Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate for the information of honourable senators the Leader of the Opposition’s response to the budget speech, delivered by Mr Abbott in the House of Representatives earlier this evening.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

Of the three budgets delivered by the Rudd Government, this is the most political, the least believable, and the most damaging to Australia’s long term future. It’s a typical, old-fashioned, tax-and-spend Labor Budget that also features all the debt and deficit that can be expected from Labor, only covered up by clever accounting and a great big new tax on mining.

If the government’s revenues really had exceeded expenditure, it would be entitled to claim prudent economic management. What the government has actually delivered, though, as opposed to talk about, is a $57 billion deficit this year – the biggest ever. What the government is actually doing now, as opposed to promising in three years time, is borrowing $700 million every week till then.

Brazenly, the government wants credit for a surplus that doesn’t yet exist and that it’s unlikely ever to achieve. The surplus that it says will happen in three years time is based on increased taxes and on the growth that those increased taxes will almost certainly strangle.

That $1 billion surplus is roughly the amount required to fix the pink batts program that’s been linked to four deaths; the amount required to pay for the extra detention measures needed because the government has lost control of our borders; or the blow out in the computers in schools programme. It’s roughly half the blow-out in the school hall programme.

Does anybody seriously believe, based on this record, that a re-elected Rudd government could avoid another, surplus-shattering disaster sometime in the next three years?

It took the last Labor government thirteen years to accumulate $96 billion of debt but this Labor Government expects to do the same in less than half the time. It took a change of government to get Labor’s debt paid off last time and, once again, the quickest way to get rid of this debt will be to get rid of this government.

Everyone wants our country to succeed and many still hope that our Prime Minister is up to the job but there’s always this question: why should his latest promises turn out to be more credible than the ones that he’s already broken? Amidst all the self-congratulation about how historic this budget is, you almost expected the Prime Minister to declare that fixing the deficit is the greatest moral challenge of our time.

In his 2007 Budget reply, the then opposition leader, now the Prime Minister said “we must remain committed to keeping taxes low”. But he has just increased the cigarette tax and added a new mining tax to the 125 separate taxes that Australia already has.

He said then that a Labor government would withdraw an existing regulation for every new one imposed on business. In office, he has introduced 9997 new or amended regulations and withdrawn just 52.

He said then that he would pursue “a conservative fiscal policy” but proceeded to unleash the greatest spending spree in Australian history, turning a $20 billion surplus into a $27 billion deficit in just one year.

The Prime Minister said then that he was committed to “working families hit hard by the cost of mortgage repayments, food prices, petrol…and childcare”. His spendathon has contributed to six interest rate rises in the last eight months, with housing affordability at record lows and a $4500 a year hit on families with a $300,000 mortgage.

He’s abandoned his fuel watch and grocery watch schemes, though prices keep going up, and he’s dumped his childcare commitment after building less than 40 of the promised 260 centres.

The Prime Minister said then that the “economic cost of not acting (on climate change) will be far greater than the cost of taking early and responsible action”.  As recently as November he said that to delay action would be “absolute political cowardice”, and an “absolute failure of leadership”.

But he now won’t do anything about it till sometime next term for fear of fighting an election on tax. Instead, there’s a different great big new tax that will now be the issue on which the election turns.

Mr Rudd observed in 2007 that “mining booms don’t last forever”. They certainly don’t when governments threaten to kill them with a new tax that will eventually choke the goose that’s laid the golden egg for Australia. Despite its name, this is not a normal tax on super profits. It’s a super tax on normal profits.

Every company extracting non-renewable resources will have to pay an additional 40 per cent tax, as well as normal tax, once its rate of return on capital exceeds the long term bond rate or about 6 per cent. The new tax applies to the extraction of phosphate, sand and stone as well as to the extraction of minerals, oil and gas. It’s a tax on small quarries as well as big miners.

It will impact on the price of fertilisers and building materials as well as on the price of energy. It’s a triple whammy tax on the jobs of half a million mining and related workers, on the superannuation of millions of retirees with mining shares and on the cost of living of everyone who uses power.

It will increase the effective rate of tax on all mining from 44 to 57 per cent. Already, Australia heavily taxes the extraction of resources. The proposed new 57 per cent rate would make Australian taxes the highest in the world.

It’s amazing how quickly BHP and Rio Tinto have gone from being lionized to demonized. The government says that this new tax is needed to stop foreign companies ripping us off. In fact, there would be no wealth to redistribute if those same companies and their shareholders had not invested serious money to turn untapped resources into national wealth.

Imposing a prohibitive rate of tax on returns above 6 per cent sends an implicit message to business people that they would be better off putting their money in the bank. After all, who would bother to take the risks of investing in actual production if there’s an extra penalty on success?

This great big new tax has already put all investment decisions on hold. Rio has said that its investment in Australia will be reviewed. Xstrata has indefinitely suspended new exploration in north Queensland. BHP has raised doubts about new coal mines in Queensland, iron ore and uranium mines in Western Australia and, particularly, the $22 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of this. A 40 per cent tax on so called super profits coupled with a 40 per cent government rebate for losses penalizes good projects and rewards the duds. Perversely, it gives an unfair advantage to projects backed by foreign sovereign wealth funds which won’t need to satisfy normal commercial risk assessment. These projects could then transfer price profits out of Australia and sell ventures at a loss subsidised by Australian taxpayers.

By this budget’s bizarre logic, putting a new tax on cigarettes means less smoking but putting a new tax on resources means more mining. If this tax is going to be so good for the resources sector, why aren’t other industries lining up to beg for a super profits tax to be imposed on them?

The budget formula assumes the best terms of trade in 60 years, assumes that higher taxes have no impact on investment, assumes a 4 per cent growth rate and, presto, the deficit disappears three years early without the need for any hard decisions. If only company promoters could get away with such a prospectus.

Yet if growth really is such a sure thing, why does the government also keep warning that “we’re not out of the woods yet”?

A responsible government would understand that it’s better to reform your way through hard times than to try to spend your way out of them. Even the worthy-sounding measures in this budget are unlikely to make much difference to the real problems that people face.

The government’s savings cameo, for instance, has a person earning just $40,000 a year putting aside $50 a week for several years to generate $20,000 in savings bank deposits for a $177 a year tax break. No one with any idea of the cost pressures on low income earners would find this very plausible.

More GP “super clinics” sound like a good idea too except that 36 were promised at the last election and only two are actually operational. In fact, fee-for-service under Medicare has already produced hundreds of private sector equivalents and these don’t deserve unfair competition from government-funded rivals.

Of course, there should be an electronic health record but hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent to make this a reality and no more should be spent until it’s certain that we’re not throwing good money after bad.

Of course, there should be more defence spending but not to produce 1500 more “suits” and 500 fewer “uniforms”. In these respects, this budget is more about looking good than doing good.

Before the last election, Labor promised to eliminate wasteful government advertising. Instead, it’s eliminated auditor-general scrutiny of government ad campaigns and has just put aside $74 million for taxpayer funded pre-election blitzes about climate change, the national broadband network and hospital reform.  

Then there’s the dishonesty of the government’s sales pitch. The mining tax was not a recommendation of the Henry review. Henry recommended a replacement tax not an additional one and an offsetting 5 per cent not a 2 per cent cut in corporate tax.

The mining tax does not fund the increased superannuation. That’s funded by a separate 3 per cent levy on payroll that will be an additional cost to business or forgone wages to workers.

The mining tax is not an onshore version of the existing resource rent tax on offshore projects.  That tax substituted for state royalties which don’t apply offshore, was prospective not retrospective, and only cuts in after a much higher rate of return.

If a 6 per cent rate of return is a “super” profit for mining, how can it be just “modest” for the government-owned national broadband network – as one minister claimed - and what other unpopular industries might be the next target of penalty taxes?

It’s true that Australia has so far survived the Global Financial Crisis in better shape than almost any other nation. The issue is whether this success is due to the spending spree of the current government or to the reforms of previous ones; whether it’s due to the government’s management skills or to our resource exports to China? The question, I think, only has to be asked for the answer to be obvious.

There is a low road and a high road to achieving a surplus. The high road is expenditure restraint and economic reform. The low road is increasing taxes and making assumptions about economic growth.

The budget’s projections depend more on the success of the Chinese economy than on any decisions that the Rudd government has taken. In opposition, Labor often accused the then government of riding the China boom.

Say what you like about John Howard and Peter Costello but they didn’t shirk the hard reform and they didn’t need to hit miners with extra tax to generate a surplus. Their surpluses were the result of tough decisions, not new taxes.

Let me make this clear: the Coalition will oppose the mining tax in opposition and we will rescind it in government.

I have one message for Mr Rudd. It’s one he should be familiar with: this reckless spending must stop.

Until Labor’s debt and deficit has been dealt with it’s not hardness of heart but economic prudence to say “no” even to good causes. In other circumstances, you could fund a company tax cut and depreciation allowances for small business but not at the cost of an economy-stopping tax on our most successful export industry.

It would be robbing Peter to pay Paul and playing to the kind of class war envy that Mr Rudd’s Labor predecessors have mostly been too honourable to exploit.

It’s my goal to return the budget to surplus at least as quickly as the government proposes but not the lazy way through a great big new tax that threatens miners’ jobs, retirees’ incomes and everybody’s standard of living.

Fostering a savings culture is important but the government should come clean about whether higher superannuation contributions are to be paid out of workers’ pockets or by their employers. If it means an extra three per cent tax payroll tax on every business, that’s a $20 billion a year handbrake on economic growth.

The Coalition will spend more on health but only where we’re certain that extra spending will produce extra services. Improved Medicare rebates, for instance, would be a better way than phantom clinics to deliver improved primary care.

I’m happy to let the Labor Party win any race to raise taxes. Taxes and spending will always be lower and government will always be smaller under the Coalition. That should also mean that economic growth will be higher and that the size of government will always be about one per cent of GDP less under the Coalition.

For nine years, I was a minister in a government that delivered lower taxes and higher surpluses because it did not shirk the hard decisions needed to reform our economy. I was part of a government that understood that you can’t spend what you haven’t got and that you can only create real wealth by hard work.

I know, as anyone who has spent time in remote indigenous townships should, that you can’t have much of a community without an economy to sustain it.

The first principle of government should be: “do no harm”. The Coalition wants lower taxes, smaller government and greater freedom. It wants a fair go for families and respect for institutions that have stood the test of time. These instincts are in our DNA.

The Coalition wants an Australia that is prosperous, united and respected; where families’ choices are taken seriously by government; where pensioners and carers are regarded as people who have served and are serving our country; where officials understand that the public are their masters not their servants; where migrants are welcome but borders are secure; where people’s taxes give them decent hospitals and proper highways; and where the armed forces represent our country’s best values. But we also know that government can’t solve all problems immediately and that over-promising and under-delivering politicians are the cause of so much cynicism about public life.

A good cause never justifies wasting money. On coming to government the Coalition would immediately restructure the school hall programme and provide further funding to school communities, not to state bureaucracies. Parents are normally better than bureaucrats at getting value for their school.

The latest industry data suggests that, had parents been distributing the money, they could have obtained almost twice the build for half the spend.

Likewise, the Coalition won’t go ahead with the National Broadband Network avoiding the creation of a $43 billion white elephant. Better access to faster broadband should not mean a new nationalized telecommunications monopoly and Telstra shareholders should not have their assets subject to coerced acquisition.

The former government’s workplace reforms went too far but they helped to create more than 2 million new jobs, lift real wages by 20 per cent and more than double net household wealth between 1996 and 2007. We’ll seek to take the unfair dismissal monkey off the back of small businesses which are more like families than institutions.

We’ll make Labor’s transitional employment agreements less transitional and Labor’s individual flexibility agreements more flexible. We have faith in Australian workers who are not as easily pushed around and exploited as the ACTU’s dishonest ad campaign is already making out.

If elected, we will be faithful to the liberal conservative tradition. But we will strive to be better than the former government, not just a copy of it. We will be a contemporary government, not just a conservative one.

For starters, there’ll be a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme which gives women six months leave at their full pay. That’s real time and real money to care for their newborns.

Parental leave is a workplace entitlement not a welfare one. It should be paid for by business but not in way which could lead to discrimination against female staff or hurt small business. Only the Labor Party habitually increases businesses’ cost burden and if the current government had not completely blown the surplus it wouldn’t be necessary.

But all benefits have to be paid for and the fairest way to have a paid parental leave scheme anytime soon is through a modest levy on companies’ taxable income over $5 million a year. It will be a universal scheme but, importantly, won’t mean any extra cost for small business.

The Coalition’s paid parental leave policy is good for women who will finally have more realistic choices to combine work and family. It’s good for all those families that need two incomes to pay the mortgage helping them when they are most financially vulnerable.

And it’s good for the economy which won’t lose some of the best workers because they can’t do justice both to their jobs and to their families. More freedom for mothers to work, if that’s their choice, is a productivity measure not just a social reform.

The Coalition will fight Mr Rudd’s means test on the private health insurance rebate because it’s yet another one of his broken promises and because strong private hospitals take the pressure off public waiting lists.

It’s previously been calculated that every dollar the government spends on the rebate brings more private money into healthcare saving two dollars that government would otherwise have to spend on health. As well, we’ll ensure that Medibank Private really is private by selling it and using the proceeds to reduce government debt.

Before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Rudd attacked the “bloating” of the federal bureaucracy but has since added nearly 20,000 to the 258,000-strong Australian Public Service.

To rein in spending, the Coalition will introduce a two year recruitment freeze to reduce public servant numbers through natural attrition. The freeze will apply on an agency-by-agency basis but uniformed and frontline service positions including, for example, the federal police, customs and quarantine, the Australian Defence Force and Centrelink customer service staff will be excluded.

There will be no redundancies but for two years 6,000 bureaucrats who retire or resign each year will not be replaced. This should deliver a modest reduction in public sector numbers without compromising essential services and save about $4 billion over the forward estimates.

As well, the Coalition would not proceed with the budget increase to the renewable energy future fund and will cut government advertising by 25 per cent. These savings will pay for the Coalition’s direct action on climate change policy, the Green Army and the retention of the current private health insurance rebate.

Next Wednesday at the National Press Club, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey will announce further measures to reduce spending and to increase productivity including a detailed response to the new spending and new savings proposals in the budget.

The final costing and funding details of Coalition policy will be released nearer the election but all policies will be fully costed and fully funded because the Australian people are entitled to reassurance that the alternative government’s promises are responsible and achievable.  

The Coalition has changed over the past two and a half years. We’ve heeded the lessons of defeat. We’ve learnt from our mistakes.

We know, unlike our opponents, that governments shouldn’t ignore expert advice about the lethal dangers of their programmes, shouldn’t decide to change the health system without taking the premiers into their confidence and shouldn’t decide, with minimal Treasury input, to put a new tax on mining without first talking to the people whose livelihoods are on the line.

The government has changed too. It no longer seems to stand for many of the things it used to, like combating climate change and ending the blame game. Conversely, it does seem to stand for things that no one would once have expected, like a chronic inability to take advice and a dangerous tendency to make policy on the run.

In the end, it’s a judgment about who can be trusted with the fate of the country that decides elections. This budget rests on the government’s new mining tax and the election should turn on this too.

Australia’s future depends on the bulk carriers travelling to Asia just as surely as it once rode on the sheep’s back. This election, like the budget, will pit a party that thinks it’s reasonable to make Australian miners the world’s highest taxed against one that doesn’t.

The die is cast. Neither side will retreat. The only way to stop this great big new tax on the people who saved us from the recession is to change the government.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak tonight on the alternatives which the Australian Greens would have put forward in the budget context and will be moving to implement in this parliament, in the consequent parliament and in coming fiscal years. I first of all want to pay a tribute to my colleagues, Senators Christine Milne, Rachel Siewert, Sarah Hanson-Young and Scott Ludlam, who are prodigious workers in this place and who ensure that the Greens as the third political party in this nation are not only across all issues but in advance of the big parties in advocating alternatives for a nation which badly needs a lead, which badly needs innovation, which badly needs imagination in politics and which badly needs a closer connection with the Australian people, who pay us to be here.

A little less than a year ago, the country was faced with the prospect of recession. All of us will remember the projections from Treasury, which showed that by the final quarter of last year we would be in recession unless the government acted swiftly in the face of the global downturn. In that circumstance, in February last year the government brought forward a package of some $42 billion to stimulate the economy. The first thing the opposition did, the Liberal and National parties, was to announce that they would block that stimulus program. That immediately threw the challenge to us Greens. In consideration with my colleagues, we recognised that while we did not support all the components of such a huge taking of taxpayers’ money and applying it to, in no small measure, the big end of town as well as to such worthy projects as a building program for 9,000 schools across this country, we would support that package and we did so.

We took the responsible option of negotiating with Treasurer Swan, the Prime Minister and several other ministers to improve that package. As a result, a jobs dividend came from the Greens work and thousands more Australians were employed. Not only that, those people who did not survive with their businesses or jobs intact got a much better deal from the government to tide them over until the worst of the recession had passed. We Greens are proud of that arrangement we made with government. It did involve $100 million to stimulate jobs right across rural and regional Australia, including in the refurbishment of this nation’s great heritage, for which there was no budget line until the Greens arrived and got $60 million put into these job-rich projects, and another $40 million for bikeways in all states and territories of the country.

We are also aware now that, in hindsight, it is the consensus of social commentators and economists that it was that stimulus package which the Greens made possible—and I pay tribute to our two crossbench colleagues, by the way, who were essential to its success—that prevented the country from heading to double-digit unemployment, and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work had the coalition succeeded in its negative attitude, which is ‘block everything the Labor government puts forward’. In this budget the country now has a forecast of 4.75 per cent unemployment by next year. What a remarkable achievement that is. Without the Greens that would not have happened. We are very proud of the role we took, responsibly, in the economic management of this country when the National and Liberal coalition failed at a moment of crisis for the nation.

Climate change is still coming rapidly upon the planet, and Australia is one of the most exposed and potentially damaged countries in the world. Yet the government has decided to set aside for three years further action on climate change, and the opposition have a polyglot of proposals which do not take government responsibility seriously should they be elected to government. Faced with a proposal which included a $20 billion waste of public money, if I correctly interpret the Grattan report of just a couple of weeks ago, the Greens have been proven right in not accepting the government’s proposal nor its failure to adequately tackle climate change with a prescription for five per cent downturn in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 rather than 25 to 40 per cent, which is required if we are really going to be successful in protecting the Great Barrier Reef, our snowfields, the productivity of the Murray-Darling Basin and a great deal more that is at stake in Australia in the coming century.

Instead, the Greens earlier this year took up Professor Garnaut’s proposal for an interim carbon tax. You will know the details of that. I want simply to point to what some of the commentators have said about the Greens’ proposal, which in this parliament and in the run to the election is the only consistent, nationally directed action plan to tackle climate change. I might add that, rather than costing taxpayers billions of dollars, as the government’s ETS proposal would be doing in this and subsequent budgets, the Greens’ proposal would bring in some $10 billion a year from a pollution tax on the 1,000 biggest polluters in the country, $5 billion of it earmarked to help households facing climate change right across the country. It would be a community dividend as well as a stimulus to business and a reorienting of our economy to green in an age when we must do that if we are going to face the challenge of much bigger and stronger economies—witness China and India for two.

Dr Frank Jotzo, a leading environmental economist from the Australian National University and an adviser to the original Garnaut review, said the Greens’ proposal:

… is a very sensible proposal. It was first suggested by Professor Garnaut to start the emissions trading scheme system with a fixed price and I believe that it’s even more relevant now in the political deadlock that we’re finding in Parliament.

Mr Acting Deputy President, on carbon tax generally you might listen to these comments from Geoff Carmody—no Green but a co-founder of Access Economics and before that a senior officer in the Commonwealth Treasury—who said:

A carbon tax allows a steady, predictable, ramping up of the price of carbon over time, allowing business (and, ultimately, consumers) to plan against this prospect and shift to lower emissions technology and more efficiency in energy use.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University, a Nobel laureate, said:

Economic efficiency requires that those who generate emissions pay the cost, and the simplest way of forcing them to do so is through a carbon tax … Indeed, it makes far more sense to tax bad things, like pollution, than to tax good things like work and savings.

Dr Richard Denniss is Executive Director of the Australia Institute and an adjunct associate professor in economics at the ANU. He said:

But the beauty of a carbon tax compared to an emissions trading scheme is that it is easy to design complementary policies, such as investments in energy efficiency, public transport and renewable energy, to augment the impact of a carbon tax.

Professor William Nordhouse, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, said:

The international community should move quickly to replace the current cap-and-trade structure with one in which the central economic mechanism is a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions.

These are comments that absolutely back the wisdom of the Greens’ proposal for a carbon tax at $23 a tonne of emissions now, ramping up at four per cent plus CPI into the future, allowing the way for a much more successful emissions trading option or carbon tax option in the future. It is to be noted that carbon taxes have been imposed in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, for example. As Kenneth Davidson commented in the Age last year:

Sweden is the most successful country in the world in reducing its carbon footprint … Between 1990 and 2006 Sweden cut its emissions by 9 per cent, exceeding the target set by Kyoto, while at the same time real growth increased 44 per cent.

This Greens prescription is central to the emerging political reality that it is the Greens who will present a positive alternative when neither of the big parties steps up to the mark with proposals that meet the biggest potential economic challenge of the age, which is climate change.

Finally, I quote Professor James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and dubbed ‘the godfather of climate science’, who was in Australia recently and was quoted in the Age. He said:

If we had a democracy where decisions were based on the public’s best interest, then that—

that is, the Greens’ proposal—

would be taken up in a heartbeat … Neither of the major parties gets it—or they don’t want to get it.

That speaks for itself.

The mining boom tax has been seriously panned by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, in the House of Representatives tonight. It cannot pass notice here, of course, that the government’s proposed mining boom tax, which the Greens support, is a progressive tax on the huge, multibillion-dollar profits coming to the big mining corporations, which, as the Prime Minister pointed out, have massive transfer of funds overseas from those profits, using the Australian people’s own ore resource in the Australian ground.

I remember, because I was in this place, that the GST was favoured by Mr Abbott in the Howard government. It was a regressive tax which hit people right across the board. The lower your income, the greater was the impact of the tax. Mr Abbott tonight spoke about the impact of a mining boom tax on average Australians. As the Greens see it, properly applied it will be a boon for average Australians, not like the GST, which as a fundraiser has added a great deal to Australian society but which hit the poor much harder than it did the very wealthy, the multimillionaires, who are organising the current protest against this mining boom tax.

The Greens would, however, see a sovereign fund set up, as the Norwegians have done with their windfall profits from mining and from the petroleum and gas reserves of the North Sea. That small country, with fewer than five million people, has put aside $450 billion for its future infrastructure and the progress of its society. The Australian government would do well to do the same. The Greens will be pursuing that strongly when legislation comes into this parliament, if it does, in the coming year to ensure that we wisely put aside money for the nation’s future and not simply return it, as the government would do, to instant proposals, including the building of infrastructure for the very same mining corporations to export coal faster through taxpayer funded railways and port facilities—including those on the Great Barrier Reef—to line the pockets of people other than average Australians.

The Australian Greens support the government’s $7.3 billion per annum health reform package, as we did the private health insurance rebate, which was unsuccessful in this Senate but which was supported by the Greens alone when the government brought it forward earlier this year. We are very strong advocates for better spending in the areas of mental health and dental health for this country. We believe we now have the resources to do that and we should be pursuing it. The Greens are calling for a minimum of $350 million per annum for mental health over the next four years. That would put $100 million a year worth of incentives at the primary care level to target those in need—the vulnerable and long-term clientele within the community and the NGO sector. That would also afford $150 million per year for early intervention mental health programs, including the youth mental health service, ‘headspace’, and early psychosis prevention services. It would also mean $100 million a year for alternatives to emergency department treatment such as multidisciplinary community based subacute services that support stepped or two-stage prevention and recovery care for people suffering mental problems or illnesses.

Denticare is the clear concept of paralleling Medicare by ensuring that all Australians have ready and easy access to dental health care. The failure of government to provide dental health care to everybody in this country remains a black hole—caries—in the delivery of health care in the country. A full national scheme would cost about $4.8 billion per annum. One billion dollars or so is spent on dental health care in current schemes. We could well fund that amount by, for example, reducing the fuel tax credit scheme for miners by $1.7 billion. How much better to be putting that into dental health care for people who have to wait months otherwise for treatment of their dental problems. We could add to that the rethinking of the $0.7 billion for coal and mining infrastructure out of the mining boom tax, which I just referred to. The $1 billion per annum dished out each year in the fringe benefit tax rebate on corporate vehicle fleets could be diverted to a national dental healthcare system. This is no great difficulty. It is just a failure of policy, imagination and carry-through from both the big parties. This has been advocated for decades, but it is the Greens here who have funding proposals for a national dental healthcare system—funded from the wealth of this country at the moment.

On some particulars from the Rudd government’s budget, I note that there is $27 billion over six years on roads. We are in peak oil. We are facing an enormous cost, both in pollution and in real costs for transport, if we depend upon the road system. We Greens would do much more to advance public transport, bikeways and a high-speed rail system. It will not have passed your notice that the government and the opposition both in the last few days have voted down the Greens proposal for a feasibility study into high-speed rail. It is an extraordinary failure not just of imagination but also of determination not to look at this proposal. The proposal is a must for this nation’s future. It is a proposal for high-speed rail linking the big cities of the eastern seaboard, and later all the big cities of this country. We see it going ahead apace in Saudi Arabia; in Argentina; in the United States; in the United Kingdom; in China, where a train recently reached 510 kilometres an hour; and in France, where standard high-speed rail is at 340 kilometres an hour. But in Australia we have two major parties who cannot step up to the plate, who are failures when it comes to the delivery of innovative public transport and who have even voted down a proposal to even look at high-speed rail in 2010. It is a proposal which I wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Mr Albanese, about today—again—saying, ‘Let’s get together and talk about this.’ A $10 million injection of funds would get world’s best expertise into Australia in the coming 12 months so that we could look at this fantastic high-speed rail facility—not least between Sydney and Melbourne, the third or fourth busiest air route in the world. Passengers could comfortably travel between those two cities in peak hours as quickly as, if not faster than, they can at the moment by air. They have to travel through peak hour traffic and go through all the delays in airports. Instead, they can travel in comfort while being able to access computers, mobile phones and entertainment en route.

Unemployment benefits still sit at $231 per week. Through the actions of the Greens, pensions were raised last year by $30 to $332. We would lift the decreasing number—if projections are right for the next year—of people employed in this country. Unemployment is decreasing because of Greens actions—following on a Labor government proposal for the stimulus package—out of that level way below the poverty line.

The $2 billion being spent on Christmas Island at the moment is the most expensive way to deliver a system for vetting refugees coming to this country from extraordinary circumstances. Senator Hanson-Young has put forward the much more cogent, humane and cheaper options that the Greens would pursue there.

Overseas aid languishes at 0.33 per cent of gross national income, and the government’s target is 0.5 per cent by the year 2015, when it should be one per cent. Included in that aid is $760 million, or some proportion of that, committed by the government at Copenhagen for helping poorer countries in our neighbourhood and elsewhere tackle their own problems with climate change. This was taken out of our aid budget, against the United Nations’ wishes, instead of coming from other funds.

Now we have a childcare rebate pegged at $7,500—that is $500 less per child for eligible parents—which saves only $86 million in an area where there is a need for an injection of funds to meet the quality performance that government quite rightly is now putting into the area. But it is an area that is being neglected and squeezed because the government is applying the squeeze. The Greens see that as a basic need for parents and children across this country if the country is going to have the future it should have.

I might note here some of the other innovations which do not strictly come into the budget speeches of the government or the opposition but which the Greens have initiated in this place in recent years and which we are proud of but which have been knocked off because the big parties simply will not move in the region. One is euthanasia legislation, backed by more than 80 per cent of the Australian populace. Even when I moved to restore the territories’ right—the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory—to legislate in this area, again both the big parties opposed it. Another step was legislation to ensure that Australians are not involved in aiding the Japanese killer whaling fleets of the south—opposed by both parties. Container deposit legislation has had no chance in here under either coalition or Labor governments. Senator Milne’s national feed-in tariff, which would be a great boon to renewable energy, is not seeing the light of day despite experts in the field and business calling for this innovation, which other countries have had for years. A referendum on the republic gained great applause at the Prime Minister’s 2020 forum but there has been no action there at all. Truth in political advertising, which has been proposed by the Greens, was voted down by both the big political parties—that speaks for itself. I referred to high-speed rail earlier. There was the proposal that junk food advertising be banned in children’s TV viewing hours—the scourge of obesity cuts across the health and lifespan of increasing numbers of Australian citizens but, ‘no’ say the big parties to a simple move towards offsetting obesity by banning junk food advertising aimed at children in children’s TV viewing hours.

Yesterday I brought forward legislation to give citizens a far better go in the banking system, including to prohibit the rip-off $2 which banks charge at ATMs to citizens from pensioners right through if they happen to go to an ATM which is not that of their own bank. The legislation requires basic no-cost banking services for people who have simple banking needs wherever they might be in this country. Also, of course, there is the 26 weeks paid parental leave with super, which the Greens not only have before this parliament but will continue to promote, because that is at best standard fare in similar countries around the world. It is every parent’s and every child’s right in this nation in 2010.

I note tonight that the coalition is about to extend the threat to the Australian Public Service with a freeze for two years on new public service jobs. Imagine the incentive that will be for young people who have aspired to study hard and gain themselves a place in the service of the nation when we have an Abbott government saying, ‘If we get in, your road will be blocked now for at least the next two years.’ I quote from the opposition’s shadow Treasurer, Mr Hockey, on ABC TV’s Lateline as recently as April—apparently not understanding that there are 200-plus members of parliament here who do not bake bread, who do not fill potholes and who are not serving in Afghanistan—slinging off at the Public Service, without which this country would not be what it is and who work in the country’s interest. This sneering by the coalition had Mr Hockey saying:

There are 5,000 people in the Department of Health in Canberra and they don’t treat one patient—

and—

There’s 5,000 people in the Department of Education and they don’t teach one pupil.

The threat of the axe hangs above public servants right across this country. There are 2,000 facing it in the current Labor budget, but that will extend to tens of thousands if an Abbott government is elected. The voters of the ACT in particular, but also in my home state of Tasmania, which has a very healthy public service, will be looking carefully at that threat because it cuts right across their future employment and the employment of their children.

There has arisen to public notice in the last few days a wonderful opportunity for this government if it will take it—that is, to end the many decades of contention about the fate of the great forests of south-east New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. There is a current collapse of that industry. It is due to a glut of wood from around the world. It has been predicted by the analysts, including Judith Ajani from the Australian National University, for many years. It has arrived. The industry is in such a parlous state that it has asked the Greens in Tasmania to meet with it in council to find some way forward. This is a remarkable opportunity to do as Labor Premier Geoff Gallop, following on the work of his Liberal predecessor in Western Australia, did in 2004. When the industry was restructured 29 national parks were created. They are now a huge boon for jobs and productivity in the south-west region of Western Australia. The contention, which pitted people so much against each other, was taken out of that issue. I note that over 80 per cent of Australians in all opinion polls want the end of the destruction of our great native forests and their wildlife. Here is an opportunity for the Rudd government to work with the three south-east states of Australia to indeed achieve a historic outcome for a very small, I believe, outlay which will be in the interests of that industry and, of course, in the interests of Australia’s heirloom forests going on into the future.

As we head for the election, the Greens have a very proud record of responsibility, of taking government proposals in this place and treating them genuinely, of working hard on them and of getting better outcomes. Unlike the coalition, we are not simply naysayers. We do not block simply for the sake of blocking. We are not simply oppositionists, as the coalition is. We believe that if you say no to something you should come up with a better alternative. That is our credo and we will continue to do that. We have a long-sided view for the security of this nation and its future. That is why we are the experts, with the only standing positive proposal on climate change before this parliament.

We will go to the election with a fresh and alternative but very progressive and economically sound outlook and a raft of policies for the people of Australia to consider. We will continue in our role in the Senate to be responsible and economically forward thinking, and we will do so should we win seats in the lower house. Post election, we commit to negotiating responsibly for better outcomes with whichever government is elected. We will go to the people of Australia with the policies I have put forward tonight and more. We look forward to this exercise in democracy and a greater green presence in this parliament—and not least in this Senate, the constructive backstop of democracy for the Australian people.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to provide Family First’s budget-in-reply speech. On Tuesday night the Treasurer delivered a budget which was all smiles on the outside but, beneath the surface, it was hiding a dark underbelly. The budget might be more aptly called a gangland budget—smiles on the surface but a dark underbelly. It is a budget that promises financial responsibility but abandons its responsibility to ordinary, hardworking Australians—or, as the Rudd government calls them, working families.

Family First welcomes the news that the budget figures are better than last year. We are pleased that the return to a surplus will come three years earlier than expected. But the question is: at what price has this come? Where are the cuts and what are the clawbacks the Rudd government has forced onto the Australian people? Fiscal responsibility is more than just balancing the numbers; it is knowing where to spend and knowing where to cut. We need to ask if the government has got its priorities right. The answer is a clear no, because the Rudd government has ripped into some of the most important items for ordinary Australians while looking after its own den.

Firstly, the Rudd government’s budget has ripped into child care. That is right: our kids; our future. It has ripped into our kids and their parents. Of course, this means that the government has abandoned its pledge to help its ‘working families’ when it comes to accessible and affordable child care. It has done this by slashing the childcare rebate and putting mums and dads out of pocket by an extra $278 per child per year. For a family of two children, this means that the family budget will be worse off by more than $500. Any parent who pays more than $57.70 in childcare fees per day for five days a week will be worse off under this budget announced by the Rudd government. It is a kick in the guts to mums and dads who are already struggling to pay their childcare bills as it is. What is more, on top of this, the childcare rebate will no longer be indexed to the CPI like it has been in the past. This means that, as the childcare expenses go up and up each year, Australian families will be left more and more out of pocket. Instead of listening to the recommendations of the Henry tax review which suggest giving low-income families a 90 per cent subsidy for child care, the government has gone out and done the exact opposite, by hiking up the childcare costs for those who depend on it most.

This latest attack on working families comes only a few weeks after the government broke its election promise by scrapping plans to build 260 childcare centres. These 260 new childcare centres were badly needed because there are already many families who have trouble finding an affordable spot for their kids. The Prime Minister claims he is committed to helping working families. But how are working families supposed to go to work if there are not enough childcare centres to look after their kids at an affordable price? If childcare is too expensive for them to afford, how are they supposed to be ‘working families’? We know where that promise of 260 new childcare centres has gone. It has gone to the Labor election promise graveyard.

The second dark underbelly of the budget is housing affordability. Family First believes that the government has missed the mark when it comes to addressing this core issue for ordinary Australians of housing affordability. People trying to enter the property market will find it just as hard to buy a house, as the government has done nothing to make housing more affordable. Housing affordability is a crisis that is getting worse and worse and is being compounded by the fact that the government does not seem to care.

Housing prices in my home city of Melbourne went up 28 per cent in the 12 months to March this year, and in the past eight months interest rates have gone up by 1½ per cent. Put in real terms, this means that first home buyers who could not afford to get into the market last year have had to stump up $98,000 more to afford the average median home this year. And those who were under mortgage stress last year are now under even greater pressure and have to pay $270 more to the banks each month. What about the great Australian dream? It is the great Australian dream to own your home, and we should be doing everything we can to make it easier for people to live that dream. Instead, we have a government that does not care about housing affordability—and this budget does not give any hope to first home buyers.

I would liked to have seen the government look at the idea of letting first home buyers access part of their superannuation to put a deposit on a house so that they can at least get a foot in the door and have that great Australian dream of owning their home. Instead of making people wait 40 years until they can access their super, this money should be allowed to be partly put to another good use like owning your own home. This would not cost the taxpayer any money in government funding but would help go towards solving a housing crisis that is spiralling out of control. This would be a lifeline to thousands of young families desperately trying to escape the rent rut.

The third dark underbelly of the budget is medical costs. Family First is at a loss to understand the government’s decision to increase the net medical expenses tax offset from $1,500 to $2,000. It sounds like an increase but it is a slug on Australian families and their medical costs. I understand that some costs need to be reined in if we are to get this budget back into surplus but why would you go out and increase basic medical costs for those who need treatment the most? Why would you go out and make those people who are already paying the most for medical bills pay even more? The Rudd government has done this in a mean and tricky way by raising the net medical expenses tax offset. It sounds like it is better; it is worse. It does not make any sense. It is a heartless policy that slugs the sick and unwell.

What makes it all the worse is that, while the government is leaving families short-changed with their medical bills, the Prime Minister has given himself an extra 86 staff on top of the 65 additional staff he took on in last year’s budget. How many more people do you need? It just stinks to think that this is the second year in a row that Prime Minister Rudd has increased his staffing levels by more than 60 people. It is a real smack in the face to all Australians who are struggling to stay afloat when they see the Prime Minister feathering his own nest. At a time when Australians are told to cut back and make do, this excess by the Prime Minister is obscene.

The government cries poor and says it does not have the money to keep the net medical expenses tax offset as it is but it has no problems splashing out $18 million of taxpayers’ money to boost the Prime Minister’s office budget. I find the government’s priorities in this gangland budget amazingly warped. I find the government’s priorities all the more disturbing given that it is willing to spend cash on itself but when it comes to our veterans community this government is once again silent and pretends it has empty pockets.

Once again there is no mention in the budget of plans to implement a more appropriate and equitable indexation arrangement for the military superannuation schemes. It is a national disgrace the way this government has chosen to treat our veterans community and failed to recognise the unique nature of military service—and I think the government is going to get a whacking at the ballot box at the next election.

Family First does recognise that the budget allocates more spending on health reform and it is certainly a good thing that more money is going into this area of health; however, it is not enough just to pour money into health and leave it at that. We have to make sure that we are spending this money wisely. We need to get the best bang for our buck and ensure that this money actually goes towards fixing the health system once and for all—not just splashing it out on ineffective and useless reforms.

I still believe we need to be looking at the basics—that is, how many doctors, how many dentists, how many nurses, how many beds, how many other resources and how many other health professionals do we need per thousand people or per thousand families? This is what we have got to start to see. Once we work that out we need to look at whether there are enough doctors, dentists, nurses, beds, other resources and other health professionals in each region. Rather than just throwing money at it, surely we cannot continue to allow things to happen where we are turning away thousands of our young kids from studying medicine when we keep on importing doctors. It is ridiculous.

We should do this demand and supply planning immediately and urgently. Then we can look at this on a city basis, on a regional basis, on an outer suburban basis, on a country area basis and then on a state basis. Then you can work out whether we have got real health reform. The money needs to go directly to where the shortages are so that we stop living in a first-world country with a substandard health system.

This budget does not do enough for families and it does not deliver on the key areas which affect ordinary Australians. This budget is disappointing and Family First look forward to sitting down with the government and working together with them on making it work better for all Australians.

Debate (on motion by Senator Arbib) adjourned.