John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I continue from where I left off before there was a change of program in the Senate. I was talking about the Building the Education Revolution and about the waste of money in this program. I mentioned that on election day—Saturday, 21 August—I called into the school at Kingstown, which has a $330,000 building of about 10 metres by eight metres. I was saying that $300,000 will build you a good, large, four-bedroom brick home, but the school got a 10 metre by eight metre building with a little kitchen inside. It is just crazy.

I was interested one night to see Senator Joyce on television when he went to the school at Manilla. Two demountable classrooms were brought in on a truck. There was nothing in them, but they cost $1.8 million. That could have built you six four-bedroom brick veneer homes. But no—the school at Manilla got two demountable classrooms for the same amount of money. This is just incredible, and this is what infuriates the people of Australia—the waste of not only taxpayers money but also borrowed money that has to be paid back with interest. It is borrowed money.

We can talk more about the waste. I think the issue of the pink batts has been aired enough in this place. It is just amazing. There was a $2.45 billion program to roll out pink batts for free to insulate houses around Australia, and the very tragic thing is that four young men lost their lives. That is the tragic part of that program, and what their families went through with their loss is something that we probably cannot imagine ourselves.

But now what is there? There is $1 billion to clean up the mess. There is not only a $2.45 billion program to put ceiling batts in houses but also $1 billion to clean up the mess. The Solar Homes Program blew out by $850 million. The laptops in schools program, which was under the direction of our now Prime Minister, Ms Gillard, blew out by $1.2 billion. Labor has wasted over $10 billion of taxpayers’ money and borrowed money in its first term, and they are now borrowing over $100 million a day, seven days a week.

What do we find now if we look at the debt and deficit? The forecasts are coming out now, and a media article today says:

The Federal Budget is at risk of returning to deficit in 2013/14 after the much touted surplus in 2012/13, because commodity forecasts are too optimistic, an independent forecaster says.

While Access Economics expects revenues will total some $6 billion more than official forecasts over this financial year and next, it believes high commodity prices are unsustainable.

That is a sound argument. Having spent most of my life on the land, I know that prices—whether they be wool prices, wheat prices, land prices or mutton prices—go up and go down according to supply and demand. We know that every time prices go up you should not expect them to stay there for ever—they will come down again. That is what Access Economics are saying. The article continues:

“Despite all the hoo-ha by politicians over the ‘return to surplus’, we see the five minutes of fiscal sunshine before re-emergence of a deficit,” Access Economics director Chris Richardson says.

Releasing his updated Budget Monitor today, Mr Richardson forecast a near $2 billion deficit in 2013/14, but stressed this wasn’t due to recent policy costs - neither the election campaign nor the “undignified scramble” for a parliamentary majority which followed it.

On that deficit that we talk about and going back over the years, the 2008-09 budget of $22 billion came out at $27 billion in the red, a turnaround of almost $50 billion. In the last financial year we borrowed $57 billion. In the current financial year, which we will be in until June 30 next year, another $41.8 billion was borrowed, and another $13 billion will be borrowed in the year after. What effect is it having? We have seen six rises in interest rates because the Reserve Bank is saying that there is too much money in the economy, and the talk is that November will bring interest rate rise No. 7.

So we have the government borrowing money and pouring it into the economy while people, the battlers, paying for their homes, running their small businesses or running their farms have to face high interest rates. That is nothing new under Labor. I can recall in the early nineties the 25.25 per cent interest rates I was paying under the then so-called world’s greatest Treasurer—25.25 per cent! In other words, you pay your principal back every four years. What was the effect of that? I do not think regional Australia has ever recovered from it.

We saw the crash in the wool market, the droughts et cetera. Regional Australia, as far as the people on the land are concerned, has never really recovered from those days of the Labor government and those outrageous interest rates. I am sure those who are 30 or 32 years old or younger could not imagine paying such high interest rates. We saw home loans at 17 and 18 per cent. People had their houses repossessed. A million people were unemployed—11 per cent unemployment! We are now seeing more money borrowed and being put into the economy, and it will put upward pressure on interest rates; there is nothing surer.

There was the Green Loans fiasco, where we trained thousands of people to assess homes. What do we have? About 1,000 people actually took up the loans. With the millions and millions of dollars spent on that program, they should have just rebuilt the facilities in those houses and given them a free solar-powered hot-water system, free PB systems on the roof and free this and that. They would have been better off spending it on those thousand homes than wasting all that money on those who did the inspections. The program was a failure.

On the National Broadband Network, one person says: ‘The important point, however, is that your standard ADSL service that is available right now for around 91 per cent of the population provides minimum download speeds of 1,500 kbps and 256 kbps upload—which will give you videoconferencing just fine. ADSL2+ gives much faster speeds—minimum speeds of between 256 kbps and a maximum of 8 Mbps—and is being progressively rolled out across Australia.’

One of the big arguments for the NBN is that it is about to provide videoconferencing for medical facilities. We are hearing from people that it is already there. This means that broadband services available right now without any fancy NBN will give you high-quality videoconferencing suitable for medical and health uses, including consultation and, in theory, procedures via the internet. Leading surgeon and medical media pioneer Professor Andrew Renaut has said that either the National Broadband Network or the $6 billion coalition alternative would be sufficient to overcome Australia’s bandwidth barrier, which he says is preventing technological advances in fields such as medicine and education.

The big fear for the National Broadband Network is the take-up rate. We have seen similar networks rolled out in places like South Korea and Japan for some 10 years, yet only 30 to 35 per cent of people have taken it up. Today the Armidale Express in northern New South Wales, where I live, says:

Mr Davies’ call comes in the face of a less than stellar take-up of fibre installation in the first release area in north-west Armidale.

It is free, and Mr Davies is calling on people to ‘please take up the NBN’. He is concerned that people are simply not taking it up. So why run it out to every household at such a huge cost? As I said, going on the take-up rate in places like Korea and Japan, if after 10 years we are only going to have 35 per cent of people taking it up, look at the cost and where that money is invested and what return there will be.

My greatest concern about this government is the influence the Greens are going to have on the Labor government. Let me take you back to New South Wales and a bloke called Kim Yeadon, the minister for the environment in the early days of the Carr government. He introduced a thing called SEPP 46—State Environment Protection Plan No. 46—where farmers were not allowed to cut down a tree or alter anything on their property. SEPP 46 went on to become the Native Vegetation Conservation Act. We have seen people like Peter Spencer up a pole for 50-odd days protesting about his property rights. I note that when asylum seekers get on a roof at Villawood they attract immediate attention, but when Peter Spencer spent 50 days up a pole he could not get any attention from the government in fighting for the property rights of people in Australia.

The Greens’ influence in New South Wales has been dramatic and all negative. We are going to see exactly the same thing here. We have seen the Prime Minister’s promise: ‘There won’t be any carbon tax while I lead the government.’ Now it is all on. We have this cosy little club of stern believers in climate change saying: ‘What are we going to do? We’re going to have a conference. We’re going to work it through. We’re going to gather some facts together and we’ll look at a carbon tax.’ It is so amazing—