Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to debate Senator Cameron's motion to take note of answers to questions from today's question time. I would particularly like to make a comment in regard to some comments that were made by Senator Cameron when he rose to take note of answers today. I think his opening line was some thing like 'local and regional areas will need safeguards for flights'.'

I come from a regional area, and I come from a state that relies significantly on regional flights to enable people to get access to their communities, particularly those people who live on the other side of the gulfs in my state. For the life of me I cannot see how denying Qantas what they have asked for—that is, a level playing field—can possibly not assist the continuation of these jobs. I cannot for the life of me see why the Australian aviation sector is going to be disadvantaged in any way, shape or form by Qantas being more competitive in the marketplace. They will be more competitive in the market place because of a market mechanism rather than because of a debt guarantee which would give them a competitive advantage against many of the other small carriers that operate in this regional space. I think we need to be very clear that lots of lovely words and grandstanding are not necessarily going to be in the best interests of the people who live outside the metropolitan area, and they are the people whom I seek to represent in this place.

The other thing that I find quite bizarre is that we talk about stuff that has happened in the past. We live in a global marketplace and we are expecting Qantas to go out there and compete in an international marketplace, yet we have stuck shackles on it. I would suggest that those opposite need to have a look beyond our shores and realise what Qantas has to deal with on a day-to-day basis before they stand up in this place and refuse to accept not just what the Australian government has suggested needs to be done but also what Qantas itself has asked for. Qantas did not ask for a debt guarantee. In fact, they have come out and said that that was not what they wanted. What they want is to be unshackled so they can operate in this marketplace like every other international carrier around the whole world.

Senator Ludwig also got up and made some comments along the lines that 'this is not the government Australia was promised, because there is so much business uncertainty'. I find this quite an extraordinary comment coming from somebody who was at the centre of the live export ban. If ever I have seen in Australia in my time a situation which destroyed the certainty of the Australian marketplace, it was that live export ban. We all know, sitting here, the extraordinary consequences that that had on the northern part of our country. Many of these people are still struggling today due to the impacts of what happened there.

Another question was asked regarding the struggling, drought affected farmers and how supposedly slow this government has been in responding to the problem. I advise this chamber that, until a few days ago, when Minister Joyce and the Liberal-National coalition announced the drought package, no drought-affected farmers in South Australia had received any funding whatsoever, because the South Australian Labor government refused to put any drought provisions in place, constantly pointing the finger at the federal government and saying that they needed to put them in place.

New South Wales and Queensland, the two other major drought affected states, put things in place at a state level, and then, once the drought deepened to such an extent that they required federal assistance, the federal government kicked in. So I think it is quite extraordinary that Senator Ludwig would make these comments, particularly given the nature of some of the decisions that he made.

If we want to look at uncertainty we should look at the question directed to Senator Fifield today about the Building Multicultural Communities Program. If ever there was a cruel hoax, it is the set of promises that was made to the Australian public during the election campaign from the then government, which obviously must have thought that it was not going to get back into government. Now that we have had a chance to have a look at the budget and the books, we can see that there was no way that any of these promises were ever going to be able to be funded.

Unfortunately, with respect to the region within which I live, the then Minister King made massive promises about grants along the river corridor in South Australia, none of which were ever funded. So we are left with a situation where these poor people believed that they were about to get funding, but it is non-existent. (Time expired)