Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Hansard source

On 3 January 2018, we realised in South Australia that the Productivity Commission and the Treasurer, who obviously has received this report, have put the torpedoes in the water for GST cuts to South Australia. And what's the reaction we've seen from this government? First of all, it was complete delay. They want to delay until after the state election. They don't want to own up to the fact that the Treasurer, Mr Morrison, has said that the GST allocation system is broken and needs to be fixed, yet they're not prepared to own up to the solution the Treasurer might adopt until after the state election. This is because we're going to get a $557 million cut, which will cost us 2,400 doctors or 5,000 nurses or 5,000 teachers or 4,000 police. This is the impact of this sort of cut—a cut of this magnitude.

Of course, when this is reported in the Adelaide Advertiser and when the state Premier, Jay Weatherill, seeks to make this a legitimate issue for the South Australian election, for the opposition leader, for the Liberal Party, what do we get? I'll tell you what we got. We got a great bit of confusion from the South Australian Liberal Party. On 7 February in an Adelaide Advertiser report called 'Hands off our Ca$h', we had cabinet ministers Pyne and Simon Birmingham quelling fears by 'emphatically stating':

… the Turnbull government had no policy to change the way the cash was distributed.

Mr Pyne said:

The Productivity Commission writes reports, the Government makes policy. There is no policy to change the GST mix …

However, we know that Mr Morrison has said the system is broken and needs to be fixed, so what we get in that very same story is the member for Boothby saying she's going to fight for 'a fair deal for SA'. That seems to indicate that something's going on in federal cabinet regarding South Australia's GST allocations. Why else would she say that she's going to fight to protect it? Who is she seeking to protect it from if not the federal Treasurer, if not the federal cabinet, if not the Turnbull government? We know she's had much to say about banking reforms, bizarrely being on the side of the banks, unlike most Australians; she's on the side of the banks, not on the side of the people.

We then, of course, have the member for Barker, who just spoke. He made a very parochial speech, but, to The Advertiser, he said:

Any attempt to undermine this principle will be met with a fierce fight from me and, I would expect, every other South Australian in Federal Parliament …

So what we're seeing is the federal government putting on all the mood music. We know Morrison, Cormann and the Prime Minister are putting on all this mood music in Western Australia in a desperate attempt to deal with their political problems over there. The state government have blown their budget. The previous state Liberal government blew their budget and left the incoming Labor government with that problem. And what we find here is a bunch of state Liberal Party backbenchers from South Australia fighting a desperate rearguard action against their own cabinet. This is division over an issue which vitally affects South Australia—that is, our GST allocation.

The same article says:

Grey MP Rowan Ramsay said the current GST carve-up was not sustainable in the long-term but suggested putting a minimum on the cents in the dollar return …

So he's making up his own policy. He's not for cabinet. He's not for the member for Barker and the member for Boothby's policy of protecting South Australia's allocation. He's for his own policy on the run. We know that the member for Grey tends to just say whatever comes into his head at any moment, and it's normally a bit wayward and a bit deranged, and so here we have him making his own statements on horizontal fiscal equalisation.

This is the fairest system in the world for allocating these funds. It means that South Australians get a fair go. That's all we want—a fair go—because we need to develop the country. We're developing a vast continent, with small populations often in big parts of it. We need to keep the GST system the way it is, and we certainly need a position of no disadvantage to South Australia. But what we've got is Liberal cabinet ministers and Liberal backbenchers all at sea over their own government's policy.

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