Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Finance and Debt Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010. Together these two bills appropriate just over $2 billion in additional funds from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 appropriates just over $1.69 billion for the ordinary services of government. The largest elements of this bill include: $510.8 million for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts for the Solar Homes and Communities Plan, now rebadged as the solar credits scheme, and I will return to that issue soon; $290.1 million for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts to meet increased demand under the Home Insulation Program brought forward from 2011 and 2012, and I would also like to elaborate on that wondrous scheme in just a short while; and $639.2 million for the Department of Defence, although this amount will be offset by reductions in non-operating appropriations.

Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010 appropriates $311 million for the other annual services of government. The largest element of this bill includes: $167 million for the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, the bulk of which, $120 million, will be allocated to strategic projects, or ‘slush funds’, some may suggest; and $34.1 million for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to expand the accommodation capacity of Christmas Island, a venue that the Labor Party used to deride and are now expanding in response to increased ‘irregular’ maritime arrivals. Unfortunately, the ‘irregular’ is becoming far more regular under a Labor government.

In addition to these appropriations, these bills provide for the minister to claw back unused funds provided previously for depreciation and make-good amounts. I have talked to those issues in previous appropriations. Neither the bills nor the explanatory memorandum provide estimates of the savings expected from these clawbacks. This mechanism is part of the government’s so-called Operation Sunlight. After all the Labor Party’s blow-outs and reckless and wasteful spending, savings must be found somewhere. So the government has turned to Operation Sunlight to claw back funds put away in previous years to replace and maintain assets. Provisions to fund future asset maintenance and replacement are an oft-used management and accountancy practice. Taking money from these provisional accounts does not make a saving for the taxpayer. Future taxpayers will need to make up the amounts that we previously put away. In summary, the government, having borrowed too much from our future, is now borrowing from our past.

Let’s consider Operation Sunlight in more detail. The name makes you think about openness, transparency and good ordering of the taxpayers’ balance sheet, but it is nothing of the kind. There is no transparency or openness, and the government has not provided any certainty on what savings Operation Sunlight will deliver—nor at what cost. So in the end we are not even sure if this aspect of Operation Sunlight will deliver. No doubt there will be an army of public servants tracking down every last provision for funds set aside against every last printer. But how much will all this cost? Will they actually provide returns commensurate with all the effort? This is the kind of information that the taxpayer deserves to know. At the very best, it is the sort of information that competent managers of the public purse would find out before making a decision to claw back these funds. The concept of due diligence seems a foreign one to this government. All of this shows that the forecast of Operation Sunlight is not so much more sunlight as more cloudiness. The lack of transparency is a function of the Labor Party trying to hide its reckless and wasteful spending. The Labor Party is looking in every hollow log they can find. Nothing is safe from a government that has no idea how to balance the books and absolutely no idea about the value of money.

These bills will be supported, as appropriation bills always are, by the coalition, but people are waking up to the waste of this government and people are fearful of the monumental debt that this Labor government is building up. You cannot escape from the waste by giving the green light to shonky pink batt installers and then spending hundreds of millions in removing or fixing that insulation. The critique of Labor Party management is best exemplified by the so-called Home Insulation Scheme. You cannot escape from the waste of building school halls for one student or paying three or four times normal construction rates. The Australian public are once more awake to the overspending and lack of control of costs that the Labor Party are responsible for in their Building the Education Revolution. It certainly was revolutionary for the people who were lucky enough to score a contract from the Prime Minister. He provided a once-in-a-lifetime windfall gain for the people in the appropriate places. You cannot escape the $850 million blow-out in a $150 million program in only 18 months.

In summary, the government cannot escape from the charge that it is an incompetent manager of the public purse. It fails at due diligence, it fails to protect the taxpayers’ dollars and it is sinking this country into debt that will take decades to pay off. But, worse, the money is simply being wasted. There will be no legacy for the Australian people except a large interest bill that we will keep on having to fund every year.

These appropriation bills once more highlight to the Australian people that the Labor Party in their form, in their verse, in what they say, in how they act, have absolutely no control over costs. It is an absolute travesty that they sit there on the treasury benches without any diligence whatsoever. They lack the decisiveness, they lack the capacity and they lack the acumen to be able to manage the nation’s books, and the result of that is for all to see. The result of that is there every week when we see the extension of the nation’s debt. This is a result of not only ridiculous ideas but absolutely no control over how that appropriation is spent. It is no wonder when it comes from a party that has no experience of running a business. There is no-one on the Labor Party frontbench, from what we can perceive, that has any real experience of ever running anything. So the capacity to control costs has become self-evident. They have the rhetorical flair, no doubt; their rhetorical flair is in abundance. But their actual capacity to control the costs, to bring things in on budget, to make sure that we are prudent with the nation’s finances, to keep our debt down, is not there. As is the case with appropriations, we will be supporting these appropriations. We will be supporting the appropriations under process but we support the appropriations with absolute contempt for this government’s growing and excessive lack of financial prudence. If the Australian people do not pull these people into gear, we are going to get ourselves in a financial predicament that will take decades to fix up.