Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Completely and utterly let down, as Senator Edwards said. But the coalition will not let these men and women down, and that pledge is absolutely now written in stone. Another matter of enormous concern is the decision of the government last year to slash $8 million from veterans advocacy funding and the Veteran and Community Grants program. Just to put this into perspective, the state where this will have the biggest impact is Victoria. When the government released its advocacy review there was money set aside, quite rightly, to enable work to be done to include in New South Wales and Queensland the sorts of veterans welfare centres that Victoria had. But, remarkably, it has now removed that money. A reduction in funding was not mentioned or addressed at all by the advocacy funding review. In fact, if you read the review properly there is probably a very good reason to increase funding. So the very welfare centre model that the government was putting money into to spread the centres has been utterly decimated by the government's decision to remove $8 million.

There is a very real chance that the Ballarat Veterans Support Centre will close. The Central Victorian Veterans Support Centre in Bendigo is under enormous strain. The administrator has taken a pay cut so the centre can remain open. It is the same in Geelong. It is the same in the Blue Mountains. Everywhere I go I am confronted with veterans advocates and pensioner welfare officers telling me they wonder why they are doing this work when the government itself refuses to acknowledge the work that they are doing. These are volunteers volunteering their services for the veteran community—some are veterans, a number are not. They believe this role is so important that they volunteer their services. And the government, in that budget decision last year, absolutely ripped the heart and soul of these centres and ripped out of those volunteers to some extent the commitment that they previously had. They themselves are saying, 'If that is the way the government treats us, why should we continue doing this?' I am confident they will because I know the cause is bigger than the incompetence of this government.

Turning to the BEST funding, young veterans and their families are the ones who potentially will lose the most out of these centres not providing potentially the level of service that they were. Those young men and women are the ones who, if they have got nowhere to go, are more likely to walk away from accessing their entitlements—legitimate entitlements given by the people of this country in recognition of the uniqueness of the military service they have been engaged in. The uniqueness of military service must underpin every decision we as a nation make and underpin every decision that comes from both here and the other place. The uniqueness of military service has not been recognised with the slashing of the BEST funding.

The veterans, quite rightly, are utterly incensed that they must pay for the incompetence of this government. It is not just the DFRDB recipients. It is TPI pensioners and the widows who cannot access the gold card. I can go on and on. I will tell you why these veteran issues cannot be addressed. I will go through some of the reasons. The Home Insulation Program: $2.4 billion was wasted and mismanaged. The Building the Education Revolution: a $1.7 billion blow-out on school halls with a program costing $16.2 billion and estimates of up to $8 billion wasted. The Computers in Schools program: blown out by $1.2 billion, with one million computers promised but only 300,000 delivered. The Broadband Network: promised for $4.7 billion but replaced with a $43 billion plan. There was FuelWatch and GroceryWatch. There was the solar home program: a $150 million blow-out with the program cancelled. Green Loans program: $300 million wasted, with the program cancelled. And, to rub salt into the wounds of those people who served this country, there has been nearly $1 billion spent on consultants by this government since they came to office in 2007. Government advertising is another one: the stimulus advertising, $50 million wasted; climate change advertising, $14 million wasted. There was $81.9 million to implement the ETS that never was. For the 2020 Summit: $2 million wasted. The tax bonus payments: $46 million wasted, with money sent to people overseas, criminals and dead people. It is about time we got our priorities right.

I will raise another matter. The cost of servicing the 'loan' that this government has imposed on the people of this country—every man, woman and child—is an interest bill of $8 billion. Given the appropriate amount of time, I could go through, chapter and verse, every single dollar that could have been spent from that $8 billion on the veterans of this country. That $8 billion would pay for the bulk of the issues that the veteran community, quite rightly, is angry about. If there was some good to have come out of this waste and mismanagement, there might have been an excuse for it. But how can any government turn around a country with budget surpluses and no debt into something now approaching about $130 billion to $140 billion of net debt and borrowing $100 million a day? I thank Senator Edwards and Senator Cash for assisted me with this figure: we are borrowing $100 million a day. It is absolutely outrageous. In the four minutes left I want to raise several other matters. I pay tribute to the outgoing Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, General Peter Cosgrove. General Cosgrove steered the Australian War Memorial through difficult times. I do not want to politicise these comments, but I will say the government was dragged kicking and screaming into providing the War Memorial with desperately needed funds. On behalf of the coalition and, I am sure, on behalf of this chamber and the Australian people, I thank General Peter Cosgrove most sincerely for his contribution. I do, on behalf of all those aforementioned, welcome Rear Admiral Ken Doolan AO RAN (Ret'd) as Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial. Admiral Doolan joins a distinguished list of Australians who have served as chairmen of the Australian War Memorial's council. I have every confidence that Admiral Doolan will forthrightly represent the Memorial's views to the government and ensure that projects like the gallery's redevelopment are properly funded and delivered on time.

I turn to some remarkable comments by Councillor Cameron Granger, the Deputy Mayor of Geelong, who, of course, is a member of the ALP right and is in the faction of Richard Marles, the member for Corio. The Geelong Advertiser reports today that Councillor Granger at a Geelong business network breakfast had the gall to attack the Premier of Victoria over Alcoa. He made the quite remarkable comment: 'Mr Premier, we can't wait. Devise a plan to assist and get on a plane to New York.' Well, I have got some advice for Councillor Granger: why doesn't Councillor Granger, the Labor Party lackey Deputy Mayor of the City of Geelong, get on a plane and fly to Canberra and tell the Prime Minister of this country and the right wing of the Labor Party that he does not want a carbon tax, because the carbon tax is the one imposition that will destroy manufacturing jobs in Geelong. So if Councillor Granger gets on the plane and comes here, then let us see what outcome he will get and whether he can address this outrageous attack on Geelong manufacturing and other jobs, and this outrageous attack on Geelong families. When Councillor Granger says we cannot wait, I say to Councillor Granger: I can't and we can't wait for you to start doing your job properly and stop playing cheap partisan politics when the City of Geelong and the region of Geelong is under such enormous threat.

I will finish on this. The coalition has given the government our absolute commitment to bipartisan support for the Centenary of Anzac. It will be an extraordinarily important period in this nation's history. We have the opportunity over the term of that commemoration to provide our children and leave them with a legacy that should be modelled upon the legacy left by a former Labor veterans' affairs minister, Con Sciacca, who in my view left a remarkable legacy to this country with the Australia Remembers program. What we must do is generate in the hearts and minds of our young people ownership of those things that we hold dear. It is our children, and not the current World War II and other older veterans, who oddly have the responsibility to ensure that this country never ever forgets.