Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last night when I was speaking on the appropriation bills, I covered taxation issues and foreshadowed that I would then move on to wages. The truth of the matter is that this government has presided over an acute skills shortage and, as a consequence, it is very worried, as is the Reserve Bank, about the prospect of wage rises that would create a wage-price inflationary spiral. The government’s Work Choices legislation is much better understood not only as an attack on unions and, through unions, an attack on the Australian Labor Party but also as an attempt to suppress wages and therefore avert an interest rate rise. The problem the government has is that, with these acute skills shortages, employers in some sectors, especially the mining sector and related sectors, are needing to offer large wage increases in order to attract and retain skilled employees. Therefore, the government wants to suppress wages at the bottom end. We know that is the case through the creation of its so-called Fair Pay Commission. The authority to establish the minimum wage is taken away from the Industrial Relations Commission and given to the much tamer outfit of the so-called Fair Pay Commission.

The government wants to suppress the minimum wage—we know that. A consequence already of its delays in establishing this Fair Pay Commission has been a wage freeze in the order of 15 months. We have a government that wants to keep the minimum wage low, but the government also has indicated publicly that it is prepared to intervene in state jurisdictions when, for a selected number of employees, the states’s industrial relations commissions are hearing the case for minimum wage rises. One report on this in the Australian Financial Review on 16 May is headed:

Andrews to block union pay push.

The subheading is:

Challenge to state powers. Concern over wage inflation.

That is confirmation that, as much as anything, the Work Choices legislation is being used as a device to suppress wage increases for average earners and vulnerable workers in order to achieve the government’s desired overall economic objective—to avoid an interest rate rise. How has the government managed to get itself into this situation? Why has it not foreseen the emergence of skills shortages in this country that then creates these sorts of pressures? The Treasurer and the Prime Minister say this legislation is all about choice, freedom and flexibility—it is not. It is about smashing unions and keeping downward pressure on the wages of the most vulnerable because the government cannot keep downward pressure on the wages of executives and is certainly not interested in doing that. Nor can the government keep downward pressure on the wages of highly skilled workers in the mining sector and other booming parts of the Australian economy.

I now move to the issue of superannuation. The government’s changes have been regarded as sweeping and as a massive simplification. On that score, it is true that removing all taxes effectively on superannuation payouts does simplify the system. By the way, so would removing income tax altogether. That would make for a marvellously simple income tax system; you just would not have one.

I want to draw the attention of the House to a few considerations. The government’s changes, as foreshadowed but not absolutely determined because they are set out in the discussion paper, would appear to have the effect that in the future all people over the age of 60 will not pay income tax. Some may choose to pay income tax, but effectively income tax would be a voluntary tax for people over the age of 60. Why do I say that? The answer is that people over the age of 60 can take their superannuation, continue working if they so choose and put the superannuation into a preferred vehicle that is going to be designed by the government; and any income arising out of that investment vehicle will also be tax free. So any returns on superannuation beyond the age of 60 will be tax free, and any other income that the person over the age of 60 earns will be subject, through the senior Australian tax offset, to a tax-free threshold of around $20,000 for a single person and $40,000 for a couple.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not complaining about this. I am not objecting to this, but I am drawing the attention of this parliament to the reality that under the government’s changes people over the age of 60 will no longer need to pay income tax. A lot of people would say, ‘Isn’t that a marvellous thing?’ A lot more people would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous if no-one had to pay income tax?’ With the time remaining I want to explore from where the pressure will emerge if in the future a large proportion of the population will not be paying income tax—and it will be a large proportion. In 2002 the government released the Intergenerational Report that reminded us that there is a massive problem of population ageing in this country. Having a look at the Australian Bureau of Statistics official projections we see that now, in 2006, about 18 per cent of the population is over the age of 60. But by 2041 that will be around 31 per cent. That is a massive increase—from 18 per cent to 31 per cent. The implications of that are surely profound. A much larger proportion of the population will be income tax exempt as the population continues to age.

That can be remedied by any one of three ways. The first possibility is that income tax rates on those who are working will have to go up dramatically in order to provide the revenue to fund the services for working age, older and younger people. The second possibility is that the services that are currently provided to people over the age of 60 will no longer be affordable in the future—that is, an age pension may not be affordable in the future. Aged-care and health-care services may not be affordable in the future because of this dramatic narrowing of the income tax base. The third possibility is that the government of the day, if it were a conservative government, will say, ‘That GST at 10 per cent is just not doing the job anymore; we will increase the GST rate in order to compensate for the fact that we are losing so much of the income tax base.’ We know that the GST is a very regressive tax, and the implications of increasing the GST rate on the poor and the vulnerable would be horrendous. The other possibility is removing the exemption for food. So when the government finalises its consideration of superannuation, it needs to tell the Australian people which of those options it favours for the future. Either withdrawal of services for older people, much higher income tax rates and work disincentives for working age people, or an increase in the GST rate: something has to give.

It all sounds marvellous, it all sounds simple, but the truth of the matter is the chickens will have to come home to roost at some time in the future. It is all very well for a government to say, ‘Isn’t this terrific; aren’t we great,’ and then leave a huge problem for the future. I look forward to the government explaining which of those remedies it would employ to compensate for this massive loss in the income tax base.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The appropriation bills before the parliament each year are a report to the nation on the conduct of the government’s affairs and the priorities it sets on behalf of the people of Australia. In that context, I take the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills as a way of reporting to the parliament about the conduct of government programs in the federal electorate of Moreton.

Last Saturday I went to Runcorn State School—my old school where I went to in the seventies. The school is 105 years old this month. We celebrated with a fantastic bush dance and we were able to watch the kids enjoying that. I was also able to officially launch the results of the Australian government’s sponsorship of that school through the Investing in our Schools program. The P&C had sought money for the rejuvenation and top dressing of the school oval and also the installation of sprinklers. If only we had enough water in Queensland for those sprinklers to actually work! The dedication of $38,552 to Runcorn State School, which we celebrated last Saturday night, was fantastic.

All up in the federal electorate of Moreton there is some $532,000 in project funding so far under Investing in our Schools. ICT at Algester State School has been upgraded. The music facilities at Calamvale Community College, to which I will refer in a moment, have been refurbished. The special school at Calamvale got an undercover walkway and a multimedia room. MacGregor State School got $50,000 to refurbish the senior students’ toilets. Nyanda State School got shade structures and open learning spaces. These big schools received assistance. Rocklea State School, a small school which is a bit like a bush school in the city, received in the order of $29,000 to deal with the school oval and also the installation of airconditioning in some of the classrooms. Only 60 or 70 kids go to that school and there is no way the parent body has the capacity to raise those funds.

This underscores how the government’s program Investing in our Schools has made an enormous difference to support the work of parents in fundraising for schools. It is disappointing that things such as the refurbishment of toilets are not undertaken by the owners of the schools—the state governments. The P&Cs, frustrated by a lack of progress by state authorities, have been able to get the funds directly from the feds.

The government trusts local communities and local schools to understand their needs very clearly and we pay the funds directly to the schools without losing the 25 per cent that state governments tend to take off the top. When we pass grants to the states for school projects, they take about 25c in every dollar to administer the rest of the grant. We think this direct investment gets more bang for the buck and real results that count for the schools involved.

Last week we officially opened the marvellous new sports hall at Calamvale Community College—a $4 million project with $1 million coming directly from the Commonwealth, $1.3 million from the Brisbane City Council and about $1.8 million from the Queensland government. This place is going to have a terrific community flavour about it. The local community are going to have an opportunity to use this great school facility which has been funded in part by this government and will be used by the entire school.

Another good school that I want to mention briefly in this address, which received funding under our direct investment in non-government schools, is the Southside Christian College. Graham Johnston and his teaching team are expanding the school and growing new opportunities for more students. The school has grown in leaps and bounds over the term of this government. We have now invested another $360,000 to build six secondary general learning areas, computer labs, storerooms, two verandas—unenclosed travel—an undercover area and a covered link and for the conversion of a locker room into a new secondary, general learning area. This is a $1.5 million project funded mainly by the parents and partially funded by us. But, in the end, our commitment to the non-government schools sector takes a lot of pressure off the government schools sector because, as parents dig deeper, pay taxes through the income tax system and then support the education choices they make for their students, we back those choices with programs, which will be further invested in through the budget this year.

Recently, Anzac Day gave me an opportunity as the local member to refocus on how significant this day is in the hearts and minds of most Australians. It is not a day to glorify war. It is an extraordinary day, though, on which the community has an even greater sense of obligation to those, some who are long gone in many cases and some who have more recently departed, who have served this country to create a circumstance where we can claim today to be the sixth oldest continuous democracy in the world. If it had not been for those who served we would not have all that we do have in this nation. We would not stand in this building and debate these bills and freely express our views.

I know that Sunnybank RSL in particular is very concerned about passing that sense of heritage on to the next generation of kids. Last year we began a process, and this year we enhanced the process further, whereby Sunnybank RSL, dealing with more than 20 schools in and around the electorate of Moreton, has been able to say to the senior students of those schools: ‘Here is an Australian flag, the symbol of our nation. You now have as a school leader of today and a community leader of tomorrow an obligation to carry on this tradition of thanks for service of many years past.’ Through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs program Their Service Our Heritage, we have seen the creation of Anzac Day oriented but school based memorials. I was able to go to Eight Mile Plains State School. I saw the member for Rankin in the Main Committee chamber a moment ago, and he and I were both there that day to dedicate the memorial, just days before Anzac Day.

More importantly, perhaps, is that students from schools like St Thomas More College, at Sunnybank, and Runcorn State High School—featured this week in the Courier-Mail in an excellent article, which I recommend to all members—have started dealing with local RSL Care homes. They are working one day a week with veterans. They have been going to Cazna Gardens, at Sunnybank Hills, and to the Carrington Home, at Parkinson, to understand all about the lives that these veterans have lived; indeed, in some cases in the last year students have dealt also with the passing of veterans that they had cared for and got to know. So I want to congratulate the students who have been involved in this program. I want to congratulate particularly the Sunnybank RSL, but of course all RSLs, in the electorate of Moreton. I want to congratulate the residents of those two homes, Cazna Gardens and Carrington, on the way they have embraced the youth of today and understood them very clearly, and the kids of today have understood the oldies as well. It has been a wonderful journey to watch these students evolve as human beings.

I must also note for the record that the government’s investment directly into aged care has continued in the electorate of Moreton. This Saturday the Minister for Ageing and I will open the Plains Retirement Village, off Underwood Road, at Kuraby, and we are looking forward to that event this Saturday morning.

I want to turn now to the important question of infrastructure. The opposition in their address-in-reply talked a lot about infrastructure. We are used to hearing the Labor Party talk about infrastructure and not much about action. We have only to look at the Queensland government to see a great example. Just yesterday they released yet another glossy document, entitled the South-East Queensland infrastructure plan and program. It is in fact almost a duplicate of the document released one year ago. Methinks there must be a state election about to be called. I have to say that if the Queensland government could build infrastructure as fast as they produce glossy documents we would not have half the problems we have in the south-east corner of Queensland. Let me tell you: the whole thing is revealed on page 6, where it says:

What’s new in this Infrastructure Plan

…            …            …

Project costs have been updated to reflect costs in 2006 dollars.

So what was a $55 billion plan last year is now a $66 billion plan this year. The minister for roads, Mr Lloyd, and I were talking about this earlier. He said, ‘Don’t forget the cost blowouts.’ So lack of action on a plan from a year ago has created a higher cost regime, according to this particular document, and they have reflected that as being some sort of virtue. In fact, it is a confession of complete failure. They have a real ability to produce documents but no real ability to produce outcomes. In fact, what is also particularly interesting for this parliament is that part of that $66 billion, as it now is, includes about $30 billion of federal funds that they are likely to get between now and, wait for it, 2026. This is a program which talks about what they might do if they could—and, heaven help us, if only they would—over the next 20 years.

So the Queensland government are again trying to confuse the people of Queensland by reannouncing federal money—money they have already announced. Worse still for the people in my electorate and in the electorate of Bonner, they have again said quite plainly that the Brisbane urban corridor, which I have raised in this parliament about 15 or 20 times, is going to be protected as the freight corridor through the southern suburbs of Brisbane. Let me spell that out even more clearly. Over the next 20 years, the Queensland government claim that in 2006 dollars they will spend $66 billion on infrastructure projects. But, according to this document, they still want to keep alive the idea of B-double trucks running along suburban roads, running past people’s letterboxes in Wishart, Robertson and Coopers Plains, and running across people’s back fences in Salisbury and people’s front gates in Rocklea.

At the end of it, $66 billion could have gone a long way to making better use of the Gateway Arterial and Logan motorways, which the Queensland government own, and they should recommend to the Australian government they become part of the national road freight corridor. It is not good enough for Queensland to continue to hide behind the fact that in the early nineties the then Goss Labor government worked with the then Keating Labor government to stitch up a deal that the suburban road would become the national highway and all funding and infrastructure costs along that route would therefore be the feds’ problem. They cannot say, ‘This is a federal road,’ because the road in fact is the Queensland government’s road, which the feds have an obligation to assist in funding.

Also, in this particular infrastructure plan is the ambition to build an overpass at Kessels Road and Mains Road. It is an ambition which we are currently funding a study into. It is an ambition that was talked about in the early nineties by the Goss Labor government, but again nothing happened. It really does underscore my earlier contention that, when it comes to infrastructure, Labor talk a lot and produce lots of glossy documents, but even when they have the chance to do something they do not. People in my electorate are basically fed up with the jurisdictional buck-passing. I certainly am. We need a government in Queensland that, when they say, ‘These are Queensland government responsibilities, and we are delivering a planning document’—and that is what they have done with this document—actually deliver a planning document that realises that spending $66 billion, including about $30 billion of Australian government money, on infrastructure and still putting B-double trucks past people’s letterboxes is not a plan; it is a total folly. We need this state government to go.

On top of that, in this document they have also announced yet again more federal funds. This time it is $25 million for the long overdue rail overpass at Acacia Ridge. We have a state owned railway line which leaves the national rail freight yard—it is the Brisbane-Sydney rail line, which is owned by the Queensland government—and crosses a state owned road. Queensland have said, ‘We won’t build an overpass,’ no matter how many people in Drewvale, Calamvale, Parkinson, Stretton, Sunnybank Hills and Acacia Ridge are impacted upon. ‘No,’ they have said, ‘We want the feds to fund half.’ All right; we have decided in the interests of the national rail equation that we will fund half of that.

We put the money down on the table 200 days ago and, despite the fact that two years ago the Labor federal opposition said that they would build it if they were elected and the state government said they would build it if federal Labor were elected—they were not elected—the state government have held onto the money, have not done anything and have not processed any of the plans. Frankly, as the federal member for the area, I find it very poor that state members in the area are not demanding progress of their state government.

The bottom line is the good news: the $25 million along with the $25 million from the state means a $50 million solution. But can we actually get something built? When the Beattie government came to power in 1998, they cancelled the Borbidge-Sheldon government’s plans to deal with the infrastructure planning on this particular location. The first thing they knocked out in their 1998 budget was the commitment to plan for this infrastructure. Here we are, almost 10 years later, still banging on about it. Can we just get some progress? The feds, through this budget, are playing their part. Now all we need is the Beattie government to actually produce some results.

I also note for the record how pleased I am to see that the Brisbane City Council has received the single largest vote of funds under the Roads to Recovery program—a program which federal Labor would cancel and which has produced real road results in local authorities right around this country. Brisbane is the single biggest local authority in Australia and has seen a doubling of our contribution directly to them without losing 25 per cent off the top to the state government. Brisbane now gets another $7 million. That is a $14 million vote from us directly to Brisbane City Council. I hope that the Lord Mayor of Brisbane will make good use of that, and I know that his council roads and major infrastructure project chairman, Graham Quirk, will obviously look very closely at road projects in and around the electorate of Moreton for good use of those funds.

In the minutes left for my contribution, I also want to pay particular attention to a number of child-care based projects which are occurring in my electorate. The Southside Education Centre, which operates out of Lister Street at Sunnybank—giving second chances to young ladies with some difficult backgrounds, realising that in order for some of them to get education and training opportunities they need child care—has been making very good use of the family and community services department Jobs, Education and Training program funding. The JET child-care project, which has been applied through the Baptist church at Sunnybank, has made an enormous amount of difference to the people in that particular school. Young ladies with very small babies are able to access education opportunities as a result of the $140,000 worth of work we have put through a number of JET programs.

I also know that schools in and around Moreton, including Wellers Hill State School, have been able to learn about healthy living and build their scientific literacy through the healthier, happier kids program. Some $60,000 is going to this program, which I think will do a lot to return healthier and happier children. It is also important to state for the record the uncapping of child-care places that we are making possible through our budget initiatives contained in this bill. Reliant, of course, on planning permission from state governments and local councils are the child-care centres that will come to be built. On the most recent figures, in 2003-04, almost $13 million in child-care benefits was paid to families in Moreton, and I have no doubt that it will be much greater once the more recent figures come out.

A lot is talked about in this budget about the River Murray project—the half a billion dollars to deal with the healthy rivers needs of Australia—but, under the Community Water Grants program in the Australian government’s water fund guaranteed by this budget, some very sensible projects have been invested in in the electorate of Moreton. I was recently able to visit with the Friends of Oxley Creek Common and open the Pelican Lagoon Restoration of Water Quality and Wetland Ecology project. This project was worth some $29,353, and I know that Angela Wardell-Johnson and her team put that to very good work.

Griffith University’s Laser Lab Water Cooling Refurbishment project received almost $50,000, Runcorn State High School’s Harvesting Stormwater to Regenerate Environmental Centre and Three Sporting Fields project received almost $50,000 and Warrigal Road State School’s ‘Reduce—Water Efficiency Initiatives’ project received another $50,000.

Back that up by going to a school like Algester where you would see that they have the old dump-and-flush urinal systems. The state government maintains a water system where the water fills up in the boys’ toilets and then dumps automatically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the school has to turn to us for funding to try and retrieve that position. You should now start to understand that, even though we are spending a lot of money and we have a trillion-dollar economy, and that this Australian government focuses on the big pictures and the big international initiatives, we are also focused enough on listening to the needs of local communities that we are able to deliver on projects that make a huge difference to individuals and indeed schools and other organisations in my electorate. I am very proud of this budget and I commend it to the House.

Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased the previous speaker referred to the Murray River and the need for a decent water policy. All I can say is that at least under the Hawke and Keating governments we had some rain occasionally. This budget is yet another budget of wasted opportunity. In spite of the $36.7 billion in tax cuts over four years, there are cuts at both ends of the scale but, as usual, the cuts favour high-income groups. With the $1.4 billion extra assistance for families and the projected surplus of $10.8 billion, we will still have over two million Australians living in, on or below the poverty line. We will still have over 800,000 Australian kids growing up in households where no-one is employed. We will still have dental waiting lists recorded in calendar years rather than weeks or months. We will still have Australian motorists being bled dry at the petrol bowser, while the Prime Minister and the Treasurer engage in the sickening self-congratulations we have witnessed recently.

This budget is yet another Treasurer Costello budget of wasted opportunity. The budget fails to plan for Australia’s future; in fact, it mortgages our future, as our leader Kim Beazley has said. It has no ability to take the pressure off interest rates. If interest rates rise again, all Australians will know who to blame: this Prime Minister and this Treasurer. The budget’s failure to fix the skills crisis, demonstrate national leadership and turn around the current account deficit may force interest rates up yet again. All Australians will know who to blame: the Prime Minister and the Treasurer.

As the Leader of the Opposition said in his address on the Thursday after the budget was handed down, this budget contains no initiatives to free Australia from being held hostage to the Middle Eastern oil prices, no plan to develop new Australian fuels, no plan to fix the nation’s infrastructure—we have clogged roads, slow internet connection, near empty dams and overburdened ports—no plan to stop kids from being turned away from TAFE colleges or, if they get into university, ending up with a debt the size of a home mortgage, no plan to tackle the growing crisis in kids’ health and no plan for child care.

The miserable tax relief announced in the 2006 budget has been assisted by the massive revenue base the Howard government has achieved by ripping off ordinary Australian taxpayers at a level unprecedented in Australia’s history. The record 15 years of strong economic growth is based on the major reforms put in place by the previous Hawke and Keating governments and a massive tax rip-off by the Howard government. The Howard government constantly beats its chest, bragging about its economic management achievements when, in reality, all it has done is become the highest taxing Australian government in history. The 2006 budget tax cuts are really just paying back a tiny fraction of the massive tax rip-off that the Howard and Costello government have been slugging Australians with over the past 10 years.

What is the purpose of the Howard government’s so-called strong economy if millions of Australians are struggling to provide just the basics for themselves and their families? If the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are the economic management geniuses they pretend to be then why are Australians being slugged with crippling petrol prices, rising interest rates and dramatically increasing levels of personal debt? Under the Howard government, the strong economy only benefits those at the top end of town and leaves the no-income groups and the low- to middle-income groups struggling to survive.

Labor is committed to a strong economy with a purpose—that is, a strong economy that benefits all Australians, not just the top end of town. The Treasurer in his budget speech highlighted the fact that the so-called government debt had been abolished, but what he did not say on the day he nominated as Australia’s debt-free day was that on that day Australia’s foreign debt reached a staggering half a trillion dollars. That means Bendigo, along with the rest of Australia, is now burdened with $24,276 of foreign debt for every man, woman and child. Bendigo has one of the lowest median family weekly incomes in Australia at just $736 per week. I doubt that there are too many people in central Victoria who celebrated the Treasurer’s debt-free day.

Foreign debt has now risen by more in the last 3½ years than it did during the entire 13 years of the last federal Labor government. In the last two years alone, the Treasurer stood by and watched Australia’s foreign debt jump by more than $100 billion. In 1995 the Treasurer himself drew the link between high levels of foreign debt and the risks of high interest rates when he said, ‘A high level of foreign debt makes Australia more vulnerable and increasingly at the mercy of international financial markets because Australia has a current account problem that puts premium on Australian borrowings that flows through and every Australian pays for the consequences.’ Foreign debt is now more than $300 billion higher than it was when the member for Higgins became Treasurer.

The Treasurer has claimed this astounding level of foreign debt does not matter because it is private debt rather than public debt. However, foreign lenders, who influence the level of the interest rates we pay, do not distinguish between public and private debt. Rather than diverting attention away from the many factors currently damaging the government’s standing in the community, the Treasurer should have used the strong economic climate he largely inherited to put in place initiatives to tackle and reduce poverty. Then the Treasurer would have something worth while to brag about.

Labor’s plan for child-care centres located at schools will suit parents who have kids in child care and kids at school. To assist this initiative a federal Labor government will provide $200 million to establish 260 new child-care centres on primary school grounds or other community land. Labor will ensure that these places go to the areas in our suburbs or regional towns where there are child-care shortages. Labor will ensure the new places go to where they are needed most so that parents can work knowing their kids are getting an educational experience that will set them up for life. Labor’s child-care initiatives will meet the Australian economy’s pressing need for more skilled workers. A Labor government will do its bit by giving parents the incentive to work without killing family life.

When Australians want to learn a traditional trade to become one of the skilled workers this country so desperately needs, they should not have to pay. A future Labor government will abolish TAFE fees for traditional trades. This will benefit around 60,000 traditional apprentices who start training each year. Labor’s priority is to train Australians first and train Australians now. A federal Labor government will set up skills accounts to help Australian families save for training and skills. Labor will make an initial deposit of $800 per year for up to four years in an apprentice skills account to get rid of the up-front TAFE fees. That is $800 a year for kids who want to train to be plumbers, panel beaters, electricians, welders, motor mechanics, chefs, hairdressers et cetera. To help solve Australia’s massive shortage of child-care workers, Labor will extend its skills account plan to get rid of TAFE fees for the thousands of Australian trainee child-care carers who start courses each year. A federal Labor government will get rid of TAFE fees for eligible child-care courses by making an initial deposit of $1,200 per year for up to two years in a trainee skills account. Young people training to teach and care for the nation’s kids can use this to pay up-front fees at a TAFE or other eligible provider, or they can use it for materials and resources charges.

Labor will give every Australian student the opportunity to study at a specialised trade school. It will give younger students the chance to try their hands at a trade with a trade taster program. For older students, there will be more school based apprenticeships. Labor will invest in real apprenticeship schemes, not the fake apprenticeship schemes that use our kids as cheap labour and give them no skills. Labor will give them $2,000 as a trade completion bonus to encourage kids to finish their courses, and this will produce an extra 10,000 tradespeople—the plumbers, the builders, the child-care workers and all of those tradespeople that we so desperately need now.

Two hundred and seventy thousand extra skilled workers have entered this country over the last 10 years while 300,000 young Australians have been turned away from TAFE. We are seeing Australians laid off while foreign workers take their places on conditions that no-one should have put up with. The Howard government is allowing foreign apprentices to come to Australia and take apprenticeship places, and in fact it is providing incentives for businesses to take them on. These foreign apprentices are located in regional areas where youth unemployment is already too high and wages too low. To get their visas, foreign apprentices must accept whatever wages and conditions are on offer, and young Aussies have to compete with them. If they do not like it, they lose their visas and they are out. Over time, this will ruin the job prospects of young Australians. To deal with this, a federal Labor government will abolish the foreign apprenticeship visas. Labor will train our kids first before we train anyone else’s.

A federal Labor government will invest in a joint venture with telecommunications companies to build a superfast computer network. Labor will draw on the $757 million Broadband Connect program as well as providing an equity injection from the $2 billion earmarked for the Communications Fund to deliver the public funding on this in partnership with the private sector. This will deliver broadband that can instantly download documentaries, educational software and digital books; broadband that can host a digital classroom where children can have videoconferences all around Australia—a digital School of the Air for all. Plus, Labor will offer a clean feed for parents who want to make sure their kids are learning on the internet and not being exposed to pornography and violence. This is an investment in national infrastructure that equips our kids for the future.

Part of Labor’s plan is to rebuild Australia’s crumbling roads, rail, ports, electricity and communications networks. Labor will take the politics out of infrastructure spending with an independent expert body called Infrastructure Australia. It will make it easier for super funds to invest in infrastructure. We will set up a Building Australia fund to invest in a productive infrastructure of the future. When Australians want to compete in the world, Labor will make sure they have the 21st century infrastructure to take on the world’s best and win.

Nothing in this budget will help the 40 employees of the Kyneton firm John Brown Hosiery, who were informed on Monday, 15 May, that the company had been placed in voluntary liquidation. The company had been a major employer in Kyneton since the 1960s and many employees have been with the company for many years, some for as many as 30 years. This is a severe blow to the Kyneton district and follows the closure of the Frew Meatworks in 2004. This company enjoyed a good relationship with its employees and the Kyneton community, and its loss will adversely affect the whole region.

One of the problems that affected just some of the Frew employees, earlier, was the timing of the actual terminations, which was toward the end of that financial year, resulting in some employees who had young families and were on family payment benefits being penalised by being slugged by Centrelink for underestimating their annual income. I fear that some John Brown employees may find themselves in similar circumstances. Frew Meatworks and John Brown Hosiery employees with families had no way of knowing that they would be made redundant when they estimated their annual incomes for the next financial year, so any termination, redundancy or entitlement payment in that financial year would not have been declared and therefore will attract a penalty. This was raised with several government departments after the Frew example, but the Howard government refused to provide any worthwhile assistance other than arranging a long-term method of payment of the penalty. These people had lost their jobs through no fault of their own and were dealt with by the Howard government with all of the compassion of the Third Reich. I fear the same situation will arise for the John Brown Hosiery employees with young families. I will be more than happy to pursue this matter again on their behalf.

I said earlier that this budget is yet another example of wasted opportunity, but there is always one opportunity that the Howard-Costello government never fails to take advantage of—the opportunity to help itself to vast sums of taxpayer dollars to pay for what is allegedly government advertising but in reality is just Liberal-National Party political advertising designed to spin Australians into thinking that its harsh and unfair policies are in their interests. If the coalition policies are so good and are in the national interest, you would think there would be no need to squander the almost $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ dollars on shonky party political advertising.

Yesterday’s Senate estimates committee hearings have shown that the federal government is preparing to take advantage of around $380 million of hard-earned taxpayers’ dollars over four years in blatant party political advertising, with much of the money to be spent prior to next year’s federal election. At least $250 million has been allocated in the 2006-07 budget for 13 campaigns, including: $52.1 million for the private health insurance campaign, which it is claimed will ‘increase consumer awareness of the incentives and benefits associated with private health insurance’; $47.3 million for a smartcard awareness campaign—if it is such a smart card, why spend all that money?—which it is claimed will ‘ensure all Australians are aware of the processes for registering for the card’; $36.1 million for the child support reforms to ‘increase awareness of the reforms’; $15 million for the independent contractors and AWA communications campaign; and a massive Medicare mail-out for April 2007.

The $250 million is on top of a $130 million advertising placement spend for the current financial year, making a combined total amount of advertising, as revealed in yesterday’s estimates committee hearing, of $380 million. Budget papers show that much of the money will be spent in the lead-up to the federal election due to be held about October 2007. The spending is in addition to extra cash for a national education campaign for families, a Connect Australia campaign, a possible child-care benefits rebate campaign, a ‘smartraveller’ information campaign, a citizenship campaign and a Living in Harmony initiative.

It is also on top of $55 million already spent on the government’s Work Choices campaign promoting its new, unfair industrial relations regime. In fact, the Howard government had already misappropriated over $1 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1996 on this blatant abuse of public funds under this outrageous and so-called government advertising—a rip-off. As my colleague the member for Wills so eloquently put it, never before in the history of Australian advertising have so many taxpayer dollars been hosed up against a wall by so few, affecting so many, in so short a time.

Five days of meetings with authorities in the Northern Territory and Queensland fishing industry and marine environment have confirmed to me that illegal fishing continues to run out of control in Northern Australia. The failure of the Howard government to deal effectively with illegal fishing has seen incursions skyrocket. The budget spin suggests that the Howard government is addressing the issue but, as usual, the spin does not match the reality. Illegal fishermen landing on Australian soil is, I believe, the main security risk facing Australia today—without a doubt. Last year there were over 13,000 sightings of suspected illegal fishing boats off Northern Australia. That means thousands of people entered Australian territory illegally in 2005, presenting a significant health and quarantine risk, not to mention the possible threats to our security.

Even after all of the spin surrounding the budget, the government’s goal is to catch about 400 illegal boats next year. That will leave about 12,600 free to come and go as they please. The Australian Fisheries Management Authority has admitted that this budget will enable an average of two illegal boats to be captured per day. Again, with over 13,000 illegal vessels sighted last year, that leaves 33 illegal boats per day plundering our waters. This represents a potential catastrophe for all Australians, as the illegal fishermen are landing on mainland Australian soil, storing caches of food and water, which is often contaminated, and bringing with them various live birds and other animals for food and for pets. The boats are usually infested with rats and other vermin and the few that are confiscated have to be burnt. The fishermen come from Asian nations which have foot-and-mouth disease, rabies and a range of other diseases. It would be disastrous if those diseases were to spread throughout Australia.

I believe that illegal fishing represents a far greater threat to Australia than any asylum seekers, yet the Howard government is obsessed with tough action for illegal migrants but is doing very little to deal with this potentially devastating problem. All of the authorities and industry groups we met with have confirmed the need for better coordination of effort at a national level, and that means a coastguard. Australia desperately needs additional patrol boats to detain the thousands of illegal boats that enter our territorial waters each year. Instead, the government is inappropriately diverting just two highly specialised minehunter vessels for what should be patrol boat tasks. Minehunters have a unique design with specialised low-speed propulsion systems and are made from special non-magnetic materials. They were never designed to act as patrol boats. The Navy is now paying the price for the government’s mismanagement of border security. Instead of diverting minehunters from their normal activities, the government should commit to more patrol boats and a coastguard.

On a positive note, I welcome the budget initiative of more recognition and resources for the northern sea rangers, who are providing a superb level of Australian maritime surveillance. Labor welcomes the Howard government’s budget announcement that finally gives recognition to the northern sea rangers. For two years Labor has praised rangers like the Maningrida sea rangers, with whom I had the privilege of meeting with a few weeks ago. Indigenous sea rangers serve the important role of monitoring incursions and irregular movements in some of our most isolated areas. Indigenous sea rangers are able to spot things that non-Indigenous people would never see, because of their unique affinity with the land and the sea. Sea rangers can now play a far greater role in monitoring and reporting foreign incursions, and it is simply scandalous that the Howard government continues to deny the appropriate resources to effectively deal with the information that sea rangers are capable of delivering. This is a growing crisis that needs immediate and substantial action by the Howard government rather than the ad hoc and stopgap measures outlined in this budget.

Margaret May (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no doubt that the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and the associated bills presented to the parliament by the Treasurer recently clearly demonstrate the strong economic growth and unprecedented wealth this country has enjoyed over the past 10 years. Ten years of discipline, focus, vision and sound economic and fiscal management have seen this country and its people prosper—and they have prospered under a coalition government.

The Treasurer has delivered his 11th budget and his ninth surplus—a staggering achievement when you consider where this country was 10 years ago. The coalition came to government with a $96 million Labor government debt to pay off. That was the legacy left by the opposition—a debt we became responsible for. This debt was costing billions in annual interest payments and has now been paid off. This is an extraordinary achievement by this government and one that clearly demonstrates the competence and capability of this government: no government debt and a saving of $8 billion in interest payments. Australia has zero debt, is no longer making interest payments and has more funding for Aussie families and for Australia’s future.

By retiring that government debt, maintaining economic growth at an average of 3.5 per cent per annum, sustaining budget surpluses, keeping interest rates low, maintaining moderate inflation and keeping unemployment to 30-year lows, this country can expect strong economic growth well into the future that will see higher living standards for all and a $1 trillion economy in 2006-07, when Australia’s GDP is expected to reach that figure for the first time.

This budget spells out just how Australia and Australians can be optimistic about the future. The strong economic management of this government will deliver benefits for all Australians, and this budget introduces measures to ensure that future. There is a plan to simplify and streamline Australia’s superannuation system through personal tax relief worth $36.7 billion over the next four years, an extra $1.5 billion in extra assistance to families, enhancements to tax depreciation arrangements worth $3.7 billion to improve business efficiency and competitiveness, an additional $2.3 billion to accelerate major projects in road and rail infrastructure, a $1.9 billion investment over five years in mental health services, $241 million to train more doctors and nurses, and $905 million to boost health and medical research. This is a great budget for the future prosperity of this country.

I would like to take the opportunity today to outline in more detail some of the budget measures that will specifically assist the Gold Coast city and its residents. Over the past week I have received many calls and letters praising the coalition government on the measures in the budget, in particular from families, retirees and small business owners. All will benefit from the measures outlined by the Treasurer on budget night. How do these measures assist the Gold Coast and the people of McPherson? First, they assist through tax cuts delivered via a new comprehensive tax plan—a plan that is about continuing tax reform in this country and reducing the tax burden on all Australians while still funding services that Australians deserve and have come to expect from government, decent services that provide for all members of our communities.

Since 2000 this government has reduced the marginal tax rates at the lower end of the income scale. From 1 July 2006, the government will reduce the marginal tax rates at the upper end of the tax scale. Australia is a low tax country, despite what the opposition may say. We are the eighth lowest taxing of the developed countries. These changes will ensure our taxation system is more competitive and bring Australia’s upper income tax rates into line with OECD averages. This budget will reduce the 47c and 42c rates to 45c and 40c respectively and give Australia just four marginal tax rates, of 15c, 30c, 40c and 45c. Along with these tax cuts there will be an increase in the thresholds so that the 15c rate will apply for incomes up to $25,000, the 30c rate for incomes up to $75,000, the 40c rate for incomes up to $150,000 and the 45c rate for incomes above that. What this means is that 80 per cent of Australians will have a top marginal rate of only 30c and taxpayers will not reach the highest marginal rate until they earn more than three times average weekly earnings.

This measure has been very welcome in the electorate of McPherson. Tax reform was high on the wish list of Australian families in my electorate. The lower tax rates and the higher thresholds help the majority of my families. And the help for families does not stop with these measures. Helping families has been one of the highest priorities of this government over the last 10 years, and it will continue to be a priority. Since coming to office, we have doubled assistance to families through the family tax benefit system. The Treasurer announced in the budget package further enhancements to family tax benefit part A. Families will receive from 1 July 2006 the maximum amount if they earn less than $40,000—an increase from $33,361, which is the current level for eligibility. This is very generous. In fact, the measure will provide additional assistance to almost half a million Australian families at a cost of $993 million over four years.

The large family supplement will also increase to include those families with three children. That increase will also take effect from 1 July 2006. Child-care places will also increase. This government believes in choice with regard to child care. Options should be available for the care of children and, to that end, the limit on the number of subsidised outside school hours care and family day care places will be uncapped, which means eligible providers will be funded. This means more choices for more Aussie mums.

Tax reform did not just assist our families. The Treasurer announced measures to assist and support senior Australians, self-funded retirees and carers. Each one of these groups of people has also benefited from the comprehensive tax plan. Those senior Australians eligible for the senior Australians tax offset will pay no tax on an annual income up to $24,867 for singles and up to $41,360 for couples. The Gold Coast is home to many self-funded retirees, and the feedback on these increases is very welcome from those very special people who have worked hard and provided for their retirement. A senior’s concession allowance will be introduced for certain self-funded retirees who do not get pensioner concessions. And those eligible self-funded retirees will also receive a $102.80 one-off utilities payment.

Carers in our community make a special contribution to our society. I had the pleasure recently of officially opening a carers forum, which was convened on the Gold Coast by the Commonwealth Carer Respite Centre to enable carers to come together, to listen to speakers from government and service providers, to share the difficulties they face each day in the role they undertake—a role that often sees these people shut away from their communities with very little social interaction and very little time for themselves because of the very demanding 24-hour a day service they undertake in caring for a loved one at home. These people deserve special recognition. They need to be supported and assisted with services and respite to ensure they do not suffer themselves. So often, I hear of carers whose own health and wellbeing has deteriorated because of the constant, selfless tasks they undertake daily.

The Treasurer announced an additional $1,000 to be paid this financial year to eligible carers in recognition of the tireless work they undertake. More than 100,000 Australians will receive this payment. The $1,000 bonus will also be extended to the 25,000 people who receive either the wife pension or the veterans’ affairs partner service pension and are carers. That measure has been particularly welcomed in McPherson by the wives of veterans who are carers. And to those people in receipt of the carer allowance, there will be an additional payment of $600 this financial year. These payments, more importantly, are tax free. All these measures—measures to assist families and senior Australians—are very welcome. But of course they can be delivered and provided only because of the responsible economic management of the coalition government—that should not be forgotten. We are not running a budget deficit. We are in the black and introducing policies that will continue to build the economic strength of this country for all Australians.

There are a number of Gold Coast projects that were successful in securing funding through this budget, and I would like to briefly touch on some of those projects and what part they will play in building on the strengths of the Gold Coast city and its communities. Bond University has received a $4.5 million capital funding grant for the health sciences and medicine building that is training tomorrow’s medical practitioners. The undergraduate medical program is quickly gaining an outstanding reputation amongst the medical community, both nationally and internationally, and has attracted some very talented students who will become the medical leaders of the future. The medical program has been an exceptional success for Bond University. The federal government grant represents a landmark for Bond as it is the first time in the history of the university that government at any level has provided such significant funding.

I am proud to be a member of the Bond medical faculty advisory board and delighted that the federal government recognised the contribution Bond was making to education, particularly in the area of medicine. We all know this country needs doctors, particularly in Queensland, and Bond stepped up to the plate by investing in this very specialised area. It is to be congratulated on making the enormous commitment to training doctors and thus making an enduring contribution to the health and wellbeing of this country.

Of great assistance to Bond and other tertiary institutions around the country is the commitment by this government to increase the general FEE-HELP loan limit from $50,950 to $80,000 and increase the FEE-HELP loan limit for medicine, dentistry and veterinary science to $100,000, commencing on 1 January 2007. There is no doubt this government’s commitment to increasing the FEE-HELP loan scheme for domestic students will give Australian students far greater freedom when choosing their higher education provider. It will also improve the affordability of private education for Aussie students; it will make it more accessible. This initiative will certainly assist students choosing to study at Bond. The higher loan limit means the majority of students will now be able to fund their degree wholly through FEE-HELP rather than having to enter into expensive commercial loans.

Another project that received additional funding in the budget was the Kids Alive Do the Five program. This has been a highly successful program developed by Laurie Lawrence, a man who is committed to teaching youngsters how to swim. Even though Laurie is widely recognised and has some impressive achievements to his name, he has told me that nothing satisfies him more than saving toddlers’ lives. In 2004-05, toddler drownings in this country fell from 40 to 28, and there is no doubt Laurie’s program has played a big part in saving those young lives. The project has received an additional $330,000, which means the show will be on the road for another 12 months. The roadshow involves a crew of five travelling in two vehicles: a five-tonne truck that carries the stage equipment and a care van that carries the crew’s luggage. The show has been seen by over 45,000 kids in 109 towns around Australia, from the southern Gold Coast to Aurukun, Ayers Rock, Coober Pedy, Perth and right down to Hobart and Devonport. With this new allocation of funding, thousands more kids will learn how to ‘do the five’.

As I said earlier, this government is committed to families, and to enhance that commitment Centacare has received an allocation of $1.425 million to establish an early intervention service on the Gold Coast for families, couples and individuals to teach them the skills and the knowledge they need to help maintain a healthy family environment and assist with relationships. I have no doubt Centacare will do an excellent job in delivering these much needed services to the Gold Coast city.

The Gold Coast Drug Council received a $50,000 grant for drug and alcohol treatment services. These services are vital on the Gold Coast and the dedicated team led by Mary Alcorn at Mirakai that deliver these services are to be congratulated for their continued efforts in combating the drug and alcohol problems that affect young people on the Gold Coast.

Aged care facilities and services are vital for the Gold Coast community. To ensure the facilities are delivering and maintaining standards of care that we expect, the government has allocated funding for increased spot checks of residential aged care homes. Under this initiative each residential aged care home will have at least one unannounced site visit annually. This initiative will give peace of mind to families of loved ones who are living in an aged care home.

It is a fact that Australia does not have enough organ donors to meet the needs of Australians who require transplants. As a country we continue to lag behind other OECD countries in our rate of organ donation. The coalition government has allocated $28.4 million over four years to increase the rate of organ and tissue donation by raising awareness and streamlining the processes. This is a great step forward for an initiative that will be supported very much in my community.

The Gold Coast is the tourism capital of Australia. Some would disagree with me but I think we still maintain that crown. Tourism is a $75 billion industry that has created more than 13½ thousand jobs in this country over the last financial year. I know that many of those jobs are on the Gold Coast. It is an industry that earns Australia more than $18 billion in exports, and the funding in this budget is a further commitment by this government to the industry. Key areas of the government’s support for the industry include funding for Tourism Australia, $15.4 million to be invested under the Australian Tourism Development Program and the roll-out of the new international tourism campaign. The campaign is already having an impact. With the government’s support, this industry will continue to grow and provide many jobs in regional and rural Australia.

There are two further areas of government investment that I would like to comment on. They are two areas of investment which are often raised with me and which, in my view, we should continue to invest in wisely for the future growth and prosperity of our country. They are: economic infrastructure and physical health infrastructure. Improvements in the health of all Australians rests on quality research and funding for the National Health and Medical Research Council. That funding has been increased again in this budget, and it will take the base funding to over $700 million per annum by 2009-10. To value add to that funding the federal government has announced new funding of $235 million for the physical infrastructure—the laboratories and equipment—that our researchers need to do their work. Medical technology is helping people to live longer and to have better quality of life. Technology will continue to advance, but with that technological advance will come escalating costs.

Australians also have a part to play. Obesity is a huge problem in this country, particularly in the young. We have seen a huge increase in diabetes, a disease that can be prevented by individuals taking responsibility for the choices they make about their lifestyles. Advances in medical technology are wonderful, and certainly saves lives, but as a country we must start developing lifestyle related choices that will also enhance our quality of life and our longevity.

Finally, I want to turn to economic infrastructure, particularly roads. I know that the member for Blair, who is sitting in the chamber today, supports me in lobbying extremely hard for that funding for our road infrastructure in this country. I applaud the government for its commitment of an additional $2.3 billion for AusLink. This funding will assist with major road infrastructure through to 2009. There is of course the Roads to Recovery program, which is another important program that delivers much needed funding to local councils to fix local problems. This funding has been doubled. The Gold Coast City Council will receive double their previous funding, more than $7 million, which will certainly help to alleviate some of the bottlenecks we are experiencing in our city.

There is no doubt that this budget has delivered. There is so much more that one could comment on, such as funding for mental health, maintaining our commitment to defence, strengthening our national security and combating illegal fishing. I commend the bills to the House. (Time expired)

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was recently reading the two-volume monumental work by David Clune and Ken Turner on the premiers of New South Wales. Some of the premiers were ephemeral and some of those who were more contemporary are still remembered. Some of them were great contributors to the state and others are best forgotten. This made me think of the appropriation bills and the budget that are before us today in the context of the Prime Minister’s long-term image.

On an international front, he will not go down in history as someone of any great moment. The war in Iraq is obviously turning into an almighty mess and a number of countries are reducing their forces in that country. There is a misunderstanding of what would be necessary if and when the allied forces are victorious, and a misunderstanding of the internal forces in Iraq.

In Timor, thousands of people were murdered as this government prevaricated and denied questions about it from the then shadow foreign minister, the member for Kingsford Smith. As he daily questioned the government about the need for action, he was ridiculed and, as I said, thousands of people were killed in the interim period.

The Menzies governments and later Labor governments were respected in international forums for Australia’s strong position on human rights. Certainly on those fronts the image of the Howard government will not be a very rewarding one in the decades to come. Electorally, few would quibble with the success of the Prime Minister, although there might be some questions about the nature of the victory on the Tampa issue.

This budget presented an opportunity for the government on many fronts—economic, national infrastructure and productivity—to build Australia for the future. I am sad to say that the government missed this opportunity. It represented an opportunity for the Prime Minister to go down in history on a national building front. This economic success is based less on management by the Treasurer and the government than on minerals and commodities. The Treasury Macroeconomic Division, in their spring 2005 round-up, clearly stated where this success was due. They stated:

Mining commodity prices have risen strongly recently. This appears more than a fluctuation around a long-term downward trend. Rather it reflects the strong state of world demand, and in particular the rapid industrialisation of China.

However, they cautioned:

As more productive capacity comes into operation around the world, commodity prices will slow or fall back somewhat.

Earlier in the article, they noted:

Australia’s mineral resources are an important source of national income. The mining sector accounted for around $43 billion, or 5 per cent, of Australia’s GDP in 2004-05. This share is rising following the large price rises for some of our key resource exports. As mining is a capital-intensive sector, its share of national employment is significantly lower at around 1 per cent.

That must be borne in mind with regard to the wage repression that the government is trying to engineer in this country. The government often cites the wages in the mining sector, but mining is capital intensive, few are employed in it and it is short term in certain localities. So no less a source than Treasury cites the importance of mining in contributing to our current situation.

It is also interesting to note in ABARE’s latest statistics for the March quarter of 2006 that mineral resources, which were 35 per cent as a proportion of exports of goods and services in 2000-01, climbed to 41 per cent in 2004-05. ABARE cite similar statistics with regard to the direction of exports of minerals. In 1994-95, China represented three per cent; it now represents 17 per cent. India represented one per cent; it now represents 10 per cent. So we should not get too carried away with pronouncements about how our economic success is related to government policies. A clear ingredient in that is the minerals sector, and the government’s contribution to that success is very questionable. This is not exactly a government that goes out actively promoting exports. In fact, its philosophy is more one of hands-off and inaction.

Whilst this is a fairly merry economic picture from the government’s point of view, I note the cautionary comment by Treasury that I quoted. I also want to refer to another body, the OECD, which is often cited by this government. In an article on Wednesday, 24 May, the OECD’s latest assessment of the world economy concluded:

... inflation in Australia should remain subdued—provided the Government resists the temptation to spend any unexpected revenue gains.

This relates not only to the latest budget but also to the time of the last election when the government was spending $1 million a day. One questionable decision in this budget is to put a few million dollars into the Cronulla rugby league club in Sydney on the basis not of the national interest but that the Treasurer is the No. 2 ticket holder of the club. That is the kind of money that is being thrown away in this latest budget. The OECD has questioned the amount of money being thrown around at the moment in the context of the resources boom, which, as has been noted, will not continue in the long term.

If people are not content with the comments of ABARE, the OECD or the Treasury, I turn to the Treasurer’s view on the major ingredient of the success. Speaking to Laurie Oakes on Nightline, he said:

… strong company profits is the area that has increased and that is largely led by banks and mining companies. Mining companies and banks are extremely profitable at the moment, they are paying more in company tax.

I think he is quite correct. The successes have come from those sectors—in some instances, well beyond government control. The profitability of the banks has been driven by this government’s inaction on fees and charges as well as the explosion of personal debt and the growth in housing prices. Only last week we saw the St George Bank bring down further charges on people.

With so much money around, it would have been in the national interest for more emphasis to be placed on national infrastructure and building. We constantly talk about the roads in members’ electorates, and no doubt everyone would be happy about having roads and streets in their electorate upgraded. However, in the context of IT infrastructure—and there are major question marks there—ports, rail infrastructure et cetera, and most particularly the training of human beings in skills acquisition, one would have to say that opportunities have been lost.

In fact, a few training schemes disappeared in this budget. Assistance to help regional employers to hire locals and a scheme to put women into non-traditional occupations were both scrapped. This is in the context of this government bringing 97,000 to 100,000 migrants to Australia a year. This government was supposedly going to solve the problem by creating a series of TAFE colleges, most of which have not got off the ground—one-third of the money has not been expended at this stage, a number of the prospectuses for the colleges have been abandoned and sites have been forgotten about. With so much money in this budget, there were opportunities, but the government chose not to go down that path.

The opposition welcomes the tax relief measures. However, it is worth noting the disparity in outcomes. Those earning up to $70,000 a year will receive tax cuts of only $7 to $10 a week on top of the minimal gains in the last two budgets. In contrast, the people who will be protected by recent changes to our electoral laws when they make donations to the government parties—the people whose donations will be concealed through the Greenfields Foundation and other entities—have come out of this quite well. The richest Australians—high-income earners on $200,000 a year—will get a $90 a week tax cut in the budget on top of the $110 tax cuts they gained in the last two budgets. Since 1996, the top five per cent of taxpayers have received 25 per cent of the Howard government’s tax cuts. So whilst there was some tax relief for the average person in middle Australia, the vast preponderance of the tax cuts went to the big end of town.

The minimal gains for low-income earners are being eroded through increases in the price of oil, which shows no sign of abating, and the government is looking at wage suppression. This government constantly talks about the movement in real wages while it has been in power, in comparison to the movement in real wages under the previous government, and says it has been the government of higher wages. The government is trying to destroy the conciliation and arbitration process in this country to suppress wages. In each national wage case, the government opposed the increases. The government glories in the fact that its views were rejected by the conciliation and arbitration commission. The government associates the rejection of its views as a victory, but we know that this government is driving wage suppression in this country. This is at a time when the movement of wages in this country is extremely inequitable.

I refer to the work of John Shields in the Journal of Australian Political Economy, No. 56, with regard to the Business Council of Australia, which has driven, more than any other organisation, the need to repress wages and reduce people’s rights and conditions. That was a very interesting survey of movements of executive salaries in this country. For instance, on page 310, it states:

As the table … discloses, the average termination payment for CEOs departing prior to 2000 was $2.3 million, while for those leaving between 2001 and 2005 the average payout was just under $3.3 million.

Furthermore, it notes:

… the blow-out in CEO pay levels is difficult to reconcile with the BCA CEO’s persistent advocacy of a more competitive labour cost structure for the Australian economy …  Over the past 16 years, their average total cash earnings has risen at an average compound annual growth rate of 13.5 percent (or 10.7 percent in inflation-adjusted terms), compared to just 4.2 percent (or approximately 1.4 percent in real terms) for other employees generally. The gross cash earnings gap between the two groups has widened from 18:1 to 63:1.

We have a government driven by BCA material. We had a nice little comment from the Treasurer last week that he cannot understand how one individual could earn so much, and that is supposed to solve the long-term overall national trend. As I say, these increases in minor tax relief to the average Australian are at a time when they are eaten up by petrol price movements, the severe attempt to repress their wages and the movement in interest rates.

With regard to training, the government has really dropped the ball very badly. We are one of the few advanced Western countries in the OECD where there has been a retreat of government expenditure on tertiary education, whether it be in university or TAFE areas—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

People might shake their head, but the facts are in the statistics which the OECD puts out and which this government is well aware of. Not only has there been a retreat of government expenditure with regard to tertiary expenditure but also research and development—another area where the government believes that the hands-off, inactive approach is the way to success.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What’s the total education funding? Give us the total figure.

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are talking about the percentage of GDP. An amount of $182 million of training gestures in the context of $37 billion tax cuts really puts this in context. I want to cite Heather Ridout from the Australian Industry Group:

We’ve been seeking additional incentive arrangements that encourages existing workers to upskill and younger people to achieve higher skill levels outcomes.

…     …         …

This would require payment of incentives in addition to those announced in the Budget.

We are 15th in OECD R&D, just for the information of some of the other parties. That position, of course, is accompanied by the severe situation with regard to the current account deficit. However, Anna Lavelle, in the Australian Financial Review of 16 May, whilst talking about the government’s decision to put some money into venture capital—a praiseworthy action by the government—further commented:

One of the biggest threats to the industry is the growing skills shortage in science and engineering.

…     …         …

But the need for a long-term strategy to attract secondary and tertiary students … and to encourage retraining and upgrading of skills … is fundamental …

The article also referred to the need for business and management skills. Hundreds of thousands of people have been turned away from the TAFE sector over the last few years. They have been balanced by virtually an equal number of people coming in as skilled workers. The government tries to paint those people concerned about this pattern as xenophobic and racist et cetera. That comes from a party which used question time yesterday to essentially denigrate Indigenous Australians and tried to make into a massive national issue the fact that one or two people might have received lighter sentences because of custodial law and totally ignored their human condition with regard to housing, dislocation and family problems. 

As I have referred to previously, training in this country is a fundamental issue. Labor in its budget alternative talks about the disappearance of TAFE fees for people in traditional trades and, importantly, in child care—an area where, despite the promise of more places, article after article has talked about the fact that there is geographic imbalance, that there are large numbers of people who are not at work using these resources at the moment and that other people cannot get access so that they will be able to work. It is a question not only of access but also of people’s ability to afford those rights.

This budget, as I have stressed throughout, is a budget which again gives higher tax assistance to those on higher incomes. The picture in Australia is very complex; it is not a uniform country. When the national unemployment rate was 5.3 per cent, we had teenagers at 15.2 per cent, Indigenous Australians at 20.3 per cent, single parents at 12 per cent, North African and Middle Eastern people—who predominate in my electorate—at 12.1 per cent, Australians with Vietnamese backgrounds at 11 per cent and recently arrived people at 10.9 per cent. The central western region of Sydney, at a time when the national unemployment rate went down by 0.1 per cent, surged by 1.4 per cent to 5.8 per cent. Whilst it might be comforting that the big end of town has significant tax relief, that does not affect broad middle Australia.

In research note No. 53, you see the disparity between electorates. In the electorate of Reid, 14.3 per cent of people depend on government cash benefits compared to 2.8 per cent of people in the electorate of Wentworth, where the alternative Treasurer resides. Similarly, 24 per cent of Wentworth residents rely on investments, contrasting with three per cent in my electorate. That is reflected in Deakin University’s Australian Unity Study, which talks about the level of contentment and happiness of electorates around this country. It was no surprise that Reid, with a poverty rate of 11 per cent and ranked 109th with regard to incomes, was amongst those with the highest level of discontent about their circumstances. It was a situation where 13,850 people were regarded as being impoverished.

Labor’s alternative to this budget stresses national skills acquisition. It talks about making sure that people gain access to TAFE colleges. It makes sure that there is more availability of child care, that child-care places are in suburbs where there is a need and that it is not just a slogan about how many places are released or how big ABC is becoming as a corporation. It looks at child-care availability in schools, where parents can drop a number of children at the same site so that people are not going around to a variety of sites to drop off children and the children can have the support of their elder brothers and sisters. If that is not available, it looks at community centres.

Labor’s alternative also talks about broadband access for education. It stresses that Australia must now decide to do something about the future. It must build the infrastructure; it must build the training; it must not rely on the short-term option of importing about 100,000 skilled migrants a year. I remember the period of the Keating government when Australia was importing 25,000 skilled migrants a year. The same people who now say it is xenophobic to oppose this are the people who then decried the level of 25,000: it was too high; there were too many coming; we were relying too much on this. Which employers are going to train people if they have the easy way out of being able to bring people in from overseas at the drop of a hat?

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Establishing a shortage; no locals available.

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are no locals available in certain trades because the training has not been undertaken, and it is not going to happen if employers do not have any incentive to do it. That is the reality.

I am glad to see that the government is reacting seven years after the 1999 report about the need for action with regard to illegal workers in this country. We know that the government’s new legislation will not catch many employers, because of the requirement that the employer is reckless in the hiring of these people or did not know. However, we are pleased that despite claims of xenophobia the government actually does understand that there is an issue of illegal workers in the country. The situation is that the government is determined to repress people’s wages further over the next few years, to take away their rights and to drive down wages despite the ‘sloganising’ about the real income changes over the last decade.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin in what is essentially a discussion of Australia’s welfare system and the work that this government is doing to improve the interface between welfare and work by highlighting the announcement just yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in which their headline measures were, in the main, extremely complimentary about the improvements that Australia has achieved over the last decade. The member for Reid, who spoke just prior to me, provided a number of statistics. It is always difficult to respond to every single percentage, and that is why it is often incumbent upon us speaking here in this chamber to use headline statistics—that is, an overall figure that incorporates a whole range of these lesser statistics that are often grasped at by the opposition and held up as if they are completely watertight. The headline statistics that came to us just yesterday from the Bureau of Statistics show that national wealth, net income and the levels of education and the number of Australians of working age who have non-school degrees have climbed considerably over the last 10 years. Those figures are available this morning. They are a resounding acknowledgment of the work done by this government to get Australians participating and working in the economy and doing so more productively.

The member for Reid discussed disparity between federal electorates and then compared average wages versus CEO wages. These figures make fascinating reading for some, but in the end we need to remember that in a globalised economy every OECD country is fighting just these same battles. The point is that Australia is doing it exceptionally well. The ABS just yesterday showed that equivalised disposable household income has increased in real terms over and above inflation by 22 per cent for the lowest income earners, the lowest income quintiles, and also for middle-earning Australia. Australia is one of the few countries where that gap has not been widening. I point out that that equivalised income is an adjustment made by the ABS to allow for people living in different sized households, who have different levels of expense, to obtain the same level of wellbeing. That has been taken care of by that ABS analysis.

One always feels that, whenever we get on to the subject of the economy and have a discussion with the other side of the chamber, it is like being whipped around the head with a kleenex. They take one figure and, as soon as we seek to explain that figure in the overall context, they simply choose another. Essentially, what we had today was a criticism using OECD figures of Australia’s R&D. We may well be 15th in the OECD on one figure; we are fifth on another and 10th on another. Barlow just last week released a fascinating book on Australia’s R&D. As I think any reasonable Australian would expect, Australia punches around its weight, according to the size of its economy and the level of its population. We are a small economy, a medium political sized power and fairly influential within the region, and our R&D reflects that. It is no great surprise. We often like to talk of Australia as being extremely self-reliant and looking out for the underdog, but when you strip all that away and the selection of percentages that suit the opposition, in essence, Australia is doing reasonably well compared to other OECD countries.

There are areas where we do well and there are areas where we could do better. One area where we lag—and there is no argument about this—is the proportion of Australians aged between 25 and 64 years who are on a disability pension. I have said before that I am not about to make any judgment on any individual Australians, but, when we have close to double the proportion of people on disability pensions of some other OECD economies, it is incumbent upon the government to ask, just as a century ago Beveridge raised that very same issue, about the integrity of a welfare system that is partially reliant on the middle class. Those who pay into the system should see some benefits in the form of participation, mutual responsibility and social cohesion. To me that is just a very simple tenet of welfare.

Another tenet of welfare, of course, is that welfare must be available to those who need it—not a cent more and not a cent less—at precisely the time they need it, and it must be available in a form they can use. This brings me to the key area I want to touch on today, which is: should welfare be one large, almost impenetrable, monolith or should it be something that responds to the individual needs of a person who enters a Centrelink office? The answer is somewhere in between. The answer is that we can do better than we have done. The key strategy that came up in the budget just gone was, over the forward estimates, the billion dollar investment into an access card.

Government is employing a range of strategies to improve the way we engage individual citizens. Examples do abound. There is Job Network and Australians Working Together, where those seeking work are directly linked to job providers. There are the health management plans being developed by the health minister and the increase in conditionality in welfare payments. Even the recent discussion on Indigenous affairs shows that we cannot allow antisocial behaviour to sink beneath some miasma of cultural acceptability, that we need to pierce through that and hold individuals accountable for their actions but still remember that there are causal determinants and that only by their being addressed will we be provided with a long-term solution. There is a range of these areas: even the growth of the independent school sector is an indication that this government is saying, ‘This is not just about one size fits all.’ I would like to devote a couple of minutes to this topic.

We know that globally we have an increasing level of interconnection and access to information flows. But at the same time we are seeing a generational shift—which interests me greatly—that is, for the first time we have people aged 18 to 30 who have been, for their entire life, completely connected by information technology. They have their mobile phone and their laptop computer. These people insist they are completely encultured with access to information flows. They will be asking the very same questions: how do I remain connected to the sources of information that I wish to be connected to, and how do I cut off those in which I am not interested? That is why a one-size-fits-all welfare system will begin to struggle under the expectations of the community. It is also why I predict that the welcome for the access card will be considerably warmer than it was two decades ago, and I am going to outline some of the reasons.

Before I do, I want to quote Jonathan Levitt, who asked a fascinating question in one of his most recent books on economics: why do most drug dealers live at home with mum? It is a provocative question that asks why what is perceived to be an enormous sector of the black economy actually leaves most people still living at home with their parents. I would like to ask a similarly provocative question, not at all related to the illicit drug trade: if education is such a touchstone issue in Australia, so important for the early development of our children, why are P&Cs almost completely depopulated in some of the areas where I have been? Those of us in this chamber have often been to 20 or 30 different P&Cs, and half of them have single-figure turnouts at their meetings. Either everyone is completely happy with education and outcomes or they feel that being a member of a P&C makes no difference. But I put to you that there is a real sense that we are still not able to have a great deal of input into and control of the welfare system that is laid out for us as Australians. That is why I am predicting that over time there will be increasing tailoring of services. That may well start with an access card.

Social assistance is absolutely essential for those who are in the lower income quintiles in particular. What surprises me, when I look at how many concession cards there are, is that 80 per cent of all prescriptions in this country are written on PBS discounts. Clearly people are using concession cards to which they are not entitled. As long as this fraudulent activity persists and we have no way of identifying people and their access to services, those who fund the services can expect that there will be that sense of water running out of the leaking bucket. What the access card is going to offer—in relation to the $92 billion that is dispersed every year, those 250,000 face-to-face meetings, the half a million people who go to Centrelink offices each year and have to turn around and go home because they did not have the right form, the 100,000 letters that are sent out every day by Centrelink, and the 150,000 phone calls received every day—is that we are not going to be spending the first three minutes of the average 15-minute phone call trying to verify the identity of the person on the other end of the phone.

This is a $4 billion identity fraud sector, at best estimates, that stands to be reduced slowly with the use of an access card. Until we can do basic verification, technology will certainly be working on the other side to make things easier for those who are going to abuse the system. Isn’t it time we started to fight back?

I would like to pitch it to you in a slightly different way. There is concern out there about privacy, and a lot of work has been done with the Privacy Commissioner and privacy experts. But in the end the way we are viewing information should not be so much, ‘Are they collecting information on me?’ but remembering, ‘I’ve already given that information over in a completely consensual way. Every time I open my wallet and use my credit card I am giving my financial information to an entity’—not a trusted government entity either, I add.

So the information has already, with my approval, been provided to a third party. The issue here of access to the information is that I want it back. I want to know what information they hold about me, and I want to control, to the best of my ability, who accesses it. With a chip on an access card with a PIN-restricted secure area, that battle can begin to be fought, with an individual having some awareness—even if not complete control—of the information that is held about them. That is the objective of the access card.

These cards are going to be enormously expensive to roll out, but we need to remember that over the forward estimates, with $1 trillion being disbursed, one only needs a fraction of one per cent to be tightened up in the performance of Australia’s welfare system and we are looking at multibillion-dollar savings. That is welfare; we have not even begun to talk about health benefits. I think the great sleeper in this debate is the health benefits of a recall system in health. This is not yet part of government policy, but I see that there will be a time when health follow-up and health maintenance will become part of an access card. That may be a reminder to come back for a diabetes check or a way of supporting individuals with complex diseases. Advanced work is already being done overseas to set up support systems for people as reminders—‘Have you taken your tablet this morning?’—in households where there is not a loved one who can help with that. It may be a phone call to say, ‘Have you checked your blood pressure at home?’ or, ‘Have you come in for your monthly check?’ without having to rely on a very busy medical receptionist.

The access card will make life easy for those who are using government services because there will only be the need to register once. There will be access to multiple agencies, so every time you change details that information is passed to all agencies with which you have a relationship. A fantastic illustration of the potential for an access card is when all services go down in an area of disaster, like a cyclone. There is a possibility there for instant card readers on the back of a Woolworths truck, full of food. Where banks are not working and where cash is not available, the ability to instantly transfer funds for needy families is a significant additional benefit of having an access card.

Let us not confuse that with an ID card. This is not a card with an address or date of birth on it. We are not talking about a card that people present to establish their identity. This is a card that allows them to access the services that they deserve, and as I said in my first couple of sentences: not a penny more and not a penny less, but exactly what they deserve. You cannot ask for anything fairer than that. On the card would be a photographic verification and a name, but the rest of it would be encoded in a chip—not an easy-to-access magnetic strip but a chip that can hold 30,000 to 60,000 pages of information, which is added to that card with the consent of the individual, who can add a whole range of additional information and determine its level of security.

So areas that are highly sensitive would remain in a password-protected area that can only be read, for instance, at a medical practitioner’s office, in the room with the PIN being inserted by the patient. That information is there. You do not have to go to too many hospitals to see the reams and reams of paper records of blood tests and X-rays that sit in dusty rooms in the backs of hospitals and are lost forever. There is potential for that information to be on a card: the follow-up of the chest X-ray that demonstrates the lung cancer; the early photographs of an evolving suspicious spot that turns out to be a melanoma. These benefits are yet to even be considered in the great equation of an access card.

Obtaining an access card would be relatively easy. We have a minister who is doing everything to reduce the amount of paperwork involved, and there is no need for the card to change any benefits. In fact it is quite likely to make people aware of benefits of which they have not been told before. If the card gets lost, it is easy to cancel over the phone, across the counter or over the internet so we do not have the current situation of people using other people’s benefit cards. The card can be used as proof of ID, if people insist, in certain other offices, but as I said it does not hold obvious date of birth or address and other personal details. There will be three mandatory fields, but they are not necessarily shown on the front of the card. I think it is very important to finish that section of my speech by saying that this card is not one that you have to present compulsorily as proof of age. This is not a card that is used to obtain vital ID details from other people. It is purely to establish your eligibility for Centrelink services.

That interconnectedness that I talked about and the potential to use an access card also delivers people’s desire to keep information from others. What we are seeing with younger people, who are showing less and less inclination to get involved in community groups in some cases, less and less desire to lock into long-term services and more demand for services now—more real-time consumption—may well be a generational change. It may well just be that younger people have always been slightly more technologically minded than those who are a generation older. But, in the end, what I am witnessing in Bowman is a fall away in the engagement with non-profit groups and the community sector. This is a great concern for me and I believe that as long as we have the one-size-fits-all information system, as I have talked about before, we cannot begin to access and unlock some of the people who wish to help in the community sector.

Some will say that the desire to volunteer is inversely proportional to your ability to earn a wage doing something else. It is time that that changed and that people who genuinely care about the community have a way to do it. If I were about to have children attending kindergarten, I am sure I would be galvanised to help set up my community kindergarten. But then that interest wanes very quickly, that conditional social capital where I will help the group, I will help my own congregation and those nearest to me.

How can government help to unlock that potential assistance, the human capacity to help organisations most in need? I would put to groups like Volunteering Australia that we have still not yet unlocked that potential. One way to do it, of course, is to tailor the services by being able to identify exactly what a community group needs and match it, using the internet, to precisely what, for example, my colleague here the member for Lindsay is prepared to offer. She might well say, ‘In my spare time, I’d like to give my legal skills to an animal rights non-profit organisation, and I’m only available on Thursday nights.’ You would be flat out finding an animal rights non-profit organisation in the west of Sydney that needs legal advice—certainly the legal advice of someone who has not been in the law for some time—from the member for Lindsay. But with the power of the internet that connection could well be achieved across the country, because the member for Lindsay might be able to help a group in Western Australia who could never have hoped to have found her without an internet matching system.

You simply need five fields: what your skill is, where you would like to offer it, to what type of group, when you can offer it and some additional comments and information that will assist with the match. I do not for a moment want to say that the member for Lindsay is going to be the perfect fit for that non-profit organisation, but remember that, at the moment, the non-profit organisation lodges a request with Volunteering Australia and waits for a phone call, hoping that someone’s New Year’s resolution is to help an animal support group in Western Sydney. What we need is real-time assistance, and that is where the tailoring of services can really help, where using access to information can make an enormous advance.

My view is that eventually there would be a bank of skills, a bank of people, be they retired or otherwise—perhaps in the workforce—with additional time and a desire to help the non-profit community. Why should we not have a system that brings them together? That is something I will be launching in my electorate in the next two months, with the interest of Volunteering Queensland but not yet with them as a partner. There are concerns about information security, obviously. There are concerns about whether we will have enough people to volunteer and whether we will have the confidence of and the capacity in the non-profit sector to lodge all of their needs on the internet.

Can we be sure that, when you bring people together over the internet, there is actually a perfect match? As we know from the explosion of dating agencies that we see on the net, of course we cannot. But, when a volunteer knocks on the door of a non-profit organisation, walks in and offers their help, that agency has the capacity to work out whether that person has the skills they need. This is only bringing people together, but at the moment that is the limiting factor for volunteering in many communities. So the objective here with the service called Red-e-vol is to bring together the non-profit sector with the skills that they so desperately need. It is an example of tailoring services for the community. The access card is another good example of that, and I would urge both sides of this chamber to engage in that debate and not use the fears of the past but talk about the potential for the future.

Carmen Lawrence (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the first acts of the Howard government was to cut some $30 million allocated to the modest but promising family violence prevention programs for Indigenous people. The money was lost as a result of the massive cuts to ATSIC’s budget in 1996-97. In the last few days we have seen the spectacle of the minister responsible for Indigenous affairs railing against widespread violence against Aboriginal women and children in Indigenous communities—and indeed he should be alarmed. But Minister Brough, who expresses such surprise at violence in Indigenous communities, has been in this parliament for the whole decade that the Howard government has been in office and responsible for Indigenous affairs. And, although he has been on the planet, too, for 45 years, he appears to have remained ignorant of the dire conditions in many Indigenous communities. That is particularly surprising given that he was the minister responsible for employment services for some of that period. I think he must have had his eyes firmly closed and his ears stuffed with cloth—and now he is out there arrogantly proffering instant solutions to the problems that he appears to have so belatedly discovered. What is more, he appears to be in the process now of misdiagnosing the problems and avoiding responsibility.

As my mother would have said, and it applies in spades to this minister, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I offer some free advice to the minister: a little humility goes a long way in this very difficult portfolio. At least he should speak to his own members who represent electorates where Indigenous people live and to the many Indigenous leaders who have been working and pleading for sustained government action to prevent and deal with violence and abuse. Professor Larissa Behrendt, from the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, said on Lateline last week, ‘We have to be very careful about making knee-jerk reactions.’ After roundtables and COAG meetings and audits and reports and a decade in office, at the very least one of the three ministers who preceded the current minister should have some idea about what should be done. Maybe Minister Brough should talk to them as well. Ministerial thrashing around is not a pretty sight and not at all reassuring.

Nor should he seek to shift the blame. This is front and centre a Commonwealth responsibility—shared with the states, it is true, but constitutionally and unavoidably it is a Commonwealth responsibility. It is simply not good enough for the minister to seek to absolve himself as he did on Tuesday, saying:

... law and order and the criminal justice system have always been the responsibility of the states and territories.

Yes, they have and they are. And those governments should ensure proper policing in Indigenous communities and that the full force of the law falls on those who inflict violence and abuse children. Indigenous communities indeed have a right to enjoy the same peace and good order as any other in our nation. But he surely understands that preventing violence and abuse in the first place has to be a key objective of his government—that seriously tackling these problems needs more than just more police and more arrests. Dealing with abuse and violence needs a long-term strategy, as the minister was advised by his own steering committee for the review of government services in the Overcoming Indigenous disadvantage report of last year. It bluntly said:

Many Indigenous families and communities live under severe social strain due to a range of socioeconomic factors. Alcohol and substance misuse, and overcrowded living conditions are just some of the factors which can lead to child abuse and violence.

Further, it makes the commonsense point—a point that no sensible person would dispute—that crime is strongly related to socioeconomic disadvantage.

In Australia, of all countries, knowing as we do the historical basis of European settlement, we must acknowledge that, if people are condemned to live lives of entrenched disadvantage, then social breakdown, crime and violence will result. Is the answer really as simple as law enforcement, as the Treasurer and Acting Prime Minister insisted yesterday? Is this really the measure of the government’s policy sophistication? The report I referred to—out of the Productivity Commission, it has to be said—described its focus as being:

... on those areas in which governments have the greatest capacity to change things for the better in the short and long term.

It took as its fundamental premise:

... prevention is a far better strategy for reducing disadvantage than ‘fixing up’.

We certainly need an appropriate law response, but we also need that preventive strategy. That comes from the review of the Commonwealth government’s own service provision in this area. It is not just about law enforcement, although that must be done, but about dealing with the root causes which produce the elevated rates of crime and violence in the first place. I know this is a difficult area, Minister, but spare us the posturing. Go and do some homework before you open your mouth again. From listening to the minister’s public statements, it is a fair bet that what he knows about Indigenous law and culture could be written on the back of a postage stamp.

Let me say it clearly for you, Minister, if you are listening, and for the Prime Minister and Treasurer as well: Indigenous law and culture do not condone sexual abuse of children or family violence. That it occurs is a reflection of dysfunction and disorder in toxic communities, as one of the many reports described them—places where traditional authority has broken down, where mental illness and alcohol and substance abuse are rife and where people are exposed to violent and pornographic videos, as has been shown in some recent reports.

The offensive and racist assumption that child abuse and violence are in some way culturally sanctioned cannot be tolerated and should be challenged. Violence cannot be explained away or excused as being the Aboriginal way. As Larissa Behrendt said so clearly:

I grew up in an Aboriginal community and the values that were instilled as part of my culture were values that very much emphasise community, reciprocity, respect for country, respect for kinship and respect for elders.

She went on to say that there was nothing in these values that condoned violence towards Aboriginal women and children.

The fact that some lawyers and defendants have attempted to use caricatures of Indigenous customary law as a defence in cases of rape or assault and the fact that some judges have in their ignorance accepted these pleas do not mean that Indigenous law and culture actually do permit such brutality. In reality, the fact that such views have been endorsed says more about our prejudice than it does about Indigenous law. In 1980, one judge in a Northern Territory case infamously expressed the view that:

Rape is not considered as seriously in Aboriginal communities as it is in the white community.

And further that:

The chastity of women is not as importantly regarded as it is in the white community.

This from the judge! On the contrary, the comprehensive Australian Law Commission report of 1987 on the subject of traditional law identified the major transgressions to Aboriginal law, which notably include homicide, incest, cohabitation with certain kin, abduction or enticement of women, adultery with certain kin, adultery with potential spouses and unauthorised physical assault. Their research also indicated that:

Acts of family violence and child neglect were unacceptable under traditional law.

The problem is not traditional law but the breakdown of traditional law.

I say to the minister: where have you been? Why has your government not followed up on the many promises it has held out to Indigenous Australians to reduce the level of violence and sexual abuse in their communities? We all agree, or at least I hope we do, that after decades of turning a blind eye to violence in Indigenous communities this violence can no longer be tolerated. We have to place the same value on the lives and security of Indigenous women, children and men as we do on those in the rest of the community. But the responses have to be carefully thought through and carefully designed. They must engage Indigenous communities. They cannot be imposed. They must be based on evidence of what works. They must be sustained and not a reflex response borne of the next shocked minister’s panic.

And we do not need any more reports. There have already been so many they could wallpaper the House of Representatives chamber and still have some left for the Senate. Even a brief search through reports to government over the last 15 years turned up 42 reports—30 of them since this government has been in office—and they either dealt wholly or in part with the issue of violence in Indigenous communities. We do not need more reports.

The Howard government has organised at least three major initiatives on family violence in Indigenous communities, each conceived in a similar climate of moral panic: 1999, a roundtable as part of a national strategy under Minister Herron; 2002, a national audit of Indigenous family violence programs and services—never completed, it turns out—under Minister Ruddock; and 2003, a national roundtable on Indigenous family violence and the establishment of a working group to advise the Prime Minister on ways to address family violence. That last one seems to have disappeared without a trace, although there was a down payment, as it was described, of $20 million to address the consequences of violence in Indigenous communities—not a lot given the scale of the problem. It was followed up with some $74 million, which was earmarked in the 2004 budget for the following four years. It would appear, though it is difficult to establish, that no additional funds were appropriated last year or this year despite the scale of the problem. Since the abolition of ATSIC, it is very difficult to trace the movement of funds. We actually have no idea what this money has been spent on, let alone with what effect, except that the government’s own analysis of key indicators suggests that we are going backwards.

I referred earlier to the Productivity Commission’s Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision. Its chairman, Gary Banks, commenting on the analysis of the federal government’s progress in improving key indicators on Indigenous disadvantage, said the results confirmed the pervasiveness of Indigenous disadvantage. He said:

It is distressingly apparent that … in some important respects, the circumstances of Indigenous people appear to have deteriorated or regressed. Worse than that, outcomes in the strategic areas identified as critical to overcoming disadvantage in the long term remain well short of what is needed.

This is the Productivity Commission reporting to this government. Amongst the areas where outcomes have deteriorated, Minister, are victim rates for crime, substantiated child protection notifications and imprisonment rates for both men and women. The committee also reported that many of the indicators have shown little or no movement and that there is now an even larger gap between Indigenous people and the rest of the population on all headline indicators.

If any progress is going to be made in reducing violence and abuse in affected communities—and it is by no means all of them—then it is vital that there be a proper understanding of the causes of such violence. Minister, Prime Minister and Treasurer: to understand is not to excuse. To understand is to arm yourself with the necessary tools to intervene successfully. One suggested framework adopted by many of those who have reported to government is, firstly, to examine the immediate precipitating causes; secondly, to examine situational factors such as alcohol and substance abuse, unemployment and welfare dependency; and, finally, to understand the underlying factors, including the historical circumstances of the Indigenous communities.

After years of silence and shame about acknowledging the problem, Indigenous leaders decided more than a decade ago that the only way to begin the process of reducing violence was to confront it directly, although they were fearful that public scrutiny of the issue might reinforce the existing negative stereotypes that many people held about Indigenous people—and, sadly, I think some of that fear has been realised. This shift in sentiment was driven largely by women speaking out and refusing to countenance the now devastating levels of abuse experienced in many communities. Reports suggest that, no matter who initiates such violence, women are more likely to be injured or suffer more severe injury than men. Women’s shelters, where they exist, are often full to overflowing at the end of the week, when drinking binges occur.

As was made clear in 1999 by the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence, Indigenous women want the violence to stop and do not accept that it is part of everyday life. The task force described the situation then as having reached crisis point—and it is much worse now—a view that is reinforced by the official statistics on violent assaults, murders and serious injuries. Dealing with such violence is made more difficult, as the authors of that report pointed out, because many non-Indigenous people do not encounter such violence in their own lives and find the current level of violence in Indigenous communities difficult to comprehend. I suspect that this includes policy makers and politicians, who are still not showing the necessary sense of urgency in working to ameliorate such violence. By the way, panic is not synonymous with such determination.

In 1991, Maryanne Sam reported that family violence is widespread in Indigenous communities. It has been drawn to the attention of government for that long. She said:

In fact, it is one of the major causes of family breakdown, along with drugs and alcohol. Our women are suffering serious injuries and are fleeing to refuges and shelters in order to get away from the violence. Outfits are running away from home, often turning to crime, drugs and alcohol, as well as other substance abuse. Our men are drinking more and more, turning to drugs and gambling as a way of coping with the loss of their families and the deterioration of the traditional roles.

This is not, sadly, news. There is abundant evidence that in many communities the situation has deteriorated substantially since Maryanne Sam made those observations. For example, both Sutton and Noel Pearson report that, in many communities, violence has spiralled out of control, reaching what they describe as epidemic proportions. In assessing the causes and cures for such violence, Indigenous leaders have rightly insisted that we have to understand the role played by dispossession, relocation of whole communities and the forced separation of family members in generating the sense of hopelessness which is still palpable in many communities. As the women’s task force argued, ‘the impact of history cannot be isolated in any discussion of its origins and the consequences of such violence in the lives of Indigenous peoples’.

The wilful denial of the importance of such history by the current federal government—we saw it again yesterday—and its repeated refusal to acknowledge the impact of dispossession, cultural fragmentation and marginalisation means the solutions it proposes under the rhetoric of practical reconciliation are unlikely to solve the problem. And the government has conspicuously not solved the problem, because it has been going backwards.

Failure to analyse accurately the causes and contributing factors of violence will mean that the solutions proffered will be at best partial. The contribution of associated social problems—including high unemployment, poor mental health, poverty and low educational attainment—must also be incorporated into the development of strategies and programs. As the women’s task force report illustrated, there are factors present in Indigenous communities that are not present in non-Indigenous communities, particularly dispossession of land and culture, the separation of children from parents over successive generations and the failure of governments to enforce sanctions against violence, to name but a few. For some, the sexual assault of Indigenous children and young people began with white settlement and included the practice of abducting women for sexual exploitation. This means that the intervention strategies must be tailored to the experiences and circumstances of Indigenous communities in all their variety and complexity. One size will not fit all.

In addressing this so-called family violence, it is important always to be aware that it is closely correlated with child abuse. Some surveys indicate that as many as 60 per cent of children of abused mothers are themselves abused by the perpetrator. Children are often the silent victims of family violence, even when they are not themselves the primary victims, as they sometimes are, including of sexual assault. In many communities, they have no choice but to witness the violence and endure the disruption and mental trauma that result. In turn, they do not make very good parents themselves. Poor attendance at school, reduced employment prospects, depression and despair make such children future players in the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Attention to the special needs of children obviously should feature prominently in violence reduction strategies.

It is obvious to me, and I think to many people who have paid attention, that solutions have to be devised to deal urgently with violence wherever and whenever it occurs. We all agree about that. Different standards of response to violence should not be applied to Indigenous communities. And violence should not be accepted as normal or inevitable just because it occurs between Indigenous people. In addition, the cycle of disadvantage, reinforced as it is with alcohol and substance abuse, has to be broken. Approaches to solving these problems need to encompass measures to help prevent future violence, not just the law and order issues, as well as the rehabilitation of those damaged by violence and assistance for their families and communities. It is complex, not simple.

Critical to the successful design and implementation of such solutions is a sustained commitment from governments—I cannot emphasise that enough. Few programs delivered to Aboriginal communities in this area, or indeed in any others, have enjoyed the focused attention and commitment from governments that are necessary to deliver successful outcomes. The $30 million I mentioned that was cut in 1996 was lost as a result of those massive cuts. Too often resources are short lived or delivered as part of a narrowly conceived pilot, which rarely develops into a fully-fledged program. Bizarrely, given their experimental character, these pilots are often not evaluated at all, so it is difficult to get any idea of whether they have actually been useful. Support for staff is often inadequate and there is, as a result, high turnover. And, of course, there is still a desperate need for greater clarification of Commonwealth-state funding arrangements and responsibilities.

Given the severity and the pervasiveness of violence in Indigenous communities, a high level of coordination between agencies and programs is also essential—health, substance abuse, education, child protection and law enforcement agencies all have to be involved, starting at the top. Sadly, despite the government’s boasts of a quiet revolution, this has not been achieved—just look at Wadeye—and instead duplication, poor coordination and failure to think beyond departmental and jurisdictional boundaries still characterise many of the programs delivered to Indigenous communities. Piecemeal funding decisions—and we are about to see some more, I think—complex accountability requirements and conflicting objectives all contribute to frequent failure and escalate the sense of hopelessness which is all too palpable in many communities. In any case, much of the money ends up in the hands of administrators and consultants, not in the community. Conversely, successes are not disseminated for wider adoption and good practice goes unrecognised and unrewarded.

Perhaps the most important prerequisite to producing sustained improvements in violence levels is the involvement of Indigenous people in decision making at all levels. This depends on effective support for community development and so-called capacity building, including the provision of funds for training Indigenous leaders and staff. It cannot be done without the involvement of Indigenous people. Partnerships between government agencies and Indigenous communities should also be developed, committing all parties to specific actions and responsibilities with agreed and measurable outcomes and performance benchmarks. We need serious efforts from this government, not the shocked response of an apparently naive minister. It is time that we all got involved in solving these problems and stopped trying to shirk responsibility.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Quick, I acknowledge your deep interest in the Somme and hope that that moving experience this year will nourish that interest. Thank you for your support for the veterans community. I rise today to commend the Treasurer for a terrific budget and for his terrific economic helmsmanship over the last 10 years. A strong economy and therefore a healthy budget position provide opportunities to do things. There is often a misunderstanding that the wealth that a nation needs to generate will just be there and that it is a matter of how one then shares that wealth and opportunity amongst the citizens. We know it to be true that in many years under the former Labor government there were people in desperate search for opportunity. Budget challenges, including the one that the Howard government inherited with the budget deficit back in 1996, show that having the resources available to make choices to support the community and share opportunity and wealth are not things you can just wish for. They take a lot of hard work, and I commend the Treasurer for being the economic helmsman of what will be recognised as a golden era in the Australian nation and the Australian economy by those who will write about it as a piece of history in years to come. We hope to extend this era of good fortune—the budget aims to do that—and to carry forward the opportunities that it has generated and that are being shared by the people in the Dunkley community, whom I represent.

The most direct evidence can be seen by looking at what is actually in the budget. If you see how that good fortune and the resources that it has generated are being applied in a targeted away, you will also see that the budget caters for all sections of our community. It can be rightly labelled as a pro-family, pro-business and pro-health budget. It is a budget the rewards hard work, and that is something we should always keep sight of. It offers substantial tax cuts and it offers strong incentives for people to invest and prepare for their own retirements. It puts resources into building the capacity of the country, and it is funding some of the current strategic challenges we face as well as investing in research and development for the future. So it is a very good and balanced budget, sharing the good fortune that our nation has earned for itself and that has been nurtured by the economic stewardship of the Treasurer and the Howard government.

A compelling example, and one that I have been sharing with school principals in recent days, is the investment in our schools program. What a wonderful initiative that is. It has been a real honour to collaborate with school communities right across the Dunkley electorate: to see things that the school communities themselves have wanted to do but have not been able to do through the traditional state and federal funding arrangements, and see that nearly $2½ million has been shared in the Dunkley electorate from the two rounds that I have been able to announce thus far. That is 16 school communities in the most recent $1.733 million funding round on top of the 13 Dunkley schools that benefited last October from $887,000. Quite simply, this program is a gift. It is a godsend to the school communities, many of which are working in areas of ageing demographics. They are battling to grow their enrolments—which is probably something you see in your own electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker Quick, where the schools have been established for quite some time and were part of a neighbourhood of young families many years ago. In many of those young neighbourhood families, the students have now moved to other parts of our community or gone further, and therefore the demographics in those areas are changing.

You are faced then with a school community with a diminishing population but an increasing need to work to attract students to it. It is almost a vicious cycle in some respects. Victoria’s capital funding process is actually a disincentive to those very schools. Because population numbers are declining, a rigid and raw formula of student to floor space can see schools being told, ‘You’ve got more space than you need because of your student numbers.’ And they are saying, ‘But hang on, we need to make our facilities contemporary to have the technology and learning environment to best support our students and maybe attract more.’ But they are told, ‘No, on our formula you’ve got more space than you need now.’ That is an incredibly demoralising policy posture that the state of Victoria and the education department enforces. It can be incredibly demoralising to the dedicated teachers, the volunteers who selflessly give their time to school communities and the students. They might go past a growth area in my electorate and see a spunky, spankingly attractive brand new school with all the mod cons you could possibly imagine, and yet they are in another community—maybe a more established community—and are not able to have that learning environment.

This Investing in Our Schools program is an antidote to that. It remedies the structural hardship that is forced on areas where the demography is changing the availability of students. For communities such as Dunkley, where we have areas of rapid population growth as well as long-established areas, this program has been wonderfully well received. There are schools that, frankly, have suffered under the Bracks Labor government. They have been arguing to get toilets and amenities of that kind improved. For the school principals I have rung, who have almost squealed with delight that they can get $150,000 to fix the boys and girls toilets that have been crying out for renovation for many years, it is a terrific day. Dare I say it: some of these schools are flushed with cash. They are very happy to be able to renovate those facilities.

Let me share with you some examples of those facilities. Frankston Heights Primary School is looking at a new performing arts centre, and there is a $150,000 Investing in Our Schools grant there. Mornington Secondary College is getting the toilet renovation I just spoke about—just under $150,000 to remedy what is an older section of the school, part of the old Mornington Technical School, where the facilities have been crying out for a renovation and an update in the name of a decent learning environment and decent amenities for the student population. Mount Eliza North Primary School can construct new learning spaces with their grant. I was speaking with the principal of Derinya Primary School last night, and a new multipurpose room there will be able to become a reality because of the Howard government’s $137,000 grant. Mount Erin Secondary College is another example where the basic amenities—in this case, again, the toilet facilities—which are crying out for some attention, will get that much needed renovation with $95,000-plus being made available. My old school, Monterey Secondary College, will be able to upgrade its multimedia equipment, so I am thrilled about that. Karingal Heights Primary School can upgrade its oval and play equipment with its grant.

Elisabeth Murdoch College in Langwarrin can refurbish its classrooms and its music facilities and upgrade its computer equipment with a $140,000 grant to Jeff Davis and the team. The school, which needed to focus on its reputation, can point to the results that, in the coming year, there are about 400 year 7 students going to that college because of the outstanding work of Jeff, his leadership team and the teachers, and the generous support of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. Jeff and Dame Elisabeth are an impressive collaboration doing great work. Benton Junior College is an interesting example. This was a new school for which the majority of the funding was provided by the Commonwealth—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

I seek leave to continue my remarks at a later date.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.