Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to talk about Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2017-2018 and Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2017-2018. The budget was handed down a couple weeks go by our Treasurer, and I think it is a budget that fosters fairness, security and opportunity. The zombie bills worth $13.5 billion have now been wiped off the slate. The general thought was, 'What is the use of holding them in the forward estimates if they aren't going to be passed by the Senate?'

With the sad events that happened in Manchester with the terrorist attack two days ago, the Treasurer can be congratulated on the fact that he has added $321 million extra funding to the Australian Federal Police. The police and security services do a fantastic job in Australia, and incidents have been kept to a relatively low number, with nothing too serious apart from the Lindt Cafe disaster and the police incident down in Melbourne. Basically they have kept Australia very safe. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that Australians as a people feel safe when we know we have the Australian Federal Police and the Defence Force looking after our borders and looking after our safety in general. Sad as it was in Manchester, we are fortunate that a terrorist attack on that scale has not happened in Australia yet, and we hope it does not happen in the future. But we have extra funding for the Australian Federal Police so they can upgrade their facilities, their IT and their infrastructure to protect us.

I am pleased to say that over 90,000 pensioners who lost their concession cards back on 1 January this year will have their concession cards reinstated. This is a godsend to those pensioners who lost their cards, because the concession card does help them a lot with their weekly budget, inasmuch as they get discounts across the board for rates et cetera. I am pleased that that was introduced.

There was funding across Australia for the Bruce Highway in Queensland and the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Toowoomba, and I am pleased to say that I have $250,000 for a feasibility or business case study to continue that railway line from Toowoomba through to Gladstone, which is a very important part of the project for exports and local commodities, whether it be getting product to the Toowoomba airport or getting product down into the other Australian states. There was $8.4 billion for Inland Rail. There are other rail projects throughout the country that the budget allowed another $10 billion for. That will help other projects like the one I have 20 kilometres east of Emerald at the GrainCorp terminal where the cotton gin is. We are looking at creating an intermodal transport hub. That will be a centre of exports from and imports coming into Emerald. Emerald exports $5.6 billion of product and imports about $3.6 billion of product yearly, so there is a lot of freight goes in and out of that central highlands area.

There was $1.2 billion for skills funding. We have somehow fallen behind with our skills, and a lot of tradespeople have dropped out or retired. These need replacing with other skills that we need to keep our country going. Defence will get a boost to about two per cent of GDP. There is more money for health, with another $1.4 billion in research and development. Of course, the NDIS has now been properly funded for the first time.

The $18.6 billion for school funding will be spread across all schools in Australia. I am pleased to report that not one school out of the 128 schools in my electorate will have its funding decreased. In fact, on average, they will all go up by around five per cent, and that is future funding until the year 2027.

Government spending will be reduced from 26½ per cent to 25 per cent of GDP. The lowest it has ever been is 24.8 per cent. Our prediction is that the budget will be in balance by the year 2021. The five banks who got hit $6.5 billion did a bit of bleeding; we all know that. However, they must have forgotten about the protection we gave the big four banks during the GFC, when the government guaranteed those top four banks' funding. We did not do the same thing for the smaller banks, the building societies et cetera. So they should not feel so bad, especially if they can write that $300 million off as a tax deduction.

I am pleased to say that, as part of the National Party program, our Roads to Recovery Program will continue. The seven councils in my electorate will benefit under the Roads to Recovery Program.

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