Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I was saying earlier today, before the debate was interrupted, the mistrust starts straight upfront with the claim that the government will deliver a surplus next year. The Treasurer says it with a straight face and yet it is so very clear to everyone that the government has cooked the books to engineer a dodgy promise of a surplus. It has been widely accepted that spending has been brought forward out of next year or delayed beyond the forward estimates. I have taken Australians through that in relation to the National Broadband Network and the CEFC, which, at $10 billion, are treated off-budget. There are other initiatives such as special dividends from the Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation and the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation that are being taken only next year in order to fluff up the promise of a surplus. Of course the government has allocated only minimal funding to the expensive, $8 billion a year, National Disability Insurance Scheme and the $40 billion submarine program. And I totally refute the allegations made by the intemperate Acting Prime Minister today that we do not support the National Disability Insurance Scheme or its funding. The fact is that the government has not properly funded it and is running away from that issue.

There are a number of other broken promises in the budget. It is a budget of new promises made and a budget of broken promises. In fact, 10 major commitments were broken in this budget. First is the government's promise, and the Treasurer's promise, explicitly not to introduce a carbon tax. In fact, from memory he described it as laughable when it came up in the course of a debate with me on the 7.30 Report before the last election.

Second, the government cancelled tax cuts which they said were all part of the redistribution of money from the mining boom to deal with a patchwork economy. What we do know is that it was going to pass the Senate with the support of the Greens in relation to small businesses. But the small business minister here, like the rest of his colleagues in the Labor Party, ran away from that, after having made all those promises, and on so many occasions the Treasurer said he would introduce company tax cuts and then dumped them before it even came to the parliament.

Third, there was the $500 standard deduction on tax returns promised in August 2010 which was due to commence on 1 July this year. This was a move the Labor Party sold as 'tick and flick' tax returns. You have to be very careful with this mob because if they do not repeat something which is meant to be a core promise then you know they are going to dump it, and the $500 standard deduction is one example of that.

Fourth, they had a 50 per cent tax discount on interest earned on bank accounts, bonds, and annuities, announced in May 2010. It was meant to start on 1 July 2011. They dumped that. Then it was meant to start in July 2012 and they dumped that. Then a year later it was meant to start in 2013 and we know they have dumped that. And now they have finally dumped it altogether. They have put it out of its misery.

Fifth, Labor went to the 2007 election with a solemn promise to increase foreign aid to 0.5 per cent of GNE by 2016. Well, they have dumped that promise.

Sixth, it now appears that the government's commitment to saving the environment was not quite as strong as you would have believed. In 2010 they announced the green buildings tax break of 50 per cent on eligible assets or capital works, but that was dumped in this budget.

Seventh, Labor went to the 2010 election trying to be more conservative than us. They said that there was a real commitment for a three per cent increase in average real growth in defence spending right up to 2018. They have dumped that.

Eighth, the government has also promised that defence savings would be reinvested in defence. Well, they have dumped that.

Ninth, the government went to the 2010 election promising to spare the Public Service from budget cuts. They have challenged us up hill and down dale about all those cuts that they claim that we are going to impose on the Public Service—whereas in fact they were redundancies that I had talked about—but lo and behold, in this budget the government itself goes on and announces a number of cuts to public servants.

Tenth, there was the promise to increase the concessional cap on superannuation contributions for Australians over 50. That was promised as part of the mining tax package to start on 1 July 2012. They have now delayed it to 1 July 2014. Therefore, they have broken that promise.

So, given that the Labor Party says that they are now going to get there—they are going to deliver the much-vaunted surplus—a surplus that you would need to repeat over 100 times just pay off their deficits for the last four years—the government expects us to believe that this promise is real. The challenge is that the debt they are leaving us is the great legacy of Labor, as it always is. But what we know is that peak net interest on debt is now $8.2 billion in 2015-16, and the interest bill alone on government net debt would fully fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme or, alternatively, build eight new teaching hospitals a year.

As I have previously foreshadowed, in the limited time I have available I am moving an amendment to the appropriation bills before the House to allow substantive amendments to these bills and, if successful, we will remove the increased debt limit measure and seek to have a separate debate about that $50 billion increase.

We have sought an urgent commitment from the government that they would not attempt to hide an increase in the debt ceiling in the appropriation bills. On 7 May 2012, I wrote to the Treasurer seeking that commitment. I said: 'I am therefore seeking your urgent commitment that, if the Gillard government intends to increase the existing limit beyond $250 billion, this increase is not contained in the 2012-13 appropriation bills. Instead, if the government seeks to increase Australia's debt ceiling in excess of $250 billion, it must be in separate, stand-alone legislation so that it can be given the proper scrutiny and consideration that such a significant increase in borrowings demands.'

In 2009, the government had no such issue of increasing the debt limit through a standalone piece of legislation, the Inscribed Stock Amendment Act 2009, rather than in the appropriation bills. We do not accept the current proposed justification for an increase in the debt limit, and I reckon in his heart of hearts neither does the Treasurer, with his flimsy response to the question today.

The government must appropriately reflect the significance of increasing the limit on the face value of stock and securities that can be on issue under the Treasurer's standard borrowing authority. The Treasurer must then make the case to the Australian people that Labor deserves the right to increase the credit card limit. The Treasurer must explain why he cannot use the Loan (Temporary Revenue Deficits) Act 1953. I asked him a question in this place. He could not answer it. So, to that effect, and I move the following second reading amendment:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House requests the Government to vary the resolution in relation to the Appropriation bills agreed by the House on 8 May 2012 to permit amendments to be moved and debated to Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2012-13.”

This is the very least that the public deserves. Australians deserve an opportunity to debate the increase in the government's proposed debt limit. I would suggest that the members for New England and Lyne, who signed an agreement with the government for greater transparency, would have been appalled at today's cover-up, or protection racket—the attempt to try and avoid having a proper debate about the statement by the member for Dobell. They agreed with the coalition that it was inappropriate to close down debate. On the increase of the debt limit of the Commonwealth, I believe that the members for New England and Lyne would have a similar proposal—that you have to have a proper debate about that. They were the ones that argued that we had to have greater transparency, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. On no issue could there be a more substantive case made for having a separate and proper debate than the Labor Party's proposal to increase the debt limit of the Commonwealth government.

This is a very significant issue. The Treasurer received advice from the Australian Office of Financial Management. It is quite revealing about his incompetence, his inability to do his job and his lack of confidence that he did not challenge the Australian Office of Financial Management—'Why do we need to go that far? Are there any alternative routes?' He did not have the knowledge or the wit to ask whether there was any other legislation, such as that that I have outlined, which could be used to address the concerns in relation to refinancing during the course of any one financial year.

The Treasurer is not up to the job. He simply tables advice from an agency and says, 'That's the reason why I take public policy decisions.' Why do we have him in the Treasurer role? Why don't we have the head of AOFM or a senior public servant acting as the Treasurer? You have to have a Treasurer who questions the department, questions agencies and seeks other advice in relation to these matters. Sadly, we have a weak and insipid Treasurer who simply, when he has to come to the parliament and explain himself, refers to a tabled advice from his department, as if that is conclusive.

We will quiz the AOFM and the Department of the Treasury at estimates. We want to get to the bottom of exactly why this sneaky government is trying to avoid proper scrutiny on the debt limit.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the amendment.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for North Sydney has moved that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. If it suits the House I will state the question in the form 'that the amendment be agreed to'. The question now is that the amendment be agreed to.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I should say that it was interesting to listen to the member for North Sydney in the debate in relation to Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and the related bills. Once again, we have come to expect just negative commentary from the opposition. The bile that was just spilling out across this chamber a moment ago from the shadow Treasurer in relation to the Treasurer of this government was unbelievable. It once again shows that the opposition, particularly the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition, cannot bring themselves to accept the facts before them. The member for North Sydney talked about a surplus and said that the government are misleading the Australian people. The fact is that the budget papers and the information are there to show that we will be back in surplus.

The opposition could not bring themselves to accept the seriousness of the global financial crisis and they would not acknowledge the need for a stimulus to support the economy during that time—nor have they been able to acknowledge the success of that stimulus in supporting jobs and businesses in this country. So, for the last few years, all we have heard is that the financial crisis was just a blip on the radar, that we did not really need to stimulate the economy and that there has not really been support of jobs. They are just sticking their heads in the sand. They refuse to acknowledge the facts.

The facts are that this country's economy is the envy of the developed countries. Earlier today I moved a private member's motion in relation to the economy. We have heard that our unemployment is 4.9 per cent. We have heard our statistics compared to those of other countries, especially those in Europe. We have heard the figures in relation to the debt levels in Australia compared to those of other countries. At some point the opposition have to acknowledge the facts and stop this scare campaign and the rhetoric they keep using with the Australian people.

The member for North Sydney said 'the Australian people deserve'—they do not deserve the rubbish that is coming out from the opposition. What they deserve is an economy that is growing strongly and a government that is supporting jobs and investing in skills and training, investing in health and infrastructure and supporting business. When we talk about business, it is not just about the direct incentives that businesses are being provided; it is also about the flow-on effects of the assistance that this government is giving to households.

Let's look at the schoolkids bonus, for example. The schoolkids bonus is providing many families, over 9,700 families in the electorate of Petrie alone, with financial assistance for students—$410 per primary school student and $820 per secondary school student—to provide them support with their education expenses. The question is: where does the opposition think that parents are going to buy those education resources? They are going to buy them from businesses in our local communities. That money helps stimulate our economies. So, when we talk about business, we talk about the financial assistance that is flowing to households through the schoolkids bonus, the financial assistance that is flowing to families through the family tax benefit A assistance that has been outlined—which is an increase of $600 a year from 1 July next year—and we talk about the assistance to families from the supplementary allowance. The supplementary allowance will benefit 9,497 local young people, single parents and unemployed currently receiving allowances, by providing cash payments to help meet the costs of essential services like electricity, gas and water. They will receive a supplementary allowance of $200 while couples will receive $350. These are benefits that go in the pockets of households across the electorate of Petrie and across this country. That additional income for those families will help our local economies.

Of course, it is not just those initiatives that we are seeing benefits for in relation to this budget. There are many benefits flowing to people across my local community, especially in the area of health. I just want to take some moments to talk about the benefits to health. Firstly, in this budget the government is investing $515.3 million in a dental health package. Much of this will go towards dealing with the long waiting times for public services. It is estimated there are currently 400,000 patients on public dental waiting lists. That is why this funding is so important and why $345.9 million over the next three years will help reduce those public dental waiting lists. That is a huge benefit to people in my local communities and across this country.

But the opposition do not want to acknowledge that. They do not ever talk about dentistry because they are the ones that scrapped the Commonwealth dental scheme. But there are other initiatives flowing in relation to health—and they include the expansion of bowel cancer screening. In this budget the government is providing $49.7 million over four years to fund a phased expansion of the National Bowel Cancer Screening program. Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer related death in Australia. The expansion of this program will significantly reduce illness and death from bowel cancer through early detection and treatment. When the scheme is fully implemented around 12,000 cancers each year will be detected.

In addition, there is progress in relation to the e-health agenda. The government is investing another $233.7 million to deliver its e-health agenda, including $161.6 million to operate the personally controlled electronic health record system. This builds on the $466.7 million in the 2010-11 budget to establish the personally controlled electronic health record system. In my electorate I have medical clinics which are now offering patients the opportunity to register with the health record. That is fantastic. My new Medicare local, the North Brisbane Medicare local, which has just set up a new office at North Lakes in my electorate, has a stand-alone machine. You can walk up to your medical centre that has one of these machines—it looks very much like a stand-alone EFTPOS machine—and you can type in details and register immediately to get that electronic health record. That starts the process rolling, which means that people who do that will have the security of knowing that their health records are shared across key primary healthcare providers. If they end up in hospital—they may be unconscious, for example, or unable to recollect all the medicines they are on or the sorts of conditions and allergies they have—this sort of e-health record can save lives, because the hospital will know what that person can and cannot have and will know the sorts of conditions or illnesses they may already have. That will decide the sorts of health treatments they should get into the future.

In addition, across Queensland the Labor government is delivering on its commitments by spending around $8.9 million in 2012-13 on digital mammography technology to BreastScreen Australia. It is really important to invest in this new technology to more accurately detect breast cancer. All too often I meet people in my electorate who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and who are still battling this terrible disease. So it is great that there will be extra money, through this budget, invested in this important technology.

There is also a huge investment in an area that is very dear to my heart—that is, the disability area. There is much debate about the National Disability Insurance Scheme. There should be no debate on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. As far as I am concerned the argument has been had. The case has been made. The Productivity Commission has spoken. We need a National Disability Insurance Scheme in this country.

This budget commits $1 billion over the next four years for the first stage of the NDIS. From July 2013, an NDIS will begin operating in launch locations across Australia. And I am hoping that the Queensland government will sit down around the table with the Commonwealth and agree that one of those launch sites should be Queensland, because all too often I meet families who are caring for someone with a severe disability, who know that the current disability system is not adequate: it is not providing for their needs and they need something else. They know that we need the National Disability Insurance Scheme. This scheme will start by assisting around 10,000 people, and this will be expanded to 20,000 people from mid-2014.

It will provide individualised care and support and an assessment process so that those most in need—people with significant and permanent disability—will have access to an assessment that develops an individual support plan. That is so needed in the community. Those suffering disabilities and their carers have cried out for this individual support plan, with funding allocated for reasonable and necessary supports. There will be case management. Local area coordinators will work with clients providing information needed to make informed decisions in navigating the systems and assisting in planning. There will be increased services. Increased formal care services will include home support and respite care, and early intervention services to improve functioning and delay or lessen a decline in functioning. I do not have time to go through it in detail, but in addition this budget has significant and important investments in aged care—another key area in the electorate of Petrie. It is great to see that a large proportion of the funding that is going forward is related to home care packages, at a cost of $880 million dollars. The fact that we are increasing the number of home care packages by nearly 40,000 over the next five years is critical. People want to be able to stay at home. They want to be able to stay at home longer. Carers want to be able to stay at home with them. We need to provide them with that support, but when they do need to go into a nursing home, we need to make sure that they have the appropriate care.

That is why the other initiatives in relation to aged care are so important. It is important to address the workforce pressures. We have all heard about it: both sides of this parliament have been lobbied hard about the importance of workforce shortages, and not just from the union movement, but also from the workforce and the aged care providers. They all know that there is a workforce shortage that is critical in relation to the aged care sector and they need to be able to do more to attract and hold on to aged care staff. That is why they need to look at improvements in recruitment, training and wages for aged-care staff to enable the sector to meet growing demand and provide quality care for older Australians.

In the last couple of minutes I have left, I want to touch on the fact that, as always, this Labor government's budget has ensured there is ongoing investment in infrastructure. This has been a strong commitment of this government since we were first elected in 2007. We have continued to invest in infrastructure, and what this government has been able to show with this budget is it can bring the budget back to surplus, but it does not have to do it to the detriment of investing in infrastructure, health, education, aged care and disabilities. It can do all of that. It is about responsible fiscal policy.

In my electorate—and I know as a Queenslander you would appreciate this, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott—I was very pleased to see an additional $20 million in this budget for the Moreton Bay Rail Link. Last year, $135 million was brought forward out of the commitment of $742 million to deliver a rail line that has been promised for over 100 years. Once again there is funding allocated in this year's budget to continue that work. I spoke with the project team just this week. We are very close to announcing the contractor for the road-over-rail bridge at the Kinsellas Road East, where it will go over one of the stations. It is fantastic that this construction has started and, of course, construction along the rail corridor itself will start from mid-next year and the concept designs for the new stations will be released shortly. We are also investing in the Gateway Motorway-Nudgee Road. This budget does deliver a Labor budget: it provides for the community and for our economy, and it is a strong Labor budget.

Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a budget that makes no secret of its class warfare motivations and the government's shameful desire to pit Australian against Australian and suburb against suburb in order to reverse Labor's lagging fortunes and save the ruinous career of a desperate Prime Minister. Her embrace of envy as a political strategy must be the final action of a Prime Minister with nowhere else to go. The Prime Minister is cornered between the electorate on one side, angry with her because she has broken promises and the fact that she has consistently put her interests above those of the Australian people, and on the other side a Labor caucus that is now readying itself for another political kill. The Prime Minister is torn between buying the votes of the electorate and the votes of her party room colleagues who keep her in power. Rather than lifting the nation up and encouraging the men and women of this country to aspire to their greatest hopes, dreams and ambitions, the Prime Minister has dragged the nation down into a bitter contest of us versus them, fostering the divisive sectionalism of long-past generations. The Prime Minister has singled out some of our highest achievers for public attack, going so far as to name them individually in press conferences and in the parliament—acts that are beneath the office of the Prime Minister. As one media editorial said, what we need from this Prime Minister is 'more class, less warfare'.

This is a budget that seeks to divide rather than unite, and to tear apart rather than create. It is, as the Treasurer has admitted, a typical Labor budget. It is full of the usual tricks and sleights of hand that one has come to expect from this government. It has worked the numbers to create the mirage of a minuscule surplus, pushing expenditure out of 2012-2013 into other financial years. It has forecast a generous increase in tax revenue at a time of mounting concern over Europe's economic future and fears of a slowdown in our major export markets. Given that the government's projected $23 billion deficit in last year's budget blew out to some $44 billion in this year's budget, there is little hope that Labor will deliver on even this small sliver of a surplus. Australians are right to be wary of a government that has delivered an accumulated $174 billion in deficits in just four years, yet claimed year after year that it was committed to budget surpluses. At the same time as it talks up its success in saving Australia from further Labor debt, the government plans to introduce measures to increase the country's borrowing limit by an extra $50 billion to $300 million. No government that truly believes its forecast for a budget surplus should be increasing the debt ceiling—the government's borrowing limit—by another $50 billion. I remind the House that the debt ceiling inherited by this government in 2007 when it came to office was nil. Labor has raised the debt ceiling time and time again to $250 billion dollars, and now to $300 billion.

Having squandered the nation's wealth on pink batts, overpriced school halls and cash giveaways, the government has now chosen to tear up our national defence, destroying years of hard work and patient investment by the Howard government. The Labor government has been so reckless with Australia's finances that it can no longer even fulfil the first and basic responsibility of government—that is, to secure our nation's sovereignty and its interests. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has witnessed the disinterest and disregard of this Prime Minister in matters of foreign affairs and national security. From sending her bodyguard to cabinet's national security committee meetings to doing away with the National Security Statement to parliament—an event that was apparently meant to be as frequent as the annual budget—the Prime Minister has consistently failed in her duties. Australia is situated on the edge of the most dynamic and rapidly changing region in the world. The economic re-emergence of Asia is driving a shift in global power from Europe and North America to our neighbourhood, the Asia-Pacific/Indian Ocean. There is a growing acceptance that this region is in the middle of an arms build-up the likes of which has not been seen since the Cold War and which is heightened by the level of uncertainty felt between nations. Faced with the option of preparing Australia for this new strategic reality or closing her eyes to the challenges, the Prime Minister has chosen the latter. The Gillard government will slash funding for defence to just 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product, taking the share of Australia's wealth spent in this crucial area back to a dangerously low level not seen since the days before the Second World War.

Australia needs and deserves a government capable of planning for the future, not just for the next leadership ballot. The chasm between reality and Labor's rhetoric is as starkly apparent in the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio. As it has done with so many of its other promises, the government has trashed the bipartisan commitment to increase Australia's official development assistance to 0.5 per cent of gross national income by 2013. Labor's promise to reach the target amount in the following year is nothing more than Labor spin designed to minimise the political fallout. Should this government hang on and still be in office next May, there is no doubt that even this deadline will also be pushed back. This government's actions in pushing the aid commitment out beyond the forward estimates has made the task of reaching even this new deadline virtually impossible, and the government knows it. As Professor Stephen Howes, former chief economist at AusAID and panel member on the independent review of aid effectiveness stated:

Even with a year’s delay, it will be a steep climb to get to 0.5, requiring, on average, increases of about $1 billion for each of the next four years from 2013-14 to 2016-17. The aid program has never had an annual increase of anything close to $1 billion. The biggest increase was $626 million in 2008-09, the second biggest $500 million in 2005-06. Even with looser fiscal constraints, it will not be easy to sustain support for a single $1 billion increase, let alone for four such increases consecutively. Yet this is what it will take to get to 0.5% under the new timetable.

In retrospect it appears that the government never intended to meet its 0.5 per cent of gross national income commitment by 2015.

One need only read the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio budget statements from last year to appreciate the extent of the government's failures over the past twelve months. According to its strategic direction statement, the Gillard government would 'intensify its engagement with China'; instead it has stumbled from one mistake to another. Its schizophrenic handling of the relationship has left baffled Chinese officials who want nothing more than the consistency, coherence and respect provided by coalition policies. Far from intensifying our engagement with China, the government has placed the relationship under immeasurable strain. The departure of the former foreign minister earlier this year was reportedly welcomed as a fresh start for both countries. As Linda Jakobson, director of the East Asia program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and respected China expert, has stated, 'The "Rudd factor" has been an underlying tension in China-Australia ties for four years.' The failure of an Australian government representative to attend the Boao Forum for Asia, China's leading platform for discussing the pressing economic issues confronting the region, was a deliberate snub to China. It was only through a last-minute dash by the Australian ambassador in Beijing, as the Australian's Michael Sainsbury wrote at the time, that complete embarrassment was avoided. That Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti could find the opportunity to attend the Boao Forum despite his immense domestic challenges highlights the complete lack of interest and disregard shown by the Australian government.

So much of foreign affairs is about building productive working relationships. For countries that are crucial to our national interest, this exchange must occur at the highest levels. Despite the rhetoric of enhanced engagement, there has only been one prime ministerial visit to China since 2008. As foreign minister, the member for Griffith visited China only twice; neither of these visits was considered official. Former Prime Minister and Labor leader Bob Hawke has joined the criticism of the Gillard government, accusing it of letting the relationship languish. It was recently revealed that Labor's infighting held up the establishment of an annual summit involving key ministers from both countries. According to reports, the Treasurer refused to accept any arrangement that would result in the then foreign minister leading discussions. The Treasurer clearly had no such concern about putting Australia's national interests to the side while the government focused on its leadership tussle. Any positive developments that have occurred in the relationship with China during the past year have been in spite of the approach of this government, not because of it.

According to last year's strategic direction statement, the Gillard government sought to expand cooperation on security, trade and people-to-people links with Indonesia. That policy lasted less than a month before the government took the drastic step of suspending live cattle exports. The decision was made without any warning to or consultation with the Indonesian government. That is no way to treat a friend and strategic partner. The Indonesian government rightly registered its frustration at being kept in the dark. The consequences of the government's action have become clear as Australia suffers reduced access to the Indonesian market. The government is yet to learn from its mistakes. It has pushed ahead with the Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill 2011 despite the concerns of countries such as Indonesia that the government has failed to adequately consult with them.

Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, does not even rate a mention in the government's list of priorities. Despite being our closest neighbour, it is grouped together with other Pacific island countries. This omission is symbolic of the government's current approach to Papua New Guinea. The foreign minister's cavalier approach has done immense damage to the relationship at a time of sensitive political developments in Port Moresby. In response to suggestions that the election in Papua New Guinea be postponed until later in the year, Senator Carr declared that Australia would have 'no alternative but to organise the world to condemn and isolate Papua New Guinea'. He went on to say, 'We'd be in a position of having to consider sanctions.' Threatening sanctions is a powerful diplomatic tool, not the plaything of Sussex Street strategists. Such a move would have placed Papua New Guinea alongside such countries as Iran, North Korea and Syria as targets of Australia's autonomous sanctions. Senator Carr was rightly derided in Papua New Guinea for his amateurism.

As the recent political crisis in PNG has shown us, it is essential that Australia's political leaders, particularly the foreign minister, maintain the closest working relations with our colleagues in Port Moresby. This can only be achieved through close and consistent contact at the highest level. It was unfortunate that the foreign minister could not attend, nor send any representative of the government to be the keynote speaker, the annual Australia-Papua New Guinea Business Council forum in Brisbane last week. This was attended by former Prime Minister and cabinet minister Sir Mekere Morauta, and I was honoured to step into the vacuum left by the government and deliver the keynote address on behalf of Australia.

Last year's strategic direction statement also highlighted the government's intention to pursue a range of free trade agreements with countries in the region. Yet since the member for Rankin became Minister for Trade Australia has dropped the ball on free trade agreements. The minister is personally disinterested in pursuing them and he has even gone so far as to state that a free trade agreement with China is 'overrated'. If Australia is to benefit from the growth in Asia's middle class and consumer class, strong leadership at a government level is needed.

Given the scandals surrounding the government's handling of the Australia Network tender process, it is little wonder there is no mention of Australia's public diplomacy effort in the strategic direction statement. Nothing better captures the incompetence and base student-politicking this government has brought to the national stage than its involvement in what should have been a fair and transparent tender process. As the Australian National Audit Office stated:

The manner and circumstances in which this high profile tender process was conducted brought into question the Government’s ability to deliver such a sensitive process fairly and effectively.

In response to the ANAO report, the Australia Network Channel took aim at the government, stating:

The Australia Network tenders represent a failure of public administration and highlight the potential risk to a commercial organisation of engaging in business with the Commonwealth, particularly when a government owned entity is the competitor.

The costs involved with taking the tender to market, only to scrap the process when the result could not be changed to suit the government's preference, are considerable.

Given Labor's failings in the Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio in the past 12 months, the Australian people can have no confidence that the coming year will be any different. What Australia needs is a foreign minister capable of working patiently behind the scenes, not a dinner party conversationalist who blunders from one mistake to another. Rather than address Labor's woes, Senator Carr's arrival in Canberra has only added to them.

From his repeated mistakes about troop levels in Afghanistan, to his embrace of the Taliban as part of the Afghani government, to Papua New Guinea and reports of his strange behaviour in Fiji, he has shown himself to be a liability rather than an asset to the government. His return has been compared to a reserve-grade footballer coming out of retirement to play first grade. So far his record contains nothing to disprove this assertion. The time has come to put an end to this charade and give the people of Australia a chance to rid themselves of this chaotic mess of a government.

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

I rise to voice my support for the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and the related budget bills before the House. Before I do, I might just slip back into my role as an English teacher and correct for the record a comment made by the previous speaker, the member for Curtin. Like many people, she misunderstands the difference between 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'. I think when she used 'disinterested' she actually meant 'uninterested'. Disinterested means impartial, so I think she might have to correct that with Hansard because there is a complete difference—unless she meant that our Minister for Foreign Affairs is impartial, which is a strange assertion.

Back to the budget, which is a testament to the Gillard government's commitment to govern for all Australians and sits on those solid Labor pillars of equality, justice and opportunity—the very things that brought me to the Labor Party in the first place. These are strong times for Australia. Our economy is solid and the resources industry is booming, particularly in Western Australia and Queensland, but, unfortunately, not all Australians have been reaping these benefits. Thanks to our Prime Minister, our Treasurer and the recent battlers budget, more Australians will get to share in our national wealth. Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan are delivering much needed financial relief to families and businesses in Moreton who are currently struggling to cope with the rising cost of living. This Labor government understands current pressures and knows that the best way to support Australians is through tax cuts and directed payment increases. These measures are designed to spread the benefits of our national mining boom to help those who need it.

I am still rather surprised that the coalition does not understand the concept of a government helping people in need. The Gillard Labor government is helping 6,800 families in Moreton with kids in school, with $410 a year for each primary school student and $820 a year for each student in high school. Strangely, many in the coalition did not want these much needed payments to happen. I think some of the explanations of that included: 'Because it is just different'—it is different to the baby bonus which was, I think, one of the more detailed explanations I saw. It was certainly small-minded politics at its worst. They were so committed to saying no that they did not actually think about the ramifications or implications.

The Gillard Labor government is also helping more than 9,000 Moreton families with a $600 boost to their family tax benefit part A payments. Some in the coalition also do not want this payment to happen, which is a shame. During question time and earlier today I saw from the opposition the daily jeremiads about the cost-of-living increases but, when it came to voting for something that would benefit families in Moreton, they would not lift a finger. This Gillard Labor government is also helping 9,073 Moreton young people, single parents and the unemployed with a supplementary allowance to help them pay for essential services. Surprise, surprise!—the coalition are also against this vital assistance to help these vulnerable Australians with the cost of electricity, gas, water and those other living expenses.

I am also particularly proud that this Labor budget provides further protection for vulnerable children, with the creation of a national children's commissioner within the Australian Human Rights Commission. I have had a particular interest in this area for a long time because my partner has worked in this area for about the last 22 or so years. We are taking some great steps in the area of looking after children. Jenny Macklin's National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children and some of the other initiatives we have taken with the states will hopefully mean that fewer children will slip between the cracks.

Unfortunately, we have seen some opposite rail against the budget, which is making sure that vulnerable children are better prepared for school with a $55.7 million boost to the Home Interaction Program for Parents and Youngsters. And they rage against a budget that is helping to build a National Disability Insurance Scheme, which is something that I would have thought the Leader of the Opposition would have been quite supportive of. We have put on the table $1 billion over four years to help Australians with a disability. I see the Deputy Leader of the Opposition sitting opposite. As a Queenslander he would know some of those shameful statistics, which must be sheeted home to Labor governments as well. The sad thing is that if you are a Queenslander with a disability you receive $7 for every $10 that a Victorian receives. That is not a legacy. To take the politics out, it is certainly something I would be urging those opposite to talk to Premier Campbell Newman about as he said there will be no negotiation. But surely there could be a roadmap towards trying to help this very vulnerable group in our community, a group that has been particularly vocal in lobbying me over the last few years.

In other budget initiatives there is a $3.7 billion funding commitment towards aged care reform. Unfortunately, the Leader of the Opposition has said 'no' to this measure. Investing in maths and science, increasing the number of students attending university and improving health services are all noble aims in a parliament that on occasion lacks nobility perhaps. What did the Leader of the Opposition say? He said 'no'. It is like one of those episodes of Little Britain on steroids, where the computer says 'no' to everything.

There are over 19,000 small businesses in my electorate which need help, such as through the Gillard Labor government's instant tax write-off for each asset purchased below $6,500 and the same for the first $5,000 spent on a new motor vehicle. Unfortunately, we could not deliver the one per cent cut in company tax. I would have loved to vote for that in this chamber as would most people who understand how important small business is. As I said, I have 19,000 small businesses in my electorate so I understand the issue very well. Unfortunately, those opposite said 'no' again. These businesses need decisive action. Unfortunately, we were not able to provide that but at least the instant tax write-off and the other money will be some compensation. I still ask those opposite to step up and support that in the future. There are some good things in the budget for business. There is the small business advisory service, which I have had a bit to do with in my electorate. We are able to provide another four years of advice, knowledge and experience to help some of some of those fledgling ideas grow into big businesses.

As the Treasurer said, this is a battlers budget. We will give money to Australians who need our help the most. Unfortunately, some of those opposite have said it is the wrong thing to do. You could say that is the fundamental difference between the Australian Labor Party and the coalition: the balancing of the community versus the individual; the greater good versus individual greed; selfless versus selfish. Unfortunately the Leader of the Opposition, in his blind pursuit of power by any means necessary, has shown his true character and also shown that he is truly out of touch with Australians that are struggling at the moment with some of these cost-of-living pressures.

Although Australia does stand out amongst its international peers as a prosperous economy, despite the dark days of the global financial crisis and the current hiccoughs that are being experienced in Greece, Italy, Spain and even in the United Kingdom and United States, there are some tough times ahead for the globe, that is for sure. Obviously many other nations were hit by these tough times, particularly during the GFC, but Australia weathered the storm reasonably well with Wayne Swan at the helm of our finances. We avoided a recession that would have meant horrible job losses. That is something that is glossed over in this chamber. Think of what 200,000 job losses would mean and think of how it would affect kids in school and how it would affect businesses. That would be a horrible thing for our community. So I am glad we were part of an economic stimulus package that steered Australia through that very tough global time.

We have come through that period of global uncertainty in relatively good shape when it comes to government debt, inflation and living standards. Here we are now with our economy expected to outshine almost every other advanced economy over the next two years yet we were still able to return the budget to surplus. This sends a clear message to the rest of the world that Australia's economy has remained strong during this period of global uncertainty. The Acting Prime Minister said during question time that we had the courage to stick to our guns and to stick to our 2007 election commitment that was shared by those opposite of putting a price on harmful pollution. Obviously those opposite are still committed to reining in exactly the same amount of pollution as this government, the same emissions targets. Although how they are going to do it in a one-, two- or three-year turn around with only carrots and no stick is beyond comprehension—as any sensible environmentalist or economist would know. So we will bring in a gentle but necessary change to our economy through this price on harmful pollution and that will set us up well to provide jobs for my grandchildren long into the future as the digital economy becomes passe. Combine that with the NBN and our education reforms and we have structured the economy well for the future. Delivering a surplus or getting back in black—to quote AC/DC—will protect low-and middle-income earners and the most vulnerable people in our nation. It will give us a buffer during these turbulent global times and it will give the Reserve Bank the room it needs to cut interest rates should the international situation deteriorate and send troubling waves towards our shores.

As I said before, these are relatively good times for Australia but I know many people feel like this is somebody else's boom—somebody else is reaping the benefits when our minerals are dug up by mining companies. It is hard to be grateful for a strong economy when you are having difficulty making ends meet. Electricity, rents, mortgages, groceries and petrol are putting considerable pressure on many family budgets throughout Australia. I know in Queensland many residents are still trying to get back on their feet after the devastating floods and cyclones of recent years. What we must do, and what the Gillard Labor government has done in this budget, is support families, students and low-income-earning Australians to help them get ahead, to better share in the prosperity. This is simply the right thing to do, but let us not forget that these measures also support our economy by assisting retail, manufacturing and those other businesses that are struggling because of the high dollar and perhaps because of sales going overseas and because of the uncertainty. These are uncertain times, yet the Australian budget remains in stable hands: help is going to where it is needed and action is being taken to create a fairer Australia.

I mentioned this briefly before, but the National Disability Insurance Scheme is a component of this budget of which I am particularly proud, and I again urge every Queensland MP to contact the Leader of the Opposition about it—and Premier Newman as well. The NDIS, due to begin its rollout in mid-2013, will provide care to around 10,000 people with significant and permanent disabilities. A year later the NDIS will be expanded to help up to 20,000 people. This is a groundbreaking plan, and I thank Minister Shorten for his involvement with this early on, when he was the parliamentary secretary. Why? Because it will provide eligible people with the support they need; it will grant people decision-making powers, including being able to choose their service provider; it will deliver high-quality evidence based services, be user-friendly and link to mainstream and community services; it will acknowledge the invaluable role of families and carers and help them continue their great work, and maybe even beyond that as we move to an ageing group of people with disabilities. It will also assist with community participation, education and employment opportunities and it will be managed, as the name suggests, on an insurance basis. Disability groups in Moreton, and throughout Australia I guess, have welcomed the commitment, but unfortunately many states are dragging their feet.

I want to take this opportunity to again ask Premier Newman to consider what must go on here. And I put out the call to my LNP state MPs around Moreton—Sunnybank MP, Mark Stewart; Stretton MP, Freya Ostapovitch; Yeerongpilly MP, Carl Judge; and cabinet Minister Scott Emerson to join me in asking the Premier to reconsider this stubborn stance of just saying no. The NDIS is great news for local people with disability and their carers, and we need Queensland to sign on to this vital reform. I hope we can work together and ensure Queenslanders with a disability get the care and support they deserve. They have waited long enough for change—and, as I said, I was a bit embarrassed to find that out about the Queensland $7 to $10 ratio.

This is the right budget for the right time for Australia. It delivers a surplus on time, as promised. It delivers financial support to those in need and it delivers a plan for a fairer nation to create a stronger community and a more just society. I wholeheartedly commend the bills to the House.

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor has unquestionably delivered another budget failure. It has a fudged surplus, more broken promises—and there is no plan to drive productivity growth, to repay debt or to secure jobs. It does nothing for aspirational Australians—remember them? These are the people who believe in hard work and that you should be rewarded for your labour, your enterprise and your innovation. These are the people who are the drivers of our nation's economic growth and prosperity. From their efforts, we all benefit. It is not just a case of job creation—though this government could do with a policy on that front as well, remembering no new jobs were created at all in Australia last year, for the first time in decades—but it is also about the prospect of getting a better job, or career development.

This budget talks about 'sharing the benefits of the boom', but most of the sharing of benefits is simply paying more compensation for the carbon tax. The carbon tax is the unmentioned centrepiece of this budget—it begins, after all, in only 40 days. The budget is a precursor to the carbon tax. And that tax itself threatens the very future of the boom that is supposed to be paying for the handouts announced in this budget.

But what is of particular concern under this government is that they have created an economy which has become increasingly internationally uncompetitive. There is low productivity. They are consuming the benefits of the boom with waste and mismanagement. They have seemingly no understanding that even large corporations or large projects need a supportive government if they are to proceed. We cannot afford to continue to impose upon projects, manufacturing industries and small business in this country taxes that no-one else in the world will pay. We cannot have special burdens that make it unattractive to invest in this country. You cannot have an industrial relations climate where people believe they have a right to simply walk away from their jobs, that they actually believe that somehow or another the country is better off when they punish their own employer and make it more difficult for them to pay their wages.

I was appalled when Jacques Nasser reported to a luncheon last week that BHP had 3,200 industrial incidents in its Bowen Basin coalfields last year alone. That is almost 10 industrial incidents a day! Sometimes unions simply notify that they are going to have stop work action, and then they call it off. There were in fact 500 instances where the union announced it was going to have action and called it off at the last minute—designed to inflict the maximum pain and discomfort and reduced productivity to their employer while at the same time collecting all their wages as though nothing had happened.

You cannot have a country that is going to be prosperous and able to provide support for those in need in our community if our industry is not encouraged and rewarded for its effort. Instead of building a boom this budget has come with cheap bribes—the vain hope that people who are going to be slugged week in, week out, year after year by a carbon tax, whose name this government dare not mention, will think Labor is doing them a favour. We should be concentrating not on handing out the benefits of the boom but on nurturing it—making sure it actually happens and making sure it continues to sustain growth and to provide a future for our nation, and not just a future for the Labor government.

This unmentionable tax is now the subject of a $70 million advertising blitz, but neither the words 'carbon' nor 'tax' get used in this advertising campaign. It is simply laughable that such a wilfully deceptive campaign could ever meet the advertising standards required for 'informing the public' on government programs. They are simply taxpayer paid political ads. The government cannot sell its own budget so now it is trying to pay an advertising agency to do the job.

The 'fudge-it budget' has been concocted to provide additional compensation for lower-income people so that they can deal with the carbon tax fallout. But would it not be better to get rid of the tax altogether? Then you would not need to pay the compensation. You would not penalise Australian industry. You would not need to put them in a position where they cannot compete with imported products or cannot, in fact, maintain their own export markets. It makes far more sense to get rid of the tax itself than to use its revenue to pay compensation. This is a tax that is full of flaws and inequities and, frankly, nothing can fix it. The government are imposing a penalty on everything we do in this country, and in so doing they are placing a burden on us that is not matched anywhere else in the world.

As we look at this tax, every day new anomalies come to our attention. I was called only this morning by the operator of a small supermarket, who has been told that the cost of recharging the refrigerators in her supermarket is going to increase from $46 to $167 per refrigerator as a result of the carbon tax. And I heard a similar story—in fact, a worse story—when I visited the trucking convention last week. Truck drivers told me that the carbon tax equivalent on the refrigerant used in refrigerated trucks will not have an increase of $23 per tonne; because the government uses a global-warming potential index to multiply the cost for its calculation of the global-warming impact, the actual tax on the refrigerant used in a truck will be over $70,000 a tonne. Not $23 a tonne, over $70,000 a tonne! There are these kinds of anomalies. I do not know whether the government even knows that it is doing this sort of thing. It certainly has no plan and it has no way of helping these people to cope with that sort of cost.

You heard today in question time about the $2 million cost that the Cassowary Coast Regional Council is going to have to pay to get rid of the rubbish that was created by Cyclone Yasi. These people, who not only have the burden of having to clean up their properties, now are going to have to pay a $2 million carbon tax to get rid of the rubbish. Now, if they left it all to rot out in the field there would be no carbon tax imposed. But if they clean it up and put it in the council tip then the reward for that is a $2 million tax from this government.

And what about the example I heard about when I visited a manufacturing facility just recently? They work their boilers et cetera at night to take advantage of night rate electricity. That is an environmentally friendly and sensible thing to do. But because the carbon tax is a flat rate, they will pay double the electricity prices for their night rate even though the day rate may only go up by 10 or 20 per cent. Did the government intend to do such an illogical thing? Are they crazy? Or do they just not know what they are doing? I fear that it is a little of both.

If you believe that you need to address climate change as a global problem. Even if you believe that Australia can or should take the lead you would not set a price that is five times higher than is being paid anywhere else in the world, or a tax that is so comprehensive across the economy that no other country will collect even a fraction of what this carbon tax will raise. This is a penalty on Australians, and on Australians only, and it will do nothing—nothing whatever—to change the temperature of the globe.

Australians are sick of the mentality which drives a budget which seems to be all about class warfare. They do not want their governments to waste their money, be it on pink batts, or overpriced school halls or on handouts. And they certainly do not want governments that do not tell the truth. When it comes to this budget, the feeble $1.5 billion surplus that is supposed to be the central triumph of this budget fails to inspire or to encourage struggling communities and families right across the nation.

When you bring spending forward and push expenditure backwards into outyears you do not make any more money: you just shuffle it around. This year's surplus is largely there because we are having a bigger debt this year and a bigger debt the following year. It is a slippery surplus. If the government had not brought forward into this financial year $1.1 billion of the money to be paid to local government in 2012-13, the $1.4 billion payment to Queensland for disaster relief, $1.8 billion in infrastructure payments to the states and $1.5 billion in compensation payments to pensioners and welfare beneficiaries for the carbon tax then the budget surplus would be well and truly wiped out. But that is not all: Labor's energy security scheme is a $1 billion-a-year program, except for next financial year when the expenditure will only be $800,000. Labor's coal sector jobs package is a $220 to $250 million program, but next year there is only $10 million.

If we look at Labor's record, this is not the first time they have proposed a budget surplus. That happened in their very first budget, when we were told the budget surplus was $22 billion. Of course, it ended up as a $27 billion deficit. Our Treasurer was out by $49 billion on that occasion, and he has now produced $174 billion worth of budget deficits. The cumulative errors on his estimates for the budget surpluses or deficits amount to over $80 billion. In four budgets he has been out by $80 billion! And this time we are expected to believe that there is going to be a $1.5 billion surplus.

But if we are going to have a surplus and if we are going to run at a profit for the year, why is our net debt forecast to go up by $40 billion? Why are the government bringing in legislation to increase Australia's credit card limit from $250 billion to $300 billion? They say they only need it for temporary purposes, but you do not need legislation to temporarily increase the limit. This, like all the other increases in our national borrowing limit under Labor will unquestionably end up being permanent, and our debt will just grow and grow. Unemployment is predicted to be 5.5 per cent for the year ahead. That is up on the current figure. CPI is also expected to rise. So what hope is there for people in this budget?

It is full also of broken promises. The company tax cut that was supposed to be the compensation for the mining tax has been axed, saving the government $4.7 billion. After deferral after deferral, the proposal for the standard $500 deduction ramping up to $1,000 is gone also, saving $2 billion. The tax concession they promised on 50 per cent of people's interest earnings has been axed. The $500 mature age worker tax offset has been axed, saving another $250 million. The super tax has been doubled to 30 per cent for those people with incomes above $300,000, earning the government another $1 billion. They have deferred the higher contributions cap on superannuation yet again, saving another $1.5 billion.

This is a government that has introduced—again, as usual for a Labor government—stacks of new taxes, perhaps none less heartless than the new tax on the tourism industry, the increase in the passenger movement charge. That passenger movement charge was established to cover the cost of border processing. Now it is just a milking cow for this government. The government expects to raise an extra $610 million from the struggling tourist industry over the next four years from this tax. Of course, the airports are now also going to have to pay for the police who are doing their job on airport property.

The government's budget is a serious disappointment for people in regional Australia in particular. The $941 million for infrastructure works to improve water efficiency in the Murray-Darling Basin has been deferred to 2015-16. That is the very last year of the forward estimates, and it is clear that it is also heading for the axe. This is the lazy way that this government has approached water reform. They are happy to waste money on buyouts, but they will not do the hard work of fixing the system so that there is water available there for our environmental needs without having to take it away from country towns and from irrigators.

Another major disappointment is the $1 billion for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The Productivity Commission had recommended a $3.9 billion outlay over the next four years to set this scheme up, but the government has provided only $1 billion. It is going to cost $7 billion-plus a year to run this scheme. If we as a nation were not paying $8 billion a year on interest on Labor's debt, we could afford the National Disability Insurance Scheme now. Of course, there is $350 million for a dental waiting list program, so long as the states cooperate, but they are abolishing the Medicare dental program and the teen dental program. Sixty-eight million dollars has been cut from rural health workforce programs and $75 million from the Indigenous health infrastructure program. The Gonski review of education will require billions of dollars, but there is only $5.8 million over four years in the budget.

So this has been a budget of great disappointment. It is an endless round of more of the same: debt, spending and broken promises. The budget may spend the boom; it certainly does not nurture it.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to talk about all the good, positive and great things about this country and the great things that are being done in ordinary people's homes and for working families, small business and all those people that really work hard to make this country a success—not the negative drivel that we get over on the other side about how it is all doom and gloom and the world is coming to an end. It might be coming to an end in some parts of the world, but not in Australia, because in Australia we have a government that listens to people and delivers the right budgets at the right time, with surpluses when they are needed, not just in the golden years when the rivers of gold used to come into Canberra. The government makes the really important decisions about maintaining sustainability into the future, and that is exactly what this budget does, to a tee, and it gets it right.

In fact, it was just last week that I had the great good fortune of being with the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the Hon. Anthony Albanese, when we opened the Ipswich Motorway, a great Labor commitment—something I had campaigned for since 1998. We might have done a lot of work, and from opposition you do not get too many wins, but I tell you what: that was one of the best wins we ever got for South-East Queensland. Finally, now, in 2012 we can actually open up this road that actually began on the very first day after we were elected in 2007. That is when work began on the Ipswich Motorway. You know what they say: success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. In this case the Liberal Party, the National Party and everybody who opposed it were scrambling to be part of this great success, because they can now see with their own eyes the difference it has made to ordinary people in the south-east in that same spirit of positive thinking, responsible action, good work in terms of budgets, spending on infrastructure, keeping the economy strong and keeping people in jobs even through a global financial crisis.

I can understand if some people do not think the crisis hit Australia, because we actually did something to prevent it hitting here. This government, when we got elected, did something real. We were opposed all the way, kicking and screaming, by this mob over there on the opposition side, who just refused to do anything. If they had had their way—if they had had the numbers on the floor—we would have sat back, watched it all happen and hoped, like Europe or even the United States, that it just would not affect people here and that they would not lose their jobs. That just did not happen in Australia, because we took action. It always takes a government with just a small amount of responsibility and courage to do what is required, and we have done that since 2007—not always the most popular decisions, but always the right decisions and the responsible decisions.

I am very confident that in 20 years time, in the full glare of day, when people review us, they will go back and say, 'I tell you what: they were pretty tough decisions. They were tough times. They were tough days, but that was a government that stood up and was counted, and I'm proud of that.' I can tell you that that is exactly what will happen, just as for the first time in Australian history, as a result of the actions that we have taken as a government, the rest of the world—the global community—has rated the Australian economy one of the best in the world. We are AAA rated across all three credit-rating agencies for the first time in our history. That tells you something: at least they are not biased. At least they are not just opposing for opposition's sake. They are just making a global economic assessment and they say we are doing okay, and you know what? I agree with them. I actually think we are doing okay, and I think that if were a little bit more confidence emanating out of the people's house in parliament then there might be a little bit more confidence among ordinary folk as well.

I can talk about all the positive things, and there are so many that it would take me a lot more than the 15 minutes for which I have been given grace to speak today, but I will talk about some of the good things and why it is so important that we have put a surplus in our budget this time around. One reason is that we promised it. We said we would return the budget to surplus on time, and we have. Returning to a surplus is our best defence. We do not know what is around the corner, but it is our best defence. It arms us against another potential that we have seen in the past and it gives us and certainly the Reserve Bank more flexibility to move in terms of more interest rate cuts, if they are needed, just like occurred recently. An official cash rate of 3.75 per cent is good for some. It is certainly good for mortgage holders and it is really good for our economy. And now we are seeing a turnaround in the Australian dollar. It is easing, which means there is a little less pressure on our manufacturers and exporters. There is a little less pressure on a range of Australian businesses. It shows you that the good work of the government does pay off in the area of jobs where we have a great record.

During the global financial crisis Labor had a great record of keeping people working. Currently we have 5.1 per cent unemployment rate, which is low enough—it will never be completely low enough—compared to the rest of the world, almost at full employment, coming down to 4.9 per cent. Interestingly, that particular set of numbers, that data, are the same figures and the same dataset that have been used for 30 years, along with the same methodology. There is no question about the number—for 30 years we have had the same methodology. So rather than it being anything but positive it is actually a fantastic result. It simply says: while there are jobs being shed in certain parts of the economy, jobs are also being created just down the road. Unfortunately, we have a media in this country who will only report on one side of the ledger. Jobs go, but they never walk two steps down the street to say: 'Job created.' That is the reality: job created. Sure, there is a change in our economy and we are managing through that change because we believe people have a right to a decent opportunity to work to make something for themselves.

If we just look at interest rates and mortgages we see that, on an average mortgage today of $300,000, people are actually saving around $3,000 a year. That is how much they are saving by paying less because we are here in government. This is all in the framework of massive global uncertainty, of government being stripped of $150 billion of revenue. That is when it gets tough. That is when you need a good Treasurer, good government and serious policy. That is when you need to take responsibility, because that is when it makes a difference, not when the rivers of gold used to flow in this place and then Treasurer Costello could not make a prediction on the budget surplus because there was so much money going around that he never knew how much money was going to flood into the place. That was happening all around the world—in Europe, the US and everywhere. We were not immune. But what did we do with that great surplus, those great opportunities? Did we invest in the long-term future? Did we invest in the aftermath of a mining boom? Did we invest in skills and training, in education and in health?

You get criticised by this sloppy opposition, which had 12 years in government, yet it could not even do half—in fact, not even a third—the things we have done in four years. I am confident in saying that, in four years, we have achieved more than three times what you achieved in 12 years. It goes to evidence and proof. Just have a look at the budget. Have a look at the programs that Labor is delivering. Have a look at dental health and at a whole range of other areas. Have a look at how we are helping ordinary families keeping people in jobs and sustaining manufacturing. Have a look at what we have done in terms of solar panels and helping people on pensions. The single biggest increase in the pension rate in this country, in 100 years, came from a Labor government—a Labor government that understood that there was enough talking about people on the age pension being on the poverty edge and that actually made a financial commitment. People here still oppose that rise. They just do not get it. Go and talk to a real pensioner. Go and talk to somebody who appreciates that significant rise that we put in place. It cost the budget $5 billion on the day and $20 billion over the forward estimates. But that is the reality of what we did. We actually did something real and we have done something real for pensioners again in this budget. We have ensured that they are not the forgotten people. Call them whatever you like—battlers, people doing it tough. But I tell you this: you can talk the talk, but you have to walk it as well. Over here, in tough times, we are talking it and we are walking it. We are delivering the programs that make a difference.

Have a look at the average family and their cost-of-living pressures. What is a cost-of-living pressure? Everything costs money. We all get that, but what are we doing about it—schoolkids bonus. Call it whatever you like.

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The carbon tax!

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to talk about the carbon tax; I am happy to take the interjection. They giggle and laugh, but the reality is they have the same targets, the same policy. Everything is the same except, on the Labor side, the government side, we have a market based solution and we will be taxing 500 big companies, 500 big polluters. On the opposition side, same target, same policy, same outcomes, except they are going to tax ordinary people—households—directly. That is, in your hip pocket, in your home and at the kitchen table. That is who will have to pay under the opposition's policy. The Liberal-National Party have done this greatest turnaround in history. Once were maybe something; today are barely nothing. Because today they want to tax ordinary people and let the big polluters get away with it. You cannot even imagine it—this is the Liberal Party of Menzies over here, because they just want to tax ordinary people on absolutely everything.

Schoolkids bonus is for ordinary families. We put a tax incentive in place and not everyone accessed it, not everyone made use of it, so we have a better plan. And the better plan is to give it to them directly. They are responsible parents out there and, one way or another, they will spend that money on their kids. In whatever form it takes they will spend that money on their kids. It is good for them, it is good for their kids and it is good for the economy. For the life of me, I cannot understand how an opposition could credibly stand up and oppose such a positive change. They talk about the carbon tax. Let me tell you that, when they introduced the GST, there was no compensation. You just had to wear it. That was it; just wear it. The impact of that was 10 times what the impact of the carbon tax will be. But, at least, we have recognised that where we make people pay a little bit extra, indirectly, where there will be a cost, we will be keeping an eye on how those costs work and ensuring that people will be compensated for that. The list is long. We are protecting vulnerable children. There is more money and we are ensuring children get better access to education.

In this budget we have not forgotten disability and ageing. We have put a significant amount, billions of dollars, into the aged-care sector, ensuring that as people age they actually get some dignity, they can stay at home longer and they are not forced into a home and, very importantly, are not forced to sell their home to get into another one. That is something that only a Labor government would do. On this side we do not have discussions about kero baths; we actually have discussions about giving people proper care. That is what we do over on this side and we deliver it through this budget in the toughest of times. Again, I cannot believe that this mob over here would oppose a National Disability Insurance Scheme on the scale of Medicare. It will take some years to put into place, but you have to start somewhere. You have to recognise the need. We have been listening to people across the political spectrum talk about the need for this for 20 years. When is it going to happen? It will happen under a Labor government. We have already put it into place; that is what we are doing right now. There are many other programs: dental programs, making sure people in the workforce have skills, better safety on regional buses, Roads to Recovery—a great program, and we are continuing to fund it for the next five years.

I also want to make particular note today, in the small amount of time I have left, that it is World IBD Day. I mentioned earlier that the government is increasing funding for bowel cancer screening, and it gives me an opportunity to speak about inflammatory bowel disease. World IBD Day was Saturday, 19 May. It was the second World IBD Day. The conditions that make up IBD are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Both are very debilitating diseases that mostly hit young people and are largely unsupported and unfunded in this country. It is a great tragedy to see what the hardworking young people that are affected by this disease have to do to survive and fund their own way. Even though we have great programs and a first-class Medicare system—the best Medicare and pharmaceutical system in the world—there is still a lot more that we can do.

I am making it a mission of mine to make people aware of this. I helped set up the Crohn's and Colitis Parliamentary Friendship Group with Andrew Laming. I have good support from both sides of this House on what is recognised across the spectrum as a really bad disease that needs more work. The causes of inflammation of the bowel are more prevalent in society than epilepsy, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema or schizophrenia—it is just little understood and little known. It is a responsibility for all of us to make people aware of this, and I have certainly taken that on.

Over 61,000 Australians have IBD and a new study indicates that 18 people per 100,000 have Crohn's disease and 11 people per 100,000 have ulcerative colitis. The peak onset age is between 15 and 40, in a person's prime, and it affects not only the sufferer but also their friends, their families and their ability to work. Often you will find that they are self-employed people who, from an early age, understood that their disease meant they could not hold down a regular job and, therefore, had to create their own job and their own work. I know a number of people who have this very tragic disease and who work very hard not to be a burden on taxpayers or on others, including their family, but to fight this disease as best they can.

It is a chronic condition and sufferers require long periods of expensive medication and face multiple bouts of major surgery—some having surgery 20, 30 or 40 times. If you can imagine what that does to a person's body, you can understand just how chronic this disease is. Apart from the obvious personal cost, there is also a huge economic cost. A 2007 study by Access Economics found that the cost to the community is around $2.7 billion—a $500 million financial cost and a $2.2 billion cost in lost wellbeing and productivity through absenteeism, workplace separation, early retirement and premature death. Keep the 2007 figures in mind because I know today they are much higher.

Last year I started the parliamentary friendship group and I am very thankful for the members of that group. Tonight we have a major function on to mark World IBD Day. I challenge everyone here to pay more attention to this chronic disease and do whatever they can to find out about people in their own electorates who have it. (Time expired)

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and related bills. This federal budget has sunk like a stone. The experience in my electorate office and elsewhere, from what I gather in discussions with so many of my colleagues, is that there is virtually no contact—no phone calls, no attempt to get detail. This is most unusual irrespective of how budgets are received or who delivers the budget on either side of the chamber. You would normally expect to get a reasonable number of calls coming to your office either to complain or to congratulate or, at the very least, to seek details of different programs. This year, silence—because this budget has sunk like a stone. People have stopped listening to this government. They have no confidence that anyone is running the show. They have no confidence in this Treasurer and his ability to bring down a budget that is in any way believable or competent.

Australians simply do not find this budget believable. Not more than 18 months ago they heard the first forecast of $12 billion for this budget's deficit. Then, in the budget last year, they heard a forecast of $23 billion. Then, toward the end of last year in November's mid-year economic statement, they heard that the budget deficit would be $37 billion. This time around, when the budget was actually given, they hear that it is $44 billion—at a time when the year still had a couple of months to go. No wonder people do not find this budget believable. No wonder they have taken absolutely no notice of what has been said by the Treasurer and the government. Why would they believe a surplus forecast? Why would they believe in a $26 billion turnaround? They have heard the spin before, again and again, and we have just heard it again from the member for Oxley—apart from the last four minutes on IBD and Crohn's disease.

People have been bludgeoned into reality by the outcomes, not the spin. They have been disheartened. They have been let down so often. They are sick of it—the cute words, the explanations, the endless forecasts which are never delivered. We hear this Treasurer bemoaning the fact that he has had to deal with a $150 billion write-down in the budget, as though someone came along and put an extra burden on him. But they were his forecasts from previous budgets that were overstated—everyone said they were overstated, these pollyanna forecasts from previous budgets. Then he comes in here with shoulders stooped, complaining of the fact that he has got to write down $150 billion. Well, poor Wayne! Poor Treasurer! These are things that he forecast and then, when the forecasts were not realised, he gets it on one side—he helps sell a budget with a shonky forecast—and then he gets it on the other side, by saying that he had to deal with the write-down of $150 billion of moneys that were not realised.

This is just an example of the type of spin that everyone has to put up with. It is the type of spin that has made people so cynical, so distrustful and so confused, and so upset about the way in which this government is running the affairs of state. It is why there is a crisis of confidence in this country. It is why people are saving at a level they have never saved at before—12 per cent for the last 12 months. That is nearly $90 billion not spent that normally would be spent. No wonder retail is on its knees. There is all of the money that is sitting on balance sheets of companies not being invested. Go out and talk to them, and they all say, 'Why would I invest? I've got no idea who's running this show. Is there anyone up there who's got any ideas?'

Mr Sidebottom interjecting—

Madam Deputy Speaker, do I have to put up with this nonsense from the other side here?

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

The parliamentary secretary!

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This budget is a discredited budget—totally discredited. I just want to give a couple of quotes. The chief of certified practising accountants, Alex Malley, said that Australia desperately needs a vision and that that was not achieved in the budget. 'Accounting chicanery was the winner tonight,' he said at the end of the budget. On the same evening, respected economic commentator Alan Kohler said:

This is, at its core, a big taxing, big spending budget, including a big increase in welfare.

And he also said:

… it is the budget of an unpopular Government approaching an election, not one that's tightening the belt.

He has nailed it. You would not think so, though, from the verbiage about the budget coming from the other side of the chamber.

This budget is a flight of fancy. You need look no further than the revenue forecast. There was a revenue forecast of 11.8 per cent. The Treasurer is setting himself up again for an opportunity to bemoan the outcome next year by overstating the forecast this year, once again. The revenue forecast is 11.8 per cent. This cannot happen and will not happen. The long-term average through good years is eight per cent.

The Australian dollar, the coal price, resource share prices—they are all forward indicators, and they are all heading south, every one of them. Add to this the new socialist governments in Europe, the recent developments in the last week or two in Spain and Greece and unemployment on the up again in the United States, and we are not going to see a 12 per cent increase in revenue. It simply will not happen. We will be a long way south of that. And this government knows it. It is again an exercise in deception. It is an exercise designed to fool people long enough to get through a budget and to seek to put a gloss on what are, demonstrably, failed results.

The Treasurer keeps talking about Australia being well ahead of the rest of the developed world. Of course, our competitors are, in the main, not in the developed world, but put that aside. The IMF just a couple of weeks ago stated that six developed countries are now back in structural surplus—six developed countries. This is the yardstick that the Treasurer keeps wanting to refer to. And yet they still referred to Australia being in structural deficit. In other words, we are wasting the mining boom. The rivers of gold are being used to fund excessive payments. That is what a structural deficit means. And if the rivers of gold come off 20 or 30 per cent, we are in deep trouble. We are back in deficit without doing anything else. Without doing another thing, we are back in deficit.

This budget is a confused budget. On the one hand, we heard for weeks that it was going to be a really tough budget. My goodness, this was going to be tough. This was going to shake the bones of all those people who like to spend, spend, spend. Yet when we got to the night—actually, when we got to a couple of weeks before, when the Prime Minister came back into the country and thought she was being set up by the Treasurer—we started to hear of endless handouts: a vote-buying exercise. Of course they are all paid for by borrowed funds.

We hear again and again from the other side of the chamber, in defence of the budget, about all the spending initiatives that they have got and who they are helping. People are not deluded by this. They are worried by the fact that you are helping them with more borrowed money. That is not help; that is just deferred pain. That just means that someone further down the track is going to require repayment of that money. It is, again, spin over substance, and we are seeing the outcome of it.

The $800 cheques—that is all borrowed money, every penny of it. One hundred million dollars a day! They say they are helping small business. They are in the market for $100 million each day, forcing small business out of the market. They cannot get money to keep the doors of their businesses open, to refinance their mortgages. Nor can they get loans at any sort of reasonable interest rate, because this government has been borrowing $100 million a day for years now—for three years, $100 million a day. And they say they are interested in and supportive of small business. It is a joke.

Not only have they got a supposedly tough budget that ended up with all these handouts, but also there is a confusion of broken promises. The budget actively discourages investment by Australian based companies and foreign investors. They claim that this shonky surplus is going to give great confidence and comfort to business and will turn the tables on all sorts of problems faced by businesses outside of the mining sector. Yet, in the same breath, they drop a long-standing promise to reduce company tax. And of course there was nothing on deregulation. It is a budget that actively discourages investment. And when you look to foreign investors, one little reported measure in the budget that demonstrates that this government just does not get it which was not lost on the business sector was the doubling of the withholding tax on distributions from managed investment trusts for overseas investors. At a time when we have the biggest carbon tax in the world being introduced and a mining tax which no-one else has—which is becoming a huge sovereign risk issue in other parts of the world for investors—we also have a withholding tax, one of the few things they could claim to have done in a successful and promising way.

Just four years ago the then Assistant Treasurer put out a statement after the budget announcement which said:

As part of its commitment to establish Australia as a regional financial hub, the Rudd Government has acted to dramatically improve the competitiveness of the Australian managed funds industry.

… it will substantially reduce the level of withholding tax from a non-final rate of 30 per cent to a final rate of 7.5 per cent … These arrangements will make Australia's withholding tax rate one of the most competitive in the world, and provide a significant boost to Australia's ability to compete globally.

They were on the money. We supported this initiative. It was a very sensible thing. They got out in front of the world. And it produced results, billions of dollars of results. It went from $1 billion in the MIT to $4 billion.

Then, when it came down to 7½ per cent, it went to $5½ billion; $5½ billion came in here, got invested in infrastructure that we hear being talked about endlessly, but what happens? On budget night they reversed it. It was back up to 15 per cent. Of course there was no consultation, no warning whatsoever. What do you think this does to people in New York and London and other places who are looking to put billions of dollars here? It spells sovereign risk. It spells a government that has the shakes. It spells a government that does not know where it is going. It spells great big question marks over Australia as a destiny for stable and accountable government.

None of this is happening and these are the sorts of signals. It is not only that; it is retrospective, so companies and big funds that have sunk billions into infrastructure projects and done all their numbers on 7½ per cent withholding tax are now going to be slugged 15 per cent. Do you think they are going to come back with money to get a measly $260 million?

For this Treasurer to pull out a shonky surplus, they have probably sacrificed tens of billions of dollars over the next 10 or 20 years by this move. It is such a pathetic thing for this government to do. Then they stand up and say they understand and they have the interests of businesses at heart.

This is a budget with the debt issue, this increase in debt from $250 billion to $300 billion debt ceiling. It is so misleading. That was hidden. It is a budget of deception by omission. It has the biggest carbon tax in the world, with not one word of explanation in those inches and inches of budget papers about how this thing will work. Yet it is going to put such an enormous burden on everybody in the country.

This is a budget which will only compound the crisis of confidence currently running rampant within Australian households and businesses. (Time expired)

Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I support Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and related bills and their passage through this House. Doesn't the fact that we have targeted and delivered on a budget surplus annoy the hell out of those opposite?

Let's go back a little while. It was not all that long ago that, apart from preaching the need to have a budget in deficit, they started working through the figures—bear in mind they had a bit of a black hole to overcome—and started saying a budget would be an aspirational objective for them.

We have taken on the task of delivering a surplus budget. We have not simply said that we can; we have delivered a surplus budget to secure our economy against the persistent threats of an uncertain global environment. As I often mention here, there has not been one occasion when I have heard those opposite talk about the global financial crisis in this place. It is as if it did not occur.

Let's go back to 2008, with the fall of Lehman Brothers and the consequences around the globe. I recall it very vividly. The opposition—as a matter of fact, the shadow Treasurer—was recommending a path of action to this parliament of sitting, waiting and seeing what happens. If we had sat and waited, we would be in the same financial position as Europe, the United States, Britain and Japan.

We have had a very good result as a result of how we addressed the global financial crisis. We have shown good fiscal and budgetary management. We have kept the pressure on interest rates. What is important about delivering a budget surplus is putting downward pressure on interest rates. I think that would be in the interests of everyone in this chamber who purports to represent families, particularly those families who pay mortgages, which, let's face it, is the bulk of working families. This budget is designed to put downward pressure on interest rates.

We have just heard a lot about the issue of the mining boom. Sure, this is probably a once-in-a-generation mining boom that is occurring. It is right that we spread the benefits of that mining boom to ensure that no section of the Australian economy is left behind. I have seen the effect of the mining boom in my own family. I know the attraction there is for young to go up and work in your state, Madam Deputy Speaker D'Ath, in Queensland or over in Western Australia, where my boy has also worked. It is probably why it is very hard to attract tradesmen to other parts of the economy. Therefore, we need to put pressure on to incentivise areas, particularly in small business, to make sure that they stay competitive.

I spoke this morning on a notice of motion, which you moved, Madam Deputy Speaker. It gave me the opportunity to talk about the strong economic position that Australia is currently enjoying in relation to the rest of the world. When we talk about the global financial crisis, we should remember that our economy has grown by a further seven per cent since the crisis. We have an unemployment rate of 4.9 per cent compared to 8.3 per cent in the United States and an average of 10.7 per cent throughout Europe. Sovereign debt in most of Europe is around 80 per cent and is similar in the United States and Great Britain. Ours will peak as a debt ratio to GDP of 7.5 per cent. I hope those figures indicate we are doing a fair bit right. We are not doing what those opposite recommended: let's sit and wait and see. We decided to take very decisive action early, we decided to move and stimulate growth in our economy.

Investing in education will not only guard against the effect of a downturn in the construction industry but also in the next 10 and or 15 years be a benefit as our kids graduate and learn with modern technologies and go on to be competitive with the rest of the world. To that extent, we have only seen the first phase of the economic benefit of investing in schools. The next will be the productivity benefit as these kids who learn with the advanced technologies enter into our tertiary education system, into our workforce and make a difference for the better in our economy for the future.

That is by no means sitting back and waiting. That is taking a very strident approach, something that was criticised. I have to give credit to the opposition, they have been very consistent in their criticism. They have been consistent in their position of voting no. That is another one they voted no to. I know from my electorate that people do not go out to the schools and say, 'We oppose this.' When we are opening school science blocks or language centres or doing other things in relation to education, everyone wants to get a piece of the local action.

Our responsible management of the economy and the budget has not come at the cost of investment in our productivity. I have just mentioned schools. The government has delivered historic investments into disabilities, aged care, dental health care, education and fundamental investment in building this nation's future, including the National Broadband Network. Despite what has just been said, this budget does have fiscal restraint at its centre in order to deliver that surplus.

Families in need are clearly the beneficiaries from this budget and rightfully so. Many of these families live in my electorate. Apart from being the most multicultural electorate in the whole of Australia, my electorate is the second most disadvantaged in Australia. So extra assistance is certainly welcomed by those families—families in need, such as those who are receiving the $410 for primary kids and $820 for high-school students through the schoolkids bonus. That is something that is very important to me. A third of my electorate is Asian, 22 per cent is Vietnamese. The Vietnamese have only been here for the last 37 years, at tops.

When running my mobile offices, I have been astounded at the number of people who have not claimed education tax refunds for their kids. A lot of people just failed to understand they were entitled to it. Unfortunately, lack of language skills has kept a lot of them out of the workforce. When they have not had a job they have not paid pay tax and thought, therefore, they could not claim the benefits for their children. This will ensure that those families do not miss out. According to our statistics, in my electorate this will mean that 10 per cent of families who have been and always were eligible but did miss out will now receive justly deserved spending for their children's education. They will get paid this schoolkids bonus at the beginning and the middle of each year. That is certainly very welcome.

Similarly, there are 17,000 families in my electorate who will also see the benefit of the extra $600 from the family tax benefit A payment and more than 18,000 individuals on Centrelink allowances will also receive a supplementary payment of $210 to assist with the cost of living. For those who are truly struggling to look after their families, every cent will certainly make a welcome difference in their lives.

This budget also provides $3.7 billion worth of assistance for small business in the form of tax breaks. There are 11,300 small businesses in my electorate of Fowler. The instant asset write-off which will be increased to $6,500 will be well received, whether it be for the motor vehicle, computer equipment, utes cetera. For areas such as mine where there are a lot of trades personnel, this will be very welcome.

There is also the issue of the loss carryback where people can claim losses of up to $1 million against the tax paid on previous profits. I know the Council of Small Business welcome it. Many businesses in my area are trying to regroup and reinvest in their businesses, particularly tradesmen increasing their tools and machinery. This will be the basis upon which they can upgrade. They can actually turn around their businesses and invest in their future and, hopefully in turn, grow their businesses. That means providing greater employment for local people.

Also very important is the $3.7 billion committed to aged-care reform. It will help people stay at home for longer and not be forced to sell their homes to pay the aged-care bond. In addition to the historic and dramatic increase in the pension delivered since 2009—something the other side of politics refused to do in the 12 years they had when they occupied the government benches—more than 27,600 pensioners in my electorate alone will now receive an extra $338 per year for singles and $510 for couples combined. These are good things. They are things that we do need to strive to achieve. On that basis, it will certainly be welcomed by the very significant portion of the elderly that I have as residents in Fowler.

Other issues , such as the dental health scheme and being able to alleviate the public dental health waiting list , are certainly going to be of great benefit to the people I represent , b ut I want to particularly focus my comments on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Disability is something I have a particular interest in. My area, apart from its demographics, is very much overrepresented by people and families who live with disabilities. I can assure you that it is not the air we breathe out the re in south-west Sydney or the water we drink. Having a child with, say, a utism, is very, very expensive and very few families actually survive the challenges associated with that. So people make compromises, and one of the compromises is in land values. So the electorate of Fowler is very much overrepresented by people with disabilities.

A couple of years back I was able to show that within a 25 - kilometre radius of the Liverpool CBD resided about 52 per cent of all families in New South Wales that live with autism. Of that number, 82 per cent of those families are single - parent families. As I said, it takes a very, very strong marriage to survive some of those challenges. So it is very important to me to ensure that local families have not only the care they need now but also the lifetime care and support they will need. This is something that will certainly make our mark hopefully as a parliament — stand ing up for people with disabilities. I honestly believe that our generation is going to be judged on a range of different things but specifically on how we deliver for people with disabilities.

While we are talking about autism, I would also like to indicate my support for the Autism Advisory and Support Service in Liverpool, which provides essential support and guidance for parents of children with autism. This organisation exists entirely as a result of the dedication and commitment of its volunteers, who are mainly parents. I would particularly like to recognise its founder, Grace Fav a , and also Fiona Zammit for the good work they do. I know they are holding a fundraising function this weekend, and I wish them all the best with that. They do an extraordinary job for parents in my electorate , who are just coming to terms with the fact that their children have autism.

If I had further time I would like to talk more about unemployment in my area—which is also extremely high. I have an unemployment rate which is twice the national average. One of the things that I would like to see more attention given to is language classes to ensure that a larger number of people are given the potential to enter the workforce and become job ready. That is something that is very significant in Fowler. (Time expired)

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is an unworthy budget from an unworthy government that Australians have stopped listening to. This is a budget that cannot be believed. It is a budget that sets out to pitch Australian against Australian. It is genuinely a Labor budget—a true Labor budget—that is once again more interested in distributing other people's wealth and demonising them in the process than in the creation of that wealth for the betterment of our nation.

This is a budget that has at its heart, just as this government does, a lie—the carbon tax th at dare not speak its name in the budget or in the tens of millions of taxpayer funded advertising this government is insulting Australians with every single night. This is a budget, as the shadow Treasurer and the Leader of the Opposition have well argued, that is based on cooked books, where expenditure is hollowed out from next financial year, such as $1.3 billion in nation-building works , or the $1.1 billion on local government grants, or wiping expenditure from the Clean Energy programs only to see them reappeared the year after, all to inflate the deficit this year—a type of throwing good money after bad approach from this government and how they manage our finances—while pushing important expenditure like more than $5 billion in Defence funding, taking us to the lowest level of Defence expenditure since pre - war times, as well as absolutely welching on their grandstanding foreign aid commitment, leaving all of these things for later governments to pay for.

This is a budget based on rubbery number s . The government expect Australians to believe that, after creating $147 billion in accumulated deficits, they are going to produce a $1.5 billion surplus next year. And they make this claim after blowing the current year's budget by more than $20 billion despite a 10.3 per cent increase in tax receipts and including an almost 20 per cent increase in company tax receipts. If you listen to the Treasurer , you would think that he has been losing money. But the fact is that revenue has been going up. The only thing that it has fallen from is the Treasurer's inflated expectations of revenue to prop up previous budgets.

Research by the Parliamentary Library shows us that the average variation between actual and budgeted expenditure for the budget year over the past 22 years, going back to 1990-91, is equivalent to 0.7 per cent of GDP—or on current figures around $9.2 billion. The actuals are on average 0.7 per cent of GDP, or $9.2 billion worse off than what ultimately appears in the budget, if you go back over the last 22 years.

That takes into account the swings and the roundabouts. Of the swings, when it was worse off in the actuals than what was budgeted for by the government the previous year, on eight occasions they were Labor budgets and on three occasions they were coalition budgets. And of the roundabouts where the actual was better than the budget was predicting the previous year, the majority were coalition budgets and only two were Labor budgets, which included one that was basically neutral. To put this in perspective, the Treasurer is asking us to believe that his budget surplus of $1.5 billion—which is around one-sixth of the average negative variation over the past 20 years—is in the bag. We in this place must tell him that he is absolutely dreaming.

But it gets worse. I will go to the statement by the Treasury secretary, Dr Parkinson. In his recent speech following the budget, he said:

Given the significant structural change in the economy, and the changing relationship between the nominal economy and tax collections, this is a particularly challenging time for revenue forecasting.

So not only do we have a Treasurer who says that he is going to deliver a surplus when he has never delivered one to date—in fact, he has delivered $147 billion in accumulated deficits—and that surplus accounts for a sixth of the average variation over the last 22 years, but also the Treasurer's own secretary of his department has highlighted the volatility of the things that are in front of us.

This is a Treasurer who thinks that he can out-predict and out-budget the best Treasurer we have ever had in this country, Mr Costello, and that he is even better than Paul Keating, from his own side. He thinks that he can effectively be the fiscal equivalent of a crack sniper in a hurricane, and he believes that the Australian people will accept at his word—because there is no track record to go from—that he will land this $1.5 billion surplus next year. Well, the way they speak about it in this place, you would think they had already achieved it. But, as the Australian people have come to learn, this is the government that overpromises and under delivers like none before it.

This is a budget that is betrayed by its own deceit. When we look at their request to lift the debt ceiling, they betray themselves. By asking to increase the debt ceiling by a further $50 billion, there is no greater proof than this that the government do not believe in their own forecast surplus. They are like an addict saying that they want just one more hit. After putting up the ceiling now on numerous occasions they say, 'Just one more time. Believe us; it will be the last time.' The Australian people have given up believing in this government—if they ever did—and they have certainly given up on listening to them.

There is $8 billion in interest for this debt. Eight billion dollars in interest per year is what we will arrive at over the end of the forecast period. In my own electorate, you could build the F6 tunnel under the shire three times over. In my own electorate—and a matter that is very dear to those in my electorate—you could build the second Sydney airport and its associated land transport infrastructure for the cost of one year's debt payments.

The cost blowouts, though, go even further. This is another Labor budget—and it is indeed another blowout on boats. In this budget not one figure that relates to the cost of managing asylum seeker costs has not blown out and will not get worse by the time this budget is finished. The only surplus Labor has delivered has not been for Australia; the only surplus that this government has delivered has been for the people smugglers themselves, who continue to profit year on year as a result of this government's soft policies. More than 18,000 people have now arrived since they decided that it was a good idea to get rid of the solution that had worked. Those more than 18,000 people provide in gross revenue—we estimate, based on the estimates of $10,000 per person coming from the interviews of people getting off those boats and being transferred to Christmas Island—around $170 million so far, and counting.

More than 10½ thousand have arrived since the last election. More than 4,450 have arrived since the community release and bridging visa scheme was announced late last November. Arrivals have increased since then to a rate of almost 750 per month. More than 1,000, for the first time under this government, have arrived this month alone and more than 250 have turned up in the last 24 hours. Today we learnt in Senate estimates that this government is budgeting for next year for 450 people to turn up a month—yet we have had over 1,000 this month and we had almost 1,000 in the month before.

As we have seen blowouts occur in the past, we will see these blowouts occur again. We have seen $4.7 billion worth of blowouts since 2009-10. In the past year, at the portfolio additional estimates, there was a blowout of $866 million. Since those portfolio additional estimates, there has been a further blowout of $840 million. There was a blowout within those figures between November, when they first considered the papers and the publication and the review of those in the additional hearings in the Senate, of over $220 million. So the costs just keep going up and up every time more and more boats arrive.

Rather than trying to address these issues, the government's response is simply to blame others for their own pantheon of failures. And it is a pretty big list: the government's first decision to abolish the solution that worked; then the government's decision to introduce their asylum freeze; then the government's decision to introduce the failed East Timor solution; and then the government's decision to introduce what proved to be the illegal Malaysian people swap, found by none other than the High Court. The government now want to cling to these failures and, if they want to do so, they should go and talk to their partners in the Greens—because, on this side of the chamber, we do not support bad policy. We support proven policy.

We will stand here today and we will say to this government, 'Put back the policies that work.' But for nothing other than their stubborn pride, the members on that side will sit there and cling to failure like a life raft. That is what they will do. They know that they can introduce offshore processing at Nauru today, with no legislation required, and temporary protection visas today, with no legislation required. But they refuse to do so because, if they do, then they have to admit that the 18,000 people who have turned up on their watch and the hundreds of people they know have perished at sea and the thousands of people each year they know are being denied humanitarian visas—

Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service and Integrity) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I ask that the speaker return to the bill. The bill is the appropriation bill.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Cook has the call.

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. What I was talking about is the cost of Labor's border failures. Those costs are seen not only in the red ink in the budget but in the costs that individuals are having to wear in terms of their inability to access humanitarian places from offshore—and there are more than 4,000 that will miss out this year because those who have come by boat to Australia have taken their place. That is how our system works, and more than 4,000 people will miss out this year for no other reason than that this stubborn government cannot admit that they got it wrong back in 2008. They should never have removed those policies, and that act has led to the chaos and the carnage that has followed. It continues to this day, and for that government to sit there today and try to shift the blame to an opposition who stand ready, every single day, to support proven policy is a disgrace. It is a lame excuse.

We have a government that has given up on border protection and given in to the Greens, with their community release policies. Next year we will see over 8,000 people in the system as a result of this government's policies. That was confirmed in Senate estimates today. Back in February of this year they said that next year there would be 5,700. Now they are saying there will be over 8,000. The number in community detention and the number of those on bridging visas has doubled in their estimate just in the last few months—and that is before they even admit that arrivals are on the increase, because they are still budgeting on 450 arrivals per month. So what we are going to see next year, on these budget figures, is an increase of $424 million next year. That is $1.1 million extra every single day that taxpayers will have to shell out because this government cannot get over its own stubborn pride when it gets something so catastrophically wrong and continues to cling to failure.

This government needs to reflect on this because these budget figures are going to keep going up. They are going to keep blowing out, and they will continue to be an embarrassment, not only for the minister but also for the Treasurer, who presides over a budget that is sinking—and it is sinking within a fortnight of it being brought into this place. Already, with over 1,000 people turning up in May, the budget figures for the immigration department are in a mess; they are already in tatters. I have no doubt that when we get together again later in the year and we go through these figures again we will be told the same old thing: 'Well, we didn't know that this would continue to go on like this and we didn't think it would cost that much.' Well, if you keep doing the same thing, you cannot expect a different outcome. The outcome we have had from this government on border protection is more boats, more costs, more risks, more expense, more failure, more denial and more lame excuses from a government that has simply given in.

There is nothing wrong—whether it is on our borders or in our great country—that cannot be improved with an election and a change of government. As I move around, that is the message I am getting loud and clear from Australians of all walks of life. Those on the other side know this. They know that they are reaping what they have sown. What they have sown in border protection policy they are now reaping in the blown out budgets, those being denied humanitarian visas because of their own intransigence and incompetence and, of course, the risk of those who continue to get on these dangerous vessels. There is nothing wrong—on our borders or in our country—that a change of government will not improve. (Time expired)

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whilst of course the standing orders allow for a wide-ranging debate on the appropriations bill, because we can speak about any public affair, one would have thought that a shadow minister might think that the appropriation bill debate speech was the time that he could unveil what he would actually do. He treated us as if he had been invited on one of those 24/7 TV shows, where the emotive word 'chaos' has to be used and that the government has to have 'lost the plot' in a piece of policy area. But what did he say that he would do if he became the immigration minister?

He has been told—and we know, because of the High Court case—of the need for new legislation. We have legislation before the parliament. He tends to rattle on about the Greens and say that they in some way have the government hostage, but the Greens do not support this particular piece of legislation. The coalition would require the piece of legislation, and therefore it is up to them to support it. The shadow minister says that we can return to the Nauru 'solution'. He does not consider that we have moved on a little bit. Five years on, we have moved on from there, and certainly the landscape has changed.

The success rates of those that arrived on our shores and got shoved into the middle of the Pacific Ocean on Nauru was pretty high, and I wonder, in the business of trade of humans in our region, whether it is a deterrent at all. To think that you can wind back the clock and suddenly the fear in people who approach people smugglers because they are being sent to Nauru will still be there, when the success rate of those that either came to Australia or got to other first-world countries through Nauru has been established—what a nonsense.

The shadow minister also stood at the dispatch box and said, 'Oh, we don't need legislation.' There was no mention of the briefings that have been made available to him by the government, by those that know, by those that have looked at the legislation. The shadow minister at the table, the member for Dickson, is getting a bit squeamish. We might hear some policy from him one day. He has been in his portfolio area and has had responsibility for a long time, and he has always joined the mealy-mouthed people who speak on behalf of the opposition.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, on a point of order: I can understand that the member for Scullin feels bruised and damaged because of the treatment meted out to him by this government but this is not relevant to the bill that is being discussed before the House, surely.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Cook discussed this issue at length in the debate on the appropriation bills so I intend to give the same amount of latitude to the member for Scullin.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, you do not have to give me latitude. It is about time that members in this place read the standing orders. The member for Dickson, who thinks he could rule the place, should read the standing orders. Mate, read the standing orders—76(c):

... the motion for the second reading of the Main Appropriation Bill, and Appropriation or Supply Bills for the ordinary annual services of government, when public affairs may be debated.

There is no such thing in this debate as having to be relevant to the budget, as you should have known. But, no, you are slothful in your development of policy—we never hear it. You are always critical of all actions that go on. And you have got thin skin. All you can do is get up—

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Member for Scullin, can you resume your seat. The member for Dickson.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is great to see him fired up again, Madam Deputy Speaker, but some of the comments were offensive and unparliamentary and I ask you to ask him to withdraw them.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask the member to withdraw, for the assistance of the chair.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw. I am sorry that I am surrounded by precious petals.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, point of order—

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Member for Scullin, you have the call.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was just waiting to check whether the member for Dickson is okay with me returning to the debate because he seems a bit of a precious petal tonight.

One of the things I do understand is that, yes, perceptions about public policy are as important as the detail about public policy and, yes, at the moment that is something that this government has got to work on. But this government has got nothing to be ashamed of. This government is in fact a very good government. In its policy delivery—

Mr Dutton interjecting—

The big man scoffs. The one that loves parliament so much that he would deny himself the ability to stay in the parliament, but goes on the 24/7 talk shows on TV—hear the member for Dickson, the great saviour of the Liberal Party, sorry the LNP, whatever that is—and can only sit there scoffing. He will come up with a policy; we will hear it some day. He will think of something, mealy-mouthed. Have a look at the way in which we address dental policy in a concrete way that will probably be more sustainable than was the case with both the previous governments, of both political persuasions—sometimes we all have to admit that perhaps we got it wrong. But I know there was a fair degree of effort put in place when, during the Hawke-Keating years, a public dental scheme was put in place. One of the things that it requires, and we acknowledge it in the provision of a number of health services, is cooperation between public health and private health. But the member for Dickson was of the ilk that decides that he will put words in our mouths that were anti-private provision.

The Labor Party has moved on. The Labor Party knows that it has to move on with the norms of the society, within the time frames. That does not mean that we move away from traditional Labor values. It just means that we have to adapt to different types of delivery systems. So in this budget, at a time when the economic ministers have decided that they will put in place a budget that conforms to the political aspiration we put to the people about the budget going into surplus, we still were able to do something very concrete with regard to dental health policy.

Another thing that I am not ashamed to comment on is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. I know that this is again something that the member for Dickson says, in a mealy-mouthed way, is not enough. Well, we can all say that.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sorry I have to rise to make this point but they are offensive comments again. They are untrue. I ask that you ask the member for Scullin to withdraw what are offensive comments yet again. It is unfortunate that in this rant he has to make comments that are baseless.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think you have made your point of order.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, on the point of order: this particular member has form. He is just being disruptive.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Dickson has indicated that he takes offence at the references that continue to be made about him. For the benefit and assistance of the chair, I ask that you withdraw.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I withdraw and say it saddens me that in this place, a place where there should be robust debate, we have people displaying a sensitivity that in their behaviour from time to time they do not show.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You miss the chair, don't you, Harry? They did you a wrong.

Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Dickson should be careful.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I was about to say, hopefully at some stage, because this is about the contest of ideas, we will see shadow ministers actually explain to the Australian people what it is that the coalition are willing to do about the National Disability Insurance Scheme, that they will acknowledge that the efforts in this budget have brought forward the timetable set down by the Productivity Commission and that they will not describe these efforts in this budget as being not of consequence. The federal government has taken on a vexed issue that faces the Federation and that is difficult to solve because it requires the cooperation of state and territory governments. It should be debated in a sensible manner, not in a manner that is simply point-scoring, like the attitude on asylum seeker policy of the previous contributor to this debate. A mother and her two children are taken to the immigration office in Melbourne. They do not know why they are going. They leave the husband, the new stepfather to the children, in the waiting room. They present and then they come back out of the room to tell the husband-stepfather that they are going immediately on a plane to Villawood because the wife has had an adverse ASIO assessment. When the member for Cook is given an opportunity to respond to such a situation, what does he say? 'It's a consequence of people arriving by boat.' There is a bit of a problem on that. For the last three years, or at least the last two years, there has not been a boat out of Sri Lanka because there were other things that happened in asylum seeker policy. Besides the legislation that they should vote upon and support in this place, there is the cooperation with source countries, and one of the successes has been in Sri Lanka strangling the trade in illegal movement of people.

Then again, I should not have been so surprised. The attitude to Indonesia in this regional tackling of asylum seekers is for them to be told, 'Well, we'll tie a rope on the boats and we'll drag 'em back.' There are no visits to Indonesia to discuss this, before they go out using megaphone diplomacy, no recognition that it was the Howard government that commenced a proper dialogue about a regional approach to illegal movement in people—an approach that recognised that you had source countries, countries of transit and target countries. This is just as if, because Australia is a target country, our participation in the development of policy should only be about target countries. I am sorry: that is just not good enough.

This place should be used for, I will admit, robust debate of ideas and policy. But, when I get people that will go upstairs to the gallery, knock on the doors and say: 'Here I am again. I'll be able to make the comment about the chaos and the lost control, but never put a positive idea.' Well, they can continue to do that up in the galleries. I just invite them to use the opportunities that parliament presents to actually be sensible about things, to have the full debates, to decide that they will contribute to the contest of ideas. That is what is important about this House, and that is the way we all should treat it. (Time expired)

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

I too will speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and related bills. The elephant in the room on the night that the budget was announced was Labor's, or should I say the Greens', great new carbon tax. This is the tax which Julia Gillard promised would never be introduced on her watch. She knew the damage that it could do. The carbon tax became the price of the keys to the Lodge, but it comes at a terrible cost to the competitiveness of the Australian economy. Nowhere in the long and florid speech made by the Treasurer on budget night was there a reference to the 1 July commencement date, when a hefty carbon tax will be imposed on Australia's energy consumers and emitters. The extra cost will be embedded in all that we do. Food prices will escalate; energy bills will escalate; and our industry, largely grown on the back of cheap fossil-fuel generated energy, will reel, and much of it will buckle.

Just today, the Russian aluminium giant RUSAL condemned the Gillard government for kneecapping the once high-growth alumina industry of Australia. They are quoted as saying:

Australia now faces an almost impossible task of competing with new entrants to the industry.

RUSAL Australia Chairman John Hannagan has said that the design of Gillard's carbon tax would hand future global capacity increases to competitors in Asia, South America and other places where there is no carbon impost. This industry leader referred to the perverse outcome where Labor's carbon tax could actually stimulate even higher global emissions, as new competitors in less regulated markets scramble to take up the opportunities created as Australia's global share of production falls away.

This is particularly depressing when you think that Australia's aluminium industry is amongst the world's best in generating the most efficient and least carbon-dioxide-intensive production. Generations of industry research and investment will now be compromised, or made useless, because the Greens insisted that Australia introduce the world's largest and most all-inclusive carbon tax, even though there is no evidence that the globe's emissions will be reduced or contained as a result. Others less environmentally careful than the Australian industry sectors will simply take the place of the closed-down parts of our economy. Their people will take the jobs in their countries that will be lost from our cities and regions of Australia.

The big dairy companies of Australia are also in the media today begging the government to rethink their destructive carbon tax policy. In my electorate, one of the big 3 to pay the new tax, Murray Goulburn Cooperative, have already announced job losses and a shrinkage of their activity amounting to nearly a third of their workforce in two of my small towns. Murray Goulburn's costs will rise by some $10 million a year, they calculate, and it will be their dairy farmers, their suppliers, who will have to bear the pain, given that Murray Goulburn can rarely negotiate higher prices from their international buyers, who always have the subsidised alternatives, and in the domestic market Coles and Woolworths have over 80 per cent of the retail market sown up between them. That means they can simply squeeze their suppliers as hard as they wish; there are too many alternatives.

Bega Cheese expect to see a 20 per cent impact of this new tax on their costs. Fonterra, a New Zealand owned dairy company, only pays $7 a tonne as a carbon tax in New Zealand, compared with $26 a tonne and going higher to be paid in Australia. New Zealand is the major competitor with Australia for dairy produce in international and Australian domestic markets. So guess which country's market share will shrink in the very near future? There will be less dairy production in Australia; more in our near neighbour.

But it gets worse. We have another tax—the equivalent carbon price—to be applied to synthetic greenhouse gases from 1 July. This element of the new tax will apply to bulk refrigerants and refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment, including domestic, commercial and vehicle air-conditioners and domestic and commercial refrigerators and freezers. The new equivalent carbon price is to be based on Labor's new carbon tax plus the global-warming potential of each gas relative to carbon dioxide. In theory, the price per kilogram of these gases, collectively referred to as hydroflourocarbons, will more than quadruple. In reality, price gouging is already taking place, with the importers already hiking the price for the most commonly used HFCs from $25 a kilogram in January to between $50 and $90 a kilogram now. This is despite the fact that the new tax does not start till 1 July. A coolstore operator in my region told me of his shocking experience where he had to replace 1,800 kilograms of a synthetic greenhouse gas early this year at a cost of over $50,000. If he had to do this after 1 July, when the price will be over $100 a kilogram, this replacement would have cost him $180,000.

I have tried to find some assistance for this fruit coolstore operator from this government, which has imposed this new cost upon him. This government boasts that they will help those most cruelly impacted by their new policies. Unfortunately, those who manage coolstores cannot simply refill their equipment with a different gas; a whole new set of equipment is required at a substantial cost. But Labor's Clean Technology Food and Foundries Investment Program only offers some assistance to manufacturers—not to other essential parts of the value chain like coolstores which hold the fruit, cheese or meats on their way to the manufacturer or the retail markets.

This is typical of Labor. Labor fail to understand the interdependencies or complexities of an industry sector. It happens again and again. And by the time they work it out it is too late; too much enterprise has been lost. The business is buried; the jobs are lost; the regional economy shrinks; the manufacturers have had to pick up additional costs to make up for the lost local part of the value chain. And so we further suffer, and our economy, as I said, shrinks—and it is all due to this government's policies.

We all want to see synthetic greenhouse gases substituted for something more environmentally friendly in the future. It has been the object for nearly a decade now. The European Union, however, has taken a very different approach to the Labor Party's punitive price regime. Labor's regime will simply drive businesses to the wall. The EU's regulations aim to improve leak-proof equipment, encourage better labelling of equipment containing hydrofluorocarbon gases, and have better training and certification of personnel and companies handling these types of gases, their containment and recovery. The EU will end up with a reduction in the impact of these synthetic greenhouse gases. We, instead, will simply kill our industries with a sudden impost of punitive prices—prices that cannot be clawed back by higher charges to those downstream. Those are two different approaches based on very different understandings about how industries can best adapt and survive.

But let me turn to another very serious problem now confronting us as we scour the world for skilled tradespeople who will be our next generation of technicians. We are also now seeing an avalanche of parents choosing to take their children out of state owned education systems to put them into private independent schools. And we are now seeing a generation of young people turning their heads away from apprenticeships and away from becoming skilled tradespeople. It is much more attractive to leave school and go and work in a fast-food chain than to be dedicated to years of training to become an electrician or a plumber.

Labor has presided over the biggest collapse in educational standards in this country while it boasts of the biggest investment in buildings. The problem is that bricks and mortar—or, more commonly, cement tilt slabs and composite panelling—do not in themselves address the chronic problems of teacher competency, teacher morale and curriculum deficit. Labor has the Gonski review, which identified the need to invest in individual students according to their needs. But that comes at a significant cost. Sadly, Labor will spend at least $8.7 billion over government earnings next year, and it is so heavily in debt that halting the slide in educational outcomes is simply beyond its reach.

And so we have the obscene NAPLAN, a joke to parents, who see their children coached all year to pass a test that is an instrument which cannot and does not show real changes in children's educational development. All it does is name and shame on a very popular website. Imagine the despair of Indigenous parents in remote and regional Australia whose children are given this NAPLAN test in Standard Australian English when these children do not speak this language at all. I have recently been talking to the teachers and parents in such places, and they are deeply frustrated at the negative labelling and useless statistics generated by this national test. According to the outcomes, all the Indigenous students—all their children—are dumb. Labor places great store in NAPLAN, however, trumpeting it as one of its great educational outcomes.

As for our apprenticeship training, it once produced master tradespeople, who were amongst the most skilled, compared to those anywhere. Our tradespeople could work anywhere internationally. Their qualifications were highly regarded. Our current system, presided over by Labor, means young people or mature-aged candidates must somehow survive on about $6 an hour. They are no longer required to spend some four years or so gaining on-site instruction as well as education—leaving their workplace to attend theoretical and other training in a TAFE. Instead, in the interests of cost savings and expediency an apprentice can be fast-tracked through his or her training, becoming eligible for full qualifications, or at least a bit of paper, in only two years. They achieve this with so-called competency check-offs where a registered training organisation sends someone to, for example the building site, who says: 'I can see a bit of scaffolding up there', 'I can see a bit of plumbing' or 'I can see a bit of frame. Did you do that? Great, let me take a photo. I now can tick a box saying you are competent in that element of your training.'

I have complaints from skilled tradespeople, master tradespeople, as well as the apprentices and their parents, who are now in despair at the decline in the value of their qualifications and in the decline of their real skills development. I have young apprentices who are being used as cheap labour, who are not being released to do training at a TAFE institution at all and who are being ticked off in the competency list. At the end of their two years or so, they are let loose on a workforce where they can very rarely gain any respect or work as a skilled tradesperson. This is a serious problem and I ask this government to look closely at it.

I do not know why it is that we have sacrificed real outcomes in the education sector, whether it is in our primary or secondary education or in our trades training. We have no reason at all to now be falling away in the OECD tables showing the outcomes for our students in maths and science. The results from NAPLAN—that flawed instrument—are even now showing that our literacy and numeracy standards in the years that are tested are falling away. This is a disgrace. It is happening on Labor's watch and I ask them to seriously get back to the knitting.

Stop worrying endlessly about trying to sell a carbon tax, which is indefensible. Like us, why don't you address a very real revolution and abandon the carbon tax right now. I do not understand how a country with the prospects of Australia can beggar itself through bad policy. I do understand that the lure of the Lodge was great. I do understand that we have a minority government and that the Greens made this a condition of them giving their support to the Labor Party.

However, there is a much greater issue at stake, and that is the contraction of an economy. I have job losses now in my electorate that have never been seen before, the like of which have not been known before, even in the days of the Great Depression. There are over 100 shops empty in the city of greater Shepparton, the big city of Shepparton itself, where before there was nothing but a great sense of opportunity and expectation given we are being the greatest irrigation region in Australia. We were proud to call ourselves the food bowl of Australia. Now each day we live in dread of what the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, under the guidance of this government, might do as it seeks to buy even more of our irrigation water out of the hands of drought-stressed irrigators. It wants to put it into the Commonwealth environmental waterholders' bucket, so that again the Greens can be placated, so that the Greens can be told: 'We promised you a very big bucket of gigalitres of irrigators' water. We have delivered.' At the same time they turn their backs on the fact that dairy, fruit and fibre production cannot recover from the drought if the security of the water is no longer there. I beg this government to look harder at what they are doing. Sometimes there are more important things than staying in the Lodge. Sometimes it is more important to go to an election and give the people a chance to reset the clock for Australia.

Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and cognate appropriation bills tonight and talking about the budget this government has delivered and what a positive impact it will have throughout the country and in my electorate of Richmond, on the North Coast of New South Wales. It is interesting to contrast this with what we hear from the opposition, which is again just more negative comments and more scaremongering; we do not hear anything positive from them when we look at this budget and the positive impacts of this budget, particularly its positive impact on families. It will be very wide ranging and wide reaching in its effects. In fact, we are very proud of this budget. The government is very proud of it and its economic credentials. We made a promise to deliver a surplus and we have done that.

In delivering that surplus we have also been able to deliver quite a lot for families, which is very important, and to deliver for businesses as well right across the country. Tonight I am going to run through some of those achievements in this budget and some of the great improvements that we have made, particularly in areas such as health and education, and particularly in delivering for families. This budget delivers on much needed cost-of-living relief to hundreds of thousands of families right across the country. It is really about making sure that all Australians share in the benefits of the mining boom, whilst at the same time keeping our economy very strong. Of course, we have done that in assisting those families. In my electorate we have that new cash payment to over 9½ thousand local families under the schoolkids bonus. We are increasing family payments: there are more than 12,000 local families in my electorate that will get that increase. It will make a big improvement for them. We are very proud of this budget, and the return to surplus.

We have also found time to deliver reforms that make for a much stronger community and a fairer society—doing things like the National Disability Insurance Scheme, in addition to our big investments in dental health and aged-care reform. I will come to some of those. What we are doing with this budget is spreading the benefits of the boom. It will deliver a $1.8 billion boost to family payments. There is also new tax relief for business and lump-sum allowances for struggling families as well as part of this entire package. We have got a boost in family payments for over 1.5 million families. Families receiving the maximum rate of FTB A with two or more children will receive an extra $600 per year or an extra $300 per year if they have one child. Families receiving the base rate of family tax benefit part A with two or more children will receive an extra $200 a year or an extra $100 a year if they have one child. Also, more than one million Australians will benefit from a new lump-sum supplementary allowance to help the recipients of payments such as a parenting payment and allowances who will receive $210 a year for singles or $350 a year for couples.

Businesses will also benefit from the introduction of a loss carryback scheme, which is very important. Indeed, the benefits of the boom package will be funded by redirecting the minerals resource rent tax revenue intended for the company tax cut—and of course we know this tax cut was repeatedly rejected by the Liberals and by the Greens as well. It is quite astounding that the Liberal and National parties rejected it, but that is the reality of it. They did not want to help business—they kept saying that they were not going to support it at all—but the Gillard Labor government is determined to deliver tax relief through this new loss carry-back initiative for businesses facing some challenges in our economy at the moment. We are making sure that we are keeping the economy strong. We are focusing on that and making sure that we assist business.

As I mentioned, one of the things that we are very proud of in this budget is delivering on the first stage of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The government will deliver $1 billion over four years to start rolling out the first stage of the NDIS. It will begin in mid-2013 and provide care and support to around 10,000 people with significant and permanent disabilities in up to four locations across the country. From mid-2014, the reach of the NDIS will be expanded to bring the total number of eligible people up to 20,000. That is a really strong commitment from this government. Many people have talked about the need for a national disability insurance scheme for many years, and this government has made the commitment and is delivering on the NDIS. We understand how vitally important it is, and we are delivering it a year ahead of the timetable set by the Productivity Commission.

We are very proud to be assisting local families through both the increase in family benefits and the schoolkids bonus. That is going to have a major positive impact for the people in my electorate. Eligible families will receive a total of $410 a year for each child in primary school and $820 a year for each child in high school. These schoolkids bonuses, which replace the education tax refund, are available to families receiving family tax benefit A. We wanted to make sure that the people who were not filling out the refund forms and receiving the benefits were getting the assistance they need with all the expenses that parents with kids at school have, whether it is uniforms, textbooks, stationery or school excursions. The schoolkids bonus is there to help families. In my electorate, families of more than 16,500 local kids are going to benefit from it, so it will make a big difference.

In fact, the Labor government has already made a big difference in the lives of many schoolchildren in my electorate of Richmond. We have made a massive commitment to education. We have the Building the Education Revolution, through which more than $115 million has been committed to over 90 schools. It is a wonderful privilege to be continually attending so many BER openings and seeing the real difference that the federal Labor government through our many education commitments is making in the lives of our schoolchildren. All of those schools on the North Coast needed those improvements, and they have made a massive difference. We continue to make a massive difference through so many of our reforms—our education reforms, our investment in training and our investment in skills. We understand how important it is for future generations. We also know it is important to assist families whilst their kids are at school, so we are very proud to have the schoolkids bonus there as well.

In this budget we are delivering on some major health initiatives. We continue to do that. We know how important it is that people can access care when and where they need it, and we have made major investments in some major areas of need—dental health, rural and regional facilities and aged care. The main target of the health initiatives in this year's budget is dental care. Over $515 million has been committed to a dental blitz for those people who are least able to afford dental care. About 400,000 people have been waiting on public dental waiting lists for care, and they will benefit from this blitz. We know what a difference it will make for them and how important dental care is for a person's overall health. We are very proud of making this major investment in dental care.

The budget also focuses on rural and regional Australia: $475 million has been directed to new and upgraded health and hospital infrastructure across 76 projects in country areas. These projects include: hospital redevelopments, community health centres, multipurpose services, dental facilities and training and accommodation facilities. We are very proud to be reforming Australia's aged-care system through a five-year, $3.7 billion package to build a better, fairer and more nationally consistent aged-care system. It will enable older Australians to get the help they deserve so that they can remain living in their own homes for as long as possible. We know how important that is.

We are also very proud to be investing over $49 million in expanding the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program. Under the expanded National Bowel Cancer Screening Program, screening will be offered to people turning 60 years of age from 2013 and 70 years of age from 2015. We understand how important it is to expand upon that program.

Another investment in the budget is an additional $233 million in the continued rollout of the national electronic health record system, which is so important in reducing errors and duplications in services. The federal Labor government has made such a strong commitment to health reforms across so many areas. One of them is e-health, which will deliver so many practical benefits to Australian families by greatly reducing medication errors. It will allow parents to keep better track of their children's immunisation records; it will also make it a lot easier for older Australians who may have complex and chronic health conditions to ensure that their health practitioners can access a lot easier their medical history, therefore helping them to make diagnoses quicker and a lot more accurately. So we have this ongoing commitment to the e-health, and I think we are all very much looking forward to it rolling out across the country and making a real difference in the lives of so many people.

Within my electorate there is a lot of very positive feedback all the time on our health initiatives—particularly on e-health, because there is a large number of senior Australians living in my electorate. Indeed, we have had very positive responses to many of our health commitments. Prior to the last election we made a commitment of $7 million to build a GP superclinic. The development consent has recently been approved by our local council, and we expect construction to be underway soon. It is being delivered by a wonderful consortium of local GPs who have decades of experience around the Tweed Heads area. They are going to be providing a whole series of different allied health initiatives at the GP superclinic at South Tweed Heads. They are very keen to have it built and up and running. I am very proud as a local member to have delivered the $7 million to get it up and running. Indeed, I am very proud of all our health initiatives. They will make a major difference to many people living on the North Coast. We have made some major commitments to roads funding in this budget, particularly the Pacific Highway funding, which is an area where the federal Labor government has really stepped up when previous governments have not committed funding. This budget injects an extra $3.56 billion into federal Labor's Nation Building Program funding, which if matched by the New South Wales government could be used to complete the full duplication of the Pacific Highway by the end of 2016. Of course, we are still calling on the New South Wales state government to honour their election commitment to match that funding, and it is very disappointing to see them now stepping away from that commitment. We need the Pacific Highway duplication completed in New South Wales, and I again call upon the New South Wales government to honour their commitment to make sure it is built. In my electorate, I can tell you what a difference the Pacific Highway upgrade has made.

In previous budgets we committed substantial funds of about $900 million for the Pacific Highway upgrade in my electorate. We have $357 million for the Pacific Highway upgrade at Sextons Hill at Banora Point and $554 million for the Pacific Highway upgrade between Tintenbar to Ewingsdale. Of course, construction of the Tintenbar to Ewingsdale upgrade is starting now, which is fantastic. We are very excited about that. We have only recently opened the northbound lanes for the Pacific Highway upgrade at Sextons Hill. It is a fantastic project that has been strongly needed for many, many years. I was very pleased to have the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport there last Friday, when we inspected the northbound lanes, which opened a couple of days later. This $357 million upgrade is making a huge difference to the people of the North Coast. It is a much safer road now and it cuts travel time, which is vitally important. Essentially, it means that you can now leave the Brisbane CBD and not strike any traffic lights until you get to Coffs Harbour. That is what the federal Labor government has done. We promised that and we delivered it. Those upgrades have made our roads so much safer and make such a huge difference to the people of the North Coast. I congratulate the road traffic authority, which has worked very hard to get those northbound lanes open in time. It is great to see and is certainly something that I am very proud of in our local electorate.

The federal Labor government have delivered so much for our area over so many budgets, and we continue to do that in this year's budget. We are delivering the benefits of the mining boom, particularly to local families and businesses, and continuing our strong investment right across the board to our entire community. It builds upon our already strong record, particularly in community infrastructure. In the past, we have invested $2 million for the community centre at Murwillumbah, $1.8 million for the Jack Evans Boat Harbour redevelopment, $2 million for Australia's first high-performance surfing centre, at Casuarina—we are very proud indeed of that and intend to open it in a couple of weeks—and $9.5 million for a sport and recreation centre in Byron Bay.

The federal Labor government continues to deliver for the people of the North Coast. We have certainly seen that in Richmond and in the neighbouring electorate of Page, with its very good local member. We have been delivering quite a lot for the North Coast. The largest investment that we have seen in the history of the North Coast has come about since federal Labor has been in government. There has been health investment, education investment and community infrastructure, particularly delivering for families. We are very proud to be able to do that in this year's budget, particularly through the increases in family benefits and the schoolkids bonus.

These bills are about delivering the benefits of the boom to all Australians. They are about honouring our commitments, particularly in areas such as health and education, and making a difference in the lives of so many Australians. Whilst we deliver that, we do it in a way that is very economically responsible. We made the promise that we would bring the budget into surplus, and we have completed that great economic achievement. At the same time, we have delivered a fairer society through our commitments to health and education and, very importantly, through our commitment to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The federal Labor government has been able to deliver a very responsible budget but also a fairer society. I commend the bills to the House.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to speak in this cognate debate on the appropriations bills, I recognise that this is the one debate where one can range very broadly and widely across many issues in the course of the debate, not having to adhere strictly to the substance of the bills. It is very interesting: sometimes we hear people continue to refer to the bills of supply, which, of course, these bills are not. The bills of supply were a mechanism we used to use when we had budgets in August rather than in May and they were needed to tide over money until the appropriations bills were introduced, debated and passed. So, when I hear Independents say they will not deny the government supply, I wonder sometimes what it is they are promising to do.

The fact of the matter is that this government is held up by three Labor Independents: Mr Thomson, Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor. Why do I use the term 'Labor Independents'? It is because of the support that Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor continue to give to the Labor Party. Mr Thomson, who is often referred to as having been expelled from the Labor Party, of course has not; he has merely been suspended. They are the three people who hold this government in office.

I listened intently today to Mr Thomson, in his address to the parliament, and take much succour from the fact that he thought the report from the Australian Electoral Commission had in fact exonerated him of all wrongdoing. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that the Australian Electoral Commission, which I note from the bills is going to get additional funding and, I think, 14 extra people, is being rewarded when in fact it has failed to carry out its task in relation to the matters concerning Mr Thomson.

In Senate estimates again and again, Senator Ronaldson would question particularly Mr Pirani from the Australian Electoral Commission about what action he was taking to investigate whether or not proper disclosure had been made concerning the Health Services Union and credit card usage by Mr Thomson, the member for Dobell, and whether or not the AEC had conducted proper investigations to find that out. Again and again, I can only describe the answers as being of an avoiding nature. At one stage, I think there was an indication given that, 'She'll be right, mate, we're looking at it.' But, of course, the Electoral Commission was well aware that their power to have prosecutions would run out and the date on which it would run out, and if they had not commenced any prosecutions by that stage then under the act they would have no power to investigate at all. So I am rather amazed to hear that Mr Thomson says that this is an investigation and a report from the AEC which exonerates him, because on 23 August 2011 I wrote to the Electoral Commissioner, Mr Killesteyn, asking the AEC to investigate allegations that Mr Thomson had misused his HSU credit card to pay for electrical expenses which were not declared. Two days later Mr Paul Pirani, the chief legal officer of the AEC, said on 25 August 2011 in reply to my letter:

There is no power contained in the Electoral Act that would enable the AEC to investigate the allegations concerning donations and expenditure relating to Mr Thomson that took place in the lead up to the 2007 general election.

Quite clearly the AEC report was not an investigation. It was merely a set of observations about the Fair Work Australia report. The AEC had made it perfectly clear numerous times that they did not seriously investigate matters surrounding Mr Thomson. Indeed at all occasions when I asked them, they explained they had refused to use their powers under section 316 of the Electoral Act and particularly subclause 2A subclause 3 because they did not, they said, have sufficient evidence to exercise those powers. Of course the whole nature of those investigative powers are to enable the AEC to gain evidence to see exactly what the situation is. There was a report from a well-known accounting firm that had been made into the affairs of the HSU and the AEC did not even ask for a copy of the report because Mr Pirani did not think it would be useful.

At all times when I listened to Mr Thomson, he did not address any of the serious allegations about refusing to properly declare expenditure. It does seem—

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

Mr Acting Deputy Speaker, I draw your attention to standing order 90 which says:

All imputations with improper motives to a Member and all personal reflections on other Members shall be considered highly disorderly.

The honourable member is more than sailing than close to the wind. In my view, she has crossed the line in the imputations she is making about the member for Dobell. She needs to do it by substantive motion. I am not attacking her criticisms of the AEC. I do not agree with them. They are within order. But for the imputations she has just made in relation to the member for Dobell should be pulled to order and not allowed to continue.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Banks for his point of order. I am listening to the honourable member for Mackellar and I have been listening very intently. I am advising the member for Mackellar that she should not have a personal reflection on a member of this place. She would know, as many of us would know—that standing order 90 covers that issue. I am still listening to the member for Mackellar. I will allow her to continue but I advise, as the member for Banks said, that she would be well aware of standing order 90 and she should not have improper motive to a member of this chamber.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The reason I was making those points that I made was simply from the point of view that the whole of the Electoral Act can be circumvented by the use of credit cards if these matters are allowed to stand because there is no use of the powers by the AEC in the Electoral Act to uncover whether or not correct disclosures have or have not been made. There are statements in the AEC's report which, in a press release I put out recently, made it quite clear that the report raises more questions than it answers. At the end of the day, it is one we will be looking at when we have our hearing with the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and people will be under oath when answering questions. I think the chairman might choose to change the way he conducts that committee and administer the oath to witnesses in this case.

Mr Melham interjecting—

That is right. I always administered the oath. I note that when we come to looking at these appropriation bills that we hear from the government members in speaking to this issue that they cry out loud that they have returned the budget to surplus. I think the whole of the Australian people are coming to the realisation that in fact the surplus is a figment of their imagination. I would remind the House that of course the prediction from the last budget was that the deficit for this current year was to be $22 billion. The MYEFO account in fact raised it more to some $37 billion. By the time we got to the delivery of the current budget, the deficit for the current year was $44 billion. So much for the accuracy of prediction. But then, I have to say, Treasury always does get it wrong. In this case, we had the debate as we did on pushing out half a billion dollars in compensation payments—for the damage that the carbon tax is going to do to families—dressed up as an education bonus. Interestingly enough, I have had conversations with people who had abided by the previous scheme and kept their receipts and claimed them. They actually got more money back than they will get out of the cash splash, which the government has dressed up as an education bonus but requires no evidence of being spent on education at all. The important thing was for them to get the money out the door before 30 June so it became part of the $44 billion deficit and not in the next year which would have wiped out half a billion of the so-called $1.5 billion surplus. There are going to be many examples of that in the budget where expenditure has simply been pushed into the current financial year or extended out into the out years past this notional surplus of $1.5 billion. The Australian people are not silly. The Australian people know when they see a contrivance. The Australian people voice every day that they want an election—that is what they want. They did not elect a government at the last occasion. We won the primary vote and Ms Gillard, or the Prime Minister as she is today, stitched up a vote with the Independents in order that she could have power. That is not being elected prime minister. What we need is an election whereby we are not reliant on the vote of the member for Dobell.

I would point out that in question time, the Treasurer failed to answer the question as to why the caucus is allowed to be judge and jury but—and we hear this continually—the House, or the parliament itself, may not express a view, nor, indeed, even debate the statement by Mr Thomson, simply because the government is too embarrassed to stand up and have to defend the action of accepting his vote. So the question remains. Mr Thomson has been suspended from the caucus because he is not worthy of being in the caucus, but somehow he is worthy of his vote being taken in this House, and we are denied the right to debate his statement. I suspect his statement will continue to be debated for many, many days to come.

I would like to mention the way in which the budget has been drawn up and the impact that it will have on senior Australians. The carbon tax is the single most damaging thing that will impact on senior Australians, because it is a tax which will get into every nook and cranny of every aspect of everybody's life. It is a tax on electricity. Quite clearly, Senator Brown, when he was leading the Greens, wanted us all to live in a cave with a candle. But now we have Senator Milne—she would like us to do without the candle! The fact of the matter is that the difference in a civilised country, and in a civilised society, is electricity. We all depend upon it.

It is by placing a tax on coal that we see the tax on electricity, because 80 per cent of all electricity in this country is generated from coal fired power stations—the singularly cheapest way of producing power in the world, bar none. And we have enough in this country, that we know about, for 1,000 years. It gives us the one competitive edge that we can utilise in overseas trade: we have cheap power. To this very day, our single most voluminous elaborately transformed manufactures—ETM—is aluminium ingots, produced because we have cheap power with which to produce them.

What this government is doing is punishing the people, punishing our competitive advantage and punishing the way people live, whether it is every time you turn on a light, the street lighting, refrigeration or trucks. The Prime Minister says, 'You won't have to pay the tax on the family vehicle.' Yes, you will, because electricity is used to pump the petrol from the tank into your car tank and for the cash register to work. In every aspect of life this tax is compounding and cascading. So you pay tax on a tax on a tax.

Seniors are the people who are most likely to be on fixed incomes. They are the ones who are penalised most by this budget and by this carbon tax—the tax that the Labor Party now seems reluctant to refer to as a tax; it wants to use the word 'price'. There is no free coal in this country. It all has a price—a market price. This is a euphemism for the implementation of the tax. I can only say that this budget is one that is causing pain for people. It is dishonest in claiming a surplus and it must not be— (Time expired)

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

It is interesting that the honourable member for Mackellar, in her speech, did not once mention the GST and its impost on pensioners and on the poor sections of our community. She did not mention the regressive nature of it, or the fact that you get it from the cradle to the grave, so when you have your funeral, your family cop 10 per cent on top of the bill, courtesy of her and John Howard.

In recent months, we have heard a lot from sections of the media, together with those on the other side, criticising the Labor government. What I have just pointed out is one example of the opposition's alternative way of doing business. I think they compensated pensioners in a one-off payment, not a continuous payment like our initiatives. The comments have focused on the level of our commitment to the Labor values that we believe in. Let me say that there is a stark contrast between the values that drew us to the Labor Party, that we continue to espouse, and those of the coalition.

I wish to highlight to the parliament why this budget is very much a Labor budget and one that I am very proud of. The Australian Labor Party had its origins with people who sought that the aspirations of the Australian people for a decent, secure, dignified and constructive way of life be realised. These were people who sought to embody the recognition by the trade union movement of the necessity for a political voice to take forward the struggle of the working class against the excesses, injustices and inequalities of capitalism, and to ensure that the commitment by the Australian people to the creation of an independent, free and enlightened Australia was successful. These were the values of the origins of the Labor Party

At that time and since then, the Labor Party has always acted to ensure a fair and equitable society based on principles of social justice, employment and access to all the benefits of a just society. This budget is a continuation of those core principles. Our policy is to ensure that the government continues to provide the basic infrastructure for the whole community and continues to help those who are in need of extra assistance. As the Prime Minister said in the inaugural Gough Whitlam oration on 31 March 2011:

The historic mission of our political party is to ensure the fair distribution of opportunity. From the moment of our inception our mission has been to enable the son of the labourer, the daughter of the cleaner, to have access to the same opportunities in life as the son of the millionaire, the daughter of the lawyer.

This is who we in the Labor Party are. Before I turn to the implications of the budget for the people of my electorate of Banks, I note that prior to this year's budget this government introduced a series of policy initiatives in the best of the Labor tradition that I am proud of. Some of the highlights of the Labor government's achievements since its election in 2007 include: abolished Work Choices and restored entitlements and a basic safety net for all workers; delivered more than 800,000 jobs and saved 200,000 jobs during the GFC and since; delivered a $2.2 billion comprehensive package focusing on early intervention and coordinated care, the largest investment in mental health; increased hospital funding by $20 billion since 2007, including 1,300 new subacute beds and support for 2,500 new aged-care beds; and invested in 24 regional cancer centres and 44 McGrath Foundation specialist breast cancer nurses.

Other highlights include: invested in the nation through the $37 billion Nation Building Program to improve our roads, rails and ports, together with a $6 billion regional infrastructure fund; decreased taxes as a percentage of GDP—21.2 per cent in 2011-12, down from the 24.2 per cent at which the Howard government peaked in 2004-05, 2005-06; managed underlying inflation at 2.6 per cent in December 2011, down from 3.7 per cent at the end of the Howard government; introduced less income tax of $1,750 for someone on $50,000 and $1,900 less tax for someone on $100,000; boosted retirement savings for 8.4 million workers by increasing the superannuation guarantee from nine per cent to 12 per cent. The achievements include: doubled investment in schools; conducted the first review of school funding in almost 40 years and provided increased transparency to give us the data we need for a proper debate on schools; delivered reforms to pensions since 29 September—pensions have increased an extra $148 a fortnight for singles and around $146 a fortnight for couples and in the electorate of Banks there are 22,800 pensioners benefitting from these historic changes; provided an extra $338 and $510 a year to assist those in need with the introduction of a carbon price; delivered the first ever Paid Parental Leave scheme on 1 January 2011 with 18 weeks of leave paid at the minimum wage—there are 1,075 local families currently benefitting from this initiative in my electorate; and introduced tax breaks for small business, improving their cash flows by allowing them to claim tax deductions sooner. From 1 July 2012, small business will get $6,500 instant asset write-off for each business asset, as well as an instant asset write-off for the first $5,000 of any car purchased.

These are just a few of the reforms introduced by the Labor government, and are in addition to the massive reform in the process of being introduced through the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the reforms to aged care. Who can forget that, for most of our first term from 2007 to 2010, we had an obstructionist Senate. In the first part the majority in the Senate was held by the Liberal-National Party. Then they relied on two independent senators to obstruct. In this term we have a hung parliament. So, all those achievements have been achieved despite the resistance of those opposite, dragged kicking and screaming, which is the conservative way of doing business. They do not mind when it comes to business welfare or welfare for the upper middle classes. That is what they expect. Traditionally, that is the history of the conservatives on the other side of politics. The rest of us subsidise the upper middle class and the business sector.

This government has had the courage to take action on climate change. We are cutting carbon pollution and driving investment in clean energy technologies like solar, gas and wind. We are supporting jobs in existing and renewable industries nationwide. This budget continues to deliver for the Australian community, and I will outline exactly the benefits to people in the electorate of Banks.

The school kids bonus will deliver over $7.5 million dollars to an estimated 7,450 families in Banks and over 1.3 million families nationally. This helps people on Family Tax Benefit A who need assistance in providing the necessities for their kids at school: uniforms; books, stationery and so on. They will also receive an increase of up to $600 in their payments from 1 July 2013, affecting about 10,000 of my constituents. Young people, single parents and the unemployed currently receiving allowances will receive extra payments of $210 for singles and $350 for couples. This will assist those in need to meet the costs of essential services like electricity, gas and water. This payment will impact on 6,954 people in Banks.

Labor has increased the childcare rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of parents' out-of-pocket expenses to a maximum of $7,500 per family. This represents 5,575 families in my electorate. More than 22,800 pensioners in Banks will receive an extra $338 a year for singles and $510 for couples to assist with any cost-of-living changes brought on from the introduction of the carbon price. An additional 2,300 local self-funded retirees will also benefit from this initiative. Overall, around 53,000 local taxpayers will receive a tax cut on 1 July and around 42,000 will get a cut of up to $300. There are 17,400 small businesses in Banks that may benefit from the decision to extend the small business advisory service, providing access to knowledge and experience to help maintain and grow their businesses. We on this side look at our responsibilities as legislators through the prism of the Labor values of equity and fairness, and the Labor Party is the only party committed to social justice and equality. This is the 23rd budget that I have seen in this place. In my first speech I stated:

… a Labor government is the only government which governs in the interests of all Australians. They share the same hopes and aspirations as most Australians and look to their elected representatives to fight for an equal and fairer society which offers security for all.

This is as true today as it was in 1990. I continued in that speech to say:

I believe in government regulation and intervention, for without it the inequalities inherent in our society will continue to flourish. Governments are elected to govern, not to sit back and be spectators.

The classic example of that being successful was this government's response to the GFC, which made the rest of the world look up and take notice because we were the best performing economy in the world. Why? Because we did not do as the coalition wanted us to do: act like moo-cows and just watch the passing traffic. We got involved. We protected our society from the GFC. Instead of losing 200,000 people from employment, we have now created over the life of the Labor government 800,000 jobs, protecting families, protecting the workplace and protecting our community, in stark contrast to what the opposition were advocating: do nothing.

The road to reform as we are now experiencing it is not an easy one, nor has it ever been. The reforms of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments were not easily accepted at the time, yet today they are keystones of our society. Medicare, when it was originally introduced as Medibank, was to be the end of Western civilisation as we know it, as was the Mabo legislation. The superannuation guarantee, when it was introduced, was the beginning of the end for business, yet civilisation is still standing. The mining companies admitted on the Four Corners program the other night that they are doing better than ever in relation to their involvement in the mining sector and their interaction with the Indigenous people of this country.

Today we are looking forward to major initiatives in the form of a National Disability Insurance Scheme and the beginnings of a national dental scheme. Superannuation will be increased so that all Australians can benefit from the mining boom. The direct result of this measure will increase superannuation as the guarantee is lifted from nine per cent to 12 per cent for around 8.4 million working people, increasing retirement savings by $500 billion by 2035, as well as providing 3.6 million low-income earners with concessions worth $800 million a year on employer super contributions. That $500 billion is a good capital pool that can be used to invest within Australia on a range of fronts: creation of jobs and assistance with infrastructure. The Liberal-National coalition have no such vision for the future. Time and again in this place we experience their negativity, their complacency and their inability to identify with the great social and economic changes introduced by Labor governments. Their role is to carp and criticise, to complain, to block and to continually look back. And what is their big reform in the Howard years? A 10 per cent tax, a GST from the cradle to the grave—a regressive tax.

This government and the Labor governments which preceded it can look with pride at their achievements for all in our society. The government will continue to implement policies and programs which will benefit all Australians and will continue to address the needs of the less fortunate in our community by seeking to raise the standard of living for all Australians. So I am proud to be speaking on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2012-2013 and related bills, because I think this is a Labor budget that we on this side can be proud of. I note that the electorate itself has generally accepted the budget because it sees that in the circumstances it is a very good budget. I commend the bills to the House.

Debate interrupted.