Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great idea in principle, and your electorate may well have benefited from it. There certainly have been places in my electorate—and Ungarie is a great example—that got basically a tin shack and it cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. The acronym BER means Building the Education Revolution, but in some parts of my electorate it stood for ‘builder’s early retirement’ fund because that is what it was. There was so much waste and mismanagement. A classic case was at Hillston, where they already had the steel girders up and it cost $1 million to put the bricks up. Quite frankly, it was a complete waste of money. As I said, it is a good idea in principle. There have been so many fanciful projects that are thought up in some prime ministerial thought bubble or some Labor caucus focus group. They have good ideas but they are not actually able to roll them out in an economic, sensible and practical way, which is what most everyday Australians have to do.

I have to reiterate that not many of those on the Labor side have run businesses—a few, but not many, and certainly not as many as on our side of the chamber. If you run a business you cannot spend more money than you bring in. If you do, you are going to have to pay it back. The trouble with Labor is that someone will have to pay it back but it is going to be the Australian public who have to pay it back. It is going to be a fiscally responsible Liberal-National government which will end up paying it back. With power bills set to rise, petrol going up and everyday costs of living, the pressures are just enormous.

Yesterday we heard that this Labor government cannot even find $5 million—it cannot even write a cheque for $5 million—to provide the Australian War Memorial with the additional funding it requires to keep its doors open. I think that this might be some way of forcing people to pay admission. I think that is the modus operandi here. That is the ulterior motive. But to not be able to find $5 million in a budget of $350 billion to me is quite extraordinary. The War Memorial stands as a shrine to our fallen, our heroes, our bravest of the brave. If the War Memorial needs $5 million the War Memorial should receive $5 million. Just write the cheque, put it in the post or, better still, go down and present it to General Cosgrove, the Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial. There should be no question about this. The Prime Minister says this is the year of decision and delivery. She has got the Ds right, but it should really be ‘debt and delay’. Just think about that. Everything with this government is about debt. Everything is about delay—putting it off to a review committee or putting it off to a focus group. It is unbelievable. If the War Memorial requires $5 million in additional funding, I say, ‘Write the cheque.’ This is a no-brainer. It should not even be questioned.

We also see that we have another rollout of tenders for buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. That was announced by the water minister after the interim findings from the inquiry by the Standing Committee on Regional Australia into the impact—how this is going to hurt the social and economic welfare of the people who live in the basin.

The chair, the Independent member for New England, Tony Windsor, announced three interim findings. The very first one was about putting more strategic buybacks in place and reducing that Swiss cheese effect. The second one was about putting in place measures to help the taxation needs of the irrigation corporations, because if they were to put some of the infrastructure in place they would be slugged with a huge tax bill, which of course nobody wants. The third finding was to focus on not wasting water in overbank flooding of wetlands and icon sites which require environmental watering.

I go back to the first finding, relating to the Swiss cheese effect of the small strategic buybacks. The finding came about because we were discovering that too many farmers were being forced to sell their water because of debt pressures, and here we had stranded assets—you would see a patch of green and then three patches of brown. A lot of the irrigation companies were worried that they would not be able to service their customers because they had a bare paddock here and a ride paddy there. Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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