Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2008-2009 and the related bills and, in doing so, at the outset will make a few observations about the budget itself before dealing in some detail with some of the measures contained in it. It is often said—and it is certainly the case—that a budget tells a story of a government’s priorities. The first budget of a new government, in particular, tells the story and sets the tone for that government. What we have seen in this budget has been illuminating, to say the least. The first observation I would make is that this new government, in preparing this budget, has faced the best budget position in living memory. As it prepared the budget, it faced no net government debt because the previous government left it none. It was left with a huge surplus because the previous government left it one.

As the government have gone about producing the budget, we have seen a number of important things. The first, over the last six months, has been a new Treasurer totally out of his depth. It has been quite obvious—as he has prepared the budget and as he has tried to reconcile what was pledged before the election with what Labor believes in, as well as get across the detail of managing an economy of more than $1 trillion and all the associated complex decisions that affect people’s lives—that he has grappled with all of that with great difficulty. To put not too fine a point on it, at times he has looked like an elephant on ice skates. At times he has looked like someone—and we have all experienced this in our day-to-day lives—who has bought a package of furniture from Ikea, got it home, started to lay out all the pieces on the floor, found the allen key and all of the bits to get it together and, after grabbing the instructions, has found they are in the wrong language but has tried to put it together anyway and has become more and more frustrated. When he is doing the job of the Treasurer of the country, that affects everyone’s day-to-day lives.

When it came to budget night, when we actually saw the product of the federal Treasurer’s work of the last six months, it was quite obvious that in this budget there were cobbled together a number of competing and inconsistent priorities. You could almost divide it into thirds. One-third of the budget dealt with the things Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, and Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, copied from the previous government. The most obvious of those was the tax cuts. The previous speaker spoke of them as ‘our tax cuts’, meaning the new government’s tax cuts. I hope he does not really believe that, but the fact that those tax cuts were copied is a good thing. That is one of the few good things about the budget. What worries members on this side and what worries so many Australian families and small businesses is not the things the Treasurer copied from the previous government but the things he is copying now from his colleagues. Another big aspect of the budget was a whole range of decisions, announcements and measures that had not been mentioned prior to the election. The alcopops tax is just one. The increase in the Medicare surcharge is another. Fuelwatch is another that I mention by way of illustration. I will come back to those in some detail in a moment.

The third aspect of the budget contained a number of pre-election promises that the Labor Party had made in the lead-up to last year’s election. Of course, it is quite right and proper that they meet those commitments, but what is alarming, as you examine the detail of some of those commitments—and the story is the same as you go through page after page of the federal budget—is that the election promises were designed to survive until election day only. As this new government has come to grapple with actually implementing a promise, converting it into a policy that is operational and that will work and that will be sustainable, it has been quite clear over the months leading up to the budget, and even more starkly clear since budget night, that this government has a chaotic policy implementation strategy. I will come back to those aspects a bit later in the course of this debate.

But first of all are those items that were not mentioned before the election. The government has decided that the Medicare levy surcharge should be raised—in fact, doubled. What that will do, on the government’s own figures, will be to force nearly 500,000 people out of private health insurance. The private health industry itself has varying estimates of around double that amount, but for the purposes of this debate let us just stick with the government’s own budget figures, a costed Treasury policy outcome that says that as a result of the government’s decision 485,000 people currently holding private health insurance will cease paying their premiums, will join public hospital queues and will leave those with private health insurance facing higher premiums. At a policy level this is a recipe to increase the private health insurance premiums of every single Australian holding private health insurance. At the same time, it is a recipe to increase the pressure massively on public hospitals.

In my electorate of Casey, an outer suburban Melbourne electorate—and I know my friend and colleague next to me, the member for Fadden, has an electorate in the outer suburbs of Brisbane—around half my electors have private health insurance. Many of them, particularly older Australians—who barely scored a mention in the budget I must say—have been paying those premiums not just for years but for decades. And, now that they are faced with not a possible premium rise but a certain premium rise of some magnitude over the next few years, it will make it harder and harder for them to make their weekly budgets add up.

This decision also goes to the motives of the government. We are now told by the Treasurer, the health minister and the Prime Minister that this policy decision was an obvious one that needed to be taken. There is only one problem: it was so obvious that it was never mentioned by those opposite before the election. That of course nails the point: it was not thought of after the election; it was, by their own admission now, something that they thought of prior to the election but concealed from every Australian voter before the election. It is classic Labor agenda: first, an attack on private health insurance. An attack on private education is sure to follow, because so much of what Labor said in the 12 months leading up to the election denied so many things they had publicly stood up for in the 11 years of opposition before their final year. And now in this first budget we see the beginnings of some of the true Labor agenda that was concealed from the Australian people. That will not be forgotten as those premium rises come in.

We have seen populist decisions like the alcopop tax, which is designed to raise $3 billion more, yet of course just a fraction of that is planned to be spent on health campaigns, with no thought whatsoever given to a wider strategy dealing with the switching to other products that we are seeing already. It is a policy conceived in a rush after the election and a policy without substance to back it up.

Most spectacularly, over the last week and the days since budget night, we have seen the true decision-making priorities and processes of the government with respect to Fuelwatch. Hasn’t it been illuminating? We all know what happened prior to the election. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer ran around the country saying the price of petrol was too high and that they were going to do something about it. Then, after the election, it became quite clear that they thought, ‘We need some sort of response—petrol prices are high; we said we’d do something about it.’ And they grabbed the discredited FuelWatch system from Western Australia, thinking it would be a fig leaf to cover the fact that they had thought of nothing and had no plan. And when they sent that plan down for analysis by four senior departments—independent departments with hardworking public servants who have just one role: to serve the Australian people and give an impartial appraisal of any policy proposal—and the advice came back, the fig leaf turned out to be a gum leaf and they were terribly exposed. On hearing the news that Fuelwatch would not only not result in reductions in petrol prices at the bowser but actually force up the price of petrol, what did the new government do? They did not say, ‘Now that we have that advice we can’t possibly go ahead with it.’ No. What the government did was to deliberately and callously decide to go ahead with the policy in the full knowledge that not only would it not bring down petrol prices but it would put up prices for the very people they piously pretend to care about. That is what the government decided to do.

All over Australia there are motoring organisations, like the RACV in my home state of Victoria, that have pointed out that FuelWatch has not worked in Western Australia. In Melbourne, on average, there have been lower prices. The discounting that occurs between Sunday and Tuesday gives motorists wanting to get petrol at a cheaper price that opportunity. Thousands queue up for it. The RACV is an independent motoring organisation. It was quite happy to criticise the previous government. It will be quite happy to criticise this government. It has one interest—that of motorists. If the RACV and all the other motoring organisations had thought Fuelwatch would work, they would have advocated it. This Prime Minister and Treasurer got advice from their most senior public servants and when it came in, saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ they thought, ‘We’ll do it anyway; we don’t have a care for the motorists; we care more about the stunt.’ So we have Fuelwatch. What we really need for this government—and it is starting to happen so early—is ‘spin watch’ and ‘stunt watch’. That has been the enduring message out of the last week.

A sensible Prime Minister and Treasurer would admit that they had got it wrong. But this Prime Minister, we have learnt, cannot be wrong. He can never be wrong. Instead, he should embrace a 5c cut in excise. It is a sensible policy. It is a policy that disproportionately helps those in outer suburban areas, in electorates like Casey and Fadden, where working families have to drive longer distances and so often need two cars. They are paying, in some cases, family petrol bills of hundreds of dollars a week.

The other aspects of the budget I mentioned earlier were those that deal with policy promises made by those opposite prior to the last election. Even with them we can see that it was the stunt and the spin that was in mind, never the worth of the policy. In the few minutes left available I will mention two in the area of education. The first example is the notorious computers-in-schools policy. We all remember the Prime Minister saying he would put a computer on the desk of every secondary student in years 9, 10, 11 and 12. As the months have gone on, it has become increasingly clear that no thought was given to how these computers could actually be made to work. There was no thought about the maintenance costs, let alone the power upgrades that are needed, the cabling upgrades and all the other on-costs—no thought whatsoever. One principal said to me, ‘I have 25 students in a portable classroom with one power point.’ The computers will turn up in the boxes. I am sure Labor MPs will turn up and smile for the photo opportunity, then wave and disappear. And it will be left to the school communities to get these computers to work.

The Minister for Education has been on notice about this problem since December and, like her Prime Minister, she can never be wrong! In December, state premiers and state ministers informed this new government that there had been no costing to actually make the computers work—that is, the promise was to deliver them; there was no interest in getting them working. Western Australian Premier Carpenter has since put the cost at $3 billion. There has been another COAG meeting and a monumental decision from this new minister, which was: ‘We’ll think about it and we’ll tell you in November.’ That will be exactly, and quite fittingly, a year after that policy was announced—announced with just one day in mind, election day 2007, and no school in mind and no school student in mind.

The other central education policy was Trades Training Centres in Schools. This was announced by the now Prime Minister in his budget reply in 2007. The promise, which of course sounds great, was to provide a trade training centre to all 2,650 secondary schools around Australia. It sounds great, until you actually look at the figures and what they mean. Each school will get a grant sometime in the next 10 years—between now and 2018—of a minimum of $500,000, a maximum of $1.5 million and an average of $900,000. It will be a trade training centre only because a Labor member will turn up and put a sign on the woodwork room, the metalwork room or the hospitality unit and say it is a trade training centre. But that spread of money and that scale will not create a trade training centre. This policy is destined for chaos. The minister knows it and those opposite know it—and if they do not know it then they will experience it. A student at a school that is doing hospitality might want to do automotive training. Where does that student do the automotive training? The sensible policy response was the Australian technical colleges.

In my final few minutes I want to address this point, because this is one opportunity for those opposite in their party room to say: ‘I think we got this wrong. This might’ve been a very popular policy for the election, but when you think it through this policy will not have scale.’ Delivering a grant of that magnitude sometime in the next 10 years will not create a trade training centre and will not make the students job ready. Critically, there will not be business involvement at the board level to provide some of those great pathways into local jobs in the very communities where the students live. I say this in the final minute: in their heart of hearts, those opposite know that Australian technical colleges are a better option. They provide scale, they centre the funding, they have local business involvement—which those opposite scoff about, although that does not surprise me—and they can work. If those opposite backflipped on this, we would not criticise them; we would applaud them. But if they do not then they will see that this will not work—it will not work for a second. Like the computers in schools, it will be left to them to explain how it actually works and left to them to explain to school communities why they are doing fundraising events to pay for the costs the Minister for Education did not think of.

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