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

I will get to that, Mate. You will have your chance to tell us what you have delivered for North Queensland in the last 40 years! We will be building the roads of the 21st century. It has to be funded. The final one is to fix Labor's mess and this measure, in part, does that. But we have to start living within our means. This bill reintroduces the biannual indexation of excise customs duty on all fuels, from 1 July 2014. (Quorum formed)

The member for Fraser is upset about gagging debates and then calls a quorum. That really shows what he is worth. The excise rate has been locked at 38.143c since the cessation of the indexation in March 2001. In the June quarter 2001, excise represented approximately 41.5 per cent of the price of unleaded fuel. It is now worth about 25 per cent. By the end of the forward estimates, the fuel excise is expected to have risen by 4.1c per litre and, whilst no-one takes any joy in that, it is necessary.

When I was first voting in the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser brought in fuel parity. I was bitterly upset with that. I did not mind paying the fuel parity if the money went to roads, but the money did not go to roads. When Paul Keating brought in the fuel excise, the money did not go to roads. People say to me that they do not mind paying it as long as it goes to roads. That is the biggest gripe that people come to me with. What we will be doing with this money is making sure that it is going to roads.

The funds in this account can only be spent on road infrastructure. That is the trade-off that we have to make here. Reintroducing the fuel excise indexation is forecast to raise over $2.2 billion in the forward estimates, and it will all be spent on roads. In Townsville we have Vantassel Street bypass leading onto the Ring Road already underway. We have Townsville Ring Road, stage 4, to complete the Ring Road, making it easier to get from north to south around our city.

In my city we have announced $20 million for the Dalrymple Road upgrade, something that has been going on for a long, long time and which makes sure that access not just around our city but also across our city is able to be achieved. We have announced that should we be lucky enough to form government after the next election, we will be replacing the Haughton River Bridge—and about time too. It is something that has plagued North Queensland for an awfully long time and anyone who has driven between Townsville and Ayr will know just how dangerous and rough that bridge is. You hold your breath as you go across.

After the next election, should we be lucky enough to be elected, the Bowden Road intersection will be changed to a series of service roads so that when you are coming north across the Black River and try to turn right at the ambulance there, you are actually able to do that. I have only just taken over that part of Townsville. Previously it was in Kennedy and for an awfully long time it was never able to be fixed. We will be fixing it.

Who does not pay? What does not pay? Farmers do not pay the fuel excise. Airlines do not pay the fuel excise on this basis, because all the money from airline fuel excise goes back to run CASA, which is another question of course. Mining companies will not be paying the excise. Why? Because they do not use the roads.

Farmers run tractors and off-road vehicles and pumps. My in-laws are cane farmers. Most of their pumps now are on electricity, but there is still a lot of diesel used in those areas. Mines use their own power generation. They also build their own roads and so it has always been reasonable that they should not pay the fuel excise. Capital is mobile. If you make it too hard for people to do their business, you will end up in trouble. The cost of living in North Queensland is very high so we make sure that the cost of our goods, road freight, is not included in this.

I will spend a little bit of time—because I have had a fair bit of time cut out of this—on the modelling debate. Senator Ian Macdonald has said that it is tough living in the bush and, yes, it is. In some ways you do have to spend a lot of time in the car and you do not have access to public transport. But I have lived in both rural and urban areas for long periods of time. There is a trade-off here and a little bit of common sense is needed.

When I lived in Brisbane I lived on the south side and worked on the north side. On a good day, it took me 35 minutes to get to work; on a bad day it took me an hour and a half. To get to my local golf club or play my local sport in Brisbane it would take me anything up to two hours to get across town, depending on the time of day, to get to wherever I needed to go.

Now, in Townsville I live three blocks away from my office. It takes my son 10 minutes to get to school. To get to his sport on the weekend there is nothing more than five or 10 minutes away, and he plays a lot of sport. He plays soccer over at Murray, he plays rugby at Hughes Street and he has got friends all over town. So there is that break. But I have played football in the bush as well and I know that when you leave Toowoomba to play Goondiwindi and St George, that there is a fair bit of distance to be covered there. Schiz McWilliam would be very proud of you there, Barnaby. When you do that sort of thing there are pluses and minuses to living in the cities and the bush to get that done.

I also want to address the flood levy that the member for Fraser spoke about. I was not so much upset about the actual levy being raised, it was just that it was the first option. Labor's first option always is to raise a tax. Labor's first option on anything is never to look inward, never to look at your own situation; it is always to look at other people to make sure that they can pay. That is what I objected to in the flood levy—the very first option was that we should just raise another tax. We are going well now in this country with very low taxes but falling terms of trade. However, if we have a spike in interest rates—and we are a price taker country—we will need to be able to service our debt. If we do not service our debt and if we do not build the roads of the 21st century and if we do not invest in infrastructure, we will not be able to maintain our edge, we will not be able to get our goods to market, we will not be able to get our goods to port, we will not be able to develop the north of Australia. There has been—

Mr Katter interjecting—

I will just take the interjection. The member for Kennedy has been in state and federal parliament since 1974. We have done more about developing the north of Australia in the last eight months than he has been able to achieve in the previous 40 years. So the member for Kennedy can sit there and we will see all this verbal diarrhoea come out of him shortly about where we are going to go and what he is going to do and how he is going to do it, and you know he is just as irrelevant as he will ever be. Your day is done, mate! It is over! You are no longer relevant.

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