Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

As the shadow minister has pointed out to me, this is unlike his opposite number, the minister, who has actually refused to come into this House and speak on this debate—something that I think says everything about this government's attitude to this vitally important Australian tourism sector.

At a time when the tourism sector is suffering, our airports are being hit with these new taxes. The Australian Customs and Border Protection service—an agency that has been systematically savaged by Labor—has faced specific budget cuts to the line that they have for processing passengers throughout Australia's international terminals. Customs and Border Protection have been slugged with staff cuts, they have been slugged with budget cuts and Labor has specifically cut the budget for passenger processing. Last year, Labor hit Customs with a $34 million cut to the passenger facilitation program and this year, astonishingly, they cut a further $10.4 million from that program at a time when passenger numbers are expected to increase from approximately 32 billion to 38 billion in just four years.

So passenger numbers are increasing, the government is charging people more to come to Australia and to leave Australia, yet it is cutting the services associated with processing those passengers. I note that as well as the tourism minister, who has refused to speak on this issue, the Minister for Home Affairs will not speak on this measure either. He is responsible for this from a Customs perspective, and he has not addressed these issues when he made his contributions.

The $434 million hit that Customs took has already had the effect of taking 70 staff off the front line for processing passengers at Australia's international airports. A further funding cut will clearly make these waiting times worse. Airports are already short-staffed and we actually need to put more Customs officers in, not fewer. If the government refuses to do that, and if it refuses to reverse the measures that it has taken to take those front-line staff out, then we are going to find a situation where passenger processing times—which are already increasing—are going to continue to get worse.

According to the government's own figures, Customs has a target of processing inbound passengers within 30 minutes when they come to Australia. In the past they have managed to do that for 95 per cent of inbound passengers, but now they have had to adjust that figure down to 92 per cent. A 30-minute processing time is, quite frankly, not that great. If you are moving about airports around the world, you would expect at more efficient airports that you would get through in a better time than 30 minutes. The Australian benchmark, as set by the government, is 30 minutes. It is not a particularly competitive benchmark, compared to our international competitors, yet the government is not even managing to meet that and, of course, according to its own figures it is getting worse. It is getting worse specifically because the government has cut funding and personnel to the agency that is doing this job, and it has done that at a time when it is allegedly taking more money from passengers moving in and out of Australia to provide that service. The Australian Airports Association have highlighted their concerns about government cuts in this area. They wrote a discussion paper in 2011 that highlighted Labor's cuts and they stated that those cuts have led to an increase at our major international gateways of Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth for peak-period inbound processing of an extra 24 minutes processing time. So people coming into Australian can expect to wait and have been waiting an extra 24 minutes because of the government's cuts. Since then, those government cuts have become more severe, so those waiting times are going to increase and the extra time that people wait at Australia's major international gateways is likewise going to continue to rise.

Customs, of course, have been hit by more than just these particular budget cuts. They are also cutting 190 staff from Customs in this budget, which will put increased pressure on passenger processing times. Indeed, globally, since Labor has come to office, they have cut 750 staff from the Customs and Border Protection Service, an agency that is clearly being pushed to breaking point by a Labor government that has failed them in so many ways but particularly, of course, in regard to border security.

Customs staff numbers and resources are not increasing in line with the increasing numbers of people coming to Australia. Indeed, as I have outlined, they are decreasing. International passenger numbers coming through our airports increased by almost nine per cent between 2009 and 2010, from 23.6 million to 25.7 million. An estimate by Customs showed that international visitors to Australia will increase by more than 150 per cent and international departures will increase by more than 500 per cent over the next two decades. Yet the government's plan to deal with this is to continue to attack the agency that provides this service.

It is not the only way they are doing so, sadly. In this year's budget there has been another major blow for Australia's national security agencies, in particular, the aviation sector. Airports have been slugged with a new tax on services provided by the AFP for national security policing at our airports. Labor's lazy accounting and their requirement to prop up their dodgy surplus have led them to raise $118 million over four years from airports to cover what should be a federal government responsibility. The Australian Airports Association highlighted what they believe is the inequity of this measure when they wrote directly to the Prime Minister and said that airports are a major critical infrastructure where the AFP predominantly play a counterterrorism role.

Security is a national issue and therefore should be paid for by the Commonwealth government. The policy debate about it being inappropriate for entities such as airports to pay for the AFP in a rent-a-cop scenario has already been had. That is why the Labor government agreed to pay for these services in 2010. Airports have found, as so many other sectors in the Australian economy have, that you cannot trust the Labor Party at their word. If they tell you something, there is no guarantee that they will follow through with it and there is no guarantee that it will be delivered. Airports around Australia have found this to their detriment with this $110 million slug to provide policing at our airports.

Labor have also placed additional pressure on airports and Customs through the budget measure of cutting duty free allowances for tobacco from 1 September this year. This will have significant impacts on delays for passenger processing times at the primary line. Labor have not given Customs any extra resources to deal with this change and have not boosted funds for cargo Customs screenings to deal with the expected influx of illegal tobacco that will come through our borders, instead cutting $58.1 million from the cargo screening program, again, at a time when cargo numbers are increasing.

All of these cuts and proposed measures serve only to hinder passenger movement and slug the tourism industry, and make Australia a less attractive destination for international visitors and an inconvenient and expensive experience for Australian passengers passing through our airports. This measure that we are debating today is another deceitful budget measure from a Labor Party that can never be believed at their word. The Minister for Tourism promised the tourism industry that this was not going to happen two months before they brought down their budget. The increase is nothing more than an unjustified tax grab, and it is occurring because Labor have wasted billions of dollars through their failed programs that I outlined at the start of my speech.

The greatest insult, of course, is the fact that they are increasing the passenger movement charge and trying to say that this is just a charge for people coming to and going from Australia. At the same time they are doing it, they are cutting resources to the agencies to process passengers and they are increasing the waiting times for international visitors and Australians travelling internationally. People entering and leaving Australia are going to pay more to wait longer. We do not believe that this is justifiable. As I said at the outset of my comments, we would have loved to have stopped this tax in its entirety. It has no relationship to passenger processing. It is purely about propping up a dodgy surplus.

What we have been successful in doing is convincing the crossbenchers and forcing a government backdown on the automatic indexation that Australian international passengers were going to have to pay on this passenger movement charge. The government will have you believe that this is their amendment. They will have you believe that suddenly, six weeks after the budget, they had a change of heart and decided that this indexation was unjustifiable.

It was just yesterday that the coalition circulated its amendment to this bill, and the amendment is very simple. It reads very simply, and I have it here. It is a very straightforward amendment. It did the job that we wanted it to do, which was to stop this unjustifiable increase on the tourism industry and to stop this annual tax increase that they can ill afford as they are struggling to cope with the extra imposts that have been put on them by this Labor government. We circulated our amendment at about midday yesterday. Suddenly, later on that afternoon, the government had a change of heart and they circulated their own amendment to their own bill, a bill that implements measures from their own budget brought down just six weeks ago. If you examine both of the amendments, as I am doing now, you will see that they are word-for-word, letter-for-letter, exactly the same. There is not one difference between the opposition's amendment that was circulated early yesterday and the government amendment that was circulated a few hours afterwards.

The government will have you believe that they had some sort of change of heart, but we all know what happened here and we all know it is another great example of why minority government is not working and why this parliament has been judged by the Australian people to be a failed experiment that they are just itching to end. When you cannot bring down a budget and stick to it for six weeks, when you have to amend the measures that you announced just six weeks ago, that is a sign of a government that is failing. It would have been inconceivable at any one— (Time expired)

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