John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills. When the Treasurer stood up 18 months ago to deliver his 2019 budget, you could tell it wasn't standalone. Like a Hollywood blockbuster, you could tell it was setting itself up for a sequel—the glorious 2020 budget, where the surplus would be reached, the sun would shine and Richmond wouldn't win the football again! And then 2020 happened, and all bets were off. So instead of the budget we wanted to have, we got the budget that we had to have, beyond ideology, to deliver economic stimulus where it was needed—into businesses and into people's wallets.

Around 83,000 taxpayers in Bennelong will benefit from tax relief of up to $2,745 this year as a result of the Morrison government's tax relief measures, which have already passed parliament. Around 7,111 individuals in Bennelong have received the coronavirus supplement, which was added to JobSeeker to provide additional support through this crisis. Around 12,847 aged pensioners in Bennelong received support payments of $750 in April and July, and will receive a further $250 payment in December and a further $250 from March next year. Around 974 carers in Bennelong received support payments of $750 in April and July, and will receive a further $250 payment in December and a further $250 from March next year. This means people across the electorate and the nation will have more of their hard-earned money in their pockets. In tough times like these, that extra money could mean the difference between skipped meals, rent being paid or the air-con running. It could be a lifesaver. Regardless of whether you spend this on necessities or desires, please spend it locally so that it can go towards helping our hardworking small businesses, many of whom have done it really tough.

In my time as the member for Bennelong, I have implemented a number of projects to help local businesses. Perhaps significant in these times is the Bennelong Village Business program. Started in 2010 as small businesses were struggling out of the GFC, it has continued ever since and has found new relevance this year. Through this program, I have actively promoted local shops and local village precincts to surrounding neighbourhoods to encourage people to shop locally. Buying locally means putting money in the pockets of local business owners and creating lively, vibrant local shopping precincts. Earlier this year I had been unable to physically visit shopping centres and meet with business owners because of the impact of COVID. Given the extraordinary success of NSW Health in controlling the virus, case numbers are sufficiently low now that I will be able to resume the Bennelong Village Business program in the lead-up to Christmas. I'm very much looking forward to speaking to our businesses, seeing how they are faring and assisting them as best I can.

Local shops which have been unable to keep trading due to the impact of the COVID virus have been particularly affected by the crisis. I recently conducted a business survey across my electorate to hear the opinions of business owners and to see how they have fared during the crisis. Most alarmingly, I found that not a single store that responded had experienced less than a 30 per cent decline in revenue. The government's JobKeeper payment has been so essential, supporting 7,500 businesses in Bennelong through the pandemic and keeping them connected to their employees. The cash flow boost has helped around 6,200 small and medium-sized businesses, providing payments to help businesses in Bennelong stay afloat.

Bennelong businesses have been versatile and innovative over the past few months. One of our favourites, Formula Chemicals, saw the need in the market and shifted rapidly to produce huge quantities of sanitiser to keep us all healthy. Top Ryde Tailoring saw a dip in people needing suits as people were working from home in their trackies but recognised that their excess fabric was perfect for face masks, which they started making, bespoke, to stay afloat. Scott Morrison has an embroidered one himself. Despite these innovations, they cannot do this alone. This is why JobKeeper payments have been so critical.

The next step is to rebuild, and the government has a plan to support new investment and increase business cash flow. The government is providing a temporary tax incentive that will allow 21,800 businesses in Bennelong to write off the full value of any eligible asset they purchase. This will build on the government's successful instant asset write-off measure announced earlier in the year. The possibilities with this are endless. Local manufacturers in West Ryde can buy new machines; the car repairers of Buffalo Road can replace their tools; the great restaurants of Eastwood can renew their kitchens before the post-COVID rush descends. Anything is possible. This is hopefully the sort of circuit-breaker that our economy needs to get back on its feet rapidly, encouraging people to get out and spend their money at Australian businesses, trickling the money back up the chain until we are back to where we were 12 months ago.

For all the good work this month, I can't help but feeling that there is a bit of a missed opportunity. By spending money on infrastructure, we can provide jobs and economic stimulus while also providing a future benefit for the people of Australia who get to use this infrastructure. Of course, there is infrastructure in the budget. Some of them, like the bypasses that almost finish the Pacific Highway upgrades, are long overdue and will fill critical gaps in our national infrastructure. Most of them are small, shovel-ready projects that can be turned around now for maximum impact, which is certainly a praiseworthy aim. But, with the continuation of the tradition of ad hoc building of small projects—fixing our problems but not the root cause of the issues—the can is simply being kicked further down the road.

I'll speak later today in the other chamber about the need for vision, but for now I would like to talk about a better way to fund infrastructure. Albert Einstein claimed the greatest power in the universe was compounding interest. I'm currently chairing the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport and Cities inquiry into financing faster rail, and we have discovered the greatest power in the Australian infrastructure funding and tax relief universe. This power is the compounding of property values due to infrastructure investment and rezoning. For over 100 years, a select group of property owners have been the beneficiaries, funded by governments with taxpayers' money. We recently heard evidence that conclusively shows the extraordinary rise in property values that have occurred when major infrastructure has been announced, most recently at the Western Sydney International Airport. This is hardly surprising. The land around one of the new metro stations will go from rural agricultural to high-density apartments basically overnight. A quick comparison of rural land prices versus inner-city apartment land prices demonstrates the huge financial gains to be made. The lucky property owners, many of them recent speculators, would be the huge beneficiaries of this great force of price uplift as their acreage goes from $2,000 an acre to over $10 million for selected lands close to train stations. That is an increase of 5,000 times, or 500,000 per cent. The greatest power in the universe indeed.

The fundamental questions are: who pays and who gains, and what responsibility does the government have? The answer is: the taxpayer pays and the select few gain. The government is elected to represent the people's interest. This inquiry has clarified a shocking oversight by governments that has escalated more over the past century. It must be remedied and remedied now before any more infrastructure announcements are made. We heard evidence from Professor Andrew McNaughton, the technical director of High Speed Two, in Britain, who has recently consulted for the New South Wales government on faster rail and high-speed rail. He provided evidence that was a perfect encapsulation of our past mistakes and what we should do now. He said essentially that property prices enjoy significant uplift within 500 metres of a metro station; however, increases in property values around regional fast-rail stations or high-speed rail stations are over a far greater area and are far more dramatic. His concluding advice was that before another infrastructure project is announced you must secure the current value of the lands that will be impacted on which to make your charge, because, the moment you make the announcement, within minutes, the prices have gone up and it is too late.

The purpose of this inquiry, announced pre-COVID, was to find the best practices to fund and finance faster rail, but the virus has now changed the imperative. The huge impact on the economy that this virus has had will obviously require huge amounts of government stimulus. As we have seen, much of this has gone directly to workers and businesses. But we must use this opportunity to invest in major infrastructure as well. Indeed, it has been announced that we will be spending astounding amounts on infrastructure. This will be funded out of debt and this debt will be paid by future generations. Does this mean that the taxpayer will fund even more phenomenal gains for some that will impoverish future generations of taxpayers? Recommendations that will flow from this inquiry must advise the government that they represent the taxpayer to gain a fair share of the profits to fund the infrastructure and therefore put downward pressures on taxes now and for future generations.

Hand in hand with these funding ideas is the idea of master planning. These recommendations followed repeated inquiries which called for more planning for our infrastructure. Long-term planning is essential for setting out the areas which will need funding but, more importantly than that, it gives certainty to industry, politics and the community. Building companies regularly say that the greatest cost of doing business in Australia is the constant gearing up and gearing down for a single project. A continuous program of works would alleviate most of these costs.

But there is a less prosaic reason than that. Imagine if we had a vision of what we wanted this country to look like in 10, 20, 50 or even 100 years—a roadmap of what we think we need and a plan on how to achieve it. In Japan, in the 1960s they planned out their high-speed rail to be rolled out across the country, which included a route to the north to be built in the 2010s—50-year planning that gave certainty to all levels of society about the direction of the Japanese plan. When the line was open on time a few years ago, the supporting infrastructure was ready to go and the community benefited from that certainty. Australia hasn't seen an integrated plan like this since Bradfield planned Sydney—and, even then, political opportunism stymied some of his big ideas. We need long-term planning of our settlement and then, when we suffer from our next economic shock—whenever that may be—we will not need to scrounge around for short-term, shovel-ready projects to stimulate the economy; we will have a full list of important nation-building projects that can be accelerated.

Ten years ago to this day, I stood in the other chamber for the first time and made my maiden speech. I had been the most unlikely candidate for federal politics. I had no credit whatsoever. However, I shared a common complaint that our leaders lack vision and engaged too much in unproductive negative repartee. I asked in that first speech that this be a place, an arena, for the contest of ideas. What I presented may have started out as an idea, but it has survived a number of inquiries and gained enormous support from academics and business leaders. So I conclude by asking our leaders to enter this great arena, leave the tools of your political trade on the sidelines and fight for what the people of Australia want of you. Keep your promise to represent us and give us a vision—a grand vision where our dreams and aspirations can come true.

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