David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I want to alert the Senate to the appalling state of affairs in my home state of Western Australia. My state is currently being run by what must now be described as the most poorly managed, badly run, shoddy and crooked government since the WA Inc. years of the 1980s. I do not make that comparison lightly because, as we in this chamber all know, the WA Inc. years, led by Mr Brian Burke, had enormous ramifications and reverberations for my state that are still being felt today.

The latest of many examples of the Carpenter government’s appalling attitude to accountability and the good governance of our state’s affairs is their participation in the recent High Court challenge to the Howard government’s Work Choices reforms. On the day that the High Court announced their decision that the Work Choices reforms did not breach any constitutional law, the state Minister for Employment Protection, Mr John Bowler, admitted that taking the issue to the High Court was ‘always a long shot’. They took a matter to the High Court on behalf of a state and took schools of lawyers across to the High Court in Canberra on a long shot. Was there any legal advice which the government took as to whether or not there was some viability in this action?

What concerns me is that the state minister could not say how much the High Court challenge had cost WA taxpayers and that the challenge had been undertaken using the state Crown Solicitor’s Office and was essentially a politically and publicity motivated challenge in the highest court in the land. When asked by a reporter how much the High Court challenge had cost in exact figures, he could not answer. He either did not know or would not say. Perhaps, as he has admitted previously, he was awaiting a call from Mr Brian Burke before admitting anything at all. Who knows how things work inside the state Labor government in Western Australia these days.

Going to the High Court is a most expensive exercise and beyond the financial capacity of almost every Western Australian and not something undertaken lightly or frivolously. But this profligate state government mounted this challenge in the full knowledge that it was, to quote the minister, ‘always a long shot’. I wonder if the Carpenter government would have been so cavalier if they were using their own money from their own pockets to mount this challenge. Would they have been so keen to undertake the long shot in such circumstances?

If I or any ordinary member of the public wanted to take an issue to the High Court, we would have to weigh up the cost factors of mounting the challenge against the probability that the action would be successful or unsuccessful, a process requiring prudence and good judgement. If it appeared that what was involved was indeed a long shot, I put it that no-one in their right mind would risk their own money to proceed. In my past life, I was always advising clients to be very mindful and careful to weigh up the costs against the likelihood of success. In a High Court challenge, you have a liability factor for your own costs—and the state government has incurred high costs in running this case, such as the cost of hiring the team of lawyers, including barristers, their airfares, accommodation et cetera. But you also run the very real risk of losing and having to pay the other party’s costs, too—the defendant’s costs, or the respondent’s costs in this case.

This is exactly what has happened. The state government of Western Australia and their union masters now have to pay for this very expensive exercise because the High Court has ordered that they must pay the Commonwealth’s costs. As I have said, the unions are no better than the state government. Again, it was easy for them to be cavalier in this case when they were using the money of their members—working class members of our community with their hard-earned union subscriptions being wasted on what we now know was always a long shot.

The state minister has the nerve to claim that he is worried about families with mortgages who are apparently facing the loss of their jobs as a result of workplace reform—a completely false assertion. This is a state government that has absolutely milked the home owners and home buyers of Western Australia with its exorbitant stamp duty rates and outrageous utility charges. Stamp duty has been turned into the greatest cash cow the state has ever seen—particularly on the back of soaring house prices in Western Australia, comparable only with those in New South Wales. Many Western Australians cannot afford to get a home in Western Australia because of the extra burden of state stamp duty. The government in Western Australia has stubbornly and consistently refused to lower stamp duty, particularly for first home buyers, although my guess is that that may change in the lead-up to the next state election. Unfortunately for everybody concerned, that is not until 2008.

If the state minister is so concerned about families with mortgages, he should go to the premier and ask him to use the considerable cash reserves because, after all, this is the wealthiest state government my state has ever known. Mining royalties and stamp duty, not to mention the GST windfall, have generated more revenue than my state of Western Australia has ever known. If he was in earnest and being honest about his concern, the minister would go to the premier and say, ‘Let’s give some tax relief back to these families.’ Is this simply just a political charade played out for the benefit of his union masters? I suggest that that is exactly what it is and that the frivolous High Court challenge that cost us so much was simply a stunt.

The problem is that Mr Bowler, like his federal colleagues Mr Beazley and Mr Smith, is desperately trying to find real-life examples to back up his outrageous and hysterical claims about workplace reform. Let us look at the reality. In WA we currently have the highest rate per capita of people on Australian workplace agreements. Historically, we have the lowest unemployment across the country at about 3.2 per cent—and I say that in the context of having the highest percentage of Aboriginal people in our population—and the highest rate of average weekly earnings across all sectors. This is happening in Western Australia and yet the state government is complaining about workplace reform. Workers on AWAs are not just employed in the mining industry; they are also very much employed in the industries of retail, tourism, hospitality, manufacturing and many others. The reason Western Australian workers would rather be on an Australian workplace agreement is because they offer, firstly, higher wages and, secondly, more flexible conditions than awards. It is that simple. People in Western Australia have voted with their feet. They love Australian workplace agreements and they are going to see that the scare campaign, rhetoric and scaremongering of Mr Beazley, Mr Smith and now Mr Bowler are simply not the facts in the reality of industrial life in Western Australia.

I now want to go to the building and construction industry in my home state. The past six months have seen the most industrially peaceful period in commercial construction—previously, it was a battleground—because of the Howard government’s workplace reforms. It has been the most productive period in commercial construction in Western Australia for several decades, all because of the Howard government’s legislative initiative. This scare campaign matches precisely the scare campaign, utterly lacking in credibility, run against the GST. Of course, the states bow their heads and go deathly quiet when someone talks about the GST because they are the principal beneficiaries of it. They have never had so much money; they are rolling in it. If Mr Bowler and the Carpenter government want to continue with this scare campaign, let them go ahead, but they should not be wasting taxpayers’ money in the process. The High Court challenge was a blatant abuse of power and a disgraceful waste of the money of Western Australian taxpayers, and I want to be on the record roundly condemning that. This was, in the words of the minister, ‘always a long shot’.

Contrasting with this attitude of ‘We need to protect the workers’, another issue that has come to light in Western Australia is that of the salaries the Carpenter government is paying its fat cat public servant bosses in the inflated bureaucracy it has created since coming to power in 2001. It is completely and utterly hypocritical for the minister and the state government to feign concern for families as a response to Work Choices and the effect of IR reform while the state government in Western Australia has given pay rises three times the rate of the CPI to the director-generals in the Public Service. Talk about mates. Since the current government has been in power, these fat cats have received pay rises of a whopping 38.9 per cent while the CPI for Perth has risen only 12 per cent in the same period. This is an outrageous scandal.

What makes this situation even more appalling is that higher salaries have not guaranteed better run departments or any type of accountability when something goes wrong. Both the Director-General of the Department of Education and Training, Paul Albert, and the Director-General of the Department of Community Development, Jane Brazier, have left their departments and flown the coop in scandalous circumstances with major problems in their departments—and all of this has happened on the state Labor Party’s watch. Both public servants received massive pay rises during their tenure. Jane Brazier’s pay went from $184,000 per annum in 2002 to a whopping $284,614 just before she was sacked. During that time the Department of Community Development was rocked by one scandal, blunder and fiasco after another—all at the expense of Western Australian children and their families. In the meantime, Ms Brazier walks away having made tremendous financial gains from her position and is comfortably set up for life, and none of this financial benefit is linked to her performance or to the performance of her department. There were no KPIs, no quality assurance targets and no productivity benchmarks. There was no accountability whatsoever, just high wages and enormous pay packets.

While the Carpenter government consistently rewards the fat cats at the top of an increasingly bulging bureaucracy in Western Australia, they fail to hold these bureaucrats to any level of accountability or standards whatsoever. The public of Western Australia are being left in ambulances at the front of hospitals. In fact, beds are now measured by how many ambulances—they are included in the count—are parked at the front of a hospital. A hospital bed is in fact an ambulance in Western Australia. This is an absolute outrage. Parents still have no idea how their children are doing at school. Indeed, under the current minister, the education department is in a state of utter turmoil. It is a national disgrace. Commuters are still waiting for their rail line to transport them between Perth and Mandurah. The rail line is late, overdue, over cost and over budget—another national disgrace. On average, there is currently a three-hour wait for a taxi in Perth on a Friday night. I could go on. Mental health is an absolute fiasco in Western Australia at the moment. There are power blackouts and utility blackouts all over the place. The roads are in a state of chronic disrepair. The Great Eastern Highway is absolutely scandalous for its neglect and danger to public users. And so it goes on.

The problem for Mr Carpenter, and his very profligate and dilatory Western Australian government, is that he needs to knuckle down and fix these problems and not pay money to public servants who do not deserve it and who do not come forward with any achievement. Obviously the Premier’s time is being taken up with enormous scandals, where he has had two cabinet ministers wiped out by CCC inquiries. There have been scandalous phone taps and gross abuse of public office. This is the hallmark of a state government that is in absolute decline and decay. The public of Western Australia have a right to feel let down and lied to by this government. It is the worst government the state has probably ever seen—certainly the worst since the fiasco and the scandals of the WA Inc. years. The extent of the links between the two is currently being revealed. Many of them commenced when the Premier, upon taking up his position as Premier of Western Australia, said, ‘We can go back and talk to Brian Burke.’ That was the beginning—and they are paying big time for it now.