Grant Chapman (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, Senator Macdonald. Maybe your school’s fundraising committee can scrounge a few extra dollars after you have paid for the solar hot-water system and the rainwater tank. Then there is this government’s ill-considered plan for trade training centres in every school, which was developed just to be different from our plan for specialist trade schools. Treasurer Swan has announced $2.5 billion in this budget to honour that promise. I am sure our schools will be delighted, until they divide the allocated funding by the number of schools and discover that each of them can now purchase a lathe or a welder. Of course, there will not be anyone to teach the kids how to use them. If your child wants to be an electrician, or pursue any other trade, then they might have to change schools. But look on the bright side—they can now take their new computer with them because it will still be in its box.

Of course computers and trade equipment are commendable, but if they are misdelivered then they are of no use. You cannot provide a quality education for the leaders of tomorrow, you cannot even begin to reverse the effects of the global dumbing down of education systems everywhere, without high-quality teachers dedicated to the future of Australia’s children. While this government has ploughed billions of dollars into headline-grabbing programs of dubious long-term impact, they have cut the Howard government’s summer schools, which were designed to inspire and further educate our teachers. Minister Gillard should go and sit in the corner. She is a class hater Arthur Calwell would have embraced, just as she laid one on Treasurer Swan on budget night.

Now Foreign Minister Smith is reinventing nuclear policy on the run in India. Next it is a seat on the UN Security Council, instructing South Africa on how to fix Zimbabwe and an Asian version of the European Economic Community—all of it the politics of hubris and distraction. The Prime Minister just does not get it; it is the economy, stupid. Budgets set a framework within which a government will work for the next 12 months. They are the clearest outline of what a government stands for. They define in dollars and cents a government’s vision for the future of the nation. In this case the budget serves to expose hype and hypocrisy.

For the last 11 years I have sat in this place and been inspired on budget night by the direction our nation was taking. Budgets were presented with vision and responded to economic and social challenges with innovative and responsible solutions. Sadly, this year I was left with a sense of emptiness. We need more than spin and empty rhetoric from a federal government. This cannot be a budget for all Australians when our rural Australians are delivered yet another raw deal. You need to understand that, when you sit behind a big desk in Canberra, you need to get out into the community, and Labor failed to do that. So this budget fails to deliver. It is a sad budget that squanders the inheritance from the previous government. As I said, it is a budget of unintended consequences. I am confident that in two years time, or possibly less if the rumours are true, the Australian people will see the Rudd government and dismiss it for what it is—an unintended consequence.