Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a great pleasure to follow the member for Bendigo, but it is somewhat daunting because she is such a good advocate for Labor and for her community. Tonight we are talking on these bills because the government has presented us with a difficult choice; they have presented the community with a difficult choice. The choice is either that we hand millions and millions of dollars back to multinational companies—not to consumers—or that we try to find some more productive way of dealing with that money. In this instance, Labor has decided that the best approach would be to hand that money back to local communities and local councils. As the member for Bendigo said, that is because this was a tax that was collected without parliamentary approval. Given the rhetoric of those opposite and given the philosophical underpinnings of those opposite, you would think that they would not instigate or collect a tax for which this parliament had not given approval to, but that is what they did—just as they implemented a GP tax by stealth, by regulation.

We are left with a difficult choice—Hobson's choice. We can either hand money to multinationals for their own bottom line or for some other purpose—I suppose they might refund it to consumers, but they would find it very difficult to do so—or give it to regional councils. We know that councils need these funds because there has been a $925 million cut from local assistance grants for the next three years. That is nearly a billion dollars coming out of local communities. Those important grants help councils with their everyday operations; those grants have been an important part of council funding since the Whitlam government. They are particularly important for regional communities with very large areas, very high costs and very low populations.

There are many councils north of Gawler in my electorate—councils like the Clare and Gilbert Valley or the Light Regional Council, of which I am a ratepayer, or the Barossa Council—have a very heavy burden, because they have vast road networks. Often these are graded dirt roads, like the roads I travelled in my youth for one reason or another. I have vivid memories of riding out from Kapunda to Allendale North on my bike; it was a pretty tough ride; later on I had a few old cars that I used to bash around in. These are important roads for the local community; I know that because I have travelled them. Since becoming an MP I have had cause to drive them to visit one community or another. These roads make an impact and, as a local member, you know there is no greater thing you can do for country residents than to prevail on the council to get a road graded so that it can be navigated in wet weather. It is often a difficult task. It does not matter whether you are talking about Mallala, Owen, Tarlee, Balaclava or Kapunda—these farming communities all have vast road networks and they need good roads.

Every time this government hacks into the funding of local councils, that hurts city councils but it has a disproportionate impact on country councils and rural and remote locations. We know that in Australia there is a $15 billion local government infrastructure deficit across the country, where infrastructure needs fixing but it cannot be fixed. We know that councils manage 670,000 kilometres of roads—75 per cent of all the roads by length—and so we know that 11 per cent of those roads are poorly maintained. That is not because the council wants to let the local community down—they are closest to the community—but they have to work out in their works budget which roads get fixed and which roads do not. It is always a difficult trade-off. Every time this Commonwealth government cuts their funding, the choice becomes even harder.

We have difficult choices in this national parliament, which cause difficulties in local communities. In South Australia we have a particular difficulty: historically, since the late 1990s we have had eight per cent of the country's population receive roughly six per cent of the road funding. That has been a difficult issue because we had a decade of Commonwealth underfunding of roads during the Howard era and up until 2004, when the rivers of gold started to flow from the mining boom mark 1. If you have a decade of underfunding and you do not maintain the top of the road every few years, then you end up wrecking the base of the road and then it is ten times more expensive and more difficult to fix. We had a very big infrastructure backlog for South Australian roads. When I got elected, I remember going down the Kapunda to Tarlee road, and it had not changed since I left year 12—15 years later it had not changed a jot. It was patched up all over the place and still taking very large trucks. I was proud when the South Australian government under Mike Rann finally got it fixed to something approximating a decent road.

We know the Howard government fixed the problem by putting in an additional top-up to South Australian roads in 2004 and that funding remained all the way through the Rudd and Gillard governments. And it helped. It made a difference. It helped clean up that backlog. The councils were very, very attached to that funding, but this government cut that funding, on top of all of its other cuts. To rub salt in the wound, it was a South Australian minister, the member for Mayo as the infrastructure minister, who cut this $18 million a year that made all the difference and that recognised South Australia's population demands.

You have to remember that, in South Australia, most of its very large population—eight per cent—is in Adelaide. So we have a far-flung population in this state. This state is important to this nation's mining revenues. There has been an explosion in mining in South Australia over the last few years because of the pay scheme and because of our very good state mineral resources minister, Tom Koutsantonis, among others. But we have a small population across that. So, we have very large road network that need to be maintained by councils with very low rate bases, as the member for Bendigo said. That is exactly the situation. That has a big effect on South Australia.

So, it is disappointing that the government, on top of all the other cuts that they have made, have hacked South Australia again. It was not good enough for the government to just wave goodbye to the car industry or to lie openly about submarines—flat-out lie to the public of South Australia about submarines. It also had to hack a road funding measure put in place by the Howard government in recognition of our situation.

David O'Loughlin is the Local Government Association president—and, yes, I know him well because he was a Labor candidate for Adelaide, a very fine one. But, with his Local Government Association hat on, he said:

If this funding is not extended in the May federal budget, state council road programs will be trashed …

As it only affects South Australia, it would mean the federal government is making a conscious decision to strip funds from our state while every other state retains the status quo.

That is just unfair to South Australia.

With this bill, we have Hobson's choice, a difficult choice, between handing this money that has been collected without parliamentary approval—in this sort of sly, double-dutch deal where you get the petrol companies to collect your tax and then present this parliament with an unfortunate, unpleasant choice—back to the petrol companies for them to do with as they please or, alternatively, finding some productive use for it. Now, the productive use that Labor have achieved for it, through negotiation, is making sure that that money goes back to local roads and local councils. That is an important thing for my electorate. It is an important deal to make.

Bismarck, I think, said about legislatures: 'Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.' That would be true of this bill. Nobody would look at this bill and say it is a high point of parliamentary decision making or as an exercise. No-one would hold the government up as having done the right thing in these circumstances. That is why we opposed it—because we assumed that this government would do the right thing. After all the government's rhetoric, after all their commitments, after the elevation of trust to some sacrosanct place by the Prime Minister in the last election, we assumed that they would bring this tax to the parliament. Remember, 'no taxation without representation' was the cry of the miners at Eureka; here, all these years later, what would they say about this fix? This is indeed taxation without representation.

You would expect better of the conservative parties, who like to philosophically elevate taxation to some sort of barometer of a nation's health—if not of the Prime Minister then surely of their very animated backbench. There is nothing that gets that side more motivated than a good discussion about taxation. So, to find them in here—or not in here, as the case may be—supporting taxation without representation, particularly on the bowser, every time people have to go to the petrol station, is absolutely galling.

What Labor decided to do was make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. We decided to make sure that the $1.1 billion boost to the Roads to Recovery program occurs and stimulates local jobs, local communities and local demand, and gives real confidence to bush areas which have been hit hard and will always be hit hard by people who want to mess with federation, with basic services and with the ordinary operations of government, as this government does—and it does not matter whether it is in this bill; in the federation white paper; or in health and education funding, with $60 billion worth of cuts that the government will not own up to. There is nothing worse than someone who will not own up to their own work, who is not proud of their own work, and that is this government: shamefaced, sneaky and, often, operating in violation of its own philosophical precepts.

We support this bill, but it is not perfect. We wish that the government had behaved in a different manner, where we would have had different choices.

See this speech in context