Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and related bills. It is a great privilege to be one of the regional members of this parliament from Tasmania. It is a thrill to be able to represent such a great community—people who are dedicated to the future and who are looking to be filled with hope and anticipation of the future. For me and for the electorate that I represent, I believe wholeheartedly that this bill will provide the stimulus for jobs, that it will provide encouragement and incentive for growth, and that it will provide real opportunities for Tasmanians, particularly those in my electorate of Braddon. This budget is the clearest sign yet that we have a federal government that treats Tasmania not just as a great place to live and a great place to visit—and if you have not visited, you should—but rather as a great place to work and a great place to invest and do business. We have a federal government that is willing to invest in the economic enablers for Tasmania—to give Tasmanian small businesses the confidence they need to take a chance, to grow their businesses and, more importantly, to boost employment.

My overview of the budget as translated to me over the last two weeks by my constituents would be this—and I will try and summarise it fairly and do justice to their comments. Even at the football on Saturday, while having a couple of beers with the teams in Smithton and Penguin, you get a chance to say, 'How do you think it's going? How do you think we're going? How do you think the budget's going? How's the boss travelling?' And with all of us, I am sure, our constituents are never backward in coming forward and telling us their views. This is the view that I have picked up over the last few weeks: the budget was good, the budget seemed to be positive and it was great to see support behind small business. Keep in mind that probably most of the people that I was speaking to were either small business operators, sole traders, partners in a small business or in the employ of a small business. So they were encouraged to see a significant—in fact, a $5 billion plus—injection into the small business sector and the agricultural sector, which is of course made up of small business. So that was their overview of the budget. They saw it as positive and encouraging of small business.

The constituents that I talked to understand the need for the government to live within its means. Does that mean that everything relayed to me over the last few weeks was that they agreed with everything in the budget? Certainly not. But they do, at the heart of their beliefs, know that we have to live within our means. They get that. They understand it for their families, they understand it for their business and they know that that is what is required at a national level. So they understand the need. Even our detractors understand the need to live within our means. When I, as a local member, get the opportunity to say, 'Do you know how much more we are spending every day than we earn?' They go, no, and they do not really understand that. When you put it in terms of, 'It was going to be $130 million a day more in spending than we earned, and we have it back to probably $100 million at the moment,' they look at you with great disbelief. But this is the reality. It is not my reality, it is not Joe Hockey's reality and it is not Tony Abbott's reality; it is Treasury's reality backed up by the best commentators and economists in the country. We are spending more than we earn, and any clown in any circus would know that that is not sustainable.

I will tell you what else they are feeling. They are starting, absolutely, to feel frustration at governance in this country. Again, I would be silly to presume that they agree with everything that this government wants to do, but what they do get is that in September 2013 we were given an overwhelming mandate to govern this country. They are now seeing the strategy or the tactics—call it what you will; I would probably say 'bloody-mindedness'—in the Senate of the Labor Party standing in the way of the mandate that we were given. They will say, 'I don't like that, Brett, but I do accept that you got elected and you really should have a go. If we don't like what you do and if we don't like the journey that you're taking us on, we'll kick you out in three years time'. So that is my overview of what my constituency is telling me.

What do you do, as a government, when you are preparing a budget and you are faced with so many stark realities about the future of this country? What do you do when you come to realise that life expectancy in our nation, in the next 30 or 40 years, will be 90 years of age? With all the advances in health, it could even be more. What do you do with that piece of information when you have it? Do you disregard it or do you take into consideration as you should? As you watch your own children grow, you plan for the future: you plan for weddings and you plan for university degrees—it is just common sense. So how do we plan when we know that life expectancy will reach an average of 90 years of age? In 1970, when I was 10, if you walked up the main street of my city you would run into 7½ people aged between 15 and 64—there was one with half a leg and an arm—before you ran into someone over the age of 65. Today, if I walk up the same street, I will only meet 4½ people on average before I run into someone aged over 65. But here is the thing: in 30 or 40 years time, you will only run into 2.7 people as you walk up your main street, Member for Indi, before you run into someone who is aged 65. We are going to be knocked over by Zimmer frames.

Seriously, what do you do in a public policy sense when you are faced with this reality? That is what governments do. You cannot win as a politician in government, can you? You are accused on one day of being short term and short sighted and only having your eye on the next election, and then, when you want to talk about the year 2030, people think you are an idiot and you should get yourself some therapy. Well, I remind people that it was 15 years ago that Cathy Freeman won the gold medal in Sydney. It was 13 years ago that two big planes ran into two big towers. It seems like yesterday, but in the same amount of time going forward it will be 2030, and these are the challenges we face. You can bury your head in the sand all you like, but the reality is that this budget and every budget that comes after it, whether it be by us or by anyone else, should reflect that in the plans.

We in this government are committed to living within our means and we are committed to energising small business, but among our opponents there is no commitment there. There is no commitment that we can see to rein in spending money we do not have. Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, had 30 minutes a couple of Thursday evenings ago to outline his plan, and what did we get? We got an unfunded spending spree of about a quarter of a billion dollars every minute of his speech, with no sign of where that money is coming from. So this leopard does not change its spots.

We have to face reality: we cannot keep borrowing money. We have a commitment to ensuring sustainability of the pension system, and what do we have from our opponents? No commitment to sustainability, preferring to ignore the problem and make out that it does not exist, when the stats about the age differentiation coming forward that I put up as I started this speech say to any person with any degree of common sense that there is an issue coming down the track. It is a tsunami, in fact, that obviously any government in its right mind and committed to the people of Australia would address.

We are committed to changes in the culture of welfare dependency. There is no question about that. Can I just say that I believe that the overwhelming majority of the nation supports this journey that we as a government want to go on—that is, changing the culture of welfare dependency. But our opponents have no commitment to changing that culture, because fundamentally I believe, sadly, that it suits them to leave people dependent on government, because at the end of the day that just leads to out-and-out socialism.

When it comes to health and education in the state of Tasmania, I want to put a couple of things on the record as a part of the debate on the appropriation bills. Despite all the best efforts of people like the member for Franklin and the senators who do not have much to do but just to make up things as they go along, the reality is that the funding to Tasmanian hospitals will increase by 19 per cent over the next four years. This is on top of the increase of 12 per cent that was in place last year. We are also increasing funding to Tasmania's schools by 17 per cent over the next four years. That is on top of the increase of another 17 per cent just last year alone.

So can I put to bed this myth that there have been cuts to health and education. There have not. You cannot cut money that was never there. We keep hearing this magical figure, $80 billion. This magic pudding figure that was put on the table by Rudd-Gillard-Rudd was never in the budget or in the forward estimates. We cannot afford what we are doing now. We certainly could not afford that. We never committed to it at the election, so how can you cut something that never existed—or was I imagining the Gonski protesters at every polling booth in my electorate? I went to the election saying we would fund Gonski for the first four years but not the last two. The people who voted me in fully understand that. There are no cuts; there are increases over the forward estimates. So I want to just put that on the table for everybody to clearly understand.

Just on those facts and figures for health, I am thrilled that just last week, as a part of the budget process, I was able to formally announce ongoing funding for the next two years for the Mersey hospital, the only hospital in Australia that the Commonwealth has a direct relationship with in its funding. I will not go into the history of that, although it makes for a good story, but it was thrilling last week to be able to announce $148½ million over the next two years, to be reviewed in two years time as the Tasmanian government rolls out the realignment of its health services. For the people who live at the eastern end of my electorate, that is certainly very good news.

Small businesses play a massive role in my electorate. They are the heartland of Australia and we need to pay more attention to them, give them more respect, more encouragement and more incentive. This budget does that. I have always said that if I could just get one in every three or four of the small businesses in my electorate to be empowered sufficiently to employ one more person, we would flog the unemployment figure in my electorate to death. It is as simple as that. That is what is at the heart of the small business package in this budget—tax cuts, not just for incorporated small businesses but for sole traders and artists. That is great news. Even better than that, the budget allows for unlimited accelerated write-offs as long as each individual item is no more than $20,000 in value.

There is a young guy in my electorate who is powering on, building his business and his vision in the community—Lee Murphy, the owner of the Harbourmaster Cafe on the banks of the Mersey where the TT-Line ships go past. Only days before the package was announced, Lee received the permit to upgrade his kitchen and expand his business. This small business package is going to offer him some amazing incentives to do that. What a great, positive, encouraging surprise it was to him: as he was about to invest his money, the government stands alongside him and says, 'Lee, well done—here are some incentives for you; here is some tax relief to reward you for your commitment to building a business in Devonport.'

As a result of the budget, Briar Maritime Services in Ulverstone—the business of Captain Brian Peters and Captain Anne Rutherford—made a commitment to buy two new boat engines and a new work trailer. They even said that, as a result of that, they are going to engage another full-time employee. Well done to them—congratulations. May those two people be a shining example to every other small business in my electorate as they move on with hope and opportunity for employment in the not-too-distant future.

This budget is about jobs. It is about growth. It is about opportunity. It is a budget that is courageous enough to tackle the issues that confront this country. You can either confront them or, for political expediency, you can bury your head in the sand and make out that they do not exist. But at the end of the day those issues exist and the country requires the government to deal with them.

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