Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always interesting to get up in parliament to talk about the federal budget and Tasmania. It's nice to remind members in this place that Tasmania exists, when it comes to the federal budget. Earlier this week, Tasmanians tried to get an answer out of the infrastructure minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, about projects that are locked in for our state. He mentioned agricultural irrigation—a Labor project. He mentioned the Midland Highway—another Labor project. And then he mentioned Inland Rail. Well, unless the Deputy Prime Minister has figured out a way to get a rail line across Bass Strait, while still calling it 'inland rail', I can only imagine that the Deputy Prime Minister has some secret plan to build an inland rail system actually in Tasmania that does a choo-choo circuit of the island. All aboard the 'Barnaby Express'! It would no doubt, like the Deputy Prime Minister, cost a lot of money, go around in circles, make a lot of noise but eventually not achieve very much at all.

Tasmanian members of this House well recall the dim, dark day of last year's federal budget—the so-called infrastructure budget, in which not one significant new infrastructure project was announced for Tasmania—$74 billion for projects across the rest of the country but nothing beyond previously announced projects for Tasmania. If there were any one thing that this government could do to demonstrate its contempt for Tasmanians in recent memory, that was it.

Tasmania has a number of infrastructure projects that could benefit our state economy. Take, for example, the Bridgewater Bridge—a 70-year-old bridge that has been lined up for decades for an upgrade, which is getting increasingly more urgent as the industrial sector and population grow around the Brighton area in my electorate. The current old bridge carries, on average, 18,500 vehicles per day and it locks down into a bottleneck of two lanes. It is a lifting bridge. Boats have to go past every now and then, so it has to lift and vehicles stop, but the heritage lifting mechanism is wearing down and subject to breakdown. Let's face it, things have come a long way since the 1940 build date. So, a new replacement bridge has been on the drawing board for years, but there has been no substantive action by this government to make it happen.

There are the possible upgrades to the Tasman Highway along the east coast of my electorate. It is affectionately known as the 'Great Eastern Drive'. It's fair to say the views are great and so are the communities along the way, but the road itself could not be described as great. It's a winding road with most of it being one lane each way, carrying increasing numbers of tourism traffic.

Arthur Highway on the Tasman Peninsula, which connects the town of Sorell to Port Arthur, is one of the busiest tourism destinations in the country. Sure, it is a state government road, but the state Liberal government has been so inept that it has failed to ensure this road can accommodate its growing traffic needs. And there's the Bass Highway in the north of my electorate, especially the stretch between Hadspen and Deloraine, which could do with additional lanes.

There is a dam or two on the East Coast that could be funded to improve water security. There are the facilities at Mount Field and Ben Lomond to give tourists a better skiing experience or the footy oval at Boyer, the sportsgrounds at Longford. The list goes on. There are many, many infrastructure projects in my electorate alone, let alone the rest of Tasmania, that could have been funded by this government in the so-called infrastructure budget but were not. This minister, this Treasurer, could have nominated any one of these projects. Instead, what we had the other day from the Deputy Prime Minister was the mythical inland rail, which, of course, is going nowhere near Tasmania.

But, of course, this government's Tasmanian failures are not just in infrastructure. In 2015 the Senate held an inquiry into biosecurity in Australia, chaired by Tasmanian Senator Anne Urquhart. It red-flagged, amongst the 26 recommendations, federal funding cuts to biosecurity, which have led to cuts in frontline staffing and less money for research and prevention. Fast forward to 2018 and we now have a fruit fly crisis in Tasmania where 18 cases of flies and larvae have been discovered in Flinders in the north of the state. We've never had fruit fly before, but, since biosecurity cuts came in under state and federal Liberal governments, it has emerged for the first time in Tasmania, putting at risk a $200 million fruit and vegetable industry and the reputation of Tasmania as a clean, green agricultural state. These are the real, practical effects of cuts to biosecurity.

There's not just fruit fly; we've had the POMS outbreak—Pacific oyster mortality syndrome. We don't blame the government for the outbreak. It's a natural virus that comes down from the East Coast as the waters are naturally warming. But, if we had better biosecurity in place and the Liberal government in Tasmania and the Liberal government in Canberra took biosecurity more seriously, perhaps it could have been arrested earlier, instead of seeing the outbreak occur and oyster farmers in Tasmania pay the price. There is a clear need to increase federal and state oversight of biosecurity related issues that have the potential to ruin multimillion-dollar industries and impact thousands of people.

Farmers in Tasmania are demanding that information that has been posted about fruit fly and the exclusion zones be made available on the front page of the newspapers, included in mail-outs and texted to people in the area using the emergency text systems in place. They make these requests because they know that, if people don't know what the exclusion zones are and how important they are, people will unwittingly take infected fruit out of the exclusion zone and spread the disease. The government needs to get serious about doing this. Farmers want to take an eradication approach to these matters, not a management approach—not: 'Oh, well, it's here now; throw up your hands and surrender and just live with it.' Farmers want these issues eradicated. That means that the federal government and the government in Tasmania need to get much more serious about this issue.

Many farmers in Tasmania are from generations of a family working on the land. The impact of Taiwan and China putting a halt to hard-won trading deals, hard-won fruit deals, has a huge impact on employment and cash flow, and, once you have lost those customers, it is hard to get them back. The $1 million cut to Biosecurity Tasmania three years ago—which has been found in leaked documents—had an immediate and catastrophic effect on the Tasmanian market. So it is a series of biosecurity issues. These are not isolated incidents; it is a pattern of behaviour. It is complacency and arrogance.

Tasmania is in an education crisis, with $68 million ripped from Tasmanian schools over the next two years. That had been previously budgeted. The money was there. The money was available and it has been ripped back. The Tasmanian Treasurer will not fight for this funding. In fact, he denies that there has been any loss. What else would he say with his Liberal mates here in Canberra? Just imagine the difference $68 million would make: more resources, more teachers, more science, more coding, specialist teachers, smaller classrooms and more pathways for Tasmanian kids, who are already behind the eight ball compared to kids on the mainland, to open the door to a life of opportunity.

Last year, The Mercury newspaper surveyed the public about the Tasmania that kids wanted to live in. The common theme to emerge from responses was the need to place a greater value on education and, in particular, an emphasis on completing year 12. Tasmanian people believe that improving Tasmania's educational opportunities will be the key to sharing the state's wealth more fairly, but that is going to be very difficult to achieve with the education cuts that this government has introduced. Tasmanians also rated as very important improving digital connectivity—it was rated as very important by 40 per cent of respondents—and lifting the minimum wage was rated as very important by 33 per cent.

Lyons, my electorate, lags behind the Australian average when it comes to education at every level. Only 10.9 per cent identify as having post-school qualifications, compared to 22 per cent being the Australian average. Of people aged 15 and over in Lyons, 9.6 per cent reported completing year 12 as their highest level of education, 19 per cent completed a certificate III or IV and only 7.5 per cent completed an advanced diploma or diploma. Across the board, these figures lag well behind the mainland—and the figures are not going to improve with the funding cuts introduced by this government.

So it follows that Lyons, my electorate, sits in a challenging place for finding a job. According to the latest census, 14½ thousand people reported being in the labour force in the week before census night in Lyons. Of these, 52.7 per cent were employed full time, 34.3 per cent were employed part time and 6.3 per cent were unemployed. Now, 6.3 per cent doesn't sound bad, until you go into the regions. There is 24 per cent youth unemployment in places like Sorell. It's a patchwork outcome of unemployment in my electorate.

The vocational educational system is also in crisis. After years of neglect and the opening to unscrupulous VET industry training companies who popped up to take advantage of the open market, this government is madly scrambling to get the sector under control. There are still plenty of people in my electorate and my state paying off dodgy certifications that they didn't get to complete after the closure of some of these dodgy operators. Telstra's 2016 Digital inclusion report revealed that Tasmania hits the bottom of the list when it comes to digital literacy. This all comes back to this government's sense of priorities. Tasmania just isn't a priority for this government. In digital literacy, Tasmania falls way behind. With virtually no investment from either the federal or the state government, a very dodgy NBN rollout—it's way behind schedule and way above cost—and under-resourced regional schools, Tasmanian kids are simply falling behind, and they're going to find it much harder to catch up.

I think the general perception that if you can use a phone and get on Facebook then you are digitally okay needs sorting out. The internet and good broadband means much more than that. The internet's not just some toy to watch movies on or to play games on. It's an essential economic business tool. It's an essential educational tool. Increasingly it will be an essential medical tool, and for that you need good bandwidth, of which there's far too little in my electorate. Industry expert William Kestin from TasICT presented evidence to the Joint Standing Committee on the NBN last year showcasing the incredible gap between the delivery of the NBN in Tasmania and people understanding how to use the NBN. He recommended that Tasmania start including digital and coding training from kinder upwards—something Labor wants to do in government: increase the level of digital literacy by getting the kids involved, learning coding in schools. That is something this government could learn.

The government has not jumped on this at a federal level or at a state Liberal level. But additional resourcing from a Rebecca White Labor government—Rebecca White's the opposition leader in Tasmania—should she win will come from prioritising bridging education gaps and building skills from birth up. Tasmania needs a comprehensive plan to address the gaps in education and training—one that will address, in the long term, strategies to create a learning state with real outcomes.

Finally, and certainly not least, I come to health. So much has been said about health in this place, and the crisis Tasmania is facing in health. We are in absolute crisis in Tasmania. Ambulance ramping is out of control. Rebecca White, the opposition leader, has been posting photos just in the past couple of days about the level of ambulance ramping at Royal Hobart, and it's scary to see. The ambulances are down the ramp and on the road. That's real patients in real ambulances waiting just to be admitted to hospital. A Rebecca White Labor government will introduce $560 million into the health budget in Tasmania and put 500 more health workers into Tasmania, and that's a hell of a lot more than this government is doing for Tasmania. I certainly urge everybody to consider voting '1' Rebecca White.

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