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

I rise to support the amendment that has been moved by Senator Abetz in relation to the speech by the Governor-General, who yesterday in this chamber outlined the plan for the Gillard Labor government in the future. How much can we believe? How much will be delivered? How much will be true? If we look at history we can go back to Mr Rudd. In the 2007 election campaign he said: ‘I’ll fix our hospitals. The buck stops with me and they’ll be fixed by 30 June 2009.’ I could take you around a lot of hospitals in regional New South Wales and the last thing they would say is that all the problems are fixed. We have seen the problems in the Greater Western Area Health Service, from problems with paying accounts to many problems where, unfortunately, regional areas in New South Wales seem to be neglected. That is sad in itself. We seem to have two standards in this nation: one for the urban areas and one for the regional areas. Of course, there are many problems with the health system in urban areas as well. I will not go into detail or my whole speech here will simply be on that.

Mr Rudd said that he would put downward pressure on grocery prices and he introduced Grocery Watch. What a failure that was! It was laughable. A couple of towns I know were mentioned. I looked at the Grocery Watch site for northern New South Wales, where I live. There were some grocery prices for Tamworth and Grafton. Tamworth is about 2½ hours drive from where I live and Grafton is three hours, so what about the places in between? We know Grocery Watch was a waste of millions of dollars. There is no need to expand on that.

We also had the downward pressure on fuel prices, with Fuel Watch. It was the same. It was a farce. And we had the CPRS, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme—the greatest moral challenge of our time! Carbon is not a pollutant. You can google a list of pollutants. I challenge anyone listening to go to the web and google ‘list of pollutants’. Carbon is not listed. Why do we have so many people around this place who list carbon as a pollutant? Seventy per cent of the food we eat is carbon; 18 per cent of our body weight is carbon. Everything around us contains carbon! We seem to have this idea that carbon is a pollutant.

In the election of 2007 we heard many promises. Another one from Mr Rudd was: ‘I’ll turn back the boats.’ Have a look at the legacy of those promises and the actions of the government on asylum seekers coming to Australia. This financial year it will cost the taxpayers of Australia more than one billion dollars—a billion dollars that could be going into our aged-care facilities or our health system, our roads or infrastructure, looking after those people who are getting home care through EACH and CACP packages. That is where the billion dollars could be going and should be going—not into asylum seekers, who are sponsors of a boat travel industry run by people overseas. They collect the money from people who pay to come here. This is an industry that has got to be wiped out. But the government has failed dismally when it comes to asylum seekers in this nation.

Then there were the promises of ‘me too’ in the 2007 election campaign. But Mr Rudd was not at the forefront of the 2010 campaign. The so-called faceless men did away with him as Prime Minister. Perhaps that is why many of those people now sit on the front bench of this chamber—so that they cannot put knives in the backs of others. It is safer to have them up the front! It is ironic that those who backed Ms Gillard are seated on the front bench these days. The Prime Minister said, ‘I have more chance of playing full-forward for the Western Bulldogs than challenging Kevin Rudd for the Prime Ministership.’ Well, when the Western Bulldogs beat the Sydney Swans just recently, which was a sad occasion, I did not see Ms Gillard playing full-forward for the Western Bulldogs; I actually saw Barry Hall there.

We can go on about the plans of the government, but let’s look at the track record of what this government has done. Let’s look at the waste of money in Building the Education Revolution. They called it Building the Education Revolution but it was quickly dubbed ‘the builders’ early retirement fund’. There was $16 billion supposedly poured into school projects, but much of it found its way into the pockets of managing contractors and the New South Wales government. The BER task force found that the New South Wales government had the highest overall total percentage of management and design fees in Australia. It was taking out 1.3 per cent in fees. This is in addition to all the other fees being ripped out. Schools were getting halls when they really needed classrooms. They were getting classrooms when they could have done with a canteen. Yet the Catholic and independent schools that managed their own projects got value for money.

On election day I called into Kingstown. Many of you would probably not know where Kingstown is. It is a little town situated between Tamworth and Inverell. There was a school building of about 10 metres by eight metres with a small kitchen in it. It cost $330,000, when $300,000 will build you a very good, large four-bedroom brick veneer home. That is what my son tells me.

Debate interrupted.