James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the passage of the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2024-2025, as well as the Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2024-2025 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2024-2025, as we all do on this side of the chamber. It's very important that we make sure the government has the funding that it needs to get through the election period and support the commencement of a new Dutton government before a budget can be passed by that new government at a later stage this year, so we very much support ensuring that the resources are in place for that important transition that is almost upon the Australian people because we desperately need a change in this country. Happily, even if the Prime Minister waits till the latest possible moment—I think the date is 17 May—by 17 May, we will have an election in this country, and the people of Australia will get the chance to cast their verdict on the last three years of this Labor government. I've got a sense of what they're going to say about all that when they get their chance at the ballot box.

It's been three tough years for the Australian people. It's been three years of a government wasting our money on the wrong priorities. We had the voice referendum. That was nearly half a billion dollars of money we'll never see again that came out of the pockets of Australian taxpayers. It was torched on that divisive, unnecessary distraction of a referendum—one that was comprehensively rejected by the Australian people but that didn't result in saving the money that was spent on it. Indeed, not just was it the cost to run it but the money that was invested in that campaign by a range of organisations—the tax deductibility of the donations into that campaign—was an enormous cost to the Australian taxpayer.

We've seen the Public Service grow by 36,000 people at the cost of $6 billion a year. There are 36,000 more bureaucrats here in Canberra worth $6 billion a year. That's a 20 per cent increase in the size of the public sector. Are there many parts of government that are 20 per cent better thanks to those extra 36,000 people? I don't have people stopping me in the street saying: 'It's great that you've got those extra bureaucrats because I really feel like we're getting so much more out of our government because of them.' Far from that, in fact, the data shows that simple things like the KPI failures of Centrelink processing emergency payments for people in domestic violence circumstances, those fundamental elements of government, are an absolute disgrace, despite the fact we've got 36,000 more public servants.

This government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, of course. Because they're not a good government, they have to try and look like good government, and that is very expensive. You have to spend a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, on television advertising campaigns when you're an atrociously bad government to try and look like a good government, and this government is breaking all the records when it comes to advertising. It was nearly a quarter of a billion dollars—just over that in fact. I think it was $260 million spent in this financial year alone across various government advertising programs.

The Future Made in Australia—that's going well. I'd up the ad buy on that one if I was the government! Hydrogen is going well. In my home state of South Australia I think the state government are about to announce that they're abandoning that as a hydrogen plant and converting it to a gas plant. They're not purchasing the electrolysers for that, and they'll probably use the tragic situation in Whyalla with the steelworks as an excuse to scrap that promise. Hydrogen ideas are collapsing around the country as we speak. So the hydrogen dream isn't going so well.

Solar panel manufacturing doesn't seem to going very well. Then there's PsiQuantum, the 'Future Made in America' quantum computer that the Americans are happily receiving a billion dollars for—maybe not, though, because maybe the Queensland new LNP government will be looking pretty closely at that decision and wondering whether or not the Queensland taxpayer should be shovelling half a billion dollars of their hard-earned money into that very interesting PR exercise that is all about this government trying to look like they're doing things rather than actually achieving them for the people of this country.

The waste goes on and on and on and on, and it couldn't be happening at a worst time because it has never been harder to make the household budget stack up. People are really hurting in this high inflationary environment, with high interest rates, high rents, if you rent your home, high grocery prices and, of course, extremely high energy prices, which were meant to be $275 cheaper for every Australian family. RepuTex did the modelling on that one—they staked their reputation on it, so possibly a name change could be recommended for that company—saying that this government was going to drop our power bills by $275. Well, of course, the absolute opposite has occurred.

This leads to really difficult decisions for Australian families because they have had to cut back on some of the things that they had always been able to afford with everything else going up—cancelling family holidays, making difficult decisions when they're buying groceries. I met someone the other day who can't afford to buy fresh vegetables any more. She's buying frozen because the fresh is too expensive. This is Australia. This is Australia, and you're hearing those kinds of heartbreaking stories. It's because the government is wasting money on completely unnecessary things. Our taxes are higher than they need to be. And, of course, all that unnecessarily high government expenditure fuels inflation, and it's inflation that's hurting Australian families right now.

The solution to that is a change of government to get this country back on track. When the average Australian thinks about how they're going to vote at the ballot box in the weeks ahead I think it's a pretty simple proposition: Do you feel better off today than you were three years ago when the Albanese Labor government came to power? Have things gotten better for you or worse for you? Is this country on the right track under this government, or do we need to change direction? A Dutton coalition government is the change that this country needs.

In my own electorate of Sturt, when I think about the appropriation bills before us, I lament the lack of investment particularly in the vital Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass corridor, which has a number of components, which when completed will divert heavy freight out of the suburbs of my electorate of Sturt—getting them off Portrush Road and the future risk of them going down Cross Road through my electorate and the seats of Adelaide and Boothby—and get the freight around the back of the Adelaide Hills.

I was very proud to be a part of the government that put money into the Truro bypass with the South Australian Liberal government, which was the first part of building that freight bypass. Unfortunately, that project was the victim of the cruel and nasty infrastructure cuts implemented by this government last year. That has really hurt my community, and it's really hurt my city, because that investment was going to not only transform the economic efficiency of freight movements throughout South Australia and around Adelaide but make a dramatic difference to the safety of commuters and pedestrians, who don't feel it's reasonable to live in a city of 1.2 million people and have Highway 1 running through their suburbs. Small country towns, happily for them, had bypasses built around them decades ago, but we've still got a situation where heavy freight going from Melbourne to Perth travels through suburban Adelaide. It's completely ludicrous. We need to fix that. We were on the pathway to doing that, and, regrettably, that was cruelly ripped away from my community and other communities in Adelaide by that callous decision to cut that project.

We've learned, on that project, that the South Australian government has submitted to the federal government a new business case, which, it seems, based on the Labor state ministers' commentary around it on radio, is a positive cost benefit. Even the state Labor government are hoping that the federal government will decide to reconsider their cruel cuts and again partner with them on that project. Having heard that revelation this week, I call on this government to release that business case and show people what that plan looks like, what it will cost and how it will benefit the people of my electorate of Sturt, the people of Adelaide and the state of South Australia. Burying that thing and hiding it from everyone is completely unacceptable and cannot possibly be tolerated.

To hear that the state government have given it to the federal government and said, 'Well, we've given it to the federal government; it's really up to them to decide what they're going to do next with it'—if this federal government refuses to release that plan, it will be an indictment on its lack of interest in investing in that project. An election is about to be upon us, and it is a very helpful and important debate to be had, equipped with all the necessary information, to compare the major parties' offerings on that project, like on many others, in the lead-up to the election. I hope Minister King is on the cusp of releasing that Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass business case which the state Labor minister said he provided to them. It's in their court to release it. We want to know what it says and we want to get on and build this thing. It needs to happen. We should have started by now. We've lost years because of this Labor government's cruel decision to defund one of those projects, but we're not giving up on it. We've got to get on with it. We want to see it get done.

The other thing that's very relevant in this appropriation bill that the Labor Party is going to have to confront and take very seriously is defence expenditure. We've recently had the confirmation of what we already knew: the Greens political party have said that their policy position at the next election is to scrap the AUKUS agreement and to scrap submarine construction for the Royal Australian Navy. They've already said they want to scrap the Hunter frigate program as well—so they want to shut down naval shipbuilding in Adelaide. Most importantly, this is disastrous for our national security. To take that capability away from the future of the Royal Australian Navy is absolutely treasonous. But the double whammy in South Australia is the collapse of one of the great bright shining future industries of our state—shipbuilding.

This is very relevant for the Labor Party because they've got to decide what they're doing with their preferences in the state of South Australia. If a candidate on a ballot paper has a policy position to shut down naval shipbuilding, they should be put last on that ballot paper. I'm sure that decision is forthcoming. It is very serious; we have not had this circumstance in a federal election contest in South Australia before.

The Greens party also want to shut down the oil and gas industries—so that's the end of Santos and Beach. With the difficult circumstances facing the steel industry, the concept of a political force like the Greens, who want to get rid of shipbuilding and oil and gas—the overall impact on the South Australian economy would probably be approaching around 100,000 jobs, as those decisions flow through the entirety of our economy. That is an economic Armageddon for my home state. Even though we sometimes think the Greens are a joke of a political party because that happens to be the truth, this has to be taken very, very seriously, and no credible political force and no major party, no party of government, can possibly countenance indulging such a dangerous, reckless outlook for the people of South Australia and, frankly, the people of the entire country.

We support the funding for the government, obviously. We look forward to this bill supporting the operation of the government through the election period that is upon us. We look forward to that campaign and to debating the significant issues that face the future of the entire nation and, as I have outlined, particularly the future of my home state of South Australia, the future of my constituents in the seat of Sturt. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

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