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

It is wrong, Senator Macdonald. A major factor pushing up the price of vehicles in this range is the increasingly sophisticated safety and environmental features they offer. This new measure will result in car makers reducing state-of-the-art safety features or environmental advances in their vehicles simply to scrape in under the tax threshold. The unintended consequences of this class-warfare policy may prove fatal for some Australian motorists, leaving the government with blood on its hands.

As if families have not suffered enough under this budget, you would not want to be a working family with three kids and about to have your fourth. You will now find the family Tarago is even more expensive, and that is before the cost of filling it with petrol. I forgot about Fuelwatch, or, as Minister Martin Ferguson calls it, ‘fuel botch’. Minister Ferguson went off to apply the blowtorch to OPEC. I will say this: they were impressed when he addressed them in Arabic, until they realised he was not speaking Arabic. Let’s take bets: how long before Kevin 07 becomes Kevin 03.8c a litre off? Closer to home for me, you would not want to be a blue-collar worker on the assembly line of Holden’s Elizabeth plant in South Australia building Statesmen that will now fall foul of this threshold. Can Treasurer Swan guarantee that no Australian car-manufacturing jobs will be lost?

Now let us jump into one of those luxury cars that so offend the Treasurer. Let us mortgage the house to fill it with petrol. Let us drive to rural and regional Australia, to places and people abandoned by Labor. Those people have suffered terribly under this budget. At the end of his budget speech, the Treasurer asserted:

It is a Labor Budget for the nation. For Australia’s future. For all Australians.

Well, this was certainly a Labor budget—and that is hardly a compliment in economic circles. But it was not a budget for all Australians, and it damn well was not a budget for the future of rural Australia and the people who are already doing it tough after years of record drought. We rightly condemn the callousness of the Burmese generals in the face of their people’s current tragic suffering from natural disaster. Labor’s Burmese corporals have similarly reacted with uncaring neglect for those who are suffering in the bush and enduring long-term hardship. Labor has chosen to abolish the Regional Partnerships program and the Growing Regions program. It will rip $436 million out of our regions and abolish programs which are aimed at developing our regional centres and communities, creating and maintaining jobs in regional Australia and keeping our farming families on the land. Do we start to see where Labor’s admitted increase in unemployment will happen? Do we see who it targets and punishes? This government for all Australians has chosen to pull $334 million out of existing agriculture programs and replace them with entirely different programs worth $220 million, which is far less.

In the process of kicking rural Australia while it is down, Labor has chosen to cancel the OPEL contract, which would have enabled access to high-speed broadband for 99 per cent of Australians. It has provided no funding for an alternative other than to extend the Howard government’s Australian Broadband Guarantee. Enough is enough. The bush has been the backbone of this nation since Federation. The government’s own budget papers show that. They confirm that rural and remote Australians account for over one-third of the population and generate two-thirds of Australia’s export income. But regional Australia is suffering. It suffered terribly in recent years under one of the worst droughts on record. How does this cynical Rudd Labor government respond? It sticks the boot into rural Australian families again by reducing exceptional circumstances funding. This is not a government for all Australians; it is a government for all Australians who conform to the 1950s ideology of the Labor Party. This is a budget that panders to Labor’s supporters and punishes anyone it myopically sees as its class enemies.

I am wondering what schools and the environment did to alienate this government and get onto its enemies list, because they are not left untouched by this work experience budget either. I would have thought that, with this government’s AEU mates funding its election campaign and the Greens preferencing Labor, the environment and education would be two areas spared the ideological idiocy of this budget. Think again. The green voucher program introduced under the Howard government, which enabled schools to apply for up to $50,000 for rainwater tanks and solar hot water systems, was also neutered by Treasurer Swan’s budget for all Australians. This program has been replaced by a new one that caps the available funding at $30,000, which leaves schools—and that essentially means parents—to raise the missing $20,000.

I have seen the green vouchers program in action. Schools like St Martin de Porres in the electorate of Kingston, and many others in South Australia, welcomed their green voucher with open arms when I presented it to them. These schools work hard at fundraising, not just to improve their own facilities but also for a range of charities. Their parents are not the so-called wealthy that the Prime Minister and Treasurer Swan were going after in this budget; they are ordinary working Australians, and most of them are in families with both parents working. Without the $50,000 green voucher, parents like these will be forced to sacrifice more time and find more money so that their school and their children can set an environmentally responsible example. As one unintended consequence after another of this budget is considered, one begins to ask: what are the intended consequences, if any, aside from sinking the boot into those that Labor hates? Did I mention that St Martin de Porres is a private school?

In this instance, schools will prioritise. With the Labor states critically underfunding education, schools already have to fundraise to provide basic infrastructure and services. Now Treasurer Swan’s king hit means that, while they would love to pursue practical, environmentally responsible measures like solar hot water and rainwater tanks, without the former government’s green vouchers they cannot put these items ahead of sports facilities, shade shelters and IT equipment. What a fine message to send to the next generation of Australians while you are signing the Kyoto protocol with the other hand! The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, should be blushing to the point of his bald head about such senseless false economics. But then, he may have used up his quota of embarrassment after decimating the Australian domestic solar panel industry inside a fortnight with another stroke of Treasurer Swan’s poison pen. You have to wonder how much midnight oil was burned dreaming up those idiocies in the name of budget savings. Now Minister Garrett is off to the International Whaling Commission, having already been harpooned by his Prime Minister’s capitulation to the Japanese in order to save his own face after gratuitously snubbing our major Asian ally. Anyone who saw Prime Minister Rudd’s meeting with the Japanese royal family will have noticed that our emperor was wearing no clothes.

The frustration for parents and schools does not end with the abolition of green vouchers. During the last election campaign, Kevin 07 spouted another slogan, for this is a government of slogans, mantras and empty catch phrases: education revolution. He would be the Che Guevara of the classroom. If elected, he would provide one computer for every high school student in the country—one computer in a box, terrific! But another definition of a revolution is ‘going around in circles’. He had not thought about what happens when you take the computer out of the box. Who is going to pay for all the stuff you need to make a computer a useful teaching tool—basic stuff like rewiring all the high school classrooms in the country, all those extra power points and electricity bills, software purchasing and licensing, equipment maintenance and repairs, internet access, virus systems, mousepads, disks, USB drives, printers and all the extra training for all the extra teachers? Who is going to pay for those things? Guess what, schools and parents of Australia: you are. The Prime Minister is not going to. There is no provision in this budget for all the essential extras without which the computer stays in the box and gathers dust.