that this is something that is happening accidentally. The very design of Labor's carbon tax is to encourage people, to force them, to switch off their heaters on cold days and to switch off their air conditioners during a hot summer. This is the strategy: make the price of electricity so high that we cannot afford to use it anymore and as a result there will be less CO2 emissions.

We have now seen the asylum seeker debacle. More people have arrived by boat in the last three days than in the last six years of the Howard government. Does that sound like a successful asylum seeker policy? It is a dismal failure. The welcome mat is well and truly out with their onshore processing arrangements these days: it only takes a few days and you are out living in the city and qualify for benefits et cetera. This has been the greatest encouragement to the people-smuggling business to ramp up their trade. Frankly, it is a shameful example of this government's failure—and it is a failure they could so easily fix. They pulled their own legislation; they failed to bring it into the House for a vote that could have resolved this problem. We could have had this problem fixed by this Christmas but it is not going to be. There will be thousands more people coming before the government have the courage to bring their legislation into the parliament to try and fix the problem.

What we have now is a government that is completely out of control. They talk so much about how they want to care for people and they make big announcements, such as that we must have a national road system—which is in fact paved with press releases. There are grandiose announcements, especially from the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, like $1 billion extra for the Pacific Highway. But, when it came to it, $700 million of it had already been announced, $200 million was being transferred from other projects in New South Wales and the whole billion was going to be spent on planning. There were announcements last week about a whole stack of new projects that are being brought forward to try and make next year's balance sheet look a little bit better by bringing the debt forward. The projects will not be built, but the debt has been transferred from one year to the next to try and help Labor deliver its dream of a balanced budget. Of course that will not happen, no matter what is said in the context of the minibudget that is in process.

In my own electorate just the other day the minister announced a large number of new projects that he said would fix black spots on the Bruce Highway. I do not know whether he even reads his own press releases because he has already announced all these projects, some of them many times, and most of them are already finished. He announced a new spate of activities that are going to happen on the Bruce Highway but most of the projects are already completed and have been for months. I also want to refer to a number of people who are not going to have a happy Christmas this year as a direct result of another government policy failure. They have spoken a lot about their proposed new mental health initiative—a $2.5 billion mental health initiative. We do need to do more on mental health, but what they do not front up to is the fact that the government are actually cutting expenditure for mental health this year. They are actually cutting expenditure. I have been approached by many psychiatrists in my own electorate who are now fronting up to the cruel reality of the limits that have been put on the Better Access program—people who cannot get any psychiatric care over the Christmas period because they have used up their 10 treatments for the year. One person who wrote to me has 63 patients who have accessed their maximum 10 rebates in 2011 and now cannot get any services until 2012.

What are this government's priorities? They go on with all this intrigue and political nonsense, when they should be looking after the Australian people. This is the fourth birthday of disaster, an anniversary of an underachieving government—a government that ought to give it away. (Time expired)

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