Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Making Sure Every State and Territory Gets Their Fair of GST) Bill 2018. I want to start by saying that we've seen what happened in Western Australia over the last couple of years with their share of the GST, where, for every dollar that the Western Australian people spent on GST, their state got only 30c back. People living in Perth, Geraldton and Broome wouldn't believe it if they read it—that they could go out and spend their cash, buy a new car and buy food each week and, for every dollar that they spent on GST, they'd receive only 30c back. That tells me that the way that the GST has been delivered over the last few years is broken. It just doesn't seem right.

I understand that the government here is increasing a lot more funding to the states. This bill isn't just making sure that every state and territory gets their fair share of GST; it's their fair share of GST plus their fair share of the income tax that we're collecting as well. Basically, we're throwing a lot more money at the state governments. That's what we're doing here. We're giving them the GST that they collect but, in order to keep every state happy, we're also giving them a lot more in other taxes that the federal government collects. Given that neither side has run a surplus since John Howard and Peter Costello back in 2007, I do have some concerns around that. I believe in reward for effort. When I look at what some of the state governments do and how they prioritise their funding, I have a concern with giving them more cash when they waste it on a whole lot of things or when they don't look for new projects that they could do in order to bring more income into their state.

If we look at Queensland at the moment, we see the Labor state government spending money left, right and centre on things which I don't necessarily think are important—for example, changing the name of the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital, which is going to cost, they say, some $50 million. It will probably actually cost a lot more than that. Also, when we wanted to invest money through the NAIF to support mining jobs, we saw the Premier in Queensland using her authority to block that and block more investment, more jobs and possibly more mining royalties for the state of Queensland. We've seen massive increases in the public service, whilst they have also got some $80 billion worth of debt. Millions were spent by state government ministers on the Commonwealth Games recently on the Gold Coast for accommodation. That's just Queensland alone.

If you look at Victoria and New South Wales, we're basically seeing those two states put a moratorium on gas exploration projects. They've basically said, 'No new mining projects and no new gas projects,' when Australians have actually had a shortage of gas. It's our government that's had to try to address that by basically making sure the gas companies keep more gas for Australians. They've had to try to possibly balance the projects they've had with Japan and others. We've seen states like Victoria and New South Wales say, 'No more gas.' So they're missing out on mining royalties but, at the same time, they're getting millions and millions of dollars extra from the Commonwealth in this deal.

In Tasmania, too—the member for Lyons touched on it before—over the last decade we've seen that they've basically stopped logging in some ways. They have a tourism industry, but state governments and activists down there have stopped income-producing assets being continued. Then they come into this parliament and cry poor. So I do have concerns about that because, ultimately, state governments have a lot of power in our Constitution and they need to be held accountable for the decisions they make.

Mr Snowdon interjecting—

I'd ask the member for Lingiari to withdraw that comment, if he would.

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