Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the chamber for the opportunity to continue my speech on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and cognate bills from where I left off last week. I will not go for the full 10 minutes; I will start where I left off last week. At that point, I was speaking about the benefits of the different funding to seniors—whether it be through the internet or through the bonus payment—and the government’s commitment of $50 million to introduce a national seniors transport concession scheme for seniors card holders by 1 January 2009.

On this note, I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate someone in my electorate, Mr Kevin Hamilton, the former member for Albert Park, who has been campaigning on this particular issue from the days when he was a state member—from the eighties right through to the early nineties. One of the first people to see me when I was elected was Kevin Hamilton, who came to lobby me on this issue. I am very pleased that the Rudd Labor government has delivered, after many years of many governments discussing this issue. We have committed $50 million to introduce the national seniors transport concession scheme for seniors card holders by 1 January 2009. It is very important for seniors who are travelling interstate to visit families, friends or grandchildren. Previously, their discounts were not acknowledged, and sometimes you would think we needed a visa to cross a border in this country. It is about time we conform things across all states. I am a very big believer of that.

We are also committed to reintroducing the Commonwealth dental scheme to aid those who are young—teenagers—and those who are older to access affordable dental care. There are hundreds of elderly residents within my electorate who are currently languishing on dental waiting lists, and have been for many years, who are in need of care. I have supported and will continue to adamantly support the reintroduction of this scheme. We are going to end the blame game. The government has also reached an agreement with the states to provide $150 million to help 25,000 patients get the elective surgery they need. Too many people are currently waiting too long to get that surgery. This $150 million commitment will help slash the number of people waiting longer than clinically recommended for elective surgery, and $13.6 million of that will go to South Australia to deliver an additional 2,262 procedures.

I was also pleased to see in the budget announcement that the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is in my electorate, has had $31 million committed to it. This will ensure that there is a pipeline that takes water treated at the wastewater treatment plant at Glenelg to pump it through the electorate of Hindmarsh into the CBD, ensuring that along the way industry, schools, governments and local councils use the water that would normally be pumped out into the sea into the Gulf of St Vincent.

This government is aware that we need to address the needs of everyone—including the aged and those on fixed incomes, such as the disability support pensioners and carers—within our society. We have a commitment to assist those in need to help them make ends meet. I have listened to and will continue to listen to the concerns and questions of all residents of Hindmarsh and I commend the appropriation bills to this House.

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking to the appropriation bills, which of course encompass the first budget of this new Labor government, I have to say that, maybe having been spoilt by the previous budgets presented by the honourable member for Higgins, Peter Costello, this budget came across as a very big disappointment. It was a very pedestrian performance. I think it really did show that it is classic Labor and we are back to the old style. There was a lot of talk and hype beforehand about this being a tough budget but, when we look at the so-called savings and new spending, we find that it is two for one: the spending has gone up $2 for every $1 that was saved. As I say, this is a classic Labor budget. In fact, we have seen an increase in spending and an increase in taxes. In actual dollar terms, it is the biggest spending and biggest taxing budget Australia has ever seen.

Really, there were two messages that came out of this budget. It was a squandered opportunity. The first budget in a new parliament is the time when a government can really do some important things to set the scene, but very little has happened. We are very much seeing a return to many of the old Labor values. As the Australian of 17 May put it: ‘We are going to see a sharp rise in central state planning.’ In other words, rather than a fresh face, we are very much seeing a return to the old Labor values.

When we look at some of the aspects of the budget, we have to remember a bit of the background of the people who have been directly involved. If we look at both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, we see that they were trained in Queensland, where they learned the art of parochialism and the art of ultrapopulism, and I think that is really showing through in their whole approach to this budget. But the thing that really does concern me, as someone who represents a regional seat in this parliament, is that we have seen a real push back to city values and a city focus. This should not come as a surprise if you look at the make-up of the Rudd cabinet. There are 20 members of the cabinet and, if you do a quick analysis, you find the answer to what I have said: eight of the cabinet ministers come from Melbourne, six come from Sydney, three come from Brisbane, one comes from Perth, one comes from Adelaide and one—the token regional representative—comes from Newcastle. That is seriously scary, and I think it shows in the thinking of these people, who are very much city oriented. This is going to be the shape of decision making for this current government. It will be very much a city based thinking government. I remind honourable members that, when we look at the make-up of the House of Representatives, we see that, of the 150 members, a third of them come from regional Australia—and yet there is one token regional member in the cabinet. That is a bit scary. For people who do not live in the major cities, it is a very big worry.

This government inherited an economy that is the envy of most of the world. If ever a government was given a golden chance to really do something, it was this government. It inherited this economy and yet already we are seeing a budget that has almost got shades of the Whitlam era. And the events of last week will add to a major decline in public confidence in the ability of this government when it comes to addressing the real challenges that we are facing in the world today—and let us not underestimate it: there are some very big challenges.

When you look at the specifics of this budget, you see that there is a $40 billion infrastructure fund but there are no details; there is no convincing explanation of how it is going to be spent. There is a very real fear about how funds will be spent. I think we have already seen some indications in the by-election in the seat of Gippsland that this money is being saved up to be used not for the most important challenges of infrastructure in the country—whether it be for new roads, transport links or other infrastructure—but to try and buy some votes in the lead-up to the next federal election.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Slush funds.

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As my colleague points out, a slush fund. When we listened to some of the pronouncements made in relation to this infrastructure fund, it was pretty obvious that a lot of it could be used to paper over the mess that some of the state governments are making. When I say ‘paper over’, I mean that there is no indication that there will be proper accountability. Having been involved in trying to get some accountability into the way the states spend money, I assure honourable members on the other side that, despite all the rhetoric, the states are very good at covering up what they are really doing. I do not believe that this government will find it any different.

Looking further at the approach of this government: it has been suggested that there are already more than 100 task forces, reviews and white papers which have been announced. In other words, it is going to be government by review. No real decisions are going to be taken in so many areas; already they have all been deferred. In some cases, these deferrals are for more than three years, so the government does not want to make a decision in the whole term of this parliament. I think that is a huge disappointment for the Australian people: to think that they elected a government and that this is its approach. While these reviews may be very interesting, the only thing they will do in the short term is create a lot of highly paid jobs for some of the mates of the government, as we have seen in so many of the states. It is very much an indication of what we see in the states’ approach to governing.

Having limited time, I will quickly run through some of the more specific things in the budget. As I mentioned, it is disappointing. There is a lot of indecision and there is a lot of work on this thing called ‘spin’, which is going to be the hallmark of this government. It has been well-reported recently—not earlier but recently—that so much is being tailored for the 24-hour news cycle, and the budget reflects that in so many ways. We have seen some increases in taxes, but you could not exactly call them taxes which are in the main area. We have seen the ready-to-drink alcohol tax—and I will come back to that, because if ever there was something dreamt up a week before budget date to fill a gap then that must be it. There has been a 10 per cent increase in stamps announced. We have seen an increase in the condensate tax on gas fields. You could call none of this deflationary, despite all the rhetoric about inflation. Today the Prime Minister wound the rhetoric up a few more notches and talked about the ‘inflation monster’. Yet, when we look at the budget, we see that there are increased taxes in some areas that will really have a major impact on inflation.

Another announcement was the changes to private health cover. There is no doubt that not only will the changes that have been mooted put up the price of private health cover but they will put more pressure on public hospitals. I think people are going to lose on that both ways. Other prices will also go up—things such as the so-called luxury car tax.

As I have mentioned, the spending is going to go up, so all the talk about inflation really does not match the detail of the budget. I look at a couple of other areas. The government made a lot of noise about climate change, but what have they done? They have cut the solar panel industry to pieces. People who make solar panels are virtually facing the prospect of going out of business. That is a local industry that has been cut to pieces. The government’s proposed emissions trading is nowhere in the budget or the forward estimates. Yet if, for example, there were a $25 a tonne carbon tax then that would add $10 billion to the tax on Australians.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And between 10c and 30c to a litre of petrol.

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As my colleague reminds me, it would dramatically increase the tax on fuel. Then we come back to the whole question of the tax on the ready-to-drink market. I think this is a clear case of utter hypocrisy. It was put forward as a health measure, and yet when we look at it we see that it was all about raising more money. We have seen the reports in the papers and they show quite clearly that, as was predicted and as was reported last week, alcopop drinkers are ‘turning to spirits’. The report says that, while sales of the so-called ‘alcopops plummeted by almost 40 per cent in the fortnight after last month’s lightning tax hike on the drinks, any health gains have been offset by a 20 per cent jump in stronger, straight spirit sales’. Anyone could have told you that that was going to happen, and yet the government was desperate to find the money and then try and clothe it in the guise of a health measure. I cannot see how encouraging people to take stronger alcohol—and maybe or maybe not dilute it to the same amount of alcohol as ready-to-drinks—is in any way contributing to health. I do not deny that there may be a problem, but that is not the way you address it. So that is an issue with health.

I want to turn quickly to two specific things. I mentioned the 5c increase in stamps. Some would argue that basic postage stamps have been 50c for quite a long time, but it just so happens—if you look closely in the budget papers—that Australia Post will pay a special dividend of $150 million to the government in 2008-09, as the Senate estimates were told last week. This, of course, is on top of the $300 million Australia Post already provides to the Commonwealth annually. But how much is the extra 5c going to raise for Australia Post? Guess what.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One hundred and fifty million?

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not $150 million—$155 million. So Australia Post is now out there as a tax collector for this government. So, again, the poor old consumer is being hit with this underhand approach—a tax grab—to try and make sure that the Treasurer can say, ‘That’s not a tax that I actually authorised.’ Well, what is it if it is not?

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A tax is a tax by any other name.

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A tax is a tax. I would like to come back to the whole question of fuel. As we heard a couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister said in relation to this:

We have done as much as we physically can …

Well, that did not work too well. Let me just remind honourable members that, since this government was elected—and up until a week ago—the price of petrol has gone up over 13c on average, and in the last few days it has gone up even more. That is an increase of 10 per cent. While I think that most of the public realise the underlying reasons for this, the public are also well aware that the Prime Minister went to great lengths to try and deceive them during the election by saying that with petrol prices it was the previous government that was not worried about the increase in costs and that if the Rudd Labor government was elected it would do something about petrol. Well, it has sure done something: it has announced Fuelwatch to watch the price keep going up.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Did he also say ‘peace in our time’?

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member at the desk will desist from interjecting. It is not actually helping anybody.

David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am quite happy about the interjections; they do not worry me. I could also make the point that there is a little windfall going on on the side with the increase in fuel prices, a windfall which people want to keep very quiet. Of course, the GST keeps going up, and so the states have got a little windfall. I notice that the government is very reluctant to talk to its Labor mates about the fact that they are getting a little windfall and that maybe they could think about how they might help motorists. It is a clear case of a government not being able to manage properly.

I think that what honourable members ought to be well aware of is that it is having a massive impact out in voter land, but particularly out in the country. People must remember that, for most in the country, there is very little opportunity to use public transport and generally the fuel prices are already higher than they are in the city. I called in to fill up at a local petrol station last week and I asked the person at the desk how the impact was being felt. To my horror, I was told: ‘Well, you ought to be aware of just how much it is hurting. We now have people coming in and buying $7 or $8 of petrol because that is all they have the money for.’ That is how it is being felt. All the Prime Minister can say is, ‘We have done as much as we physically can.’ At the same time, when I was looking at the board at that petrol station, I saw that the price of diesel was 28c a litre more than unleaded petrol. When you look at it, it is not just about the direct cost to consumers in the regions; it also affects freight because all goods both to and from the regions have to be transported and, with the rail system so limited these days, most of it goes by road. I think it is clear that the government really has misled the Australian population in the lead-up to the election and has now been hoist on its own petard.

But what I find quite extraordinary is that the Prime Minister has now decided that he has to do something, or be seen to be doing something, so he has gone to great lengths to talk about this thing called Fuelwatch. Fuelwatch is rather a curious thing. My colleagues from Western Australia tell me it is questionable whether it has had any impact over there. When you start to look at the fine print, you see that not only have four federal departments questioned its value but also one cabinet minister is strongly opposed to the introduction of Fuelwatch. And we read some of the comments made by the Chairman of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, Mr Graeme Samuel. He is reported in Friday’s papers as saying that in certain rural areas Fuelwatch could lead to potential collusion and cause higher prices.

So here we see yet again what I was saying right at the beginning: the cabinet of this government is a city-centric cabinet willing to push policies of very questionable value for people in the city, but for people in the country it could actually make things worse. I think that really brings it home to us that we have a government that is not interested in looking after people in the country, is not prepared to govern for people in all the regions but is very much governing for those who it feels have supported it in being elected. I think by any measure that is a recipe for bad government. Not only is it a recipe for bad government but it is also a recipe for a bad future for people in many parts of Australia. I think that the Australian public are just starting to seriously question which way the government is going.

Let us come back to looking at some of the aspects of this budget in relation to the environment. I have mentioned the fact that we have seen the local solar panel industry devastated by a decision which they clearly had no warning of, which has already led to the loss of jobs and certainly has put these businesses under extreme strain. But look at some of the other environmental bodies, such as the catchment management bodies. I have two very good ones in my region and they have had cuts of effectively 40 per cent. These bodies are doing some excellent work in environmental management. The Community Water Grants, which provided up to $50,000 to local community groups to help them save water, have been axed, except for a small amount if you belong to a surf-lifesaving club. I do not know who is the friend there. Then we have seen what has happened in regional development with the on-again off-again treatment of local area consultative committees.

I think history will judge this budget very harshly and it will judge the government very harshly because an opportunity has been squandered here. The government inherited financial advantages of the like that no government in my memory has ever inherited. Frankly, I think that history will show that in their first attempt they have seriously botched it—and Australians and Australia are going to be the poorer for it.

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

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related bills. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge a significant milestone for a company that has become an institution in my electorate of Bendigo. On the evening of 9 July 1858, what the Bendigo Advertiser called a ‘very numerously attended meeting’ was held at Abbott’s Hotel to discuss the formation of the first local building society. James Sullivan, who chaired the meeting, told the meeting that the object of the society was to encourage people to settle permanently in the locality. ‘Surely, every man of right feeling would rather see men living in comfortable houses than tents,’ he said. Of course, a building society would benefit not only borrowers but also savers, and Sullivan was worried about large sums of capital leaving the town in the form of deposits with other societies. Local accountant James Burnside moved:

That it is considered expedient to establish a society to be called the Bendigo Land and Building Society for the purpose of enabling shareholders of such a society to become possessed of freehold and leasehold property or other benefits.

One hundred and fifty years later, we know this institution as the Bendigo Bank. The bank has grown fourfold in the 13 years since its conversion from a building society: its customer numbers have reached 1.3 million, the number of employees has quadrupled to 4,000 and it has more than 400 branches. The bank’s founders believed that its prosperity would come from contributing to the economic and social wellbeing of the community in which they had chosen to live and work.

That philosophy is still followed by the bank today, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in its community banks. In the 1990s, when our major banks were almost daily closing country bank branches across the country, Bendigo Bank demonstrated its faith in regional communities. Community banks are owned by their local community and operate on a franchise from Bendigo Bank. By the end of 2007 there were more than 200 community banks across Australia, with over 615,000 accounts and $10.7 billion in banking business. They not only offer banking services to the community but through grants and dividend payments also retain capital locally for the community’s benefit. They have returned almost $17 million to their communities through donations and grants for local projects and paid more than $12 million in dividends to local shareholders. A further $36 million in operating costs is being spent with local businesses. Bendigo Bank today is truly one of the country’s most innovative and successful institutions. On behalf of all central Victorians, I would like to congratulate its staff, both past and present, its management—and, in particular, CEO Rob Hunt, who has been a major force in the outstanding success of the organisation—its directors past and current, and its shareholders on the superb contribution they have made and continue to make to so many communities across Australia.

The Rudd government’s first budget sought to honour its commitment to wage war on inflation. With underlying inflation reaching 4.2 per cent in the March quarter, well above the Reserve Bank’s inflation target, the government delivered a budget surplus of 1.8 per cent of GDP—well above the one per cent target established under the previous government. Growth in real spending will be 1.1 per cent in 2008-09, the lowest rate for nine years. Over four years, the budget makes savings of $33.3 billion. Economic growth is forecast to slow in 2008-09 to 2¾ per cent.

Treasurer Swan identified four key principles of his first budget: honouring election commitments, delivering for working families, investing in the future and beginning a new era of responsible economic management to sustain growth in challenging times. Key initiatives to deliver these principles included the $55 billion Working Families Support Package, an initiative including cutting income tax, reducing the cost of educating and looking after children, making housing more affordable, providing the Teen Dental Plan and making sure that grocery and petrol prices are competitive; $2.4 billion in additional support for older Australians and carers; $5.9 billion over five years for the government’s education revolution, with initiatives in the areas of early childhood education, schools, vocational training and higher education; $2.3 billion over five years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the unavoidable challenge of climate change; and $3.2 billion for a national health and hospitals reform plan to work with the states and ensure spending on health reflects the needs of the broader Australian community.

To ease bottlenecks and allow infrastructure to support future economic growth, the Rudd government is providing significant funding for national infrastructure projects through its Infrastructure Australia program. Three new nation-building funds have been established—the Building Australia Fund, the Education Investment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund—that will provide around $40 billion for future capital investments in infrastructure, higher and vocational education and health to modernise and reinvigorate the Australian economy.

This classic Labor budget delivers for central Victoria. It is the first federal Labor budget for almost 12 years and it certainly does not disappoint. It is a responsible nation-building budget that also delivers for working Australians in the finest Labor tradition. The budget was aimed at building a strong economy through responsible economic management and reining in the irresponsible spending of the former Howard government that had contributed to the current inflationary pressures.

Central Victorians especially will benefit from several of the measures announced on budget night by federal Treasurer Wayne Swan. The government’s $55 billion Working Families Support Package will help people cope with day-to-day living pressures by cutting income tax, reducing the cost of educating and looking after children, making housing more affordable, providing a teen dental plan and making sure that grocery and petrol prices are competitive. That would be very much appreciated in my electorate of Bendigo and indeed throughout central Victoria. An average household earning $770 a week will have its tax bill cut by $20 a week from this July and by as much as $35 a week by 2010-11.

Funding of $1.9 million for Bendigo’s Chinese precinct continues the Rudd Labor government’s record of delivering on its election promises to the people of Bendigo. Funding for other Bendigo-specific election commitments include the virtual critical care unit development, the redevelopment of Bendigo Health’s primary care centre and the business case for the Australian Military Mobility Centre, and central Victoria’s Solar Cities initiative had already been allocated out of the Commonwealth’s 2007-08 budget.

The federal budget will help working Australians deal with rising cost of living pressures. This classic Labor budget is targeted at those Australians who have been working hard to build a future for themselves and their families but are now finding it harder and harder to balance the family budget. After years of neglect by the Howard government, Labor understands this and is taking action with its $55 billion Working Families Support Package. These tax cuts, which were promised during last year’s federal election campaign, have been targeted squarely at those who deserve them most: working Australians. Labor’s tax cuts provide substantial support to the many central Victorians who are in the low- and middle-income brackets. The effective tax-free threshold for low-income earners will go up to $14,000 next year and increase to $16,000 by 2010-11. Families earning the median income in the Bendigo electorate—that is, the median household income—of $40,000 will have up to $1,800 a year more disposable income from next July as a result of Labor’s tax cuts.

In addition to the tax cuts, the Working Families Support Package delivers on other Labor election commitments by introducing an education tax refund to help parents with the costs of educating their kids, at a cost of $4.4 billion; increasing the childcare tax rebate from 30 to 50 per cent and paying it quarterly, at a cost of $1.6 billion; acting on the housing affordability crisis with a $2.2 billion package covering First Home Saver Accounts, the National Rental Affordability Scheme and the new Housing Affordability Fund; providing a teen dental plan at a cost of $491 million; a fairer Medicare levy surcharge threshold for individuals and families; and implementing the first ever national Fuelwatch scheme.

The Howard government just stood by while working Australians were hit with rising living costs. It has been left to a Labor government to take action to help them cope with the pressures of day-to-day living in these challenging times.

The Rudd Labor government’s first budget also delivers on its election commitments to improve the education and skills of working Australians. Investing in our people is the best way to secure prosperity, spread opportunity and increase living standards into the future.

This budget delivers on Labor’s commitment to an education revolution and includes $2.5 billion over 10 years for the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program; $1.9 billion over five years for 630,000 additional training places to boost the skill level of the workforce; and up to $1 million for computers and communication technologies in each secondary school for all students in Years 9 to 12.

A federal Labor election commitment for Maryborough was delivered recently with the announcement of a $500,000 grant towards a new complex care unit. The funding will be provided this financial year to allow Maryborough District Health Service to get started on delivering this much needed facility. There is also potential for additional money in 2008-09 as part of the health funding initiatives announced in this federal budget. This is a major investment for the Maryborough community. It will deliver a resource centre for integrated case management; a centre for the referral of clients requiring more intensive case management; a range of walk-in, walk-out specialist services not currently available locally; teleconference-telemedicine facilities where diagnostic assessments can be obtained from the most appropriate specialists; a resource centre to help patients with self-management; and a centre for clinical placements of medical students from universities to help attract and retain medical professionals in the regional community.

This funding is a clear example of the Rudd government’s commitment to rural and regional health services. All in all, I think Bendigo has done very well in the first six months of the Rudd Labor government.

Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, what a distinct pleasure to be able to remain in the same chamber. I take this opportunity, in the great tradition of Animal Farm, where up is down and down is up and where eagles apparently have to climb trees, to point out to a Labor government so enraptured with their own budget that it is an old-fashioned, lightweight, high-taxing, high-spending, standard-fare Labor budget. It is unremarkable in every extreme, except for the $15 billion in spending cuts announced to coalition programs and $30 billion in additional spending by the government—a net increase in spending of $15 billion. However you want to slice and dice the spin, this is an incredibly high-spending budget. That, along with $19 billion of new taxes over the forward estimates, simply asserts what we know: old Labor is back, unreformed and clearly unrepentant.

But what makes this budget worse is a range of irregular and highly undesirable accounting tricks. The CPI is used as a deflator rather than the non-farm GDP, as has been the case traditionally to try and keep the increases in spending down. Labor has used an unprecedented accounting move to artificially inflate the size of the budget surplus by a staggering $2.9 billion, by using second-round effects—adding in the expected income from an increase in skilled migration, something the previous government never dreamed of doing let alone actually put into practice. The evidence of this can be seen by comparing Labor’s costings for the migration program increases with the previous, Howard government’s costings. Under the Howard government, budget decisions to increase migration were accompanied by a costing of all the resulting expenditure on health care, welfare, education and other migrant based services. The Howard government budget measures never claimed a matching increase in income tax revenue—never claimed it.

In technical terms, such a costing would be called a second-round effect. It was not claimed in the past because of the fundamental difficulties in trying to make accurate costing assumptions. It is just not possible. So First World nations across the globe, provided with good advice from their treasuries, do not add in second-round effects, except for—you guessed it—this Animal Farm government. Just in case the members opposite cannot quite pull it together, I will quote Treasury’s own costing guidelines issued for the 2007 election which stated:

As with existing arrangements individual costings may take account of direct behavioural responses, but will generally not incorporate second round effects. The costing will focus on first round effects and the direct budgetary consequences of policies.

Now, I am not too sure where the Labor government were when Treasury issued that advice. I can only assume they were in the same position they are in now with ‘foolwatch’, or should I say Fuelwatch, when the four major departments all issued advice that was ignored. I guess Treasury’s advice was ignored with respect to second-round effects, as advice with respect to ‘foolwatch’ has been ignored.

The Labor government decision to increase the migration program by 37½ thousand places involves a gross cost of $2.4 billion. In a Howard government budget, it would have appeared as an expenditure item of $2.4 billion. However, by including income tax receipts of $2.9 billion—that is, the second-round effects—Labor’s budget has turned a $2.4 billion expenditure into a supposed saving of half a billion dollars. That is an amazing sleight of hand, in the best of language—a $2.4 billion expenditure has been turned into a $500 million saving by adding in a $2.9 billion second-round effect.

I can only imagine that Labor will try to argue that it is entirely appropriate to include the income tax of migrants in the migration measure. But then they must answer: if Treasury did not claim this revenue source in the Howard government budgets—if they made it patently clear, pre-election, that this was not the way business was done—why the sudden change of rules for a Rudd government unless, by sleight of hand, they are trying to increase the value of the surpluses and, again by sleight of hand, trying decrease the percentage increases in expenditure in the forward estimates? I suspect this is just one of many budget tricks that Labor have used to hide the fact that their supposedly tough, inflation-fighting budget is absolutely and utterly a fallacy.

But it does not stop there. In changing the deflator from non-farm GDP to CPI and adding in second-round effects you have nothing in the forward estimates with respect to the emissions trading scheme. This trading scheme will have an enormous impact on our economy. It will increase the prices of literally everything. Even if the carbon price were simply $25 a tonne, which some believe may be at the low end, it would generate at least $10 billion in additional federal government revenue—an enormous new federal government tax. Yet it is nowhere to be seen in the forward estimates.

And the tax increases do not stop there. On they go with new taxes on condensate. Condensate is a form of light crude associated with gas accumulations. It is used for making plastics and cosmetics, although mainly for making petrol, and it is exported 100 per cent. Condensate produced in a state or territory or inside the outer limits of the territorial sea of Australia and marketed separately from a crude oil stream was free of excise in 1977. This was to encourage exploration and production from onshore and predominantly offshore gas fields that did not have the same profitability as the main crude oil produced in Bass Strait. Thus it was aimed at the development of petroleum resources in the mainly gas-producing areas of the Cooper Basin and the North West Shelf. It was designed to allow high-risk projects that companies would not normally put exploration dollars and cents into, allow them to recoup profits over time and amortise risks and early losses. It was an incentive for exploration—and suddenly an arbitrary tax with no warning and no consultation is thrown on it.

The move has changed the investment environment. In his second reading speech on 15 May the Assistant Treasurer stated:

As the development of petroleum fields in this region is now reaching maturity, and the world prices for non-renewable energy resources are high, there is no need to retain this generous concession.

Given the similarity between condensate and crude oil, the two commodities should be taxed in a similar manner.

The PM stated in response to a question from the shadow deputy leader on 27 May:

On the condensate arrangement, it was actually instituted back then in order to provide encouragement for the industry ... That is the first point. Secondly, that is quite a long time ago, and since that time the industry has not only become profitable and been established; if you look at the return to the industry concerned, its actual profits in recent years have been not just in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the billions of dollars.

What this seeks to do is to actually close a tax loophole which has existed for a long, long time and, furthermore, to use those taxation measures to underpin the robustness and the financial integrity of this budget ...

This is not a tax loophole; this is not a generous concession. If it was, the previous Labor government, which racked up $96 billion of debt—that Labor government—would have closed the tax loophole. The previous Labor government had from 1983 to 1996 to close all the tax loopholes they could possibly find, but they did not. If the Hawke-Keating government did not close a supposed tax loophole, those opposite should not roll out the Animal Farm view that this is a loophole and, ‘We, Labor, the saviours of the universe, have now closed it to help poor struggling, battling families.’

What Labor have done has fundamentally changed the exploration investment architecture. Companies that would generally not consider putting dollars and cents into exploration projects of some risk may now walk away because, as far as they are concerned, this Labor government will change the rules without consultation, at a whim. The PM went further; he did not just stop there. He said:

So condensate and all the other measures in the budget represent an exercise in financial integrity.

Clearly, the Treasurer and I—or the Prime Minister and I—went to different MBA schools when it comes to financial integrity. This has got nothing to do with financial integrity. They are raising a tax—an excise designed for light crude oil—that punishes exploration.

The fact is that the most easily explored compressed LNG—liquid natural gas—fields are those that have condensate. Those that are most easily able to generate a profit to offset large risks and costs are those with condensate. Yet the Minister for Resources and Energy and Minister for Tourism, when speaking on 13 May, on the third reading of the Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2008, stated:

The amendments in this bill are required to ensure that the regulatory regime continues to support the development of our vital oil and gas reserves. As we all appreciate, this issue is of critical importance to our nation. Whilst Australia is very well endowed with gas, with more than 110 years of gas reserves at current production rates, we only have about eight per cent of known oil reserves remaining at today’s consumption rates. Consequently, Australia is looking down the barrel of a $27 billion trade deficit in oil and condensate by 2015. Therefore, it is very important that we work to open up more frontiers.

On 13 May, the Minister for Resources and Energy said, ‘It’s important we work to open up more frontiers,’ and yet this budget clamps down on the very frontiers we want to open up by saying: ‘Here is a new tax; let us discourage you from opening up frontiers.’ It is fundamental—the ignorance of the Animal Farm budget that is before us! This has got nothing to do with financial integrity. One minister is saying, ‘We want to open up more frontiers and encourage it,’ and, at the same time, the PM wants to punish those who open those same frontiers. It is an absolute and utter farce. It is a tax grab—nothing more, nothing less; call it what it is.

It is the same with the ready-to-drinks—the alcopops. It is simply a tax grab. Treasury’s own figures indicate that the drinking patterns will not reduce. All of the anecdotal evidence coming forward shows quite clearly that young people are now getting heavy liquor and heavy spirits and mixing their own and, indeed, it may be making binge drinking worse.

The rise in the luxury car tax, from 25 to 33 per cent, is simply aimed at grabbing revenue, because apparently anyone paying more than $57,000 for a car is rich, and this Labor government does not like rich people, apparently. Increased passenger charges are apparently good for tourism, as are increased visa charges. The hide of some of the changes in this budget! In one move, the government gave $20.7 million to veterans through a range of minor changes and, at the same time, in the budget, it took away $110 million from veterans. The cabinet, in which no-one has ever worn a uniform or served a day in uniform in their lives, thought they would take away, with the stroke of a pen, $110 million from veterans by increasing the partner pension age from 50 to 58.5 and then stopped partner pensions 12 months after separations.

But it continues. The level at which the Medicare surcharge is paid was increased from $50,000 to $100,000. Treasury’s own estimates show that something like half a million people will leave private health insurance. I can only conclude that the Labor government does not like private health insurance. Here are some facts. Private hospitals treat four out of every 10 admitted patients in Australia, representing nearly one-third of all days in hospitals. Private hospitals perform the majority of surgery—56 per cent. In my electorate of Fadden, the fastest-growing electorate in the nation, there are 49,724 people with private health insurance. With predictions that almost 10 per cent of insured people will drop out of the system, that is almost 5,000 people dropping out who will then be required to go into the public system.

Let us have a look at the public system, shall we? Let us look at Queensland Health—that incredible organisation of efficiency and effectiveness—and their quarterly public hospital performance report for the March quarter of 2008. The Gold Coast Hospital is the only public hospital that services the sixth-largest city in the nation. With at least 5,000 people in my electorate and a similar number in the two electorates of Moncrieff and MacPherson, 15,000 more people will draw on the requirements and services of the Gold Coast Hospital. It has the third-highest number of people admitted to hospital: 17,344. It services the most people in Queensland in an emergency department: 24,613—that is, 30 per cent more than the next highest hospital, which is Royal Brisbane Hospital. The Gold Coast Hospital performed 2,650 elective surgeries, and came third after Royal Brisbane and Princess Alexandra hospitals.

Whilst the move on the Medicare surcharge will throw at least 15,000 people—and as many as half a million across the nation—into the public system, let us look at the elective surgery numbers. According to Queensland Health’s report, right now there are 36,030 people on waiting lists and a further 159,000 people waiting to get on the waiting list—and this government thinks it is economically prudent to raise the Medicare surcharge and push more people into public hospitals. Right now Queensland Health is failing the people of Queensland. Right now there are 36,000 people on a waiting list for elective surgery and 159,000 people waiting to get on the waiting list, and this government wants to push half a million people into the public hospital system. If this is not a new chapter of Animal Farm, I do not know what is.

The Regional Partnerships program has been axed and yet, in an embarrassing backflip, Minister Albanese was forced, because of Channel 7, to fund almost 100 of the 116 projects that had been funded but contracts not yet signed, because of the genuine community need for them. Hundreds more projects were pending—projects for which people had spent time, money and effort over many months and years to put a submission forward. What about those that are pending? What about those that have not yet been approved? What is the minister going to do about them—including $1½ million for the Coomera and Oxenford youth centre in my electorate of Fadden? It is the fastest-growing electorate in the nation, yet there is only one youth centre servicing the whole northern growth corridor. It is the fastest-growing area in the nation, and what does the minister say about a simple grant to extend the youth centre? He says sorry. Yet, in the same Animal Farm chapter, he funds $14.5 million for sound insulation of a school in his own electorate. Fort Street High School has long campaigned for noise insulation, but the school is outside the agreed excessive noise area and it has been ineligible.

In what can only be described as something out of the ordinary, Minister Albanese has approved funding for a project in his own electorate that does not meet his government’s own guidelines. No departmental review. Likewise Labor’s Tree of Knowledge—no departmental scrutiny. With one breath, Labor takes money away from the Royal Flying Doctors, from disabled playgrounds in Bundaberg and from youth centres in my electorate, but he is happy to fund noise insulation in the minister’s own electorate because it is politically expedient—unbelievable!

And the politics of envy does not stop. The solar panel rebates have been lost. If you earn over $100,000 the rebate is gone, and the solar industry across the nation is now collapsing. Family tax benefit B is lost for families earning over $150,000. The childcare benefit is lost if you earn over $110,000, yet the top tax bracket is $180,000. I ask the government: what is rich? Is it $57,000? Is it $100,000, $110,000 or $150,000? Is there any competent narrative to this budget, or is it simply a grab for tax—simply amending the various rules using second-round effects to inflate the budget? This is just more spin and more hype and it is appalling.

Yet what is truly horrifying is banking $40 billion of Australian savings, which exist thanks to the work of the member for Higgins, in a fund that can be invested at the Treasurer’s discretion, without any definition of what the investments might be expected to return and without any parameters as to financial returns. There are no guidelines; there are no rules. When there are no rules, no guidelines, no investment returns and no prudential regulatory things around it, it is one thing and one thing only—it is a slush fund. That is what it is; that is what it should be called. In the world I live in and do business in, you would not raise a brass razoo if you went to the market with something like the fund that $40 billion is being put into. This is not a nation-building budget. This is a farce. This is a joke. This is the last chapter of Animal Farm. (Time expired)

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in support of the appropriation bills today. In deference to the number of members wishing to speak in this debate, I will keep my contribution brief. It is a particular pleasure to stand in this chamber during Queensland Week to make some comments on a budget that has been delivered by a Treasurer from Queensland. The reality of the 2008 budget is that it is a good budget. It is an economically responsible budget through fiscal conservatism. It delivers immediate benefits for all Australians, it delivers on Labor’s election commitments and it provides for the future.

This budget has been framed in the context of world economic conditions. It has been framed in the context of the global credit crisis and a US economy in decline—the principal economy in the western world. It has been framed in the context of rising fuel and food prices domestically. It has been framed in the context of a rising Australian dollar, with the implications that that has for manufacturing and tourism, amongst others. The budget has also been framed in the context of the former government’s legacy: eight consecutive interest rate rises, the highest inflation in 16 years and the lowest productivity growth in 17 years. Notwithstanding those, it is fair for us to acknowledge that, as a consequence of the mining boom, this budget has also been framed in the context of an Australian economy best placed in the world to avoid tumbling into the abyss that appears likely to swallow up other Western economies. Avoiding that pitfall requires a budget just like the one presented by Wayne Swan—a responsible budget.

I want to turn very briefly to the specifics of this budget as they relate to my electorate of Longman. This budget has delivered some valuable and long-overdue assistance to some sporting bodies in my electorate. The Burpengary Jets junior rugby league club, at Burpengary, will receive $130,000 to install lights on its fields. The Jets are a large and very successful junior sporting club and a tribute to the voluntary efforts of those who have guided them over the years, and I am very pleased that we have been able to provide them with this assistance. All members would understand the value of lighting playing fields and the difficulty that volunteer groups have in raising the funds to do so.

The Caboolture Rugby League Club—the senior rugby league club—is to receive $110,000 for additional lighting and for facility upgrading. The club is known as the Snakes, which reflects the meaning of the place name of Caboolture; in the language of the traditional owners, Caboolture translates as ‘place of the carpet snakes’. We are not terribly venomous but we can frighten you! The Snakes compete with distinction in the Sunshine Coast Rugby League, which has night-time fixtures as part of that competition. This money will assist them to make sure that their facility is of the standard that is required for that competition.

The Caboolture Sports Softball Association will receive $200,000 for the installation of batting cages, for the lighting of an additional playing diamond and for canteen and toilet facility upgrading that is required by the local council. In the interests of transparency, I indicate that softball is a sport in which I am heavily involved, although not with the Caboolture association. The new batting cages, in particular, will be welcome among participants, as there are presently no facilities on the north side of Brisbane and from our area have come two players who will shortly represent Australia at the Olympics.

This budget also delivers a valuable addition to community facilities in the electorate of Longman, where $250,000 will be spent installing solar panels to provide water heating for the Deception Bay Aquatic and Fitness Centre and to extend the useability of the facility through what are thankfully, in Queensland, short winter months. These panels will be installed on the roof of the adjoining PCYC and common sense would dictate that the panels will also provide hot water for both the aquatic centre change rooms and those of the PCYC.

This budget also provides for valuable new health facilities in my electorate of Longman to service the north side of Brisbane—and I speak of $7 million for a 12-chair renal unit to be included in the North Lakes health precinct and currently being constructed by the Queensland government. The dialysis needs of patients on the north side of Brisbane, the Moreton Bay region generally and the electorate of Longman particularly will be much better met through this initiative. I know from discussions with a number of people who require these services that they are very appreciative of this new initiative.

Valuable new road infrastructure funding—not new funding but new directions—will see overpasses completed at Boundary Road, Bribie Island Road and Pumicestone Road as they cross the Bruce Highway through my electorate, each of them subject to heavy traffic these days. There is also valuable assistance for local small business. The Caboolture Business Enterprise Centre is to receive recurrent funding of $300,000, or $1.2 million over four years, to provide business advice and services to microbusinesses and small businesses in our region. The enterprise centre has been operating since 1994, offering a range of services to the local business community. This funding will allow those services to be extended. Again, for the sake of disclosure, I announce that I spent a considerable period of time, seven or eight years, as chairman of that group, the enterprise centre having been an election commitment and funded as a consequence of the 1992 Queensland state election, when I became the local state member.

Just to wind up, the budget has not been without disappointments, and I am sorry the previous speaker, the member for Fadden, is not here to hear me say this. It is in many respects a disappointment that the Regional Partnerships program has been discontinued. Not all of the projects were bad or rorts; in fact, the majority were no doubt valuable to their communities. This makes the rorts even more regrettable, because, as a consequence of the program misuse, some really good local initiatives are on hold—and I think that you will find that you have the support of most members of the Labor government in that regard. There were good projects delivered under this program; however, the rorts—

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tell the minister.

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have mentioned it to the minister, I promise you. The rorts have made the continuation of this program untenable. For the benefit of the member opposite, I note that I am part of the committee that the minister has sought to review the Regional Partnerships program; he has given us a very short space of time in which to do it. I think he is serious.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me keep going. Among the programs that missed out on getting a guernsey as a consequence of the discontinuation was a lift for the Deception Bay Sports Club, in the electorate of Longman, which would have allowed people with mobility disabilities to access the club. It is regrettable that this could not go forward, and I can say today to the people of Deception Bay that I will be working hard to make sure that that project gets up when the program’s replacement is implemented.

Also—and I say this with a little more of a smile—I regret that, despite the former Prime Minister’s sneak visit to Bribie Island to promise $1 million for the local hospice association and $1.1 million for respite care on Bribie Island, that was not carried through in our budget. Clearly, these were election commitments of the side that did not win the election and, just as Labor’s election commitments in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004 did not get up in Costello budgets, these had little chance. However, both of these projects are worthy of consideration in the context of the Bribie Island community, and I will be seeking to progress these.

In conclusion, there are a couple of national initiatives in the budget that have ramifications for what I consider to be my program locally. The first of these is the health and hospital fund, which is relevant to my concern that we start now to plan for a new hospital in our area so that it can come online when the existing hospitals are no longer able to cater for the growth that is occurring there quite rapidly. The second is the Education Investment Fund, which has relevance given that I am concerned to see that we develop within that part of south-east Queensland a comprehensive university to serve the young people. Finally, this budget delivers on Labor’s election commitments, and it also points towards the future—a better future for all Australians and particularly for those dependent on the government for their income.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In March last year there was a change of government. Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party made a lot of promises to Australian families. Particularly, they promised to bring down petrol prices, to bring down grocery prices and to put downward pressure on inflation and interest rates. Six months later, after the new government brought down its first budget, the Australian people have their answer to what the achievements of this government or its methods of operation are. We can see that Labor has failed on all counts. All of the issues it has raised it has failed to take any action on.

The government’s first budget has now been delivered under the most fortuitous circumstances of any new government in the history of this country. This country has a pretty impressive history—108 years. No government has inherited such a strong fiscal position as the new, incoming Rudd government. I will quote the Australian commentator Janet Albrechtsen because I like this quote. She says:

If ... giving money and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to a teenager, then the Rudd Government has just been handed the finest whisky money can buy and the keys to a Maserati.

Labor are drunk behind the wheel on this one. Instead of us having a luxury sports car, they are driving the economy into a wall. We have silly cost-cutting measures that do not do anything apart from feign that these guys are strong economic conservatives.

This is the budget that was dressed up as being tough and rugged—and no-one was more hairy-chested than the Treasurer—but what we ultimately got was a high-taxing, high-spending budget. We have no really clear direction on taxation policy from this government. Apparently the largest taxation reform in my lifetime was the tax reform brought in under the Hawke-Keating years, when we moved to a sales tax as opposed to a myriad of smaller taxes—an extraordinarily complex and difficult system for people to navigate. Apparently that government now stands condemned by the new government for not doing enough about tax reform. I find that extraordinary.

Since coming into government, the government has established more than 100 reviews, summits, agencies and offices. Of course what it has not done is save Australians one cent on the price of fuel at the bowser or one cent on their weekly grocery bill. What it has done instead is raise new taxes on alcohol, raise new taxes on motorcars and increase the cost of private health insurance and energy. When you increase the prices of things, that increases inflationary pressures. In his Adelaide surrender, which I think was really extraordinary for a man who has been in office for all of six months, the Prime Minister said:

... we have done as much as we physically can to provide additional help to the family budget ...

He said that on 22 May this year. Extraordinarily, before the election the Prime Minister was running around talking about petrol prices, grocery prices and the high cost of living, and then he said, ‘The buck will stop with me.’ Now apparently there is nothing further he can do, which is really quite an extraordinary surrender. If the government had actually tried to do something then the Australian people might be a bit more understanding but, considering they have not, I suspect that the government will be judged very harshly.

Australian families deserve a government that can make the tough decisions that are necessary to protect the Australian economy. This budget does not do that. It is a high-taxing, high-spending, old-fashioned Labor budget. It does not fight inflation, because you do not fight inflation when you are pushing prices up, and it will not do one thing to help families battling with high fuel prices and high grocery prices. Really, the only positive measure in this budget, the real core of important things that were delivered in this budget, is the tax cuts that were of course proposed by the then Treasurer Peter Costello and photocopied by Kevin Rudd. When he did that, he exposed the fact that he did not have a tax policy during the election campaign last year.

The Treasurer would have had us all believe that this budget was going to cut spending in order to put downwards pressure on inflation. You have to wonder, Madam Deputy Speaker, if the Treasurer actually knew what was in this budget, because it did not do anything of the sort. Spending has gone up by $3 billion in the current financial year and by $14.9 billion over the forward estimates. Labor have cut $15.2 billion off coalition spending programs, but then they have spent more than $30.1 billion on new Labor spending programs. Some of the former coalition programs that were scrapped brought many millions of dollars into my electorate of Stirling. I note that the previous speaker—I cannot recall his seat, sadly—talked about how the Regional Partnerships program was actually, it turns out, a very good program after all. Even though the government have trashed it and scrapped it, apparently he now wants that money for his electorate, which I find rather extraordinary.

The money that was spent in my electorate was through programs such as the Investing in Our Schools Program, which supported local schools in Stirling and supported new and innovative research projects. It helped fight crime, something that my constituents are particularly concerned about, and it helped schools and community organisations in Stirling save hundreds of millions of dollars of local water—something, of course, that is on everybody’s mind but is particularly so in Western Australia, where it has been extraordinarily dry. Many of these grant recipients relied on these grants coming from the federal government, because of the complete failure and incompetence of the Western Australian state Labor government, who do not seem to have any idea about what to do about rising crime levels or what to do about the decaying state of local schools in Stirling. So the scrapping of these federal programs that made up for state government incompetence dealt a heavy blow to my local community. I would like to talk a little bit about that later.

All up, Labor’s high-taxing policies have added $19.5 billion in increased revenue over the forward estimates. The preliminary economic modelling that we announced on budget night estimates that Labor’s new taxes and charges could add up to 0.4 percentage points to the CPI. The Treasurer has long been saying that ‘it is a hard day at the office’ to achieve a surplus of 1½ per cent of GDP, but what was revealed in the budget is that this year the surplus will be $16.8 billion, which is 1.5 per cent of GDP, but it would have been 1.7 per cent of GDP without Mr Swan’s intervention. So he could sit on his hands and get 1.7 per cent, but really his actions have meant that it is only 1.5 per cent. Next year, in 2008-09, the surplus is estimated to be 1.8 per cent of GDP. Again, this is a legacy of the strong economic management of the Howard-Costello years.

On climate change, Labor talk about the need for an emissions trading scheme; however, the budget papers make no provision whatsoever for the revenues that may flow from such a scheme. I would just remind the House that this scheme is supposed to start in 2010. What we do know is that it will be terribly expensive. It is going to cost taxpayers. It is going to be a new tax, and the government will have a windfall from this new tax, but they do not seem to have any idea about how to spend it—and, if they do, they are not prepared to share that information with the Australian people.

I want to turn to the infrastructure fund, this incredible slush fund that has been announced in this new budget. We have $40 billion in the slush fund, although we have no idea what sort of economic return it is supposed to deliver to the Australian people. We have been given no details about how this money might actually be spent. That is an extraordinary indictment of this budget—$40 billion and they do not know what they are going to do with it. They have tried to pretend that it is like the Future Fund when of course it is not, because you can spend the capital as opposed to the interest. That was the whole point of the funds that were set up in the Howard-Costello years: they spent interest rather than capital. But the infrastructure funds can be spent completely—and, apparently, without too much regard for due process.

Prior to the election we heard a lot from this government about core business and the sorts of pressures that were on working families, as the Prime Minister likes to talk about. These included the rising cost of living, petrol prices and the rising cost of owning a home—all of which are serious issues. But Australian families need their government not only to have the ability to raise issues—because anybody can do that; it is easy to walk into the House or walk into a press conference and raise an issue of concern—but also to actually do something. There is a big difference between raising an issue and addressing an issue. Sadly, the government has already surrendered. It has raised the issues and, in some instances, has made some gesture—which does not work—and has then moved on to the next thing, and the Prime Minister says, ‘Oh, well, there’s nothing more I can do.’

I will look at one specific instance—because it occupied a lot of time in the House last week and I suspect it will throughout the course of this week—and that is petrol prices. What we have seen from this government is really quite ludicrous. The government raised the issue of petrol prices but it had no idea about how to actually address it. It needed to come up with something so that it could say to the Australian people, ‘We’ve tried to do something about it.’ So the government came up with this ludicrous Fuelwatch scheme, which in some cases may actually lead to consumers paying more for petrol. This is the sort of thing that we see from Kevin Rudd and his government. Fuelwatch has been brutally unmasked by the resources and energy minister, who actually said to his colleagues that it will leave battlers out of pocket. He said it is anticompetitive and a waste of money and it will fail Australian families.

As a Western Australian I know a little bit about this scheme because it has been in operation in Western Australia since 2001. I have spoken to local petrol retailers about it—in particular, one independent retailer who has his station just around the corner from my office. I asked him what he thought about FuelWatch and he gave me an example. I have raised it in the House before but it is such an absurd example I think it is worth repeating. He tried to lower his prices to compete with one of his large competitors. This guy is an independent, a sole trader, who pumps fuel just to keep people moving through into his workshop. So his margins on fuel are tiny. He tried to bring his price down in relation to one of his competitors, who is from a major chain, and he was told by the administrators of the scheme that he would be fined if he tried to do that. I think that is really quite extraordinary: an independent retailer being fined for offering cheaper petrol to consumers. And this is the scheme that the Prime Minister and the Assistant Treasurer want to take from Western Australia and make nationwide.

I will now turn to grocery prices, because I think we are going to be hearing a lot more about this issue, as we see that there is now going to be some sort of grocery watch mechanism. Money has been allocated in the budget to create that. Again, bringing down grocery prices was apparently core business for the Rudd government. In fact, in the Australian this year the Prime Minister was quoted as saying:

The buck stops with me.

How quickly things change! Mr Rudd was further quoted as saying:

We’ll all be expecting to see positive programs, positive measures that will have the effect of bringing grocery prices down.

That is what he actually said at the start of this year, and the Treasurer of course said very similar things. But already we have the Prime Minister, within the space of less than four months, surrendering on this. It really is extraordinary that these large promises were made and the government had no idea about how to deal with them.

I just might turn to local issues in the minutes I have remaining because the electorate of Stirling has been severely hit by measures contained within this budget, these ill thought out measures. Firstly, this budget fails to deliver on promises that were made to my constituents prior to the last election. Two that are very close to my heart are the overpasses where Reid Highway intersects with Mirrabooka Avenue and where Reid Highway intersects with Alexander Drive. Sadly last week there was another fatality at the Mirrabooka Avenue intersection. Because of the high incidence of fatalities occurring at that intersection, I campaigned very strongly within the previous government to allocate some money towards that overpass, funding which was subsequently provided.

Labor matched these promises during the election campaign. They said that they would build these overpasses. In fact, with the Alexander Drive overpass, I think they said something along the lines that ‘this overpass can start tomorrow’. Yet in this budget they have failed to deliver any money towards building this overpass. They have turned their backs on my local community essentially because they did not win the seat. The unsuccessful Labor candidate, on behalf of an elected Rudd government, promised unconditional funding through AusLink 2 for the building of an overpass at the Alexander Drive intersection and promised consideration of the Mirrabooka Avenue and Reid Highway overpass. Hundreds of local families signed my petition to see these overpasses built, and during last year’s campaign I secured $20 million towards the Mirrabooka Avenue and Alexander Drive overpasses over the Reid Highway. I think the local community will be very disappointed with the Labor government, which pledged to fund this project but within a few months have already turned their backs on that promise. But I will continue to fight for these important local projects.

I have mentioned in this House in the past the Commercial Ready program. Its cancellation will affect some extraordinarily good small businesses within my electorate who are doing world leading research. In particular, I would like to mention Structural Monitoring Systems. This is a small engineering firm based in Osmond Park that has the interest of all the major players in the aerospace industry around the world—it has the interest of Airbus and Boeing—because it has developed a system to monitor the structural integrity of aircraft, a system that is far more lightweight and far more simple than existing systems. So there it is: a little company doing world-beating research and it has had the rug pulled out from under it by this government. That I think is a most extraordinarily short-sighted measure. Structural Monitoring Systems will keep punching on because it is an extraordinarily aggressive little company, and I do not doubt for a second that it will succeed in commercialising its world-beating technology. But what a ridiculous and short-sighted thing for this government to do. The Commercial Ready program is an extraordinarily successful program and, if this government and the minister had any sense, they would be actively campaigning to have that program reinstated.

I want to turn to Investing in Our Schools. The scrapping of that program will also cause a lot of pain in my electorate of Stirling. I recently took the Leader of the Opposition, Dr Nelson, around one of my local schools, St Andrews Grammar in Dianella. St Andrews Grammar has almost completed construction of an amphitheatre with benches and seating, security lighting and covered walkways, as well as an upgrade of their car park. The school’s principal, Craig D’cruz, is very proud of the construction of a music and drama room and the refurbishment of a classroom into a canteen and uniform shop. All of these projects were funded under the former coalition government’s Investing in Our Schools program. Extraordinarily, this program has been scrapped by the Rudd Labor government. This was a program that went into my local schools and did something constructive, in conjunction with the local P&Cs and the local school communities. It funded things like an upgrade to sporting facilities and new IT equipment. It did the sorts of things that you would expect a state Labor government to do—but which they seem completely incapable of doing.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Refurbishing toilets.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, refurbishing toilets. There are literally hundreds of things that this program has done within my electorate, let alone in other electorates such as that of the member for Mallee and other members. Government members of course will know how successful this program has been, yet I have not heard a peep out of any of them when talking to the appropriations bills about the damage that cutting this program is doing.

Another very successful program that has done a lot of good within my electorate is the Community Water Grants program. Money was allocated under this program to Our Lady of Lourdes School, Deanmore Primary School, St Kieran Catholic School and Glendale Primary School. They received grants to fund measures to save water within their own local communities and they have done it very successfully. I commend them for what they have done. Extraordinarily, no other local schools or community organisations will be able to do the same thing, because this program has been summarily scrapped.

Finally, there is the National Community Crime Prevention program—a program which is very dear to my heart. This program funded things such as CCTV at a local shopping centre in my electorate that is, quite frankly, suffering a plague of crime. The small businesses at the Nollamara shopping centre can no longer get insurance because their businesses are so readily graffitied and vandalised. So we came in, the Howard government, and said, ‘This is a problem. We’ll address this problem by putting CCTV at the shopping centre.’ That CCTV has been erected by the local council. Scrapping this program is just another example of the short-sighted measures that are taken in this ill-considered and diabolically bad budget. (Time expired)

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, the appropriations debate allows wide-ranging discussions, because it relates to budget bills. Tonight I want to utilise that convention of a wide-ranging debate, and I rely on the appropriations in relation to the Attorney-General’s portfolio for the matters which I propose to raise.

For the first time in 18 years, I rise to criticise my state colleagues in the New South Wales government, in particular the Attorney-General’s department, for what I have said publicly is a mean-spirited and counterproductive response in relation to the transfer of a prisoner from Hong Kong under the International Transfer of Prisoners Act 1997. Rachel Diaz, who is in custody in Hong Kong, and her parents are constituents of mine. Rachel was convicted in relation to drug matters and is currently serving a sentence in a Hong Kong jail. Her date of birth is 28 December 1987. She is a classic example of a person who comes within the provisions of the International Transfer of Prisoners Act for repatriation back to Australia and to a New South Wales prison to serve the remainder of her sentence.

The matter has received some publicity and there is some information on a particular website on the internet. An article about the case appeared in the Australian on Monday, 19 May 2008. I wrote to the New South Wales Attorney-General in relation to this case on Monday, 21 April 2008. As of today’s date, Monday, 2 June 2008, I have not received a reply. My submissions to the New South Wales Attorney-General were strongly in favour of the New South Wales government exercising its discretion and agreeing to the repatriation of Ms Diaz back to Australia to serve the remainder of her sentence. The basis upon which the New South Wales government is prevaricating is that they are seeking $10,043 in costs for sending two people to Hong Kong to bring her back. That is the condition of their consent. The article quotes a spokeswoman for the New South Wales Attorney-General, saying:

‘These matters are considered on a case-by-case basis, but generally the state Government does not think it is reasonable for NSW taxpayers to have to pay to transport Australians who have been convicted of crimes overseas back to prisons in NSW.’

I put it to the New South Wales Attorney-General that there were three grounds for the waiver of this payment. One was the cooperation that Rachel Ann Diaz gave the authorities. I have to say this: she gave cooperation way beyond what was required.

There were two statements from a particular police officer attached to my submission. The first was from Detective Senior Constable John Bamford, as he then was, dated 27 July 2006, and on 26 October 2007 he made a statement when he was a detective sergeant. What he pointed out was that Diaz provided a frank and accurate account of her involvement in the attempted importation of heroin into Australia. Diaz also spoke of the role played by the accused persons, Kim and Zhang, in the offence. Diaz listened to a number of intercepted telephone calls involving her and she identified the voices of other persons involved in the offence. Diaz was also able to provide an insight into the exact context of those calls. She was fearful of possible reprisals, should she speak to the police or give evidence, but she chose to do so regardless. She was brought back to Australia to give that evidence.

We are told in the statement that, on 27 June 2006, Kim and Zhang changed their pleas to guilty. ‘In my opinion, the evidence of Diaz was a contributing factor to this change of plea’—that is what the detective said. What he is in effect saying, if one reads between the lines, is that it was the credible evidence given by Ms Diaz that led to Kim and Zhang pleading guilty. Why do I raise this? For this reason, Madam Deputy Speaker Vale: as you well know, given your background, if you run a drug trial in New South Wales with two accused, it can be a very expensive exercise. I estimate that this young woman saved the state of New South Wales more than $1 million by providing credible evidence which led to a plea of guilty instead of a fully-fledged trial, and the New South Wales state government repays her by trying to extract just over $10,000 for her return to Australia. She is a woman without means and her family is without means. Her family is $60,000 in debt as a result of assistance they gave her during her legal process in Hong Kong, particularly with her mother spending time over there. The medical evidence in relation to her shows that she was sexually assaulted as a 12-year-old and that that has had a profound effect on her behaviour. So she is a vulnerable individual. Within the last two weeks, someone in an adjoining cell committed suicide, so Ms Diaz has had to be transferred within the system because of the impact of that incident on her.

In relation to the hardship of the family and their inability to pay, the New South Wales government is relying on this family either borrowing money—the father has offered to make payments over time and that has been rejected—or someone coughing up the $10,000 to bring her back here. I will come to that in a short moment. Having read the International Transfer of Prisoners Act, I am a little bit angry in relation to the cost recovery, considering my interpretation of how the New South Wales government could get cost recovery, as against trying to impose this further burden on the Diaz family. The whole input behind this act is not cost recovery. No other state or territory in the Commonwealth requires cost recovery or consideration of it—only the New South Wales government. Ms Diaz’s mother, as a result of these trials and tribulations, and other trials and tribulations, has real problems in relation to her medical condition, to do with depression amongst other things. If I am wrong about the International Transfer of Prisoners Act on this, then I will put my hand up and say I am wrong, but I do not think I am. Having been a former Legal Aid solicitor and a public defender in New South Wales, I do know how to read an act of parliament and interpret it.

Section 27(4) of the International Transfer of Prisoners Act says:

Each minister concerned is to advise the Attorney-General in writing as to whether the Minister consents to the transfer on the terms proposed as soon as possible after receiving the notification.

The cost recovery section is section 51 of the act and is headed ‘Recovery of costs and expenses of transfers’. Section 51(1) says:

The terms agreed under this Act for transfer of a prisoner or Tribunal prisoner may, if the Attorney-General considers it appropriate, include terms relating to the recovery of the costs and expenses reasonably incurred in transferring the prisoner or Tribunal prisoner.

It sounds reasonable, which is what New South Wales says they are relying on, I believe. It is section 51(2) that is the clincher:

If any costs or expenses in respect of money recovered in accordance with such terms were incurred by a State or Territory, the Commonwealth is to reimburse the State or Territory concerned.

That is section 51(2). I will read it again:

If any costs or expenses in respect of money recovered in accordance with such terms were incurred by a State or Territory, the Commonwealth is to reimburse the State or Territory concerned.

What I am suggesting is that, if New South Wales are mean enough to want to get their $10,000, they should go to the Commonwealth and get the recovery from the Commonwealth—because it is a federal prisoner, in relation to the definitional section, that is coming back to Australia—and not go the family. That is something that I discovered just in preparation for saying something here in parliament this evening. I am appalled that, if I am right, it means that Ms Diaz has continued to be incarcerated on a false fact in terms of cost recovery—that New South Wales could have got it off the Commonwealth instead of putting the weights on her family.

One of the things I also said in my letter was that this goes to her rehabilitation in relation to the balance of sentence—the ability of the family to continue to visit her and help her before she comes out of prison in New South Wales when she is repatriated.

I call on the New South Wales government and the New South Wales Attorney-General to reconsider their position. I think it is unacceptable and poor public policy to put pressure on the family to come up with this money—or, if not the family, some anonymous donor. If they want their money, come to the Commonwealth. If not, cease and desist because, in the particular circumstances of this case, the cooperation of this prisoner has resulted in the New South Wales government saving over a million dollars in not having to go through a trial for the ringleaders of this event.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I thank you and the parliament and those present in the chamber for your indulgence in allowing me to give what is a wide-ranging speech during the appropriations debate. It is the first time I have done it in this form against my colleagues. The New South Wales Attorney-General is a good and decent man. It is just that in this matter I believe he has a blind spot and I strongly disagree with him.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was most interesting to hear the concluding remarks of the member for Banks. He did not mention the budget, but I fear and feel that what he talked about was possibly even more important and I would also at some stage appreciate the opportunity to talk about such matters.

I appear here today on behalf of my constituents. In opposition it is very easy to point the finger of blame, to complain and whinge, after a budget. I have sat on the government side of the Main Committee and listened to opposition members talk about budgets that we brought down, and a certain level of tedium entered the room very early on in the piece. I really do not want to do that, but I do want to point out what I feel the effect of the budget will be on the constituents I represent.

There are 94,157 voters in the electorate of Farrer, and 47 per cent of them have private health insurance. To me, the fact that so many in an area that is not wealthy have decided to take out private health insurance and do whatever they can to protect themselves and their families from the touch-and-go nature of some of our public hospital systems is a credit to them. The one thing that I am most concerned about with this budget is the effect that the changes to the Medicare levy surcharge threshold will have on those people, because out of the total number of voters who have private health insurance there are almost as many singles as families. I know that not all those singles will be young and healthy—some of them will be older and less healthy—but a fair proportion of them will be young and healthy, and I was quite surprised when I saw the statistics showing that so many were singles.

What we are predicting, and what the modelling is predicting, is that when this measure comes into play a lot of young people—and often, of course, healthy people—will decide to chuck in their private health insurance because they are going to go on the public system. That means automatically that those who are left in the private system have to meet the costs for everyone. They are to some extent, of course, socialised across the system. The reason that the previous government made such an effort to bring people in early by effectively giving them benefits and encouragement to do that was in order that everyone could realise, if they could, a lifetime in private health insurance: you do not need it as much when you are younger and your contributions are relatively modest but, of course, as you get older, you do need it and you are more of a drain—and I do not like to use that word, because older people have a right to use our health systems, but you use up more of the resources that are available—so those two times of your life balance out. What we are going to see is that older people are going to struggle to meet increasing premiums at a time when they will not be able to afford them and that younger people are going to say, ‘Here I am in the casualty system of my local hospital, and I demand to be treated because I have a right to public health just the same as everybody else.’

I do not know whether state health ministers are happy with this decision by the federal government. All of the intelligence tells us that they are not—that they are most unhappy—and I am not surprised, because the thing that state governments come under fire for the most is health, and anything that goes wrong with the public health system is automatically a serious problem, as it should be, for state health ministers. We only have to look at the high jinks in New South Wales going from bad to worse to realise what, if we dumped what may be another 200,000 people into the public hospital system, that would do to its efficiency and effectiveness. I am sorry for those who will have to bear the brunt of such a failed policy.

I will move from health insurance to talk about the nature of funding in the electorate generally. As members would know, I have a very rural electorate, as does my colleague the member for Mallee, who neighbours me on the Victorian side of the river.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All that water!

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I represent a large piece of western New South Wales, and both the member for Mallee and I constantly talk about water in this House. I made some remarks the other night that I am sure he would have endorsed had he been here. We will look at western New South Wales, and I will use a statistic to illustrate the point. This area is not all my electorate—some of it is in that of the member for Calare. Forty-two per cent of the state of New South Wales is west of, probably, Balranald, in the Western Division, and it contains only five per cent of the population. That becomes progressively less of an extreme distribution as you move closer to the sea, but it does illustrate the effect of the city-country divide, because in that 42 per cent of New South Wales that has five per cent of the population we have very poor roads, for obvious reasons. We just do not have the population that uses them, so we are constantly battling to get decent roads to drive our cars on.

The measure that the government has brought in about luxury cars has been, frankly, quite insulting to the people whom I represent, because to consider a four-wheel drive, and the necessary additions that you would have to make to such a vehicle in order to safely traverse these roads, a luxury is absolutely crazy. As the Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson, put it, if you are in your 10-year-old Mitsubishi queuing up at the petrol station, being told by the Rudd government that the reduction in excise of 5c a litre that we suggest is meaningless and does not matter to you, and you are trying to balance the family budget, you would be insulted too.

There are two things: the luxury car tax and the fact that the government thinks that the cost of fuel is not something that matters a great deal to these people on relatively low incomes. In fact, the government believes that these people would not really appreciate a drop of any description. That is absolutely crazy. I have to be honest: it is a subject that absolutely consumes people everywhere you go. If I say to them, ‘What about a 5.5c a litre drop?’ they say, ‘Of course we’d like more, but anything will help.’ I think sometimes governments lose touch with the small amounts that matter in a family’s fortnightly budget.

Small amounts do matter in my electorate because we have been struggling with the drought for a long time now. In some areas we have had 10 years of lower than average rainfall. Particularly in the southern Murray-Darling Basin we are battling over the scarce resources that the Murray-Darling system offers us. There is no doubt at all that we really cannot achieve very much until it rains. The storages in the Snowy Mountains are woefully low and woefully inadequate. The arguments that governments are having with irrigators in rural communities are particularly sad and distressing for those on the receiving end, because they know that, although the government is ‘offering’, to put it in its politest possible terms, to buy their water by coming into the market with a $3 billion chequebook, all they are buying is air space in a dam or empty buckets of water. Perhaps in the government’s mind—but certainly not my mind—it is to help them out. Until we actually know what an allocation will be in any year, the government does not know what it has bought. What it has done is remove control of an irrigation licence from a rural town or a rural community.

There is an analogy here with the end of the wool floor price. There was a lot of discussion then that we should burn the stockpile of wool because then we would have it out of the system and out of the way. I am not saying I supported it one way or the other, although I was a wool farmer at the time. The stockpile sat there and it sort of trickled onto the market in stages. Every now and then a bit more wool would come out and everybody would say, ‘What has happened here?’ and the market would rock from this entry of wool that everyone had forgotten about. This is exactly what is going to happen with this water. The water will be owned by an environmental water manager who is part of the Australian government. Like all responsible government departments, their job will be to maximise the income they make from these water licences. We know that environmental allocations do not work the same every year. If you are looking at your wetlands you might say, ‘I want to water that one this year but not the next year,’ or ‘I want to top up a flood here,’ or ‘There’s no rain still so I’ll hang onto this water in this part of the catchment.’ It is a delicate balancing act, as it should be. If that water is not needed for that wetland or that environmental flow in a particular year, the government are not just going to sit on it; the government is going to put it back on the market and offer it for sale. Inevitably that is what will happen.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Forrest interjecting

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, they will demand a high price. They will have to maximise their price. In maximising their price they are going to maximise the pain that anyone who buys that water will undergo. Irrigators are going to be completely at the mercy of the biggest water holder in the Murray-Darling Basin by far—the Australian government, which will supposedly be acting in the interests of all taxpayers but will be acting in their own fiscal interests. I am not overstating the case to say that people are very angry and frightened. They are angry with me. They are saying, ‘You need to do more.’ I am feeling extremely frustrated because I cannot get through to the water minister. She does not answer my letters and she does not really want to see my constituents. She does not want to come down to the electorate of Farrer. She made a drop-in, drop-out visit lately. She probably thinks she has bigger fish to fry.

It is enormously worrying for us because we can see ghost towns appearing along the Murray River where once there were traditional, proud, flourishing settlements. I thought it was a bit ironic that one of the ministers of the government had leave today. It was not the agriculture minister—or maybe it will be at a later time this week—to attend a food meeting in Europe where the subject matter would be feeding a hungry world and, presumably, the interaction between growing grain for ethanol fuel and growing grain for food. I thought it was interesting that this is a government that is ripping out the water that grows our food in the southern Murray-Darling Basin but does not seem to realise the consequences. We contribute enormously; there is no question about it. I think that the previous government had the balance right between the environment and production, because we cannot afford to ignore either. That continues to be something that I worry about year after year and I certainly will not stop until we get that good drenching rain.

In the recent budget about a billion dollars was taken out of rural Australia, and that was enormously disappointing to my constituents. It is interesting that prior to the election Mr Rudd talked up the clever country image quite a lot. He talked about innovation and doing things smarter. They were good words, but what he actually did was take about $500 million from research and development. There were huge cuts to the CSIRO. I do not always agree to the CSIRO.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Forrest interjecting

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the member for Mallee’s electorate, in Mildura I think, we have to close down a laboratory. As the parliamentary secretary who administered research and development in agriculture, I saw what those programs did for our agricultural industries and how our future as farmers on the world stage, as the best and brightest—I know that is a bit of a cliche—came from our competitive edge. We do not get subsidies and we do not have the benefit of tariffs that Europe and America do, but we do have some amazingly good minds working on the case. The cuts to research and development have effectively pulled the rug out from under those who would have used their ability, knowledge, innovation and networks, which were all set up and operating, to make us more and more at the competitive edge. That is something we so desperately need in the face of the other disadvantages of not having subsidies and tariffs, which, as an individual, can secure your income.

Regional Partnerships has been much talked about. I particularly want to mention Broken Hill, which came into my electorate at the last election, and say how disappointed I was that money for the regional events centre, money for the hearing centre—come on, this is helping senior Australians with their hearing—and money for an aquatic centre was withdrawn. Broken Hill is a long way from anywhere and it has one small 25-metre pool. The aim of the Regional Partnerships program was to upgrade it to something much better for the local kids. Three projects have been wiped off the table by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. What was amazing was the very ad hoc nature that became apparent as he moved through the administration of that program. Nothing at all happened for six months, except that we sacked the small business officer who was associated with the program, and that was very sad. The next thing that happened was that every program was off except for the ones that the Labor Party had guaranteed as being doable, which were their own election commitments during their election campaign. Ironically, they criticised us for making ad hoc decisions but then said they would fund everything they had committed to during the election campaign—none of which had been through the rigorous selection, review and recommendation program that our projects had been through and which, having passed that very important first hurdle that says, ‘Yes, it is in the interests of the community, it is a good thing to do and it is a good use of taxpayers’ money,’ were waiting to see if funding was available. Those projects that were waiting there were axed and, instead, the new Labor government came in with their various election commitments, which have not undergone that rigorous process.

I challenge the minister and anyone in the government to tell me why projects other than those that have been cancelled in my electorate—and I particularly focus on the three in Broken Hill: the events centre, the aquatic centre and the hearing centre—are more deserving and why Minister Albanese, in an amazing backflip, reinstated some projects but left others out in the cold. That appeared to be entirely under pressure from Sunrise and the media—‘I didn’t realise there were such good community things happening here.’ I have to tell the minister: they are all good community things. I have seen sporting facilities, halls, libraries and community function centres all receive dollars under the Regional Partnerships program. The Rural Medical Infrastructure Fund is another example. They are real live examples of what a small amount of money can do and the difference it can make to the heart and soul of a very little country town. It was very disappointing to see us lose those projects.

The Investing in Our Schools Program has been axed. I was at the Booligal Public School, which is a little school in the middle of the Hay Plains, where we were opening new facilities. All over my electorate, the Investing in Our Schools Program has provided covered outdoor learning areas, new play equipment, electronic whiteboards and computers.

The great thing about the program was that whatever the school needed, whatever it wanted, it was allowed to apply for. We now have a completely top-down approach, in keeping with Labor’s approach to people generally—which is that they know better than the community does. They have said that students in years 9 and 10 will have laptops. That is where the money that was going to Investing in Our Schools appears to have been directed.

I just want to relay one anecdote. I was at a conference of single mums in Adelaide recently, and one of the attendees, one of the mums, broke down in tears. She said: ‘Everyone else in the class is getting their education rebate for their computer for their child, but I don’t pay tax. I’m doing my 15 hours work a week and I’m on a pension, but I don’t pay tax, and my child is coming home completely disadvantaged, because others are getting the education tax rebate and my child is not.’ And I thought Labor was the party that looked after those people. I think, if we have a program like that, there is a responsibility to not disadvantage the kids of single mothers who have to turn up in the classroom without a computer. It is hard enough raising children on your own without having that sort of distress to deal with and with having to feel so left out by the government, which is exactly how this woman described it. She said, ‘This government has just left me out.’

So we have lost Regional Partnerships, drought assistance, the Rural Medical Infrastructure Fund and the Investing in Our Schools Program. Much has been said about petrol, and I have made some remarks about that elsewhere. I simply appeal to the minister for agriculture that, in reviewing exceptional circumstances declarations as they come due in the second half of this year, he remember the advice of the Rural Financial Counselling Service: basically, if you stop the exceptional circumstances payments, some people feel that as many as 50 per cent of those receiving them will simply go to the wall. I say to the minister: you cannot do that. I am a little bit worried and suspicious because I see a $14 million transition fund in the budget, a transitional welfare fund, which suggests to me that it is for when people finish a program and they need some transitional help. If the government is considering finishing the EC assistance, would it please reconsider, because I could not cope with seeing half the farmers in my electorate who receive exceptional circumstances go bankrupt, and I do not think it would do much for the fabric of the society in those country towns.

I invite the minister to come and have a look and have a chat. He does not need to take me, but he does need to come and talk to the Rural Financial Counselling Service and see exactly what they do, because they actually have all of the knowledge about this. There is no need to listen to anyone else except the counsellors, who deal on a day-to-day basis with farmers who are in crisis—and we all know that, when it rains, you still need a bit of help, and it has not really rained sufficiently yet.

In conclusion, I think the budget lets rural Australian families down. It is a typical Labor budget. It increases taxes and spending, it plays on the politics of envy and it does not really do much for the running of the economy either. I appreciate the opportunity to make the points that I have this afternoon.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I listened to the member for Farrer’s comments with interest, and, whilst I certainly do not intend to respond to all of her comments in detail, I do want to pick up one of the points she made, and that was in respect of Australia’s water supplies and the shortage of water that we are experiencing throughout Australia. It is a fact, and it is a point that I think is well understood by people right across Australia and by governments right across Australia. But the cold, hard reality is that our serious situation with water did not occur overnight or since the Rudd government came to power; it occurred as a result of neglect by governments for decades and, in particular, neglect on the part of the previous Howard government. In the last 10 years in particular there were some very real warnings put to the government about the water crisis that this country was facing and we saw very, very little response from the previous government. I have spoken on another occasion about water and the need for Australia to have a better water plan.

The point I also want to make is that, in this budget, there is in fact $12.9 billion set aside by the Rudd government to respond to the serious water shortages that this country is facing. Might I say of the minister, Senator the Hon. Penny Wong, that she is doing a very good job in that new portfolio, given the seriousness and the size of the problem that she has inherited. I believe that the commitments she has made and the decisions that she has made to date certainly show that she is someone who is committed to finding real, long-term solutions to the water needs of this country.

In his budget address to parliament on 13 May, the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, began his remarks with the following:

This Budget is designed to meet the big challenges of the future.

It is a Budget that strengthens Australia’s economic foundations, and delivers for working families under pressure.

It is the responsible Budget our nation needs at this time of international turbulence, and high inflation at home.

A Budget carefully designed to fight inflation, and ensure we meet the uncertainties of the future from a position of strength.

The first Rudd government budget is indeed a budget which responds to the complex social, economic and environmental issues facing Australia—complex issues made even more difficult because of the previous government’s failure to address the future needs of our nation. This is the first Labor government budget in 12 years, and Australia today is a vastly different country to the one it was 12 years ago—as indeed is the world. In my first speech in this place I said that those countries which invest in education, manage their environment well and minimise global influences on their economies will prosper most into the future. I also said that governments need to win back the trust and faith of the people they serve.

In the time I have today, I will speak about how the first Rudd government budget responds to some of these issues, and I begin with the question of trust. Governments will win back the trust of people they serve only if they deliver on the commitments they make. The first Rudd budget does exactly that. Funding commitments made in the election campaign by the Rudd government have all been delivered in this budget. This is unlike the record of the Howard government when, after elections, promises became core and non-core promises. In my own electorate of Makin in particular, every single funding commitment made by the Rudd government or by me has been delivered in this budget. Those projects include a new GP superclinic, $750,000 for the Tea Tree Gully Business Enterprise Centre, $500,000 to improve television reception along the Para Escarpment, $150,000 to the cities of Salisbury and Tea Tree Gully for Safer Communities funding, and $2.675 million for improvements to a range of community facilities.

I also welcome the announcement by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, the Hon. Anthony Albanese, that 86 community organisations around Australia who were promised funding by the previous Howard government—but to whom the funding was never delivered because the Howard government did not sign off on the necessary government contracts with these clubs—now have until 31 July to finalise their funding agreement with the federal government. Two of these clubs are in my electorate of Makin. I refer to the Golden Grove Football Club, whose facilities at Harpers Field are totally inadequate, and the sporting clubs at Tilley Reserve, Golden Grove, which include a junior soccer club, a Little Athletics club, a tennis club and a table tennis club. These clubs have collectively outgrown their facilities at Tilley Reserve and they have been waiting for years for improvements to their facilities. I have visited these two facilities and met on numerous occasions with both club officials and parents of the children who use the facilities, and I have seen for myself how inadequate the facilities are.

The families and the children of these communities should not be victims of a Regional Partnerships funding mess created by the Howard government, criticised by the Auditor-General and inherited by the Rudd government. I discussed the importance of the funding required by the Golden Grove Football Club and Tilley Reserve sports clubs with both the minister, the Hon. Anthony Albanese, and Parliamentary Secretary Gary Gray on several occasions. I thank both of them for their sympathetic response to the needs of the many families in Makin. I hope to speak at length on another occasion about the wonderful role of the sporting clubs throughout our communities—not just in Makin but right across Australia.

Let me now turn to education. Education means knowledge, and knowledge empowers people to make sound decisions about their own future and sound judgements about the policies of the governments that they elect. Education is also the most effective way of overcoming social disadvantage. From the outset, the Prime Minister made education a priority for a Rudd government. In the first Rudd government budget, the government has delivered on its commitment to education with a combination of sensible policies and $19.3 billion of funding.

I was particularly pleased to see that these policies recognise the importance of early childhood education and the foundation that it builds for the rest of the lives of these young people. Again, I was particularly pleased to hear the Deputy Prime Minister in question time today speak about the $535 million over five years for early childhood education.

The wasteful, politically motivated expenditure by the Howard government in detaining refugees offshore, estimated to have cost Australian taxpayers over $1 billion, would have been much better spent on our schools, our TAFEs and our universities. If it had been, today we might not be facing critical skills shortages in our trades and in our professions, shortages which are in turn causing serious workforce shortages, and the number of full-time or part-time students continuing from year 10 to year 12 would not be down to the 1999 level of 79.2 per cent. These statistics are a sad indictment of the last Liberal government.

Shortly before I stepped down as Mayor of Salisbury, we established the Northern Economic Leaders Group to work with government in overcoming the barriers to productivity growth in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. The Northern Economic Leaders Group is made up of CEOs of significant national industries from a broad cross-section of employment sectors, including BAE Systems, Inghams Enterprises and RM Williams. The single dominant, common concern raised by all of those CEOs was the workforce shortages and their difficulty in recruiting suitably trained staff. Their dilemma, which I am sure applies equally to industries across Australia, will not be resolved overnight, but the education commitments made in the first Rudd government’s budget, and the immigration changes announced by Senator Chris Evans, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, are an important step in the right direction. The allocation in this budget of $19.3 billion for education, skills and training, with $11 billion of it in the form of a new education investment fund, demonstrates a real commitment by the Rudd government to addressing the future education, skilling and training needs of Australia.

Let me now turn to the environment for a moment. The failure of the Howard government to properly address the national impacts of climate change has already cost our country dearly and will continue to do so on a compounding scale for many years to come. In my first speech in this place I referred to the Murray River as an example and highlighted the social, economic and environmental costs to Australia as a result of both the mismanagement of the Murray-Darling system and the failure to factor in climate change to our water supplies and water flows into the Murray itself.

Today I want to refer to another example—that is, the price of petrol, LPG and diesel. The simple reality is that world demand for fuel is driving up fuel prices and will continue to do so. At the same time it is well known that the use of fossil fuels have, for a long time, been a major cause of greenhouse gas pollution. Had Australia begun addressing petrol as an environmental issue a decade ago, we might have been better prepared and less dependent on petrol today and therefore not so much impacted by rising petrol prices. It is not only the price of petrol that needs to come down; it is as much our reliance on it. Oil is a finite resource and many experts believe we have reached our peak oil supplies—another warning that the Howard government seemed oblivious to.

It is imperative that Australia invest more in public transport systems. Increased use of public transport will reduce household reliance on motor vehicles, thereby reducing living costs and environmental damage. With respect to this point, I want to read a letter that was published in the Adelaide Advertiser last Friday from a person by the name of Anne McMenamin. I am going to read the letter almost exactly as it appeared in the paper:

The real issue is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Many mainstream commentators predict $150 a barrel by the end of 2008, and some up to $200. It’s already 30 per cent higher than at the beginning of the year, and six times what it was 10 years ago.

The situation has been predicted for many years. Earth does not have an infinite supply of oil.

What we need from our governments—state and federal—is leadership, including a preparedness to take steps which will not be universally popular.

These have to involve huge expenditure on public transport, major intervention in and regulation of urban consolidation, and overhaul of food production systems heavily dependent on the input of both oil and petrochemical products.

Inevitably, money will still need to be spent on present systems, so there will be a period of overlapping financial demands. This will require some national pulling together and readjustment of priorities, in which governments need to protect and support the more vulnerable sectors of the community.

Changes to excise and/or the GST may be useful in this, but they are not fixes for the central problems.

One comforting thought in all this: changes made to accommodate the demands of peak oil will all help in the battle against global warming.

The two are not unrelated.

I could not have put it better myself if I tried. I think that letter sums up the situation perfectly.

On an associated matter, Australia’s continued high dependence on petrol raises a secondary cause for concern. Our diminishing petrol reserves mean an increasing dependency on imported petrol. That in turn means a worsening position with respect to our balance of trade. In fact, if the present trends continue, within the next five to 10 years our net foreign debt—which, as at 31 December 2007, was $610 billion or 60 per cent of Australia’s $1 trillion economy—will most likely exceed Australia’s GDP; that is, our net foreign debt, if we continue on the trend we are following right now, will exceed our total national GDP. That is certainly a cause for concern, and that will be the case if both petrol consumption and petrol imports continue to increase. For the sake of both our environment and our economy, we have to reduce our reliance on petrol. Might I say that LPG and compressed natural gas may not be the best long-term fuel solutions but in the short term both are far better options than petrol, given the abundant supplies of LPG and compressed natural gas in Australia and their lower greenhouse gas emissions. In this respect, I endorse the comments made by the member for Wills on this subject about a week ago.

Neither the pretentious concern about fuel prices by the opposition nor their excise rebate proposal will bring much joy to motorists. Investment in transport infrastructure and public transport systems will go much further in reducing petrol costs for motorists than a 5c petrol excise cut. That is why I support and welcome the $20 billion commitment in this budget to the Building Australia Fund, which represents the first major infrastructure investment plan in Australia for decades. It is these long-term solutions to spiralling petrol costs that Australia needs, and that is what differentiates the Rudd government from the opposition. I was going to speak further about climate change but, given the time available to me, I will simply make this point: the government’s $2.3 billion for tackling climate change shows a real commitment to addressing the issues that we as a nation and as a globe face in the years ahead. How those funds will be spent is broken down in the budget documents. I endorse and support the government’s initiatives in that respect.

I will finish by saying that, of course, there is so much more to do. This budget does not by any means do all of the things that we as a government would like to do. In my own electorate of Makin I frequently speak to pensioners and people with family members who have a disability. Might I at this point talk about the $1.9 billion that was only last Friday agreed between the federal and state governments to respond to some of those people’s needs. I speak to carers, people with mental health problems, Indigenous people, single parents, people suffering from work related injuries, war veterans and so on. I understand their needs and I understand that there are things that governments at all levels could do to assist them. I also understand that in many cases these people are severely disadvantaged and suffering real hardship. This budget, however, begins the process of building an Australia in which all members of our society can share in the nation’s prosperity and those who are struggling the most are not simply given short-term, once-only handouts but a real opportunity to have a better quality of life. It is a nation-building budget, and I commend and support the appropriation bills put to this parliament by the Treasurer.

Louise Markus (Greenway, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor’s high-taxing, high-spending budget is a cruel joke being played on the working families that the Rudd government promised to fight for. The working families in my electorate of Greenway are feeling the effects of incompetence as they experience higher prices at the checkout and the bowsers. Unfortunately, the Rudd government does not understand that this is no joke.

The first budget of the Rudd government is one of arrogance. The members opposite are so smug that they are under the pretence that they do not have a responsibility to working families—the very same working families that elected them. This budget does not deliver on petrol, health, welfare, education or the environment. Put simply: working families have been let down by the Labor Party. This government does not understand the plight of working families in Western Sydney, the Hawkesbury, Penrith, Blacktown, Mount Druitt or Seven Hills—and the list continues.

After getting himself elected by promising the world on petrol prices, the Prime Minister has failed to have any effect on the skyrocketing price of operating a family car. Since being elected and delivering this first budget, the Prime Minister has had zero impact on the price of petrol. He has forgotten what really matters to the electorate. Through inexperience he has been unable to offer anything to the working families in Western Sydney who struggle to get the children to school and drive to work.

Unfortunately, the incompetence of Labor extends beyond this chamber. Toll charges are inequitably disadvantaging working families in Western Sydney because, just like the Rudd government, the Iemma government takes Western Sydney for granted. For a family in Western Sydney to survive the current economic mismanagement of this government, it is not uncommon for both parents to work hard in order to earn enough to pay for increasingly expensive petrol, groceries and health care. Inadequate public transport often necessitates that two parents drive into the city and home again every day. A family is burdened with the cost of petrol and tolls five days a week, costing on average a whopping $270. The average take-home pay of $907 a week does not cut it when the average family spends $270, or 23 per cent of their net income, on getting to and from work.

Mr Rudd simply misses the mark with Fuelwatch. This new spin by the Labor Party will not decrease prices. It merely disadvantages small fuel retailers, who will be the only businesses that are pressured to lower prices. Fuelwatch will undermine competition and ultimately lead to higher fuel prices, something working families cannot afford.

While the Labor Party is busy ‘spinning’ for the media, the coalition has come up with an economically responsible and simple measure to reduce fuel prices in a way that will benefit working families the second it is introduced. Cutting the fuel excise will ease the pressure on working families. It simply makes fuel cheaper without the spin, the committees, the observation and the documentation.

This Labor budget increased taxation for the first time in recent memory. As working families struggle, Mr Rudd needs to reduce the tax on petrol, not watch prices. The budget brought forward by this government is one of hidden spending cuts to vital services in order to contribute to Labor’s ambiguous nation-building slush funds. The budget cuts $67.5 million from the already under resourced immigration department. This funding has been taken away from the critical border security and immigration processing functions, which means longer waiting times for visa processing and less secure borders for Australians. If these cuts were not bad enough, there are immigration officers from key roles in Australia and on overseas postings that will no longer have jobs. This, disguised as efficiency, effectively shows that the speed and accuracy of visa processing are simply not a priority to the Rudd government. A further total of $43.6 million is being cut from areas such as border security, family migration, economic migration, student and temporary visas and even humanitarian programs.

The member for Lilley has underestimated the people of Australia, who can see straight through the Treasurer’s short-term plan to ease the burden by changing the condition of the Medicare levy—the burden that he himself has created for Australian battlers. An increase in the earnings threshold for the Medicare levy is a short-term policy from this cabinet of self-proclaimed ‘nation builders’. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Mark Metherell identified in one sentence the straightforward concept that our Treasurer could not understand: ‘The loss of many young, low-risk members is likely to push up premiums and add to public hospital pressures.’

Private health care will no be longer an option for working families in Western Sydney as premiums for private health care will be pushed out of reach of the average household budget. Any examination of the New South Wales health and hospital system would show the Treasurer why many families are not confident in government health care for their children. These are mums and dads in my electorate of Greenway who previously had the choice to do what was best for their families, mums and dads who will now be forced to rely on the waiting-list prone New South Wales health system administered by the Rudd government’s mates—New South Wales Labor. This is the very same government that requires additional federal funding just to fix their desperate hospitals and other strained medical facilities. The Rudd government’s $10 billion Health and Hospitals Fund has been earmarked to fund the development of health infrastructure and medical equipment, but is rendered useless by the lack of funding for additional healthcare professionals and training, thus highlighting the ineptitude of the Treasurer. We can have all the shiny new buildings and the latest tech gadgets we want, but, as New South Wales Rural Doctors Association President Dr Ken Mackey rightly points out, there is no point in funding this infrastructure in a budget that makes cuts to training programs for enrolled nurses in regional Australia. There is no point in having brand new buildings in regional Australia with waiting lists of up to six months for basic services.

The working families of Greenway urge me to call upon the government to listen to them and to fix the problems they are already facing, such as six- to 12-month waiting lists for a dental check-ups for their children, hours of waiting time in the emergency department when their children need to be seen by a doctor and struggling to find a nurse with time to concentrate on their child’s needs when in a public hospital. The people of Western Sydney simply will not accept this kind of irrelevant government. This high-taxing, high-spending budget delivers successive blows to young families trying to establish a future in an uncertain economic climate. The Treasurer’s plans to exclude some families from receiving family tax benefit B by placing a means test on the family tax benefit demonstrates the government’s ignorance as to the very reason for its existence. The family tax benefit is recognition not only of the communal social value of families to this nation but also that significant expense is incurred on the part of those providing for the social good. The Treasurer does not understand the pressure of a family budget. Mortgages now take up to one-third of most families incomes in repayments, then add to that groceries and petrol costs—they hit harder than ever as mums and dads endeavour to provide opportunities for their children. The family tax benefit is a response to these difficulties that face families and is society’s way of contributing something to the production of social value.

A further slap in the face to working families is the restrictions to the childcare benefits. The Rudd government is once again all spin and no substance as it publicises the increased childcare rebate but fails to mention the new restrictions in place. Working families only have access to the childcare rebate if they are both working. To be eligible for the rebate, parents must be either single working parents or working a combined total of more than 1.5 times a full-time workload. For example, the childcare rebate is only available to caretaker parents working 25 hours or more. This is a discriminatory practice against stay-at-home mums. The primary caregiver parent is given the options of working 25 hours—more than three days a week—or going without a rebate. This is no choice at all.

The next step in this government’s grudge on families is the new payment arrangement and means test for the baby bonus. The payment of the baby bonus was introduced by the Howard government to coincide with the expenses incurred by expecting parents. The initial capital required for a new pram, a larger car, changing tables and many other large baby requirements is too much for working Australian families, covering bills for two to three months that the second income would have covered. The average family does not have a spare $5,000 to finance their expenses while they wait for the baby bonus to be drip-fed to them over a six-month period. I completely support the Democrats’ Senate private member’s bill to extend the baby bonus to adopted children over the age of two. This bill takes action to stop the discrimination against those who wish to adopt from overseas. Adoption is a benefit to the child and a benefit to society and as such adoptive parents deserve the same recognition as others. It is necessary to remember that the baby bonus exists to reimburse the parents for the investment that they make in society. To not extend the reimbursement is to deny that an adopted child has the same potential and ability to contribute to society as a child that is born in Australia.

The Rudd Labor government have not delivered for the residents of Greenway on the Prime Minister’s promises for the education revolution. Importantly, as a growth area in Western Sydney, Greenway has many working families with young children, and parents are legitimately concerned about their children’s future. The Rudd government promised an education revolution, but the parents of Greenway are experiencing nothing but the same old, same old. Labor have not delivered an education revolution. They have failed to deliver anything to primary schools at all—another let-down.

There is no education revolution. All that has happened is that there will be extra computers for high schools that lack the infrastructure to make use of them. Local primary school age children again missed out because funding for local community sporting infrastructure grants, introduced by the coalition government, has been terminated, and the upgrade of sporting fields in Greenway has been left to already underfunded local governments. The residents of Greenway are still waiting on the education revolution that this budget does not deliver.

The Hawkesbury River has not been allocated the funding agreed to under the previous government—$132.5 million. The Rudd government are clearly not committed to environmental management or sustainability. The river is in desperate need of the funding package promised by the Howard government, which included amounts for recycling and maintaining the health and sustainability of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River catchment system. This funding has not been allocated by the Rudd government. They are convinced they can ignore Western Sydney. The newly elected member for Lindsay has not spoken of the river since his maiden speech. Has the member for Lindsay forgotten the existence of the river, is he ignorant of its poor health and its significance or does he lack the courage to stand up to his government’s neglect?

The member for Parramatta is a part of the same government that snuck through reforms to the Solar Cities program. The Minister for Climate Change and Water introduced a means test to the solar panels program, which effectively renders the Solar Cities program useless. The means test has had an instant effect, with many companies reporting an 80 per cent reduction in contracts. Experts predict further decreases in the number of people using the scheme. On 16 May Hamish Wall, the General Manager of Business Development with Nicholls Solar, a company that installs solar panels, said on The World Today:

... we had one household which consisted of a nurse and a teacher and obviously under the Federal Government’s policy, they’re rich and therefore they are no longer eligible for the rebate.

The minister admitted that the decision to means test the solar rebate was based on the opinion that the program had been too successful, with too many people taking it up. This skin-deep level of commitment to tackling climate change does not sit well with the people who chose the party championing the environment or with the people who chose the party of self-decreed economic conservatism, people who now watch the solar industry crumble and hear the minister’s lack of concern as she describes the loss of livelihoods as merely ‘disappointing’.

Despite being economic trainees, the government are expert at disguising cuts to environment spending by renaming, moving and rebundling old schemes. Areas like the Riverstone storm corridor, the Windsor-Richmond lowlands, Wollemi National Park and Windsor Downs Nature Reserve were all to benefit from funding for the Bureau of Meteorology, but staff cuts will affect how these areas are managed. However, there was no consultation with me or my Western Sydney coalition colleagues, who could have told the minister of the risks. We have no guarantee of the safety of the people and property in Western Sydney, and we have heard of no justification for the cuts. This is just another example of a Labor government sneaking through spending cuts to vital services in order to fund their ambiguous nation-building slush funds.

The members for Parramatta and Lindsay are not committed to the environment at all. In this budget, they confirmed what the environment minister pre-empted—he just got in and changed it all. Working families in Western Sydney are struggling, and I regrettably have to inform the families in my electorate that the Rudd government seem not to care. They are economic novices who have hurt families and seem determined to merely watch petrol prices instead of act on them.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and associated bills before the House. From the outset, especially for those opposite, I wish to congratulate the Treasurer for his first budget. As a proud Queenslander I am particularly proud of what he has delivered for Australia and for Queensland. It is a budget that will deliver economic security for our families and for all Australians in these uncertain economic times. We are facing a lot of pressures from around the world and domestically. One of the best ways we can support working Australians struggling to cope with rising costs is to put downward pressure on interest rates. With a forecast surplus of $21.7 billion—that is, 1.8 per cent of the GDP; I repeat that: 1.8 per cent of the GDP—this budget forms a strong defence against the curve balls that may come our way from the global economy and other outside pressures.

I also welcome the budget initiatives that stimulate productivity, overcome infrastructure bottlenecks and drive world-class education and training. I will just unpack some of those—starting with productivity. When Treasurer Wayne Swan was handed a budget, when he was handed the reins to the economy, productivity was at zero. Surely that is one of the best indicia as to the state of the economy. Unfortunately, former Treasurer Costello handed over productivity rates of zero. Infrastructure bottlenecks were something that we heard much about in the preceding years, as part of the blame game played by the former government. They would take photographs of ships and say, ‘This is the fault of the state governments,’ without doing anything constructive. It is yet again an example of the blame game being played by the former federal government.

Obviously, we have heard on numerous occasions about how the former government neglected education and training—shameful results in terms of university funding. Every other OECD country had increases and if you compare them to Australia we actually went backwards—a shameful approach. No plan for the future. Those three things—productivity, infrastructure bottlenecks and the neglect of education and training—should be hung around the neck of the former government like a dead albatross, so that they are held accountable for that, the so-called economic managers who did absolutely nothing in terms of having a vision for the future. Instead, they just took the benefits of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms that can be listed off. If we do make a list of all of the current member for Higgins’s economic reforms, it will not take very long at all, because there were none—apart from the GST. In terms of major economic reforms, there are none. As I said, that neglect should be hung around their neck like an albatross, as in Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

Treasurer Swan’s budget delivers the $55 billion Working Families Support Package, delivering tax cuts directed to low- and middle-income families and support for childcare and education costs. These tax cuts and other incentives provide some relief to those Australians who need it most. We know that the price of petrol has gone up significantly. It has gone up over 400 per cent since the Iraq war started. We know that the drought has had long-term impacts on groceries. We also know that rents and mortgages are significant pressures as well, especially in places like Brisbane and in the growing cities. The Swan budget makes a real investment in Australia’s future rather than just in the next election—not handouts based on a political whim. There is no regional rorts in this budget; it is measured and delivers for Australian families and seniors. It provides measured and targeted investments in our future to address infrastructure, skills and climate change. They might be three terms that those opposite have not heard before: infrastructure, skills and climate change.

Among the dubious economic claims of those opposite is that the Howard-Costello government successfully cancelled government debt, but obviously this is only half the story. They might have paid off government debt, but what they do not tell us is that they increasingly shifted debt back onto Australian families and squandered their good fortune by failing to invest in infrastructure for the future. As I said, the Hawke-Keating government made tough decisions that impacted on battlers where they were able to get the union movement to make significant reforms by investing in superannuation and forgoing wage rises for the good of the economy.

That was the way of the Hawke-Keating government. As I said, if we look at the reforms of the Howard-Costello government, we see that they did nothing in terms of infrastructure and significant economic reform. This shameful underspend by the previous federal government has forced state governments to take on more debt to deliver vital infrastructure. This is not reckless economic management but a sound investment in productivity by our state governments. No more blame game; this is actually about working together to deliver something for the benefit of all Australia. We simply cannot afford to have workers trapped in traffic gridlocks or goods stranded at rail and port bottlenecks. Coming from Queensland, and having worked in the mining  industry, I have seen—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the date will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed on a future date.