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

It's always a great pleasure to follow my good friend the member for Moreton. He's a great local member and a great fighter for the Labor cause. But, tragically, he's terrible at squash! He cannot win a game on the squash courts—and it's important that the country knows that fact. Even someone like me, who suffered from asthma in my childhood, can beat him. But it's about asthma that I want to talk.

Asthma is a really serious condition. I shouldn't make jokes at the member for Moreton's expense, and I shouldn't introduce this subject with such levity, because asthma is a very serious disease and a very serious issue. I suffered from it in my childhood, and there were numerous times my mum had to take me to the women's and children's hospital. I think she still carries a lot of trauma from those visits because they were very serious.

Asthma Australia have pointed out that one in nine Australians has asthma. It hospitalises 39,500 people a year and results in 419 deaths each year. That is a very, very serious problem for not just the individuals concerned and their families but also our hospital system because every one of those attendances in an emergency ward obviously consumes valuable health resources, valuable time and valuable funding, which our hospitals could put to other uses were those attendance numbers reduced in some way.

We know that children under 14 represent 52 per cent of those asthma hospitalisations. So it's absolutely critical that we have a national organisation—Asthma Australia, in this case—that can train and educate people to learn how to monitor their asthma, to prevent flare-ups, to prevent hospitalisations and ultimately to prevent deaths. That's why it's so concerning that this government cut funding to Asthma Australia in 2017 by 57 per cent. That is a cut of $4.73 million over three years. That is a very, very serious cut to a very, very important organisation.

Of course, those cuts are not really a saving to the government or to the taxpayer because, if people don't manage their asthma—or any chronic disease—properly, we know what happens. We get more attendances in emergency departments. We get more attendances in hospital. And a hospitalisation in acute care costs infinitely more than prevention does. This would seem to me to be a very foolish way of trying to manage the Commonwealth budget or manage state budgets. It's a very silly way to manage taxpayers' resources, because what you might save in the Commonwealth budget will be more than consumed through increased attendance at hospitals.

Of course, it makes a mockery of the Asthma Strategy 2018 that the government came out with earlier this year, committing $1 million over two years for school and youth programs. On one hand they cut; on the other hand they give. It's this sort of pea and thimble trick in health that does not save a single dollar, does not help families, does not help communities and doesn't help doctors, nurses and those in our emergency wards; it just creates confusion and makes it hard for organisations to operate. Of course, it can potentially cause desperate problems out there in the community. I don't want to slam into the government or harangue them; I just want them to fix what is a pretty simple thing to fix. It's not a great amount of money in the context of the health budget, and it's certainly not a great amount of money in the context of a Commonwealth budget, but it has a very real effect for families, children, sufferers of asthma and, more importantly, our emergency wards, which are obviously under pressure and which we are trying to better manage. I think the government should reconsider the cuts to Asthma Australia.

The other issue I want to raise is that of the GST. I know the GST concerns Western Australians greatly. I know that it's a hot topic in Western Australia. My great-grandfather and grandfather were both Western Australians, so I think I was educated somewhat about the mindset. Interestingly, my great-grandfather was a personal friend of Charles Court—I was shocked to find that out. It's interesting, because Western Australia, South Australia and other small states used to be on a unity ticket about horizontal fiscal equalisation. For years and years and years we were the recipients of funds that were allocated from New South Wales and Victoria. That was for good reason: we were larger states with small populations and we needed to develop this massive continent. That's why we have what is a very fair system, a system that has been developed over time in order to make sure Western Australians, South Australians, Tasmanians and New South Welshman are all treated in roughly the same way in terms of services. That's important because we're all one country. We're very, very fortunate to have a continent to ourselves, not to have divisions based on geography or separatist elements in our country. We're extraordinarily lucky that we live in a country where we are bound by this national ethos.

The GST and its allocations are very, very important issues. Of course, there seem to be mixed messages coming out of the government. On one hand we have the Treasurer telling the country that the GST allocation system is broken, is a mess that has to be fixed. He sent the Productivity Commission in to do a report, and those reports are very serious indeed for South Australia, because they propose $600 million in cuts. These are serious budget cuts to South Australia's GST allocation. They have a terrible consequence for the number of doctors and nurses in EDs, the number of teachers in schools or the number of police out on the streets. They have terrible consequences for the services provided. On the other hand we have two cabinet ministers, Minister Birmingham and Minister Pyne, saying, 'Nothing to see here.' In fact, in the Adelaide Advertiser on 7 February, Senator Birmingham said, 'Right now there's no proposal for change and nothing for people to fight over.' That is a strange thing to say when the Treasurer, on the other hand, said:

The PC inquiry has already demonstrated in its interim report that the system is broken and needs a real fix.

It's very interesting to see how different MPs have responded to this. We have Minister Pyne saying there's no policy to change things. We have Steven Marshall out there saying he would oppose any change to the GST carve-up. Then we have the Liberal backbench, who certainly seem to think that there's something going on in terms of South Australia's GST allocations. We've got the member for Boothby saying she would fight for a 'fair deal' for South Australia and she would fight 'to protect the state's interests'. We've got Tony Pasin, the member for Barker, who's a parliamentary neighbour of mine in South Australia, who 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 he's there saying that he would fight a fierce fight on that principle. He makes the same point I do about services in South Australia. We've got the newly-minted South Australian Liberal senator, Lucy Gichuhi, saying that she had concerns and that if such a change were pursued there'd need to be a cushion for South Australia for a possible impact. That's a different thing. However, she has said:

South Australia continues to suffer from challenging socioeconomic issues such as a high unemployment rate, a low workforce participation rate, an ageing population … among other things.

Rowan Ramsey, my colleague from Grey, seems to raise the white flag, although he does say: 'I will resist change until I'm sure SA's interests are protected.' That's less of a fierce fight than the member for Boothby and the member for Barker.

What this article shows is that there is an intention, a proposal, to change the GST allocations across this country, and the Treasurer has made it plain that he's going to take this to cabinet, but only after the South Australian election. What they're trying to do is, frankly, what they've done on shipbuilding, Holden and a whole range of issues that concern South Australia. They want to have a go at us; they want to have a crack at us—unfairly so. They maligned our shipbuilding industry. They maligned the car industry. They maligned South Australia's abilities and role as a state. But they don't quite have the courage to do it before a state election. They don't quite have the courage to do it when votes are on the line, so what we will find is that, after this state election, a horrible proposition will be made by this government regarding GST allocations to South Australia—and, probably, to Tasmania and the Northern Territory—without any capacity for South Australians to resist it.

If that's the government's grand political plan, I think it's going to go about as well as every other grand political plan they've had in South Australia. Let's not be under any illusions about it, because the Adelaide Advertiser again reported, just this week on 13 February, in an article entitled 'GST black hole worth billions, report shows'. The article said that we will be $2 billion poorer if this carve-up is in place over the next five years. That will have a devastating effect on South Australia, and it is manifestly unfair. It is manifestly out of character with the way we have conducted ourselves as a country. The way we have conducted ourselves as a country is to say: we will have the same supports, the same level of services, the same ideas about education and health, no matter where you live. And, of course, that is most important for those who live outside our capital cities, because they are particularly vulnerable to cuts in services. The further away you get from the Commonwealth government office in Sydney the worse off you might be under such a proposition, and that is just not right. It won't help Western Australians. Those West Australians who live in rural centres relied on this system for years and years in the postwar situation. It allowed us to develop our great minerals industry in Western Australia, and it's allowing us to develop a great minerals industry in South Australia.

So I urge the government to take a longer view of this, not to jump to conclusions, not to embark on a course of action that will undermine the federation—a very important idea of a fair go, of equality, of the fact that we won't have a situation like they have in America, where there are some very great differences in wealth, in education, in social outcomes, in health outcomes and in employment outcomes from one end of the country to the other. It doesn't help outlying states; they're the ones which suffer. It doesn't help people in rural communities; they're the ones who suffer. They don't get a fairer go, if you look at those systems. What happens is that the big cities and the places that generate great wealth—which tend to be cities in this modern economy—are where wealth ends up residing, and that growth has this accelerating effect.

So, let's not embrace the worst ideas that operate in the United States of America, in their great union. Let's keep the spirit, the justification and the fairness that's inherent in an Australian federation—the idea that we should all be equal, that we should all give each other a fair go. I'd urge this government to back off their terrible plans to rip off South Australians to the tune of $2 billion.

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