Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I continue the remarks I was making when I addressed this place in the last sitting week on the appropriation bills, I take this opportunity, on behalf of my soccer-crazy electorate, to congratulate the Socceroos on their 3-1 victory against Japan this morning, and wish them luck. I am sure that we will all be watching their progress with great anticipation and excitement.

On my last opportunity to speak on the effect of the federal budget on my electorate, I made reference to a number of areas that remain of great concern to the people whom I represent. I made the point that, unfortunately, there were no measures in the budget to address those areas. I want to refer now to the area of health and the delivery of health services, which continue to be major issues for my electorate. There are three problems with regard to health. The first is the rising cost of health. The out-of-pocket costs to see a GP in my electorate have risen by almost 18 per cent since December 2005. The second issue is the great shortage of doctors, which is being strongly felt in the electorate of Calwell. The third and most pressing issue is the ongoing crisis in public dental health services that has been exacerbated intensely since the abolition of the public dental health scheme by this government. I would like to take this opportunity yet again to lament the fact that the government has not seen fit to restore this very vital public health service. Clearly, there is a serious problem in my electorate as a result of this failure.

As I said, there is a significant shortage of doctors in my electorate and the effects are widely felt. Some relevant statistics would be of interest to illustrate just how difficult it is for people to see a GP in Calwell. For every 1,700 people in my electorate, there is only one full-time GP available. The national average is 1,451 people per GP and the recommended figure is around 1,200 people per GP. As you can see, we are well above the national average.

This is not atypical of doctor shortages in other electorates. The number of GPs is dwindling as a result of the consistent underinvestment by this government in university and GP training places and the failure of this government to recognise the implications of an ageing GP workforce. I do not think there is enough talk about the ageing general practitioner workforce. More than 30 per cent of GPs are now aged over 55 years, with only a 10 per cent increase in new GPs under this government. The number of GPs aged under 35 years has also decreased by 70 per cent since the Howard government cut GP training places by some 400 per year. There is an urgent need for Australia to train more young people in medicine and, as the current workforce prepares for retirement, it is imperative to address this issue. The government does not seem to be aware of the urgency to address the issue. The Labor Party certainly has a plan to address what is a vital failure of this government in the delivery of health services.

As I also mentioned, the implications of doctor shortages are being felt in the Dianella Community Health Centre in my electorate, which I have spoken about on a number of occasions in this place. As a result of a shortage of doctors, Dianella has had to cut back its after-hours GP service, which has been at great cost to the community. I would like to make the point—and I am conscious I do not have very much time left—that Dianella did apply to the federal government for funding under its round-the-clock Medicare program and that application was rejected. In a letter that the parliamentary secretary sent to us, no reasons were cited as to why Dianella was rejected; we just simply did not make it in the top 50 candidates. If we could not make it in the top 50, with the huge shortage of doctors that we have and the huge waiting lists for dental care services, then I would like to know which areas were deemed to have been more important for welfare and service delivery than the electorate of Calwell.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on the appropriation bills. I welcome the opportunity to highlight the government’s achievements and, in particular, to refute some of the claptrap that has been peddled by the unions and the ALP about the workplace reforms. The 2006-07 budget brings into focus for all of us to see that what has been achieved over the last 10 years by the coalition government is quite remarkable.

In my recent newsletter I put in a scale which reviewed 36 fiscal and social measures, which I then benchmarked against the performance of the previous Hawke and Keating governments. There were improvements in all of them, and they have gone on to materially improve the quality of life of all Australians. Let me detail some of the achievements. For the first time in a generation, our unemployment rate in Australia has fallen below five per cent—a wonderful example of the success of the government’s economic policies. Huge contributing factors are the economic and workplace reforms we undertook upon winning government. Quite simply, our modern day prosperity would never have come without tax and industrial relations reforms. It is not all about industrial relations; it is about the whole economy. Industrial relations, though important, is just one part of that.

Let us look at some of the very telling and damning comparisons between the current coalition government and the previous Hawke-Keating Labor governments. Under the coalition government, average mortgage rates have been 7.15 per cent; under Labor, 12.75 per cent. Under Labor, 197,800 people were unemployed; under this government, 100,100 are unemployed, despite the increase in population. Under this government real wages growth has been 16.8 per cent; under the previous Labor government, it was 0.3 per cent. The coup de grace is the number of days lost per thousand workers in industrial disputes. There have been 64 days lost per thousand workers under this government and 193 days were lost per thousand workers under the Labor government, which is more than three times as many.

I have already touched on the stellar employment record, but to put some real sense into this, let me tell you about Bundaberg’s Centrelink lines. I monitor these very closely. I deliberately publish them every month in both Bundaberg and Gladstone. Whether they are good or bad for the government, I provide them to the papers. Sometimes they choose not to use them, but they are always provided. Since the coalition came to power in 1996, Bundaberg’s dole queues have been cut almost in half, from 5,864 in April 1996—the first month after we came to power—down to 2,961 in April this year. That is half. For a city which has always struggled with a difficult reputation in terms of jobs, that is an outstanding achievement.

You might recall, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, coming from a sugar seat, that Bundaberg, the Tweed, the western suburbs of Sydney and the Mersey region of Tasmania are always the worst four areas for unemployment in Australia—but not so anymore. The environment that has been created in Bundaberg and Gladstone by this government has made a material difference to the number of people who are unemployed. Would you now say to the 3,000-odd people who are in permanent unemployment: ‘We’d like to go back to the old employment regime. That will be much better for you’? Do you think they would want that? No way in the world.

It is the fraudulent approach by the unions and Labor towards the latest raft of reforms to our industrial relations system that really angers me. The ongoing anti-Work Choices campaign that has been spearheaded by the unions is totally dishonest in its approach. The unions have particularly targeted my electorate with this anti-IR reform campaign. A handful of union reps have written letters to the editor, spruiking a lot of fallacies and falsehoods.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What? Outrageous!

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad you said that, my Tasmanian colleague. I note that many of these letters are almost straight lifts from the press releases, statements and commentary of Labor politicians and union leaders. Apart from the dishonesty of plagiarism, I must say I am surprised, with the wealth of information sources available today—television, radio, newspapers and the internet—and the fact that the unions have paid the Labor Party over recent campaigns $50 million in donations, that such a pitiful performance was mounted in the media. That the unions are still falling back on these practices I find very sad. I have said in my own paper in Gladstone, where it is most prevalent, that if I were a paid-up union member and that was the best that a state organiser could dish up in this campaign, I would be disappointed. I recognise some Labor members and some union members find this campaign important. I do not diminish that and I respect their point of view. But if the people carrying their argument have to stoop to these measures, that says very little about the sincerity or the depth of the campaign.

I am sure that most of my constituents will take the time to decide for themselves what they think of the Work Choices changes. On that point, Gladstone is a very interesting place because the employees of a lot of firms are already on AWAs, and I think that a lot of people in Gladstone would find the Leader of the Opposition’s latest statement, at the weekend, quite horrific. Gladstone is a very focused town: people come there to work very hard and earn a good living. The town has a good standard of living. Of all the industrial towns in Australia, Gladstone is probably the one with the best aesthetics and the best community facilities, and I compliment the city council and the community at large on that. So those people have not come to Gladstone to be pushed around by unions. I remember when one particular plant was moving over to a system—not the AWA system that is now proposed but a forerunner of that—there was a great campaign at this particular plant. A tent was put up at the gate by the Electrical Trades Union and people were handed pamphlets and told, ‘Come on, brother, when we hold the referendum, stay on the award; don’t go onto these AWAs’—or whatever they were at the time, whatever they were called in those days. We eventually had referendum day. The plant voted 83 per cent to 17 per cent to go onto AWAs, despite this huge union campaign. I think that says it all: people do not like to be pushed around; they are intelligent and they can make decisions for themselves.

The other thing that we should recognise is that the fact that unemployment is at this 30-year low of 4.9 per cent stands in stark contrast to what it was when Mr Beazley was in government. He had an unemployment rate that at the time topped 10.9 per cent. I am sure that people like the people of Gladstone will note that since the first raft of workplace reforms in 1996 we have created 1.8 million jobs and that they have seen their real wages increase by 16.8 per cent, after inflation and all the other bits and pieces, as against a rise of 0.3 per cent during the 13 years of the previous government. I am sure they will consider themselves to be better off under the coalition than they ever were under Labor. What Labor and their union puppet masters fail to acknowledge is that these changes are actually about creating jobs in Australia. A case in point is Spotlight. While I might not agree that it is the greatest of all AWA offers—I am not saying that for a minute—if you look beyond the bluster what does this case illustrate? Spotlight’s new store at Mount Druitt, in Sydney’s west, has employed 40 people, many of them previously unemployed. Thirty-eight of the 40 were previously unemployed.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek to intervene.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Would the member for Hinkler accept the intervention?

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, certainly.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. I would like to ask the member for Hinkler when the Spotlight store in Mount Druitt was planned to be opened. Wouldn’t his assumption be that those staff would have been employed in any case because without staff—

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Your question needs to be short.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

a newly built store could not operate?

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I suppose you can torture the argument and say that, if they had been there a bit earlier, these people would have gone onto a different rate. The point is that 38 of the 40 of them were out of work. Instead of being on $205 a week they are on $543. They are getting back their confidence, they are honing their skills, they are becoming experienced and they will be sought after by other employers. These sorts of people become valuable. I know there is movement from store to store in Bundaberg and Gladstone all the time because employers want people who are skilled at their jobs.

We have been asked to confine our remarks to about 10 minutes, so I would like to finish on the point—

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We’ve been provocative, though, Paul.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have great respect for the members opposite. But I would like to finish on this point: if you took some modelling based on the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, had they not followed the regime that they did and had followed what the unions had put to them over that time, quite apart from 500,000 people going back into jobs, we would have lost another 386,000 jobs over the 10-year period. I wonder what that would have done to Australia today. It just shows you that subtle balance. If Labor had stayed in power and just let things go along the way they were, forgetting about the Commonwealth debt and everything else, based on that modelling you would have had about another 365,000 people out of work, and that would not be acceptable. So I think we have seen a very good budget against a backdrop of new industrial relations reform. I say to those people who are a little apprehensive: from 1996 to 2006 we kept our compact with you and created more jobs and a higher standard of living. Give us another 10 years like that and we will show you an even greater and more prosperous Australia.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The address-in-reply to the budget gives members a unique opportunity to speak at large on issues of public governance in this country and it can be and often is a chance to be reflective about the more significant values that underpin our democracy. Today I want to use that opportunity to reflect on what has increasingly become lip-service to one of the key underlying principles of our democracy, and that is the rule of law.

Some little while ago it would have been quite unquestioned that, were an Australian to be held without trial by a foreign government without charge and, were charges to be preferred, to be put to his ordeal through a process which does not meet benchmark standards of justice, the Australian government would be speaking on behalf of the detained Australian. Today we have to face up to the reality that, notwithstanding the expressed concerns of the special reporter appointed by the Law Council of Australia and the concern expressed by the International Commission of Jurists and many prominent Australian lawyers, the Australian government remains mute or even supportive in the face of the continuing detention of David Hicks under exactly those circumstances.

Why does this matter? It matters because one of the things that we have always been able to assert that distinguishes us from totalitarian regimes is that, in the Western democratic environment, respect for the rule of law is basic—not an optional extra but something fundamental which not only citizens but any person who becomes subject to the jurisdiction of one of our governments can take for granted.

It is an underpinning that has been placed under stress on a large number of occasions. The present security environment is not the first time that Western societies have been tested in terms of their commitment to the rule of law. I refer to World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and various other instances that have occurred where governments have had to deal with internal dissent, external provocation and even some instances of real violence directed against state institutions or against innocent civilians. We should not pretend to be naive. Australia has been the target of acts of terrorism—not in the recent past, where my concern now arises, but in the not so remote past. Who can forget, for example, the Hilton bombings and various other instances that occurred in the decades of my relative youth, where Australia was tested and yet remained firmly committed to the fundamental principle that the rule of law would be preserved and would prevail?

In our response to the horrors and terrors of World War II, Australia, as part of the international community, took a leading role in establishing normative standards that we have spoken up for from the time that we survived those horrors to the present. We still speak up for them, but, as I say, I think increasingly we pay them lip service. Take, for example, the objection to torture. The objection to torture and cruel and degrading punishment ought to be fundamental in any society that respects the rule of law. When the show trials of Stalin took place, it was the event which led some of the more perceptive supporters of state socialism of the Stalinist variety to allow the scales to fall away from their eyes and to see that regime truly as it was—that is, a regime which was founded on authoritarianism far more than it was on the principles that it espoused.

We knew that those who were confessing to crimes in the Stalin show trials had suffered extreme deprivation—sensory deprivation, sometimes actual physical torture. Some had died as a result of that infliction of torture. We distinguished ourselves entirely from a society that could act in that way and said, ‘We repudiate that entirely.’ Yet we know that exactly such conduct has been perpetrated by our principal ally in the so-called war against terror in its response in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And we remain relatively mute in terms of our condemnation of those processes.

We have seen the events of Abu Ghraib, and we might say that those particular extremes were not authorised, although others who were less charitably disposed might say that there was too close to a nod and a wink regarding the use of extreme means to obtain information. But how do we explain, for example, the recently reported statements that the Pentagon is considering removing the key Geneva convention protection, the ban against degrading and humiliating treatment, from its army field guide? How do we explain that?

The Australian government needs to answer whether there is any such Australian proposal. Are we looking at taking a similar step? I doubt it. I think that our Australian defence forces have much higher regard for the rule of law and for the international conventions that we have signed up to and adhere to. But if you remove the ban on degrading and humiliating treatment and restrict torture to the narrow events that were described in advice to the President—that is, the application of physical force to such a degree that would create the possibility of major organ failure—you permit physical violence, you permit the kind of hoodings, sensory deprivation and exposure to noise and to various degrading and demeaning events which may relate to sexuality, of the kind that we saw in Abu Ghraib.

If we had known that such events were occurring in the Stalinist Soviet Union, we would have been outraged; we would have been speaking up and saying that a society that is prepared to condone that is intolerable. We cannot continue to operate as if our normative underpinnings simply do not matter very much when they are put to the test, because one of the things that has allowed us to hang together is the knowledge that even if we oppose our governments, even if we disagree with them, even if we act against them and even if we rebel, we are entitled to be treated as persons with dignity, to be treated with respect and to be treated in accordance with existing legal regimes. That in itself has been a significant component of our national solidarity as to why we do hang together, why we do not suffer extremism and why we have not experienced the kind of disintegration that those who would prefer other sets of values to prevail would impose upon us.

If we are in a fight, it is a fight of values. Let us not for a moment believe that even the most determined terrorist, however well resourced and however effective, will bring undone the functioning of the national state. It will not happen. We have the capacity to deal with terrorism and to restrict its impact. We should always resource our security agencies to make certain that any foreseeable act of terrorism is prevented. We should never cease to be on guard but we should not believe that the fundamental structure of a democratic, strong society will be undone by one, two or many acts of terrorism on our shores. We have survived it in the past. They have occurred and they did not undo the fabric of our society. We can survive it in the future. What we cannot survive is any belief amongst this now multicultural and multifaith society of ours, with persons of many different backgrounds, that we are prepared to sacrifice the rule of law for political expediency.

We cannot survive that, because it underpins the things that hold us together, the glue that sticks us together. It is the glue that Churchill understood stuck together the British Commonwealth as it faced up to Nazi Germany. It is the glue that the citizens of the United States know underpins their great democracy. Remember the words on the Statue of Liberty by Benjamin Franklin: ‘Those who would give up even a little of their liberty for some temporary safety deserve neither their liberty nor safety.’ That sounds like a very hard judgment to make. I do not make it of my fellow Australians, but we have given up some of our liberties. We have been tested and we have walked back from some of our fundamental propositions that we have said matter to us as citizens of this great country.

It is no surprise that on this issue former Prime Minister Fraser speaks bluntly for the values that he sees and recognises we have walked back from. Former Prime Minister Fraser has been at the forefront of those who have said that the way in which Australia has failed to speak up for David Hicks is a blot on us as a nation. Our failure to articulate our criticism of the United States and the proposal to walk away from rules of war which limit those engaged to warlike pursuits, to exercise respect for those captured on the field of battle, whether they be persons captured in civil wars or in uniformed conflicts, do both the United States and our own society an injustice.

We cannot demand it of others if we do not respect it in ourselves. We cannot expect positive outcomes for the values we say we are fighting to leave as our legacy in other countries, or arguing should be respected in other countries, if we show that we are half-hearted ourselves and walk away from those underpinning values whenever we are tested.

There are issues that we need to speak out on. Our government should make it plain that it does not support the practice of rendition, which our allies in the war on terror have undertaken—that is, taking persons captured, not necessarily on the battlefield but brought into custody, sometimes through the payment of money, taken in secret to third-country locations where torture is not prohibited and subjected to that torture in order to obtain intelligence in a manner that would be prohibited were it to have been undertaken by the forces that initially held those persons hostage or captive.

We should make plain that just as Amnesty International has repudiated those secret renditions so too does the Australian community, so too does the Australian government. We need in that regard to examine the allegations that have appeared in theMonthly, which state that Hicks has been subjected to rendition, to torture, and has been treated like a lab rat. It is not sufficient to respond, as the Attorney has, that it is not a conventional war and that others are not observing the Geneva convention, with its implication that, if others do not observe the Geneva convention, neither do we need to, nor does our ally the United States.

We are the light on the hill in the international world. An argument of that kind—that, if the Soviet Union exercised cruel and degrading treatment, or the North Vietnamese did so in relation to our captured soldiers in the Vietnam War, it authorised us to take such measures—would have been regarded as offensive. Our military would have regarded it as offensive. Our citizens would have regarded it as offensive. We do not need to stoop to those measures, nor does our great and powerful ally and it needs our help to point that out. We are not acting in a way which is unfriendly to a country with whom our fortunes are entwined to make the obvious point that one of the things that sustains Western democracy is an adherence to a set of values that endures over time, over circumstances and over temporary setbacks.

We owe it not only to our own citizenry but also to future Australians who will be on the field of battle dealing with situations where their lives may be in peril to see that there is no record which anyone can point to and say, ‘We were legitimately treating that captured Australian in this crude and barbaric way because we were merely repeating the conduct that Australia itself had condoned.’ It would be tragic were that so. We need to always act in a way which enables us to take the high moral ground, not only simply for the point of doing so but because it is actually our strongest bulwark in this war against terror. People will stay the course for democracy, for the values we aspire to, provided we live those values, but if we walk away from our own values we lessen them in the eyes of others and we make them doubt the degree to which we hold to them.

These are testing times but no more so than when we made a decision not to ban the Communist Party when it was argued that this nation was in peril. We are under no greater test than in World War II, when we stood side by side with soldiers from Great Britain and the United States to resist Nazi Germany. We are no more imperilled than when we allowed our citizens freedom to express their views as they saw fit during those great postwar years when wars of national liberation were occurring in different parts of the world, which we said needed to be conducted according to universal standards and should not permit torture and the kinds of renditions or shortcuts that are occurring now. Sadly, sometimes that advice was not taken, but we stood above that and tried to argue for it.

Some of my best friends have worked for the International Red Cross, urging, even in those terrible conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, that the rule of law be obeyed. The rule of law is enduring and important, and Australia’s respect for the rule of law cannot be traded lightly. For those who are interested in a more detailed and comprehensive assessment of this, I commend the recent speech by Chief Justice Underwood of the Tasmanian Supreme Court on the rule of law and the duties and responsibilities of those who practise the law. I thank the House for this opportunity to make my rather wide-ranging remarks.

Bob Sercombe (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there was ever a time when we should realise the need to focus our foreign policy and related resources on our own region, it is now. From East Timor eastward, we see on a daily basis the background to why that focus is so important. We need to focus our public diplomacy, our development policy, our intelligence efforts and our security efforts on that region. In an article in the Canberra Times on 28 May, Mark Thomson, the head of the budget program for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said that overseas deployments to multiple locations put a big strain on logistics and intelligence support from home. He said the demand for timely intelligence on what is happening on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomons and now East Timor is pushing the analytical capabilities of the Defence Intelligence Organisation to the limit. Mark Thomson previously worked in senior positions in Defence. He believes a choice needs to be made between deployments in our own region and further afield. His personal view is that our allies would understand if we withdrew from Iraq now that the burden has increased closer to home where fewer countries are able to help.

I want to quote from a couple of very interesting articles from very good journalists on the situation in East Timor. In an article in the Age on 27 March, Hamish McDonald talked about Australia’s role in East Timor. Young Australian men and women are taking a significant risk in East Timor and their efforts are supported by all sides of this parliament. Nonetheless, there are aspects of the history that we need to be aware of. Hamish McDonald said:

But where was Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, when this crisis unfolded over three months? Where were the Australian military advisers who, with Portuguese counterparts, trained the East Timor armed forces through to independence in May 2002?

Why was the Howard Government so strongly opposed to the UN peacekeeping mission continuing when its mandate ran out a year ago, apparently persuading the US to support its view?

East Timor’s Government was keen for a continuing UN security role. A modest UN presence, focused on guiding the young local army and police forces, might have helped nip this crisis in the bud.

The article goes on:

There are echoes here of the Howard Government’s refusal to send a small body of police to the Solomon Islands in 2000 when requested by its then prime minister. Three years later it had to launch its $2 billion regional assistance mission to revive a collapsed system of government.

In a similar vein, in terms of understanding the failings of Australian policy in this region—failings which I would suggest relate very directly to overloading our foreign policy establishment with deployments in parts of the world where, with the greatest respect to all those involved in those interventions, we have very limited and very much fringe effects, to the detriment of our own immediate region, where we can have a significant effect—it is worth continuing this theme of looking at the government’s failings.

In an article in the Australian on 31 May, Allan Behm, a former head of the international policy and strategy divisions of the defence department, says:

Australia compounded this tactical misjudgment—

in relation to Timor—

in four crucial ways: in a “beggar thy neighbour” ploy, it sought to drive the toughest possible deal on undersea resource development; it supported the creation of a freestanding East Timorese defence force, powerless in any serious defence role but a natural and armed alternative to an elected government; it withdrew Australian security personnel from East Timor as soon as it could following the Interfet deployment; and it encouraged the UN to do the same. A security vacuum ensued, which the events of the past few weeks have exploited.

Once again I would suggest that this analysis very much reflects the laziness on the part of the Australian government in focusing on our own immediate strategic environment, but it also reflects the fact that it is simply overloaded in its analytical capability.

A bit further eastward we move to the largest country in the region and potentially the most challenging for our nation and for the region, and that is Papua New Guinea. Having visited Papua New Guinea on a number of occasions I take a somewhat more optimistic view about the current state of affairs there than seems to be conventionally popular. You sometimes see stories in the media about New Guinea being a failing state or falling to bits. That is certainly a possible scenario—and a catastrophic scenario—for this country, but there are a number of very positive things about PNG at the moment, most of which do not have anything to do with support from Australia.

Democracy in Papua New Guinea is robust. There are extraordinarily high levels of participation in the operation of the Papua New Guinea government. The present government is, on an unprecedented basis in PNG history, about to serve a full parliamentary term of five years. Papua New Guinea is blessed with some outstanding national figures: Treasurer Bart Philemon and people like Rabbie Namaliu and the present justice minister, Bire Kimisopa—who is visiting Canberra—are outstanding leaders.

Papua New Guinea has a fiercely independent and very competent judiciary and some aspects of its economic future are looking very promising indeed. The PNG-Queensland gas pipeline which will emerge over the next few years and will deliver gas to Queensland and elsewhere in Australia is an extremely positive signal. But that is not to underestimate the problems, which include a very heavy-handed and patronising attitude that often emanates from this town of Canberra towards Papua New Guinea.

Further, I think there is a problem in relation to ignoring Papua New Guinea. I recently had the pleasure of attending the Australia Papua New Guinea Business Council forum—an annual forum—in Cairns. At that forum there were five Papua New Guinean ministers present and all the relevant important business leaders from Papua New Guinea and the Australian businesses that are engaged there. The Papua New Guinean government had five ministers—from the Deputy Prime Minister down, including the foreign minister. There was not a single Australian minister present at that forum.

To her great credit, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ms Gambaro, turned up on the second day—I think it was a fairly rushed trip—and good luck to her. But it sent all the wrong messages and reinforced this perception that is very deep seated in Papua New Guinea that, frankly, Australia is not particularly engaged. Papua New Guinea, as I said, is our nearest neighbour and probably our most important immediate neighbour, certainly in the Pacific region. One of the implications of a possible lack of success would be that the foreign policy and security challenges that it would pose for Australia would be catastrophic, yet none of our ministers could be bothered going to a very important meeting relevant to its economic future.

As time permits, I will talk a bit more about the aid budget. Aid to Papua New Guinea has been substantially scaled down in this year’s budget. We are providing less in our budget appropriations for Papua New Guinea this year than we are for debt forgiveness in Iraq. I think that, once again, sends all the wrong messages. Moving a little further east—and we are still in Papua New Guinea—we go to the autonomous region of Bougainville. Bougainville of course was a site of dramatic civil war and civil conflict up until recently. There are still significant challenges there—the activities of Noel Musingku and his group of thugs, and the concerning presence, apparently, of ex-Fijian soldiers there—and they simply cannot be ignored by this country, but too often, tragically, they are.

I spoke briefly before about the Solomon Islands and the failure of Australian policy. In 2000, at the invitation of the then Solomon Islands government, we were invited to intervene to stem the crisis that was enveloping that country. Our failure made the task extraordinarily more complex in 2003, when at long last the intervention occurred. But we saw just recently, tragically, the rioting in Honiara. In an article also in the Australian on 27 May, Mary Louise O’Callaghan—who is singularly well informed on Solomon Islands matters; she lives there—amongst other things, said this:

RAMSI also must get better, smarter and faster at getting its message out. Right now the mission still has enormous support from the broad mass of Solomon islanders, but there is never an exhaustible supply of goodwill towards an intervention force.

Ms O’Callaghan makes a number of very important suggestions as to how the quality of our role there—it is a regional role, but it is an Australian led role—can be enhanced, if the energy and the focus of Australian foreign policy goes on our region rather than on bit roles on supporting adventures from our great and powerful friend. She talks, for example, about the need for a common language. She says, amongst other things:

The absence of all but a few pidgin speakers is a major weakness of the mission. Learning even cursory pidgin should be compulsory for all new starters.

Certainly, there are going to be continuing and deeper problems in the Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands economy in terms of foreign exchange depends overwhelmingly on the logging industry. The tragedy is that the place is nearly logged out and within the next decade the Solomon Islands’s largest source of foreign exchange will evaporate. To the best of my observation, having been in the Solomon Islands a couple of months ago in the context of the election, it seems to me that Australia, in effect as the regional leader, is not providing the focus needed to lay the foundations for a sustainable future for the Solomon Islands, so the problems will continue. One could go on to talk about Fiji, Vanuatu and other places but time prevents that.

A great deal of hoopla and self-congratulation from the government has occurred in the context of the 2006-07 budget, but the peak body of non-government aid organisations, ACFID, in its press release, stated: ‘The aid budget is disappointing.’ Despite all the spin, there has only been a 2.4 per cent increase in it, when you exclude the one-off debt cancellation for Iraq of $343 million.

I do not have any particular problems in supporting economic restructuring in Iraq but Iraq, by international standards, is not a particularly poor country. It is a deeply troubled country, but it ought not to be receiving—as a single item, the largest amount of Australian development assistance in this year’s budget; that is precisely what it has achieved—much more than what has been going to Papua New Guinea.

Even including the debt forgiveness for Iraq, Australia’s ratio of gross national income to development assistance only rises from 0.25 per cent of GNI to 0.3 per cent. Compare that with the rates of other developed countries: Canada, 0.34 per cent; the United Kingdom, 0.48 per cent; the Netherlands, 0.82 per cent; and Norway, 0.93 per cent. This failure of the government to take seriously the need for commitment to our geopolitical region in this budget—not to bells and whistles and self-congratulation about aid but to actually addressing the needs here—I think is very noteworthy when you compare Australia’s very poor performance with that of comparable developed countries.

The aid budget position is made even worse when you look at some of the rorts that are included in it. It does not seem to me, frankly, to be a legitimate charge on the aid budget to pay for keeping asylum seekers on Nauru or on Manus Island as part of the government’s Pacific solution, but that is precisely where it is funded from. Of course, Trevor Flugge traipsing off to Iraq with $1 million worth of outlays was also charged to the aid budget. It has nothing to do with aid, but the government seeks, off an inadequate basis in itself, to then rort the system by making all sorts of other charges on the aid budget. An article in the Age on 29 May says this:

The harsh reality is that the poor in our region are being denied more than $660 million in grassroots development projects because the Government chooses to use aid to paper over this commercial incompetence. It is certainly a slick accounting move, paying off export debt and calling it aid. It seems grossly unfair that the poor should have to pay for AWB’s mismanagement.

I think that point is extraordinarily well made.

As far as aid is concerned, the budget also has other significant missed opportunities in it. One of the very great achievements in aid and getting it to where people most need it, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, relates to microcredit. Last year was the United Nations International Year of Microcredit. In fact, in a recent discussion paper that I released on behalf of the opposition I proposed as part of our aid program the establishment of a Pacific development trust that would enable very small amounts of capital to go to communities, individuals and families to set up small businesses, to commercialise crops, to enable real benefits to flow very much to local communities.

To its great credit, one of the Australian banks—the ANZ bank, which is very prominent in the Pacific—is doing some interesting things on a commercial basis in relation to banking facilities, but more needs to be done. What we need in the Pacific particularly, as has been found in parts of Asia, are opportunities for poor people to set themselves up in small business—with cash to seed a crop, for example. The thing that is always surprising in the literature I receive on this subject is that the credit risks are extraordinarily low. People tend to repay their debt. Really, I would have thought this was consistent with a more conservative political party philosophy—actually encouraging a bit of entrepreneurship in poor communities—but this is a singularly great gap in the Australian aid program and one that I would be urging this government to seriously address.

Similarly, one of the things we need to be doing in the Pacific is substantially building the people-to-people links between Australian communities and Pacific communities so that mentoring can occur and so that service clubs, churches, schools and local governments in many parts of Australia—and I think in provincial Australia particularly this would be appropriate—can form sister links and sister relationships with communities in particular parts of the Pacific and engage in deep and meaningful people-to-people connections. There is no support from the government for that sort of initiative. In fact, the budget cuts back assistance for the efforts of non-government organisations. The government provides top-down support for Pacific countries, Asian countries and other development recipients but does nothing about mobilising the generosity of the Australian people in these areas.

Mr Deputy Speaker, because of the time I will look for another occasion to develop some of these themes. Thank you for your forbearance—I think we might have run over time a little bit—but I would certainly urge the Australian government to focus on where we can achieve significant bang for our buck and in our own region, which is sometimes perhaps a little overcolourfully described as an ‘arc of instability’. We really need to be focusing our resources there and we need to be ensuring that our aid program reflects genuine community priorities and not flights of fantasy by the government.

Debate interrupted.