Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I speak on these appropriation bills, because there are some very exciting aspects to these bills, especially for my electorate of Page. I have mentioned it once or twice before in this chamber, but I certainly want to acknowledge in these appropriation bills the commitment that this government has made to the Pacific Highway. You may well be aware that one of the distinctions between us and the previous government at the last election was the difference in the commitment that we were making to the Pacific Highway. The previous government wanted to reverse its funding commitment to the Pacific Highway from 80 per cent federal and 20 per cent state back to fifty-fifty. This meant they were taking off the table over $2 billion of federal money to complete the duplication of the Pacific Highway. It was with great pleasure when, in my conversations with the then opposition Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, we made an election commitment that, if elected as a coalition government, we would put that $2 billion back on the table. So the federal funds going towards the duplication of the Pacific Highway are actually over $5 billion—not a large amount of money—and when you add in the state contribution the total is over $7 billion. It is great to see that this commitment is in the budget and that it will happen.

Deputy Speaker, as you would know, there are a number of aspects to this that are very important. The primary reason that we are doing this is for the safety of people driving on that road. Fatalities on the Pacific Highway are at low levels that we have not seen in decades—which is wonderful. When the duplication is completed that figure will even go lower, because statistically it is very well proven that when you have a duplication highway the fatalities drop enormously. That is obviously the main reason, but there are other side benefits. One of them is the construction activity that will be generated when you are building it and another is that post-construction there is the ease for transport, the ease of travel, and the advantages that that brings to those areas.

The good news for my community is that the major section that is not completed is between Ballina in the north and Woolgoolga in the south. It is a stretch of about 155 kilometres and a lot of that is in my electorate. As the work on that is about to begin, there will be up to 4,000 people who will be employed directly in the construction phase of this. When you add in the indirect jobs—as we know, there is a multiple that is created when you have direct jobs—there will be over 10,000 jobs created. The people who are working on the highway need to eat somewhere, they need to sleep somewhere, they need to have their haircut and they need to do everything else that they do at home. So the indirect jobs that it will create are enormous—let alone the quarries, the truck transport and all the associated things that go into that.

I am not an engineer but I know that there are some enormous engineering feats that are going to have to be undertaken, such as the Harwood Bridge over the Clarence River. I do not know if you have seen the Clarence River, Deputy Speaker, but it is a pretty impressive river. That bridge alone is going to cost in the multiple-hundreds-of-millions of dollars to complete and it will be a major engineering feat on its own as one small section of that highway. Last month I had the absolute pleasure of having the Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss, in the electorate, and we announced that Pacific Complete had won the tender to complete this last section of the highway. As a small part of this project, Pacific Complete are going to base themselves in Grafton and they will immediately need almost 80 people to be put into an office block in Grafton to start to coordinate and administer this scheme. At their peak, they think they will have 200 people working in their head office in Grafton administering this multibillion dollar program. The day the Deputy Prime Minister visited I organised what we call the Clarence Valley Ready to Work Forum, after we announced that Pacific Complete had won the tender. We had a great turnout. What I wanted to do was to have our community leverage off this. We want local companies to win tenders and we want to leverage every cent possible that is spent constructing this highway to be retained in our local community Very importantly, post-construction of this highway, we want to envisage where our community will be post-2020—what type of community, what type of infrastructure will be built in parallel with this highway so that we can keep growing and moving on afterwards.

I would like to acknowledge some of the people who came to that forum. The Grafton Chamber of Commerce, some real estate agents, the Mayor and some staff from the Clarence Valley council and the New South Wales Business Chamber were there. John Murray, the head of that organisation in our region, and everyone who attended the forum came up with some great suggestions and great practical things that we can do to make sure we leverage this right. Others who attended were C-BEAS—a local business incubator—NORTEC, Epic Employment and some training providers and some employment and job service providers. They can tell us how we can educate our people and what skills they need so that they can be the people who get the type of jobs that we need for this project. They were there giving us their ideas as well.

This is obviously not just the Clarence Valley, though; this highway is going to move directly through or just bypass communities such as Yamba and Iluka, Weddell, Broadwater, Woodburn and many others. I am working with all these communities on how we do this and how we leverage this for all the communities along the route and obviously the ones off it not only during construction but post-construction as well. It is a very exciting part of the appropriation bills that we are talking about.

The other thing that struck me about this budget and these appropriation bills was the small business package, which, Mr Deputy Speaker, I know you would be aware of. There are over 10,000 small businesses, as there are in every electorate. Every time someone gets up and talks about small business in their community, they will mention a figure somewhere in excess of 10,000. We know that small businesses are the biggest employer in our country. They are the lifeblood of commerce, especially in many rural and regional areas. If there is one projection that I think might be wrong in the budget, it is the amount that we think this $20,000 deduction or write-off of taxable income for capital investments in our businesses. In fact, that night I had some businesses from my community here in Parliament House and they were telling me that that was fantastic news. I had two or three unsolicited calls the next day from people who said: 'Kevin, that is the best thing that we have heard in a budget for many, many years.' Like everyone in this chamber, last week I had the absolute pleasure of being home in my community, and every day people were telling me that already they had started to invest money. I spoke to many, whether they were IT companies, hardware stores or machinery companies, who had orders on their books that were looking very promising because of this initiative.

The one thing that this side of politics gets is that every public sector dollar, every taxpayer dollar, that you want to spend on many worthy causes has to come from a healthy private sector. This measure, combined with the tax cuts that we also gave small business—which means that small businesses now have the lowest tax rate in 50 years—is again a matter of us walking our talk. We say that we are the political parties for small business and we are walking the talk through this $20,000 write-off and the cut in the company tax rate for small businesses. This will improve cash flow. We have also, though not necessarily as part of these bills, got on with reducing red tape for small businesses. Already there is anecdotal evidence that small business is going to be driving this economy forward in the next 12 months because of this budget and this appropriation bill initiative. I applaud it and know it is going to be a great success.

In my maiden speech I made much of the Australian colloquialism 'have a go'. We encourage everyone in this country to have a go, because this country has been built on the have a go philosophy. It is essential if we want to succeed as a country and if we want to succeed as individuals. And how do we talk to our children? For those of us who are lucky enough to be parents, what is the one thing that we want to encourage in our own children? If they have a dream or if they want to do something in life, what is the one thing we tell them? As good parents, as good mentors, we tell them to have a go. This budget is about that same philosophy—we want small business people and everyone in this country to have a go so that they can succeed and, by default, the country can succeed so there is more employment and the benefits that go with that.

I know my local councils are very happy with the doubling of the Roads to Recovery funding in this 12-month period. Almost $9 million will be going to the five local councils in my area. Ballina is getting over $1 million, Clarence Valley nearly $3 million, Kyogle $1½ billion dollars, Lismore nearly $2 million and Richmond Valley nearly $1½ million dollars in specific funds through Roads to Recovery. Again, it was very much a Nationals initiative a number of governments ago to allocate federal funding to local councils because those of us who live in rural and regional Australia know the importance of that infrastructure. This is on top of Black Spot funding, and I recently announced almost $3 million of funding to fix seven dangerous black spots on local roads across my community. We know that targeting dangerous roads saves lives—much like the duplication of the highway, it is safer for motorists.

I would like to finish on the philosophy of the budget. There is much made of spending and there is much made of income when we debate these issues. There is not one politician, not just in this chamber but in any level of government across this country, who does not want to spend money. Spending money is nice for a politician; it is a very easy thing to do because of the pats on the back you get from where that money goes. But a budget always has to be crafted with balance—we need our economy to grow. If we are going to spend money, we need to get the money from somewhere. As I continually say, governments do not create money—we are simply a redistributor of money. We are taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. While we always like to fund government programs and public programs to the best of our ability, we have to be conscious that we have to physically take that money from someone else and that someone else is the private sector. We have to make sure they are flourishing, because if we take too much from them they will become noncompetitive. A lot of businesses have global competitors now, especially with the internet, and everyone is competing at some level, no matter what their business, on a global scale. We have to be very conscious of that as well and we have to get the balance right. We are fostering the private sector, almost like a small child, to make sure they grow each year and have the conditions in which to survive and flourish. That can obviously then feed into the public sector.

We talk about sustainability—we talk about sustainability in the environmental field; we talk about sustainability in lots of different areas. We have to be sustainable economically, as much as that might mean that sometimes we do not spend as much money as we would like. Especially in recent times, some European countries are having imposed on them some quite stringent controls because they are in a state that is not sustainable. While we would always like to give more, we have to act the same as we do with our own family budgets—what can we afford, what can we do, how can we protect our income flows while also looking after those areas that we should. We should, as a government, look after those who need support and government money. I commend the bills to the House.

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