Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on theTelecommunications Legislation Amendment (Communications Fund) Bill 2008. As the federal representative of a rural electorate, I vigorously oppose the amendment to part 9C of the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999. If this bill passes both chambers it will allow this inexperienced, unfriendly government that is ruling Australia—the Rudd Labor government—to raid the Communications Fund. We will have a modern-day Ned Kelly, only Ned Kelly had a face mask. I am sure the member for Kennedy would support me, but he has left the chamber. They want to raid the fund that was put away in perpetuity by the former coalition government. We put it away to ensure that, when markets failed to provide new technologies for communications networks in outback and rural Australia, there was going to be a source of funds available without rural Australia having to rely on the federal budget.

Right now we are hearing daily from the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance and Deregulation that this is going to be a tough budget and that they are making cuts and looking for savings. I know just how hard it is to go to a Treasurer and the Expenditure Review Committee to get money when they are looking for savings in the budget. That is why we put this fund aside. That is why it was put away in perpetuity—so that no future government and no future communications minister would ever have to go back to the Expenditure Review Committee to get funds to meet market failures out in rural areas. This perpetual fund must remain a perpetual fund. The fund was designed so that only the earnings from the fund would be used to deal with those market failures, and that must remain the case in the future. I know and you know, I am sure, Mr Deputy Speaker, that market failures have occurred in the past and will occur in the future.

The new Prime Minister says he is a Prime Minister for all Australians. We saw those advertisements before the election, which the Prime Minister often cites, saying that the Prime Minister is a boy from the Queensland bush. Well, he left the bush a long time ago and he is totally out of touch with the needs of rural Australia today. If this legislation passes the House and the Senate, the Labor Party will be able to pilfer the $2 billion Communications Fund, which was put away by a responsible coalition government—a responsible economic manager—that was thinking of the future and governing for all Australians, unlike what we have already seen in the first 100 days of this government.

We saw this morning that fuel excise on road transport will be automatically indexed. We abolished automatic indexation, which was a policy of Keating’s Labor government. What we have seen from this government is a return to the Keating days. When Keating was Treasurer he introduced the automatic indexation of fuel excise. It automatically went up twice a year, without ever having to be scrutinised by the Senate or the House. It was automatic.

The other side are trying to portray this Prime Minister as a boy from the bush. Well, goodness me! If we took him to the outback of my electorate and turned him around once, he would be certainly lost. He would be totally out of place. He was never a boy from the bush—because if he were a boy from the bush, he would make sure that this legislation was not introduced into this parliament. Before it got to the Senate, he would say, ‘Look, I think I’ve made a mistake.’ He could do a ‘Peter Beattie’: ‘Look, I’ve made a mistake.’

See this speech in context