David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

If all they did was turn their own state into an economic basket case, perhaps we could live with it. But the dysfunction of the state now affects us all.

This week, I was visited by Louise Burge, who is still counting the cost of floods on her property near Deniliquin in southern New South Wales. The damage was greatly exacerbated by releases from the Hume Dam as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. You can understand why she is so outraged by suggestions from South Australia that yet more water should be sent down the river. As chair of the recent Senate inquiry into the Basin Plan, I heard testimony from dozens of people in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria who have suffered greatly, losing their jobs, businesses and regional communities because of water buybacks in their area, turning productive irrigation farms into dryland farms. And yet the primary concern of some South Australian politicians appears to be that people visiting holiday houses in Goolwa might miss out on watching gigalitres of fresh water flow into the ocean every day.

Likewise, the submarine contract is no joke to the rest of us. While we need submarines, it will cost every Australian thousands of dollars to let South Australians have a crack at making them, despite the sorry history of the Air Warfare Destroyers. If you recall, in 2007 we ordered three such ships to be built in South Australia. Even now, not one ship has been delivered and costs have blown out by more than $1 billion.

I should at least acknowledge the South Australian Premier, Jay Weatherill, for recognising that something has to be done about his economy and opening up the debate about nuclear technology. Initiatives in the nuclear field could pull the state out of its malaise. A large-scale waste repository alone, by itself, could attract billions for the state, with little or no risk. Thousands of my constituents in southern Sydney currently live within a few kilometres of nuclear waste that is held temporarily in a shed at Lucas Heights. Because of the laws of physics, there is no increase in radiation beyond the gates of the facility. However, creating a permanent repository in South Australia, much further away from people than the deposit in Sydney is, sends South Australians and their representatives into paroxysms of rejection. With the recent backtracking from the South Australian opposition leader on the issue, I can confidently predict that a large-scale permanent nuclear waste repository will not happen in South Australia.

If South Australia is to become a useful member of the federation, it needs to change. Like other Australians, South Australians would be better off concentrating on areas in which we have natural advantages, such as agriculture, mining and tourism. No taxpayers' money is needed to support these. Simply reducing red tape would go a long way towards encouraging more investment. The potential expansion of Olympic Dam should have South Australian politicians bending over backwards to help the project proponents make the necessary cuts to their costs. And they should be bending over backwards to ensure that future approval processes will be less arduous than the processes of the past. But instead we have South Australian politicians promising that approval processes will be more arduous and costly.

Allowing farmers to grow genetically modified crops, like in WA and Victoria, would also be important. Genetic modification can help us feed the world's poor. Pandering to thoroughly debunked, antiscientific fearmongering about genetic modification is a luxury that South Australia, and indeed the rest of Australia and the world, cannot afford. South Australia desperately needs to reform its electricity industry. Poor electricity policy burdens its citizens, has made manufacturing in the state unsustainable, raises the operating costs of all businesses, including tourism, and leaves the state dependent on others.

It should allow all forms of power generation, including nuclear power, on equal terms and without subsidy, so that the lowest-cost suppliers succeed. The South Australian government should cut its spending, such as by abolishing the wide range of subsidies it irresponsibly doles out to home owning pensioners. These subsidies just reinforce South Australia's status as the world's biggest retirement home.

The South Australian government should reduce taxes so as to make South Australia a place where at least some people want to live and do business, and it should make it easier to establish and operate a business in South Australia than in any other state. Meanwhile, the best thing we can do to help South Australia get over its addiction to other people's money is to stop giving it to them. The federal government should provide fewer transfers and special payments to all states and tax them less but allow them to raise their own taxes. It would concentrate the minds of South Australians wonderfully if we started to return GST revenues to states based on what they generate, or at least if we doled revenue out on an equal per capita basis. But currently, when an average Australian gets $1 of GST revenue, each South Australian gets $1.42. We should respond less to all of their bleatings—their bleatings for money, for water, for power, and for anything else—until such time as they can demonstrate that they can behave like responsible adults in the federation.