David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As Napoleon said, ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake’—or perhaps, as Senator Birmingham may take note of, never argue with the guy with the microphone. I can assure them that my colleagues over here and I are enjoying the opportunity to work up some campaigning material for the months ahead.

Today we are being accused of wasting taxpayers’ money. I said yesterday that the motion introduced by the opposition, accusing the Rudd government of reckless spending, required cheek of a very high order. Today’s motion goes even further: it is positively reckless. For the Liberal and National parties to raise the issue of wasteful use of taxpayers’ money in this Senate shows a truly reckless disregard for their own political safety. We knew that they would abandon the truth, but now they have abandoned caution as well. Senators opposite seem to think that they can come into the Senate and berate us for allegedly wasting taxpayers’ money, without anyone pointing to the monumental hypocrisy that this charge entails, coming as it does from the most shameless misusers of public money in the history of Australian politics—and that is indeed saying something. They must have very short memories; they must imagine that we all have the memories of goldfish and they must assume that the electorate does too.

Fortunately for the forces of truth and virtue, however, I have a very long memory, and I also have a big fat file on the record of the Liberal and National parties misusing taxpayers’ money. It is now my privilege to share with the Senate some of the contents of that file. Perhaps fortunately for those opposite, the time available to me will not allow me to go through every example of their gross waste of taxpayers’ money. The rest will, however, keep for another occasion.

The first item from this file is the report of the inquiry held by the Senate Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee entitled Regional partnerships and sustainable regions programs and dated 6 October 2005. This was the notorious ‘regional rorts’ program, as it came to be popularly known—a program which the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government referred to in such a timely way in question time in the House of Representatives just today.

What did that committee inquiry find? It found:

In six case studies involving grants in excess of $15.5 million, the Committee uncovered major deficiencies … “In these projects the Committee found common problems—funding criteria were bypassed, the department and area consultative committees were cut out of the picture and ministers and their advisers intervened to fast track the approval of select projects at the expense of due process” …

There you have it—but the story continues. It is very clear from the committee’s report that the Regional Partnerships program was used by ministers in the Howard government as a way to channel taxpayers’ money to their own marginal electorates. The clinching proof of this dire allegation is that the committee found that over half of the grant approvals, amounting to over $70 million in funding, occurred in the three months leading to the federal election of 2004. Fancy that! They were timed so that coalition members and candidates could announce these projects just before or during the election campaign—what a coincidence!—and then, of course, take credit for them. They were, in other words, a blatant exercise in vote buying. These are the people who now come into this place and seek to lecture us about the misuse of taxpayers’ money.

Let me give some striking examples of this magnificent program. The Beaudesert Rail project was the recipient of four grants totalling $5.7 million, including a $600,000 grant under the Regional Partnerships program. Beaudesert was, of course, in the marginal Liberal electorate of Forde, and the committee concluded that the $600,000 Regional Partnerships grant to Beaudesert Rail approved in November 2003 was made for political purposes. The committee said:

Documents provided in evidence to the Committee reveal that in the final days leading up to the government decision on BR the Deputy Prime Minister, the Hon. John Anderson MP, who was also the portfolio minister for RPP, was involved in discussions with the Prime Minister’s office about the matter of government assistance.

Next we have the notorious Tumbi Creek dredging project—and, I must confess, it is one of my personal favourites. Surely senators opposite remember Tumbi Creek. They might have recalled this matter before they came into the Senate and tried to raise the issue of misusing of taxpayers’ money. Let me remind them that two grants totalling $1.5 million to Wyong Shire Council for dredging work at the mouth of Tumbi Creek were approved by the National Party parliamentary secretary De-Anne Kelly in mid 2004. Tumbi Creek happened to be in what was then the marginal Liberal seat of Dobell. It has of course since been liberated from the forces of darkness and evil and is held by Mr Craig Thomson.

The committee found that there was ‘a high degree of political collaboration’ involving ministerial advisers and the federal member’s office in relation to this project. In one instance a ministerial adviser countermanded departmental advice. This meant that, even though the dredging project was actually ineligible to receive funding because it did not have the relevant state licence, the grant announcement could still be made by the Prime Minister just days before the 2004 federal election was announced. Fancy that!

If I had the time, I would offer the Senate some more fine examples that were set out in the Senate committee’s report on the Regional Partnerships program—more examples of the gross and deliberate waste of taxpayers’ money by the previous government. Alas, if I did that, I would not have time to remind the Senate of an even bigger abuse of public funds by the government to which senators opposite belonged. I am referring, of course, to the huge amount of money spent by the Howard government on government advertising.

During the 11 years of the Howard government, something in the order of $1 billion was spent on government advertising—a truly extraordinary sum, and there was not even a pink batt to show for it. The biggest ticket items in the Howard government’s advertising budget were blatantly political campaigns designed to further the government’s agenda. There is no person active in politics in this country who would doubt for a single moment that those campaigns were tasked with anything other than the re-election of the government that paid for them.

The campaign to promote the GST cost something in the order of $400 million. This was a campaign launched before the relevant legislation had been passed by the Senate—that is to say, the coalition government launched the television campaign to support their policies before they even bothered putting the legislation into the parliament. This was not a legitimate advertising campaign designed to explain a new tax system to the taxpayers. It was a political campaign designed to put pressure on this Senate to pass the legislation, to persuade the electorate at large that that legislation was desirable and to do that before even legislators had had the opportunity to consider it. It was a campaign that met all of the tests of an outrage.

The other big-ticket item on the Howard government’s advertising bill was the campaign to promote the Work Choices legislation, a campaign that cost taxpayers well over $120 million and which was one of the most blatantly political campaigns ever seen in this country. It is true to say that it was a terribly unsuccessful campaign. It is true to say that the coalition government’s campaign to sell Work Choices was a complete and miserable failure. It proves that old advertising adage that nothing kills a poor product like good advertising. Notwithstanding the abject failure of that campaign, the intent and the reasoning that gave rise to it make it clear that it was one of the most blatantly political campaigns ever seen in this country. Australian working families were forced to watch their own taxes being used to pay for advertisements telling them that they would be better off under an industrial relations system that stripped away nearly all of their workplace rights. Most importantly, of course, they could see through its transparent political agenda.

Today’s motion seeks to criticise the Rudd government for wasteful misuse of taxpayers’ money. It comes from senators who were themselves part of a government that was guilty of massive and systemic misuse of taxpayers’ money. They wasted taxpayers’ money on middle-class welfare, showering money on their own supporters at every budget and during every election campaign. The Australian newspaper famously calculated that, in his 2004 election announcement, former Prime Minister John Howard spent $94 million a minute—an extent of largesse and an orgy of pork-barrelling that even appalled their friends at the Australian newspaper.

Those opposite are not strangers to misuse of taxpayers’ moneys. Even some of the Howard government’s strongest supporters became queasy about the reckless spending of the Howard government. In December 2006 Greg Lindsay, Barry Maley and Peter Saunders from the Centre For Independent Studies, a conservative think tank—which, I might wryly remark, was neither independent nor guilty of much study—wrote in the Australian about their concerns at the Howard government’s wasteful spending:

We are among those who have expressed concern about the federal Government’s family policies …

We were appalled by the $3000-per-child cash handouts showered on parents at the time of the last election, and we are increasingly convinced that the Government’s new family relationship centres are a waste of money.

               …            …            …

The Howard Government is spending record sums of taxpayers’ money providing for families who could provide for themselves if only it taxed them less.

Earlier in the article, they also stated:

Families are losing their financial independence as they become habituated to receiving handouts from Canberra.

This motion today is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. It comes from a coalition which has no credibility when it comes to the subject of wasteful spending and whose leaders were members of the cabinet that presided over some of the most wilful and exposed rorting of the public purse of any government in Australian history. No-one who has had the patience to listen to this debate would be fooled by this motion.

Let us remember that the stimulus package and the expenditure of the Rudd Labor government were designed to fulfil an important macroeconomic task. That macroeconomic task was the preservation of our economy in a period of unprecedented turbulence. The global financial crisis raised the very real spectre of a global recession and even, some feared, a global depression. It was in those circumstances that the Rudd government acted boldly and decisively. It introduced a stimulus package which saved the Australian economy. A technical recession was avoided and the Australian economy is now the envy of the world. This was the great macroeconomic task that our expenditure was aimed at.

Those opposite might whinge and wail about some of the implementation of some of the smaller parts of that stimulus package, but let us remember that the stimulus package was conceived by a government concerned for the national good. Compare and contrast that to the behaviour of those opposite, because these abuses of taxpayers’ money that I have cited here today were not conceived in the national interest. They were not part of a broader program aimed to preserve and protect Australian jobs. They were not part of a program to bring about better government in this country. They were not conceived by politicians anxious to protect Australians from a global financial crisis. No, their atrocities were nothing more than the small-minded plotting of politicians desperate to protect and preserve their own election. The opposition come into this place with such a miserable record and seek to berate this government, when in fact what they should be doing is looking at their own record and the fact that not only have their own abuses of the public purse been dramatically exposed but the reasoning that gave rise to them was utterly bereft of anything other than a greed for power.