Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The 2007-08 federal budget is an outstanding budget for local families. The federal budget has delivered the best-ever result for local families, with income tax cuts, a national boost to the childcare tax rebate, extra payments for carers, more money for local roads and more support for apprentices. The government has delivered nine budget surpluses in the last 10 budgets. Maintaining a surplus is the best thing a government can do to put downward pressure on interest rates, which is important to local families, especially the homebuyers. Families are the big winners in this budget, with a 13 per cent increase in childcare benefit, and a bringing forward of the childcare tax rebate for 2006-07. All these measures will be at a cost of $1.4 billion over four years. We are also bringing income tax cuts worth $31.5 billion over four years, and local families will also benefit from the increase in the tax thresholds. Income tax cuts of $31.5 billion over five years confirm the government’s commitment to reducing taxation, especially income taxation.

In the Keating years basic wage earners paid 20c in the dollar; they are now paying 15c in the dollar and the threshold has been lifted to $30,000. At the other end of the scale, where we previously paid the top marginal rate from $50,000, that now does not cut in until $180,000 and then at 45c in the dollar, not 47c. Only two per cent of Australians will pay the top marginal tax rate. This is now the fifth in a series of tax cuts since the introduction of GST. We have chipped away on five occasions, targeting different income groups each time. We were ridiculed for the ‘milkshake and hamburger’ reduction, but when you put the five tax cuts together then you see the real picture. Back in 1999 taxpayers earning $30,000 a year paid $6,222 in income tax, but from 1 July they will only pay $2,850—a reduction of 54 per cent. That is very significant to families. A 54 per cent tax cut is very effective.

The government is also serious about investing in our national road and rail network under AusLink 2, which will sink $22.3 billion over five years from 2009-10 into key transport infrastructure. A significant part of that, around $3.2 billion over the five years from 2009-10, will go towards the local roads grant program, including $1.8 billion to the Roads to Recovery project, which I might add is one of the most popular with local government, and another $300 million will go to the strategic regional program.

My electorate has already seen the benefits of the coalition’s focus on better roads. In recent weeks I have had the pleasure of announcing three significant projects in Gladstone and Hervey Bay. The first was $12.75 million from the Commonwealth and it is going into the first stage of the Kirkwood Road project in Gladstone. This is a crucial development for Gladstone and also for the Calliope area. Because of it we will be able to funnel industrial and work commuter traffic away from the Gladstone CBD via a south-western bypass to the port and industrial areas of the city.

The second project, which will do a lot to improve local driver safety, is a $900,000 allocation towards the upgrading of the Benaraby regional landfill intersection. This is a very important project because the Calliope Shire Council will be able to provide safer access to the Benaraby regional waste management facility, something everyone has to go to every couple of weeks, I imagine, and also to the Benaraby raceway, which is in the same area and a very important recreational facility. The Calliope project was the first priority for the council, and The Nationals candidate for Flynn, Glenn Churchill, has also strongly backed my efforts to get this funding commitment, which proves he has a real vision for the region, its industry and its families.

The third project was $1 million allocated to complete stage 3 of the Old Toogoom Road in Hervey Bay. This comes on top of previous grants, one of them also $1 million for that road. This is a key project for the area, given the increasing popularity of Hervey Bay. You have to recognise that 30 years ago this was a town of 7,000 or 8,000 people; it now has 55,000 people. That is a huge increase, and so it is important to families, retirees and tourists. The project will see 1.1 kilometres of Old Toogoom Road realigned, which will improve flood immunity as well as the safety of crossings and approaches. All in all, the extra funding for my local roads will make driving a lot safer for local residents, businesspeople and, as I said before, tourists. I should also add that the government has reconfirmed its commitment to the $2 million Bundaberg Port ring road, with $1 million coming from the Commonwealth.

I also applaud the continuation of the Investing in Our Schools program with a further $195.9 million allocated to help schools complete projects identified as priorities. Schools in Hinkler which can demonstrate improvements in literacy and numeracy results are now in line for $50,000 bonuses under the new Rewarding Schools for Improving Literacy and Numeracy Outcomes program. That funding runs to $53 million over five years and will reward those schools that are working hard to improve the fundamental learning outcomes of their students. For those children who have not achieved minimum standards in literacy and numeracy the government is providing $457 million for the national literacy and numeracy voucher program. The most interesting part of this announcement is the $700 vouchers which will be available to parents of students who do not reach current literacy and numeracy benchmarks in years 3, 5 and 7.

The government is investing not only in young people but also in older teenagers, especially in the area of apprenticeships. Our first- and second-year apprentices under 30 years of age will receive a tax-free $1,000 wage top-up from 1 July in recognition of the difficulty of entering the workforce for the first time. The payments will be made for each of two years of eligible full-time Australian Apprenticeships and will be paid in six-monthly instalments. All apprentices, regardless of their age, will also be eligible from 1 July for an annual payment of $500 to help out with their TAFE and other training fees.

Funding for environmental matters has also increased, with a total of $4.3 billion allocated to tackling pressing issues of climate change, water security and natural resource management. Perhaps the most tangible initiatives at the grassroots level are the doubling of the rebate for solar panels on homes, from a maximum of $4,000 to $8,000, and a new competitive grants scheme for schools and communities to install solar panels on their buildings.

I have a particular interest in an environmental project that is being conducted by the Burnett Mary Regional Group for Natural Resource Management—with the help of $3.2 million from the Commonwealth, I might add. The group is using the funding from the government’s National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality and the Natural Heritage Trust programs to study fish movements and shorebird roosts and breeding sites in the Burnett-Mary catchment area. The group will be locating and mapping significant shorebird roosts and breeding sites north of Point Vernon near Hervey Bay, on Fraser Island and stretching north to Tannum Sands near Gladstone. It will look at migratory and resident shorebirds listed under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, including the grey plover, the whimbrel, the common crested and little terns, the bar-tailed godwit and the red-necked stint. These birds might not sound very important but many of them are Northern Hemisphere birds that come to roost in Australia. If you do not get it right at one end you are not going to have the birds at either end, so this is a very important program.

The Burnett Mary Regional Group for Natural Resource Management is also looking at ways to offset the impact of barriers to fish movements within the catchment area. This might not sound like groundbreaking stuff, but they are crucial studies, given the state Labor government’s refusal to reconsider an alternative to the Traveston Crossing dam. This is an abomination, this dam. How the Labor government could lend its hand to this staggers me, given what it has done to oppose such schemes over the years. The dam is shallow. It is set on 18 metres of gravel and sand. It will require massive foundations. It is very wide at its mouth. Six hundred properties will have to be resumed—six hundred properties would fund two medium sized dams—and, on top of that, you have the cost of transporting that water by pipes to Brisbane. It is an absolute abomination, and the state government should be ashamed of itself.

In the health sphere, I will be fighting to secure one of three new Medicare-eligible MRI machines, which were announced in the budget—a project I have already prioritised for the Wide Bay region and will pursue doggedly. People with chronic conditions and complex healthcare needs will be looked after with $377 million to improve access to dental treatment in the private system. Eligible patients will be able to claim Medicare benefits for diagnostic dental consultations as well as Medicare benefits for a range of dental treatment services, up to a maximum of $2,000 in any calendar year. Some great news for elderly residents and families, especially families with young children, is the increase in the Medicare Benefits Schedule rebate for after hours GP services from November 2008. The current rebate, ranging from $33.75 to $54.55, will be increased to $83.50 for urgent home visits. This builds on the government’s Round the Clock Medicare program, introduced in the 2005-06 budget, which vastly improved access to after hours GP services.

I would like to use the next part of my speech to talk to the Main Committee, and indeed the parliament, about the current and dangerous way in which the Beattie government is moving, and it builds on what happened under the Goss government. I am not trying to be overtly political in this. I passionately believe that we are now becoming part of a highly centralised form of government. If we look back to the Goss years, we see electricity boards that were regional in nature being combined in the name of competition. We certainly have not seen competition that has caused the price of electricity to drop; we have seen two major boards running the whole of the state.

We had a very good ambulance system in Queensland, called the QATB, and it was run by a modest government contribution and by private subscription. The government took this over with a flurry and started charging everyone $88 a year on their electricity bills—and of course it has gone up since then because it is indexed. It has not provided a better service. We have many ambulance centres now having to call in volunteers to help run the centres. We have ambulance officers and paramedics out on stress leave and, from time to time, we hear about the state government injecting a bit of money here and there to try to pick up the pace. From talking to my state colleagues, I do not believe that the funding being collected by the state government is actually being totally expended on the ambulance service. So what have we seen happen? We have seen a decentralised form of ambulance care become what is now a highly centralised form, and it is being run from Brisbane—and not all that successfully. This is not a reflection on any of the officers who work for this organisation, for whom I have immense respect, but the organisational structure and the way that the system is run is an abomination.

We have had port authorities amalgamated. The Rockhampton Port Authority was merged with the Gladstone Port Authority and it became the Central Queensland Ports Authority. Then the Bundaberg Port Authority was merged with the Port of Brisbane Authority, so that we now have Bundaberg subsumed into the Brisbane authority. Then we had health councils, which were supposed to replace hospital boards but were a very feeble attempt, I might add. These health councils are now being amalgamated with the North Burnett Health Community Council being merged with Bundaberg.

On and on this goes—a culture of centralisation of government in Brisbane and less and less control by people in regional and country areas. But it has reached its high point of stupidity with this current round of forced amalgamations. The councils throughout Queensland have been undertaking a SSS program looking at their size and sustainability, and working very hard in groups of councils to see how they could share facilities and whether there were cases in some areas for amalgamations that would receive support from local communities under a proper plebiscite or perhaps some form of vote in each area of the council so that everyone had a say in what happened.

This has not happened. The state government have decided to take over the whole process and cancel the SSS process that was already going on and to which they had allocated—although not spent, I might add—$25 million. They have formed a commission and it has been set an extraordinarily tight time frame in which to recommend on the combination of various councils in the state into larger local government units.

I have no problems with amalgamations where you go through an ordered process. For example, you might have a plebiscite first in which you give people a number of alternatives to vote on. On the basis of that and perhaps submissions from councils you then put up some new boundaries and correct anomalies in existing boundaries. Then you have public consultation and involve people in communities. Then, perhaps, at the end of that process—and this has always been the case in Queensland and it is the case, really, throughout all of the states in the Commonwealth—you have a referendum. But that will not happen. There is no referendum. It is just going to be: ‘Wham, bam, thank you, Ma’am. This is what you are going to do. You are going to be in councils of three or four or five or whatever the case might be and you had better learn to live with it.’ That is just not acceptable.

I have been out in my electorate and I have never seen more anger in country areas. In fact, I would equate it—even though it was directed towards our government at the time—with the gun laws. In some areas it is almost on a par with the rise of One Nation. It is a vehement grassroots reaction to people having their basic unit of democracy—the local council—being taken away from them. Local councils are the glue, if you like, or the mortar that holds small country communities together. If you take that away, your machinery pool goes and your working people go. Because the council workers have gone, the school goes from four teachers down to three or three to two; the police station goes down by one constable; where there are three restaurants in the town, you end up with one closing and you are left with two—and so it goes on and on until you get quite a distinct downward spiral.

I marched at Gayndah with 400 people—I see some of the members smiling, but I did march; I am not frightened to go to the front of a march for a thing like that. It was interesting too to see people wearing red shirts. It just showed the vehemence of it all. There were 400 there. I went to a public meeting in Childers—there were another 400 there. There were 250 at Biggenden and 120 at Gin Gin. The bush is alight with this and the state ALP government will persist with this at their peril.

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