Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have just listened to the shadow Treasurer and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition for 30 minutes on these appropriation bills and there was not one solution proffered. There was 30 minutes of whingeing, moaning and carrying on. There was not one solution offered, so go back to the glory days.

First and foremost I would like to pass on my personal best wishes and congratulations to the Treasurer, Joe B Hockey, and the leadership group of the coalition government for the job that they have done here. This budget lays the foundations for our nation to be more productive, more affluent and more inclusive. In September last year, just after Mr Hockey was made Treasurer, he gave a speech that has always stuck with me. He said we have to do three things: first, we have to tell the people what the problem was; second, we have to tell the people what we are going to do about it; and, third and most importantly, we have to take the people with us when we are working.

So what was the problem? I have got only 15 minutes to go through the problems that we encountered over the last six years, but I will go as quickly as possible. Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, has always said there is nothing new in politics, so it will not surprise anyone that in 1996 the then Howard coalition government faced a $96 billion gross debt problem and a $10 billion black hole. In 1996, because the previous Labor government reformed the way we did business in Australia and the way we acted as a government—and that was accepted in a bipartisan way—we had rising terms of trade. But the Howard government was still a government that made tough decisions.

Australia faced the Asian financial crisis in those days. This was very local and we were very exposed. It was a very worrying time in the auction industry, in which I was employed, and in the finance industry. Yet the Howard government went into deficit for one year only. We acted, supported and then corrected. Fast forward to the economic conservatism of the Rudd-Gillard era, when the GFC hit they acted and supported but they did not correct. When Andrew Robb, the member for Goldstein, was the shadow finance spokesperson he gave a speech in here in which he said that what happens in the GFC is sort of like when you are doing your house. You pay your mortgage and you have a set number of expenses then one year you decide you are going to do a renovation. So for that year your expenses, your outgoings, go up. But the next year, because you are no longer doing the renovations, your expenses come down to roughly what they were. What the Labor government did under Rudd and Gillard was raise expenses and that was the new floor. That was the problem we encountered. That was the new starting point so that was the problem.

When people come to me and say, 'I don't know what to believe', and 'Everyone can do projections', and 'Anyone can point the finger'—we have just seen how wonderful the Labor Party was in the last two speeches made by those members opposite, and yet we won 90 seats in the last election. I say to them: whether you believe our projections about gross debt going up to $667 billion is completely up to you. What no-one can deny is that over the past six years we had budget deficits totalling $191.5 billion, with the major expenses still to come on health, education, NBN and NDIS and no plan to pay for them. No-one can dispute those figures. So even if you accept those base figures, we are still left with a massive task quite similar to what was faced by the Howard government in 1996.

We are borrowing $1 billion per month to pay the interest on the debt at the moment. What do we do about it? This budget brings our gross figure down from the projected $667 billion by nearly $300 billion to $389 billion. This budget addresses the issues of the ageing population. Even the opposition leader in his speech, when he referred to taxpayers and pensioners, said that when he was at school there were 7.5 taxpayers per pensioner and today there are five taxpayers per pensioner. By 2050 there will be 2.5 taxpayers per person over the age of 65 and 70. That is not a shrinking workforce; that is a growing ageing population with challenges that have to be faced.

This budget attempts to make the support the taxpayer extends to the community more sustainable, whether it be the pension, Medicare, health in general, education, defence: the lot has to be paid for by the taxpayers and the taxpayers' dollars. The Howard government did it before and was able to hand the benefits back to those who did the heavy lifting. Family tax benefit part B was initially installed by the Howard government because from 1996 through to 2001 the families of Australia did the heavy lifting. They paid off Labor's debt, and the then Prime Minister said, 'You deserve to be helped'. We are borrowing money to support a lifestyle. We cannot continue to do that. No-one likes losing a benefit, but when people sit down and actually start to think about it they understand why we are doing it.

What we said we would do in the last election—every day for three years the now Prime Minister said at every opportunity and every press conference that we would axe the carbon tax, we would stop the boats, we would build the roads of the 21st century and we would fix the budget. The boats: well and truly over 150 days since a successful arrival. Check: we have done it, and saved $2.5 billion by closing down detention centres inside Australia. As a first order of business in this place, we axed the carbon tax in this House of Representatives; it is sitting over there. Those opposite will sit there and tell you they are concerned about people's cost of living, and yet the average family is saving $550 per year, going up again on 1 July because the carbon tax will be extended again on 1 July this year. It is still sitting over there; it can be passed today if members opposite choose to do so. The carbon tax repeal has been passed by us in this place, so that is a check.

Roads: we have $50 billion worth of infrastructure projects—$25 billion worth of roads—approved under this government. There is $220 million alone on road projects in Townsville. The member for Grayndler will probably come in here and tell us that he actually turned the first sod on all of those, that was all done, all paid for previously. So we get down to fixing the budget. We went to the last election saying that we would extend a levy to the biggest companies to pay for a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme. We went to the last election saying we would raise a levy and support a raised levy to support the NDIS, so this notion about no new taxes—what do members opposite actually think we are going to do, win lotto? That we are going to take a system 25 each week and that is how we are going to get the budget back into order?

We need to take the people with us. I have concerns in relation to the way Australia is going, and I share the concerns of some people in this House. There are conversations we have to have in relation to where this country is going. The NDIS is an idea whose time has come, but we must make it affordable. We cannot afford to live in a country where someone is walking down the street and a man is mowing his lawn in an NDIS T-shirt and no-one knows what it stands for. I worry that we have parents still talking about the people that they love the most, their children with a disability, and that they still have to describe them in the worst possible way to get the help they need. I truly believe that Senator Fifield is the right man for the job and I truly believe that this place is bipartisan in its approach. But I cannot help but think that we are still going to be heading down that same track, where parents are still going to be dreadfully exposed in the way they are going to have to explain themselves to get the help they need. I will know that that is fixed when parents can come to me and tell me that they are happy with the way it is going.

I also share the concern about the timing of deregulation fees for the university sector. I have no problems with deregulation itself. I think that is a very healthy thing and I think the way we are going about it—extending it to TAFE students and to subdegree things and trade support loans to another 80,000 people—is a great idea. But you have third parties coming into the system now and they must be watched. We must make sure that we control not only the organisations but also the organisations that participate in that sector. We must have a very strong and effective authority. We cannot afford to see what happened in the VET sector—we saw an explosion of RTOs to more than 4,600 but more than 90 per cent of the results are still produced by less than 100 organisations—happen in our higher education sector. Again, I believe that Minister Pyne is the right person at the right time to take this debate forward. I believe that he is truly consultative with Universities Australia and with the education sector in general.

I want to see the white papers on taxation and the Federation happen as quickly as possible, and I want the discussions to be as open and frank and free as possible. We have a chance in this place to fundamentally change our country for a long time. We are a vastly different place to what we were in 1901. I see kids up there behind the glass and they are watching us here. When you are older, I want to make sure that you are living in an Australia which is inclusive, I want to make sure that you are living in an Australia which is affordable, and I want to make sure that you are living in an Australia where you are not paying for the mistakes of my generation—where you are not paying for the profligacy of previous governments, because you kids deserve better.

So I want to make sure we have those open and frank conversations and I want to make sure that we do the right thing by people. I want to see the red tape reduction practices undertaken by this government to be the catalyst for freeing up business and industry and not an exercise in cost-shifting to other forms of government. The Townsville City Council in my electorate of Herbert—which I sometimes have a fractious relationship with—have seen many areas of regulation cut from other levels of government and simply had the cost of compliance and the cost of regulation lumped onto them with no benefit. This red tape reduction must be driven through COAG so we do not see one level of government reducing costs and another level rising. We must make sure this is a coordinated approach.

I want to see work done to the tender process for all government projects to make sure they support local government, local contractors and local communities. When Senator Arthur Sinodinos was in Charters Towers with me recently we heard a story about a local council out west of Charters Towers. The Flinders Shire Council had costed out a road at $9 million. It had to go to national tender. The cost came in at $27 million. The contractor who won it flew in their team, their workers, the camp—everything. They did the work and not one cent of stayed in the local community. We cannot have a tender process where we are doing major jobs in places like Townsville where the only beneficiaries are McDonald's and the pie van. We want to make sure that our local contractors, our local people, are being looked after. We want to make sure that the money is going through the community.

I want to see an aviation hub in Townsville. I want to see the C27J turboprop replaced with the Caribou based at RAAF Base Garbutt. It makes sense. I want to see the cost of production spread away from Defence and into the private sector.

We talk a lot about Northern Australia and the white paper is to be handed down. I copped a bit of flak in Townsville because there wasn't any projects in the white paper. We must get the foundations right and that means getting a baseline science right. That means backing CSIRO and backing James Cook University to make sure that we are looking at our freshwater options. Once we get the macro right, once we get the picture right, we can then develop. What I will not cop is being held accountable for some dodgy deal done between the member for Lilley and some Independent over a project that was absolutely stone motherless dead in 2011 and was still being kept in the federal budget for two years so they could throw a sling at the member for Herbert.

I want to see us have a better relationship and continue to grow our relationship with Papua New Guinea. Prime Minister Peter O'Neill spoke in Cairns just last week and he said, 'Suddenly we are back on the map with Australia. It is great to see. Funnily enough, Papua New Guinea was visited by no less than three different prime ministers inside 12 months.' He said, 'I don't think we'll ever see that time again.' He understands the need for trade and he understands the need to grow it organically. I think we can learn a lot from Papua New Guinea. They are in the 14th year of economic growth. Their economy is expected to grow at 15 per cent. There is some serious business being done up there. We must be more proactive in getting them to participate in the development of Northern Australia. Townsville is the perfect place for it.

I do want refer to the credibility argument that has been thrown down by others opposite. Last year in the budget reply speech, Tony Abbott, the then opposition leader, stared down the barrel of the camera and told people that we were axing the things from the mining tax—that there were things that would have to go because they were not affordable; that we would not be able to keep on spending the way we had. He told the people of Australia that we had to make some tough decisions, and we have. You have the opposition Treasury now saying approximately 392 times that it was an unfair budget but he says nothing about what he's going to do!

Can I tell you finally, Deputy Speaker Mitchell, when I walk down the street there are a lot of people concerned about the budget but not one person has said to me, 'You know, I want to go back to the glory days of the Rudd-Gillard government.' No-one is saying that ever. I thank the House.

See this speech in context