Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege and a humbling experience to have been chosen by the people living in the electorate of Indi to again be their federal member. I owe them a great debt of gratitude. I will be, as I always have been, fearless in my advocacy of the values and concerns of the people of my electorate. I would also like to put on the record my gratitude to those who helped in my campaign: the Liberal Party members, the thousands of supporters, and of course my long-suffering staff and family.

In many respects it has never been a harder time to be a representative of a rural electorate, and that is because so much that we hold dear is under threat. So many important decisions that need to be made to lay the foundation for future prosperity outside metropolitan areas are not being made and, where they are, they are having dire consequences. Decisions are being made for the whole country, for which our children will suffer through increased taxes. They will bear the significant burden of repaying debt, to pay for disastrous decisions: the huge white elephant of the NBN, the problems and financial cost we will have from illegal immigration when the boats keep coming, and the great big new tax that the Labor Party wants to impose. These are some of our broader challenges. Then there is all the money that is being spent on very expensive sheds and schools which, if I wanted to put one on my farm, would cost at most a fifth of the price. This money will not be available in the future for very important, prudent, good spending and investment in social and built infrastructure in Australia, and we will be paying interest on this very bad spending.

There have been a couple of issues of particular importance to my electorate. We have seen billions of dollars wasted in national programs by the Labor Party. Let us look at a couple of examples. In north-east Victoria, we have had a project worth $600 million to revitalise the main railway line, the Melbourne to Sydney line, between Albury-Wodonga and Melbourne. You would think that when significant funds were spent on upgrading infrastructure there would be improvements, but not only have we had slower services because of 80 danger points; we now have no train services. The train line is so bad that we can no longer have safe train travel. It is almost Monty Python-esque in its absurdity. It would be funny if it were not such a disgraceful example of mismanagement of something as basic as that.

The issue of water is the No. 1 environmental issue for Australia. It is the No. 1 issue for my electorate. Yet we have seen the handling of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan being nothing short of absolute amateurish incompetence. From the outset it was obvious that the government did not care about the basin, because it is a rural issue and they do not really care about the country. When the Labor Party won the 2007 election, it took them 18 months to appoint the MDBA commissioners. It is little wonder that everything is running behind schedule when such delays occurred in the first instance. The coalition had a very sensible $10 billion 10-point plan but the government could not accept that. They had to come up with their own program, and they still do not know where they are heading. We had a good plan that would have returned health to the river, primarily by investing in river communities to ensure that they were able to produce more food with less water. Innovation and investment in better productivity are the sorts of things that help a nation grow its economy and maintain its standard of living—but none of that from the Labor Party.

We foresaw the problems that have engulfed the Labor Party with the release of the draft. We produced an election policy just months ago that called for a full socioeconomic study on the impacts of basin reform. It outlined a plan to get water-saving infrastructure projects back on track, proposed more funding for community adjustment and established a fund to identify and kick-start new projects for sustainable water use. We have seen the Labor Party try to hide behind the Water Act. They say, ‘It’s not really our problem; it’s the Water Act.’ But the reality is that the Howard government had provided for balanced outcomes, and Labor’s position is just another example of their refusal to be grown-up and responsible politicians. Those on the opposite side who form government need to take responsibility for their actions.

The act already requires Labor to engage in a way ‘that optimises economic, social and environmental outcomes’, and the recent outcry and distress from rural communities was because these very outcomes were utterly ignored. The Prime Minister was exposed as engaging in a great election lie when she said,

I am determined we will do what is necessary to implement the Murray-Darling Basin Authority plan.

But now she says:

It would be highly inappropriate for me to announce a government decision at this stage …

The problem is that Labor do not do the hard yakka in the first place. They do not assess the situation. They do not gather all the relevant scientific information and regional data that is required and that is essential to produce a national plan worthy of implementation. This ridiculous rush has resulted in a situation where the Ovens catchment in my electorate will effectively have 70 per cent of its irrigation water cut. This catchment already returns 95 per cent of its 1,804 gigalitres back into the system and currently irrigates only 0.7 per cent of the total water in the Ovens system. So you can see the one-size-fits-all rushed approach has potentially disproportionately disadvantaged a highly efficient and effective and very small irrigation water-using area in the basin.

There is much work to be done, and we are not going to allow the government to get away with this sloppy work. We will not rest until we get a detailed plan which appreciates that the basin is a diverse area, with different needs and uses. The government’s incompetence on water policy mimics what we have seen from the state Labor Party over the last few years. The Labor Party broke their previous election promise not to pipe water north of the divide; but, lo and behold, their great big white elephant, which rips out water from north-east Victoria and delivers it to the city, was built, breaking an election promise. Recently, they have had to stop water coming down the pipe because, lo and behold, it rained. If they did not have an ideologically intransigent position of no more dams, they could have invested the wasted money that has gone on building the pipeline in building dams. We need to be able to understand rainfall patterns in Australia to capture the water when it falls so that we can use it later. Past visionaries in representative positions in parliaments were able to make these decisions, but the Labor Party are incapable of doing so because they have a simple rule: no more dams. It is as was described by one Labor senator: robotic zombies following this mantra.

At Wonthaggi they have proceeded with a desalination plant without even thinking about different options. Kenneth Davidson from the Age has done some very good work in revealing some of the very alarming statistics. The Victorian taxpayer has lost upwards of $3 billion through this project, and this $3 billion to $4 billion at the beginning equates to an extra $11 billion in interest charges over the next three decades. Imagine what better projects this money could have been spent on. In Australia this costs $32 million per gigalitre, which is simply ludicrous when you compare it to $5.5 million per gigalitre for a plant recently announced in Saudi Arabia.

While this is all very dispiriting, of course, it is not a surprise. As I said, they don’t care about country Australia; they don’t care about the issues that matter in non-metropolitan Victoria. It is no surprise that Julia Gillard visited a regional electorate only once in the entire campaign. That is truly telling. Perhaps it mirrors her attitudes to pensioners and the armed forces. It has been reported that she does not think pensioners and those in the armed forces vote Labor, so she has not really cared about policies catering to them. Perhaps she thinks that regional Australians do not vote Labor, they predominantly vote for the coalition, so why should you care about them. She has never pretended to govern for all. She has excelled at the politics of politics, but she has utterly failed in being a visionary. She has utterly failed with every single policy that she has touched. It is the reverse Midas touch, and it is very sad for Australia.

In my own portfolio we have seen some very dismal failures. We know that it is critically important for our economy, for our progress as a nation, to maintain productivity. Essential in productivity is innovation and investment in research and development that underpins that innovation. We have seen a minister who thinks it is okay to slash support in critical areas for Australia’s future like commercialisation and research and development, but sees no object to spending money on wasteful causes. He is the sort of person who takes extreme umbrage and offence and tries to intimidate people when they make this rather obvious and self-evident point.

While I know it is not something he personally wants to introduce, he has lost the plot so badly that he has been lumped with the job of pushing through the visionless this policy of the cash-for-clunkers scheme, which is a shemozzle. Minister Garrett, who represents him in the House of Representatives, does not even know the name of the program. Minister Garrett, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, who is supposed to know all about all the government’s great and wonderful plans to reduce emissions, cannot even tell you how much cash-for-clunkers is going to cost, even though it is plan is to supposedly reduce our carbon emissions. It was a bad idea, it was formed on the run, the whole concept has been discredited internationally and no less than four ministers over the last three weeks have not been able to speak with one voice and get their lines on it right. She should just break this election promise. This is one election promise she should break. Do all the Australian taxpayers a favour and dump this dud.

This would follow, of course, from one of her more spectacular failures—the $1.7 billion blow-out in the Building the Education Revolution. Interestingly, in Victoria only 20 per cent of the buildings have been completed after 15 months. So when you hear the government say that they have saved us from recession, it is all garbage. What they have actually done is hock this nation’s future because if this money was so critical to stimulating the Australian economy why have only 20 per cent of the buildings been completed? What is the continued $100 million a day being borrowed by the government doing to interest rates? It is pushing them up—that is what it is doing. The government are out there in the marketplace competing with business and private individuals for finance and they are pushing the price of interest rates up. It is Australian families who are suffering and who will continue to suffer.

We saw millions of dollars go offshore with the pink batts fiasco when overseas crime gangs came to Australia, registered and then sent money overseas. We have seen the extraordinary waste of money in other mismanaged programs such as the $850 million blow-out the solar homes program, the $300 million wasted on the Green Loans Program, the $50 million wasted on the stimulus advertising, the $14 million wasted on the climate change advertising and the $2 million wasted on the 2020 Summit. That is almost the price of a packet of lollies compared to the sheer volume of funds wasted by this government. It will continue because they have no other solution—if there is a problem, they will just throw money at it.

The reality is that before the Labor Party won in 2007 Australia was engaged in reform through a government that made the difficult decisions. Between 1998 and 2007 Julia Gillard, and those who now sit on the frontbench, opposed every major economic reform of the Howard government, even though we have been fortunate enough to have been beneficiaries of those reforms during the recent financial crisis. Now she is running the most economically incompetent government in living memory. It is a government that has turned a $20 billion surplus into a $57 billion deficit in such a short space of time.

We saw her make a particular election promise to stop the boats but a lot of us knew she was not fair dinkum. She just had to say something to keep people happy and to allay their concerns. She said she would stop the boats, but she did not know how to do it and she really did not care as long as she could make it through the election. She tried to look tough—she even took a marginal seat colleague and a brigade of journalists to tour the harbour on a gunboat. She devised a grand plan for a regional detention centre in East Timor and announced it before discussing it with the East Timorese government.

But what do we have now? A record number of boats are coming to Australia and they are not going to stop, because the carpet has been rolled out. And true to form, the factions in the Labor Party do not want her to stop the boats coming in. They believe we should have an open-door policy. She pretends to talk tough but people are starting to see through the rhetoric and the lies.

One of the worst policies that this government could inflict on Australia—and there is a lot of competition—is the NBN. We have a Prime Minister who says, ‘I believe spending every dollar carefully is important.’ So Madam Prime Minister, where is the cost-benefit analysis of the NBN? What are you saying to the thousands of people who are going to be left behind because you refuse to have a broad and visionary outlook on technology with regard to broadband? Why don’t you allow a full cost-benefit analysis so that people can see how much it will actually cost? What happened to your famous words you said soon after forming government, ‘So let’s draw back the curtains and let the sun shine in, let our parliament be more open than it was before’? And what about, ‘We will be held to higher standards of transparency and reform and it’s in that spirit I approach the task of forming a government’? What a load of rubbish. What an absolute embarrassment. Labor will spend billions of dollars, plunging our nation into debt, just to create a giant monopoly—a white elephant—that will destroy competition, increase the digital divide and increase costs.

That does take the cake, but perhaps it will be outdone by the Prime Minister’s broken promise regarding climate change. What was her solution? Her solution was to frame Kevin Rudd, stab him in the back, take over and then announce the most ridiculous election promise of all time: a citizens assembly. After emphatically ruling out a carbon tax during the election campaign, she is now going to back such a tax. She cannot be taken on her word, because it does not mean anything. There is no track record of actually living up to any promises, and the Australian public are seeing through that. The Australian people deserve something better than—to paraphrase a long-time Labor hero—a political party run by ruthless, robotic machine men who preside over lobotomised zombies. We deserve the vision, the passion, the ideas, the diversity—(Time expired)

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