Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak about the budget, because the budget is a very important part of governing. Ultimately, the first role of this government is the defence of the Australian people, to ensure that Australians are safe and that provision is made for our welfare. The next is to create an economy that rewards endeavour. You have to reward endeavour, because the government doesn't have any money; the government only has your money. We need to get that clear: we spend your money, and it needs to be spent responsibly. But we also, if we can, should give some back, because an economy has to create endeavour. Those who get out of bed earlier than others—those who take risks—ultimately need to get rewarded for that. If you fail to grasp that, you get to a point where you stifle the money that comes into this place and the country becomes poorer. Ultimately, a country is rich when its citizens are rich. I think that is the difference and the contrast between how we view a budget and how the Australian Labor Party views a budget. In this budget, we must make sure we look after those who can't look after themselves. We have a duty of care to our senior Australians. We have a duty of care to educate the future and to look after our children. We also have a duty of care to be a beacon to other countries in the world, and I will touch on Australian aid in this budget as well.

Let's just run through this: in 2007, the nation had no government debt, and now we have government debt of $349.9 billion. That is partly from the years of the Labor Party in power, but we have also run deficit budgets ourselves, so we need to look very clearly at that. This year the budget will have a deficit of $18.2 billion and next year a deficit of $14.5 billion, but by 2019-20 we will have a surplus budget of $2.2 billion. I need to make it very clear for those who might be listening that a surplus budget does not mean we no longer have debt. A surplus budget simply means that we have spent less money than we have received, and that then affords us the opportunity to start to pay down debt. We have a long way to go. In 2020-21 we will have an $11 billion surplus, and in 2021-22 there is a projected surplus of $16.6 billion. But that is still only chipping away at the debt.

But I think there are some very good things in this budget contained in the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2018-2019, and it's about investing in growth and investing in incentives. I want to just touch on the $530 tax rebate for the people who live in my patch. Seventy-three per cent of the people who live in my patch earn under $87,000. The electorate of Mallee is not an electorate made up of people who are very rich. We're not an inner city Sydney or a Brighton or some of those suburbs in Melbourne, but we are very fair and decent people. So we will be quite appreciative of this tax cut.

I noticed that someone put on my Facebook, 'You can keep my $10, and that should go to health and education.' I replied very quickly that I can give you some schools and some hospitals in my patch that would happily take his donation of $530. He didn't reply, and I put that challenge out there. But can I say that that does create incentive, and $530 for those people in that year will be spinning through our local economy. They will spend it on essential things. That's a family trip to the pool. That's a little camping trip on the Murray, a great place. Spinning money through our economy is very important to our country towns. We have over 17,000 small businesses in the electorate of Mallee, and they will benefit from the $20,000 instant tax write-off. There are things that you can deduct instantly to make your business grow. I think that's been very welcome.

One of the things I'm particularly proud of in this budget is addressing health concerns. Unfortunately, we have a shortage of general practitioners in my patch. If you're a general practitioner who has tuned in on the radio, listening to the great debate in parliament, because that's what a good general practitioner should do, can I just say that there are very welcoming people in my patch who would love to have you. Part of this budget is that we have invested $550 million into a stronger rural health strategy. This means that GPs will be able to train in a regional area from start to finish. More than that, there's going to be the opportunity for a graduate who practices in a rural area to have a Medicare provider number, so they will be able to practice. Also, there will be support around graduate positions. What was happening was that people would train in the regions but then have to go to the city for those graduate years, and somehow the attraction of the great lights of the city—whether they fell in love or enjoyed the coffee—meant they didn't come back. Just on that, I might point out that Mildura was the second city in Victoria to get a barista, so if you want good coffee as a GP, you can get it in our part of the world.

There's been some good money put aside for regional development, with round 3 of the Building Better Regions Fund. This is the fund that in our patch has built the Swan Hill saleyards upgrade; the Horsham North Children's Hub; some facilities around recreational lakes, like Tchum Lake, Watchem Lake, Wooroonook Lake; the Mildura runway upgrade; and, recently, the Mallee Accommodation and Support Program facilities, which got $2.4 million, for which I did a sod turning the other day. Having that fund so that councils and communities can work with me to try and tender for it has also been welcome.

I am very pleased to see more money for education in our patch. There are 119 schools in the electorate of Mallee, and every one of those schools gets more. One of the things I've been advocating for, surprisingly, more than anything in the lead-up to the budget, was the school chaplaincy program. Because some of my country schools are reasonably small country schools, they wouldn't have an opportunity to have a school counsellor or wouldn't be able to afford a school counsellor. I was very pleased to see that the National School Chaplaincy Program of $247 million over the forward estimates has been committed. When I started as a member of parliament five years ago I was pulled aside by a young lady, who was 17, and her dad. They said they were in Swan Hill and that there were no mental health support services at all for her when she was going through a difficult time. We now have three headspaces in the electorate of Mallee, in Mildura, Swan Hill and Horsham, combined with the school chaplaincy programs. So they have that initial point of contact within the school network and can be directed to headspace for more clinical support. It makes me very pleased that we are addressing the needs of youth mental health in the great electorate of Mallee.

We have massive infrastructure needs in our patch. One of the great things I've got to say about my electorate is that we are a net contributor to the Australian economy, with $5.3 billion annually of agricultural product being produced—not bad—with only 140,000 residents of Australia. But those things have to be carted on rail or on roads. I was pleased to see that the federal budget continues to fund the Murray Basin Rail Project, with a $440 million upgrade. We are now seeing upgrades on our roads. Of course, something I'd like to see more of, frankly, is Roads to Recovery. There is no point producing something on a farm and not being able to get that onto a national road. You still need to be able to get that 60-tonne B-double down that dirt country road to get the product to the market. I think we should be doing more, and we should continue a higher allocation of that.

One of the things that is also very relevant to the people in my patch is funding for pensioners. Now, I'm going to touch on this a little bit. There are 20,234 pensioners in the electorate of Mallee. Whilst I was pleased to see that a pensioner can earn $300 per fortnight without it upsetting their pension payments, I would have liked to have seen that able to be accumulated in a lump sum and then averaged across a year. I will explain why this is. Three hundred dollars per fortnight is $7,800 over a 12-month period.

Increasingly, many of our senior Australians are going to be an important aspect of filling the labour shortage, particularly in a horticultural region. I was at Boundary Bend Olives the other day, and they were picking their olive harvest. They were employing 130 people for about an eight-week period. They have people who tend to be grey nomads who come in and work. Once they've worked the harvest, they will go up to Queensland and spend the money there, or maybe they'll even go down to Tasmania and spend the money down there, which would make some members in this place very happy—or even across to South Australia, if they're really scraping the barrel for places they might go to visit!

We should be empowering them to do that seasonal work. Rather than making it just $300 per fortnight, it makes sense that they could accumulate $7,800—so work a vintage, work a season in horticulture or work somewhere—and then go away and take their holidays, and they will largely spend that money locally. So, whilst I'm very pleased to see that our pensioners can earn a little bit more without it upsetting their pension, I would like that to be able to be accumulated and then averaged over a 12-month period both to provide an incentive for our workforce in our horticultural industry and to create more flexibility for our senior Australians who choose to do something in the workforce. I've got to say: pensioners have a lot of skills. We should empower them. They've still got a lot to offer Australia.

One thing I think we need to look at very seriously in a welfare payment—and it concerns me a great deal—is the impacts on single pensioners. If you are two pensioners living in a household, by the time you pay your rates and by the time you pay your power bill, you can get through. It's not a rich, vibrant living, but you can get through. But what happens when one of those pensioners passes away? The rates still need to be paid. The power bill still needs to be paid. I think that, if there's one thing in the welfare budget that we should look at some increases in, it should be that single widow pension. I think that would be a very interesting and compassionate response, particularly when people find themselves in those hardships, and in the light of the expenses of daily living.

I was very pleased to see $51.3 million put aside for agricultural counsellors. It's one thing to have a free trade agreement, but a free trade agreement simply opens an opportunity. There's no point having an opportunity unless you can turn an opportunity into a reality. A lot of our producers produce very, very good product. In my patch, there is really nothing you can eat that isn't grown in the Mallee, be it table grapes, be it carrots—25 per cent of Australia's carrots—or be it citrus. I was told once that the only thing you can't catch in the Mallee is a Murray cod, because technically it's on the South Australian side once you get on the water, and all that water is making its good way down to South Australia to be used effectively there as well. You've got to be able to turn those opportunities into reality, and the additional $51.3 million to do that is very welcome.

As well, something that, whilst not in the budget, slipped through the radar for many people is the unlocking of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan that came with the SDLs. I'll explain why this is relevant to my patch. One of the great lessons we've learnt out of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is that you can achieve good environmental outcomes with the investment of some pumps, some dams, some risers and a culvert here or there. People may not have realised this, but there will be $300 million worth of investment—think about that: $300 million worth of investment—in the electorate of Mallee to deliver seven environmental water projects, and they have to be built by 2024. Whilst the budget was going on here, in the other chamber over there they were passing the SDLs. This will achieve better management of our water as well as unleashing quite a substantial amount of infrastructure that has to take place in my patch.

One of the other great things in the budget, which is a small thing, which appeals to me as an aviator as well as a farmer, was $260 million for the GPS satellite based augmentation strategy. For people who don't understand what that is—I first saw this in Canada—essentially you can have inter-row sowing and GPS technology. Instead of it taking five metres, it will get it down to 10 centimetres, so the accuracy is substantially improved. There's also a big advantage for aviators—and I am one—in being able to do GPS approaches to airports.

There are a lot of good things in this budget. There are a lot of things to be proud of. There are things that we can do better, and we should always have that robust debate. I do not hold the view that everything we do on our side of the parliament is perfect and everything the other side does is wrong and evil, or vice versa, but we need to ensure that we spend Australians' money wisely, create incentive and look after those who can't look after themselves. I think this is a very fair and reasonable budget.

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