Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Finance, Competition Policy and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I make it clear at the outset that the coalition obviously will be supporting Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2008-2009, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2008-2009 and also Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2008-2009 and its cognate bill Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2008-2009 and sticking to the by now well-honoured convention of the Senate passing supply bills. This is so even though we do take issue with some of the stated purposes for which these appropriations are sought, and I propose to make some comments concerning them.

The total appropriation being sought in Appropriation Bill (No. 3) is $2.053 billion. The total appropriation being sought in Appropriation Bill (No. 4) is $1.41 billion. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) contains appropriations for any changes to estimates of program expenditure and policy decisions taken since the 2008-09 budget. Appropriation Bill (No. 4) contains appropriations for grants to the state and local governments. The total appropriation of Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) is $3.94 billion, which is money that this Rudd Labor government has been very busy spending since the last budget and which contains further examples, we would say, of more reckless spending by the government with the result of yet again increasing the budget deficit. For example, Appropriation Bill (No. 3) will appropriate $13.95 million for a national advertising campaign to raise public awareness of climate change and the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Does anyone in Australia seriously believe that Australians today are unaware of climate change? Surely the answer to that question is a resounding ‘Of course they are’, yet the government is going to waste almost $14 million ensuring that Australians are aware of the Labor government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which of course has not been passed by the parliament and looks shakier by the day. What sort of scheme is this that appropriates $14 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money? My colleague in the House said recently that this Labor government’s scheme is deeply flawed, will cost tens of thousands of jobs, will kill investment, will not deliver any CO2 reductions of any consequence and so fails on all counts.

The coalition believes that it is important to reduce carbon emissions and the best way of tackling climate change is of course from a position of economic strength. Our leader, Malcolm Turnbull, has advocated alternative and very comprehensive ways to address and redress the issue of CO2 emissions. There can be, of course, no solution to climate change that relies on Australia’s commitment alone. It can only be and must be a worldwide solution, yet we do not yet know what and when President Barack Obama will be putting forward as a program of action for the United States—apart from a budget allocation in 2012—or what any other country will decide after the December 2009 environment summit in Copenhagen. We cannot act alone or in a vacuum on this issue, yet we say that this reckless Rudd government will not be swayed in its one-dimensional and unilateral course of action on a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. If it goes ahead it will cost tens of thousands of jobs, will kill investment and will put a big hole in the balance sheets of trade exposed companies. Its flawed scheme will export jobs and export emissions with absolutely no benefit to Australia or, indeed, the rest of the world.

Also in Appropriation Bill (No. 3) is an amount of $101 million extra for the solar panel rebate scheme. It is a good scheme, now badly mismanaged by the current government. First it put a means test on families when applying for their rebate, then it removed it, then it had a mish-mash on the various dollar amounts people could actually receive as a subsidy and, finally—when it appears that it could not get more disorganised—Australians are being forced to wait until almost winter this year to get their rebate as the federal government is taking up to six months to pay the solar panel rebate. As if that was not enough, this government is changing the scheme yet again in mid-2009. It will then pay thousands of dollars less to individuals claiming the rebate payment.

Mr Acting Deputy President, you might be confused about this, but for the Australian taxpayer, unfortunately, it does not stop there. As the famous TV ad man Tim Shaw used to say, ‘But wait—there’s more.’ We have another $10 million being spent to meet the higher costs of the broadband assessment process. These higher costs are for consultancy fees and legal advice for the Broadband Network. Looking at the mess that the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has made of the broadband assessment process, I am not surprised that they need more legal advice.

The government has failed to meet its 2007 election promise to reduce the costs of consultancy fees by $395 million. Despite that promise, the Rudd government’s spending on consultancy services is now at $553 million, which is the highest amount spent on consultancies by a federal government. Quite clearly, spending has got away from the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Mr Tanner. He cannot restrain the extreme spending that is very much a hallmark of the Labor government.

This additional appropriation for consultancy is for broadband, which I do normally restrain myself from speaking about these days. The National Broadband Network would have to win on a count-back the title of the most bungled attempt at policy this inexperienced Labor government has made. The incompetence of Senator Conroy, the responsible minister, has the telecommunications industry agog. Not content with first moving the goalposts and cancelling OPEL—the coalition’s national rural and regional broadband project that by now would have reached 900,000 premises at metro equivalent services and prices—Senator Conroy then adopted the coalition’s idea of a tender for a new fibre network, which was a complementary process. Here we are now in March 2009 and Senator Conroy still has not announced how he actually proposes to deliver a new fibre network to 98 per cent of the population and, perhaps more significantly, when. Instead, we see another appropriation for more consultants and more advice on broadband to help out this utterly hopeless minister, who is out of his depth. If the Prime Minister were paying attention, he would give this important portfolio to someone else to fix.

Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2008-2009 will also appropriate $93.3 million for the LPG vehicle scheme. This popular scheme was introduced by the former coalition government. Unfortunately, in the typical style of this government, it grossly underfunded the scheme in the May budget, despite acknowledging even in the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research portfolio budget statements that there were likely to be twice as many conversions as budgeted for. This extra appropriation would not be necessary if the government had not deliberately underfunded the scheme in the budget in an attempt to conceal the apparent size of the Rudd government’s outlays. It is really yet one more example of mismanagement needing to be shored up when the sunlight is not shining quite so brightly into the recesses of how this government is appropriating money.

As I said a moment ago, this march by the Labor government goes agonisingly onwards to economic obstruction of the sound economic fundamentals bequeathed to them by the former coalition government. Labor’s spending priorities are all wrong. Of course, this trend simply continues in appropriation bills Nos 5 and 6. I will outline to the Senate the details of these two bills.

Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2008-2009 contains appropriations for payments that are designed to meet components of the implementation costs of the government’s so-called second fiscal stimulus package. The bill appropriates $384 million for a number of different departments. The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations receives $285.6 million. This includes $43.7 million for the commencement and completion of claims under the Australian apprenticeship system, $38.8 million to assist apprentices and trainees to return to work, $34 million to keep 241 ABC Learning Centres open until 31 March—there is not long to go for that—$36.8 million for personalised assistance to any worker made redundant and $70 million for the General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme, GEERS.

Funding for other departments includes $16.4 million for the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government for the East Kimberley development package, $11.1 million for the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs to double the emergency relief program until 30 June 2011 and $14.9 million for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to account for the impact of foreign exchange rate changes on international payments, as well as $68.7 million to agencies in general for implementation costs of the government’s second stimulus package. The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts has been allocated $24 million over two financial years for government advertising for the Energy Efficient Homes Package or what we colloquially now know as the Pink Batts appropriation.

Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2008-2009 contains appropriations for purchases of capital items and for payments to the states, territories and local government authorities. Specifically, the bill provides the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government with $1.189 billion for additional equity in the Australian Rail Track Corporation, as well as $392 million to be given to the states and territories to bring forward road infrastructure projects. It also contains an appropriation of $250 million for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts for the Murray-Darling Basin. This is part of the Murray River funding that the government promised to bring forward at Senator Xenophon’s request during the negotiations on the government’s second stimulus package, which was eventually passed in this chamber.

The funding appropriations in these bills have a significant impact on a number of portfolios, from Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to Defence, from Education, Employment and Workplace Relations to Foreign Affairs and Trade and from Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government to Treasury.

The total funding appropriated by bills Nos 5 and 6, as I said earlier, is $2.215 billion. Although most of this money relates to the government’s second stimulus package, it should be noted that this funding comes at a time when evidence has emerged that the initial stimulus package did not deliver the desired result. The national accounts for the December quarter 2008 showed that the first stimulus package, the December 2008 cash splash, did not stop the slide into negative territory. GDP contracted by half a per cent in the December quarter, and the 75,000 jobs that the government promised to create have not materialised. Rather, unemployment had the biggest jump last month since 1991. Critically, Australians showed no confidence in the Prime Minister, not listening to his exhortations to ‘spend, spend, spend’. Instead, they acted far more sensibly—or perhaps they were far too frightened—saving their payments during these uncertain economic times. In fact, data shows that 80 per cent of all recipients of this cash splash saved their cash payment. This was of course a critical blow to the government’s ‘don’t think, just spend’ reaction.

What made things worse was Australians reading this week that these taxpayer funded stimulus payments, doled out in the hope that they would be injected into the Australian economy, had gone worldwide to recipients in countries such as Italy, New Zealand, the United States and Japan. Just yesterday—actually, I suppose it was over a day ago now; time flies in the Senate—we woke to news that cemented the mockery of this bungled spendathon, the extreme spending that this government is engaged in, with cash payments being made to criminals and dead people, and family pets perhaps. Hollywood scriptwriters simply could not make this up.

This Rudd-led Labor government, packed to the rafters with trade unionists, does not know the first thing about managing Australia’s economy. They do not value the unique entrepreneurship of Australians and their businesses. They do not understand how to keep Australians in their jobs because they have never walked in the shoes of a business owner or employer. I tell you: it matters when you have to pay wages at the end of the week and it is just you and a few employees. Labor is the party of spending extremists, extreme spenders who simply throw money and a review or two at every problem. That is not the role of government, in our view.

Labor promised before the election to spend less and govern as economic conservatives. The additional funding appropriated in these bills is yet another example of broken government promises. It is just another $2.2 billion on the government credit card that will need to be paid back in the future. Frankly, only the Lord above—or that supposedly brilliant economic duo of Prime Minister Rudd and Treasurer Swan—knows when we will return to trend growth and begin to look again at a surplus.

But, as these are supply bills, we have said that the coalition will support this legislation, as we did appropriation bills Nos 1 and 2, even though they contained some pretty crazy funding—for example, for the discredited Fuelwatch scheme. We support the passage of these appropriation bills through the Senate, even though we certainly do not agree with some of the specific funding appropriations sought in the bills.

Now that Labor has raided the surplus and plunged the budget into deficit, all new government expenditure must be funded by borrowing—that is, this bill and any additional funding appropriated must be placed on the national bank card for our children to pay off later down the track. If indeed we will be borrowing to fund government expenditures then surely the government should be ensuring that all new spending is well targeted and likely to have the desired outcomes.

Put simply, these bills allow very poor quality spending. One of the worst examples is the $17.9 million allocated in bill No. 5 for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts for government advertising for the Energy Efficient Homes Package, the so-called Pink Batts installation. Despite Labor’s rhetoric while in opposition, when they demanded that government advertising should be cut, now that we are in deficit Labor actually propose to borrow to spend a large but unspecified component of $17.9 million to advertise the much lauded installation of Pink Batts. Adding insult to injury there is a further allocation in 2009 of $6.4 million for further advertising. Bear in mind of course that these funds will need to be spent within the very short period of time remaining in this financial year.

It is already bad enough that nearly $4 billion of taxpayers’ funds are earmarked for the installation of Pink Batts—hardly spending on the economic infrastructure that will stimulate the economy and encourage productivity, let alone create jobs—but to top it off the government is putting another $17.9 million on the national bank card to advertise the Pink Batts installation scheme. Even Treasurer Wayne Swan, who advocated this measure as it would increase jobs in the sector—he said—has admitted that an unspecified amount of these Pink Batts will be imported from overseas, stimulating someone else’s economy yet again.

The coalition believes that in the current economic circumstances the main focus should be about jobs, jobs, jobs: new government expenditure should be focused on job creation and supporting those at risk of losing their jobs. The coalition, especially the Leader of the Opposition, has on numerous occasions addressed parliament and highlighted alternative policies that will help stimulate the economy and support jobs. The first stimulus package has certainly not created the jobs that were touted. We have made suggestions about using government expenditure to support jobs and reduce barriers to employment—for example, by temporarily paying the superannuation guarantee liabilities for targeted small businesses. This proposal, like many other suggestions, has simply been ignored by the government. Instead we have seen the government engage in some of the most overblown and deceptive rhetoric that I think I have seen in all my years in this place. Whenever we disagree with the Prime Minister he scoffs, ‘The opposition just want to sit there and do nothing,’ or he says that the alternative is to do nothing. This is complete tosh. The alternative to government cash splashes is not to do nothing; we in fact support a fiscal stimulus. Our alternative is instead to better target more modest spending into more productive activities.

It is a worry that during a global financial crisis we have a spending extremist for Prime Minister, one who wants to spend $24 million on advertising in the next 16 months and then engage in a misleading political diatribe about the opposition instead of investing in economic infrastructure that will boost the productive capacity of the nation. This kind of excess in a time of financial uncertainty and deficit is symptomatic of a government that has simply lost the plot. Labor’s addiction to spin, even during this crisis, is not new leadership; it is right out of The Hollow Men playbook of a stunt a day, playing politics at the expense of standing up for good policy. As I outlined earlier, we believe Labor’s spending priorities are all wrong, and while we support the legislation in the Senate, as these are supply bills, we highlight the fact that this is a government acting to type, condemning Australia to debt, deficit and a legacy that will haunt future generations of Australians.