Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As explained by the member for Lowe, the International Monetary Agreements Amendment Bill 2009 is fairly routine legislation, but it is worth recording in my speech some items from the explanatory memorandum. We are advised that the purpose of this bill is to amend the International Monetary Agreements Act 1947 to alter the definition of the International Monetary Fund articles of agreement, known as the fund agreement, and the definition of World Bank articles of agreement, known as the bank agreement, to include any amendments of the relevant articles of agreement that enter into force for Australia without the need for further legislative changes when these amendments are made.

That is a fairly significant move nevertheless because the parliament is virtually authorising executive government to carry out matters related to this area without, one might say, further consultation. Nevertheless, we are assured that, within this area also, the agreements which are schedules to the act constitute international treaties for Australia and as such, irrespective of the requirement for legislation, any amendments to the treaties will still require tabling in parliament for consideration by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. This committee operates quite well and it will in fact probably be sufficient to maintain some oversight of the executive in this regard.

Nevertheless, because this matter deals with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and considering the fact that the government virtually used statements from the IMF as absolute justification for things such as their stimulus package and that it is an established and public fact that the IMF continues to campaign for countries such as Australia to borrow and spend money for this purpose, it is of interest that the IMF’s interest is not in Australia; its interest is that, by Australia borrowing and spending money, it might just get the world over its problems. I know that is not hugely significant, but it is significant and questions must be levelled at the intentions of the IMF being so supportive of what the Australian government is doing in circumstances where it is questionable that such stimulus expenditure of borrowed money is in the long-term interests of Australians.

It is an absolute fact that the distribution of $900 cheques totalling, I think, some $24 billion, as urged by the IMF, has resulted in expenditure and some savings, but the expenditure was typically directed in two directions. Because of the nature and marketing of consumer goods in Australia it was primarily directed at imported goods. The IMF would say, ‘Three cheers for that; you are buying imported goods from other countries and helping them out in their circumstances as they relate to the global financial crisis.’ China was, no doubt, a major recipient, with flat-screen televisions and products of that nature. So was the Indonesian tourist industry, as people discovered that 900 bucks got them a round trip to Bali, with a few days to spend there. So, there again, Australia obviously did its best for the international community. I am not sure that future generations will thank the government for the debts incurred and the interest that will accumulate in the early years before there are in fact any repayment possibilities whatsoever.

I have left out the other important bodies, the Westfield Group and others, which are very supportive. They are property developers, big investors in shopping centres and, for that, we are extremely grateful. But they have always shown their support for the Labor Party when one reads the list of donors to their efforts during the election campaign. Without their close association with property developers the New South Wales Labor Party would have no idea what to do. All those who have been loyal have been rewarded by that initiative but, even with the building initiatives, one can only wonder how come young people are attending schools in a new covered assembly area, or a new gymnasium, when there was insufficient money to meet the entire demand for science and library facilities?

I have a very proactive school in my electorate, Albany Grammar School. They have gone in the last, I think, 10 years from nothing to about 600 students, demonstrating how Australian parents are determined to spend money, which they sometimes have great difficulty in acquiring, to give their kids a good education. They wanted one of these science facilities; they were able to employ teachers with the qualifications to teach science, but they missed out.

Today we heard the Minister for Education explaining, ‘We are sorry; we were only going to have 500 science and language centres.’ I do not know how that figure was arrived at, but the 500 did not include Albany. The reality is that that need is not being met in that particular community, with a population of some 30,000 people, with a surrounding catchment area of probably three times that number. So too bad for those kids, notwithstanding that the teaching resource was available. In terms of my support for their application for funding, I wrote to the minister drawing that to her attention.

Notably, the BER, the Building the Education Revolution, is all about building; it is not about teachers. Of course, that is a serious problem. It is nice to have some flash classrooms but, of course, if you have nobody who can teach the kids within that facility then it is of little assistance. Notably, there has been a massive increase in costs due to this program, the BER, recommended by the IMF—just to make sure I stick to the subject. The minister was at pains to try to defend it again, but the reality is that the simple act of constructing school buildings has engendered massive cost increases.

The Leader of the House, Mr Albanese, stood up as acting minister for the Minister for Education, when she was absent in Israel, and attacked the school principal, who had publicly said that she did not like the quote that was being accepted to build, as it turned out, two classrooms and two storerooms in her school, because she had had a quote of $150,000 which was, apparently, much less than the actual cost. I might add that a later quote was for a larger building. But the one referred to by the Leader of the House was this particular quote. He said it was for only $120,000 and then listed all the things that were left out, trying to belittle the applicant. He mentioned the actual tenderer, the building company. It is national. In fact, it has an agency here in Canberra and it makes transportable buildings. Transportable buildings have been the only solution to a two-year time frame from government decision to completion, whereby most of these buildings can be provided to schools. So I rang the tenderer. He said, ‘$120,000 is right, but we had options in there for another $18,000, some of which the minister said had not been included.’ That took the price to approximately $150,000. That is exactly what the school principal mentioned.

But Minister Albanese went well beyond that. He listed things like furniture, site works and the connection of electricity and sewerage. Interestingly, the original quote included no requirement for toilets, handbasins and sewerage. But when he had finished, he added up the cost of this delivery and it totalled $350,000. When I approached the builder, who gets no work in New South Wales, and who runs, as I said, a highly recognised business—he is not some fly-by-night—he could not get any quotes. Do you know why? Because the New South Wales government had two identified suppliers to initially build a small number of additional schools that were going to be needed under the budget arrangements of the New South Wales government.

When the flood of cash came along under the BER, did they go back to tender? Did they open the field up to the best competition available in New South Wales? No. They just told these two companies they could share the business. What a bonanza for them: ‘Write your own cheque.’ They had no capacity whatsoever to do it, so they got steel bases built in Victoria—a great help to the New South Wales industry, or the ‘tradies’ as the minister calls them. Those steel bases were then transported, by truck, to Queensland where the classrooms, the roof, the lighting and whatever else were put on, and then they were trucked back into New South Wales. And you wonder why they are so expensive! In that process, a particular well-established builder, with evidence on his website of classrooms of very good standard, could not get anything. That is what we are confronted with.

It is all right for the minister to get up here and say, as she did today, ‘I challenge you to tell me we should not have spent money on 30 schools in your electorate, Mr Backbencher.’ That was not the criticism. The criticism was that there was enough money to do twice as much. On the figures that I went through on this particular example, and it is all in Hansard, I could not get past $178,000, and I am a frustrated builder of many years. I know what things cost. I made a proper inquiry. I went to the IKEA website to cost the furniture, and that would be at retail when, I would imagine the New South Wales education department could get it for much less. That is the point I make. If that is the standard of estimates that were being delivered to this government by the New South Wales education department, there is a real issue therein.

I was interested in some of the other remarks made by the member for Lowe. He talked about toxic assets and toxic debts, which the IMF wants to tackle. Those were the result of the horrendous growth of the derivatives industry. In the end, one could argue that they were virtually trading in fresh air. I do not know if anybody else listens to NewsRadio or the BBC at night-time; I do frequently, and there has been almost a play put together about the crash of Lehman Brothers. It is a drama, and all the interviews and everything that happened in all of that are well worth listening to. But here were all these major banking concerns all running around betting with one another—and I know a bit about horseracing; I have a couple of horses in work at the moment—and they were betting in a way that no punter on a racecourse would even consider. They were putting down in their books that they had all these assets—’toxic debt’, to use the words of the member for Lowe—all derivative based. Everybody was betting that they could find someone more stupid than themselves, and they were blowing up assets that virtually did not exist and always looking for a new deal.

Why do I raise that specifically and why do I quote the member for Lowe? It is because we have got one of those in this parliament at the moment. It is called an emissions trading scheme. It is a process by which people are going to bet on fresh air. I guess that one day they will be told, ‘We did it because the IMF said.’ It is going to give renewed respectability to the hedge funds and the screen jockeys, because they can argue that they have gone back into this punting regime to save the planet. How do you save the planet by allowing a totally unrelated group—their only relationship to energy consumption is their computer and the light overhead—to make profits from the scheme? And who has to pay? BlueScope Steel obviously has to use carbon and burn carbon to make steel, and so they have to go to the marketplace to buy the right to pollute—and of course we are told by the Treasury modelling, ‘You don’t have to buy the certificates in Australia if they get too dear. Buy them from China.’ China will have plenty, because they are building 20 nuclear power stations, which will give them credits under Kyoto to sell to Australia.

We have already got a problem with steel manufacturing. I read in the media today that all of the specifications for steel profiles that will be used in Gorgon and some of these other manufacturers are not consistent with the profiles manufactured in Australia. It is a sort of reverse non-tariff barrier. Again, maybe it does not matter, because if an ETS is delivered upon BlueScope Steel, then they must pay. And when they pay, the cost of those certificates could be grossly exaggerated or increased, because the hedge funds are in there playing with one another and using the weight of huge volumes of finance to escalate the cost. In other words, while the member for Lowe and, no doubt, the minister who introduced this bill—what is he: the governor of IMF Australia or something like that—were talking up resolving the $3 trillion of debt that the member for Lowe quoted from some acceptable publication, the IMF were talking about making sure that this never happens again. Increased regulation over the banking sector and the finance sector: I agree with that. Australia had it, which is one of the reasons that our financial institutions are not as badly off.

We saw what happened with the price of oil; it went through the roof. Yet, when the financial crisis arrived and these people had no more money to play with, the price dropped to one-third. It was not all supply and demand; there was a component of that but not much. It was all about the way they had forced the price up, and we have a debate going on in this parliament that the same thing should apply. I do not know how you explain that to the IMF. They tell us to have economic stimulus, and I have mentioned how that works. They tell us that we, the G20, have to get together and prevent that ever happening again. Yet this government is trying to deliver a new system which the screen jockeys and hedge funds can play with to the expense of Australia. There is no excuse for that.

I have said on other occasions: why have a scheme whereby you license people either with free certificates or at cost to pollute? How does that reduce pollution in Australia? Why let the hedge funds play with that when a simple investment of the $1.7 billion that was handed over the other day could have put high-voltage DC transmission between the Pilbara and the Western Australian network and opened the opportunity to reduce emissions by hundreds of thousands of tonnes that are exerted pumping gas down a pipeline?

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