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

In continuing my speech from last night, can I say that this is a brand-new day. As I said earlier, it is appropriate that I acknowledge that it is the anniversary of the Mabo decision and especially acknowledge the endeavours of Eddie Koiki Mabo in bringing justice to the fabrication that was terra nullius. When I was interrupted last night I was talking about my involvement in the mining industry and I commended the Rudd government for its approach to stopping workers from being trapped in traffic gridlock, stopping goods being stranded on rail and abolishing port bottlenecks.

Coming from Queensland, the same place that Eddie Mabo came from, we especially appreciate the endeavours to ensure that the economy is given every help that it can be. There are lots of kinds of inefficiencies that cripple productivity. In my electorate, where we are working on the intersection at the corner of Kessels and Mains roads, I know how important it is to have a solution to something that should have been done 15 years ago, 12 years ago, six years ago and three years ago. Now we have a funding commitment from the Rudd government and Minister Albanese and we will be sorting out that intersection.

The Rudd government’s $20 billion Building Australia Fund is critical to infrastructure. It shows that this government is serious about addressing transport and communications infrastructure. I suspect that this fund will help us finance projects like the Kessels and Mains roads intersection, and I welcome the commitment of $75 million in 2007-08 for immediate feasibility studies on high-priority transport projects across Australia. I am sure that members opposite will be supportive of such infrastructure projects.

The budget also finances our commitment to providing leadership in the global fight against—and it is not a four-letter word; it is two words—climate change. Members are well aware of the Howard government’s ignorance on this issue and we will not make the same mistake, not for the sake of our children and our children’s children. Two hundred and fifty million dollars over six years for the Water for the Future program will help secure our most precious resource for the long term. It is amazing that how we talk and think about water has changed so much, certainly in Brisbane, in the last three or four years. Once upon a time you just turned on the tap and did not think about it; now we are having showers with buckets, we have timers and we understand the language of water and how our approach to it has changed. In the next couple of years there will be a similar change in thinking about carbon. It should have happened 10 years ago, when Kyoto should have been ratified by the Howard government, but that is a journey that we will take the Australian people on as well. We are certainly behind the pack, but it only took us 11 minutes to ratify Kyoto once the Rudd government was sworn in.

Some of the other programs announced in the budget include the national rainwater and grey water initiative to provide $500 rebates for households to install tanks or new piping for grey water. We are investing $1 billion in the National Urban Water and Desalination Plan for water recycling, desalination and stormwater harvesting projects, including $20 million for a water recycling centre of excellence in Brisbane—a great location—and $254.8 million over five years for the National Water Security Plan for cities and towns to help local water authorities with practical measures to conserve water and minimise waste. This budget also brings forward $400 million to accelerate investment in water-saving infrastructure and purchased water entitlements adjustments.

These measures, along with our $2.3 billion plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ensure that we will show global leadership on climate change. We are investing $500 million for clean coal technology, $500 million for renewable energy and $150 million over four years for energy innovation. Countries like the United States are now turning to Australia for answers to climate change, as will many other countries around the world. These will be the great economic opportunities if we take the lead in climate change. As I said, we are starting from behind the pack but I am sure Australian know-how and innovation will get us to the front again.

The United States is turning to Australia for something as simple as the Hills hoist clothes line. One of Queensland’s online newspapers, the Brisbane Times, recently reported that demand is building in the USA for our backyard icon the Hills hoist. After the refrigerator, the electric dryer is the biggest user of household electricity in the US. According to the United States Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, there were 88 million dryers in the US in 2005. Each dryer consumes about 1,079 kilowatt hours of energy, which is equivalent to about 1,008 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Something as simple as exporting our Hills hoist to the US is not only good for our exports; it is promoting more sustainable practices in the world’s biggest economy—the economy with the largest carbon footprint. This is a simple example but it shows how we can make a difference in the global struggle against climate change and make a dollar for Australian businesses.

Sadly, this example also highlights the economic opportunities wasted by the Howard government. Their failure and refusal to advance research into clean coal and solar technologies left Australia behind the ball and, as a result, we have lost many experts overseas. Too often we hear of solar experts and others like them travelling to China, where renewable energies are embraced rather than, as with the previous government, ignored. As I said previously, after 11 minutes in office the Rudd government has signalled its intention to catch up and to drive real solutions on climate change.

I also welcome the allocation of an additional $500 million to Australian universities towards capital investments. This is a welcome change of attitude as our tertiary education sector was punished for too long by the Howard government. I am particularly pleased that $16.2 million will go to Griffith University. I understand these dollars will go towards ICT labs, libraries, student study places, teaching spaces and student amenities. The budget also funds additional elective surgery in public hospitals—$75 million in 2007-08 and up to $600 million over four years for states and territories to deliver more than 25,000 additional surgical procedures.

Lastly, I wish to highlight a number of budget funding initiatives in my electorate where the Rudd government has delivered: up to $7 million to construct a GP superclinic; nearly $3 million to improve local roads; $200,000 for the two-road bike path at Tarragindi; $300,000 towards a new multipurpose hall at the Moorooka State School, which was a victim of arson; and $40,000 for rainwater tanks and lighting at the Kyabra Community Association. This is a responsible budget and in many ways it heralds a new era of financial management for the country. No longer is the budget a shameless vote-buying exercise. Rather, the funding measures contained in this budget are responsible and backed up by considerable savings elsewhere. I commend the bills to the House.

Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have heard a great deal so far in this debate on the appropriation bills, especially from government members championing the decisions made by their government on the funding that has gone into their electorates. So many of them, I note, are metropolitan electorates. Conversely, I represent a very regional and remote electorate—about a third of Australia and 1/150th of its population. I am amazed that I am hearing so many glowing reports about this budget, because my people are despairing; they have been gutted. They have had snatched away so many good programs, programs which had been introduced by the previous government.

There is something that amazes me even more. I have been listening incessantly to the chorus, the chortling, that goes on behind Minister Albanese as he talks about the ‘rorting’ that went on by the ‘dastardly’ Howard government in having a program that selected chairmen from regional areas to head up area consultative committees and that channelled funds into regional areas where they were desperately required—to improve the ambience, to improve service delivery and to improve job opportunities and the general liveability of those towns. We have been repeatedly told by Minister Albanese how all of this funding was nothing but pork-barrelling. Every time the Regional Partnerships fund was mentioned, you would hear the chortling of the now government members in unison about what a dreadful act it was to be involved in pork-barrelling. Well, me smells pork right now!

We have just heard much in the main chamber about how this new government has decided to honour all of its election promises. It has created a funding program called Better Regions, which is going to provide $176 million to fund all of the promises made during the election campaign. It is going to, amongst other things, fund a project in Mandurah, in Western Australia. Mandurah, coincidentally, is a marginal seat headed up by the member for Brand, Gary Gray, who also is the Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia and heads up the Office of Northern Australia. Miraculously, his Better Regions program—the only one funded in Western Australia—has got a guernsey. There is no smell of pork there!

Apart from that, of course, there is Fort Street High School in Petersham, which happens to be in Minister Albanese’s electorate. It was outside the area designated for funding for acoustic insulation when we were trying to combat the excessive noise in the vicinity of Sydney airport. Fort Street High School was not in the area that justified funding—it missed out, as did its neighbours and other similar institutions in the area that were not in the area designated appropriate for funding. The school had repeatedly called for funding, but that did not get it into the area. The simple fact is that if you are not in the area for funding you do not get the funding—under a reasonable government. Yet—hello!—suddenly the government have found $14 million to put in acoustic insulation in a school that was not justified in receiving it because it was not in the area that justified funding for a project such as reducing aircraft noise. People involved in the project have confessed they could have built a couple of schools for that $14 million. But Minister Albanese is bold and loud in his approval of such funding being granted. I dare say he feels quite justified. It is, after all, his electorate.

One thing appals me most in this budget—that is, apart from the destruction of the very fine program Investing in Our Schools and an AusIndustry program called Commercial Ready, which allowed product manufacturers with an idea who wanted to move into an overseas market to develop that product and receive some assistance from the federal taxpayer. Those good ideas are gone. But what offended me as much as anything else was that, on the night of the budget, Treasurer Swan removed the exemption for excise on condensate from natural gas. Many of the members of this place will have no understanding of the ramifications of that move at all, but they voted the legislation through. They passed the Excise Tariff Amendment (Condensate) Bill 2008. In doing so, they put at risk investment in Australia’s petroleum industry. Right now there are multiple billions of dollars waiting for investment off the Western Australian coast and off the Northern Territory coast. Somewhere in the vicinity of $50 billion is waiting to be invested. This move on the night the budget was handed down by Treasurer Swan put that at risk.

One of the main attractions that investors find in investment in Australia is the very, very low sovereign risk. When treasurers overnight make decisions that can in the forward estimates period, the five years, take $2.5 billion out of Woodside Petroleum’s bottom line, that is unforgivable. What is it that this Rudd government has against the investors in Western Australia? What does he hate about Woodside shareholders that he would make such a move? This was an unforgivable move, but a move that the member for Oxley nevertheless said was simply ‘the stopping of a tax loophole; a loophole that needed to be plugged’—a loophole, I might add, that has been going on very satisfactorily, attracting industry investment in Western Australia and Australia at large, since the handing down of the 1977-78 budget, when Phillip Lynch handed down the budget because of the very necessary and delicate negotiations between the Woodside partners, the Western Australian government and the federal government to get underway what was then the largest ever infrastructure investment in Australia.

For Woodside and their partners to make a positive decision to develop the North West Shelf gas fields, they needed some sort of contribution from the taxpayers of Australia. The then Premier of Western Australia, Sir Charles Court, was prepared to make the negotiation. He was prepared to have vision. He was, I grant you, criticised at the time but he entered into a deal that saw a take or pay contract for domestic gas entered into. Those sorts of financial arrangements allowed this mammoth project—at the time worth some $13 billion—to get underway. It advanced the Western Australian economy like no financial decision ever made before.

The exemption from excise on condensate was one of the key financial planks in the decision to go ahead—and it was simply struck down in the dark of night by a Prime Minister-Treasurer combination that obviously does not care about working families if they happen to be shareholders of Woodside. This Prime Minister constantly rabbits on about working families—forgetting about pensioner families or families who are unable to work through some degree of incapacity—but then does in the eye overnight Woodside shareholders to the tune of $2.5 billion over five years. One can only presume that it is going to have an effect of $500 million on the bottom line of Woodside each and every year.

One of the vital aspects that is raised by such a decision is: what impact is this decision going to have on the price of a litre of LPG on the streets? When motorists took the decision to convert to LPG as a result of the very generous $2,000 contribution that the previous government made for a conversion from unleaded fuel to LPG, do you believe that they thought that they would run the risk of being dudded in a couple of years time by excise being placed on LPG, putting it through the roof by another 25c a litre? I do not think they did. When they voted for this Rudd government to come in and dominate politics in Australia, I wonder if they thought that the Rudd government would put at risk the future of motorists using LPG. They took that decision in good faith. They supposedly elected this ratbag government on the basis of the promises made in the lead-up to the election but they did not expect to be dudded on the night of the budget with a decision that will have such a disastrous impact.

The Prime Minister has thus far not been able to make any commitment that the price of LPG will not rise as a result of this decision. And I put this government on notice that, if as a result of the decision by the Treasurer announced on budget night to impose the excise to the tune of $2.5 billion—which impacts directly on Woodside shareholders—the taxation department now collects excise on LPG, this government deserves to be brought crashing down by a public who know that they deserve better treatment.

So much disappointed me in this budget. I am pleased to say that the tenacity of the opposition has now brought Minister Albanese to his knees. He has now decided to backflip on 86 projects that, remember, he previously condemned as pork-barrelling.

Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But he did not look at them.

Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right: he had not bothered to actually observe them. He had made a blanket decision that anything approved by the Howard government to actually improve life in the bush rather than make it more expensive must be pork-barrelling. So, rather than bother to look at these projects to determine whether or not they were worthy of funding, he condemned them all out of hand as being pork-barrelling. But, because of the tenacity of this coalition opposition, he has had to backflip. And isn’t that such a good thing, when you consider that it is the public, the voters of Australia, who are going to benefit from such a backflip? He has finally seen sense. He got a bit of heat. He was under the blowtorch on the Sunrise program and he caved in because he had not read his brief. He did not know what he was talking about.

So many of the ministers in this Rudd government are not prepared to take advice from the departments. We understand that already. But one would have thought that Minister Albanese, having had so much to say about how dreadful the act of pork-barrelling was and how undeserving these Regional Partnerships projects were, would have at least had the opportunity to look at them before going on air and having to finally declare that there were in fact some very deserving projects amongst them. We knew that all along. Because of our tenacity, he has now backflipped and is talking about funding the 86 that had been promised funding but which this rotten government took the funding away from.

So we have a situation whereby we have a government on the ropes, prepared to backflip. We will keep the government under the blowtorch of public scrutiny and we will well and truly make sure that when we find fault we expose it to the public. I am very confident that when we keep the blowtorch of attention on this government it will cave in. We will find the fault. We will make sure that public pressure is maintained and we will make sure—mark my words—that the public know about it and ministers have to think twice about the decisions they take that will impact negatively on regional Australia.

We have so many issues to pick up on when we want to bring some focus on the actions of this government. The question has been asked of me on numerous occasions by people in my electorate: what is it that makes an ALP government so metropolitan focused? We have heard so often from those who are well informed that this budget was an old-fashioned, high-taxing, high-spending budget. Many have compared it to the Whitlam years. The suggestion is: ‘Here we go again! What will be the next Khemlani affair?’ But I suggest to those who ask this question that it is not surprising. We have a cultural divide—almost. Members of the Labor Party are primarily those who have not worked for a living. They have held down a job in a union position, in the main, and they have always wanted to work on and maintain the divide between ‘the bosses and us’. They do not realise, of course, that what they are supposed to do is represent the public at large. The public at large deserve better. What is more, they expect better. So when people say to me, ‘Why is it that the Rudd Labor government hate the people in the bush?’ I simply explain to them: ‘They don’t do it out of malice; they do it out of ignorance because they do not understand the bush. They never have.’ You have to go back as far as the days of the great unionists—Mick Young comes to mind—to find Labor politicians in this place who really understood the bush.

I come from the bush. I know what bush people think. You only have to look at a political map of Australia that is coloured blue, green or red and, apart from one seat of the Northern Territory, you are hard pressed to find the red patches representing rural seats held by the Labor Party. My mob think that the Labor Party ought to be left in the cities that they understand. The sad reality in Australian politics is that, because of the lack of even distribution of the Australian population, you find governments like the Rudd Labor government being elected. You find them handing down budgets that deal out dirt to regional communities. You find good projects like Investing in Our Schools and the Commercial Ready projects of AusIndustry ditched because the Rudd Labor government simply does not understand the bush.

I say to members that we have a lot to realise as far as truth is concerned when dealing with this new government. We have much to focus upon. In the lead-up to the election we heard so much about how we were going to reduce grocery prices, reduce fuel prices, reduce interest rates and therefore create greater housing affordability. So many of the Australian public were obviously convinced that they were going to see practical change that would reduce the costs of their day-to-day living. Instead of that, we have discovered that this government is intent on the upward process of watching. We know about ‘foolwatch’. That has been heralded with great fanfare. We are now hearing about ‘grocery watch’, and the next thing will of course be ‘child care watch’. Methinks that the coalition have a case to introduce ‘spin watch’. We know that the Australian taxpayers, the voters, are sick of this watching brief. They want some action. They want to know why it is they were fooled into voting for a group of people who are capable only of watching, not actually of getting on with the job of doing something about fulfilling their election promises. Collectively, Australian voters feel absolutely dudded by this Rudd government.

David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the cognate bills that form the basis of the Rudd Labor government’s first budget, which was delivered some weeks ago by the Treasurer. This is a good budget. It is a budget that reflects strong Labor values and delivers on the commitments that we made prior to the last election. Most importantly, though, it is a responsible budget. It is a responsible budget that on the one hand delivers much-needed support to working families, to working people and to those under financial pressure but on the other hand delivers a massive investment in our future—an investment in Australia’s long-term prosperity. That is why this budget is a good budget and a budget that stands in stark contrast to those of the immediately preceding years.

Delivering a $21.7 billion surplus at 1.8 per cent of GDP exceeds the target of 1.5 per cent that the government had set. We had always said that in order to take pressure off inflation and to take pressure off interest rates we needed to deliver a budget surplus in excess of 1.5 per cent of GDP. That has been achieved. We must, of course, remember that this budget was handed down in the context of an economy that was experiencing the highest inflation in 16 years. Principally, one of the biggest contributing factors to that high level of inflation was the failure of the previous government to rein in government expenditure. But government expenditure and the fact that it had got out of control under the previous government was not the only reason why pressure was placed on interest rates, why pressure was placed on inflation in this country. It was because those on the other side had chosen to ignore the more than 20 warnings that had come forward from the Reserve Bank, warnings that covered a vast array of red light issues, if you like.

There was the issue of skill shortages and the failure of the former government to address the skill shortages. There was the issue of infrastructure bottlenecks and the complete absence of genuine investment in Australia’s long-term infrastructure needs. But most significant, as I indicated before, was the failure to rein in government expenditure. The Expenditure Review Committee and indeed the Minister for Finance and Deregulation deserve to be congratulated because they have done what the finance minister and the Expenditure Review Committee have not been required to do for some years now—that is, to make some hard decisions. Those hard decisions have been taken in the broader interests of the Australian community and, in particular, of those people that are currently doing it tough and have been doing it tough for some time now.

We do not have to go all that far back to recall the former Prime Minister, the then member for Bennelong, telling us that Australian working families had never been better off. That was never the case. It was not the case at the time that he said it and it has not been the case since. The reality is that many people—and many people in my community—are doing it tough. That is why this budget, in delivering much needed relief to those people, is a step in the right direction. The challenge for this government always was to deliver that relief but to do it in an economically responsible way. I think that is where this budget deserves the greatest accolades. Not only have we delivered the Working Families Support Package, in the order of $55 billion, but we have done that whilst retaining a strong budget surplus—almost $22 billion.

In order to do that, we have had to make some cuts. We have had to increase taxes and close some tax loopholes in various respects—we have done that. These were areas where the former government had failed to act. We have all heard a lot of discussion about the alcopops tax. We are not really sure exactly where the opposition stand on that at this point in time. But the reality is that, had they introduced the tax in an equitable way back when they made changes to the tax system with the introduction of the GST, there would have been no philosophical or policy rationale for distinguishing between premixed drinks and those that are mixed later. There is no argument on this—there is no argument from health professionals; there is no argument from anyone who is a serious contributor to public policy debate. But once again we find that those on the other side are in the corner of big business, in the corner of the distillers. They are the only people that are suggesting that some relief in this budget should be directed towards those particular individuals and entities.

When working families in places like Western Sydney are doing it tough, we say that we need to find savings and raise additional revenue in other parts of the economy to ensure that we can deliver the relief that our Working Families Support Package delivers and, at the same time, do so in an economically responsible way. We said that we had a five-point plan, and that five-point plan is well and truly a nucleus of this budget. I have already indicated that we have delivered on the 1.5 per cent of GDP surplus. In addition to that, we have said that we need greater investment in education and skills. This budget delivers that with the $2.5 billion investment in Trades Training Centres in Schools, along with the 630,000 additional training places. In addition to that, we have the $11 billion Education Investment Fund. Some of those funds were released immediately, and we have already started to see the benefit of that being handed over to the University of Western Sydney, in my local community, with some $16 million being made available out of that fund. After over a decade of underinvestment—a lost opportunity, a failure to invest in our nation’s productive capacity—we are now moving towards redressing some of those policy failures.

In addition to that, we have our investment in early childhood education, which ties in nicely with one of the other elements of our five-point plan—that is, workforce participation. By providing a greater benefit to parents with children in child care, increasing the rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent, we are able to deliver more money back into the pockets of working families and, in particular, those families who are doing it tough, who are trying to manage dual incomes—both parents in the workforce, with the obvious need that that brings for child care. In addition to that, for single-parent families, child care, in some senses, becomes even more critical, and that is why the childcare tax rebate and the increase in that rebate to 50 per cent will deliver real benefits in a part of the economy where that benefit is needed most.

We have said that workforce participation is important and we have made significant tax cuts. This is the No. 1 means by which we are delivering that relief to working families and to those working Australians who are doing it tough—with significant tax cuts. In particular, the first tranche of those tax cuts delivers real relief to low- and middle-income earners. And not only do we have tax cuts skewed in favour of low- and middle-income earners to redress the fact that successive tax cut decisions that have been taken over the last decade have been skewed in favour of higher income earners; we also have the introduction of the low-income tax offset, which is a policy that is unabashedly directed towards encouraging more people back into the workforce, to take away some of those disincentives that discourage people from moving back into the workforce or earning more income. These policies will make a difference, and they will make a difference in the areas where we have said we need to make that difference in order to take pressure off inflation and to keep interest rates low.

The final point in the five-point plan is to boost national savings. One of the initiatives—and only one of the initiatives that falls within this category—is the first home saver accounts. Of course, the first home saver accounts form a small part of a larger package of policies addressing the important challenge of housing affordability, which I must say is a particular challenge in electorates such as mine and that of the member for Parramatta, who is a fellow member in Western Sydney.

This budget, in taking into account all of those considerations, will deliver relief to the people who need it most and, at the same time, will do so in an economically responsible way. This is the most economically responsible budget this country has seen for many years. Economic commentators confirm that, and the response we have seen from the opposition only confirms our belief that, had they won the election at the end of last year, unfortunately the hard decisions that have been taken in this budget would not have been taken. We have already seen that, while those people had a great capacity to spend taxpayers’ money when they were in power, they seem to have an even greater capacity to do it from opposition. They have already blown billions of dollars of the surplus; they have raided the surplus for a range of policies that will be here today and gone tomorrow. Our policies, on the other hand, are about long-term investment in our nation’s future.

I just wish to briefly record some of the local commitments that the government have delivered in my electorate—in particular, the $15 million contribution towards the establishment of a Cumberland conservation corridor; $5 million towards the upgrade of the CUA stadium; $2.7 million for a recycled water network; $933,000 for the upgrade of the St Marys Memorial Hall; $350,000 to the Penrith Valley BEC, or business enterprise centre; and $160,000 towards the construction of a homework facility at Barnardos in Cranebrook. We have also delivered on our commitment to a $500,000 weed harvester to keep our great Nepean River the clean river that we all remember it to be and the clean river that it deserves to be. In addition to that, we have confirmed our commitments to the upgrade of the intersection at Sherringham Road and the Northern Road and the delivery of the first stage of the Werrington arterial. These are but the local dimension of an overall platform and policy framework that the government are intent on delivering because we are about investing in our nation’s long-term future but doing it in a responsible way. We are doing it in a way that recognises the challenges that working Australians, working families and people doing it tough are facing and we are going out of our way to deliver relief to those people who need it most, at the time when they need it most.

Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the related bills and, in doing so, at the outset will make a few observations about the budget itself before dealing in some detail with some of the measures contained in it. It is often said—and it is certainly the case—that a budget tells a story of a government’s priorities. The first budget of a new government, in particular, tells the story and sets the tone for that government. What we have seen in this budget has been illuminating, to say the least. The first observation I would make is that this new government, in preparing this budget, has faced the best budget position in living memory. As it prepared the budget, it faced no net government debt because the previous government left it none. It was left with a huge surplus because the previous government left it one.

As the government have gone about producing the budget, we have seen a number of important things. The first, over the last six months, has been a new Treasurer totally out of his depth. It has been quite obvious—as he has prepared the budget and as he has tried to reconcile what was pledged before the election with what Labor believes in, as well as get across the detail of managing an economy of more than $1 trillion and all the associated complex decisions that affect people’s lives—that he has grappled with all of that with great difficulty. To put not too fine a point on it, at times he has looked like an elephant on ice skates. At times he has looked like someone—and we have all experienced this in our day-to-day lives—who has bought a package of furniture from Ikea, got it home, started to lay out all the pieces on the floor, found the allen key and all of the bits to get it together and, after grabbing the instructions, has found they are in the wrong language but has tried to put it together anyway and has become more and more frustrated. When he is doing the job of the Treasurer of the country, that affects everyone’s day-to-day lives.

When it came to budget night, when we actually saw the product of the federal Treasurer’s work of the last six months, it was quite obvious that in this budget there were cobbled together a number of competing and inconsistent priorities. You could almost divide it into thirds. One-third of the budget dealt with the things Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, and Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, copied from the previous government. The most obvious of those was the tax cuts. The previous speaker spoke of them as ‘our tax cuts’, meaning the new government’s tax cuts. I hope he does not really believe that, but the fact that those tax cuts were copied is a good thing. That is one of the few good things about the budget. What worries members on this side and what worries so many Australian families and small businesses is not the things the Treasurer copied from the previous government but the things he is copying now from his colleagues. Another big aspect of the budget was a whole range of decisions, announcements and measures that had not been mentioned prior to the election. The alcopops tax is just one. The increase in the Medicare surcharge is another. Fuelwatch is another that I mention by way of illustration. I will come back to those in some detail in a moment.

The third aspect of the budget contained a number of pre-election promises that the Labor Party had made in the lead-up to last year’s election. Of course, it is quite right and proper that they meet those commitments, but what is alarming, as you examine the detail of some of those commitments—and the story is the same as you go through page after page of the federal budget—is that the election promises were designed to survive until election day only. As this new government has come to grapple with actually implementing a promise, converting it into a policy that is operational and that will work and that will be sustainable, it has been quite clear over the months leading up to the budget, and even more starkly clear since budget night, that this government has a chaotic policy implementation strategy. I will come back to those aspects a bit later in the course of this debate.

But first of all are those items that were not mentioned before the election. The government has decided that the Medicare levy surcharge should be raised—in fact, doubled. What that will do, on the government’s own figures, will be to force nearly 500,000 people out of private health insurance. The private health industry itself has varying estimates of around double that amount, but for the purposes of this debate let us just stick with the government’s own budget figures, a costed Treasury policy outcome that says that as a result of the government’s decision 485,000 people currently holding private health insurance will cease paying their premiums, will join public hospital queues and will leave those with private health insurance facing higher premiums. At a policy level this is a recipe to increase the private health insurance premiums of every single Australian holding private health insurance. At the same time, it is a recipe to increase the pressure massively on public hospitals.

In my electorate of Casey, an outer suburban Melbourne electorate—and I know my friend and colleague next to me, the member for Fadden, has an electorate in the outer suburbs of Brisbane—around half my electors have private health insurance. Many of them, particularly older Australians—who barely scored a mention in the budget I must say—have been paying those premiums not just for years but for decades. And, now that they are faced with not a possible premium rise but a certain premium rise of some magnitude over the next few years, it will make it harder and harder for them to make their weekly budgets add up.

This decision also goes to the motives of the government. We are now told by the Treasurer, the health minister and the Prime Minister that this policy decision was an obvious one that needed to be taken. There is only one problem: it was so obvious that it was never mentioned by those opposite before the election. That of course nails the point: it was not thought of after the election; it was, by their own admission now, something that they thought of prior to the election but concealed from every Australian voter before the election. It is classic Labor agenda: first, an attack on private health insurance. An attack on private education is sure to follow, because so much of what Labor said in the 12 months leading up to the election denied so many things they had publicly stood up for in the 11 years of opposition before their final year. And now in this first budget we see the beginnings of some of the true Labor agenda that was concealed from the Australian people. That will not be forgotten as those premium rises come in.

We have seen populist decisions like the alcopop tax, which is designed to raise $3 billion more, yet of course just a fraction of that is planned to be spent on health campaigns, with no thought whatsoever given to a wider strategy dealing with the switching to other products that we are seeing already. It is a policy conceived in a rush after the election and a policy without substance to back it up.

Most spectacularly, over the last week and the days since budget night, we have seen the true decision-making priorities and processes of the government with respect to Fuelwatch. Hasn’t it been illuminating? We all know what happened prior to the election. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer ran around the country saying the price of petrol was too high and that they were going to do something about it. Then, after the election, it became quite clear that they thought, ‘We need some sort of response—petrol prices are high; we said we’d do something about it.’ And they grabbed the discredited FuelWatch system from Western Australia, thinking it would be a fig leaf to cover the fact that they had thought of nothing and had no plan. And when they sent that plan down for analysis by four senior departments—independent departments with hardworking public servants who have just one role: to serve the Australian people and give an impartial appraisal of any policy proposal—and the advice came back, the fig leaf turned out to be a gum leaf and they were terribly exposed. On hearing the news that Fuelwatch would not only not result in reductions in petrol prices at the bowser but actually force up the price of petrol, what did the new government do? They did not say, ‘Now that we have that advice we can’t possibly go ahead with it.’ No. What the government did was to deliberately and callously decide to go ahead with the policy in the full knowledge that not only would it not bring down petrol prices but it would put up prices for the very people they piously pretend to care about. That is what the government decided to do.

All over Australia there are motoring organisations, like the RACV in my home state of Victoria, that have pointed out that FuelWatch has not worked in Western Australia. In Melbourne, on average, there have been lower prices. The discounting that occurs between Sunday and Tuesday gives motorists wanting to get petrol at a cheaper price that opportunity. Thousands queue up for it. The RACV is an independent motoring organisation. It was quite happy to criticise the previous government. It will be quite happy to criticise this government. It has one interest—that of motorists. If the RACV and all the other motoring organisations had thought Fuelwatch would work, they would have advocated it. This Prime Minister and Treasurer got advice from their most senior public servants and when it came in, saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ they thought, ‘We’ll do it anyway; we don’t have a care for the motorists; we care more about the stunt.’ So we have Fuelwatch. What we really need for this government—and it is starting to happen so early—is ‘spin watch’ and ‘stunt watch’. That has been the enduring message out of the last week.

A sensible Prime Minister and Treasurer would admit that they had got it wrong. But this Prime Minister, we have learnt, cannot be wrong. He can never be wrong. Instead, he should embrace a 5c cut in excise. It is a sensible policy. It is a policy that disproportionately helps those in outer suburban areas, in electorates like Casey and Fadden, where working families have to drive longer distances and so often need two cars. They are paying, in some cases, family petrol bills of hundreds of dollars a week.

The other aspects of the budget I mentioned earlier were those that deal with policy promises made by those opposite prior to the last election. Even with them we can see that it was the stunt and the spin that was in mind, never the worth of the policy. In the few minutes left available I will mention two in the area of education. The first example is the notorious computers-in-schools policy. We all remember the Prime Minister saying he would put a computer on the desk of every secondary student in years 9, 10, 11 and 12. As the months have gone on, it has become increasingly clear that no thought was given to how these computers could actually be made to work. There was no thought about the maintenance costs, let alone the power upgrades that are needed, the cabling upgrades and all the other on-costs—no thought whatsoever. One principal said to me, ‘I have 25 students in a portable classroom with one power point.’ The computers will turn up in the boxes. I am sure Labor MPs will turn up and smile for the photo opportunity, then wave and disappear. And it will be left to the school communities to get these computers to work.

The Minister for Education has been on notice about this problem since December and, like her Prime Minister, she can never be wrong! In December, state premiers and state ministers informed this new government that there had been no costing to actually make the computers work—that is, the promise was to deliver them; there was no interest in getting them working. Western Australian Premier Carpenter has since put the cost at $3 billion. There has been another COAG meeting and a monumental decision from this new minister, which was: ‘We’ll think about it and we’ll tell you in November.’ That will be exactly, and quite fittingly, a year after that policy was announced—announced with just one day in mind, election day 2007, and no school in mind and no school student in mind.

The other central education policy was Trades Training Centres in Schools. This was announced by the now Prime Minister in his budget reply in 2007. The promise, which of course sounds great, was to provide a trade training centre to all 2,650 secondary schools around Australia. It sounds great, until you actually look at the figures and what they mean. Each school will get a grant sometime in the next 10 years—between now and 2018—of a minimum of $500,000, a maximum of $1.5 million and an average of $900,000. It will be a trade training centre only because a Labor member will turn up and put a sign on the woodwork room, the metalwork room or the hospitality unit and say it is a trade training centre. But that spread of money and that scale will not create a trade training centre. This policy is destined for chaos. The minister knows it and those opposite know it—and if they do not know it then they will experience it. A student at a school that is doing hospitality might want to do automotive training. Where does that student do the automotive training? The sensible policy response was the Australian technical colleges.

In my final few minutes I want to address this point, because this is one opportunity for those opposite in their party room to say: ‘I think we got this wrong. This might’ve been a very popular policy for the election, but when you think it through this policy will not have scale.’ Delivering a grant of that magnitude sometime in the next 10 years will not create a trade training centre and will not make the students job ready. Critically, there will not be business involvement at the board level to provide some of those great pathways into local jobs in the very communities where the students live. I say this in the final minute: in their heart of hearts, those opposite know that Australian technical colleges are a better option. They provide scale, they centre the funding, they have local business involvement—which those opposite scoff about, although that does not surprise me—and they can work. If those opposite backflipped on this, we would not criticise them; we would applaud them. But if they do not then they will see that this will not work—it will not work for a second. Like the computers in schools, it will be left to them to explain how it actually works and left to them to explain to school communities why they are doing fundraising events to pay for the costs the Minister for Education did not think of.

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

Before I go to the substance of my debate, the member for Casey may like to hear about the experience of the Australian technical college in the Hunter. It was announced last year and became operational. Students were recruited for the courses at the Australian technical college that was in the Hunter, but there were a few little problems: (1) there were no tools, (2) there was no workbench and (3) no work experience had been organised. Finally, they were able to organise donations of tools, the parents went in and built the workbenches, and half the students dropped out because they could not arrange work placements. I am sure that the Australian public knows that what Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party took to the election—the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program—is the way to go.

Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the cognate bills that were introduced into the parliament by the Treasurer on 13 May 2008 deliver to the Australian people. This is a budget for all Australians. It delivers tax cuts whilst maintaining responsible economic management and delivering a budget surplus of $22 billion. It is a budget for the future, investing over $40 billion in infrastructure, health and education funds.

The $20 billion for the Building Australia Fund will pay for ongoing improvements to our roads, ports, railways and telecommunications. In the last parliament I was on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services. We held an inquiry into the blockages to ports and the infrastructure that was needed to allow our ports to function effectively. I see the Building Australia Fund as a fund that will be able to act on some of the recommendations that were in the inquiry’s report—and that was a fine report. A lot of outstanding contributions were made to the committee, and I know that that is the type of thing that will be considered.

There has been an allocation of $11 billion for the Education Investment Fund, which will pay for ongoing improvements to our TAFEs. While I am talking about TAFEs, one of the first acts of the Howard government in 1996 was to rip money out of the TAFE system, and they never restored those funds. The fund will also improve our universities, as part of the education revolution, because we on this side of the House understand just how important education is for the future of our nation. The budget also puts $10 billion into the Health and Hospitals Fund, which will ensure that we have better hospitals and, importantly, money for medical research.

These are funds that are needed; these are funds for the future. This is a planned approach to delivering to the Australian people, rather than just throwing money at people and projects that will deliver to the government, not to the people. That is what the Howard government did—they threw money at projects that they could see would deliver to them. There is no finer example of that than some of the projects that were funded under the Regional Partnerships program.

As I was saying, these funds are investments for the future. They are investments to address the chronic skills shortage that the Howard government allowed to develop. That government was more interested in punishing the unemployed than in giving them the skills they needed to move from unemployment to work. We have a very different approach to solving the skills shortage. The Howard government last year like drunken sailors threw around the surplus in the lead-up to the election. The Rudd government has just brought down a budget that will deliver to the Australian people a $55 billion Working Families Support Package and at the same time address inflation. It is making the hard decisions that the Howard government refused to make. This is a budget to address the challenges of high inflation, which places pressure on interest rates and which in turn places pressure on our pensioners, retirees and working families.

Unfortunately, high inflation leads to high prices. We have seen a 10 per cent increase in the price of groceries and petrol. There has been a 14 per cent increase in the price of fruit and vegetables, which are staples that we should all be eating. The people that inflation has the greatest impact on are those on a fixed income—people like pensioners, veterans and retirees. Their standard of living has been badly affected. That is why we have invested so much in pensioners and retirees this year. We have increased the utilities allowance from $107.20 to $500, and it will be paid not just twice a year but quarterly. In addition to that, we are looking at the way the pension is calculated. We are looking at the types of things that a pensioner actually buys—that is, groceries and essentials. The Rudd government also recognised pensioners and carers by paying them bonuses in this budget.

It is important to mention that this budget introduces a means test for the baby bonus at $150,000. That is something I wholeheartedly support, and it is something that is wholeheartedly supported by the number of women I have spoken to with incomes above that. There is also a means test at $150,000 for family tax benefit B. There has been much talk about the Medicare surcharge. The budget delivers a tax cut to people earning between $50,000 and $100,000. When members on that side of the House talk about the Medicare surcharge, they fail to mention the impact that the 30 per cent rebate had on people taking out health insurance. They also fail to mention what I think had the greatest impact on people taking out health insurance: the community rating. They oppose the tax on luxury cars, they oppose the tax on alcopops and they oppose Fuelwatch. This says to me that nothing has changed in the way those on that side of the House look at things. They are in parliament for the big end of town. They represent the private health insurance companies, they represent the luxury car companies, they represent the distillery and alcohol companies and they represent the big fuel companies. That is very disappointing.

In the time that I have left, I will quickly—

Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’ve got plenty of time, Jill.

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

No, I haven’t.

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

Order! Your remarks will be made through the chair.

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

In the interests of other members, I am truncating my speech so that everybody has a chance to speak and, as such, I have limited time. The point I would like to make is that this budget has delivered for the people of Shortland, who have a median income of $1,046 per week. I understand why people like the member for North Sydney stand up and argue against some of the things in this budget, when in his electorate there is a median income of $2,412 per week. I understand that he represents the big end of town, but I have to say that for the people I represent in this parliament this budget recognises the importance of controlling inflation and delivering to them.

If you look at all the indicators that came out in the census, you can see why this budget will be good for the people of Shortland. It is an electorate where over 56 per cent of people completed only year 10 or less as far as education is concerned. It is really important that we create educational opportunities for the children of those people. In addition to that, the majority of students in Shortland electorate attend public schools and have been disadvantaged. This budget recognises that children should have the choice of attending public or private schools and, as such, should have equal opportunities.

In this budget, the government has delivered $750,000 to upgrade Fernleigh Track. Fernleigh Track was initially to be funded under the Regional Partnerships program but will now be funded under the Better Regions program. It is a fine example of the types of programs that should be funded. Fernleigh Track recently won a highly commended award at the Parks and Leisure Australia awards in the category of management of open space development. It is something that has community support and is the type of project that should be funded.

Money went through the Black Spot Program. I have that detailed here but I have already spoken too long. There is money from the Roads to Recovery program to Lake Macquarie City Council and Wyong Shire Council. Rather than pork-barrelling and putting resources into marginal communities, this governmebnt recognises that, no matter where a person lives, no matter what region they are in, they should get their share of resources.

There has been $10 million given to the upgrade of EnergyAustralia Stadium. The PET scan at the Calvary Mater hospital has been funded. They are both things that the Howard government refused to do. The Newcastle university has had $13.7 million directed towards it. The superclinic in the northern part of the Wyong shire will benefit the people of Shortland electorate. This budget delivers to the people of Shortland and to the people of Australia. It is a budget for all Australians and not just for the big end of town.

Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to hear the member for Shortland say that this budget delivered for the people of Shortland, because it sure as hell did not deliver for the people of Groom nor the people of regional Australia. I am comforted that at least the member for Shortland thinks her members have done well. I am sure she has nobody who buys four-wheel drive cars to do their business and no-one who, after work, decides that the easiest way to have a drink would be to have a premix drink rather than have to buy a bottle of something and be inexact in the way they mix it. I am pleased that all the people in Shortland, as the Treasurer said, are happy. I am very pleased about that.

Since the Rudd Labor government’s budget was handed down I have had time to digest it and reread it many times, but what was in it for regional Australia and particularly for my electorate of Groom has not changed. This is a budget of betrayal and let-down to the people of rural and regional Australia, people whom I have had the great honour of representing for over nine years in this parliament and, prior to that, probably another 10 years in various forums.

It is a glaring feature of this budget that there has been a glaring absence of anything of substance for regional and rural Australia, the people I represent. The budget is a blatant failure of this government to live up to the expectations it cultivated, particularly the Prime Minister’s claim to govern for all Australians. This is not a budget for all Australians. This may be a budget for the people of Shortland, and I would actually take the opportunity if it comes my way to go down and ask some of those people in the good member’s electorate if they think it is a good budget for them, because I am sure we would find there that there are people who know enough about the importance of rural and regional Australia to say that if this budget is not good for all of Australia then it is not a good budget.

This budget favours some at the expense of others. It is a budget that this government has used to drive its own ideological purposes at the price of breaking faith with the people in regional Australia. Instead of governing for all Australians, this government has actually delivered a budget that rips apart a number of key programs that have been ensuring positive outcomes for regional areas and, in the process, it rips the heart and soul out of regional Australia.

Much like the government itself, this budget is trumped up for the sake of appearances but, if you look a little deeper, the tightly spun image begins to unravel. Take infrastructure, an area in which this government truly let down the people I represent and the people who are near and dear to me, the people of regional Australia. The budget is talking up the government’s Building Australia Fund, which has been given the broad objective of covering transport and communications infrastructure. But other than a sweeping announcement there is no evidence to back that up. The government has given no indication of what projects will fall under this fund, nor has it given any guidelines for how the money will be allocated and administered and accounted for. The fund actually swipes $2 billion from the Communications Fund, which existed expressly to ensure a high-speed standard of rural and regional telecommunications, which seemingly undermines at least half of the stated purpose of the fund. In doing that, it has also condemned the people of regional Australia to a poor internet access regime and a long wait for whatever broadband internet they receive.

In referring to communications infrastructure, this government seems to be confining its focus to city infrastructure—again, at the expense of more regional parts of Australia. Add to this the government’s own admission that its only action on delivering the Building Australia Fund was to conduct feasibility studies and the gloss does start to fade substantially. How long do the people of Australia have to wait before this government actually decides to govern rather than to commission more reviews and hang out with celebrities?

All the while, the Rudd government is remaining equally as secret about the future of the previous government’s forward-thinking roads and rail program, AusLink 2, and how that fund is to be allocated. This is an issue of vital importance to my electorate of Groom, because the people of this electorate are entitled to the $700 million allocated in the May 2007 budget to start building the second range crossing, a critical highway. But the Rudd Labor government seems determined to renege on this fully funded budget commitment as well. It seems that it is not enough for this government to operate on a blanket freeze frame mode that prevents business and whole sectors from moving forward; the government is now applying its obsession with reviews retrospectively and claiming that a firm decision to build the Toowoomba second range crossing under AusLink 2 must now be subject—and yes, you have probably guessed it—to another review. It is a nonsensical claim, given that the previous Howard government had already decided to build this road. The Rudd government cannot hide under the cover of its reviews and summits forever.

It is not just highway users who are feeling let down by this government and the budget which it has delivered; it is also the many primary schools across my electorate and across Australia. They have real reason to feel betrayed by the Rudd Labor government’s decision to abolish the highly successful Investing in Our Schools Program. That was a program that allocated local schools the opportunity to take control of their own destiny—and, in my electorate, more than $8 million worth of their own destiny. It gave them the power to choose projects they wanted to develop or new equipment they wanted to purchase, based on their own day-to-day experience in that school and the needs of their own students. The program did not rely on state Labor governments to make up their minds as to whether or not a school in Cambooya or Bowenville or Toowoomba should receive funds for things like air conditioning, computers or a whole range of facilities and amenities which they simply would not get under the slow-moving and city-centric Queensland Labor government.

It is particularly galling, given that the Rudd government speak incessantly about the so-called education revolution. As primary schools in my electorate are discovering, the Rudd government have no place to promise these schools an education revolution. If they do, as they are, then the schools in my electorate will find that there is no place for them in this education revolution. In fact, this so-called revolution is nothing more than a deceptive political exercise. In the meantime, it is high schools that are finding out that if they are to be part of this so-called revolution then it will come at a substantial cost, because this government is short-changing them on the laptop policy and leaving local schools to meet fundamental costs like connections and electricity. Some revolution! I think it is fairly revolting, to be quite honest.

This budget is also a tale of woe in the area of water because projects like the Community Water Grants program have also felt the sharp edge of the government’s razor gang. It is hard to determine what is driving this government to slash a program that has empowered residents to address one of the biggest issues facing their own communities and others right across Australia. I have had the pleasure of inspecting most of the programs that have been allocated funds in the electorate of Groom. They are high-quality programs and, most importantly, they work, saving hundreds of millions of litres of water every year. While the many local schools, sporting clubs and community groups in my electorate and across the entire country may be relieved they took the chance to receive support for their endeavours while they could, it is a slap in the face to see those efforts devalued and their example unable to be followed by other community groups who want to do their part to save this valuable resource—the water that they need every day. It is inconceivable that this government would slash this effective program without so much as a whisper of it in the budget and without any plans to replace this program—or none that we can find, but perhaps that, too, will be subject to another review.

This is all part of the broader picture that shows that this is a government that has no plans for regional Australia and is intent on punishing those sections of the Australian community who do not vote for it. We hear words from those who sit on the government benches about conspicuous consumption. If you buy a vehicle worth more than a certain amount of money—and I am not sure why those who decide on conspicuous consumption only target motor vehicles, but let us hope they go no further—and if you are guilty, as was said in the other place earlier this week, of conspicuous consumption then you can be sure that the Labor Party will tax you for it.

If I can move to the Regional Partnerships program, there is even more evidence here that the Rudd Labor government is not interested in helping regional Australia. We can see the ultimate crystallisation of this government’s modus operandi. It is a government based on spin and image control. This is the very program that the Labor Party and the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government have been denouncing as a slush fund and a pork-barrelling exercise. Mind you, the minister’s cries took on more of a hypocritical hew after I read this morning in the newspaper that Labor had poured 90 per cent of its own regional grants funding into electorates it already held or intended to win—90 per cent of $150 million went into those electorates. Notwithstanding this, the minister has repeatedly tarnished the reputation of programs and projects that have received funding under the Regional Partnerships program as being part of some sort of rort.

Last week the minister for infrastructure had to come clean, though, and concede that he had not even bothered to look into the program or into which specific projects had been funded. While the minister was out talking down the projects, and refusing to fight for the budget funds that were needed for them, the truth came out on television. It was only then that we saw some action—and are we surprised by that? Certainly not. Maybe we should get Kochie to ring the minister more often. It did not matter that the livelihoods of local businesses and communities were on the line. It did not matter that other communities had pledged their very own money and fundraised for these projects on the understanding that these grants had been secured. It did not matter that the blood, sweat and tears of local communities had been put into these projects. It did not matter to the minister until Kochie rang him. And then the minister thought, ‘The media are interested’—and we know how obsessed the government is with the media cycle—‘so perhaps I should go and have another look at them.’ The only thing that then mattered was how the storyline played out in the media. So, after a bit of bad PR, the government decided to do the right thing at long last and honour the funding for local community projects under the Regional Partnerships program.

Regardless of the motivation behind it, I welcome the government’s backflip on this issue. But now it has the responsibility to take the matter more seriously as it revives negotiations with affected community groups. Unfortunately, the signs that this is more than a token gesture are sparse, given that Labor has slashed more than $1 billion from regional Australia. Other than saving face on this issue, the Rudd government has distinguished itself only as a government that simply does not understand—either that or it does not care—about regional Australia and its people.

This budget is all about appearances and about the Labor Party’s longstanding ideological vendettas. This budget sets in motion the conditions to undermine the private health insurance sector, as we always knew it would, and place fatal pressure on the already overburdened public health system. It is a budget that divides the community along the lines of what this government defines as being rich. It is a budget that punishes larger families that live in rural areas who need to buy a four-wheel drive vehicle worth more than $57,000—those conspicuous consumers, those people guilty of conspicuous consumption, to use the words of the Labor Party. It is a budget that locks out the hardworking families who want to install solar energy panels but who earn more than $100,000 in combined incomes. This is a real slap in the face from a government that talks up its environmental credentials but makes a determined effort to stand in the way of those who want to switch to solar power, both for environmental and necessity reasons. The environment minister himself should be ashamed. It is a budget that talks big and delivers nothing for seniors and carers. It is a budget that shows in a devastating fashion that the reality of the Rudd government is not what it promised before the election.

In the short time I have left can I touch on the area of my portfolio responsibility. Again, we see a situation where a minister did not stand up for his portfolio and did not do what was promised prior to the election. The trade minister spun some sort of deception that he was going to not only expand the EMDG Scheme but make sure that that expansion was funded. But, when the budget was handed down, we found two things. The first was that there is going to be another review—and we knew that was coming!—so whatever is done now may be reviewed and changed. Also, this much vaunted extra money only goes for one year. So you expand the scheme, you get all these people in, you get the momentum up and you pay that year. In the following year, what is going to fund those applications? We do not know the answer to that. The minister is unable to explain it, and we have to wonder whether or not he went to the ERC process to ensure that his portfolio needs were met. It is just another example of a promise not delivered, a promise that has been glossed in spin and a promise which I know will come back and not only hurt the exporters of Australia but show just how shallow this government is in its commitments.

Let me conclude by saying that the evidence is quite clear and yet, at the same time, disturbing and distressing. This budget is vintage Labor. It is a high-taxing, high-spending budget that rewards those the Labor Party favour and punishes those they do not. It is a budget that lets down the people of regional and rural Australia and exposes the truth behind Labor’s claim to govern for all Australians. It is a budget that encapsulates the hidden ethos of the Rudd Labor government, because it is a budget dedicated more to maintaining appearances and manipulating an image than to delivering on the ground.

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

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related bills. I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak in support of Labor’s first federal budget in more than 11 years and the first that Labor have delivered during my 10-year parliamentary career. I am proud of this budget. It delivers on all of our election promises. It is a responsible budget considering the economic circumstances of high inflation and high interest rates and yet it makes good on all our election promises, delivering for working families. Finally, low- to middle-income earners are back in the picture. What a relief after all those years of Howard government budget handouts for high-income earners who did not really need them. For once the people who actually carry this country are being acknowledged and provided for to the tune of a $55 billion Working Families Support Package. But this budget is also good for Australia’s future. It is a vision. It puts the people in my electorate of Chisholm at the centre of our commitment to tackle inflation and lays the building blocks for a stronger, more modern Australia.

The Rudd government has delivered a tight fiscal policy to bear down on inflation while investing in sustainable productivity and growth, dealing with the issues of skill shortages. Strong economic management is the key. A surplus of $22 billion will ensure a strong budget at a time of global financial turbulence, with every dollar of new spending matched by spending cuts. The government is right to avoid wasteful spending that puts unnecessary pressure on the economy and makes the Reserve Bank’s job of controlling inflation harder. Thanks to years of Howard government neglect and inaction, productivity growth has fallen to its lowest rate in over 17 years. Government spending needs to be more firmly focused on measures that boost the economy’s productivity potential. This reinforces the economy’s ability to deliver strong and sustainable growth without triggering inflationary pressures. This budget focuses on the supply side; the Howard government allowed demand side pressures to build up and push prices up.

It is a good budget in the tradition of great, visionary, nation-building Labor budgets. We have reprioritised spending towards education, health and infrastructure, to invest in Australia’s future while giving working families the tax relief—$46.7 billion in personal income tax cuts—they need at a time when the family budget is severely stretched. I applaud these measures. They address many of the concerns of my constituents, who saw education, health care, child care, aged care, investment in infrastructure and the environment go backwards under the Howard government. They felt short-changed and rightly so. If governments do not invest in the wellbeing of the nation, who else will?

Education is a key concern for many of my constituents. Many of them are university students, graduates, lecturers and teachers, parents of students or just people who are concerned about the skills shortages and the creativity of our nation—and the previous government’s lack of investment in education. I am delighted to say that the two universities in my electorate—Monash University, with the largest campus at Clayton, and Deakin University, with the city campus at Burwood—have received large funding boosts in this budget for urgent capital investment works. Monash University received $29.6 million and Deakin University received $13.8 million. That is money that is desperately needed by both those campuses and universities. That money is a one-off payment to those universities, under the Better Universities Renewal Fund, to renew and upgrade information and communications technology systems, laboratories, libraries, student study spaces, teaching spaces and student amenities. The money will make those universities a better place to work and study and it will take the strain off the universities’ budgets. It will go some way towards addressing the neglect and decline in university facilities that we saw under the Howard government, particularly thanks to Peter Costello, who was, of course, a Monash graduate and who should have treated his old alma mater better. The not-so-voluntary voluntary student unionism was a nasty piece of regressive ideology.

I am also pleased to say that Box Hill TAFE’s business enterprise centre received $350,000 in funding to support small businesses in the area. This funding was promised during the election campaign last year by the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy when he visited Box Hill Institute of TAFE with me. I am pleased to say that the government has delivered on that promise. I have been a long supporter of this centre, which is a one-stop shop for local businesses in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, providing invaluable support and advice to small business people who want to improve their business. It is a terrific centre, as Box Hill TAFE is a great institute, and I am pleased that the money is going to such a worthwhile institution. The funding is part of a fantastic $42 million program to fund small business advisory centres across Australia.

No-one can say that the ALP does not support small business, and this initiative was most welcomed by the small business community. Indeed, Labor’s education revolution will provide $5.9 billion for the education of all Australians, from our youngest citizens to university students. It will invest $534 million over four years to provide universal access to preschool years for 15 hours a week, 40 weeks annually, by 2013—a terrific initiative. It will invest $1.2 billion over five years for the digital education revolution to deliver information and communications technology to all year 9 to 12 students, $2.5 billion over 10 years for the trade training centres in schools, $578 million to improve literacy and numerary and $662 million for the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program. Asian language study is a big issue in my electorate of Chisholm, which has a very large Asian population. They have been quite disappointed over the years that the study of Asian languages has faltered, particularly through the school system, as not many Asian languages are offered at school level. Hopefully, this will encourage the take-up of Asian language studies at school level, as opposed to the numerous Saturday and Sunday classes that operate quite extensively in my electorate.

We will lift the year 12 or equivalent retention rate to 90 per cent by 2020. There will be $500 million invested this year to assist universities with capital funding and a $626 million funding injection will reduce the cost of studying maths and science at university. An extra 630 training places will be provided, at a cost of $1.9 billion, which is great news for Box Hill TAFE students. The budget has also put aside a further $11 billion into a special fund to be drawn on for Australia’s long-term educational needs.

Child care is also a major priority issue in my electorate. It is expensive bringing up kids, especially when you are on a limited budget. I have had many emails and phone calls from parents who cannot get their kids into a childcare centre because there are not enough places, or they just cannot afford child care, or they are very concerned about their inability to get child care with their impending return-to-work date fast approaching. In response to these problems, the Rudd government have raised the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. That will ensure that, in addition to any childcare benefit payment, half of a family’s total out-of-pocket childcare costs will be met every year. We have also made applying for and getting this payment much easier, because at the moment it is a minefield to apply for and get. In addition, the cap on the maximum out-of-pocket expenses claimable each year will rise from $4,354 to $7,500, and 50 per cent of the childcare tax rebate will be paid every three months instead of just once a year. This initiative will be greatly appreciated by many families in my electorate as providing welcome relief to the family budget.

A bigger initiative in this budget is aimed at seniors. I have an ageing population within my electorate. The phone calls coming into my electorate office showed that seniors were very grateful for the measures within the budget. I did not have one pensioner ring and complain. Actually, I had quite a few ring to ask why all the pensioners were complaining! The increase to the concessions allowance in the budget was welcomed with huge relief. One of the issues that many in my electorate are looking forward to is the provision for senior card holders to have access to travel concession across Australia. Victorians cannot understand that, when they go to Queensland, they are suddenly no longer considered a senior. I know that many are looking forward to that issue being resolved.

In respect of private health cover and the changes to the private health surcharge, it is interesting to note the claims from the opposition about how this will put massive pressure back on the public sector, and at the same time they claim that a whole lot of young individuals will come out of private health insurance. We cannot have it both ways. If it is the young, healthy people who will be leaving, why will they suddenly be going to hospitals? It is a ridiculous argument and eventually somebody will point out the anomaly in this argument. People currently have to go to public hospitals for a range of matters, whether they have private health insurance or not. They present to these places because they are involved in accidents or serious issues. The bulk of the private sector does not cover these. Those people will be the ones who present and have always presented. The people who will leave because of this change, if they choose to leave—many will probably stay—are not the people who will be actually going to hospitals, because they are healthy; they are young, they are healthy and they do not need hospital care.

Finally I want to again address the issue of health care. The Rudd government is committed to improving the health system in this country. We have committed $32 billion for the National Health and Hospitals Reform Plan as well as many other healthcare initiatives which will go a long way to helping solve the public health crisis. I know many people in my electorate are concerned about the lack of funding and the current state of Box Hill Hospital. Box Hill Hospital is in need of an urgent upgrade. The facilities are old, out of date and not meeting patient demands. In 2006 the state government promised a $185 million upgrade to rebuild the hospital. In this year’s state budget $8.5 million was provided for infrastructure upgrades at Box Hill Hospital, including theatre, electrical and mechanical service works. While this is a patch-up job for an institution that desperately needs a complete overhaul, it will ensure the hospital continues to function effectively while a new state-of-the-art hospital is built at Box Hill in the future. I know many of my constituents were disappointed with the state budget outcome, but I want to urge the state and federal governments to work towards the resolution of the Box Hill Hospital issue. I know the state government is committed to funding and redeveloping the hospital. We need to see action on it sooner rather than later. I commend this terrific Labor budget to the House.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and associated appropriation bills. The Treasurer said that this is a Labor budget—it was echoed by the previous speaker—and it certainly is a Labor budget. It is a budget characterised by high taxes, high spending, high unemployment and no relief on inflation. The Labor government inherited an enviable economy from the coalition. The coalition eradicated debt, established and maintained healthy services and instituted economic and taxation reform. These fostered and encouraged employment growth and a prosperity enjoyed by this country over the past decade. The legacy of the coalition government is an economy that is flexible, strong and prosperous. This is a total contrast to what the coalition inherited when it came to government in 1996. Government debt was $96 billion; the deficit was $10 billion. Australia suffered through a recession that we had to have and endured astronomic interest rates, high inflation and high unemployment. The coalition’s responsible management of the economy fostered an economy in which all Australians could be confident about the future.

It has to be said that this economic prosperity seems to have been taken for granted by Labor, and this budget is certainly one of missed opportunities. There is no agenda for the future; there is no vision for the type of nation we can grow to become. There are no details of action to strengthen our position and build on the gains that have already been made. Instead of capitalising on the strength and stability of the economy, the Labor government has instituted a range of measures that increase inflationary pressures. The budget fails to assist with the cost of living. There are income tax cuts but they were delivered by the coalition in its last election commitments. They were provided for in forward estimates and maintained by Labor, which I find is nice. What I find a bit concerning is that the Treasurer has indicated that there will be an end to returning excess budget surpluses to taxpayers as tax cuts.

This budget forecasts higher spending, higher taxes, higher unemployment and lower economic growth. New taxes and revenue measures will raise $19.7 billion over five years. Taxes have been increased on everyday items such as cars, alcohol, energy, computer software and passports. Even with the coalition’s income tax cuts in this budget, the total income tax take will increase by $42.8 billion, or 21.1 per cent, over the next four years. The CPI increase from the new tax increases means that despite the government’s rhetoric there is no relief from petrol prices, grocery prices or home loan interest rates.

Preliminary modelling estimates that the new tax alone will add up to 0.4 percentage points to the CPI. The strain on the community is increasing as the cost of living continues to grow. The budget increases inflationary pressure by increased spending. Again, despite a lot of chest beating by the Labor government that the razor gang would be slashing spending to contain inflation, the opposite is actually true. This budget removes $15.2 billion of coalition spending detailed in forward estimates but replaces it with $30.1 billion in new spending. And budget papers forecast a rise in the unemployment rate in the next 12 months.

This budget fails across a wide range of fronts. It fails pensioners; it fails retirees; it fails our schools and students; it fails our rural communities and it fails carers. Today I want to focus on the budget decision to increase the tax threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge. This was something that the member for Chisholm took up. The fact is that the coalition has long understood and appreciated that this nation’s health system is best served when we have viable, efficient and successful private and public health services working together to deliver health care.

The people of Kooyong understand and appreciate the importance of a strong private health system contributing to the overall quality of health care, and in my electorate the percentage of people with private health insurance is 77 per cent—30 per cent higher than the national average. A balanced health system with strong private hospitals is in the interest of all Australians. In government the coalition supported private health insurance to ensure that the right balance existed in the way health care was managed. Labor, on the other hand, has long held a different set of principles. The last time Labor was in government it continuously undermined the private health insurance system. Under Labor, private health insurance coverage fell significantly, and the reality is that Labor has always thought that it can afford to diminish the private health system because it believes that it is wealthy people who are in the system and that they will always stay there so the system does not need support.

Real life is quite different from this. One of the most interesting findings from the period when Labor was systematically eroding the base of private health insurance was that, amongst the lowest 20 per cent of income earners, private health insurance membership levels remained virtually unchanged across the decade from 1983 to 1992, while membership in all other income brackets declined. Under Labor it was the lower income earners who felt the brunt of Labor’s attack on private health. I believe that it is these people who will again feel the most pain as a result of Labor’s decimation of the private health system. Labor’s long-term cynicism about private health is becoming clear, and it is this cynicism that lies at the heart of the decision to increase the threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge. This increased threshold will serve to turn people away from private health insurance and further burden an already struggling public system. Not only will this increase the burden on the public health system but it will place unacceptable costs on the Australian community at large.

Research has shown that, for every dollar spent by the government on the private health insurance rebate, a saving of up to $2 on healthcare costs is made. It is undeniable that the public health system, now run by state Labor governments across Australia, is under strain. Even the states recognise that, and Western Australia and Tasmania have said that compensation from the federal government will be sought if there is an increased demand created by the policy change to the Medicare levy surcharge.

Previously, singles earning $50,000 or more who did not have private health insurance were required to pay a Medicare surcharge of one per cent of their taxable income. The threshold for families was $100,000. This policy provided an impetus for people to consider taking out private health insurance. Since the introduction of the Medicare levy surcharge, the number of people participating in the private health system has increased from below 30 per cent in the late 1990s to the current participation rate of 44.6 per cent, or 9½ million people. The number of patients treated by private hospitals has increased by 17 per cent in four years to 2.8 million patients, and 56 per cent of all surgeries are conducted in private hospitals.

The importance of private health cannot be underestimated, and the Labor Party is making a fundamental mistake by taking it for granted. Let me just run over some more statistics. Private hospitals currently conduct 84 per cent of all obesity related surgery, 77 per cent of all knee procedures, 70 per cent of all eye procedures, 64 per cent of all spinal procedures, 55 per cent of all hip procedures, 55 per cent of all chemotherapy and 41 per cent of all coronary bypass surgery. Private hospitals treat four out of every 10 patients admitted to a public hospital for treatment. In 2005-06 they treated 423,000 accident and emergency patients and over one million patients aged 65 years or over.  It is these older Australians who will be most adversely affected by this change. They cannot easily leave the system and they will be forced to pay higher premiums. The AMA has reported that it is older Australians who will be most adversely affected. The security and comfort that elderly and chronically ill Australians have had through affordable health insurance is at serious risk.

The change in the threshold has led the Department of the Treasury to anticipate that 485,000 people will leave the private system. This has been calculated as 186,000 singles and 150,000 families. Contrary to what the previous speaker, the member for Chisholm, said, these families actually need health cover. They will now need to rely on an overstretched public health system. But, to take this matter further, the working paper written by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Australian Health Insurance Association has estimated that government savings, as detailed in the budget papers, would actually require more rebate payers to leave the system than is stated. Using the average premium cost, PricewaterhouseCoopers calculate that 613,000 people would have to leave private health insurance in the next financial year. With over 610,000 policyholders, and taking into account children in families, the number of people leaving private health insurance to fit the government’s forecast is potentially in the order of 900,000.

The Australian Medical Association commissioned Access Economics to report on the overall impact on health of the 2008-09 budget. Access concluded that the government has adopted a policy that harms the insurers and the private hospitals, while adding further burdens to an overstressed public hospital system and affecting the long-term fiscal position, which will in fact be felt immediately. I do not think that the Labor Party’s ideological obsession with undermining private health insurance will serve the government or the community well in the longer term. Good policy must exhibit short-term gain and long-term vision, especially in an area such as health. Sadly, the policy decision on private health insurance, like the vast majority of measures in this budget, lacks both.

Another feature of the budget that is worth while remarking on is the abolition of the Investing in Our Schools Program. I have had some experience with Labor economics, but I have got to say that I was surprised about the abolition of this program. I think that it had been universally welcomed by all members of parliament, and certainly, in my electorate, it made a fundamental contribution to improving, at the margins, the quality of education in our schools. I think that every member of parliament who walked into a school to see the new facilities, especially in the state school system, was taken by the quality of the changes and the dedication of the people who made bids for the Investing in Our Schools Program. I think that this is a very sad loss and I reiterate that it did surprise me, because I thought that that program would have had overwhelming support from all sides of the parliament.

On a positive note, I note the budget commitment to the abolition of temporary protection visas and the granting of permanent visa status to all refugees found to be owed protection. I think this is a measure that addresses a situation which has been unacceptable for far too long, and I am pleased to note that the arrangements to abolish the temporary visas will be in place by 1 October. I also welcome the commitment to the Adult Migrant English Program of an additional $49.2 million over four years.

In fairness, I should also welcome the provision in the budget to end discrimination against same-sex couples. This is a measure which has been long discussed in the coalition and I am just glad it is taking place in this budget.

Overall, it cannot be denied that the budget represents missed opportunities. Instead of continuing on the path of sound economic management with a range of prudent measures to encourage prosperity and growth, this budget reverts to the Labor style of economic management. Spending has been increased, despite pledges that the razor gang would be ruthless in its funding cuts. Cuts have been made to agencies such as CSIRO, HREOC, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Ombudsman. In that context I note that I am concerned about those cuts in terms of the Ombudsman’s ability to deliver on his statutory responsibilities.

The bottom line is that new spending in this budget is almost double the amount saved by cuts. There is no strategy for reform in this budget to enable continuing economic growth, and I think it needs to be registered that the maintenance of economic prosperity will not continue as a matter of course and that there has been a failure on the part of this government to address this issue. Australia’s prosperity is an outcome of disciplined management of the nation’s economy. This is something that Australians can never take for granted and it is something that we can no longer believe is in place. The budget increases taxes, increases spending and increases pressure on inflation. It is a budget in which Labor has failed the Australian economy.

John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related budget bills. I would like to outline those areas which are of particular concern to my electorate of Lowe in Sydney’s inner west. I start by commending the Prime Minister and the Treasurer for honouring Labor’s election promises to the Australian people in this, the first budget delivered in this parliament by the Rudd Labor government.

The current world economic climate is uncertain and, appropriately, the Treasurer has delivered a very responsible budget. Australians are experiencing rising living costs, from housing to groceries to fuel, to name some of the essentials. The increasing living costs arise from both internal and external factors, and this budget seeks to reduce those pressures on hardworking families. Importantly, the Rudd Labor government has fixed its sights on long-term, sustainable and responsible fiscal policy to ensure our economy can meet future economic challenges. Notably, the $21.7 billion budget surplus is designed to put downward pressure on inflation and stabilise interest rates. The allocation of funds is targeted to those most in need and coupled with initiatives to raise productivity and participation.

The Rudd Labor government has set the task of cooperating with state governments to end the blame game which crippled the health and education system for 11½ years under the Howard government. COAG meetings under a Rudd Labor government are now forums for constructive dialogue and decision making to improve vital services which every Australian expects and deserves. Prime Minister Rudd delivered on his commitment from the time he became opposition leader, when he promised that a government led by him would promote a cooperative dialogue between the federal government and the state governments.

Thirty-four thousand families in Sydney’s inner west in my electorate of Lowe welcome the $55 billion Working Families Support Package delivered in the 2008-09 federal budget. This package will provide tax relief of $46.7 billion over the next four years for low- to middle-income families. The package has increased accessibility and affordability to health care, including dental care, with the introduction of GP superclinics and the Teen Dental Plan.

For young families, the Rudd Labor government has increased the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent, increasing the claimable cap from $4,354 to $7,500 per child. As well as increasing the rebate, the government has allocated $1.6 billion to increase the number of available childcare places, more of which are desperately needed. That has been an important issue for the families I represent in the electorate of Lowe. The rebate will assist the 7,340 children under the age of four in my electorate attain an affordable, quality childcare place. I welcome this measure in the budget.

For the 20-plus schools in Lowe the education tax refund assists with education expenses for school students. The refund provides up to $375 for each primary school student and up to $750 per year for each secondary school student. This initiative alone will give a total of $4.4 billion in refunds to working families. These are real measures offering real relief to Australian families.

On the housing front, it would be an understatement to say that housing in the inner west is becoming unaffordable for the average Australian. My electorate of Lowe has one of the highest levels of mortgage stress in Australia. One constituent wrote to me in response to an information pamphlet on housing stress:

I’m a single income tenant, my husband has a long term illness which has made him unable to work since the end of 2004. We rent a tiny one bedroom flat in the Inner West for convenience of public transport to enable me to get to work. This one bedroom flat costs me 50 per cent of my weekly income.

My constituent went on to say that, because of the crisis, she had looked at purchasing an apartment. But, after seeking professional financial advice, she realised that a $250,000 loan would, with associated expenses, cost her more than 50 per cent of her income. This is the type of rental trap many people find themselves in.

This budget includes the First Home Saver Accounts package to help people save money for a deposit for a home and the Housing Affordability Fund and National Rental Affordability Scheme to increase the supply of affordable housing and rental properties. There is no simple, overnight solution to the housing crisis, and I commend the Rudd government for taking the first step in tackling the problem, unlike the previous Howard government.

Just as housing affordability became an issue the previous government chose to ignore, so too did the price of fuel. For all the condemnation the national Fuelwatch scheme has received from the opposition, I ask: what did the Howard government in its last three years of office do to alleviate rising fuel prices? What did the previous government do or even attempt to do to ease the rising cost of fuel for working families? The appointment of a petrol commissioner is a step to ensure transparency and competition in the petrol industry. It is to keep the oil companies honest and minimise the rorting—and hence the price hikes in fuel—that has taken place. It is another measure to assist working families in the fight against rising living costs.

For families with carers, the government has expanded the eligibility criteria for the carer payment. The Rudd Labor government recognises the invaluable work of carers and in this budget will deliver $20 million in ex gratia payments to certain families, extend the eligibility for the utilities allowance, and deliver a lump sum bonus of $1,000 to those receiving the carer payment and $600 to those on carer allowance. I know that there was considerable alarm at the mention of cutting the lump sum payment earlier in the year and I am delighted that the government has increased the benefits for carers in the 2008-09 budget in recognition of their sacrifice.

It would also be prudent to note a couple of local groups which have received targeted funding from this budget. I would like to acknowledge the Settlement Grants Program funding which two migrant organisations in my electorate of Lowe have received in the 2008-09 budget. My electorate, like many areas in Australia, is culturally diverse, with refugees and migrants choosing to live in Lowe. In fact, in the 2006 census 40 per cent of respondents in my electorate were born overseas. These organisations, the Chinese Migrant Welfare Association and the Russian Ethnic Community Council of New South Wales, will receive approximately $68,000 and $73,000 respectively.

Moving to a new country is extremely daunting and difficult, particularly for those with no prior knowledge of the language. These organisations are pivotal in assisting the successful integration of refugees and migrants, offering goods and services to help them become independent, self-reliant and active members of our community. I know you would understand that, Mr Deputy Speaker Andrews, from your previous portfolio. I am extremely pleased to know that there are services in my electorate catering for those in need and that they are being recognised in this budget and supported by the new federal Labor government.

I am also pleased that the 2008-09 budget gives the urgent attention needed to our tertiary institutions. Of the $500 million injection to Australian universities to rebuild their infrastructure, $5.9 million has been allocated to the Australian Catholic University. I am proud to say that my electorate hosts a campus in Strathfield and I know that these funds will enable the university to provide facilities for such purposes as research, child care and student amenities.

As the Parliamentary Secretary for Trade, I also welcome initiatives in this budget which will assist in lifting Australia out of the trade deficit quagmire left behind by the Howard government. In the last six years of the Howard government, total export revenues grew at an average annual rate of only 5.8 per cent. This compares with the 10.7 per cent growth in the 18 years following the float of the dollar by the Hawke government in 1983. The Howard government has bequeathed Australia a goods and services sector where export growth has stalled, a manufacturing sector that has collapsed and export volumes that are stagnant. Conditions in the global environment are no excuse for this performance.

Demand for Australian commodities reached record levels under the Howard government’s watch while, over the past five years, world trade has grown at twice the rate of world output. In my view, the Howard government was either unwilling or unable to engage in areas of opportunity. It was either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the global prospects presented to it. The result of the Howard government’s inability to integrate trade, social and economic policies is a trade performance that is one of the worst in Australia’s history. It will not be easy to steer the ship around. However, unlike the Howard government, the Rudd government is willing and able to engage in areas of opportunity and to take advantage of global prospects presented to it. Rather than having an unflinching obsession with free trade agreements and believing that the mere conclusion of bilateral agreements will be enough to lift Australia’s trade performance, the Rudd government is engaging in proactive reform.

The former government could not understand that improving market access globally is useless if Australian companies are not productive or competitive enough to take up these new opportunities. The former government could not understand that entering into free trade agreements would do nothing to assist companies in Australia that were hamstrung by capacity constraints—capacity constraints that have intensified over the past decade due to the disgraceful underinvestment in infrastructure by the Howard government. Despite the opening of doors to the global economy, our businesses have been forced to fight for Australia with both hands tied behind their back.

Several measures announced in the budget provide a clear indication of a fresh approach to Australia’s trade policy. Several measures demonstrate that Australia will seek a whole-of-government approach to increasing export levels. The Rudd government’s first budget will deal with some of the productivity reasons underpinning Australia’s poor export performance.

As the Parliamentary Secretary for Trade I am delighted with the government’s investment in education and skills. As I have mentioned, this budget will invest $5.9 billion over five years in the Rudd government’s education revolution, including investment in more training places, trade facilities in our schools and capital works for our higher education and vocational institutions. The Rudd government’s first budget will also deal with some of the capacity constraints holding back our businesses from sending greater volumes of exports to overseas markets.

This budget has provided a substantial down payment on a pledge to fix and modernise the nation’s infrastructure. An initial allocation of $20 billion will be used to build critical economic infrastructure such as roads, rail, ports and broadband. Unlike the Howard government’s last spending spree, which in my view was not only short sighted but also sickeningly reckless, the Rudd government’s first budget is the start of responsible investment in the very things that are constraining our export performance.

I have had the benefit of visiting many Austrade offices around Australia and the privilege of meeting many exporters. Almost all of those exporters have made mention of the need for critical infrastructure to support their businesses as well as skilled labour to improve their productive capacity. As I said, it will not be easy to undo 11½ years of neglect, but this budget is, refreshingly, a step in the right direction. Exporters have, for far too long, been carrying a disproportionate amount of the weight in the quest to improve Australia’s trade performance. The indolence of the former federal government has come to an end with this budget, and that will be of tremendous relief to many exporters.

As well as investing in the capacity of existing exporters to take their products worldwide, the Rudd government is also investing in the exporters of tomorrow. The government is acting now to ensure Australia is in a position to take advantage of the economic opportunities of the future.

Climate change presents both challenges and opportunities for Australian exporters. Australia has the natural conditions to be a world leader in the provision of clean technologies in global markets. The global market for renewable energy is set to be worth US$750 billion a year by 2016. We need to act now to ensure Australian companies are in a position to exploit these markets in coming years and be competitive. While there are already 17,000 Australians employed in renewable energy and related industries, there is great potential to increase this number. Unlike the Howard government, the Rudd government is not willing to ride on the back of those doing the hard work. That is why this budget will invest $150 million over four years to support the development of clean energy technologies in Australia. This is on top of a $500 million fund over six years to support the mandatory renewable energy target and accelerate the development and commercialisation of renewable technology.

These are the clearest possible examples of a government that has fresh ideas for Australia’s future. They are clear examples that the Rudd government has the conviction to engage in areas of opportunity and to take advantage of global prospects presented to it.

Before concluding, I wish to comment briefly on the Rudd government’s commitment to improving the very successful Export Market Development Grants Scheme, another key component of the trade portfolio. Notwithstanding the significant support for the scheme by businesses, the scheme had been cut in half by the Howard government in real terms. Not only has the Rudd government made this scheme more accessible for exporters; it has boosted funding for the scheme by $50 million in 2009-10. Like infrastructure and education, the EMDG Scheme was deserted by the Howard government. The previous government was no friend of the EDMG Scheme, just as it was no friend of innovation, research, infrastructure development or education investment—all of which are essential for our exporters.

I am proud to be a member of a government that has put an end to the reckless, short-term spending of the previous government and is looking to the long-term future of our country. This budget provides for the establishment of new nation-building funds—funds that are sorely needed if we are to have any hope of reversing a decade of neglect of our trade performance. This is a budget that will be welcomed not only by Australian exporters but also by the working families that keep our exporting traditions alive, including the ones that I represent in my electorate of Lowe. Unfortunately, I do not have time to elaborate on every provision in this budget which I feel is important to hardworking Australians, particularly those most relevant to my constituents. I hope I have outlined a few of the initiatives which indicate why I support the first Rudd Labor government. Of course the budget cannot address the shortcomings of every aspect in every area of Australian life. I do believe, however, that the Treasurer and the government have made an honourable and praiseworthy first attempt at laying the foundations for our country and have committed to fighting inflation, investing in infrastructure, developing a globally competitive trade platform and arming the workforce with the best education and training possible. Under the Rudd government and under this budget, I look forward to a better equipped Australia as we move through the 21st century.

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Leader of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A government’s first budget allows it the opportunity to set out its financial agenda for the years to come. It allows it to lay the foundations and to build on those foundations in subsequent budgets. When the member for Higgins stepped up to the dispatch box in 1996, he faced a bleak financial position. He faced a $10 billion budget black hole. He faced $96 billion in government debt. He faced an economy that had lost confidence and, in many cases, lost hope. But his budget was a very strong statement. It was a budget that underpinned strong growth in the years to come. It was a budget that underpinned the creation of a million jobs. It was a budget that took Australia forward and built this country into the confident and self-assured nation that we became.

When the people of Australia listened to that budget, they knew they had a government that was caring as well as economically responsible. They knew they had a government that was going to look after small business. They knew they had a government that was going to look after families. They knew that they had a government that was going to look after carers and pensioners. It was a very strong statement.

When I look at the budget that was put out by this government in this House earlier in May, I find a much different position. I find that we have a government that has inherited a strong surplus. I find that we have had a government that has inherited full employment. I find we have a government that has inherited a confident Australia. But what do we get from this government by way of its budget statement? We get a very confused document. We get a document that does not set out a clear direction for this country. We get a document that does not set out a clear agenda. We get a document that lets this country down. We see a range of promises that were made during the election campaign—a range of promises which this government appears now unlikely to fulfil. This budget certainly does not give us any assurance that those promises and commitments to the Australian people will be fulfilled.

We have to look no further than the debate in this House on fuel to see the shortcomings of this budget. We had a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who walked the length and breadth of this country promising cheaper petrol. The Prime Minister created an illusion to the Australian people that he was the high-octane messiah who was going to deliver cheap fuel. What has happened? What have the people of Australia received in relation to this promise? They certainly have not received cheaper petrol. We have seen petrol rising at a faster rate than at any other time in our history. We see petrol becoming unaffordable to families and pensioners. We see a government that offers little more than rhetoric and false hope.

The government’s answer to the commitment that it made to the Australian people was the discredited Fuelwatch scheme. This budget funds Fuelwatch. This budget throws money at a scheme that is going to push up the cost to motorists. This budget throws money at a scheme that is going to make motoring less affordable, not more affordable. It is a scheme that is based on a lie. It is a scheme that is based on flimsy research. It is a scheme that is not going to deliver outcomes to the people who elected this government. It is a scheme that is going to make fuel much more expensive in regional and rural areas. It is a scheme that is going to take away cheap Tuesdays from those motorists who are price conscious and need to purchase their fuel at the bottom of the fuel cycle. It is a very disappointing budget in relation to this government’s commitment to the Australian people on fuel.

By contrast the Leader of the Opposition, in his budget reply, proposed a solid solution: a reduction in the fuel excise. He proposed a measure that would provide real and immediate benefits to the motoring public and real and immediate benefits to pensioners and families, rather than just a hoax.

I turn to another measure which was very prominent in the election campaign but seems to be slipping below the radar screen, if the government has its way: the issue of groceries. Not only were we going to get cheaper petrol; we were going to get cheaper groceries. We were going to mystically have the Prime Minister and the Treasurer wave a magic wand and suddenly groceries would become more affordable—or so they tried to lead the Australian people to believe. Having introduced the concept of Fuelwatch in relation to their commitment on fuel, they also introduced the notion of ‘grocery watch’—another expenditure which will not provide one cent of savings to the people of Australia. It will not provide cheaper groceries. It is nothing more than yet another stunt, another elaborate hoax and another dashed promise.

The average supermarket has some 25,000 to 30,000 lines. They change in price daily. They change in price hourly. These lines can change in price, in some circumstances, by the minute. Somehow we are going to have a website that is going to miraculously keep consumers up to date with the movements in the price of carrots and the movements in the price of broccoli! Somehow the Australian people are going to benefit from the money spent on this policy! It is money wasted. It is funding in this budget that will not produce real outcomes for consumers or meet the commitments of this government.

I will touch on the issue of health insurance. Labor have always had a pathological hatred for the notion of private health insurance. They begrudgingly allow health insurance to exist only because they know that they would have difficulty eliminating private health insurance from our health system. We have a system that depends on the workings of a public and private system together. We have a system that is very much dependent on those who can afford it paying a substantial proportion of the cost of their own healthcare. But in this budget what do we do? We remove the incentive for more people to take up private health insurance. We encourage people out of private health insurance and into the public system. We encourage further stress on state health systems that are struggling. What is the problem with that? We see right around the country our hospitals bursting at the seams, we see right around the country a public system that is not coping with the strains upon it, yet we see this government discouraging private health care through its changes to the private health insurance measures—the Medicare surcharge. We see this government putting in place measures that are actually going to detract from the likelihood that people are going to maintain their private health insurance.

It is interesting that on the North Coast of New South Wales the area health service has introduced a concept called surge beds. One would think that the notion of surge beds would certainly be an idea of merit: when you have an increase in demand, further beds are opened to meet that increase in demand. But the notion of surge beds is more like an Orwellian concept, because the notion of surge beds does not mean that our already strapped hospitals will get additional beds; it means that the existing beds will be closed and then reopened at crisis points in the health cycle. So, rather than having additional surge beds, we have fewer beds open full time—and they will be open only part time—as the demands placed on the hospital occur at an even more frantic pace than they currently do.

I would like to quote a gentleman who wrote to me. He said: ‘My wife and I are both 77. We live on the age pension. Even with the government rebate, we pay 14 per cent of our income for health insurance.’ The man told me: ‘We cannot afford not to have private health insurance but we can no longer afford this insurance.’ What is the government going to do for these people? If we have a mass exodus from the private health insurance system, if we have a great many people leaving private health insurance and piling onto the public system, we will have an increase in premiums and we will have an increase in the demand for public hospitals. What we are going to see is more expensive premiums for those who wish to stay in the private system and longer waiting lists for those who are dependent on the public system. For those who are seriously ill, it potentially means much longer waiting lists. It potentially means an even more stressed public hospital system.

I now turn to seniors. I do not recall in my time in this place that any budget in the past ever engendered a demonstration in Melbourne where seniors took off their clothes to highlight their objection to the shoddy way in which the needs of seniors were attended to. Certainly, it shows neglect of our senior citizens. It shows a failure to recognise their needs in the budget at a time when our country is prosperous, at a time when so many people are doing well, at a time when some people are struggling quite clearly—and our pensioners are in that group. They are in a group that needs to be supported, and this budget fails to deliver to them the sort of support that they need.

I would also like to concentrate on the issues for regional Australia. What we see in this budget is the cancelling of the Regional Partnerships program. What we see in this budget is the cancelling of the Sustainable Regions Program. There is a wide range of community groups which have been left in the lurch by this budget. If it were not for the backflip by the responsible minister, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, they would still be left in the lurch. If it were not for the media pressure, they would not be able to participate in their projects. I think it set a very poor precedent that community groups received letters of offer that were not executed and community groups received contracts that were not executed. One would think that a group who had received a contract from the government of the Commonwealth of Australia would be on fairly solid ground to assume that the incoming government would honour the terms and conditions upon which that contract was based. But, no, this government was adamant that it was not going to honour those contracts. This government was going to leave a range of community groups in the lurch. This government was going to basically let all of the hard work by those hardworking volunteers go down the drain because of a matter of ideology. It was not concerned by the loss of many very fine projects.

Sportz Central in my local electorate is an excellent example. It was a project that had achieved funding from local government. It was a project that had achieved funding from the state government. But somehow the minister was able to declare that Sportz Central, a very important sports facility for Coffs Harbour, was a rort. Why would the state government advance funding for a rort? Why would the local council advance funding for a rort?

It is the same with the Valla Community Hall, for instance. The Valla hall committee worked very hard to get their project up. They jumped through hoops, they provided all the information that the department required and at the last minute—at the eleventh hour—the funding was cut in this budget. The people of Valla were very disappointed. The people of Valla felt they had been snubbed by this government. The people of Valla deserve better. If it were not for the pressure on the responsible minister, if it were not for his absolute embarrassment on the Sunrise program, the funding for those projects would not have been reinstated.

There is another range of fine projects that are not being funded. The Sustainable Regions Program is an important one. It funded projects to deliver more jobs in regional areas. We have higher levels of unemployment along the coast and we have less opportunity along the coast. These projects were sorely needed, but what did this government do? It cut the funding. On its own projections, there will be 134,000 fewer jobs across the country. That figure is alarming enough, but when you break it down on an electorate-by-electorate basis there will be well on the way to 1,000 fewer jobs in every electorate in the country. I can tell you that I do not want to see close to 1,000 more people without work in the area I represent. I want to see 1,000 more people in work. I want to see the sorts of projects that were funded by the Sustainable Regions Program going ahead. That means projects like those involving Biodental, Pacific Vetcare and Faircloth and Reynolds in Coffs Harbour. Those organisations were going to put on more people. Those organisations were busy generating jobs and providing goods and services for the region, and they have been left in the lurch by this government. I think it sets a very poor precedent. Contracts had been sent out, discussions were underway, negotiations were taking place and at the eleventh hour in this budget the funding was cut.

I would like to read to you a piece of correspondence I got from Comet Windmills, a company that decentralised from Sydney and is involved in the environmentally sustainable business of building windmills for pumping water and generating and storing electricity. The company is very much at the leading edge of environmentally friendly technology. The letter to me of 15 May said:

We were devastated to learn that the Sustainable Regions Program has been scrapped. This is ridiculous, since the program officially ends on 30 June 2008.

Comet Windmills was striving to get a grant under the Sustainable Regions Program. Comet Windmills wanted to expand and employ more people. Comet Windmills was playing its role in working towards a low-carbon world. It is just one small company in a regional area that is employing people, and it has been cut down and disappointed by this budget.

This budget has come as a great disappointment to the people of regional and rural Australia. It has come as a great disappointment to those who want to grow their businesses. It has come as a great disappointment to those who strive to get ahead. It is a budget that lacks direction. It is a budget that is not going to take us forward in the way we desire. We are living in a country that is a lot less self-assured than it was just six months ago. We live in a country where the confidence that existed under the previous government is evaporating fast. We live in a country that is not going to benefit greatly from this budget.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure for me to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related bills. I follow my National Party colleague the member for Cowper who, true to the traditions of his party, in his speech outlined an extensive expenditure program but no savings, I note. That is part of what I would suggest is the problem with the opposition’s general response to this budget. I well remember that in opposition it was always very important for us as an alternative government to not only outline how we would spend the money in the budget and our priorities but also show that we would do that in a fiscally responsible way. The pressure was always on us to do that. It is interesting to see that the opposition, in response to this budget, has failed to indicate any fiscal responsibility. It is fair enough for an opposition to outline alternative ways to spend or allocate money, but to completely fail to provide any savings or pay-offs for that spending indicates it has given up on making any attempt to retain a reputation for economic responsibility.

I would suggest to the opposition that, while that spending might give them some very short-term sense of wellbeing in the House, over the long term they will pay a price for it. I think the Australian population is educated enough to understand that governments, like families, make choices between competing priorities and that it is very easy for kids, such as those in my family—and I am sure in everybody else’s family—to say: ‘Why don’t we buy this? Why don’t we spend money on that? Why can’t we have something else?’ We learn through the process of growing up that it all costs money, that one priority competes with another for that money and that there is only a limited budget. So, in the process of growing up in opposition, I would suggest to those on the other side of the House that simply outlining a whole lot of potential expenditure without outlining where the revenue would come from or, indeed, how those savings would be made is pretty irresponsible and that, in the longer term, the opposition might want to find a more comprehensive response to budgets than what we have seen from them so far.

The first Rudd Labor government budget is in stark contrast to the first budget of the former Howard government, which will long be remembered, I am sure, as the budget that introduced the terms ‘core and non-core promises’ into our political lexicon. Indeed, I would suggest that that began the process of cynicism and disregard towards the commitments of politicians in this country. The Rudd government’s first budget delivers on the election commitments made by our shadow ministers, sitting members and Labor candidates. Many of them have joined with me in serving as members of the government, and I am pleased to see them on board.

This budget is very economically responsible. Most importantly—for all the talk on the other side about providing relief for the cost of fuel, groceries, child care and other expenses that are hitting families and pensioners—this budget tackles inflation. It is irresponsible not to understand that inflation is the great enemy of those on low and fixed incomes. Giving these people one-off payments, as happened over the last four years under the previous government, without addressing the fact that the cost of living is increasing is a false relief for them. So it is important that we tackle inflation. This ensures that fiscal policy works with monetary policy to maintain a substantial budget surplus.

The budget also provides financial support to low- and middle-income Australians—a commitment that we have made through successive budgets of the previous government, when we argued that we thought their tax concessions were wrongly targeted and that they should be targeted to low- and middle-income Australians. We have delivered on that commitment in this budget.

Importantly, this budget establishes three new investment funds to improve our education; and to renew our hospitals and to address the infrastructure constraints that have been identified by many groups, particularly peak industry groups, as a major problem for our long-term future. This budget reverses the irresponsible spending spree of the former Howard government—a problem that many conservative economic commentators had been raising for quite a long time. This first Labor government budget in 12 long years fundamentally challenges the notion that the coalition were responsible economic managers of the Australian economy.

I am particularly pleased that the centrepiece of the government’s very first budget is the $55 billion Working Families Support Package. Measures within the package will certainly benefit constituents in my electorate. There are four key elements to the government’s support package: firstly, cuts in personal income tax; secondly, reductions in childcare and education costs; thirdly, improvements in housing affordability; and, fourthly, access to high-quality education, training and health care.

The personal income tax measures are the most significant cuts in personal income tax for 20 years. This aspect of the budget has not received the attention it deserves. From 1 July, the government will embark on a four-year tax cutting program. From 1 July, the 30 per cent income tax threshold will rise from $30,001 to $34,001; the 40 per cent threshold will rise from $75,001 to $80,001; and the 45 per cent threshold will rise from $150,001 to $180,001. From 1 July 2009, the 30 per cent rate threshold will rise again by another $1,000 and the existing 40 per cent rate will be cut to 38 per cent. On 1 July 2010, the 30 per cent rate threshold will increase by $2,000 to take it to $37,001 and the 38 per cent rate will be cut by one per cent to 37 per cent.

At the same time, and importantly for many of our constituents that we are most concerned about, the low-income tax offset will be increased over the next four years. These increases will create an effective tax-free threshold for low-income earners of $14,000 in 2008-09, increasing by $2,000 to $16,000 in 2010-11. The government’s objective by 2013-14 is to ensure that the number of income tax rates that apply to income in Australia is reduced to just three: 15 per cent, 30 per cent and 40 per cent. This is real tax reform for Australian income earners. Over the next four years, Australians will receive real, effective tax relief that will encourage participation and productivity. The government’s tax policy will deliver tax relief where it is most needed and most effective: amongst Australia’s low- and middle-income households.

Just this year, 2008-09, the tax saving estimated for an individual on an average income in households in my electorate—that is $51,000 a year—will be $1,000 for the year. The government, in a further effort to help Australian lower- and middle-income families, has also increased the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. This rebate will be paid every three months, instead of once a year, to relieve the budget of the family. The government has also introduced an education tax refund to assist families with children at primary and secondary school. The education tax refund will be available starting this financial year, at a rebate of 50 per cent. That means an eligible parent will receive up to $750 for each child attending primary school and $1,500 for each child attending secondary school, at the 50 per cent rebate. This is real, effective financial assistance to families when they need it most.

I am also very pleased the government has allocated $1.2 billion to help first home buyers save for a house, by contributing to the enhanced First Home Saver Accounts program. I know that in Wollongong, even with stable house prices, the challenge for many young people to save for and buy a house is an enormous struggle.

I also want to address the fact that the government has—unfairly, in my view—been accused of not providing assistance to pensioners and seniors. Senior Australians will be up to $400, on average, better off under the first budget of the Labor government—in contrast to the policies of the Howard government. Under this budget, senior Australians have been provided with the $500 bonus, a bonus that was not guaranteed by the previous government to be delivered in this financial year. It was never guaranteed in any year to the next but was totally reliant on their generosity, depending on the surplus. That will be delivered. Carers are eligible for $1,000, and an additional $600 will be paid to those in receipt of the carer allowance. These measures, in recognition of rising costs and their impact on pensioners and other senior Australians, will cost $1.8 billion.

In an additional and important measure, pensioners will, for the first time, have a new reference for the twice-yearly indexation of pensions. The highest reference of either the CPI, male total average weekly earnings or the living cost index for aged pensioner households will determine the indexation of pensions from now on—an issue that was raised consistently by pensioner advocacy groups. We have taken on board their requests and have put this in place. Starting in March this year, the government has also increased the utilities allowance from $127 per year to $500. This allowance is also now paid quarterly to provide greater alleviation to the family budget. The telephone allowance has increased from $88 to $132 for those pensioners with internet connection—and there are many of them; they regularly email and send us messages. In this budget the government has allocated $150 million to ensure that all concession card holders have equal access to concessions for public transport throughout Australia.

The government continues, of course, to ensure the viability of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which is a very important public subsidy for medicines provided to Australian concession card holders. Indeed, the government’s commitment to recognising the contribution of pensioners and senior Australians is evidenced by the budget papers—that is, nearly $36 billion has been allocated to funding services to the aged in Australia. The budget, importantly, tackles inflation, which is the great enemy of people on fixed incomes such as pensions. No matter how much you increase the amount that they are getting, if you allow inflation to run rampant and eat away at the value of that then you are doing them a great disservice. The government does accept that there needs to be a review of the level of the pension in light of these challenges, and I am very encouraged that the government has established a comprehensive review of Australia’s tax and retirement incomes system. That review will assess the pension and other government retirement income issues.

At a local level, I want to acknowledge— very quickly because I have spoken at length on these issues previously—that the budget delivered $300,000 to conduct a prefeasibility study into the completion of a very important rail link for the economic development of Wollongong and the port of Kembla—that is, the Maldon-Dombarton rail link. I pledged this funding during the last election and I am very pleased to see this important infrastructure get its start. I am looking forward to a series of meetings in the next few weeks with interested people and stakeholders to get this study underway.

I have to say that I am pleased the government has established Infrastructure Australia. As a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services under the previous government, I think we did a very important review of and report on the future rail task in Australia. The consistent message from many, many players and partners in industry in the area of infrastructure provision was that they felt that there needed to be an independent national coordinating body, and that is what Infrastructure Australia will deliver.

I am similarly pleased with the government’s establishment of the Building Australia Fund, as I am certain that, through this fund Wollongong and the wider Illawarra region will be able to put a comprehensive case for the funding of a range of road and rail projects, a task that was very difficult in opposition because we never got very much at all from the previous government. In fact, Port Kembla is probably the only port on the eastern seaboard that is underutilised because no federal money has gone into developing the links for freight movement into that port. I hope to see that change.

I also want to acknowledge the $230,000 provided to WIN Entertainment Centre and WIN Stadium for fencing and a new rigging system. Many of the young people in my area who enjoy watching performances of bands and sporting events will appreciate that.

Importantly, all of the pledges made by me to my constituents have been delivered in this first budget. It is a responsible budget. It is in stark contrast to the very irresponsible budget reply by the Leader of the Opposition. This budget maintains a substantial surplus. It balances the functions of fiscal and monetary policy with the intention of taking the pressure off interest rates and inflation—the great enemies of the people that we seek to represent in this place.

In contrast, the coalition knows not whether to raid the surplus, cut spending or increase taxes. None of the measures announced by the Leader of the Opposition comes with a budget plan. We are in the dark as to whether the coalition will increase taxes to fund it, cut spending or raid the surplus. How will the coalition fund its budget reply initiatives? We simply do not know—and, I suspect, neither does the opposition. The shadow Treasurer said as much to the National Press Club. I think he is correct and I think the Treasurer should be commended for bringing down a responsible budget that builds a solid foundation for the future of our nation. I commend the bill to the Main Committee.

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

It is interesting that Labor, during the election campaign, had lots of talk about plans for the future, but the reality, as delivered by the budget, shows a lack of vision and a lack of strategic planning or coherent direction. Before the election, the then Leader of the Opposition kept telling us that he had a plan for this and he had a plan for that. In reality, his only plan was to become Prime Minister.

Let us have a look at some of the issues that have a lot of unintended consequences—for instance, the removal of the condensate exemption, which will result in a net gain of revenue of $2.43 billion but will significantly damage the international competitiveness of the resources industry. The government have also decided to reintroduce the CPI increase on the diesel excise levy. Obviously, this will result in increased costs of transport, and this is inflationary. Increased costs to mining also reduce productivity, and hence the tax take. And increased costs to agriculture are inflationary and threaten farmers’ livelihoods.

There is the so-called alcopops tax—increasing the tax on alcopops, theoretically to reduce binge drinking. But binge drinking has actually reduced over the last five or so years with the target audience of young women, and projections by Treasury show a four per cent reduction in the consumption of ready-to-drinks compared with before the increased tax. HBF’s Western Australian data show that ready-to-drinks comprise only three per cent of what 18- to 21-year-olds are drinking, compared with 51 per cent for spirits. Those over 30 consume ready-to-drinks at greater percentages than those in the 18 to 21 group. This shows that Labor are completely illiterate regarding statistics—and perhaps that is why they have cut the ABS budget. Of importance is reducing the overall alcohol consumption in binge-drinking situations, not just ready-to-drinks, where substitution of other forms of alcohol is already happening. In summary, looking at a massive tax increase on ready-to-drinks is supposed to decrease use of a product that only three per cent of the target group use, and that reduction is only by four per cent. This is two-thirds of stuff-all, I would suggest.

Then there is the area of science, a discipline that is critical to Australia’s advancement. Scientific research is vital in the development of solutions to many problems, as well as pure research. So what do the Labor government do? They cut CSIRO’s budget so significantly that CSIRO will shed 100 jobs and four divisions. What a travesty! What hypocrisy! And that is before we even get to cuts to ANSTO—probably purely based on political antinuclear ideology. The government have also slashed the Commercial Ready program, which, in the past, funded clinical trials for cancer treatments and the high-risk biotech sector. So much for R&D! On 1 November 2000 and in February 2007, the current Prime Minister extolled the virtue of research and development, especially in universities, and feigned outrage at the policies of the coalition. This man has now slashed CSIRO funding. Fine words; black deeds.

Then, worst of all, in the areas of energy and the environment the government are shown to be clueless hypocrites. We had Peter Garrett decrying the coalition government’s environment policy when in opposition. On an almost weekly basis he complained about our policy for solar power generation, stating that we had been world leaders in solar technology, particularly photovoltaics, but were no longer so. Now Labor are in government, and it is instructive to compare rhetoric with action. Far from delivering a policy to enhance the photovoltaic industry, the Rudd Labor government have introduced a policy that is likely to kill the entire industry in Australia. The Rudd government have introduced a budget measure that will dissuade essentially the only people who will be able to afford solar panels on the roof—those earning over $100,000—from doing so by cutting the solar rebate. That is grubby Labor politics of envy winning out over good policy, I would suggest.

Look at Labor rhetoric on carbon dioxide emissions and contrast that with their actions. State Labor governments in New South Wales and Western Australia have decided to build new coal-fired power stations. What happened to gas, never mind renewables or—God forbid, in the eyes of some Labor and particularly Greens members—nuclear power? This seems to be a pattern: a lot of whingeing about problems when in opposition but nary a solution when in government. Labor’s spin puts youths with hotted-up cars doing burnouts to shame. We have news, however, of a new baseload gas-fired power station in New South Wales which effectively puts the carbon cost at two cents per kilowatt hour for coal-fired power stations. This will make electricity far more expensive and make nuclear power extremely cost-competitive. Think what this carbon price will do to petrol prices.

The Labor Party, the party that promised in an election campaign to put maximum downward pressure on petrol prices, will be slugging hard-pressed motorists with far higher petrol prices. We put downward pressure on petrol prices. Indeed, the proportion of tax take from fuel has gone down from 6.6 per cent to 4.8 per cent in the last six years. That is real downward pressure. Perhaps the media and others have misunderstood the Labor catchphrase. Perhaps when Labor were saying ‘working families’ they were actually saying ‘walking families’ to prepare Australia for this very crisis. This will no doubt be explained away as a measure to solve another crisis that Labor will no doubt bring forward when they are next under pressure: the obesity epidemic. Not being able to afford petrol will clearly assist in that regard—irony intended.

An opposition that promised a long-term plan for the future has mutated into a government scrambling desperately for ideas, throwing up short-sighted, ill thought out policy that exacerbates the very problems that Labor promised to solve. Where is the long-term coherent policy and strategy? It is nowhere to be seen in this budget. There are just a whole lot of punitive measures, slush funds and inevitable spin. It just will not wash.

Let us have a look at the future and what we can do. In going around my electorate of Tangney, I have heard people express concern that they see no light at the end of the tunnel regarding petrol. Not only do they worry about increasing fuel prices; they worry that there will not be any fuel at all for their vehicles. What is the government doing? These are issues of sovereign risk and sovereign energy security, which are clearly critical for our long-term future. What the government is doing is nothing more than attempting to wallpaper over gaping cracks in its policies.

I have already spoken at length of the necessity to consider nuclear energy, so I will not dwell on it. I would just urge the government to fully and critically examine and analyse all potential electricity generation methods. We need a comprehensive national energy strategy. This is something that is clearly not on the cards with this government.

But what about petrol and other oil based products? It may shock you to learn that there is an essentially Third World nation that obtains fully one-third of its fuel synthetically and has done so for 50 years. The country is the nation of my birth, South Africa, and the process is Sasol. Rugby Union fans would probably have wondered what ‘Sasol’ across the Springboks jumper meant. You are about to find out.

Sasol is an oil-from-coal process that uses the Fischer-Tropsch process, developed prior to World War II. Germany produced synthetic fuel during the war using this process. It was further developed in South Africa, and Sasol fuels began to be sold 50 years ago. This process was largely ignored in the rest of the world due to the expense of the process, but from South Africa’s perspective in the apartheid days it was essential from an energy security point of view. A benefit of the fuel is that it is extremely clean. Just as synthetic engine oil has virtually no impurities, the same holds for synthetic petrol. The really good news is that the fuel that was ignored due to costs is now remarkably cheap. The Sasol process produces oil for between $27 and $55 a barrel. Somehow I do not think we will have oil prices quite that low again. The United States is showing significant interest in the process, as are many other nations. Where are we?

The green disciples of anthropogenic global warming will oppose this process, as it is relatively carbon dioxide intensive. But let us take the time to examine some of the pseudoscience on which this whole anthropogenic global warming belief is based. Let us also examine how these disciples act and how they are reported. First, I find some of the commentary coming from some of the anthropogenic global warming zealots extremely perplexing. We hear that the rate of increase of global temperature is faster than the science predicted. But what is actually happening?

I have three graphs: one from the third IPCC assessment report and two from the fourth assessment report. All of the projections show an increase from the year 2000, even if the graph for carbon dioxide is held constant at year 2000 levels. I repeat: all the projections show an increase over the last decade. But what do actual measurements show? I have many charts showing the global temperature as measured by four groups, including the Hadley centre, whose data is officially used by the IPCC. This data shows that the temperature has flatlined over the last 10 years. Observation does not fit theory and yet the theory is deemed correct.

A classic example of rejecting facts which do not fit the theory is the temperature graph over the last 1,000 years and the use of tree ring and tree density data as a proxy for temperature. There is a well-known problem when comparing tree ring and density data with temperature data over the last 140 years. Between 1860 and 1960, the data agreed reasonably well. After 1960, there is a divergence. The tree ring and density data indicate that temperatures have decreased, where measurements have actually indicated an increase. If you look at the IPCC graphs, the tree proxy data ends abruptly at—you guessed it—1960.

Keith Briffa, a lead author of the IPCC, in the chapter relating to tree proxy data had this to say of the divergence problem:

In the absence of a substantiated explanation for the decline, we make the assumption that it is likely to be a response to some kind of recent anthropogenic forcing. On the basis of this assumption, the pre-twentieth century part of the reconstructions can be considered to be free from similar events and thus accurately represent past temperature variability.

In other words, we do not know how the hell to explain the post-1960 data, so we will just blame humans and accept that all the earlier data is correct because that fits neatly with our paradigm. This is what a friend of mine refers to as ‘situating the appreciation rather than appreciating the situation’. You make the facts fit the theory when you should make the theory fit the facts.

If global temperature is not heating as predicted, maybe this elusive heat is going into the oceans. Not so. Three thousand oceanic robots that dive up to 1,000 metres have been measuring ocean temperatures since 2003 and show, if anything, a slight decrease and certainly not an increase. So where has the heat gone? IPCC coordinating lead author Kevin Trenberth has stated:

... none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models.

According to Kevin Trenberth, the lost heat is probably going back out to space. He says the earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can trap heat, turn up the temperature or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet. So why is none of this reflected in the modelling? It is situating the appreciation again.

This whole issue of anthropogenic global warming has all the classic hallmarks of religion. There are the high priests—the Gores, the Flannerys et cetera of the world, who talk the talk but are utterly hypocritical when it comes to walking their talk. There is the concept of original sin, being industry and carbon dioxide, and the whole issue of penance or paying the price for your actions. This is the way we have to pay for the use of industry which is emitting carbon dioxide. The high priests, however, can get away with their profligate lifestyle by buying indulgences, also known as carbon credits, and so continue to sin. Hence, we have Flannery jetting here, there and everywhere and Gore, similarly, with just one of his residences—one of three, I might add—consuming 20 times as much energy as the average American household. That is how concerned he is about global warming in reality.

The media indulge the high priests, castigating the many heretics who dare to differ. Yet they let the high priests off, not scrutinising their statements as the media should. Take Flannery’s suggestion, for example, of putting sulphur into the atmosphere, using terribly polluting aircraft to disperse it. What a delicious irony! For those who know a bit of chemistry, what happens when you mix sulphur, water and oxygen? You get sulphuric acid, also known as acid rain. I guess that is the price that we need to pay for our sin. But why has the media not lampooned Flannery, who is supposed to be a global warming expert scientist of the highest order, for such a ridiculous proposal? It is political correctness of the highest and most unconscionable order.

So what we have is a more and more desperate anthropogenic global warming theory supporters club who, when the data indicates that the planet has not been heating for the last 10 years and the oceans have not heated for at least the last five, tell us that global warming is happening even more quickly than the theory predicts. After all, the models must be right, just like the bookies must always be right with predictions on match or racing results. The problem is that this religion based around the false god of a controllable and naturally benign climate is going to hurt every man, woman and child in Australia as a result of significantly higher fuel and energy prices and consequent increases in the cost of living, particularly food. Groceries and fuel and so on are going to go up significantly—estimates say by approximately 10c to 30c per litre for petrol alone. This government is clearly quite happy with that, and that is a tragedy for many Australians.

Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak in support of Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the cognate bills, as they epitomise the reasons for my signing on to the Rudd Labor team. For 12 long years the Howard government sat idly by while the world left them behind. They chose to fiddle while Rome burned, as climate change, skills shortages, inadequate national infrastructure, regulatory and structural deficiencies and the failure to adequately resource the education and training sector placed us at a grave competitive disadvantage.

For 12 years they relied solely on the benefits of the macroeconomic and industrial reforms of the Hawke-Keating governments and the mining boom. In that time the Howard government only had two ideas, to introduce a new tax—the GST—and Work Choices. That was it. That was the best they could do in 12 years. That was the full scope of their grand nation-building vision and forward thinking for this country. They were like monkeys riding an elephant when it came to the economy. They had no idea where it was going, they were not able to control it and they were just enjoying the ride.

While the Howard government failed miserably when it came to macroeconomic imagination, they were nevertheless quite creative when it came to economic mismanagement. In particular I have been appalled at the mess I have inherited in Eden-Monaro as a consequence of the shambolic pork barrel that was Regional Partnerships under the coalition. I was staggered to find that last year 100 Regional Partnerships promises had been made in Eden-Monaro alone!

If it had merely been that this was a case of indiscriminate and profligate spending that would be bad enough. In so many cases, however, organisations in Eden-Monaro were misled by promises that the ‘money was in the bank’, which was simply not true, and in a number of cases with no application having been submitted. Many of these organisations will now have to submit applications under new Labor schemes. So many of these projects breached the program’s guidelines or lacked required documentation. These were reviewed against the coalition’s own Regional Partnerships program guidelines and mostly found not to conform. Nor were they costed and budgeted with the same rigor that was applied to our election undertakings.

In determining which projects should be approved, the Rudd Labor government has been obliged to take into consideration the scathing Australian National Audit Office report on the program, which found the Howard government responsible for political bias associated with the allocations and process and for the breach of government financial standards which highlighted the failure of a number of projects to achieve defined outcomes. The report specifically stated that the program ‘fell short of acceptable standards of public administration’.

The report also showed that more than $110 million or a third of the program’s funds was pumped into just 10 coalition seats. We now know that around $2 million of Regional Partnerships money was poured into Bondi, the home turf of the member for Wentworth. How on earth Bondi could qualify for Regional Partnerships money is beyond me. That program was intended to assist struggling rural and regional Australia. The only cow you will see in Bondi is a coalition cash cow. How cynical had they become? How symbolic was this of their betrayal of the bush? I welcome the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government’s inquiry into the Regional Partnerships program, as there are aspects of the way it was operated that cry out for further investigation.

This practice was not confined to Regional Partnerships, however. Another glaring example in Eden-Monaro was the election promise that $11 million had been locked away for an upgrade of Gocup Road between Tumut and Gundagai. This road has not even been designated as a state road, and no arrangements had been entered into with the state government to complete the project. When this was revealed, they claimed that they had ‘a wink and a nod’ from the state. This was simply untrue. The final insult was our discovery that the so-called ‘locked away money’ was simply not there. And yet still the member for Riverina tries to perpetuate these Howard government deceptions, adding the false new claim that I ‘stole’ the $11 million for the Gocup Road for use on the Bega bypass. This demonstrates yet again the contempt of the member for Riverina, and the continuing coalition contempt, for rural and regional Australia. Is it any wonder that the bush is abandoning the coalition and the National Party is disappearing?

All this confirms how true the reflections of the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins, were when criticising the former Prime Minister for his short-sighted and irresponsible approach to government spending. What do we see now from the heirs of that pale, stunted and tawdry legacy? What was their dynamic and visionary plan in response to the budget to confront the challenges that face this nation? It was to cut the fuel excise by 5c a litre, to irresponsibly gouge out $22 billion in revenue without any plan to compensate for this. Breathtaking! Through this they have demonstrated that they are worthy heirs of the Howard legacy. What have we heard from them as to how they would tackle the much larger energy security question of how we deal with future oil shocks and dwindling supplies of easily-won resources? What do they say about climate change and how this can be risk and consequence managed? How would they deal with the infrastructure choke points and constraints that have developed over the last 12 years? What measures would they take to lift the dead hand of duplication and conflicting regulation in our federal system? There is a deafening silence from the opposition on all this, but it is a silence that speaks volumes as to the intellectual bankruptcy that is the coalition.

In stark contrast to that sorry tale, I am intensely proud of the first budget of the Rudd Labor government. This budget proves the broader vision and courage of the government to prepare for the longer term economic social and physical security of this country. It is essential for us to avoid the so-called Dutch disease that threatens us at present. Named after the effect of the North Sea oil resource boom on the Dutch economy, this describes the dynamic whereby resource exports cause a country’s currency to rise in value, making non-resource exports—which might be good for technological, or, for that matter, agricultural progress—uncompetitive. Reliance on the resource boom also masks the need for essential reforms to deepen, broaden and strengthen the underlying economy. That is why the Rudd Labor government has adopted measures that will benefit us greatly in the years ahead. At the same time, we recognise that there is a need to maintain our social cohesion and deal with the daily struggles of working families and the disadvantaged. The remarkable thing about this budget is that it manages to balance these competing dynamics.

One of the things that so angered me about the previous government was their betrayal of rural and regional Australia. I was personally delighted, therefore, to be able to win for Eden-Monaro support for a number of critical projects and save others under threat because of the Regional Partnerships fiasco. We also stand to gain from national projects such as the $2.2 billion provided for the Caring for Our Country program. This will generate a new, coordinated approach to environmental management and strengthen the role of farmers in the delivery of environmental services.

Other rural initiatives include $760 million for ongoing support for exceptional circumstance declared areas in 2008-09, $130 million over four years for Australia’s Farming Future initiative and $35 million for the Regional Food Producers Innovation and Productivity Program. There will be $20 million to help Australia’s forest industries, so important to Eden-Monaro, to prepare for the future, including coping with climate change and skills shortages. There is also $15.3 million in new measures to fight the critical weed menace that is seriously threatening our farmers, which I was proud to have gotten on the agenda during the campaign last year. This includes $300,000 for the national eradication of fireweed project and $15 million to set up the Australian Weeds Research Centre. This is in stark contrast to the previous government, which was pulling the plug on funding for the weeds CRC, effectively killing it from the end of June 2008.

Working families and the disadvantaged will see that this budget helps them cope with day-to-day cost of living pressures through our $55 billion Working Families Support Package. Initiatives include cutting income tax, reducing the costs 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.

Older Australians and carers will benefit from $2.4 billion in additional support next year, and a lot of that help will flow into Eden-Monaro.

We are investing $5.9 billion over five years in the education revolution with initiatives in the areas of early childhood education, schools, vocational training and higher education.

We will spend $2.3 billion over five years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This will help our local community group Clean Energy for Eternity achieve its goals. I am at work to complement this by holding discussions with industry and scientists to establish solar, biomass and methane renewable energy projects in Eden-Monaro. Included is the $100,000 I obtained to fund a feasibility study for a solar farm project in the Bega Valley, with a further $1 million to support building the project from our Green Precincts program.

Eden-Monaro will also get its fair share of benefits from the $11 billion Education Investment Fund for improvements in our TAFEs and universities, and the $20 billion Building Australia Fund for ongoing improvements in our roads, ports, railways and telecommunications.

Most pleasing of all, the Rudd Labor government has heard the pleas of the bush to do something about the rural and regional health crisis. With the establishment of the Office of Rural Health we stand to get crucial assistance under the $10 billion Health and Hospitals Fund.

All in all this is a budget that delivers for the future of this country while at the same time tackling the problems of today. Our children will have cause to be grateful that in 2008 there was at last a government that was prepared to make the big decisions.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to address the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related bills. I am the representative of the people of Grey, by any description a regionally and rurally focused seat. As a new member of parliament I come to this House still believing that whatever side of the House we sit on we are here to service not just our electorates but Australia as a whole. I am therefore more than a little disillusioned to find that we now have a government that is focused on providing for two Australias—those who have Labor members and those who do not. This is a pretty rich kind of attitude to take considering the Labor Party’s criticisms of the Regional Partnerships program, but more of that later. I am disappointed that I have just lost the audience of the member for Eden-Monaro, as he listed off the things that his electorate had been fortunate enough to gain from the Labor government. He should have a good talk with his friend the member for Corangamite.

I listened with great interest to the new member for Corangamite as he spent a good five minutes of his address in thanking the government for the largesse in his seat—$20 million for an Innovative Regions Centre; $30 million for the next stage of a ring route; money for extra road upgrades; $10 million for a water recycling project, which, by the sounds of his speech, is yet to even get approval from the relevant water authority. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But there is more: $30.8 million for a university; $7 million for a GP superclinic; $4 million for a sports precinct, providing two new football ovals, three more soccer pitches, half-a-dozen more netball courts and a shared pavilion. And there is still more: lighting for projects for two sporting facilities; $3 million for a Leisurelink facility; upgrades to a senior citizens centre and a community house; $1 million for a weeds project on the side of a highway; and an upgrade to a surf lifesaving club. That is $105 million. I am sure that all these worthy community organisations will be thrilled with the largesse of the government—but, boy, they must have thought they were dealing with Father Christmas. There is no doubt that, if the Labor Party are into buying a seat, they know no equal. The good general Stewart McArthur did not stand a chance. He was fighting one of Santa’s little helpers!

I draw the House’s attention to an article by Lenore Taylor in today’s Australian titled ‘PM rolls out pork barrel of his own’. The article points out that, under the government’s $176 million Better Regions Program, 33 of 34 grants, worth a total of $145.96 million, went to either marginal Labor held or targeted seats. The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government has admitted the government is still writing the guidelines for these projects. No wonder it is taking some time. The government has to write the guidelines so that the projects it promised can fit the criteria.

This comes from a Labor government that have loudly condemned the previous government for the Regional Partnerships program. Perhaps someone from the government could tell me how this fits with the Prime Minister’s commitment to clear public administration. Is it a fact that there is no process? Or is it just, as ex-senator Graham Richardson used to say, ‘whatever it takes’? The Labor Party decided that what it took was for them to target every seat they believed they had to win to form government and throw money at it until the citizens gave in. What a sad indictment this is of a government just six months old—a government the Prime Minister pledged would govern for all Australians.

What did this budget offer for the people of Grey? It has cancelled the highly successful and lauded Community Water Grants program. Can you imagine that—in the middle of the biggest water crisis Australia has ever faced? It shows just what standing the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts is held in within cabinet. This scheme has delivered 40 gigalitres of annual savings in water around Australia for a total cost of $327 million. Compare this with the planned desalination plant in my home state of South Australia—a very worthy project—in Adelaide’s south, which produces 50 gigalitres of water annually for $1.3 million.

Projects in local communities make a real difference. The Port Pirie water recycling plant is a project so worthy that, when the previous government committed to supporting it during the election campaign, the now Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government was moved to say on ABC Radio:

Labor has set a target of recycling 30 per cent of waste-water by 2015, and Labor will support practical water recycling projects ...

He said that Labor, if elected, would ‘give the Port Pirie water recycling plant proposal urgent attention’. I say to the minister and to the Minister for Climate Change and Water: we have passed the six-month mark. How about that urgent attention? How about the water recycling scheme in Port Pirie—the water recycling scheme that will provide 1.3 gigalitres of water for just $9 million? Does the government have any idea how desperate the water crisis facing Australia is?

The government has cancelled the Regional Partnerships program, and at this stage, if we take into context the largesse showered upon targeted electorates, we would have to say it has replaced it with a targeted ‘elect Labor program’. However, I must congratulate the government that after intense public pressure it has now discovered that these projects were not rorts, were not badly vetted and were, in fact, good-quality programs which deserved its support.

In my electorate alone I have three extremely worthy projects that received government approval before the election and, in the case of at least one, were just caught up in some late minor alterations to wording on contracts which resulted in the government claiming that these were incomplete; thus, they plan not to honour the commitments. One example of these very worthy schemes was the Gladstone Laura recovery project. This project had a number of initiatives aimed at helping these towns re-establish after a tragic, devastating explosion three years ago resulted in three young men losing their lives and, ultimately, the loss of the community’s major employer. This was a pact to help these small towns get back on their feet. As is the case with all these projects, they are partnerships.

I am glad that the government now concedes the Regional Partnerships program was doing exactly what it was designed to do—that is, encourage communities to help themselves to identify the need, draw together a partnership to support it and then get a helping hand with some return on their tax dollars and some return to the regions of the resources boom to allow it all to happen. If the government now recognises what a great program this was, it should reinstate it.

In light of the wonderful largesse showered upon the electorates that the government sought to buy off, what else is there in the budget for the electorate of Grey? They have axed the Investing in Our Schools Program, and if the government think they have some natural pact with the education community I suggest they come and have a talk with some of the schools in my electorate, because they are incredulous that this program is being scrapped. Capital projects identified by parents and teachers as being of the most benefit to their campuses are being replaced by a one-size-fits-all computer pledge which is less than 50 per cent funded. Projects included support for schools to reroof leaking classrooms, to extend and improve playgrounds, to install interactive whiteboards and to set up specialised state-of-the-art classrooms for music, catering and, in many cases, computer rooms and systems, if that is what the school identified as the area of need. As I said, teachers and parents are scratching their heads with disbelief that the government would axe this program.

The budget has taken another swipe at regional and rural Australia with a lift in the luxury car tax. There are many regions in Australia where four-wheel drives are not a luxury. Dirt roads, often rough and with loose surfaces, are a fact of life. Extra safety, clearance and control in wet weather are all necessary requirements of these vehicles. With the price of a fairly standard Toyota Landcruiser in excess of $80,000, for those who live in regional Australia and need vehicles in this range as standard equipment, it is a kick in the guts. Similarly, for those who need oversize vehicles to accommodate family members with disabilities, this is an unfair impost—an impost on those who do the most to contribute to our community by caring for a loved one in their home.

The axing of the FarmBis program is, once again, just a cheap shot at rural Australia. This program has been the vehicle and stimulus to upskill our rural communities, and this is a time when we are being challenged like never before by climatic conditions in Australia. The most troubling of all these decisions is the intent. There can be no doubt that the government has lined up regional and rural Australia in its sights as an easy target to finance the largesse I spoke of earlier. This assault on regional and rural Australia is a continuation of the well-adopted form shown before the election. Rises in fuel excise and registration for heavy transport, which will feed into higher fuel and grocery prices, will impact most on those who use transport most—that is, regional Australia—and this at a time when the Prime Minister created an expectation out in the electorate that the Labor Party would lower fuel and grocery costs.

I do welcome the tax cuts but we should remember where they came from. The Labor Party had no tax policy at the beginning of the election. Peter Costello delivered the tax cuts. They were the dividend of years of superior management of the economy, of reducing the $96 billion of Labor debt, of savings for the future, of reforming the tax system and the labour market to promote productivity and competitiveness in the world. The Treasurer now claims they were his idea, when in fact he had no idea. But I am pleased that they have been delivered.

We need to look at what has been missed in this budget. The aged care and pensioner section of our community has been overlooked. Since the election I have been making a habit of dropping into aged-care facilities and, as I travel around my electorate, almost all are, at best, breaking even. Most are losing money and are looking to a future where they need to upgrade and extend facilities to meet the rising demand. There was very little in the budget for these centres. Pensioners have been treated with total disregard. A rise in the utilities allowance—once again, a Peter Costello gift—is the sum total of the Labor Party’s commitment to the pensioners of Australia, although they claim the pensioner bonus, which of course has been par for the course for the last number of years.

This government, after being presented with one of the best performing economies in the world, with some of the biggest surpluses in the developed world, no government debt and 35-year low unemployment, has gone out and vindictively targeted regional Australia by focusing on cutting programs that support this very important productive sector of our economy, just because it can. This is not a government for all Australians. It is an opportunist government committed only to its own survival, and this budget exposes clearly just what that agenda is.

Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, on bringing down the first Rudd government budget. It really is a budget that this country has needed for a very long period of time. This is the first budget we have had in many years that looks to the long-term future of our country as opposed to looking to the short-term electoral prospects of the Liberal Party of Australia. It is a budget which is absolutely for the people of this country.

There are three pillars to this budget. The first is that this budget is about tight fiscal management. It provides for a surplus of $21.7 billion, 1.8 per cent of GDP. That is coupled with the lowest real increase in government spending in nearly a decade. So, according to Goldman Sachs and much to the embarrassment of the member for Wentworth, we have for the first time fiscal policy and monetary policy pulling in the same direction. High interest rates are a legacy left to this country as a result of 12 long years of the Howard government. It is going to take some time to fight the inflation battle, but at least we now have all guns of public policy in this country aimed at fighting that battle with fiscal policy, for the first time in a long time, pulling in the same direction as monetary policy.

The second pillar of this budget is that it is a nation-building budget. This is a budget which is aimed at providing a number of funds, totalling $40 billion, which will produce much needed infrastructure in this country. There is the $20 billion Building Australia Fund, which will direct money into road, rail, ports and broadband. That will be managed by Infrastructure Australia, which is also another initiative of this budget. There is the $11 billion Education Investment Fund, which will provide for an education revolution in this country, and there is the $10 billion Health and Hospitals Fund.

One of the key reasons that we are facing an inflationary environment at the moment is the capacity constraints in the economy which have been ignored due to 12 years of neglect on the part of the Howard government, despite 20 separate Reserve Bank of Australia warnings about those capacity constraints. One of the key constraints in, and one of the key bottlenecks of, the economy is infrastructure, so having a nation-building budget which looks to address those particular capacity constraints is obviously critical to building our country and also critical to maintaining the fight against inflation.

The third pillar of this budget is that it meets the election commitments that were made by Rudd Labor in the lead-up to the election last year. What Rudd Labor promised in the lead-up to the election, Rudd Labor will do in government. So the budget does deliver: $47 billion in personal income tax cuts over a four-year period; the $55 billion Working Families Support Package, with spending to increase the childcare tax rebate; spending on housing with the establishment of first home saver accounts; and spending on education through, for example, the education tax refund. That is just a small sample of a range of election commitments that were made in the lead-up to the last election. All of these measures find their way into this budget, so this is a budget which absolutely honours the electoral mandate that Rudd Labor got in November last year.

That stands in stark contrast to the 12 years of the Howard government. We do not regard promises as being categorised as ‘core promises’ or ‘non-core promises’. If a promise was made in the lead-up to the last election then we delivered it in this budget. The critics seem to agree with us. TD Securities senior strategist Joshua Williamson said:

There is certainly a lot in there for infrastructure and federalism generally. I think it is generally favourable for the market.

The reaction of Michael Blythe, the Chief Economist of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was reported in this way: ‘Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief economist Michael Blythe said the budget had exceeded expectations, as the Treasurer announced bigger than forecast spending cuts to battle inflation.’ ACCI Chief Executive Peter Anderson said of the budget:

“It’s good on infrastructure, it’s good on workforce skills and it makes good progress on reducing the size of government expenditure.

This budget and the clear direction that is within it stand in stark contrast to the Howard years—the Howard government, which gave us 15 interest rate rises during its term in office, including 10 successive interest rate rises from 2002 through until the end of its term. This budget is clearly consistent with all the messages that Rudd Labor has been giving both in the lead-up to the election and since. Whereas this is clearly a Labor budget and there are no surprises in this budget in terms of the crystal clear direction that this government has, the Liberals have been all over the place. They are struggling to find where they are in this world. They are at sea. The only thing they can hang on to is being opposed to anything that Rudd Labor puts up. At one moment there is an inflation problem in this country, according to the Liberals; the next moment there is not. At one moment they are saying that there do not need to be spending cuts and the next moment they are saying that there have not been enough spending cuts. The only contribution they have been able to make to this debate is to blow a $22 billion hole in the budget surplus with their promise to reduce fuel excise by 5c.

Again, this is a typical example of the Liberal Party looking to the short-term prospects of their own agenda, as opposed to looking to the long-term future of this country. This is an irresponsible decision. There is not an economist in Australia who would suggest that this is good for the economy. It will absolutely put upward pressure on inflation, which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates. That promise, while there may be some short-term gain in the day-to-day polls, will be an albatross around the neck of the Liberal Party leading into the next election. It will particularly be an albatross around the neck of the member for Wentworth, who absolutely understands that this is bad economics. It is bad policy but, as far as he is concerned, it is worth supporting because it is good politics.

That says everything about the Liberal Party: the triumph of good politics over good policy. That is what the member for Wentworth stands for and, ultimately, that is what the Leader of the Opposition stands for. These are two men who originally sought some form of public life on this side of the House, in the Labor Party, but, unable to do that, have pursued their own personal agendas through the Liberal Party. Their statement about where they are in their political life is all about the triumph of good politics over good policy, of good politics over any personal ideology. So this decision to reduce fuel excise by 5c will absolutely hang around their necks like an albatross in the lead-up to the next election and beyond.

Can I say a few words about how this budget impacts on Geelong, and in particular how this budget impacts on the nation-building side of it—the building of infrastructure. Geelong is a very good example of how this nation needs to invest more in its infrastructure and how that in turn can help the productive capacity of the country and remove some of those bottlenecks and capacity constraints in the economy. In Geelong we have the potential to be a transport and logistics hub not just for the region and for the state of Victoria but for the country.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Located in a corner of Australia, with Adelaide and Perth to our west and Sydney and Brisbane to our north, Geelong is strategically located to be a transport and logistics hub for Australia. In the northern suburbs of Geelong, we have the confluence of a number of mediums of transport, which is really the opportunity that exists. The port of Geelong, which is the reason Geelong is where it is on Corio Bay, handles 25 per cent of Victorian exports. It deals with 12 million tonnes of cargo commodities every year—fertiliser, wheat, woodchips, grain, oil and petroleum products—and there are prospects for the expansion of the port of Geelong, particularly into the import and export of motor vehicles.

The national rail gauge, first brought to Geelong under the Keating government, runs very proximate to the port of Geelong. The state Labor government has funded the Geelong Rail Access Improvement Project, which sees standard gauge rail connection to the north shore precinct, a new rail bridge over Cowleys Creek and the upgrade of the north shore yard for both standard gauge and broad gauge freight trains from Geelong. There was a commitment in the lead-up to the last election by Rudd Labor to further improve the access of the national rail gauge to the port of Geelong for trains heading south from Melbourne.

Of course, just north of Geelong we have the burgeoning Avalon Airport, which currently lands 1.4 million passengers—or at least that is the expectation in 2008. More than 1,000 people are employed at Avalon Airport. It engages in air freight and we have hopes that in the not-too-distant future Avalon will expand its activities to become an international airport.

Finally, there is the Geelong ring road, Highway No. 1, which has been a very important project. Essentially it is a Labor achievement. It happened through state Labor governments and Labor candidates encouraging the then Howard government to participate in the project. Of course, in the lead-up to the last election Rudd Labor committed to its completion in circumstances where the Howard government did not.

All of these modes of transport—seaport, airport, rail and road—combine in the north of Geelong, where, importantly, there is land. The Heales Road area has 500 hectares of heavy industrial zone land, the largest industrial site in Geelong. Around 60 per cent of that real estate is currently underdeveloped and it is bordered by the ring-road, is close to the seaport, next to the national rail gauge and close to Avalon Airport. All of this gives the potential for Geelong to become a transport and logistics hub in this country. That will greatly improve the productive capacity of Geelong and greatly provide for new jobs in Geelong, and it is a perfect example of the way in which investment in infrastructure can develop jobs, develop the productive capacity of a local region and, therefore, make a contribution to developing the productive capacity of the country.

In summary, this is a very important budget indeed. It signals a change in direction for our nation; it signals a change in philosophy to looking to the long-term future of this country rather than the short-term future of the Liberal Party. It deals with inflation, the parting gift of the Howard government after 12 long years, and it aligns all forms of public policy, fiscal policy and monetary policy in the one direction so that we can actually deal with that challenge. For all these reasons, I commend the bills to the House.

John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and related bills. There are a raft of issues which we as a responsible opposition, and in my case with a very regional electorate to represent, have some serious issues with. Quite obviously, there are many things in the budget the current government has handed down which are necessary and which have to be done, as they are every year, and the majority of budgets generally pass through. But there are some notable issues this time, and if I did not raise them I would be failing in my duty to the people of Calare, the largest electorate in New South Wales and very much a rural and regional electorate, going from Orange, a city of some 38,000 people, to the far west of New South Wales and up to the Queensland border, where things are certainly very different.

One thing that does strike me is that in this budget the luxury car tax deals with the issue of vehicles, be they large family vehicles, four-wheel drives or whatever they might be. Out where I was brought up, west of Condobolin and the Cobar shire, and further west than that—out at Wanaaring, Bourke, Brewarrina or Wilcannia—a four-wheel drive costing $57,000 or more, I can assure you, is not a luxury. That is a necessity, including for keeping your family safe from kangaroos on an outback road, whether it be in as far as Wyalong, where I currently live, or out at my place in the Cobar shire. Kangaroos, I suppose, are just there trying to get along like the rest of us, but they do make life dangerous for individuals and families travelling a road, particularly early and late in the day, and they have caused the deaths of a lot of people—and not necessarily because the people are driving very fast. If the uninitiated are in a small vehicle and they swerve to miss a kangaroo then that can be it. That is one reason four-wheel drives are so important to those of us who live in those areas.

There is also the fact that you are less likely to have breakdowns. Roads are not good. Obviously, most of the roads in that area belong to the state government or to local government. Roads to Recovery is one of the better things that our government ever did, and we tend to think that the new government has maintained it. It is not 100 per cent obvious, but we do think it is still there. Despite the efforts we have made to help local governments and people in regional Australia with that particular program, roads are not what they could be, and wear and tear on vehicles is particularly high, which is another reason four-wheel drives, as I said, are not a luxury. They are a necessity, and because of that people should not have the taxation or excise they pay lifted to well over 30 per cent.

In the area of health, coming from a regional electorate as I do, we are extraordinarily lucky in the city of Orange to have the wonderful array of doctors and specialists that we do. Also, the state government have finally decided to build a new hospital in Orange, and last year we as the Commonwealth government committed to putting in half the funds for the oncology unit to go with it, which the state government then matched. That is fantastic. But further west it is not so good. There is an incredible shortage of doctors.

I think the increase in the Medicare levy surcharge threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 and $150,000 for families is an incredible backward step for public health, because that system is obviously going to have a lot more to deal with. It is also a backward step for people who live in an isolated situation, in a rural or remote area, who in many cases are more likely to have private health insurance. It is a little hard when you live 100 miles from town. I remember my wife once sat all day waiting to see a doctor and drove home that night without having seen one. That is not great. The reason you go into private health in that situation is that you can go to a larger regional centre like Orange or Dubbo, where there are private hospitals, and actually get in to see a doctor. I think that to provide disincentives to people to be part of the private health system is very unfair to those who need it, the families who warrant it, but it is also very unfair to the public health system, which is quite obviously going to have a lot more to deal with.

One of the things I am most disappointed about in this budget is that it does not seem to be making any more inroads into encouraging people to get into nursing. I think some of those regional incentives for nurses, scholarships and the like, are incredibly necessary. If there is one thing we need in western New South Wales, Northern Australia, north-west Western Australia and South Australia, it is many more young Aboriginal people to get into nursing—doctors would be great, but nursing is incredibly important—to help Aboriginal people with their health issues, to make them comfortable. Yes, you can have Aboriginal health services, but to actually have Indigenous nurses is something we must encourage everywhere. I would love to have seen more in this budget to encourage Aboriginal people in schools everywhere to think about doing nursing.

I would like to have seen far more in the way of scholarships for the whole community, particularly for rural people. They need scholarships. They need the sort of thing we have done in Dubbo and Orange; we have put universities and clinical schools out there for those doing nursing and provided those in medical school with the experience of practising health in regional areas to realise what a rewarding thing it is—to know where you are really needed. We do need those things, and they do not seem to be in this budget. Everything seems to be right across Australia rather than concentrating on the people who need it most—the Indigenous population in Australia and those in rural and remote Australia.

I would also like to talk about the issue of water. That was obviously quite prominent in the budget, but what was not prominent was a commitment by Senator Wong and her government to where they are actually going to spend or appropriate money over the next year or two in terms of the National Plan for Water Security. While they have appropriated money for their promises, which actually do not do a lot for the irrigation industry or to create water savings, they have not done those other things.

What they have appropriated is money to buy water, well over twice as much as they should be, which will create incredible hardship for the communities where that water is taken from. And it is only going to be sold because people, after six years of drought, may be experiencing mental, physical and financial pressure for whatever reason—but particularly because they have had six years of drought and they are struggling. The only people who are really going to sell them that water are those who do not have much of a choice, which means they are not targeting it and which means they will just have to buy it where they can get it.

I can talk about a couple of places in my electorate where the shadow minister prior to 24 November committed this government to spending on water. One was up to $400,000 out at Menindee Lakes. I can see over the next two years no sign of where any of that is going to be spent. I can come back a little bit in the figures—$12 million was to be spent on the Albert Priest Channel to assist the towns of Nyngan and Cobar, including the mining communities and other people in Cobar, to make incredible savings, which can be made. We pinpointed last year where very, very good savings could be made for irrigators, for the towns and for the communities. That $12 million is not showing up so far in the budget for the next couple of years either. As far as I can see, the only money that the senator has put out for the next couple of years is something like $600 million to buy water, which I do not think it is possible to spend, because people simply do not sell that much water in the Murray-Darling Basin. The only way she can spend it, I think, is if she is paying ridiculous amounts for that water.

I think the whole issue of water needs to be rethought. Everybody is trying to explain the issue to the senator. I do not blame her for not understanding the issue, as there is no reason in her history why she should understand the intricacies of irrigation, what it does for communities and the fact that water is not a mental exercise. Water is about people, and people are the mainstay of our country. Without them, none of us would be in this room.

I will also briefly touch on drought. It may be news but, going on the press releases and the statements I have seen from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and others just lately, I hope they do realise that this drought is very, very much still a reality now. It is a real issue, particularly in western New South Wales. The one thing I am certainly not proud of is the fact that I have the most drought affected electorate in Australia. I am very proud of the people who deal with it. You have to be pretty tough. You have to have a lot of resilience to deal with what our people have dealt with since 2002. I have the rural lands protection boards of Bourke and Brewarrina in the north-west of my electorate, up on the Queensland border. Their exceptional circumstances assistance comes to an end—if they do not hear anything in the next few days—on 15 June.

We did take areas out of EC in our term in government, but we never took an area out that had been in continual drought. The very first people to go into drought in south-eastern Australia in the current tragedy were in Bourke and Brewarrina in November 2002, some two months after I took the then Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, John Howard and John Anderson, to Cobar to show them just how much it was hurting and cutting there. A month or two later, Bourke and Brewarrina were declared eligible for exceptional circumstances assistance. This has meant an awful lot to the people there and it still does. If you talk to the agents in Bourke and Brewarrina, they will tell you that a lot of the graziers in that area are there and hoping for revival because of the interest rate subsidy. They have to spend in the region of $50 to $100 for a ewe or $500 to $1,000 for a cow and calf—and these are people whose stock numbers are way down. They might have some grass because they did have summer rain up in that region this year, but they do not have money and they are not going to have it in the near future. Their stock numbers are probably around 30 per cent. This is tough territory. I hope that this government realises that to cut somebody dead who has been in this situation for six years straight is to condemn a lot of those people and the people who backed them, the communities, to a very, very tragic situation.

One of the things that certainly did feature in the budget—mainly because it was cut dead, and it has certainly been in the news recently—was the Regional Partnerships program. Having one of the more remote of the rural and regional electorates in Australia, I will stand behind Regional Partnerships as one of the best programs that regional Australia has ever had. It was one of the most popular. It did much for remote, isolated or just unfortunate communities—communities that could not raise the wherewithal for community projects. Sometimes it was about aged care, sometimes it was about respite, sometimes it was about youth programs like PCYC and sometimes it was about health projects. To cut that dead in this budget was one of the most ruthless things I have ever seen a government do. You may talk about rorts but I think you have only to listen to some of the things that happened today—a minister who unilaterally funds a school with up to $14½ million in their own electorate out of their own department when no-one else except that particular school can get any money at all, let alone $14½ million—to recognise where the rorts and the faults really lie.

I have spoken about water. As I said earlier, water needs to be funded so that in partnership with those who irrigate—those who use that water—we can invest in the industry and save the water. A recent report showed that almost 1,000 gigalitres of water could be saved in the Murray-Darling Basin and that over 600 gigalitres of that could be saved for no more than $2,000 a megalitre. I think you will find that Senator Wong will end up spending far more than that buying water, and once she buys that water it is gone forever. She is not even intending to have a water holder who can lease that water back to industry in a good year. That water is simply for the environment, nothing else, so it is condemned in terms of production. Governments, after all, have a responsibility to the people on behalf of whom they govern, for defence certainly but also for food security—and this is about food security. It is about the fresh food security of this nation, and it is about Australia’s place in the world as one of the great agricultural exporters.

As I said earlier, a lot of things in this budget are fine. I think that for every budget that comes along we are all in agreement on probably half of it, but not when it does not support health in rural Australia or when it picks on people like those in my electorate to whom four-wheel drives are not a luxury. Four-wheel drives are an absolute necessity for them, whether it be for surviving collisions with kangaroos or for surviving the wear and tear on vehicles. Whatever it might be, $57,000 is not a hell of a lot of money to spend on something that can save your life.

Jodie Campbell (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and cognate bills—the Rudd government’s first budget, the first Labor budget in some 13 years and a budget of which I am extremely proud. Past governments have spoken of fiscal responsibility and yet failed to deliver again and again, come budget time. The end result of that has been increased pressure on families and workers across my electorate of Bass, who have suffered through interest rate rise after interest rate rise.

If you want examples of mortgage stress and families’ budgets being stressed to breaking point then look no further than Northern Tasmania. That is why the Rudd government’s budget has been so welcome. The tax cuts promised during the election and delivered in the budget will help ease the pressures on families, workers and those doing it really tough in Bass. I know, because families with young children in child care are telling me that the increase in the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent is a practical and well-targeted initiative.

So too is the education tax rebate. Families across Northern Tasmania want the absolute best for their children. They want to offer them the greatest support possible to achieve their dreams, be that in a trade or going on to further study. The education tax rebate offers some assistance with the costs involved in making that possible. This budget strikes a balance between providing for the here and now—the very real and everyday pressures and the costs of living—and providing for the future. There will come a time when the mining boom is over, when we as a nation need to be looking elsewhere for our financial security. This budget provides for the future. Investment in infrastructure is being targeted, not to win elections but to secure our future as a nation. All this has been achieved against a backdrop of promises kept.

I campaigned across the unique electorate of Bass, talking to communities, individuals, councils, sporting groups, churches and the like. I looked each and every person I met in the eye and made commitments to them knowing that they would actually be met. Launceston City Council was promised $2 million towards the Launceston Aquatic Centre. It was delivered. So too, I am pleased to inform the House, was half a million dollars promised for Launceston’s regional tennis centre. Right across Northern Tasmania there are projects which can move forward with confidence, thanks to the Prime Minister and the Treasurer’s determination. The promises made during the heat of an election campaign actually count for something.

The Scottsdale Bowling Club can look forward to a new all-weather, synthetic bowling green—$170,000 will see that become a reality. For the Tamar Rowing Club, there is $150,000 towards their jetty upgrade. The community of Low Head and George Town has received $750,000 for a cycling and recreation trail. This funding will ensure our recreation facilities are more accessible and attractive to the wider community. Launceston City and its thousands of tourist visitors will benefit greatly from a $500,000 contribution towards the iconic Cataract Gorge walkways. Windsor Park will be redeveloped, thanks to a $370,000 contribution from the Commonwealth.

Investment in sport and recreation is an investment in the health and wellbeing of the community. This includes the upgrade of Blackstone Park, with the help of a $170,000 funding commitment. The Bridport walking trail is to be extended and linked, with $150,000 from the federal government, while a feasibility study will be undertaken into the proposed George Town Sports Complex, thanks to a $25,000 grant.

For communities, these programs are of vital importance and they now know and understand that when this government says it is going to do something it actually does it. It is something even the opposition has responded to. In April last year, before the election was even called, I stood on the banks of the Tamar River in Launceston, within throwing distance of ageing and dilapidated levees, and made a commitment that a Rudd Labor government would commit the $13 million that the Launceston City Council needed to upgrade them. Only after this did the Liberals promise to match that funding. It was budgeted for in last year’s budget.

A large part of economic management is about providing infrastructure to grow and secure communities, particularly regional communities like Bass. One hundred and forty-three million dollars was promised and will be produced over the coming years for road, rail and transport infrastructure in Northern Tasmania. Fifteen million dollars will see the Bass Strait Passenger Equalisation Scheme increased and the Freight Equalisation Scheme extended to both Flinders Island and King Island. Also, $1.2 million has been provided for black spot funding, while councils in my electorate will share in almost $2¼  million in Roads to Recovery funding. Northern Tasmanians will benefit also from an $18 million rail upgrade and a $4½ million commitment to the Midland Highway. As a government, we understand the importance of safe road and rail infrastructure to communities and industry.

Labor has a clear vision for this country. The key to realising the vision is working with the state governments to end the cycle of blame, particularly regarding health. Ten million dollars was committed to improving patient transport throughout the state. Seven million dollars will see a new radiation oncology service for Tasmania’s north or north-west.

By the end of this month the Tasmanian government will receive $15 million for an integrated care centre in Launceston. Again, this was an election commitment—one which means an enormous amount to me personally and one which means an enormous amount to the people who rely on this facility, together with their families. I am pleased that the Prime Minister and the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, after having visited the Launceston General Hospital and the renal unit, took on board and listened to my concerns and, more importantly, to the concerns of the community—people like the director of the renal unit, Professor Rob Fassett, and the nursing unit manager, Rose Mace, who have both been extremely strong advocates for many years now and instrumental in their long, hard fight for this new facility. I thank them for their commitment and their patience.

Robert Wilkinson, who has been a long-time user of the renal unit and who really has lobbied and championed this cause, together with his Lions Club, the Lions Club of Riverside, who are raising funds to help furnish the integrated care centre, are to be congratulated. Angela Sheehan, the ward clerk of the renal unit, first raised this with me out of concern for the many patients of the unit—the lack of provision of space, the inadequate mix of well and chronic patients and not being able to take any more patients due to the fact that the unit is pushed to capacity, and not being able to make provision for tourists who are visiting the area. I sincerely thank Angela for her compassion.

In conclusion, I add my voice to those who have spoken before in praise of this budget. Those families, workers and people doing it tough who most need assistance have been offered it by this budget. Pensioners, for example, will be $400 a year better off after 30 June, and those communities most in need of funding and developmental health have received it. This budget is the budget the Australian people, the people of Bass, have been waiting for and have deserved for all the years while those now on the other side of the House simply served their own political ambitions. The Liberals squandered record surpluses, became the highest taxing government in 40 years and flagrantly ignored economic warnings, with dire results. Their reckless and irresponsible spending is something that workers and families in Bass who are doing it tough will be paying for for some time to come. The Rudd government’s first budget is the first step to securing our great nation’s future prosperity. As I said at the outset, that is something that I am tremendously proud to be a part of.

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government’s first budget was far from the slash-and-burn job predicted by the Treasurer in the lead-up to 13 May. Despite boosting overall health spending, there is little in this budget that will advance the health of Australians. Contrary to the banter about preventative health and hospital reform being thrown around, there was nothing in this budget that reflected a new, meaningful shift of policy in either direction. Instead, we got a confused jumble of policies that add up to a big disappointment for the Australian people.

The first and most obvious problem with the budget, from our perspective, is the baseball bat that the government has taken to private health insurance. The government’s changes to the Medicare levy surcharge will see healthy young Australians leaving private health insurance in droves and relying on a dysfunctional state-run public health system shackled by constant mismanagement. The government has raised the Medicare levy surcharge threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 for individuals and from $100,000 to $150,000 for families.

According to the budget papers, this measure alone will save the government $959.7 million over four years and $232 million in 2008-09 alone, because the government will not have to pay the private health insurance rebate to those who opt out of private health insurance. Exactly how many people we are talking about remains a mystery, as the Prime Minister has refused to reveal Treasury’s modelling. One would suspect that the number lies somewhere between the 485,000 offered by the Treasurer and the one million asserted by the Access Economics report commissioned by the Australian Medical Association.

It stands to reason that those who benefit least from health insurance and whom the costs of premiums hurt the most will be the first to leave the system. They will be those with good health, the young and the fit. Australian families are hurting. As the government watches fuel prices, grocery prices and mortgage repayments spike, the cost of private health insurance may be too much for individuals and families to bear. This means that those left in the system will be the high-end users: the aged, the sick and those with an urgent need for health insurance and access to the sort of health care that the public system cannot provide. That will translate to higher premiums for anyone left in the system. Medibank Private’s chief executive officer, George Savvides, told a Senate estimates hearing that he expects to lose between seven and 10 per cent of his clients alone. If you apply that across the board, that is somewhere between 700,000 and 950,000 people dropping out of private health insurance. Ultimately, even those who need private health insurance will be forced out of the system and these high-end users will cost the public health system a disproportionately high amount in dollar terms, placing even greater burdens on an already overburdened public hospital system. It is a lose-lose situation for all Australians and a prime example of how poorly developed policy can cost the Australian people a relative fortune.

Another poorly thought out supposed health measure was the Prime Minister’s pet project: the alcopop tax. As a straight revenue raiser it is supposedly going to deliver $3.1 billion to the government over five years. It will do absolutely nothing to curb binge drinking. Even Treasury’s own modelling, or at least the brief that was released on the modelling, says that. It is said that each year revenues from the alcopop tax will increase in line with increasing consumption, from $640 million in 2008-09 to $892 million in 2011-12.

Right from the start the coalition disputed the validity of this supposed health measure. We urge the Prime Minister to be honest with the Australian people that this was a revenue raiser that will do nothing to curb binge drinking. This was confirmed as recently as today, in a Senate estimates committee hearing. It was confirmed by the Treasury that the Australian Taxation Office and Customs were the only agencies consulted prior to the introduction of this tax. The department of health were not even invited to make a submission before a decision was made on the alcopop tax, and yet the Prime Minister claimed that it was a health measure. Looking at it as a revenue measure, the government needs to do some basic maths. Treasury confirmed today that the estimated revenue figures contained in the budget papers rely on the expected growth in the consumption level of alcopops. This projected growth is above and beyond that which the industry itself was predicting even before the tax was introduced by the Prime Minister.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs inquiry into ready-to-drink alcohol beverages is telling. It found that:

… the increased availability of RTDs does not appear to have directly contributed to an increase in risky alcohol consumption.

The same submission also found that the increase in consumption of ready-to-drink alcohol is apparent in older age groups but that patterns of RTD use amongst teenagers is unclear. The latest statistics from the Nielsen ScanTrak survey of liquor retailers and independent bottle shops nation-wide show that, as planned, alcopops sales have dropped since the introduction of the new tax but, instead, sales of free-pour spirits—that is, spirits in bottles—have skyrocketed to fill the gap. Sales of 700 ml bottles of spirits rose by 21 per cent and hip flasks of spirits rose by 20 per cent in the same period as the introduction of the alcopop tax.

This fits in well with the studies selectively quoted by the Prime Minister in this House. These studies show that teenagers have simply switched to alcopops from other alcoholic drinks but, overall, teens are drinking less or the same amount as they were in the 1990s. Allow me to also refer to the Treasury minute dated 14 May, the day after the federal budget—the only Treasury modelling of any kind released by this government to date. The Treasury note said: ‘The second possibility is a redirection of alcohol consumption to other products as a result of the change in the price of RTDs.’

We know from experience that the government do not take advice from Treasury seriously. Perhaps they should have in this case, as once again their advice has become prophetic. Instead of delivering a health measure the government have simply shifted teenagers away from alcopops, containing one standard drink in a 375-millilitre can, to pour-your-own spirits, where they may be doling themselves three or four standard drinks in the same volume of soft drink. The Prime Minister may well have delivered a shot in the arm to Treasury by applying a new tax to alcopops, but the health of Australian children will suffer.

As flagged in the Labor election campaign, one of the coalition’s best policies—bringing dental care into Medicare—was dismantled. From November last year people with complex health problems were eligible to receive $4,250 worth of dental treatment over two years at a private dentist. We all know that new programs are usually slow to get off the ground, but this program doubled the number of services delivered each month, peaking at 94,617 services delivered in March, just before it was scrapped altogether. In total 172,000 dental services were provided over the five months that the scheme existed. Instead, the government has rolled out two new, and, I think, unsubstantial, dental programs that are not going to deliver the outcomes that the government is predicting.

The flagship program is the $490 million teen dental scheme in which needy teenagers will each get $150 vouchers to go to the dentist for a check-up. If the dentist finds anything that needs fixing they will be on their own, because no funding has been put aside for treatment services. Instead they will be directed, together with all other Australians, to the public state-run dental clinics. These clinics, which employ less than 10 per cent of the nation’s dentists, have the sorts of waiting lists that stamp the hospital system as a failure and they are to be compensated with the grand total of $290 million over four years. This figure would not be enough to manage the numbers they are seeing now, let alone the increased pressure from those that have been kicked out of Medicare dental. I have had countless constituents call and write to complain about this. It is an absolute tragedy for Australians who have dental problems—the sorts of problems that leave them in constant pain, unable to eat, in many cases, and affect their general health.

The Prime Minister and the member for Gellibrand, the Minister for Health and Ageing, have talked a lot about preventative health care. This budget did not have anything that walks the walk of preventative health. Specifically it gave nothing to GPs, who are expected to roll out most of the health measures that will deliver the biggest benefits in health terms. There has been no funding at all to increase the number of GP trainees, which means that, as the general practice workforce continues to age and continues to shrink, the burden on the public hospital system will not be ameliorated any time soon. In fact there have been a number of slashes to the funding of GPs that will probably mean that more disillusioned doctors leave the system. By taking over $500 million off the budget in a measure widely known as the ‘mystery cuts measure’ or what the government calls ‘underspends’, many important health programs are being slashed.

In a new hallmark of haziness there is almost nothing anywhere in the budget about the details of these cuts. The minister for health has admitted that $32.6 million of the Medicare around the clock grants have hit the deck. These payments are what keep GPs providing after-hours services, especially in outer metropolitan rural areas. Slashed as well, by $180 million, are incentive payments to keep mental health nurses co-located with GPs to help guarantee access to mental health expertise.

There are other coalition general practice and service incentive payments that have been slashed by the government, including payments to sign patients up for e-health and incentives on completion of an immunisation schedule for children in a GP’s practice, primary care panels that help GPs care for people in aged-care facilities and primary care collaboratives that help GPs achieve best practice in managing people with complex care needs.

In addition, $26.2 million worth of grants that previously encouraged GPs already in practice to start doing after-hours services were also scrapped, and $29.7 million has been hacked off the ATAPS program that helps patients access mental health help through their GPs. The list goes on. It seems that the government have put all of their eggs in the superclinic basket. Of the 31 superclinics on the table, only 12 are in areas of doctor shortages and most are in marginal Labor Party seats. The $275 million in funding over four years is going to capital funding to build the centres. In concept, there will be multidisciplinary primary care centres delivering after-hours GP services as well as a whole raft of allied health and nursing services. The problem is, of course, that the Labor Party have not said how they are going to get doctors into the clinics. Unlike the coalition’s promised emergency family medical centres, there are no incentive payments to draw doctors there and no incentives for these doctors to offer after-hours services. So far, the furthest we have got in moving towards bringing superclinics to life is purchasing the land they are going to be built on. The first cabs off the rank will most likely be in South Australia, where the state government has already started building them through a state funded GP Plus program that the Minister for Health and Ageing plans to piggyback her superclinics onto. But if the South Australian experience is anything to go by, the superclinics are not going to solve anything.

Take the example of the superclinic slated for Modbury, which is now to be tacked onto to the planned state government-run GP Plus clinic, with fifty-fifty funding from the federal and state governments. Despite what the minister has promised, this superclinic, the GP Plus clinic, will have no GPs in it. The local division of GPs has unanimously elected not to move into the centre and take a hit by dissolving their own practices, no matter how shiny the new building will be. Instead they will continue to offer after-hours services, as they always have, but this superclinic will be ‘GP Minus’. The mere promise of the superclinic has meant that the South Australian government took this as an excuse to rip beds out of Modbury Hospital. How is this delivering on better health care for the people of Adelaide?

If this experience is our first taste of the superclinic, it is unlikely that this pricey scheme is going to be the panacea for the health system anywhere—especially not in rural and regional areas, where access to a GP remains an enormous problem. In fact, there is really nothing in this budget to address the problems in rural health. It is all obviously too hard for the minister to come up with any ideas to relieve the doctor shortage in rural and regional Australia. It is easier to slug rural Australians with more cuts from the mystery cuts category. Allow me to list them: $15.5 million off the Mental Health Services in Rural and Remote Areas initiative, which gives access to psychologists and mental health workers; $2.5 million off telephone and web counselling services, which are used by people in remote areas who do not have access to therapists around the corner; $33.5 million off the Training for Rural and Remote Procedural GPs program, which helped GPs get the skills they need to work with limited specialist support; and $30 million cut from the PGPPP, a coalition initiative that helps fund junior doctors to spend time in rural general practice. This means a loss of 90 places per year. Then there is $16 million off the HECS Reimbursement Scheme, which boosted the number of doctors in rural and regional Australia.

The government have set up their $10 billion Health and Hospitals Fund, with funds coming online from 2009-10. This fund is for capital works only. So you will have all these shiny new facilities and the burden of running those facilities will fall to the state governments. We know that staffing is a problem, and it is not a state-caused disaster, because they are going into hospitals where they have no staff. It is like a scene out of Yes Minister. We saw almost no investment in this budget to address this country’s chronic medical workforce shortage in any meaningful way. There are none of the coalition’s promised placements to train GPs, and 25 clinical schools for enrolled nurses were scrapped. Instead we see 1,170 new university places for nurses over four years and a harebrained scheme which aims to provide incentives to get nurses back into the workforce. Returning nurses now get an up-front cash pay-off of $6,000, with a further $3,000 if they stay in the system for six months, and again at 18 months. The problem is that it gives nothing to those hardworking nurses who stayed in the system, carrying the heavy workload. The government plan to find 7,000 nurses with the incentive program. I think they are dreaming.

One last measure that deserves our attention is buried in Budget Paper No. 2’s ‘responsible economic management’ section, where a few cuts to pathology services were announced. Pathology is generally done by big corporate players—the sort the Prime Minster definitely had in his sights when he viewed himself as Australia’s new version of Robin Hood. The problem with the pathology cuts, which wiped $180 million over four years or 2.2 per cent of the sector’s bottom line, is that the government had agreed to honour a memorandum of understanding with the peak bodies representing all pathology sectors, but these cuts—made unilaterally and with no consultation—effectively ripped up the current bipartisan MOU with pathologists and also 13 years of MOUs arrived at between Liberal and Labor national governments in the past. The implications of this are potentially dire. Perhaps I need to point out to the minister that MOUs between government and industry groups are an important way to contain costs and guarantee supply. Unilaterally breaking one throws into doubt the credibility of this government and any MOUs it has negotiated. We are not sure whether this was a flagrant thumbing of the nose at those who the member for Gellibrand no longer values as collaborative partners or whether it was simply gross incompetence from an inexperienced minister with a junior team and now an unceremoniously dumped chief of staff.

In all, the budget is a disappointment. It is a disappointment when it comes to health services. It is a disappointment when it comes to the health workforce. It has no exciting innovations. Even though it increases money, there is no indication that the money being allocated is being better allocated. From the coalition’s point of view, it seems as though the minister for health has delivered a very clumsy outcome in the budget, one with quite a ramble when it comes to health outcomes. The bottom line is that Australians will not have better health care as a result of this budget. I think all Australians expected more from the first budget of the Rudd government.

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and cognate bills. On almost every measure, the Rudd government’s first budget comes out trumps as a winner—a winner for working families, for families, for carers, for pensioners, for older Australians and for those who are doing it tough. We know there are some people who are doing it tough and I will turn to them later in my contribution. The budget is a winner for us here and now. It is a winner for our young children, for our adult children and also for the future. It is a winner for responsible economic management and for sensible spending and sage savings. A budget that only spends is not a budget; a budget has to contain sensible spending and sensible savings. As the Treasurer said, it is a Labor budget and a budget for all Australians. I agree.

This budget is sensible in its spending, which is targeted at those who most need it, but it is not a budget just of that. It is also a budget with savings; otherwise we could not have the funding for programs to deliver the services required by the people of Australia and, indeed, Page, the seat that I represent. Further, it is a budget big on responsible economic management—a $22 billion surplus, a surplus that the opposition would want to raid and spend. It contains key measures to fight inflation, because if we do not fight inflation we are in trouble. It is a budget that sets out the direction and place that Australians want to go and it is encapsulated in two words—fair go.

The passing of these bills into law allows the government to deliver its first budget, which includes the rollout of election commitments to the Australian people and to the people of Page, my constituency. It allows the government to implement a budget that is framed within the paradigm of responsible economic management. It is a budget that was built in a most challenging context—I think that we all recognise that these are challenging times. We are surrounded by economic uncertainty in the global economy because of subprime mortgages and things like that, and the domestic environment is also challenging. We inherited a challenging domestic economic environment that had a lot of weaknesses, some strengths and huge inflationary pressures. That was the product of the previous government ignoring the 20 inflation warnings that they got from the Reserve Bank. Also during the last few years of the previous government, there were 12 consecutive interest rate rises—rises that were a warning that there were problems, and yet they were seemingly ignored.

Still speaking to this challenging domestic environment, we also inherited an economy that was both strengthened and propped up by a resources boom—a resources boom that did not have a concomitant skills development program. The skills shortage as of November last year was running at around 240,000 and there were no discernible clear measures, programs or packages in place to address it. This budget contains measures whereby we can start to tackle that. There are other measures, but within the budget itself there is money for 630,000 training places. That will be delivered over the next few years and it will start to tackle some of the skills shortages. It is going to take some time for that to kick in and work, but the fact is we have started in the first six months and it is in the budget. In the period of the past government we were using, for the first time that I know of, 457 visas—and I was surprised to see this—for nurses and a whole range of professions that we normally did not have shortages in. It does not seem as though there was much done by the previous government to address that.

We—Labor and I, as a candidate—went to the people last year in the election, laying out a program for government; laying out a plan for a legislative agenda; laying out a policy plan for economic management, education, health services, infrastructure—which had been ignored—industrial relations and climate change; and, locally, laying out a plan of priorities for my electorate of Page. Those priorities have been long held, articulated and aspired to, but I have to say they were ignored by the previous incumbents, the National Party. The National Party had been the incumbents in my seat for nearly a century. There have been other incursions into it, but it has been something like a century.

I have to say that the seat I live in is still one of the poorest in Australia—between fourth and fifth poorest, by any measure. It was one of those seats that was taken for granted. So, yes, I laid out a package of priorities and, yes, I advocated that they be funded. They were things that had been ignored for a long time. They were things that people needed. They were not grand. They were based on health needs, education needs and roads. They were also based on the simple premise of getting rid of Work Choices. That was part of the legislative agenda.

I am pleased to report that the above plans and agenda—the challenges and priorities—are contained and reflected in this budget. This budget delivers on the immediate needs of working families, carers, pensioners, veterans and older Australians. There are 19,000 extra carer payments. There is fairer indexation of pensions. Carers will receive their $1,000 bonus. Those who receive the carers allowance will get the $600. The $500 bonus is there for age pensioners and veterans. The utilities allowance is up from $107.50 to $500 and will be paid quarterly.

I know that pensioners are saying that they would like some more and they would like a rise in the base level of their pension. Of course they would like a rise in the base level of their pension. My mother is an age pensioner; I would like to do that. That issue has not been addressed over the past 11 years. We have been in government six months and we are starting to address it. The Prime Minister announced in March that it would be reviewed in the budget. The taxation review was contained within the budget. The taxation review also contains the income support review, and that will cover not only pensioners but also independent retirees. It will cover everybody who receives income support of some kind, particularly pensioners, and the base level of pensions will be reviewed. The Senate report that was delivered on the cost of living for older Australians had a number of recommendations. Recommendations 1 and 2 in particular will be reflected in the review that is going on. There will be some report back early in the next year.

I am holding a series of income support reviews across my electorate of Page. I know that pensioners and those on income support are very pleased. I would like to read a message that came to me about the budget from some age pensioners in my area. They said:

We would like to congratulate all in the Labor Party who produced the first of many, I hope, excellent budgets. With the limitations imposed on monetary policy due to the fiscal ineptitude of Howard and co, you have crafted a well balanced and compassionate document. Very hard to pick holes in. And as for the petrol, do not back down. You will be bled dry. As for we aged pensioners, most of us are coping for now. Well done, we are proud of you!

I received quite a lot of messages in that vein about the budget.

The budget delivers a cogent and comprehensive package of reforms based on four key principles, and I will articulate what they are. It begins a new period of economic responsibility that the nation needs to sustain growth in these challenging times. It invests in the future. It delivers for working families and it honours our commitments. Let me turn to these four principles in some detail. As an active, engaged local member, I will turn to No. 4 first: honouring the commitments. I am pleased to report that they are delivered nationally and across electorates that had been neglected or, worse, taken for granted, including my seat. And one of those is the Grafton Base Hospital. It is one of those areas that desperately needs an upgrading of its operating theatres and its emergency department. Through the Health and Hospitals Fund that is contained in the budget, it will receive money to allow that work to begin. That is very pleasing to the Grafton community and the Clarence Valley community.

Lismore Base Hospital at the top end of the electorate, or the other end of the electorate, has long needed a radiotherapy unit contained within an integrated cancer care centre, which is being built. We need it sooner rather than later because people have to travel to Queensland to have the treatment that they need. That was one of the funding priorities we were able to bring forward. There was $8 million that had been allocated by the previous government. We honoured that and added an extra $7 million, and that allows that to come online well over a year earlier, at least, so that those families requiring treatment will be able to have it within the region.

There were roads that had been long neglected—in particular, key roads and bypasses—and I was able to get some commitments on those. I was also able to get some commitments on things like saleyards, which are very important in my electorate. The saleyards in Grafton are very busy and are very important to the local economy. The commitment there of a small amount, $125,000, makes a huge difference to what we can do in that particular area.

Another commitment was to do with a homeless shelter. The Lismore City Council and community had long wanted to deal with the problem of homelessness. We know that it is a national problem but it is also a very local problem in my electorate. Lismore City Council had wanted to build something so that they could respond to the needs of the homeless in the electorate, and I got a commitment which will not fund it all but will ensure that we start to build a shelter in the Lismore area. Indeed, homelessness is one of the problems that we are addressing as a government and addressing locally. It is a shame to all of us in public life that we have not done enough about that issue. It is an issue that the federal Labor Party and the Prime Minister are very committed to addressing.

I have a lot more issues to speak about but I have been given the wind-up. In speaking to this budget, I am very pleased to report that this is a budget that is delivering. It is a fair budget and it is an economically responsible budget. It is a budget that invests in the future, and it is a budget that I am proud to speak to.

Fran Bailey (McEwen, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Prior to November last year, the Australian Labor Party went to the Australian public and portrayed themselves as the party of the new, the party of fresh ideas and the way of the future—and I have to say that the majority of the Australian people bought that rhetoric. The first opportunity that a government has to put its stamp on its forward plans is the budget. In presenting the budget, which of course was brought down a few weeks ago, the Treasurer stood in our parliament and his opening words were:

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

Members of the Australian public who had bought that rhetoric prior to November last year were probably encouraged to hear that first sentence. But let us think about what a nation needs to meet the big challenges of the future. I would say to the House that any country needs innovation. It does need those fresh ideas and research and development. Without them a nation cannot thrive and move ahead. Let us look at the issues that face Australia in the 21st century. Where is our manufacturing industry going? Where is medical technology heading? Where are the new scientific advances? What about climate change? Where are the answers to meet these problems of the future coming from? They will come from our small- and medium-sized enterprises—the SMEs of this country—who invest their capital, their labour and their expertise.

I have to say that the government has failed its first test. It has failed to clear the very first hurdle in delivering this budget. The Treasurer said that this budget is designed to meet the real challenges, the big challenges of the future, and I want to draw the attention of the House to the travesty that has happened. The government, without any consultation with industry and without any proposal that there be a transition program, axed the Commercial Ready program—a $750 million program. I am going to spend some time detailing the sorts of successes that this program has bred, but I also want to highlight that we now know that 16 days before the government announced that they were axing this program—which is absolutely vital for Australia’s research and development sector and the ability to commercialise research—the committee charged with the responsibility of assessing applications was still meeting.

This is deception of terrible proportions. Seventy-one businesses had their applications in. These are companies, SMEs, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars getting the applications to a stage where they were ready to put them to AusIndustry—a very hardworking and dynamic bunch of bureaucrats who are very in tune with industry. I think this is an absolute travesty. I have gone out to industry and I want, tonight, to spend some time detailing what industry’s reaction is to this, because it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the first line of the budget—kaput!—is gone.

Mr Dennis Alemis is a man who has been involved in the Commercial Ready program, its predecessor and other government assistance programs and initiatives, for 19 years. He has worked with the Public Service administering the Commercial Ready program and other programs like it for 11 years, plus he has worked in the private sector as a business consultant assisting organisations which are getting their applications ready to submit to the government. Within the time that this man has worked with these companies, he has advised approximately 200 companies on undertaking research and commercialising the results. Out of those companies, over 100 have received some form of government assistance to help them undertake this research. He says:

I believe the government’s decision was probably due to a lack of consultation and understanding of the program and the impact of its decision.

That was borne out by the minister in the other place in what he said in answer to a question at question time. He told an opposition senator that this program really went to millionaire businesses. How out of touch and ignorant can a minister for industry be? Mr Alemis goes on to say:

An estimated 100 applicants wasting up to 6 months of work costing their businesses anywhere from $50,000 to over $100,000 in direct costs, in addition to the opportunity costs of directing resources into something that has been a waste of time. This does not consider the time and effort of external consultants and other participants in the supply chain.

He goes on:

It is an unjust result for up to 50 applicants already in the system that had their cases decided upon in April and early May with decisions pending announcement.

These are cases where officials within AusIndustry had rigorously assessed these projects and had passed them as ready to be funded. To call this an unjust result is, I think, an understatement.

Organisations are now considering moving their projects and their technologies offshore or accessing offshore equity to enable them to continue as Australian equity. The opportunities for this are very limited. Organisations are delaying and they are not proceeding with the employment of skilled employees to undertake their projects. There is a negative financial flow-on effect to other businesses that were involved in the projects from a technical and a commercial perspective, including of course the very skilled consultants. There is now a distrust amongst the business community about the government’s actions, and a significant funding gap has been created for the Australian innovation sector. This makes a nonsense of the Treasurer standing up in this place and saying that the budget was all about finding the answers for the future, for the big challenges.

Let me go on to detail the benefits of the Commercial Ready program. I draw honourable member’s attention to data covering at least 75 projects undertaken by companies across Australia. Mr Alemis was associated, over an eight-year period, with many of these projects. Let us look at some of the advantages—and this is just from 75 projects. There was direct employment of 363 new staff, plus of course external contractors required to work on the projects. The most important aspect was the successful commercialisation of the new technologies, and with that commercialisation came a further 401 new staff. Export revenue of $1,893 million was forecast to be generated from successful commercialisation within the first five years of project completion.

This is really what underpins Australia for the future. How do we compete in those fiercely competitive global markets? We cannot do that unless we are using the best and the brightest, the latest technology, what is going to give us an edge in that global competitive environment.

I want to detail a couple of companies who have lost out in this government decision. One is Sienna Cancer Diagnostics Ltd. Sienna is developing highly novel diagnostic tests for the assessment of cancer and the effectiveness of treatment. Sienna’s technology, developed in collaboration with the world’s largest cancer research organisation, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, is expected to be a world first and has attracted the interest of a number of global partners, including clinicians, other research institutions and global giants in sales, distribution and manufactures.

Sienna is a small public unlisted company established in 2002 which is heavily reliant on the backing of its shareholders. Sienna’s technology would have led to the early detection and monitoring of cancer, with significant health benefits to all Australians and a reduction on the stress on the public health system. For example, a recent evaluation by the American Cancer Society estimates that, when cancer is detected early, treatment costs are some 10 per cent of the expected costs in treating the late-stage disease. Further, Sienna’s test kit was expected to cost in the vicinity of US$100 to US$500 compared to US$2,000 to US$3,000 for the gold standard in cystoscopy.

Sienna was forecast to receive, cumulatively, $49 million by 2015, and royalties would also have been ongoing and weighted to global markets. It was going to employ new staff. This was placing Australia at the forefront. It was going to provide much needed assistance within our own public health system. This is now a project that has gone by the bye.

There are many other projects, but time prevents me from listing all of them. I just want to refer to another man who has contacted me—again, an expert in this field, a Mr Gil Polglase, who has personally worked with more than 100 companies over the past seven years and has successfully accessed funding under the Commercial Ready program. He says that the need for federal government funding assistance for SMEs, especially at the early and expansion stages, is so vital and integral to building Australia’s reputation as a country focused on innovation and fostering technical excellence. I endorse these comments that have been made.

I want to give you just one other quote, from Mr Russell Smith, who says:

Now that this program—

Commercial Ready—

has been abolished, we have no other choice but to consider selling the technology offshore for someone else to develop and commercialise, as we are unable to obtain any other finance and cannot complete the project in an expedient time frame to grasp the market opportunity that is now available.

What a tragedy. The tragedy, of course, is that we have hard evidence that shows that in private equity sector, for every dollar contributed by federal government grants, between $8 and $11 is contributed by private equity sources. When the government turns its back on this, what it is effectively doing is turning its back on innovation. It is turning its back on a sector of our economy which is absolutely vital to the growth of the economy.

I also want to turn to the budget speech, and I want to refer to another matter. It is so easy for governments to say—and how many times have we all heard it: ‘Small business is the engine room of the Australian economy; it is the driving force of our economy.’ The Treasurer says:

… the government supports the aspirations of Australian business …

Well, I will tell you what: by axing Commercial Ready, it does not. He goes on:

… including small business, for a simpler tax system and less regulation.

How easy. It is a mantra for this government to talk about less regulation.

Let me just say, in the brief time that I have left, that there are two programs that were running and that were of the most magnificent assistance to small business. One was the Regulation Reduction Incentive Fund, which had $50 million in it that went directly into local government to enable local government to reduce and harmonise regulation and the costs of compliance. Mr Deputy Speaker, I can tell you that, for that $50 million investment by the previous government, AusIndustry can tangibly demonstrate $450 million worth of savings in compliance costs for small business. Wouldn’t you think that a government that claims, out in the public arena, to stand up for small business and to be doing everything to assist the environment in which small business works would continue such a successful program as that?

The other program that they have axed is the Small Business Field Officers program—68 of these people, who are absolutely vital. When we look at the small business sector in Australia, the fastest growing sector is the home based business sector. These are people who are time pressured—they really have great difficulty finding what the latest in marketing is or what the latest in IT is that they can use to grow their business. These small business field officers would work one on one with small business people in regional areas. One of the first things that the Rudd government did was to axe probably the most successful program that assisted small business. And the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy had the absolute audacity to say, ‘Oh, but we’re going to have the business enterprise centres.’ Hey, get out there in regional Australia, where you have such a growth of small business! The business enterprise centres are not out there in regional Australia; they are in the metropolitan areas, or there may be a few in the very large regional centres. But the massive change that has happened with small business because of technology, of course, is that small businesses are distributed all through regional Australia.

I think that it is a great shame that the government has simply failed to clear this hurdle. It is a travesty that the Commercial Ready program has been axed. It is a travesty in the way that the government secretly went about it. It is a travesty that so many really bright, vital Australian businesses are not going to get the opportunity to develop and commercialise their innovation. It is a sad day for Australia that a government which proclaims that it stands for meeting the big challenges of the 21st century, that it is the government with the fresh ideas, is in reality the government that snuffs out all of these fresh ideas by denying these innovative, clever SMEs the ability to commercialise their innovation. It denies them the opportunity to pursue the research and development that we need not just to sustain a domestic workforce but to actually develop our export industries and to grow the Australian economy. It is a travesty, and this government should hang its head in shame for what it has done to the Australian SME sector.

Sharryn Jackson (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on this budget tonight, the first Labor budget in many years. As the Treasurer said in his budget speech, the budget is:

A coherent package of reforms based on four principles: honouring our commitments; delivering for working families; investing in the future; and beginning the new era of economic responsibility we need, to sustain growth in challenging times.

It also addresses the pressures many people are facing today. Our $55 billion Working Families Support Package will help those finding it hard to balance the family budget. The $55 billion package comprises targeted initiatives in tax, child care, education, housing and other essential components of household budgets.

The Rudd Labor government, contrary to the comments of many members opposite, have not forgotten the valuable contribution made to our community by older Australians and are committed to making sure that seniors can make ends meet. To assist with the cost of household bills, we have seen an increase in the utilities allowance from $107.20 per year to $500 per year, with annual indexation, and we have also seen the telephone allowance increased from $88 to $132 per year for those with an internet connection. Finally, the seniors concession allowance has been increased from $218 per year to $500 per year, with annual indexation, to assist those self-funded retirees with Commonwealth seniors health cards. These payments will also now be paid quarterly to make sure that the money is there when the household bills arrive. An additional $1.4 billion in lump sum payments will be made to eligible seniors by 30 June 2008, a $500 bonus which will be provided to every Australian in receipt of an income support payment over age pension age or veteran service pension qualifying age and to recipients of the seniors concession allowance, mature age allowance, partner allowance, widow allowance, widow pension and wife pension. That means that this budget supports pensioners, ensuring that they are at least $400 better off per year, and many by as much as $900.

I want to endorse the comments of many other government members in speaking to the budget and concentrate on what it means for my electorate of Hasluck. The electorate of Hasluck will benefit from this year’s Rudd government budget not only because we have delivered on our election promises but also because this budget is looking to the future. As I indicated, the budget commences an era of strategic investment to meet the challenges of the future. We have talked about the $20 billion Building Australia Fund to help with infrastructure and creating capacity; the $11 billion for the Education Investment Fund to fund capital expenditure in higher education institutions; and, of course—critically, I believe—the $10 billion for the Health and Hospitals Fund to finance the renewal and refurbishment of the nation’s hospitals and to fund major medical research facilities and projects. The government has already done more to address climate change in six months of office than the previous government did in over a decade. The budget continues to fund measures to tackle climate change—measures to reduce greenhouse emissions, invest in renewable energy and assist industry and the community to meet this fundamental environmental and economic challenge.

I am especially pleased that, as part of this year’s expenditure, the Rudd Labor government will contribute $13.9 million to help make Perth a solar city, the first in WA. The Rudd government will work with the East Metropolitan Regional Council—including my own local Hasluck councils of the City of Swan and the Shire of Kalamunda—as well as with the Western Australian government to harness Perth’s sunshine and deliver climate change solutions. The key elements of the initiative include: community engagement; social marketing; home energy assessments and smart metering; access for a range of participants including owner-occupiers and public and private tenants; solar and energy efficiency technologies; innovative financing and production subsidies; demonstration projects, including commercial buildings, public facilities and schools; an expansion strategy to move to a self-funding second phase; and an ongoing monitoring strategy to monitor results, through Murdoch University and Western Power’s data management consultants.

The Rudd Labor government values this project. It has a strong community focus and will include both new and existing homes and owner-occupier and rental properties. The project will also include an education component, with funding for 20 schools to participate as ‘solar schools’. It is estimated that more than 6,000 homes and businesses will participate in the trial. Project proponents believe that the Perth Solar City Project will deliver greenhouse gas emission reductions of more than 15,000 tonnes—equivalent to taking 3½ thousand large vehicles off the road—and cut energy use equivalent to the needs of 3,200 homes. I am delighted with this initiative and I look forward to working with the East Metropolitan Regional Council and the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts to see the Perth Solar City Project come to life later this year.

Another exciting project for me is the Swan River Regional Park. The Swan River Regional Park redevelopment will receive funding of $930,000 from the Rudd Labor government. This contribution is part of a five-year, $10 million project which will develop the Swan riverside park as an environmental, recreational and cultural showpiece for both the Swan region and the state of Western Australia. I am pleased to say that this project also received the support of the former member for Hasluck. It is an outstanding project and both parties committed to ensuring that the Swan River Regional Park project got off the ground. I want to congratulate the City of Swan for working with the local community and local community groups to develop this project and for securing support from a number of stakeholders, including the state government and agencies such as Lotterywest, which has also made a contributing funding announcement of $465,700 for the development. The funding will go towards constructing riverside paths and walkways on the 100-hectare site, interpretive signage and restoration works for local wetlands. Not only will the Swan River Regional Park development provide local residents with improved recreational facilities; it will also restore important wetlands like the Blackadder Creek area and provide training opportunities for local Indigenous youth. The project is forecast to attract up to 180,000 visitors to the park and generate an additional $12 million for the regional economy each year.

In the time I have left to speak, I want to touch on a few other initiatives in my electorate of Hasluck. The federal Labor government will invest $5 million towards the creation of a GP superclinic in Midland to improve access to services and take pressure off local public hospitals. Midland has been chosen for a GP superclinic because of the doctor shortages in the area. Co-locating specialist services and allied health services with GPs will enable patients to seamlessly access the range of health services they need to improve their health. I will be working in close consultation with local doctors and the Perth Primary Care Network, as well as the Western Australian government, to finalise the suite of services to be located at the Midland GP clinic.

There are also some community safety initiatives that I think warrant mention. The government has made funds of up to $1½ million available to the City of Gosnells, the City of Swan and the Shire of Kalamunda to boost local crime prevention efforts. Funded measures will respond to hooning, graffiti and other criminal activity on local streets in Gosnells, Thornlie, High Wycombe, Midland and the like. They will address antisocial and criminal behaviour around local shopping centres, parks and train stations. I look forward to working with those local councils to see Labor’s Safer Suburbs Plan given effect and provide some much needed funding to some excellent initiatives in my local area.

The last subject I want to touch on tonight is the need for greater funding for local sporting infrastructure. Nobody doubts the benefit of sport and recreation to our community, and everybody must acknowledge the wonderful contribution made to the community by the volunteers that staff, manage and run most of our local sporting organisations. I am particularly pleased that in my own home state of Western Australia the state government has a fund known as the Community Sport and Recreation Facilities Fund. This is a magnificent fund, though it requires, I would have to say to the Western Australian government, a substantial increase in state government funding. It provides a pool of funding for local councils and local sporting groups to be able to partner on improved local sporting facilities. It generally operates on the basis of a third, a third and a third—one-third from the local sporting club, one-third from the Western Australian government and one-third from the local government concerned.

Through this fund in Western Australia, ably supported by some assistance from the Rudd Labor government to the particular sporting clubs concerned, we have seen money for the Gosnells Bowling Club to ensure synthetic greens and address a number of water issues related to the use of the current bowling greens. I will be doing my best to lobby the state government to ensure that they recognise the benefits of this project. The fund will see $125,000 go towards assisting the shire and the Western Australian government to put in approved standard lighting at the Forrestfield United Soccer Club facilities. Last but by no means least, the fund will see $200,000 go towards the Ray Owen Sports Centre in Lesmurdie, where they are undertaking substantial renovations to their centre. They host a number of sports up there, not the least of which is basketball. In fact, it is the place where the under-16 Australian basketball championships are due to be held in July. I think it is terrific to see assistance go to areas like these where we know the community benefits from that infrastructure, and I am sure it will be gratefully received by the magnificent volunteers who operate and manage those clubs. In closing, I congratulate the Treasurer and the cabinet on what I think is a terrific budget for Australia.

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

The 2008 budget, the first handed down by the Rudd government, delivers on the election commitments we made to the Australian people last year. It is a budget that both invests in Australia’s future and provides real and tangible support for working families in my electorate of Calwell to help them cope with today’s rising cost of living and all the pressures associated with that. In particular, the government’s $55 billion Working Families Support Package puts the needs of working families squarely at the heart of this budget. As part of this government’s commitment to invest in a better future for all Australians, $40 billion is set aside for infrastructure, education and health improvements; $22 billion is allocated to rail and road projects; $15.2 billion is directed towards new initiatives aimed at tackling climate change and addressing Australia’s water shortages; and the budget includes a package of new measures totalling $2.4 billion that channel much needed help to Australian seniors and carers who are doing it particularly tough. All of these are significant investments and they all have a direct bearing on those who live in my electorate of Calwell.

Calwell is a diverse electorate. Today’s influx of young families into the area makes education, child care and health care key issues in my electorate. We also have a fast-ageing population, making aged care and more support for seniors equally important. More generally, better access to more affordable services and ensuring available infrastructure is able to keep up with local demands are crucial challenges for the people in my electorate.

The government’s $55 billion Working Families Support Package includes a raft of measures that many will welcome, given the increasing pressures household budgets are under. These measures include $46.7 billion in tax relief over the next four years. Families in my electorate on a single income of $40,000 will be $1,050 a year better off, while those on a single income of $80,000 will be $1,100 a year better off. Local families with a combined income of $100,000 where the primary earner’s income is $60,000 will be $1,650 a year better off. These tax cuts will provide substantial support to low- and middle-income families, who are struggling to cope with today’s cost of living pressures. Parents work hard to provide for their families and they deserve these tax cuts, which are more generous as a percentage of income than tax cuts announced in previous years. When fully phased in over the next two years, they will provide continuous support to working families in Calwell and of course across Australia.

The government’s $55 billion Working Families Support Package also includes a new education tax refund initiative, under which eligible families will be able to claim a 50 per cent refund on key education expenses of up to $375 a year for each child in primary school and $750 a year for each child in secondary school. Effective from 1 July this year, the education tax refund will help parents in Calwell cover expenses such as home computers and laptops, home internet connections, education software, school books, tools for trade subjects and stationery.

When it comes to child care, the Rudd Labor government is lifting the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent and increasing the cap for the rebate from $4,354 to $7,500 per child, paid quarterly instead of once a year. This will help with out-of-pocket expenses for those working parents in my electorate who rely on child care.

The government is also introducing a new Teen Dental Plan that will provide $150 each year towards the cost of a dental check-up for teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 in families that receive family tax benefit A and teenagers who receive the youth allowance or Abstudy. Of course, for many Australians the exorbitant cost of private dental health care leaves them no choice but to rely on Australia’s public dental health system. This is certainly the case for many people living in my electorate, who face up to 30 months sitting on waiting lists as a result of the former government’s neglect of Australia’s public dental health system. To rescue Australia’s failing public dental health system, the government will re-establish a Commonwealth Dental Health Program, at a cost of some $290 million, which will target public dental waiting lists and provide better access to dental services.

Other healthcare initiatives announced in this budget and very relevant to my electorate are the $600 million made available to slash elective surgery waiting lists in public hospitals, the $87 million to expand bowel cancer screening to all 50-year-olds, in addition to the existing screening of 55- and 65-year-olds, and $39 million to fund incentives to bring nurses back into the workforce. The government will also increase the Medicare levy threshold from $50,000 to $100,000 for singles and from $100,000 to $150,000 for couples.

The budget also provides funding for measures designed to tackle today’s housing affordability crisis, with the establishment of the first home saver accounts, which will provide a simple, tax-effective way for residents in Calwell to save for their first home deposit through a combination of government contributions and lower tax. This is in addition to the government’s National Rental Affordability Scheme and the new Housing Affordability Fund. Taken together, these measures will help ease some of the pressures working families in my electorate face and provide them with much needed help.

The 2008 budget also provides $5.9 billion in funding over the next five years towards a range of educational initiatives that form part of the Rudd government’s education revolution agenda. Unlike those on the opposite side of the chamber, we understand that investing in education is about investing both in our children’s future and in Australia’s future. That is why we have undertaken to comprehensively reform Australia’s education system, from kindergarten through to university, targeting key areas that have long been crying out for improvement. What local parents want is for their children to have access to high-quality education and to all of the opportunities which follow. Initiatives in the Rudd government’s first budget to improve education include investing $534 million over four years to provide universal access to preschool for all four-year-olds, investing $2.5 billion over 10 years for trade training centres in schools, $1.2 billion over five years to deliver information and communication technology to all year 9 to 12 students, $626 million to reduce the cost of studying maths and science at universities, $578 million to improve literacy and numeracy skills, and $62 million for the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program. We are also investing $500 million this year to assist universities with capital funding, and I am pleased to say that Victoria University, which has a campus in Sunbury, in my electorate, has received $8.2 million to that end. And we will deliver an extra 630,000 training places at a cost of $1.9 billion.

When it comes to supporting seniors and carers, the Rudd government has increased the utilities allowance to $500 a year in order to help seniors cope with the cost of household bills. A similar increase has been made to the seniors concession allowance and we have also increased the telephone allowance for those with a home internet connection. Pensioners and eligible seniors will also receive a $500 bonus in this budget. More importantly, the Rudd government has made a commitment to review current arrangements for pensioners with a view to finding ways to better support them. This review will form part of the government’s broader review into Australia’s taxation system. The budget also includes $822 million in measures to increase support for carers. Parents caring for a child under 16 with a severe disability will now be eligible for the carer payment of up to $546 per fortnight. A $1,000 bonus will be paid to recipients of the carer payment and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs carers services, while carer allowance recipients will also be paid $600 for each eligible care receiver. The 2008 budget also provides $100 million over the 2007-08 financial year to increase the supply of supported accommodation for people with a disability whose ageing parents can no longer care for them at home. This extra funding will provide up to 35 new facilities, accommodating up to six people each.

I am pleased to announce that the budget also sets aside funding to establish two new early learning and childcare centres in Calwell. The centres will be located in the growth areas of Tullamarine and Craigieburn in my electorate. Over the last decade, childcare shortages have become a significant problem in my electorate. That is why I as the local member have campaigned very hard for federal funding to establish more childcare centres in my electorate. I am very pleased that these two new centres will go a long way to addressing the shortfall.

There has been $14.2 million set aside for important upgrades to the Hume Freeway and the Donnybrook Road interchange, which is aimed at easing traffic congestion. An additional $5 million has also been allocated to improve traffic capacity along the Western Ring Road, which runs through my electorate, and the Hume City Council will receive more than $1.4 million under the Roads to Recovery program for road maintenance and upgrades in the area over the 2008-09 period. This is a responsible budget, one that reins in reckless government spending and channels substantial funding and support where it is needed the most. I commend Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the related bills to the House.