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

That is a very frivolous point. I often do the shopping in my household. I also am the one who usually buys the meat and fruit and vegetables, but I do not take anything away from my wife, who is a very, very frugal keeper of the family budget for those household items. But I was talking about the great engine room of this economy—small business. What has happened to the confidence of small businesses for their future since this Labor government was elected? Business confidence is at its lowest level since these statistics have been recorded. But let me move to some of the actual programs that are certain to affect my electorate. Something that will ring in the ears of many voters at the next federal election was that great statement from the now environment minister, Peter Garrett. He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about what we are saying now; when we get in, we’ll just change everything.’ That is exactly what we are seeing from this government.

Let us have a look at what was committed for road funding in rural Australia. I know that in my state of Queensland, where a great influx of people from the southern states are coming and where there is great hope for the future, the two great drivers of our economy—on the value of exports, by the value of dollars—are the coal industry and the beef industry. What do we see is going to be spent on roads? The coalition was committed to funding the second range crossing between Brisbane and Toowoomba, out to the Darling Downs, which is the gateway that links the port of Brisbane to the Surat coal basin, the largest coal reserve in Australia, which is soon to be opened up. It is bigger than the Hunter Valley. We are seeing the exploration of coal seam methane gas, a clean source for the generation of electricity. In Dalby, a town where I have one of my offices, we now have a mini-city of 1,000 people. They are building a coal seam methane gas fired power station. All the equipment for the development of that new power station is going to come from the port of Brisbane, in the south-east corner of Queensland, across the Great Dividing Range to the Braemar power station. What did we hear from this government in relation to funding for the second range crossing of the Warrego Highway between Brisbane and the Darling Downs? Not one dollar was mentioned.

I am pleased that the government has committed something like $55 million to the upgrade of the Warrego Highway west of Toowoomba, but our commitment of $127 million was to be rolled out from 1 July 2008. We looked through the budget papers to see where the money for the Warrego Highway might be—as we always say, the devil is in the detail. But we are still looking for this devil. We are at least comforted by the fact that some $55 million is to be rolled out, but it stands in stark contrast to what the coalition was offering, which was some $127 million for this section of the Warrego Highway.

I will touch on the Regional Partnerships program. We have heard the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government brand the Regional Partnerships program a fraud and a rort. I watched the minister on Channel 7 this week, and he might have been to Damascus; he might have seen the light. I say to him: this is a program, run successfully by the coalition government, that delivered to regional communities benefits that were often unable to be funded through their local government area. I know the Labor government is going to rebrand it, call it something else, but I call on the minister to commit to those projects that have been approved by the federal coalition and have been announced. Those communities out there are desperate to know that they will get that funding—albeit they had not signed the contracts.

One of them, in my electorate of Dalby, has been used as an example by the minister in the House. He was saying that it is a rort when it is, in fact, a great community benefit. They spent a great deal of their ratepayers’ money in preparing the case for the Commonwealth to sign off on the contract. No community can commit $1 million or $2 million to a project, and they cannot go to tender for a project that they have identified, until they know they have the money. When the money is approved through the due process—the area consultative committee, the department and the ministers, under a coalition government—they can then go to the architects and start to spend some of their money. They can go to tender to get quotes for the construction of, in this case, the Dalby indoor-outdoor arena. That takes time. Trying to get builders, as we all know anywhere in Australia, to commit to firm prices is a challenge. Many of my communities have found that not only frustrating but difficult. They have worked through the issues, but, because they were not able to work through those issues before the election was called, the minister has said: ‘We are going to can all those projects. We will not fund them; they are a rort.’

Many of these projects are done through hard-working volunteer organisations that have the support and confidence of their local council. Sometimes, charitable organisations are involved. Jupiters Casino in Queensland provides funds to some of these communities every year. Some state governments provide funds for these projects, as the member for Indi knows. It takes time to bring all those funding sources together, but you cannot start that process until you have the support of the Commonwealth to progress that commitment and the funding arrangements before getting the Commonwealth to sign off on those Regional Partnerships projects.

There is one program in western Queensland that I specifically want to mention tonight—the Darling Matilda Way sustainable region. Its committee included Indigenous people, local mayors and people of great integrity and commitment to the outback of western Queensland. They went through the process of looking at projects that would make a real difference to those communities to ensure that they could be sustainable and create jobs. That was against a backdrop of the extreme drought that is making it very hard for many of these communities. They identified two projects for western Queensland. One of them was the Longreach airport upgrade. As we all know, Longreach is the home of the Qantas Founders Museum—an icon in Australia, I would have thought. Under the Sustainable Regions Program the former coalition government committed $6.6 million to that project.

After due process had been gone through, we also said we would provide $5.6 million to establish a bilby centre in Charleville. The proponents of the project were the Murweh Shire Council. The bilby is an endangered species—and it is Australia’s Easter bunny. Through their great initiative, ideas and enthusiasm the people of the Murweh Shire Council put forward that project in good faith. It was approved by the former coalition government but it now appears that the Rudd government have decided they will not fund it. I call on the minister to look at the Sustainable Regions Program. Following an electoral redistribution the Longreach airport will be funded under the Sustainable Regions Program. Why has the minister approved that? Because it is in the seat of Flynn. But the minister has not approved the bilby centre in Charleville because it is in the seat of Maranoa. That is grossly unfair. To use the minister’s own words, it verges on a rort. I call on him to look at the Sustainable Regions Program and the socioeconomic circumstances of the community out there. He will see that this is a project he must support. If he puts the politics aside he will find that the hard work that has gone on over the last three years should be supported by the government. The bilby is an endangered species in this country. If this minister does not think the bilby is worthy of being celebrated and worthy of being a species to have for many years into the future so that we can tell its story to the children and the people who visit western Queensland then he is out of touch with reality and is becoming blatantly political.

I want to touch on the issue of the so-called luxury tax on four-wheel drives. In western Queensland the roads are not like the Hume Highway—they do not have four lanes divided down the middle. They are often a narrow stretch of bitumen but more often they are a gravel road that has been graded—and you might see a grader once every couple of years. On these long, lonely country roads you find tourists and you also find local people visiting their local communities—women taking their children to the school bus or going to town for the local shopping—and they use four-wheel drives not as a luxury but as a necessity.

Certainly there are some four-wheel drives that are made in Australia but, when you put them to the test on some of the outback roads in my electorate, I can assure you that they do not stand up to some of the ‘real four-wheel drives’, which I know are made overseas. If you go to any mining community you will find that the mining companies and the people who live out there are into real four-wheel drives which are built on a chassis, wide wheel based and quite often diesel powered or petrol powered. They are vehicles that suit the environment. We do need these vehicles and they are not a luxury.

When we were in government we funded some four-wheel drive troop carriers under the Regional Partnerships program for the little kids out at Windorah, Birdsville, Bedourie and Yaraka. They do not have a subsidised urban transport system that is funded by taxpayers. They do not have buses and trains and a half-hourly air service between the major capital cities. They often have to go 300 or 400 kilometres just to interact with other kids or go to a swimming lesson if there happens to be a swimming pool in another community. These troop carriers were funded under the Regional Partnerships program. They did have a little community bus that had been provided by, I think, the Barcoo Shire Council. But I can assure you that, on those 300- or 400-kilometre open dirt roads, those little minibuses just do not see the year out—and the member for Kennedy would know this very well because he shares the sort of electorate that I represent. That was not a rort. That was looking after little children. Those communities often used those buses to take the women of those towns to the larger regional centres so they could attend a mobile breast cancer screening unit on a yearly basis. Those women would have been denied the opportunity to travel to those regional towns had we as a government not funded those troop carriers through the Regional Partnerships program. They were not a luxury. They were an absolute necessity for the benefit of children, women, families and communities.

I want to touch on one other issue before I conclude, and that is the issue of what was or was not in the budget for our senior citizens and our pensioners. We are a lucky country. We are resource rich. We have a strong economy. Our very birthright makes us some of the luckiest people on this earth. So I find it appalling, when we can put $40 billion aside into a fund for some time in the future—possibly to be used as a slush fund—that we cannot find one or two billion dollars to increase the basic pension rate of our senior citizens. The government had the opportunity through a Senate inquiry to respond to that. The work had been done and it could have been in this year’s budget.

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