David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is true; it is absolutely true. They were identical to ours except you sliced a little bit off the top. Then Senator Furner went on to talk about paid parental leave. The paid parental leave that the government has delivered is nowhere near as good a deal for the people who receive it as what we have promised. Senator Furner raised the NBN. Our plan, which we went to the 2007 election with, would have been up and running for 90 per cent of Australians two to three years ago. That is right, two to three years ago 90 per cent of Australia would have been covered and would be receiving the benefits of superfast broadband. Yet, here we are with the government's proposal and the NBN has taken three years to roll out to a couple of regional areas, including in my home state of Tasmania, and hardly 100 people have subscribed to it right across the country.

Of course, it is important to remember as well that, when they went to the 2007 election talking about the National Broadband Network, it was going to cost $4 billion. That is a lot of money. Not long after they got into government they realised that they had made a huge error and could not do what they had promised for $4 billion. So, they increased the amount of money they were going to need for the NBN to over 10 times that $4 billion to $45 billion. By the time it is actually rolled out across the nation, if it ever gets there, it will have cost a lot more than $45 billion.

It is taking them years to do the rollout and so far, as I mentioned, they have only rolled out a little bit in Tasmania, a little bit in Northern New South Wales and they are talking about rolling out a little bit more around the country. It will be years and years if not decades before they get the NBN out to the coverage they say. In the meantime, what happens to technology advances? The reality is that, even in the last three years since their cost went from $4 billion to $45 billion, the technology relating to wireless delivery of superfast broadband has advanced dramatically so that the speeds now available to use in wireless are catching up to the speeds that Senator Conroy was promising would be delivered with the NBN. In another couple of years they will be overtaking that and the NBN will be redundant before it is even in the ground.

Senator Furner also raised the stimulus package. Australia's performance with respect to the stimulus package had a lot more to do, as Senator Brandis interjected earlier, with Peter Costello and John Howard, combined with the stimulus package in China, than it did to any decisions that were made by the then Rudd government to spend Australia's taxpayers' money on the stimulus package that they put forward. You only have to look at the European Union and the state of finances in Greece and Italy to know that it is not a good idea to take your country into debt in a way that will jeopardise the ability of your country to have flexibility to deal with future shocks.

It is interesting to note that, in relation to the percentage deficits that were delivered by this government over the last two years, had they been delivered by Greece or Italy or any other country that was a member of the European Union, they would have been outside the rules of what was allowable in those countries. Here you have us racking up debt in Australia at a faster rate than what is permitted in the European Union if you are a member of the Euro community. So look at the problems that Greece is facing and the problems we heard about overnight that Italy is increasingly facing; yet, in the last two years, we are racking up debt at a faster rate than would be allowable if we were Greece or Italy in the Euro community.

Building the Education Revolution was raised. Senator Furner talked about the principals and the school communities who are so welcoming of the new buildings. That is not really surprising, is it? If you were offered a new building, which you did not have to pay for because somebody else was going to pay for it, you are not likely to say that it is not a great thing. All schools need new buildings. In fact, there are worthy causes right across the country. Aged-care homes need new facilities to house the increasing number of people who need the services of aged-care providers. There are worthy causes all over the place, but we cannot afford to go out and spend money on all of them. How do we pay for all of it?

The fact is that the $16 billion spent on what have become colloquially known as the 'Julia Gillard memorial halls' was not affordable or necessary. As welcome as it is and as great as it is, it was not the right thing to do at the time, because Australian taxpayers will be paying for that for decades to come. The infrastructure needs of schools will change and they will need further upgrades, but there will be no money for that because it was all spent two years ago. There will be nothing to spend in the future. And that is ignoring the fact that a lot of the buildings, particularly in New South Wales but also elsewhere, were built to a formula and were not what the school communities really needed. In some cases, they knocked down buildings that were perfectly serviceable just to build new ones, and in other places schools were in desperate need of new buildings. For example, a remote school in Western Australia could not get teachers because it did not have suitable accommodation. They desperately needed some new buildings to accommodate young teachers, but they were told they could not have that because the money that was being provided was not flexible and new accommodation facilities could not be provided. They were told they had to have a new sunshade, despite the fact that they got a new one five years earlier. Ignoring all of that, the fact is that the government overspent. It was money that we could not afford to spend and it really did not deliver the benefits that they said it would.

Senator Furner also raised the issue of the jobs that were saved. If you look at the Treasury modelling which showed how many jobs would be saved as a result of the stimulus package and then you divide that by the cost of those jobs in the stimulus package, it works out at about $350,000 per job. Once again, I really do not think that that is particularly good value. Even if you accept that the jobs that Treasury said would be saved were saved directly by the stimulus—and, of course, we do not—it is still a huge amount per job to actually save those jobs.

Senator Furner also raised the government's response to the floods and was critical of us on that point, and queried why anyone would oppose the rebuilding of Queensland after the floods. We did not oppose the rebuilding. We did not oppose the need for government to come in and help. We opposed the flood levy. The flood levy would not have been required had the government not wasted so much money in the preceding years and taken the government from a position of delivering solid surpluses of $20 billion plus a year to a position of delivering deficits year after year—which would have been in breach of the European Union's guidelines for a member of the euro community.

As for border protection, I could talk all afternoon about the government's approach to that issue. Out of pride and for no other reason whatsoever, Labor came in and fiddled with the formula that was clearly working, that had stopped the boats. The number of boats that arrived after the Howard government's policies on border protection were put into effect slowed to a trickle. Merely a handful of boats arrived in the years prior to this government making the changes it did. In 2008, it went ahead for inexplicable reasons other than pride and made the changes, did away with temporary protection visas and closed Nauru—changes which basically sent the people smugglers the message, 'We're back in business.' Since then the boats have just not stopped coming. The message got through loud and clear, and the government has been flailing around trying to find an answer ever since to deal with the problem. The big problem it now has is that it is too proud to actually consider the solutions that will work: temporary protection visas, reopening Nauru or similar facilities in nations that have appropriate United Nations protections and turning the boats around when it is safe and appropriate to do so.