Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here the member for Perth goes again. Time after time, she will get up in this place and ask the public to un-remember what the Labor Party did when in government. In fact, the government that she was a part of lost government because people were asked to name three achievements of the Labor state government that had been in for two terms, and people could not think of three things.

Let me offer up an analogous parable that serves this motion well. Imagine the member for Perth as the ringmaster in a circus. In that circus no care is given to how many shows there are, or how good the show is, or how happy the viewer is. No money is put into the upkeep of the tent. But everyone gets a pay rise. Pretty soon the tent will begin to tear, the performers will seek a more challenging role, the customers will go and the only ones left will be the clowns—the Labor clowns. That is how the state Labor Party ran the WA economy. Labor celebrated the spending on recurrent expenditure and savagely underinvested in public infrastructure for schools, hospitals, and roads. More damning still, for all the years that the WA Labor Party were in power they never seemed capable of what the former US President George Herbert Walker Bush called 'the vision thing'.

Between 2007-08 and 2013-14 Western Australia's population grew at the fastest rate of all states and over that period increased by nearly 20 per cent, or around 410,000 people. The WA government have addressed the needs of a rapidly growing population, while at the same time they have broadened the economic base and transformed the infrastructure base of the state. Perth has taken its rightful place on the world stage and has attracted global companies to establish new head offices. The WA state government have invested in world-class hospitals, schools, sporting facilities and cultural attractions. Since 2009 they have provided $5.2 billion in Royalties for Regions funding to support those communities which fuel the economic engine of our state. Since 2009 the Barnett government has invested $4.4 billion on roads, $2 billion on public transport, $7.1 billion on electricity infrastructure and over $100 million to support cycling across the state.

And so, when the member for Perth speaks in her motion of state net debt going from $3.6 billion in 2008 to $30 billion in 2015,·she doesn't know or appreciate the difference between good and bad debt. She is not recognising the crippling inequity inherent in the GST distributions. Building critical productivity-enhancing infrastructure such as the Perth Freight Link is an investment in the future health of the WA economy. It is good debt. On the GST, revenue from GST grants is also forecast to decline in 2015-16. As in 2014-15, the distribution of GST will exacerbate revenue volatility rather than smooth it, as the process was intended to do and as the Commonwealth Grants Commission claims it should do.

Forty thousand additional jobs have been created in Western Australia despite the slowdown in the mining sector. Our population is still growing at an annualised 2.4 per cent, easily the highest in the nation. When one looks to the West, one sees a prime example of a leader, in Colin Barnett, and a prime example of good government. When the slowdown started and revenues dipped, the government sought to cut into waste and bureaucracy, not critical front-line services or productive infrastructure. WA under this good government will lead the way for the country in going from the mining boom to the dining boom. I am glad the member moved the motion, because it gives me an opportunity to talk about my great state of Western Australia and an opportunity to talk about good government in action.

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