Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, Australia's Point Piper Prime Minister visited WA to try and understand why West Aussies were so upset about receiving a miserly, pitiful 34c in the dollar of GST revenue. Mr Turnbull must be living in a parallel universe to think that Western Australians are happy about getting the nation's lowest GST share, despite facing a huge resources downturn and massive state budget deficit left by the previous Liberal government. The PM and the Commonwealth Grants Commission would have you believe that the reason we receive so little of the GST carve-up is that we had a mining boom. Well, that was over three years ago and things have changed a lot since then. This lag, coupled with the news that WA will take a further $2 billion hit due to the changes in population estimates from the debacle of a census, has WA people up in arms. Then there are the changes made by this government over here in 2015 to the commission's formula for calculating remoteness, effectively writing off service provision in Kununurra, Wyndham, Halls Creek, Broome, Derby, Eucla, Fitzroy Crossing, Karratha, Marble Bar, Port Hedland and many other towns.

What is clear to the Western Australian community is the complete absence of any meaningful leadership from the Turnbull government in addressing the current level of disparity in Western Australia's allocation of GST revenue. It may have been naive to think that the Prime Minister, bringing his entire cabinet over to Perth, would mean some actual results and action. But, in the end, Malcolm Turnbull visited WA and all we got were these lousy(Time expired)

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Props will be put down.