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

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012. I was not expecting to speak on this legislation at this particular time but I think it is very important legislation that highlights the government's excellent management of the economy.

Under the Gillard and, previously, Rudd government, the Australian economy has been the envy of countries throughout the world. The bills before us today just show what an exceptional job the government has done in looking after the Australian economy. It is important to point out that under the Gillard government there has been a massive growth in jobs and that during the period of the Rudd and Gillard government 170,000 new jobs have been created.

It is really important also to point out that in the last year's sittings over 250 bills were passed through the parliament, which is many more than were passed through in the Howard government period. It really reflects upon the performance of this government over the period that it has been in power.

I have to compare this to the performance of the opposition and their thoughts on how we should handle government. On one hand, you have a government working to return the budget to surplus, whilst on the other hand you have an opposition that has a $70 billion black hole—I should correct myself; it is a $72.4 billion black hole, because the Leader of the Opposition has stated today that he is going to repeal the changes to private health insurance. Those are changes that will benefit the people that I represent within this parliament. They are changes that will deliver more money to the health system instead of delivering to health insurance.

Since the Labor government has been in power, it has committed itself to health reform. Under the Howard government, an inquiry was undertaken into the health system, and a report, The blame game, was tabled in parliament. This highlighted the deficiencies within the health system. It highlighted the fact that cost-shifting was taking place between the Commonwealth and the states. It was the Rudd and Gillard government that undertook to resolve this problem. So we have had a massive investment in health, with money being put into the health system, an increase in the number of doctors who are being trained and more money being spent on hospitals, more beds and an increase in the capacity of accident and emergency departments. There have been agreements between the Commonwealth and the states to really improve the delivery of health services.

I look then and say: well, what is the opposition proposing? The opposition is proposing to take money out of the health system by rescinding the legislation that was passed in the House today—legislation that, as I said, will definitely benefit the people in Shortland electorate. Shortland is an older electorate. Shortland has a large number of people who are on pensions and lower incomes. As I mentioned in my contribution to the debate in the House yesterday, the median income for people living in the Shortland electorate is under $1,050 a week, based on the 2006 figures. The majority of people in the Shortland electorate who have health insurance—and that is 49 per cent of the electorate—will not be affected by the legislation, whilst there is probably in the vicinity of five per cent that it will impact on.

The Leader of the Opposition today made a commitment to rescind that legislation, which would mean that five per cent of people I represent in this House would benefit, rather than the 95 per cent who need to access health services on the ground. We were faced with a chronic shortage of doctors in the Shortland electorate prior to the government undertaking its massive health and hospital reform. That reform, as I said, arose out of the blame game. There is a stark contrast. One side of the parliament provides policies that will benefit the majority of Australians, while the other side of politics provides support and assistance for a very small group of people.

We have heard a lot in this parliament about the Building the Education Revolution program. Every school in the Shortland electorate that has had work done under this program has been absolutely ecstatic. One school with a smaller student population would have liked a bigger school hall, but it was not able to get it under the guidelines of the program. However, I have school after school that has had new blocks of classrooms, with smart boards in those classrooms. People in those schools are able to access the latest technology and are no longer accommodated in leaky demountables.

I think of one school in particular, and that is the Gwandalan Public School. At the beginning of 2008, when the Rudd government was elected, I went to visit the school and met the principal, Don Begg, and the president of the P&C at that time, Melanie Symington, and they took me around the classrooms showing me the work that needed to be done, how the school was rusting, how water was leaking into the classrooms and the rotting carpet. Don Begg had a very busy year that year. He spent his entire Christmas holidays working at the school, painting and giving those demountables a facelift. He filled the leaks and did his very best to make those classrooms functional.

In the middle of last year I attended the official opening of new classrooms. The principal was so delighted. The school had six new state-of-the-art classrooms. The old demountables had gone. The toilets that were falling down around their heads were fixed. The contrast with my first visit to that school—when there was a very unhappy principal and very unhappy president of the P&C—was graphic. You saw the emotions from an excited principal who was so ecstatic about the work that had been done at his school. I would like to encourage the members on the other side of this parliament to talk to their schools. I offer them the challenge of seeing how many of their schools would like those buildings taken away. I am talking about schools in not only the public system—the school I just mentioned was in the public system—but also the private and catholic systems. Outstanding work has been done in all sectors.

The Windale Catholic school has the lowest SES statistics of Catholic schools in the whole of New South Wales, but the work that has been done in that school under the Gillard and Rudd governments has been phenomenal. The children from that school came to Parliament House and visited the Prime Minister in her office. Some of them had not been outside Newcastle until they made this visit to Canberra. When they were in the Prime Minister's office, they thanked her for the money that had been spent on the school. They thanked her for the support that they were getting through the national school partnership program and they also thanked her for actually caring about them. These students are from a very disadvantaged area.

An enormous amount of change has taken place under the Gillard government. We made a commitment to the people of Australia to bring the budget back to surplus. We also undertook to address climate change. Our compensation package, which will come into play on 1 July, will lead to tax reductions for low- and middle-income earners. There is also a compensation package for pensioners. I understand that, once again, the Leader of the Opposition has said that he will take away those measures if he is elected.

Let us look at the situation of the two parties. On the one hand we have a government that is investing in the community and in our young people by putting money into schools. It is also investing in our health system in order to help people when they get to the other end of their life or when they get sick and need to know that there will be a doctor there or a bed for them in hospital and that they will be able to get the health care they need. The Productivity Commission brought down its report on aged-care reforms towards the end of last year. We have a minister who is looking at that report and who is keen to embrace reform in aged care. We have the National Disability Insurance Scheme. As somebody who worked in disability for many, many years before entering parliament, I know that that sector has been underresourced for a very long time. I know that carers and parents struggle every day to care for and provide support and opportunity to disabled members of their family or friends. This scheme will give people with a disability a real opportunity to be active members in our society, to seek employment, to find that employment and to have the dignity that goes with work and being able to make choices about their own lives.

On the other hand, we have an opposition that, if it ever made it to the government benches, would take from the people of Australia. It would take from those people who are most in need. It is not going to deliver on the National Disability Insurance Scheme as it initially promised it would. If it were, it would be a long, long way down the track. It would take from the health system by investing in insurance rather than health care. When it comes to education, I hate to think what an Abbott government would deliver to the Australian people. It certainly would not be investment in infrastructure and it certainly would not be investment in education. I commend the legislation to the House.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

While I do not want to be critical of my friend and colleague the member for Shortland, I have never heard such claptrap and propaganda in all my life. She issued a challenge to visit her schools. She should come to the school at Louth in my electorate. They have a wonderful investment. They have a classroom for each child. The school at Windeyer also has a classroom for each child. These isolated schools could have had money spent elsewhere. While we are on the BER, we have schools that got covered outdoor learning areas—a bit of iron on a metal frame—for the cost of a five-bedroom house in any of the towns in my electorate.

This appropriation bill is because of the mismanagement of this government. It is all very well to talk about the wonderful largesse flowing through to the constituents in various electorates, but this is all about value for money. And what we have seen from this government is that they cannot handle money.

While we are on the BER, members opposite might like to come to Dubbo and speak to the tradesmen who are in dire financial straits because of the mismanagement of the BER and the lack of scrutiny of the contractors who managed this program. They had many people do jobs worth tens of thousands of dollars and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars that are yet to be paid for. The tradesmen believed that, because they were working for the government, that money was guaranteed. But they were sadly wrong. When the subcontractors failed to pay them the government did not back them up.

Government members interjecting—

I would like a little bit of quiet. This is a free-ranging debate and I am speaking about the financial mismanagement. When we have an appropriation bill to fill in the gaps where the government has overspent, there is nothing more appropriate than talking about waste and mismanagement. The government came to power with a $20 billion surplus, including money in the bank and a Future Fund. But it has all been raided.

How about we start with the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund of $2.7 million. The member opposite, from the wild regions of Tasmania, would understand the importance of telecommunications. I have patches all over my electorate that do not have basic telephone services. They do not have mobile telephone services and they have no way of getting them. That is because the fund that was put aside by the Howard government to fund this infrastructure was raided. One of the first things I had to do when I got elected to this place was sit through the humiliation of watching this government raid the money that was salted away by the Howard government to protect the telecommunications infrastructure of the people of regional Australia. That is gone.

This government is very good at spending money but not very good at managing money. A lot of the schemes we have seen promoted by this government, a lot of the policies, have been about restricting the capacity of this great country, not growing it. The job of government is to provide an environment where the citizens of a country can undertake their best endeavours, where they can succeed, where their hard work brings them benefits. Government should basically be an unseen guiding hand that provides that environment. Instead we have a government that wants to meddle in people's lives. They want to control the environment. They want to control the river system. These are things that are not possible to attain. With these grand gestures they are severely impacting on the residents of Australia, particularly those that I represent in this place.

The carbon tax is going to affect everyone in Australia. I cannot find anyone who can guarantee we are going to see any changes to the environment from the carbon tax. Indeed, the government's salesmen, Professor Flannery, says maybe in a thousand years if the whole world follows Australia's lead we might see some changes. So this grand gesture to garner the support of the green fringe elements and give the Greens politicians in this place the opportunity to strut on the world stage is not going to have any environmental effect at all but it is going to affect the lives of everyone. The member for Shortland spoke about this wonderful compensation that is coming through the carbon tax. Compensation by its very definition is a payment for hardship caused. There is no need for compensation if you do not put in the tax in the first place. Why will people need compensation if there is no carbon tax? I represent a regional seat where people are heavily reliant on fossil fuel not only for their production but because of the distances involved for the basic tenets of life like education, health and employment. There is a large fossil fuel component for regional Australia. And, because of the harsh climate, a lot of energy is required to heat and cool homes and workplaces.

We are finding now, with the cost of electricity going up and the further escalating costs predicted—they are not denied; they are predicted—coming up from 1 July, that the sad reality is that older people, the most vulnerable people in my electorate, are sweltering in summer and are spending their winters under the blankets because they are not game to turn on their air conditioning or their heating. Meals on Wheels volunteers tell me that they are finding elderly people in the middle of the day in bed, not because they are unwell but because they cannot afford—or they perceive that they cannot afford—to run their electricity.

What is more, this carbon tax is something that we are going to do all by ourselves. None of our trading partners have this. This is what I liken this carbon tax to. When we send our athletes to London later this year, we could just chain a 10-kilogram steel ball to their ankle and say: 'This is our grand gesture to the rest of the world to show that we care about the environment. We're going to put this 10-kilogram ball on the legs of all our athletes when they go to London and expect them to compete with people who aren't encumbered.' That is exactly the same as the government are expecting Australian businesses, Australian farmers and Australian manufacturers to do with their competitors in the rest of the world by giving them a tax that their competitors do not have, a tax that will serve no purpose other than to generate money into consolidated revenue and provide a grand gesture.

We have seen other forms of mismanagement from this government. There is no better example than the youth allowance debacle. Great changes were made to the way regional students were serviced when the current Prime Minister was Minister for Education. While there has been some redress—I have to say a massive backflip—to restore independent youth allowance, there is still the means test element to it. While this government might not be very fond of farmers and farm families and saw the independent youth allowance as some sort of benefit to a farming elite, the reality is that the people who are really suffering now are the people who work in the towns. These people are coming to me asking why they cannot get independent youth allowance for their child, who has actually spent 12 months or 18 months working in a supermarket to earn the money. They might be a teacher and their husband might be a policeman or work in the banking sector or something like that. Two-income families are ineligible for any sort of assistance. They are expected to educate their children and compete with people who live within a bus ride of a university. So there is still that discrimination against country kids, and the youth allowance debacle was another example.

We as a nation are looking forward to the rollout of the NBN, or supposedly we are. But, once again, the more I find out about the NBN, the more I realise that this is going to be—I will quote Kim Beazley; I looked up the word the other day on Google—a boondoggle. The NBN is a boondoggle. What is more, it is a boondoggle that will not benefit the people in my electorate. A few of them will gain access to high-speed fibre services. Many of them feel that they do not want that or do not want to pay for it. But many people think that the point-to-point wireless connections that are going to get to most of my towns will provide higher speed on their hand-held devices. Most of the people in regional Australia are connected to the internet in a mobile sort of way. The NBN wireless system will go to a point in your house, at your personal computer. You might be able to have a router within your house, but for someone who is working in the field the NBN will play no part. When a technician goes to repair a tractor in a cotton field at Moree and is looking for a fast internet connection for his diagnostic equipment, he will go through Next G with Telstra, but he will not be getting anything from the NBN.

So people will be using the system they have now, because in most places it works, and the NBN is going to be a $50 billion white elephant. There is no greater example of financial mismanagement. You cannot measure your success as a government purely by the beads and blankets you can hand out to your constituents on a regular basis. The success of a government occurs when the Australian people have the confidence to do it themselves. The greatest gift a government can give its constituents is the confidence to succeed and have a go.

What is happening now, right across Australia and particularly in my electorate, is that people are holding back. They are nervous about the future. They are holding back on purchasing that extra bit of land, on putting on an apprentice, on updating their work vehicle and maybe on sending their kids to university. There are actually families in my electorate who are having to choose which of their children have the greatest aptitude to go to university. In the year 2012, that is an absolute disgrace. The member for Braddon is pulling funny faces, but that is an absolute fact. Tertiary education might not be a big deal in Tasmania; they might not have quite the same levels down there. But this is a big deal.

In conclusion, it is a sad state that many of the appropriations that are coming through on this bill are because of the mismanagement of this government. I believe the best thing it can do is put up the white flag, go to the Australian people and let them decide on the management style of this country.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just have to say to the member for Parkes, as much as I like him: really and truly. You said many of the people in your electorate are nervous about the future. But they would be a hell of a lot more nervous about the future if it had not been for this government and the previous government of ours, and the way we tackled the global financial crisis. You only have to look at Europe and the United States to see what could have happened. Relatively speaking, we are much better off than them. You will not recognise it, so your negativity needs to be spoken about. Before you leave the chamber: you raised issues about appropriation, and I would like to comment on them. For your information, and contrary to what you are saying, there are a record number of students enrolled in our universities today, and there are record numbers of students from rural and regional Australia—particularly from low-income families—in our universities. So I have to correct the way you were portraying the people of Parkes. Also, I will finish by saying that the NBN system—with some of the issues that you have raised, I acknowledge—is better, with the potential that exists for rural and regional Australia and particularly metropolitan Australia as well, compared to no policy at all from those opposite. So I cannot let the member for Parkes make those wild, exaggerated, generalised statements and just get away with it. I am sorry that he has walked out the door before at least he has had the opportunity to hear that.

Now, we are here to discuss appropriations, and—

Mr O'Dowd interjecting—

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Flynn will sit in silence!

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, and I hope the member for Flynn is speaking on this. I cannot see his name down there at the moment.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He is not on the list.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Anyway, I am more than happy to hear his comments. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012, amongst other things, are approvals for measures such as the government's plan for a clean energy future, a remarkable, reformative piece of legislation that is about to come into action. It is great to see how, in particular, the agricultural sector has taken up the challenge of the clean energy future—and I will to refer to that in a moment—particularly in this Australian Year of the Farmer. I am very happy to celebrate that with them.

Also, these bills are part and parcel of measures that fund the Tasmanian forest industry adjustment package. That, of course, is highly relevant to my state and particularly my region. The bills also provide Australia's contribution of overseas development assistance to the Horn of Africa drought and famine—very, very important. They also provide assistance to eligible businesses affected by the temporary suspension of the live cattle exports to Indonesia.

I mentioned the agricultural sector and the clean energy future. I will spend some time a little bit later talking about the clean energy future and its implications and benefits in my electorate, but I particularly want—in this, the Australian Year of the Farmer—to point out that Australia's agricultural sector is embracing a clean energy future, contrary to the suggestion of the member for Parkes, with more than 500 applications received from universities, land managers, the industry and government agencies for this government's funding to test and develop new ways for farmers to reduce carbon emissions. They are interested in it. They are practical people. They want practical results. And they are prepared to test those.

I noticed in today's Senate estimates that the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry has confirmed that we received at least 240 applications for the first round of the $99 million Action on the Ground program under the Carbon Farming Future Fund. That is 240 applications for the first round. A further 235 applications had been received for the first round of the $201 million Filling the Research Gap program, also part of the Carbon Farming Future Fund, which is a key component, as I mentioned before, of the clean energy future plan. The Action on the Ground and Filling the Research Gap programs provide funding for research into on-farm practices and new technologies—specifically those. The level of interest in these programs shows how keen the agricultural sector is to benefit from the opportunities in the land sector to cut carbon pollution.

The member for Parkes asked why we have a clean energy future and why we are going about this responsible program, because, he said, it does not do anything for the environment. Cutting 160 million tonnes of pollution from the atmosphere by 2020 I reckon is doing something for the environment. That is going to allow us to meet our international commitment to cut emissions by five per cent on year 2000 levels. That is the equivalent of taking 45 million cars off the road. That is a target that those opposite support. If we are attempting to meet those targets and reduce pollution by 160 million tonnes from the atmosphere through our system and they agree with those targets, how can they say that our program is not doing anything for the environment?

The member for Parkes really has got a logic problem in his argument.

Back to the agricultural sector embracing a clean energy future: I knew they would because they are practical people. They live on the land. They survive on the land. They know the land. They know what the land can do. We are there to support them in those endeavours. Agricultural emissions will be excluded under the carbon price mechanism, as I hope all those in this House are making clear. But farmers also have the opportunity to earn extra income by sequestering carbon or reducing emissions, such as nitrous oxide and methane. Part of our $1.7 billion investment in the land sector is for new research and on-farm demonstrations. Again, farmers are practical and take a great deal of note of extension programs and particularly on-farm demonstrations. That is a very practical way of developing and appreciating innovation. These activities will help the agricultural sector unlock the economic and productivity benefits of reducing emissions and at the same time protect the environment.

The $99 million Action on the Ground program, which I mentioned earlier, helps the industry and farming groups test and apply research outcomes in real farming situations. Again, these are on-the-ground demonstrations and on-the-ground practical situations. Applications, for example, include proposals to demonstrate practices in the livestock, dairy, viticulture, cropping and poultry industries and to undertake on-farm projects.

The $201 million Filling the Research Gap program funds research into new technologies and practices for land managers to reduce emissions and store soil carbon. Applications cover reducing methane emissions, reducing nitrous oxide emissions, increasing soil carbon and improving modelling capabilities. Further applications, I believe, have been received for biochar research, which is part of the Carbon Farming Initiative. The $2 million Biochar Capacity Building Program, which supports research into how biochar and integrated biochar systems can be used in Australia to mitigate emissions, has received something like 29 applications. These research proposals, I understand, are undergoing assessments and will be ranked by merit.

So here is the agricultural sector embracing the clean energy future. Here are funds available to encourage them, to support them and to nurture their ideas and innovations in order to reduce our emissions and to increase their productivity. I congratulate Minister Ludwig, Parliamentary Secretary Mark Dreyfus and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, the Hon. Greg Combet, for their work in this area.

I mentioned at the outset that a clean energy future will support and benefit my local region. I have spoken about that before in the House and pointed out how people in my electorate will benefit. One of the other benefits of this appropriation legislation is that it allows for funding to support the Tasmanian intergovernmental agreement on forestry. Forestry in Tasmania, as we all know in this place, has been and continues to be a massive challenge and a political football for some. The industry has been changing for some time now and it continues to change. Indeed, the same thing is happening in Western Australia, as it is in Victoria and New South Wales. We know this. There are a lot of factors at work, be it the Australian dollar, the changed market conditions, demands of customers for the product or the change in domestic demands and expectations of the industry. The reality is that in Tasmania that transition—those challenges—has been going on for some time. The intergovernmental agreement seeks to respond to a group of stakeholders who came together under their own volition to try to iron out what effectively have been generations of combat and conflict. They came together with a set of principles to try to transition the industry into the future, dealing with it realistically and, at the same time, conserving those areas of our forests worthy of conservation while being able to guarantee contractual resource arrangements that currently exist. This process is underway. Unfortunately it has been seriously undermined by the disgraceful actions of activists in environmental groups who—we will share this with other colleagues in other states; this is not going to be confined to Tasmania—now use techniques to attack markets and to attack customers of producers, retailers and processors until they have economically blackmailed them out of taking product.

The products of Tasmania, like in other parts of Australia, are certified as product sustainably managed. That is being attacked by these activist groups as being the opposite. It is disgraceful behaviour. It has seriously affected a major employer in Tasmania, Ta Ann, who source their supplies legally and sustainably and have now put off workers because their customers in Japan, in particular, have been frightened off by activist groups who peddle disinformation, deceit and lies. Being a retailer, you do not want to be involved in people having demonstrations outside your store, people scaring your customers. So they are forced out. These tactics will be used from here on, not just in forestry. You can bet it is going to happen in dairy and in our marine industries such as fisheries, and so on it will go. It is disgraceful behaviour and they need to be reined in, particularly by the Greens. The Libs need to get off their pat and stop the criticism and try to get a constructive solution to Tassie's forestry issues so that we have a future.

This government has appropriated funds to support Tasmania in this transition. In my electorate of Braddon we have just announced nearly $6 million for an agritrade centre to help with the development of dairying skills, and also an upgrade of Harcus River Road and the development of energy supplies so that we can go from low-value beef into high-volume dairying by developing 27 more dairy farms.

Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012 and to speak to the financial implications that I am about to raise as a result of these appropriations. I wish to talk about federal money that has been applied to assist with the NBN rollout in my electorate. On 4 November 2011, Regional Development Australia Peel lodged an application on behalf of a consortium including Explor Consulting, the Western Australian Department of Commerce and Curtin University in collaboration with iiNet, Cisco Systems and the City of Mandurah. The application was for just $35,000 from the pool of funds in the department of regional Australia to support local projects facilitating the NBN rollout in its first and second rollout areas. In my electorate this would be in some of the suburbs of Mandurah and Pinjarra. Despite a number of assurances since December last year that a funding decision would be made this week—in other words, manana; this week, every week—there has still been no response to this application. As it would not be prudent to commence a project until funding confirmation has been secured, the lack of a decision on this issue is holding this project up. I am willing to point this out and say, 'Yes, the NBN looks like it is coming to the electorate, but we are still asking when.' It has been coming forever.

At a forum on the possibilities of the NBN which took place in my electorate last November, the mayor of the City of Mandurah, Paddi Creevey, was excited by the NBN opportunities that had been spruiked to her. The City of Mandurah is keen to make sure it is a success story when it comes to facilitating the NBN rollout. It is also keen to make sure it is a success in engaging with local business and residents with regard to what the NBN can do for them. That is why the city facilitated the forum and it is why it is involved in taking the initiative in getting funding to support local projects with regard to the NBN rollout.

There are many questions from people in my electorate about the NBN, not only about when they will get it but also about what, if any, benefits it will offer. It is not good enough for the government to throw the infrastructure out there and then expect the success stories to just happen on their own without some sort of support. The government needs to provide real on-the-ground support for these programs. As of Friday last week, it was advised to RDA Peel that the funding decision is tied up in other processes within the department. No advice about when a decision will be made is forthcoming. I will now write to the minister to further address this issue and to express my support for RDA Peel's funding application. As I said, it will take just $35,000 to get this going but it is being held up in the bureaucracy. That is a shame.

The other issue I wish to raise in relation to RDAs generally is that of services provided by government. Peel RDA is trying to determine what services are provided to the region by the Australian government to understand what issues need to be addressed. This was a result of the Peel Community Development Group's draft report Peel Away the Mask II, which investigates social conditions in the Peel region. It is an excellent publication.

There is no current tool available from the Australian government that allows such groups, or interested community members, to see exactly what is being spent and delivered in the regions. The only data available is limited to that required under Senate Order No. 9 in relation to contracts over $100,000 and Finance Circular No. 2009/04 on grant announcements, both of which provide very limited information. Such information remains very difficult to ascertain despite Minister Crean's promise in 2010 that the Labor government would introduce a means by which federal government funding could be tracked. At the Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia, or SEGRA, conference on 19 October last year, Minister Crean said:

In addition, we are moving to introduce a breakdown of the Federal Budget which more clearly shows the pattern and priority of Commonwealth spending across all regions of the country. Known as spatial accounting, this will be a major advance and will allow comparisons nationwide across regions. It will take transparency to a new level.

This is still not available. Despite transparency being part of the agreement that was made with the country Independents to form this government, the promise has not been fulfilled. Transparency is something we all desire. The minister has promised it but he has not delivered it.

You may ask why it is that this promise has not been kept. It is because disclosing such comparative information would demonstrate the stark differences in funding between different regions—between, for example, my Liberal held seat of Canning and that of, perhaps, a country Independent seat in northern New South Wales, dare I say Lyne. It would be nice to be able to see the difference in funding between the two seats. Since that insufferable 17-minute speech by the member for Lyne marking the beginning of this incompetent minority government, Australians have heard story after story of disproportionate spending in the three seats held by the three Independents. Dare I say it, the last budget papers had a whole section dedicated to budget initiatives in their seats.

We all know that the Australian Labor Party is making a hobby out of breaking promises. I will not go into them all now but we saw one today in terms of the Medicare levy and private health insurance. This is one promise it is truly in our best interests not to see broken, so as to expose the enormous amount of money that has been funnelled into these electorates. My constituents in Canning would be livid if there was a website that clearly demonstrated what they were missing out on in terms of federal moneys being poured into the electorates of the Independents to prop up this flailing government. I call on the minister to fulfil his promise and provide spatial accounting for us all to see, to take transparency to a new level as promised and to draw back the curtains and 'let the sunshine in' as promised.

In terms of services versus infrastructure, let us remind ourselves that the BER involved many instances, particularly in the eastern states, of wasteful spending by this high-spending government. This is because they are only interested in cutting ribbons and placing plaques on buildings—trying to get the kudos out of it—rather than delivering what is actually required by the community. While it is nice for government members and their newsletters, this is unfortunate in that the things that are desperately required in our communities are not necessarily infrastructure but services.

A local constituent who is heavily involved in the Regional Development Authority in my electorate has spoken about the urgent need for government to focus on the delivery of services rather than the delivery of capital infrastructure. However, under the RDA fund guidelines for round 2, the eligibility requirements ensure that this will not occur. Round 2 of the RDAF will deliver $200 million to regional Australia—that is, if the money ever gets handed out. This government is making a habit of making it impossible for recipients of the money to actually use the funds that have been assigned.

In many instances the money is being handed back to government—and it obviously goes back into consolidated revenue—because they cannot use it under the terms it was given to them. This is because, to be eligible for RDAF round 2 funding, the local RDA committees will only be assessing applications from organisations or groups that have an annual turnover of at least $1.5 million each year for a minimum of three years. For goodness sake! How many small organisations in our electorate have that sort of turnover? It is just ridiculous. Obviously, it is that way so that it does not get to be handed out.

The other element of this handout requests that the minimum grant is $500,000. This encourages waste. Some local organisations do not need that amount of money. However, it is either $500,000 or nothing. They are compelled to unnecessarily spend this money. They have got to beef up the application to $500,000 before it can actually be applied for. How ridiculous! I just mentioned a moment ago funding of $35,000 for a project. That would not comply under the current rules. It is quite crazy and it has gone too far.

Just to show the anomalies that are created in these programs, I want to talk about a community group that has asked for some money from the government. The group is not even getting heard. Before I come to that I want to remind the House that Minister Crean came to my electorate and, at the golf course, promised to give the RDA an extra $50,000 to help keep its doors open because of the unique circumstances in Western Australia. He has promised this. His staff have promised it to me. I have been to his listening post and they have promised it again. I was told that the money would come before Christmas. It is still not there. They are battling to run the RDA. I am wondering if this is a direct ploy to try to shut the RDAs down so that they cannot do their job—or is it just an attack on the RDAs in Western Australia? I am going to continue to pursue this.

The migrant centre in Mandurah in my electorate urgently needs funds so that it can stay open and help the people it is trying to serve. Given the increased number of migrant arrivals, it is not good enough for the government to dump these people in Australian communities without adequate support to help them gain an education or to try to get themselves into the workforce. I have written to the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, the Hon. Chris Bowen, on two occasions regarding the funding of the Mandurah migrant centre. I first wrote in May 2011, when I appealed for help in identifying financial assistance that may have been available to the centre.

I did receive a letter in response to my call for help for this group. However, the funding options detailed in the minister's response were totally unsuitable. The response included details of two possible grants that were available, under the Adult Migrant English Program and the Settlement Grants Program. The letter detailed that the Adult Migrant English Program contracts for the newly appointed providers were not due to expire for some years—on 30 June 2014. So the centre cannot apply until 2014. They need help now. The settlement grants funding round for 2012-13 appears to not yet be open for application. We cannot find any information about when they will open. So both of those suggestions from the minister are not much help. It would still take some time to get the funding for the centre through any of these channels if the application were successful. The centre needs assistance now, not from some ethereal funding mechanism in the future. I have not yet received a response but I look forward to receiving the information.

This centre requires about $32,100 per annum for its operating costs. Other than that it is staffed by volunteers. Here we have a community group that gives of its time and that desperately needs government help. The need for this group has been exacerbated by the government's not being able to stop the massive flow of boats to our shore. Yet good people in my community who are giving their time to help the people who end up in the regions—Mandurah is in the Peel region—cannot get any attention at all from the Gillard government.

I will give one example of the good work that the centre does. Volunteers from the centre helped a newly arrived family from Iran to find accommodation to rent and to find a suitable school for the children, who were aged from eight to 12. They assisted the family with associated paperwork to do all this. The centre has also assisted the family by directing them to a number of social inclusion activities. Dare I say that the Minister for Social Inclusion might want to listen to this; then he will find out what it actually means. But here we have this group needing funds and it cannot get them. I therefore urge the government to support the Mandurah migrant centre and all the other issues I have raised in this House today. (Time expired)

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

Today I want to talk about appropriation bills Nos 3 and 4 and then to range a little more widely, as is allowed when debating appropriation bills, into another area. The funds being sought through these bills are supposed to cover the shortfalls in funding which the government tells us have happened because of the instability of global financial markets. The amount involves little more than $3.1 billion. Of course the global financial environment will have an impact on our economy; no-one doubts that. But it is this government's financial incompetence and continuing waste of money that has made these extra appropriations necessary.

The government tells us that Australia continues to outperform the developed world in economic growth, that we have strong public finances, that we have sound resources investment. Another strength they claim is low unemployment, which is most definitely not the case in my region. The most recent unemployment statistics for the Wide Bay Burnett region show unemployment to be sitting at 5.3 per cent, almost two points higher than when Labor came to power in November 2007. When I refer to the Wide Bay area, I do not refer to the electorate but rather to the lower part of the electorate of Flynn, my electorate of Hinkler and the electorate of Wide Bay itself, with a little bit of Maranoa thrown in for good measure. When we get down to youth unemployment, for the 15- to 24-year-olds, the figure is even more concerning, at 11.4 per cent. These are not figures that any government should be proud of. They are figures that will increase because of the government's addiction to taxation, spending and, sadly, wasting.

This philosophy can be seen in full living colour courtesy of Labor's carbon tax agenda. Australians always knew Labor's carbon tax would cost them dearly, and today, courtesy of these bills, we get a taste of by how much. Most of the funds being appropriated under bill No. 3 relate to measures and programs being put in place because of the imposition of a carbon tax on the Australian economy. A full $2.8 billion is being sought to fund program blow-outs and policy decisions made by the government. The money includes $1.3 billion to support several agencies in their task to roll out Labor's clean energy manifesto and a further $1 billion so that the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency can make cash payments to coal fired power stations to help them cope with the changes that are being wrought.

One figure which caught my eye is the $106 million to be spent on completing the ceiling insulation inspection program for households throughout Australia. There are some in my electorate that still have not been fixed up after 18 months. One in the township of Howard is particularly worrying. I was one of the first whistleblowers about this dog of a program, and, for my efforts, I was howled down by the then minister. I was accused of manipulating a local insulation company to create headlines for the program. In fact, I found out recently that the then minister actually sent people from his office or from the department—I am not sure which—to check everything I had said in the parliament. I thought that was extraordinary—to send someone all the way from Canberra to Bundaberg to check me out. But I had my facts right. There were 14 forms of rorting going on. I documented them. I tabled them in the parliament and the tabled document was raced up to Bundaberg so they could check out whether I had been telling the truth. Well, I was telling the truth, and all those things were subsequently proven to be true. I was telling one of my constituents about the money being sought to fix this fiasco, and she said to me, 'As if people weren't ripped off enough in the first place. Now it's the tidying up phase which is costing heaps of money. There are so many better ways they could have spent that money.' I could not agree more.

I think the people of Hinkler should also be clear on where their hard-earned dollars are going and just how much is being spent on setting up this carbon tax. These are just a few of the ways taxpayers' dollars are being spent through these appropriation bills. Thirty million dollars will be spent on setting up the Clean Energy Regulator, which will assess emissions data and make sure industries comply with carbon pricing. One hundred thousand dollars will go to the Department of Finance and Deregulation so it can review the establishment and operations of the Clean Energy Regulator. Six million dollars will go to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency to promote the carbon tax to small businesses and community organisations. Thirty-six million dollars will go to the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities so it can set up a biodiversity fund. The Department of Human Services gets $36 million to dish out to people who need compensation for the extra costs from the carbon tax—perhaps we could tolerate that one.

Also included in the appropriation bills is another $24 million in assistance to cattle producers, who were disgracefully abandoned by the government when, last year, they had a knee-jerk reaction to what was going on in Indonesia. I suspect that this is nowhere near enough assistance for this industry and the businesses associated with it. I know from cattle producers in Queensland that they are really worried about where the industry might be going, particularly in relation to the live cattle trade.

I also note that in these bills the government is seeking an immediate $330 million to cover the blow-out in asylum seeker management costs, following the scrapping of the Pacific solution and temporary protection visas. In fact, across the entire immigration portfolio, not including last year's blow-out, the increase for the four years to 2014-15 is three-quarters of a billion dollars—that is extraordinary. Then there is the $550 million, which is almost three times more than the $197 million the Treasurer and Minister Bowen told taxpayers the bill would be for immigration when they released the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook for this period last November. So, from November until now, we have had a blow-out of nearly three times more.

In just a couple of short months, the government seems to have allowed this thing to escalate by $560 million. I am sure that the hardworking, tax-paying people in the Hinkler electorate were also horrified to hear that the immigration budget has increased by a billion dollars since 2007-08, going from $1.69 billion to around $2.7 billion today. That is a lot of money. Perhaps this has something to do with the 15 per cent increase in permanent staff and the 24 per cent increase in the number of the highest paid positions, with the median pay packets being between $180,000 and $210,000. That is five to six times the average wage of people living in my electorate. You can understand, firstly, their being so worried and upset about the way this boat people fiasco has been handled but, secondly, knowing the people handling it on behalf the government are earning five and six times what local people in my electorate are earning they find particularly galling. Asylum seeker management costs have been revised to $1.2 billion for the financial year, which is up from the revised figure of $880 million last year.

On a more bipartisan matter now I would like to deal briefly with the apology to the Indigenous community and the Prime Minister's statement today on Closing the Gap. I do not resile from where I stood on that matter. I was one who certainly had to grapple with that apology. I entered into it with an open mind and a humble and, dare I say, contrite heart. I thought that if we were all going to have to do it then we should do it well. I based that initially on the fact of children being separated from their parents. All societies, primitive and developed, across the world, even some of the most hated and despotic societies, have recognised the bond between a mother and her children. Only the most hardened and experimental have tried to separate children from their parents, particularly from their mothers. These children were brought up for most of their lives in an institution, with some of them never seeing their parents again and others being told most cruelly that their parents or their mother had died—worse still, some did this in the name of a loving God. It was an outrageous blasphemy for people to do those things and to pretend that they were doing it in charity. I am not saying that there were not some very good and well intentioned organisations that did look after Indigenous kids and did give them a future—and I know some of those from my own experience of people I have known over the years. But there are others that were totally unacceptable. I think too it is fair to say that, far from helping those children, the psychological damage to the parents and the bewilderment of the children probably put that generation back 10, 15 or 20 years and the catching up is still going on. I see some pleasing things in the Prime Minister's speech of this morning. The figures do show some closing of the gap but there is still a long way to go. One thing I am troubled by is on the margins of this problem. It is where we get into this so-called cultural sensitivity. I repeat what I said in my speech four years ago when I was talking about this cultural aspect. I will read it out and you can take your own meaning from it. I said:

How this can be acceptable today in the Australia we live in is well beyond me and it is down to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to accept responsibility for it. Paternalistic attitudes, no matter how well intentioned, have spawned a welfare mentality crippling many Aboriginal communities and drastically reducing self-reliance, personal responsibility and self-determination. I feel that for decades now, political correctness and confected cultural sensitivities have been the greatest hurdles we have faced in fixing the serious problems of Aboriginal Australians. One Indigenous leader has said:

Culture is often invoked as a justification for this lowering of expectations and standards. It will be invoked by indigenous community members as well as those developing policies and delivering programs, as a justification for not upholding rigorous standards that apply in the mainstream. We must be careful to ensure that we are not unconsciously using culture as an excuse for failure, poor performance and under-achievement … why is ‘cultural appropriateness’ never invoked as a justification for higher standards and higher expectations—and higher levels of achievement, rather than lower? Beware whenever the words ‘culturally appropriate’ are used: it is usually an alibi for low standards and dumbing down.

Those are the words of Noel Pearson in his 2004 position paper Bending to dysfunction, bending to the problems. I heartily endorse what he said. I think too there are still a lot of anomalies in getting Aboriginal children into education. We thump our breast and we say that education is the door through which they will escape the grinding poverty, but I still do not think we have created nearly enough opportunities for those children.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the federal government's Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012. Success and progress have never come from those who stand still. This government will be successful because we never stand still because we create change using methods that give us a far better society. One of the measures supported through these bills is our comprehensive plan for securing our clean energy future. I am very proud to be part of a government which is championing this vital initiative. The plan will cut the nation's pollution and drive investment which will help ensure that Australia continues to compete internationally and that it will remain strong now and into the future.

The decisions that our government has made have taken courage. It would be easy in the short term to do nothing and to not take advantage of new and emerging markets. But where would this take our great country? This is why the Gillard government is taking action to tackle climate change by putting a price on pollution and ensuring that all money raised will go to supporting households and jobs to build this clean energy future. Our government has a plan to cut pollution and lay the foundation for the clean energy future that Australians deserve. Putting a price on carbon will require Australia's biggest polluters to pay for the pollution that they put into our environment. We on this side of the House are supporting families and households as we move to this clean energy future. The bill sets out a range of measures including supporting jobs, households and energy markets and setting up the Clean Energy Regulator.

More than 43,500 McEwen residents will receive support from the funding in this bill, because it is for families and individuals, to assist with any additional costs that may be associated with the emissions trading system. The revenue raised will go to tax cuts and increased payments for pensioners, low- and middle-income earners and families who are doing it tough. Support will be provided to eligible self-funded retirees, job seekers, students and other income support recipients and low-income earners.

Under our Household Assistance Package, more than 20,900 pensioners in McEwen will receive pension payments increased by more than the average price impact of an emissions trading system. Pensions will increase by $338 per year for singles and $510 per year for couples combined, and concession card holders who rely on essential medical equipment will also be eligible to receive a $140 essential medical equipment payment each and every year. Family assistance payments like family tax benefit A will increase by 1.7 per cent. Nine out of 10 households will receive some assistance through tax cuts or payment increases. This monetary support is permanent and will increase in the future. The Gillard government will review the adequacy of assistance each year and will increase it further if required.

I am proud to be part of a government that makes the big decisions that demand courage right now, decisions for the future which, when we look back, will be seen as the right decisions. The coalition, who are trying to manipulate and grasp anything they can to promote their own political ambition, would claw back this support for all these people in McEwen. Just like Medicare and the superannuation reforms that we have proudly introduced, you would think no party would seek to undo them, because they have irrefutably changed Australian society for the better, but if the coalition had had their way none of these essential reforms would have seen the light of day. In the context of this government's clean energy future initiatives, we again hear the opposition cranking out the same old broken record of their negative spin.

Consistency is not the Liberal Party's strength. As we all know, Mr Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition, dismissed climate change as 'absolute crap', yet they still have their own carbon plan which will tax individuals $720 on average a year to fund support for big polluters. Last year on radio the Leader of the Opposition said:

I've never been in favour of a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.

But in 2009 he stated:

We don't want to play games with the planet. So we are taking this issue seriously and we would like to see an ETS …

That is what he said at the time. In the same year he also said:

You can't have a climate change policy without supporting this ETS …

Yet last year Mr Abbott criticised the proposed five per cent carbon emissions cuts as 'crazy', even though the coalition support the target. They have their own policy for the same target. You really have to ask: can you ever get a straight answer out of that lot opposite? Last year he repeatedly commented that measuring carbon dioxide was near impossible, and he said:

It's actually pretty hard to do this because carbon dioxide is invisible and it's weightless and you can't smell it …

The member for Wentworth quite eloquently put an end to that.

You have to wonder—this is a bloke who is a Rhodes scholar, yet he must have failed year 9 science to not understand that sort of thing and spew out the garbage that he does. But we should not be surprised that he thinks this, as most of his views are from the dark ages. What is even sadder is that it was the Howard government which introduced standards for emissions accounting—a government that he was a senior minister in. It is clear that those on the other side do not understand science. Over the years, when you look back and you look across, it is just a litany of contradictions from the Liberal Party and the National Party.

In speaking on this bill, I would also like to touch on the foreign aid component which this legislation is seeking to fund. Over a year ago, I was delighted to be involved with Plenty Valley Christian College, a school in my electorate that has been working extremely hard on the Make Poverty History campaign. After the students learned about the hardship and the challenges that people face in other countries, they decided to stand up and take action to raise awareness and help others less fortunate than us. Year 10 students led the college in organising the school to be involved in a worldwide campaign to help raise the issue of poverty around the world. The students collected hundreds of birthday cards from the school community to raise awareness in our wider community. They brought to the government's attention our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, particularly goals 3 and 4 to improve child and maternal health. I would like to say as their local member and as part of the Gillard government that I am proud to represent such caring young people from my electorate.

Our government is committed to the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals, which are the agreed targets set by the world's nations to reduce poverty by 2015. This bill will see Australia providing $127.3 million to support developing countries in transforming their resources into significant, valuable and sustainable benefits for all their citizens. I would like to stress that the Australian aid program does not fund mining ventures. The aid program recognises that mining in developing countries is inevitable and that Australia would be better placed in helping these developing countries to develop their economies with sustainable practices. The potential benefits for developing countries to lift their economic status are enormous, especially for improving incomes, employment, education and enterprise opportunities for poor people in both rural and urban areas.

Many of our developing partner countries have substantial natural resource endowments, which, if well managed and regulated, can accelerate poverty reduction efforts. For example: in Papua New Guinea, mining employs over 30,000 people and provides 80 per cent of export earnings, and this is before LNG revenues are realised. Australia has already helped many countries to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, such as in Papua New Guinea, where more than 900,000 children were immunised against measles and other childhood illnesses between 2000 and 2009. In East Timor, Australian assistance contributed to a decrease in infant mortality from 60 per 1,000 live births in 2003 down to 44 in 2009. In Indonesia, more than 2,000 new junior secondary schools were built or renovated between 2006 and 2010. That created places for about 330,000 more children to get a decent education. I am looking forward to getting back to my electorate and visiting Plenty Valley Christian College again and talking to those students who are now in year 12 about the progress that we are making with our responsibilities as a member of the global community.

The Gillard government is committed to our Millennium Development Goals and to assisting nations that are not as lucky as we are. The early stages of a child's development are extremely important. It is well known that what happens to children in their early years has consequences throughout the course of their life. The electorate of McEwen has one of the largest zero- to 5-year-old populations in the country and it is continuing to grow, with large numbers of families and their children moving into the area. Another measure in this bill introduces reforms to strengthen incentives for parents to have their children immunised, which will improve immunisation coverage rates. As we know, immunisation helps to guard against harmful infections before they come into contact with humans. Immunisation helps people stay healthy by preventing serious infections. Immunisation is the safest and most effective way of giving protection against diseases. After immunisation, your child is far less likely to contract a disease when there are cases of disease in the community. We know when enough people in our communities are immunised that an infection can no longer be spread from person to person and that can help kill off a disease altogether. This is how smallpox was eliminated from the world and how polio has now disappeared from many countries.

The Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement, which is worth $726 per child per annum, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunised at one, two and five years of age. These new conditions will be implemented at a new immunisation checkpoint at one year of age, along with the existing checkpoints at two and five years of age. This means that over the three immunisation checkpoints families will now have an incentive of more than $2,100 to insure their children are fully immunised. Health is obviously a very important issue in my electorate. That is why we have seen things like the GP superclinics in Wallan and South Morang going ahead and there has been the removal of GP training place caps. All of these things are designed to help give us better health and a better standard of living.

It is important that these things be funded and continue to grow to make sure that we have a better future for our kids and their kids as they come along. It is important that these bills are passed speedily so that we can get on with the job of delivering a better Australia for our future.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-20012 to talk about a very significant part of the work of any government—the funding of medical and health services. We must succeed, in a way that is different from the past, in providing enough rural health services.

We know that there is an incredible shortage of health practitioners who are prepared to go to and stay in rural and regional Australia. My electorate is in Murray in rural Victoria. There we have a significant shortage of health service professionals compared to Melbourne or any other metropolitan area in Australia. For example, the number of GPs per 100,000 people in rural areas is 50 per cent to 66 per cent of the metropolitan provision. Mortality rates are 15 per cent higher for rural men and nine per cent higher for rural women compared to urban residents. And we need to close the 17-year gap in Indigenous life expectancy in Australia.

One of the greatest initiatives of the Howard government was designed to tackle rural doctor shortages through the establishment of departments of rural health and clinical schools. They were established in a number of key locations around rural Australia. Some of these centres have now changed the face of medical services and training for all time. They have certainly changed the culture of medical services provision in my part of the world.

Then minister for health, Michael Wooldridge, championed these initiatives and I will always be grateful that he listened to my argument that the first of these new departments of rural health should be established in north-central Victoria in Shepparton. The first sod was subsequently turned on a pouring wet day in a tent by Prime Minister John Howard. He was standing there at an excellent site over the road from Goulburn Valley Health. The site had enough space for what was soon to be built—excellent student residences and teaching places.

Shepparton is, of course, within the Goulburn Valley. It is a unique part of Australia with a rich mix of Indigenous, refugee, migrant and very long-established families. They have long suffered from a lack of specialist and general practitioner services. We were in despair. It is only a two- to three-hour drive up the highway to the capital city but it seemed impossible for us to lure new health service professionals to replace the ageing and very excellent medical workforce we had had for decades in our part of the world.

The University of Melbourne Department of Rural Health was therefore established in 1999. In 2002 it evolved into the Rural Clinical School and the School of Rural Health in that same year. I can very well remember when the first students from the University of Melbourne Parkville campus had to be cajoled—they had to be metaphorically dragged, kicking and screaming—to even think about leaving the city to come to this rural environment at Shepparton. It gives me enormous satisfaction to say now, 11 years on, that the places at the rural clinic schools are oversubscribed and that was also the case in 2009, 2010 and 2011. It is now the case that the academic results of the medical students there are better than the results achieved by their metropolitan peers. In fact, the valedictorian medical student for the 2009 graduating class in the whole of the University of Melbourne came from the Rural Clinical School—Dr James Hillis. More than 30 per cent of those who graduate are choosing rural internships. There are increasing numbers of senior registrars at our hospitals in the Goulburn Valley and elsewhere in northern Victoria who are in their final year of GP training.

We are also very proud that our longstanding professor, Professor Dawn DeWitt—who has recently taken up a new position in North America—in 2009 was part of the team from the Rural Clinical School who were awarded the Melbourne Medical School Excellence in Teaching Award and in 2010 led the team that won the Melbourne Medical School and University of Melbourne Program Innovation in Education Award.

In 2003 there were fewer than 20 students and only a few staff; now, there are 500 to 750 rural health profession students, supported each year with an annual budget of about $10 million. We also have the Centre for Excellence in Rural Sexual Health, which is extremely important in ensuring wellbeing in our part of the world. We have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than in many other areas and we certainly need to tackle a lot of sexually transmitted diseases and reduce the incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome. Two Indigenous full-time staff and, in all, five Indigenous staff work on these campuses. This is an initiative that can only continue to grow and to change expectations in relation to rural placements for medical students.

Another important initiative was providing special places at the University of Melbourne for students who had finished their secondary schooling in northern Victoria. Some of them are now looking at practising medicine in the places where they grew up.

Over $40 million has been spent in infrastructure since 1998. This has not only been at the campus itself in Graham Street but also at Goulburn Valley Health. This infrastructure has included specialist consulting suites, a simulation centre and a library. Then there is the joy of the new $1 million medical teaching facility. We have as part of this initiative a special GP teaching clinic. In Australia there is still an expectation that general practitioners, as part of their everyday work, take on senior medical students and, almost like an apprenticeship, guide them and provide some clinical experience. This is difficult when your GPs are very hard-pressed, with large numbers of patients in their waiting rooms. Also, they often do not have sufficient space to give to their student. So this GP teaching clinic has been a highly successful innovation in Shepparton.

In this clinic, patients are diagnosed initially by a student, before moving on to a specialist academic GP, who again talks with the patient and looks at the diagnosis and conclusions made in the earlier consultation. This service has grown to a point where the books are full. I have had so many comments from my constituents. They are coming to my office in Shepparton saying, 'We have been to that clinic. We can't believe how caring our treatment was; we were able to spend time discussing our health problems. We're going back.' I think that is an excellent outcome.

We also have placements for dental, pharmacy students, social work and psychology students. There is also a very important nursing collaboration with La Trobe University. I cannot imagine that in the very early days anyone would have believed the extent to which the Department of Rural Health Rural Clinical School based in Shepparton has leavened the health service professional environment throughout northern Victoria.

We now have towns like Numurkah with special funding for extra teaching space and accommodation. At Echuca we have funding that has converted what was a nursing home into excellent student accommodation, just a short walk to the Echuca District Hospital. That city too is now able to participate in convincing medical students born and bred in the capital cities that a regional city can be an excellent place to live and work. There is the Murray to Mountains internship and beyond project, which is a set of collaborative postgraduate basic trainee positions. There is the Bogong and Victoria Felix collaboration for supervisor teacher training for Melbourne university students. There has been mushroom-like development from the home base at Shepparton, and we have seen that some of our most expert GPs—our most long-serving GPs—have also been able to add academic teaching to their professional experience. They would never have expected to have had that opportunity without shifting from a rural location.

The purpose-built facilities we now have, which include things like procedure rooms, general practice and specialist consulting rooms, student consulting rooms and the student learning hub, encourage multiple interactions between our longstanding practitioners and students. At the new University of Melbourne Shepparton Medical Centre we are seeing patient care which at the same time provides a true learning environment. It is win-win all round. We are also proud to have in our part of the world a large Indigenous community that is very much integrated but there is an understanding that their needs must be met in a culturally sensitive way. That is being provided as well at the University of Melbourne Shepparton Medical Centre. It is our hope that it will not be long before one of our Indigenous school leavers chooses medicine as a career and will be able to spend some of their important learning time based in their home community at Shepparton.

There are of course a number of other cities and towns that also cooperate or integrate with the University of Melbourne's special centre of learning, what was once called the Department of Rural Health. They include Wangaratta, Benalla, Bendigo and Ballarat. I am proud that Georgia von Guttner, the manager of much of that activity, has been able to grow that collaboration and cooperation. We have been particularly blessed with the excellence of the staff in this project. I mention Professor Dawn DeWitt, who gave nearly eight years to the pioneering work of developing this institution. While she was and is a diabetes specialist, she is also a specialist academic teacher, so students who have gone through this place of learning in Shepparton have been given an extraordinary level of personal tuition and have, I am sure, had an experience that will last them a lifetime.

At the graduation ceremony at the end of last year I was so impressed with the enthusiasm of these doctors to be and of their understanding and empathy with the particular issues facing rural and regional Australia. Numbers of them said that if they were not intending to return immediately to a rural practice they certainly saw themselves basing much of their career in a place beyond the capital cities, because they appreciated that life can be very satisfying beyond the tram tracks.

I commend these types of initiatives to this government. Unfortunately, there has been neglect and there has been a failure to innovate in a way that the John Howard government did. Dr Michael Wooldridge was exceptional in his understanding as health minister, because he himself was a medical practitioner. This innovation was bold. It was not cheap. It took teaching away from institutions that had never imagined they could set up green fields sites and still offer excellence in learning. But the Shepparton campus has proved that all can be achieved with dedication and commitment. I congratulate all who have been associated with this project from the beginning. I know that in the future it will be a place of continuing excellence and will provide many dedicated and committed rural and regional health service professionals.

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on two budget appropriation bills that are currently being debated in this place. The purpose of these bills is to propose appropriations from the consolidated revenue fund for both the ordinary and annual services of government and for those that are not the ordinary annual services of government. These bills provide for funds in addition to those allocated in the 2011-12 budget to support government activities outlined in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

This week the government released additional estimates that show a further budget blowout in asylum seeker costs of around $866 million, or more than 25 per cent. This being the case, the government is asking for another $330 million immediately. This significant amount of taxpayer money is necessary to cover the shortfall arising from the year's cost and the expected increase for the year. Further, the entire immigration portfolio cost is expected to rise and, not including last year's blowout, the increase for the four years to 2014-15 is expected to be around $759 million.

To put this simply, this blowout is $559 million, which is almost 300 times more than the $197 million the Treasurer and Minister Bowen informed taxpayers the bill would be for immigration when releasing the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook for the period last November. Clearly, in just a few months the government appears to have reassessed their abacus and blown out the estimates by around $560 million.

In addition, the 2011-12 immigration budget will cost about $2.73 billion, or more than $1 billion above the $169 million it cost in 2007-08. On a comparative basis this is almost $330 million, or 14 per cent, more than the now estimated $2.4 billion it cost to run immigration last year.

The budget for management of asylum seekers has been revised, and that cost has increased to $1.2 billion in the 2011-12 financial year on the revised figure of $880 million provided last year. Again, on a comparative basis, in the 2007-8 financial year the cost for managing asylum seekers was less than $100 million.

Revealed during the latest round of estimates, the cost blowout takes the total budget for Labor's border protection failures over the last three years, since the 2009-10 budget, to $3.9 billion. In addition, the government has increased funding over the forward estimates for asylum seeker management in the 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15 financial years by a further $648 million. This figure takes into account the savings from not proceeding with the failed Malaysia people swap deal.

I would like to reiterate the words of the shadow minister for immigration and citizenship:

The Government and Department did not revise their budget when they abolished the Howard Government’s border protection policies, despite Secretary Metcalfe admitting today that this was a major change in policy. The Government either ignored the advice on the cost impact of abolishing the Pacific Solution or the advice was never given by the Department or Secretary Metcalfe.

Having finished speaking about and highlighting the fact that there is a big blowout in our border protection for which all these extra funds are needed, I would now like to turn to interest rates and unaffordable housing.

Families in my electorate at Darwin and Palmerston know that since Labor was elected electricity prices are up 51 per cent, gas prices are up 30 per cent, water prices are up 46 per cent, education costs have risen by around 24 per cent, health costs have risen by 20 per cent, rent costs have risen by about 21 per cent and grocery prices are up by 14 per cent. And, as of today, with the passing of the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2011, Australians will now pay more for their private health insurance. Forty thousand Darwin and Palmerston residents covered by private health insurance were betrayed today. Independent analysis shows that thousands of people will either downgrade or cancel their insurance because they cannot afford the additional costs that will be placed on them. People doing this are going to place an enormous amount of pressure on our already stretched public health system.

But, this being said, Territorians are still angry at the betrayal over the carbon tax. They tell me that they are very concerned with the increased cost of living and reiterate to me that they are already paying record house prices and the highest prices in any capital city for groceries, petrol and rent, along with soaring power bills and interest rates. I have raised this before in this House about the carbon tax and how it will affect every aspect of people's lives, and in particular the families that are already struggling to make ends meet. People in Darwin's northern suburbs tell me that they are worried that they will no longer be able to afford to pay the electricity costs associated with cooling their houses from the tropical heat. I was more concerned to hear from pensioners who tell me that they go to the shopping centre not to shop but to escape the heat and take advantage of the free air conditioning that is being provided by the shops. When asked, the reasoning was quite simple: the increasing cost of living, particularly in terms of power, means that in many instances these people are unable to afford the costs associated with cooling their homes. It is quite alarming.

I raise again the fact that the carbon tax appears to be a tax on remoteness and, indeed, a tax on the Territory. It stands to increase the cost of living and directly impact our key industries in the Northern Territory, including my electorate, such as primary producers, mining, tourism, construction and aviation. When I spoke against the introduction of the carbon tax, I gave the example of a local regional airline that will be significantly impacted. I want to restate the example today, as I think it is important that everyone understand how Territorians will be impacted, particularly small business people. Airnorth is an award-winning Territory-grown business that has been operating since 1978 as an air charter service across the Territory. Airnorth has 156 scheduled departures weekly, servicing 14 destinations and carrying in excess of 250,000 passengers annually. It employs 180 staff in Darwin. The picture that I have painted is of a solid company providing essential services to the Top End of Australia.

Airnorth will be impacted by the carbon tax. The executive chairman of Airnorth, Mr Michael Bridge, shared with me some of his company's concerns about the projected impact that this tax would have on its business and its growth plans. In the 2011-12 financial year, Airnorth budgets to use 15.5 million litres of aviation fuel; in 2012-13, it plans to use 16.5 million litres of aviation fuel; in 2013-14 it will increase to 21 million litres of aviation fuel; and in 2014-15 it will increase again to an estimated 25 million litres of aviation fuel. Based solely on the usage of fuel, the direct effect that a carbon tax will have on Airnorth in the 2012-13 financial year will be an additional tax of $986,700. In the 2013-14 financial year it will be $1,318,590. In the 2014-15 financial year the company will have to pay an additional tax of $1,651,000. If this company is to remain prosperous and provide the service that is required by its consumers, it will have no choice but to pass on those additional costs to consumers. That is bad news for consumers.

In addition to the issue of the significant increase in tax, Mr Bridge also highlighted to me that the Gillard Labor government had publicly stated that they are only taxing Australia's 500, 400 or 300 biggest polluters. Airnorth, as a small business in the Northern Territory, cannot be deemed one of the 500, 400 or 300 big polluters. But, as outlined here today, they are going to be taxed anyway. This is because the Gillard Labor government has applied the carbon tax to the aviation industry through the aviation fuel levy. This means that, no matter how big or small your aviation business, the tax will be applied. Airnorth is not the only Territory aviation company that will be affected. Locals like Hardy Aviation, Chartair and Pearl Aviation will all be paying the additional tax. They will all be penalised for building their businesses and needing to use more aviation fuel.

Cost of living pressures are also being felt across other small businesses and they are telling me that they are struggling. Margins are falling while costs are rising. We all know that small business health is a good barometer for the strength of local community economies. It is pretty concerning how many shops and small businesses are closing down. All you have to do is have a look in the Darwin mall to see how many vacant shopfronts there are. Small businesses are doing it tough. But I heard today in the chamber one of the ministers saying, 'That's okay: we care about small businesses'. What a joke. The small businesses in my electorate do not think that the government cares about them at all.

On the topic of the government not caring at all, I would like to talk about the RAAF houses in Eaton. I have spoken on this issue a number of times in this place. I would like to know why the Gillard Labor government is again defying the will of the parliament and the will of Territorians. A motion was passed unanimously last year to make these houses available to Territorians. Why will the government not listen to the call from Territorians? They want these houses to be made available. They do not want them sitting there vacant, wasting away. These are taxpayer funded assets and they should be used. I hope that there is no truth to the rumour that the Labor government is going to demolish 120 of the 396 houses in the suburb of Eaton while claiming that they are not up to Defence standards when they are most definitely up to community standards. I know that the community would be outraged at such a ridiculous and unwarranted decision. Even if new houses were going to be built in their place that would not justify a decision to demolish houses when there is such a housing shortage in my electorate.

I would like to spend a few minutes following up on some promises that the Gillard Labor government made in the lead-up to the 2010 federal election. I want to get an update on where these things are. A $1.5 million all-weather, world-championship-level BMX track was promised. That has not been delivered yet. I would like to know where that is. There was a promise for 1,200 new affordable rental homes for the Northern Territory. They have not been delivered yet. There was some talk that there had been an extension granted until 2015. That is still three years away, so I would like to get an update on that.

Then there was the promise for the new music and dance festivals and the Big Day Out, which was planned for March, April and May last year in Palmerston. Those months have all been and gone and those festivals have not occurred. Where is the money for that? Then there is the $5 million that was promised for a GP superclinic. That never occurred. As I have said, I did not support the concept of a GP superclinic. However, that $5 million could be used for medical services, particularly now that we are going to have much more pressure on our already strained public system. That $5 million could be given to us. We would really like to look at that. A GP superclinic has been built in the northern suburbs, but it was by a private company, and they are bulk billing—good news for the northern suburbs in Darwin. They did not need the government, but they would still like that $5 million.

To finish off, I would like to remind the House of a motion that I tabled last year calling for 19 February of each year to be gazetted as the Bombing of Darwin Day and for it to be named a day of national significance by the Governor-General. As this motion was also unanimously supported by the parliament, I hope that this coming weekend, with the 70th anniversary commemorations, the Prime Minister or one of her representatives will make an announcement in Darwin that the wishes of the parliament will be upheld and that 19 February each year will be recognised as a national day of significance. Additionally, it is my hope that, if such an announcement is made, all parties are acknowledged for their involvement in bringing this request to the parliament. I do not want just Labor people to be recognised; I would like the coalition to be acknowledged as well, because we took the lead in bringing this to the attention of the House.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to join this debate. I want to raise several issues which are of great importance to communities across the Gippsland electorate. I will start with the township of Yarram and two key projects that are critical to the future of the town and which deserve support by both state and federal governments.

Before I get to those projects, I would like to pay tribute to one of Yarram district's finest ever citizens, who passed away during the parliamentary break: a gentleman by the name of Bernie Walpole. Bernie passed away on 23 December at the magnificent age of 94. As a friend of the family, I attended Bernie's funeral service; it was a tremendous celebration of his life. We heard about Bernie's remarkable service to the community in education, in local government and in sporting pursuits. Bernie was the kind of bloke you could always rely on. There is an old saying that if you want something done you get a busy man to do it. Bernie was always busy, but he always had time for a chat.

He was a man of many passions. He loved his community. He loved his farm. He loved his garden. He loved his family, especially his beloved wife, Merle, who died several years ago. I consider myself to have been very fortunate to have known Bernie for many years. His personal integrity and determination to make a difference in life made him a role model for anyone pursuing public office. As I indicated, Bernie served his community with great distinction as a local government councillor and a shire president and he will be fondly remembered not just by his family but by the entire community.

The two projects that I referred to earlier are the types of things that Bernie would have loved to have gotten his teeth into. One is the plan by Mirridong Services in Yarram to build Scammell Park, which will be a group of independent living units. Mirridong is the principle provider of services to adults with a disability within the Yarram district. It provides day services, accommodation and respite services. Mirridong has a very proud reputation from serving the Yarram district community over many years. It has some big plans for the future which I believe deserve support at a government level. Their plans for a $3 million facility are very well developed and they have applied for some federal government support to develop these independent living units.

This is a need that has been identified in the community, particularly for adults who are living with a disability and residing with elderly parents who may not be able to continue to care for their children in their later life. Scammell Park will provide an important option for those parents to remain with their child while they receive the specialised support and care that they need. At the same time, they will be able to help to develop the child's independent living skills to enable them to continue to live independently and to be active in the community when the parent can no longer care for them.

I have been briefed over the last couple of years by the Mirridong board about this particular project. I can say that the Yarram district community is fully supportive of this application, which came about as the result of many years of community consultation and planning. It is an outstanding project and it is certainly worthy of federal government support. I commend the board and the staff of Mirridong Services for the work that they do with people with disabilities in our community. They provide a great service to the Yarram district and they help bond our community together.

There is another project in the Yarram district that I want to refer to and that is a plan to develop a community hub, which will include childcare facilities. To say that this proposal has had a chequered past is to state what is obvious to the local community. The lack of childcare services was identified as a major issue in the Yarram district more than five years ago. It was certainly subject to some election commitments in 2007, when my predecessor, Peter McGauran, made a $1 million commitment that a re-elected government would fund a childcare service in Yarram. That commitment was publicly matched by the Labor candidate at the time, which was reported in the local media. But unfortunately the funding for that program has not eventuated. Given this government's track record in relation to broken promises, I should not be so surprised.

The federal government now has the opportunity to redeem itself in the eyes of the Yarram district community. This is something that, as I said, had bipartisan support in the lead-up to the 2007 election. It was a commitment by the coalition at this time. As everyone is well and truly aware, the Labor Party won that election. But their candidate made a commitment to the same project, so I believe that it is something that the government should revisit.

I am pleased to say that there has been something of a breakthrough on this issue in recent times in the form of the commitment made by the Victorian state government to the community hub project. I want to pay tribute to the local state member and Deputy Premier, Mr Peter Ryan. He is a very good friend of mine. I used to work with Peter before I became a member of parliament. Peter has worked very hard with the community to develop this project and to continue to liaise with the Wellington Shire Council to get something together that could be taken to governments to seek funding support.

The Victorian state government has provided $900,000 under its local government infrastructure program, which is a very good step in the right direction. The Wellington Shire has completed a feasibility study to determine what services should actually be included in the community hub model, but it needs some additional funding before construction can begin. I understand that council is going to consider the recommendations of this feasibility study and determine which is the best way to progress but that either way child care is going to be included as a core service. It is likely that the community hub will include a public library, a kindergarten, child care and community meeting spaces in the shire service centre, so it meets a lot of this government's commentary, if you like, about consolidating community services and providing that hub-type approach where small regional communities like Yarram can enjoy the support services that perhaps some of our major regional centres and certainly our metropolitan areas take for granted. I think it is a great project and I believe it is well worthy of government support.

The members of the Yarram district community have been very patient. They have been very patient with me as their federal member when over four years we have not been able to get funding from the federal government. They have been very patient with the state government as well in that regard. They have worked tirelessly to have the project developed to this stage and they deserve to be commended for their efforts. We still, though, have a long way to go. We will need more funding to be secured for the full scope of the project, and I am hopeful that the state and federal governments will be able to see their way clear to working with the Wellington Shire Council and working with those hardworking and deserving citizens of the Yarram district to finally deliver childcare services.

I must say that a couple of the mums who first contacted me and initiated the debate about childcare services in Yarram now have no need for childcare services; their children are at school and they are probably of an age now that it is not really for an issue for them. But they are continuing to work for it as they recognise what an important issue it is for our regional communities. It is actually impossible for us in some of our small regional towns to attract skilled workers unless we can offer some of the services that people expect—in particular, in the modern era, childcare services. If we are going to attract teachers, doctors and other skilled professionals to our small regional towns, we need to make sure we have that level of childcare service which is befitting our regional centres.

In the time I have remaining I want to reflect on an issue of importance to the future of the East Gippsland community, the other end of my electorate. That is the issue of funding for upgrades to the Princes Highway, particularly in the section of the highway east of Sale. I imagine, Mr Deputy Speaker Symon, that you have probably had the opportunity to travel that road on many occasions. The highway, in Gippsland, has been the subject of much community debate over many, many years. To its credit, the federal government made allocations to the duplication of the highway between Traralgon and Sale, and I can report that that project is progressing. I think that in all $175 million has gone to that 50-kilometre section of road between Sale and Traralgon. The full scope of that project is somewhere in the order of $500 million, so there is a lot of work still to be done in that particular area.

That section of the road between Traralgon and Sale is eligible under the national road network for Commonwealth funding, but the problem starts at Sale and goes all the way to the New South Wales border and then into the South Coast of New South Wales, where the Princes Highway is not eligible for Commonwealth funding under the national road network. It is an issue that I have raised with the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport in the past. To his credit, he has discussed it with me. It is also something I have raised with colleagues in my own party. The section of road from Sale to the New South Wales border is a section of road on which, quite frankly, too many people are dying and too many people are suffering horrific injuries. The road condition is a very significant part of the problem.

We obviously need to take into account that we are talking about a section of road which is 2½ to five hours from Melbourne. It is a stretch of road where people might be getting fatigued by the time they get there and we have not built safety into the road environment. There are too many sections of that road where there are no overtaking areas, where there are poor or non-existent shoulders and where there are run-off road hazards. There are a whole range of reasons why the road is a safety risk. It has one of the highest accident and fatality rates in the state of Victoria and there is no question that the road environment itself is a contributing factor to the road trauma we are experiencing.

I have worked very closely over recent times with my state counterpart, the member for Gippsland East, Tim Bull, on this issue, and he supports my view that there is a lot more work that we need to do. I believe that one of the first things we need to do is fund a safety audit of the road and then develop a 10-year strategy to upgrade the highway east of Sale. If we do not have a plan to roll out the safety upgrade as funding becomes available, I think we are starting behind the eight ball to begin with. I will continue to lobby the federal government and I will be lobbying my colleagues in the coalition to make the highway east of Sale eligible for Commonwealth funding in the future. If we are going to be realistic about it, we should be talking about the highway all the way up the south coast of New South Wales and through Eden-Monaro. I have not spoken to the member for Eden-Monaro of late about that issue, but sections of his road are in pretty poor condition as well.

My concern is that there really is no long-term plan at the moment for the upgrade of even the most basic safety features that perhaps we take for granted on some of our other highways. Again, I am talking about things like shoulder-sealing, the need for more overtaking lanes, some realignment of some of the dangerous corners that exist and improvements to the road surface itself. In recent times we have seen an increase in the use of very heavy vehicles on the road. I am talking not just about the transport industry in terms of trucks but also about caravans and recreational vehicles, which are bigger now than they ever were before. That has added to the danger. In some of the narrow sections of road east of Orbost as you head towards Cann River on the New South Wales border it really is a nightmare watching two large vehicles pass each other. The mirrors almost touch as they come along that section of road. There is no margin for error on many sections of the highway. I estimated on one trip that there is probably about 40 kilometres of highway where there is actually no shoulder whatsoever. So one small slip, one small error could send a vehicle off into the gravel and into potential danger with the surrounding vegetation.

So, in my view, too much of the current debate about the highway funding east of Sale is based on anecdotal evidence, some of which I have just passed on to the House tonight. But I do believe there needs to be a complete safety audit, with a view to developing a 10-year strategy for upgrades of that section of road. To its credit the previous state government did that, and the current state government has been doing some upgrades of the road. It would be unfair to either of those governments to suggest that nothing is happening, but the pool of available funding is simply not adequate to get the major overhaul that is required. VicRoads is trialling some new ideas on that section of road between Sale and Bairnsdale at the moment, with some new line markings and some wider line markings and encouraging drivers to use their headlights at all times, and there is some new and improved signage. But I do not think any of that really replaces the fact that we are going to need some major upgrades to the road and it is going to cost a lot of money.

There simply has not been a major funding commitment to invest in the safety upgrades that I have talked about. I understand that, in tight budgetary times, road funding is a highly competitive area of responsibility for governments and that there are many competing needs throughout our nation. But, when the No. 1 highway is a virtual goat track in parts of the section through East Gippsland, and lives are being lost and horrific injuries are being suffered, we have to find a way to invest in safety improvements not only for those very clear social reasons I have just pointed out but also for the enormous economic benefits it would bring to the East Gippsland region in increased productivity for our transport sector, better linking our communities and making us more accessible as a tourist destination.

This is something that I think we need to resolve to work harder at improving, both at a state and at a federal level. I sincerely believe that we need to find a way to get that Princes Highway east of Sale, right through the Gippsland electorate and the Eden-Monaro electorate, within the parameters of the national road network to ensure that additional funding can flow in the future.

In the brief time I have left I want to touch on one other issue which I suppose is a personal passion of mine—that is, the health of the environment of the Gippsland Lakes. This year we have experienced an algal bloom in the Gippsland Lakes, and that is not an unknown event. We have had algal blooms over many years at different times. There are a whole range of factors that play into what causes algal blooms but the simple fact is that, when they arrive, they do have an impact on our local tourism industry and on the amenity of the Gippsland Lakes area. It is an issue for us as a community to deal with.

For more than a decade, I have campaigned on the need to have ongoing commitments from state and federal governments to do practical environmental work in the catchment to look after the health of the Gippsland Lakes. My view is that the Gippsland Lakes are really the Great Barrier Reef of the south. It is the biggest inland waterway in the Southern Hemisphere. It is critical to our tourism industry and it is critical to our enjoyment of the Gippsland region. There are some very strong cultural links to the Gippsland Lakes amongst the Indigenous community and also amongst people who choose to live and work around the Gippsland Lakes system.

The state government has allocated $10 million over the next three years for environmental works around the Gippsland Lakes and catchment area. That is welcome news and I congratulate the state government for that. The previous state government made commitments as well at various times over the last decade. But my concern is that the current federal government funding has run out. About $3 million was allocated in 2007 but there has been no ongoing federal funding. It is a major concern that, at the Commonwealth level, we have a Ramsar listed wetland and we simply are not pulling our weight in looking after the environment of this national treasure.

So I would like to see a greater commitment at the Commonwealth level to the Gippsland Lakes in the future. I think there is enormous community support for such a funding commitment, if the relevant ministers could see their way through in subsequent budgets. I thank the House for the opportunity to raise those issues tonight on behalf the people of Gippsland.

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriations Bill (No. 3) 2011-12 and Appropriations Bill (No. 4) 2011-12. In taking this opportunity, I would like to speak about the single biggest issue affecting families, individuals and businesses within my electorate of Forde, and that is the issue of the rising cost of living and the rising cost of doing business. Under this Labor-Green government, we have all witnessed the cost of basic essentials going up and up. Interest rates are climbing and jobs are being shed—and that is before we even get to the carbon and mining taxes, which will only make these issues worse. For example, last year food shot up by about 6.1 per cent, electricity shot up by about 10.7 per cent and motorists paid a little bit over 11 per cent more for petrol. At a time when these costs are skyrocketing, jobs are at risk. More than 1,800 jobs are known to have been lost in January alone, and that figure does not include the 1,000 workers at ANZ who were shown the door earlier this week.

Last year we were promised the creation of 700,000 jobs by the Prime Minister. However, yet again, we are left feeling betrayed because no net new jobs were created last year. The Executive Chairman of Manufacturing Australia has warned that 400,000 Australians are in danger of losing their jobs in the coming year. Whilst the Prime Minister continues to be consumed with the future of her own job, many other Australians are facing the prospect of underemployment or even unemployment in the near future.

Just this week an article in the Courier-Mail grabbed my attention with the headline, 'Workers struggling to get full-time jobs,' as employers increasingly hire part-time and casual workers. This can be supported by some statistics from Roy Morgan that were released in January 2012. The figures show an unemployment rate of 10.3 per cent. It is important to bear in mind that these are calculated on a different metric from the ABS, but that is as it is. An estimated 1.3 million Australians are unemployed or looking for work. This is Australia's highest ever number of unemployed as reported by Roy Morgan and according to their methodology. It is also Australia's highest unemployment rate for a decade—since January 2002. A further 7.5 per cent of the workforce are working part time or looking for more work—an alternative term is 'underemployed'. They represent 934,000 Australians. This takes it to a record total of 17.8 per cent of the workforce or 2.21 million Australians who are either unemployed or underemployed.

The single biggest question I face when I return to my electorate is: when are we going to get a break? Where are we supposed to find the means and the funds to pay for all of these increases? Australians are bunkering down with their savings because they do not feel confident about where this government is leading this great nation. I wish I could tell them some positive news. However, when I return to my electorate at the end of this week, I will be bringing more bad news—news that, again, Labor has broken a promise to the people by spearing an arrow into the heart of the private health insurance rebate. I have already spoken about that and the proposed introduction of means testing in the other chamber. That legislation has now passed, so I will not elaborate on it here. But I will use it as an example to highlight my point that, yet again, the cost of living is set to increase as premiums will grow for every man, woman and child in this country when others pull out of private health insurance cover.

Last week, I was confronted with the question of why there was so little government support for a single mother battling with the costs of medical bills for her child who has serious health conditions. Here is a woman who could benefit from a national disability insurance scheme. However, instead of a national disability insurance scheme we are given an NBN, and I can tell you that the feedback in my electorate about the NBN has not been positive. Most people do not want it, most say they will not sign up for it and most are outraged at the billions of dollars going into this project with no checks or balances. After all, what can one expect from an idea born on the back of a drink coaster on a VIP flight?

The cost of the NBN has already blown out to—who knows?—$50 billion. That is $50 billion that could have been far better utilised elsewhere. As an example of the failure to control costs on the NBN, we have a business in my electorate that can supply the same infrastructure as the NBN is providing for half the cost, yet we have an NBN that is using a foreign company to provide the services and locking out our local providers and businesses.

While we are on this topic of funding poorly thought-out ideas, the latest figures on set-top boxes show a cost blowout to $700 per set-top box. I had a constituent contact my office asking why money is being spent on set-top boxes when they have seen digital televisions advertised for around $200 or $300. Another blow-out in Labor's budget is the abolition of the Pacific solution and temporary protection visas. This has seen a blow-out in the budget of more than $1 billion. The costs of running the immigration department have gone from $1.6 billion a year under the Howard government through to $2.7 billion a year under the current government.

Back in my electorate we have a range of infrastructure projects in desperate need of funding, like the expansion of the M1 between the Gateway and Logan motorways. It is extremely frustrating to see so much money being wasted by this government which could instead be allocated to projects that would improve the daily lives of commuters in my electorate and also those surrounding me between Brisbane, Logan and the Gold Coast.

Under Labor we have seen four of the biggest budget deficits in our history. Labor continued to borrow $100 million a day, and in just four years Labor has turned a $20 billion surplus into $167 billion in accumulated deficits and $70 billion in net Commonwealth assets into $133 billion of net debt. That is $6,000 for every Australian man, woman and child. In addition to this these Australians are paying $100 million a week in interest, which is robbing our future generations of their wealth. The truth is that Labor loves spending money, and in its latest spending spree Labor has spent more than $17 million setting up an agency that will enforce—enforce—the carbon tax. This is another great big new bureaucracy—that $17 million was borrowed funds because Labor has not raised any money from the carbon tax yet—towards enforcing a tax that the majority of Australians strongly oppose. I agree with the statement made by Senator Birmingham in a recent media release that it is outrageous to spend $200,000 on the branding of an agency that has no competition. Long before the implementation of this toxic tax we are seeing the early days of its purpose, which is to bleed taxpayers dry.

To add salt to the wound, this week banks went out on their own, independent of the decision of the Reserve Bank, and increased their interest rates. Mortgage holders around the country can thank Labor for those increases, as Labor's growing mountain of debt continues to place an unnecessary strain on interest rates.

Mr Craig Thomson interjecting—

You need to put away your Keynesian economics textbook and get a proper one.

Housing affordability is also a big issue in our electorate. There are many housing developments going ahead within Forde, but these are being curtailed because of the inability of both the developers and home buyers to get finance. In addition, the ability to service those mortgages or loans is being restricted because of the level of interest rates. People are being forced away from the dream of buying a new home or buying an investment property. All of this has a flow-through effect to our local builders and contractors, where they have little or no work.

Additionally, it was reported in today's Courier-Mail that one in five residents of the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Fraser Coast struggle for necessities like food and power bills because of the cost of servicing the mortgages on their homes. According to this survey, these areas suffer the worst housing stress of all Queensland council areas. On the Gold Coast, for example, which is about a third of my electorate, 41,000 families spend more than a third of their income on housing. Brisbane has one of the highest numbers of people suffering housing stress, at 55½ thousand, and Logan sits somewhere in between. What people cannot fathom is why they should have to pay for Labor's reckless economic mismanagement. For 12 years Australians were able to enjoy good government under the coalition. The prosperity of that time speaks for itself. We had a 20 per cent increase in real wages, more than two million new jobs, and our real net worth per head more than doubled. We need to turn this country around for future generations and ensure there is hope, reward and opportunity for our children and our children's children.

The Treasurer boasted yesterday about our AAA credit rating, which is great. But the average family do not feel as if they are benefiting from the AAA credit rating, nor do they feel the benefits of the mining boom. The Treasurer restated Labor's big productivity agenda to invest in skills and infrastructure like the NBN, but nowhere in his dialogue did he mention relief for everyday Australians. It is one thing to say the economy is steaming along, but it is another thing to see with your own eyes families and individuals who are struggling to make ends meet—and I am sure that is not just in my own electorate.

While on the topic of those who struggle, I am very concerned about the decline in financial support for our not-for-profit community groups. As people's ability to donate dries up as a result of ever-increasing cost-of-living pressures, individuals are finding it harder and harder to donate or volunteer their time because more and more people are having to spend longer hours at work just to make ends meet for themselves. Individuals, along with businesses, in my electorate keep putting their hands in their pockets to help these organisations but it is becoming increasingly difficult.

A number of local business in my electorate have also suffered as a result of the actions of this incompetent government. Business owners are working longer and longer hours, sometimes around the clock, and taking home less and less, just to ensure their staff are being paid. At the end of the day, though, many businesses are starting to just give up and shut up shop in an economic crisis that burdens business with excessive red tape and hinders and disables their ability to grow and prosper. We need to remove the dead hand of government from the economy to give business the opportunity to be more productive and more innovative.

The coalition believes that the key to a strong economy is to live within our means so we can improve productivity. This means borrowing less, thereby putting less pressure on interest rates, providing the ability to lower taxes and ultimately putting more money in the pockets of Australians so they can live long and prosperous lives and leave a positive inheritance for future generations.

Labor governments continue to scramble to support their dubious claims that they are looking out for the underprivileged. It is the poor and needy that end up being stung most by the politics of envy. Labor have a problem with success. They do not want to see everyday Australians be personally responsible or entrepreneurial. They want to create a society where everyone is brought down to the lowest common denominator.

They call us negative and accuse us of false pessimism. However, it is my duty as the elected member for Forde to fight for my constituents. At the risk of being seen as negative, I know that I am listening to my electorate and carrying out their wishes. In conclusion, I hope that the government take some time to reflect on their role. It is not fair on the Australian people for this government to continue focusing on their own political survival. It is time for the government to listen to the people, not the polls. I speak on behalf of my constituents when I say enough is enough and let us get Australia back on track.

Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2011-2012 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2011-2012. However, I do not support the amendment moved by the member for Goldstein, who seeks to delay these measures for the best part of two years and maybe even longer. The total additional appropriation being sought through these bills is just under $3.2 billion. The vast majority of that is to provide for the implementation of the clean energy future package passed by parliament in 2011, despite the Liberal and National parties' opposition.

There are several recently announced programs from the clean energy future package which I would like to highlight as they have great benefit to community organisations, local government and low-income residents not only in the electorate of Deakin but right across Australia. The Community Energy Efficiency Program will invest $200 million in partnership with local councils and community organisations to improve energy efficiency in council and community buildings and facilities. With dollar-for-dollar matched funding, this program is a great opportunity to save energy, particularly electricity, and the cost of energy. In my home state of Victoria the price of electricity has been rising at close to 10 per cent per annum and for a domestic customer the current retail tariff in my area is now around 22c per kilowatt hour. This is not just a recent phenomenon and I will admit it has happened under state governments of both flavours. From everything we read about the need for new infrastructure in the industry, it is going to keep going that way.

There are gains to be made from energy efficiency, in particular savings from converting standard lighting—incandescent, fluorescent or discharge lighting like the very lights in this chamber—to LED lighting. The money saved by making the conversion can be very substantial. Energy savings can be 60 per cent, 70 per cent or even 80 per cent compared to existing lighting. This result is in a lower electricity bill and a win-win situation as it reduces demand on generation. In Victoria and in large parts of Australia generation of baseload power is almost at a critical point, particularly on very hot or very cold days when there is simply not enough power in the grid for everyone.

Mr Chester interjecting—

The member for Gippsland would be well versed in power generation issues, as am I, having had a background in the electrical industry for well over 20 years. The member for Gippsland is probably of a slightly lesser age than me but I can remember when light globes were advertised quite proudly as being 1,000-hour globes. I thought that was pretty amazing, that 1,000 hours was a long time. If you do the maths, it is about three hours a day every day for a year—that is pretty good—but the big advantage of the new LED lighting technology is its product life. If you think 1,000 hours is not bad, reset your sites to 50,000 hours. Imagine having to change a globe after 50,000 hours.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Only a sparky would know that.

Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And that is the good thing about having sparkies in parliament. If you look at LED, you could use it 24 hours a day, every day of the year for six years before you needed to replace the globe. That would be good in places which have very high ceilings, like many community facilities. I know a lot of them struggle when it is time to relamp a hall or similar. It is not the cost of the lamps; it is the cost of getting somebody in who can get up in the air to change those lights. Most community groups simply do not have that sort of money. I see that time after time in many of my local facilities.

There are two other complementary programs to the Community Energy Efficiency Program—the Energy Efficiency Information Grants Program and the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program. The Energy Efficiency Information Grants Program is a $40 million initiative that will provide funding to industry associations and not-for-profit organisations which can work with community organisations and small to medium sized businesses of up to 200 full-time equivalent employees to provide information on better ways to use and to reduce the use of energy. The third program in this package is the $100 million Low Income Energy Efficiency Program, which includes the Home Energy Saver Scheme that is available to 100,000 low-income households. That particular scheme will be delivered as part of the existing Financial Management Program and is designed to assist households that are experiencing difficulty in paying for their energy costs. By concentrating on improving financial and energy management practices through financial counselling services, the scheme can directly assist low-income households.

I should now turn my attention to another program that the Liberal Party voted against in this place: the Building the Education Revolution program. That has delivered more than $79 million of funding to schools in my electorate of Deakin. This huge investment in our local education structure has been met with acclaim by principals, teachers, parents, students and all the various parents associations—anyone you care to name, really, including the people who worked on the projects and the community groups that get to use them outside hours. Right across the electorate, they have only wonderful things to say about the new infrastructure that their schools have received under that program.

It is a huge program, and I still have a few more schools to open. They have been ones that have had various site problems over the last year or two. We are in the home straight now, and I thought I had better have a look and see how many I actually did in the last year. It added up to 18 that I opened in the last year—$39½ million of funding for schools in the electorate of Deakin. Of course, they were not just government schools; they were also Catholic schools and independent schools as well. The really good thing about the program in my part of Melbourne is that by working with the state education department, particularly in the early stages of the program, our schools not only have got the buildings that most suited them but, in many cases, have gone out and got individually architect-designed buildings and got a very good price for those.

I thought I would do a bit of a rewind. I think the first one I got to open during the year was in the newly redistributed part of Deakin, at St James Primary School, a Catholic school in Vermont. That was a project that I had not been completely up with, because until recent times it was over the boundary in the electorate of Aston. Its $2½ million multipurpose community centre included two new classrooms, and there were refurbishments of three classrooms down at the other end of the school. It also managed to put together the installation of new interactive whiteboards, upgrade its school toilets and fit out a resource centre and multimedia lab. It is a great result for that community. It is a school that needed infrastructure and needed money spent on it. Like many schools in the area, it was a really good school inside but from the outside it certainly needed some work, and it has now had it.

As I mentioned before, this also went to independent schools. Tintern Girls Grammar School is a very large independent school in my electorate of Deakin, and it received $2 million to put towards an early learning centre. It also put in nearly $1.4 million of its own funding, and the result is a very spectacular-looking building that has some particular good energy efficiency measures in it as well. I was there for the opening of that, and it was a rather unique day. We even had an archbishop out to assist in the opening, and it was a very good time. Tintern, by doing the building that it did, ensured that it got a great outcome that will serve the school very well for many, many years to come. The early learning centre has three spaces inside it which are named after the values at Tintern Girls Grammar—that is, Endeavour, Discover and Adventure.

Early last year, on 15 March 2011, I also attended the opening of Burwood Heights Primary School, which has now been redistributed into the electorate of Chisholm—a part of the world, of course, well known to Madam Deputy Speaker Burke. That was also a project that was done in conjunction with the state, so there was not only a BER building there but also a rebuild of the school. Being a multipurpose room, it is also very handy for that school to have assemblies in. Its old hall, if I can call it that, where I had attended many assemblies before, was not big enough to hold the whole school plus parents, and that is such a common thing for so many schools in the electorate. The space can also be used to expand the school's kindergarten, meaning that the project not only is meeting needs now but has a great capacity to meet the school's needs into the future. Another Catholic school I attended the opening of in the past year was St Thomas the Apostle School in Blackburn, which was established in 1953. They received $2.5 million and the work they did there is spectacular: it is architect designed; it has access for the disabled—they have a lift; and they have brand new classrooms and computer lab facilities. It is a really wonderful space.

They were also able to do up a lot of the office area and administration parts. This building in many cases had not been touched at all since 1953, so it has really gone ahead by half a century. In addition, some existing classrooms were refurbished. There was great employment of locals on the project.

More recently, towards the end of last year, I was privileged to open the Marlborough Primary School's new BER building, which was funded under stage 2 of the P21 Program. It was the school's first new building in 35 years. Again, it was a wonderful school from the inside that was looking more than a little bit faded from the outside. It now has a much better outlook and a great future. The building certainly makes the school. They set theirs up as an early learning centre for their junior students. Each school has done it differently. At Marlborough it is the little ones who get to use the new building. Having two daughters who have gone to primary school—one is still there—I know there is a great deal of competition about which class gets to use the new building and which gets to use the old building.

With the new building, Marlborough also has a great opportunity to grow as a school. It is in a great part of the electorate, Heathmont. It needs facilities to show off to the public so that when people drive past the front gate for the first time they say, 'I would like to have a look inside and see what they offer.' That is a good thing for any government school.

On 18 May I had the pleasure of opening the Ray Symons Multipurpose Centre—no relation, I might add—which is at the Eastwood Primary School. Eastwood Primary School has been in the papers for an awfully long time, quite simply because it was falling down. It is of weatherboard construction and was built nearly 60 years ago, I believe. There are holes in the external walls you can put your hand into. The buildings are not made for the learning of today. I remember the first time I went there, in late 2007. The first classroom I looked at had one power point, so there was no hope of using any of today's modern teaching aids.

The new multipurpose centre is what is called a Maroondah template building, of which there are only 10 in Victoria. Eight are in very close proximity to the electorate of Deakin. That is a great testament not only to the regional network leaders but also to the principals and especially the parents associations and school councils of the schools involved. It meant that those schools got a full-sized building big enough for an indoor basketball court for a figure of $500,000 less than was being quoted by the Victorian state government for the same facility. Therefore, the school was offered only $2.5 million under the BER. They were able to get a full-sized hall rather than something that was closer to half the size. That has been great for the local community. To me the good thing about a building like that at Eastwood Primary School is that it ensures the school's future. Whilst the state government is still dragging its heels on a rebuild, there is a brand new building there that shows not only the parents and students but the local population that there is commitment by government to their place of education.

That is very important. We have lost many schools in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the last 20 years. Although that rate has slowed down a lot there is certainly no cause to become complacent. The more money, the more investment that is put into schools, the more locals will send their children there. With government schools it is particularly important, as it is with Catholic schools, many of which have many low-income families sending their children there.

That is just a short rewind of the year in the types of funding that were delivered to the electorate of Deakin. There is a whole lot more of that to come and that is a wonderful thing to look forward to. I thank the House.

Russell Matheson (Macarthur, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to talk about my growing electorate and the infrastructure needs that face my community over the next two decades. In Macarthur we are expecting an influx of more than 200,000 new residents in the next 20 to 30 years. This will result in an increase of more than 300 per cent in the Camden local government area. The infrastructure required for new and existing residents in Macarthur must be provided before this growth occurs to ensure my electorate remains strong and resilient as it grows. In preparation for this boom, I have spearheaded a series of infrastructure meetings between local, state and federal government representatives in Macarthur. These meetings will ensure that we plan strategically for the future in the face of the major growth and change that will confront the region over the next 20 to 30 years.

The purpose of these meetings is to ensure a serious dialogue between some of the key stakeholders in my community to work out a strategic way to build a stronger and more self-sustaining Macarthur. There are several issues facing my electorate that we have begun to address. These include urban growth, dealing with the impact of this growth, recognising opportunities within the challenge of growth and ensuring that Macarthur sustains itself as a strong and resilient region. The group includes the mayors from Campbelltown, Camden and Wollondilly councils, state members of parliament, local council general managers and me. Together we have put together a list of Macarthur's high priority infrastructure projects that focus on self-sustaining an independent region for the future.

South-western Sydney has been earmarked by the metropolitan plan to take the greatest number of new dwellings and population growth in the whole metropolitan area over the next 25 years. This will have profound effects on Macarthur, including massive changes to the character of the neighbourhood, the location and nature of jobs and employment, access to roads and public transport, access to quality services and facilities and, of course, retail, commercial, government, health, education and community services.

One of the things I love about Macarthur is that it already has a strong sense of regional and community identity. It is also geographically well-defined and has a good variety of regional level facilities and services. Apart from employment, Macarthur is reasonably self-sustaining; with some help, it could be more self-sustaining in the long term. More than 75 per cent of its population leave the area and commute to work on a daily basis. I would like to see more employment lands developed in Macarthur providing more opportunity for people to work closer to home and their families. I believe that all levels of government can harness this existing energy and community capacity in Macarthur to capitalise on future growth and make the area more prosperous. This will offer a better lifestyle for our children and encourage them to live, work and bring up their own children in the Macarthur region.

As a federal representative, I am working closely with local councils, the state government, community leaders and business leaders. We must ensure that Macarthur becomes a sustainable and independent region and not be satisfied to continue as a dormitory for Sydney. To do this we need good planning, collaboration and coordination to secure the resources that will turn the challenges of growth into opportunities for economic prosperity, social equity and enrichment as well as environmental enhancement. All of these elements are crucial in determining our quality of life.

We must think and act strategically and make decisions that are focused on the betterment of the Macarthur region as a whole. I believe the key to the success lies in infrastructure—planning for it, securing the resources to pay for it and ensuring that it is delivered on time, in the right place and on budget. Decisions made about infrastructure must consider the contribution each item can make to a more sustainable Macarthur. The regional benefit must be measured against the cost. This approach is fundamental in obtaining funding from the federal government through Regional Development Australia. As a group, we have identified the high-priority roads, traffic management facilities, public transport links, water supplies, sewerage and the like that do not just facilitate new housing suburbs but will assist in private economic investment in new jobs and enterprise development.

With the expected population boom in Macarthur, we must also ensure that adequate capacity exists in our existing roads, traffic facilities, drainage, open space, recreation and community facilities and services to serve the new and existing population without compromising existing service levels and amenity. This means not just local government type infrastructure but state and federal facilities and services as well. It is very important that infrastructure investment be strategic, targeted and cost-effective and achieves tangible regional benefits. Today, Macarthur high-priority infrastructure projects include better connectivity and access on our roads; better public transport, including commuter parking; the development of employment-generating lands so that people can live and work in Macarthur; health, education and community facilities and services, such as upgrades to our hospitals, the university, TAFE and ambulance and police stations; better recreational facilities; access to water and sewerage; and better internet connection.

We have put together a high-priority infrastructure project list for Macarthur, backed up by a regional cost-benefit analysis. This will mean that we can ensure that we are ready to apply for grants and make strong representations to Regional Development Australia, infrastructure funding agencies and government ministers when funding becomes available. Progress has already begun, and I must thank my state colleagues for the infrastructure they have provided to my electorate in the New South Wales government 2011-12 budget and forward estimates. This included planning work for the upgrade of the M5 between King Georges Road and Camden Valley Way; $25 million to complete construction of the jointly funded F5 freeway widening between Ingleburn and Campbelltown; $15 million to continue construction of a four-lane upgrade of Camden Valley Way between Cobbitty Road and Narellan Road; $139 million to begin the Campbelltown Hospital redevelopment and emergency department; $292 million to continue construction work on the south-west rail link, with 11.4 kilometres of twin track between Glenfield and Leppington; and a $900,000 upgrade to Warragamba Dam. Macarthur residents were extremely grateful for all the money spent in the region.

These projects are a great start in dealing with the high-priority infrastructure needs identified for Macarthur. Both Narellan Road and Camden Valley Way cause a great amount of grief for motorists commuting to and from work in my electorate. It is great to see that upgrades to these roads are currently on the state government program, but I believe they would benefit from federal funding as well. The Spring Farm Parkway extension and connection to the Hume Highway, including on and off ramps at the Hume Highway at Menangle, is also a high priority.

These projects will significantly improve traffic flow and congestion that locals are experiencing every day in my electorate, which will only be made worse as the population increases in the coming decades. The extension and upgrade of Badgally Road from Gregory Hills Road into Campbelltown and a bus interchange at Campbelltown Station will better connect our new communities to public transport options. We need to upgrade Appin Road and Raby Road with widening and intersection improvements. We need a four-lane bridge over the Georges River to replace the causeway on Cambridge Avenue. Residents have been waiting for over 20 years for that to occur.

State government feasibility is now being carried out on the widening of the M5 east from the M7 interchange, with additional lane capacity required. We also need to extend the south-west rail link past Leppington to relieve our regional road and existing rail line congestion. It is also imperative that we make improvements to the existing rail lines and services, including interchanges, express services, easy access, increased services and improved parking and security. Improvements are also needed for our existing bus services, including high-frequency early services, priority connections from Camden to Macarthur via Narellan, and connections from Campbelltown to Liverpool via Oran Park and Leppington.

Also on our list of infrastructure projects is the upgrade of Picton Road, including the interchange with the Hume Highway, and the completion of the Maldon-Dombarton rail link to take more trucks off the road and improve our freight transportation services. I would also like to see the Badgerys Creek airport site rezoned to create employment-generating lands and allow residents not to have the restrictions of an airport zoning affecting work on their homes.

Recreational and cultural facilities, or so-called soft infrastructure, are also important factors for our growing community. Be it sports facilities, humanities or the arts, it is important that we have this infrastructure available to turn all of this new development into real communities.

As you can see, Madam Deputy Speaker, there are many projects in my electorate which are needed to service new and existing residents in the Macarthur region. With a forecast of 300 per cent growth in the next two to three decades, it is vital that we develop a region-wide strategy to deal with the expected population boom. It has been very productive working with my local government and state government colleagues to establish this plan for our community's future, and I would like to thank them for their input. We all agree that we need good planning, collaboration and coordination to secure resources that will turn the challenges of growth into opportunities for economic prosperity, social equity and environmental enhancement, which are all crucial in determining our quality of life. I believe that this joint effort between all levels of government will help us achieve more for the communities which we represent. I also believe the key to our success lies in infrastructure—planning for it, securing the resources to pay for it and ensuring that it is delivered on time in the right place and on budget. Our next step is to make strong representation to infrastructure-funding agencies and government ministers to capitalise on this growth.

We all have one goal for Macarthur—to make it more prosperous and to offer a better lifestyle for our children in future generations. I will continue to fight for the infrastructure and services my community deserves as we experience this incredible growth over the next two decades.

Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my remarks tonight I would like to address one of the great strengths of the electorate of Cowan—and probably one of the great strengths of all electorates across the country—and that is volunteerism. We know there are dedicated volunteers out in our communities who believe in something that is very special. They are the ones who are prepared, in their own time, to turn up to meetings, to turn up to activities—fundraising and other events—and to help members of their clubs or the community generally. They are prepared to show up and do what needs to be done. What sort of place would we have and what sort of country would we have if people were not prepared to do that? What sort of country would we have if everyone in the community just said, 'I am only going to do this if I get paid'.

So, in reality, within Cowan I have a very strong community volunteer sector. There is the bushfire service and we have SES volunteers all doing wonderful jobs. This evening I would like specifically to mention a number of different groups. I would like to begin by talking about the strong seniors club sector. Within my electorate of Cowan the seniors clubs provide services to older residents across the electorate. They do things like computer training, craft work, pottery, painting, carpet bowls, card playing, bingo, outings and a great range of other activities. The executives and the committees of these seniors groups do a wonderful job. As we know, there is often a sense of isolation felt by older people. That is obviously made worse by their lack of mobility as they get towards the twilight years. So it is very good and a great thing that people, often other seniors, are prepared to take up positions in these clubs. Particularly on this occasion I would like just to mention some of these volunteers.

There is the Waneroo Seniors, with their long-term president, Marcia Dinnie—a real driving force there. She is backed up by vice-president, Jean Squibb, the secretary, Ingrid Bartle, assistant secretary, Ada Aldridge, treasurer, Heather Kearton and assistant treasurer, Joy Pettigrove. Then there is the committee: Neville Rickard, Heather Hicks, Yvonne Ward, Lorraine Havlin and Margaret Whiting, and honorary committee members Priscilla Wright and David Morgan. These are great people who are doing a great job for the largest seniors club in the electorate of Cowan. It has close to 400 members as I understand. It is also worth mentioning—although I have already mentioned it in the House of Representatives chamber—that they won the community organisation of the year at the City of Wanneroo Australia Day award ceremony.

Over in Ballajura there is another very fine club—the Ballajura Seniors. When I was back in Perth on Saturday night, I had dinner with the Ballajura Seniors. Their president is Ray Fox, the vice-president is Laurie Chapman and the secretary is Val Russell. There is also the committee: Glenys Welch, Dot Moloney, Ella O'Gorka and Frank D'Silva, and many volunteers including Jim Thomas, Alf Gardner, John Macey, Margaret Ryan and Peter Welsh. Again, the Ballajura Seniors are doing a great job, and they even tolerate my bad indoor carpet bowling. They welcome me whenever I go there. At the Girrawheen Seniors, the president is Deanne Hetherington, the acting vice-president is Mrs Jan Johnson and the secretary/treasurer is Merilyn Hunter. Merilyn has not been well in recent times, and I wish her all the best for the future. The committee consists of Angela Genovese, Mrs Bella Alphonso, Jenny Hunter, Dot Dodd—again a member of the Lions club and a very outstanding lady—and Christine Situ. The bowls room captain is Coral Fotheringham and the games room captain is Alf Smallcombe.

The Wanjoo Seniors—the Wanneroo-Joondalup seniors club—are meeting in Woodvale. Their coordinator is Pat Kiernan, their assistant coordinator is Joan Evans, their treasurer is Mrs Muriel Connor and their secretary is Winsome Kiernan. Again, the Wanjoo Seniors are always very happy whenever I turn up to let me have a very brief word and say hello to the members, so I always appreciate that. The Kingsley Seniors Group is led by President Ms Pat Shears, Vice-President George Mullins, secretary Mrs Pat Jack and treasurer Ms Pat Geary.

As I said, at the seniors clubs within Cowan and in fact all the way across the country there is a degree of vulnerability involved with growing older and it is good that these sorts of positive groups can provide connections and incentives for our seniors to remain involved within the community. They provide lifelong learning in the case of computer training, and they are also therapeutic by way of the arts and crafts. So they are very good organisations and I am very pleased that I have so many great seniors groups within Cowan.

Just down the road from the Wanneroo Seniors is the Country Women's Association of Wanneroo. For an urban electorate—what I would describe as an outermetropolitan electorate—it might seem a little bit odd that there is a Country Women's Association branch, but they also do outstanding work. They are very keen on assisting breast cancer charities, and every year they put on a great morning tea which raises a lot of money for that cause. As I said before, an outermetro Country Women's Association does not seem quite consistent but, given that they have been around for 47 years, many of the suburbs within the city of Wanneroo—formerly the shire of Wanneroo—and in what is now the north of Cowan did not exist when the Country Women's Association began there 47 years ago. But all the best and greatest traditions of the Country Women's Association are carried on by President Colleen Forsyth, secretary Marion Passanisi and treasurer Mrs Pat Doig. I congratulate them and thank them for all the great work they do for charity and the Wanneroo district.

It would also be remiss of me if I did not mention another great community organisation, community service clubs. I would like to talk a little bit about the Lions clubs. Again, fortunately, I have a great many Lions clubs within Cowan, although there are about 25 suburbs within Cowan. There are Lions clubs at Ballajura—starting with the club I am a member of, of course—and also at Girradoola, which stands for Girrawheen and Koondoola, and at Wanneroo, and there is the Lions Club of Kingsley-Woodvale as well. They do fabulous work for the community and the individuals within the community that are in greatest need. They raise money for the particular Western Australian Lions causes: the Lions Save-Sight Foundation, the Lions Hearing Foundation and the Lions Cancer Institute. They also support the Lions Youth of the Year competition.

The four clubs in Cowan are all doing very well and they are used to devoting a lot of their own time in the best traditions of volunteerism for their fundraising activities. Of course, all the money raised is pushed back out into the community for these great causes. Whether it is the individuals or the other groups that are in need of support, the Lions are always reliable and will always try their best to respond. It is not uncommon to see the Lions clubs out and about doing sausage sizzles at the local Bunnings. They do the prize wheel draws at fairs and shows. In November, the Ballajura Lions Club was at the Wanneroo show running their prize chocolate wheel and generating funds for many good projects. The famous Lions Christmas cakes are always worth buying, along with the mince pies and Christmas hampers. I again congratulate the Lions clubs for all the great work that they do.

A similar club but dedicated more along the lines of business links are the Rotary clubs. Again, I have two Rotary clubs within the electorate of Cowan. The Ballajura-Malaga Rotary Club is led by President Patricia Canning and the spring fair committee is led by Gary Faas. Gary is quite an identity as is the iconic Ballajura spring fair. I always turn up to it and set up my tent, as do other members of parliament. Each year at the Ballajura Rotary fair I am used to seeing every member of the club. It is not a very big club, but the members are always there for the running of that great iconic fair within the Ballajura area. They include Fred Morrell, Karen Barry, Robert Barry, Clint Fricker, Sue Fricker, Geoffrey Knight, Steve Lennox, Peter Dunn, Robert Doohan, John Pelligrini, Shane Cross, Bruce Whitham, Lynette Rowe and Barrie Conway Mortimer. The Wanneroo Rotary Club is also in the north of the electorate of Cowan, with President Phil Cousins, President-elect Debbie Singh, Secretary Colin Parker and Treasurer Bill Kell. Fortunately, the Rotary clubs are always keen to do their best for the community, and I congratulate both the Ballajura-Malaga Rotary Club and the Wanneroo Rotary Club for the great work that they do within the community.

In the limited time that remains, I would like to speak about not a service club but a sports club, which is a real favourite of mine. I have always been fond of junior sport and sporting clubs in general because I believe that they provide a great opportunity for, and a great service to, the wider community. The Wanneroo District Netball Association is a very large organisation within the northern suburbs of Perth. Whilst it is located at the Kingsway Sporting Complex, with its 57 courts, the association draws clubs and players from across the whole of the northern suburbs. Thousands of players from the youngest net players all the way up to the ladies play there each Saturday. Whilst local residents might be a little concerned about parking issues and the traffic flows that emanate from such a popular sporting venue, for one day a week or one half-day a week it is probably not too much to ask for the great work that the association does.

The association was established with just six courts in 1974 and it has grown to a size where, last year, 433 teams played there each week. As I said, the association now has 57 courts of a high standard. Making up the committee is President Wayne Malloy, Vice President Estelle Walker, Director of Competitions Leanne Govorko, Director of Facilities Vickie Carstairs, Director of Umpires and Development Yvette Thomson, Director of Finance Jackie Horner. Melinda Dickson, Wayne Daley and Bridget Stonier Gibson are also members of the committee. They are all hard workers.

As with all sporting organisations, the coaches, managers and umpires are there with all the other volunteers to support the many schools and clubs that play each Saturday at the Kingsway Sporting Complex. They are all doing a very great job. They draw the many clubs, schools, children and ladies from across the northern suburbs to play there.

In the last minute available to me, I would like to pay tribute to the sad passing of a life member of the association and a very good friend of mine, Barbara Connett. She was a lady who had dedicated herself to many causes, and netball was one of them. She served the association faithfully for many years and was rewarded as a life member. She was also a loyal member of the Liberal Party and had been a booth captain for many elections as well as being a staff member for the Hon. Ray Halligan MLC. That was when I first met her. The last time I saw her was in November at a fete and she seemed to be fighting hard against the cancer afflicting her. I was surprised when, unfortunately, she succumbed quickly in the end and passed away on 14 December. I offer my condolences to her husband, Grant, and her daughters Amy and Rebecca. Barb will be greatly missed.

I have spoken a lot about volunteers tonight. They are the glue that holds our community together. They do great work and I pay tribute to them. I thank them for what they do. They are outstanding and long may we have volunteers in Australia.

Debate adjourned.

Main Committee adjourned at 19:2 6