Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am particularly interested in taking note of the answers given by Senator Carr and Senator Ludwig. Perhaps I should not be gracing Senator Ludwig's response to Senator Fierravanti-Wells' question by calling it an answer, because I do not think it was an answer. He was asked to outline how the Labor government got to $2.2 billion of new spending in mental health. There is no way, when you look through their figures, that this is the case. The only new spending in there appears to be about $583 million—a long, long way short of the $1.92 billion over four years that a coalition government would deliver. The coalition government began the move into a vast improvement in mental health spending with the policies brought by the then health minister, Mr Tony Abbott.

Prime Minister Gillard said in July last year, less than 12 months ago:

I want to be absolutely clear - mental health will be a second-term priority for this government.

That was probably about the same time that she was promising us that there would never be a carbon tax under a government she led. So yet again we have a broken promise—not just a broken promise but a cruel trick of smoke and mirrors with figures aimed at the mental health community and the people who desperately need the funding that they would get under practical, real programs under a coalition government and its $1.92 billion policy.

I would now like to turn to Senator Carr's extraordinary response to questions asked about what he is doing to improve the productivity of this nation. In case he has not noticed, productivity is what really sits underneath any good-quality living that this country has. Yet we have a former CSIRO chief saying that their cuts to the Cooperative Research Centres Program has knocked the stuffing out of one of Australia's most successful and cost-effective research ven­tures. It is about the only program that we actually have that encourages collaboration between industry and academia. We do pretty poorly in that field anyway. It looks as though programs that are aimed at all manner of research, in particular, rural research programs, will simply have to disappear because this government is not interested in innovation and productivity.

It has also cut the funding to the Inter­national Science Linkages program. This is a small amount of money but in fact puts at risk our whole joint project with New Zealand—the $2.5 billion square kilometre array telescope. I must admit that I have no idea what it is, but it is a $2.5 billion project that is probably not going to come here because of the short-sightedness of this government and because we are not seen to be internationally collaborating in areas of research, innovation and productivity. Austr­alian workers are now producing less per hour than they have since 1995. When is this government going to wake up and actually do something about this?