Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4). It certainly has been interesting to watch the theatre over the past week. We see a government tearing itself apart—not focused on the needs of the people of Australia, not focused on our future, but busy fighting amongst themselves over the leadership of their political party. We see a Prime Minister who has lost the trust of the Australian people. We see a Prime Minister whose word is not considered fair dinkum by most Australians. They have seen the promise the Prime Minister made that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led. They saw the promise that the government made to the member for Denison in relation to gambling reform. They saw the promised east Timor solution. On all of these issues, statements were clearly made and clearly articulated by the Prime Minister—an actual statement put not only in words but in writing with the member for Denison, promising that the Prime Minister, as a precondition to her forming a government, would support mandatory precommitment on poker machines. And what happened? As soon as it suited this Prime Minister, she abandoned that promise and we were left with just another example of how this Prime Minister cannot be trusted.

We also see that the Australian people cannot trust this Prime Minister and this government with money. Before us today we have appropriation bills, and the theme of my contribution today will be the endless waste and mismanagement of this government, because whenever this government tries to fix something it seems to get worse. Whenever this government has a new scheme to save us money, we seem to end up deeper in debt. When this government plans to save the planet, we find that our jobs in our factories and in our businesses start moving offshore. Of course this is just a political game for the government with the aim of clinging to power just a little longer. But, for the people I represent, the government's dysfunction and mismanagement is having a real impact on day-to-day living. Full-time, well-paid jobs are more difficult to find because employers are hesitant about the future, and interest rates are higher than they need to be because of the actions of this government. The actions of this government through new taxes are eating into family budgets and, on top of all that, the impact of the carbon tax is yet to be realised.

To give you an example of how out of touch this government is, we discovered recently that the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry which was allocated more than $100 million through these bills, recently spent $77,627 on rebranding. Consultants encouraged the department to change its mission statement to exclude the words 'agriculture', 'fisheries' and 'forestry'. Is there anything more absurd than to have a rebranding exercise that removed the words 'agriculture', 'fisheries' and 'forestry'? The farmers and fishermen in my electorate do not care how the department is branded. What they want is freedom from a carbon tax and some degree of confidence that the government understands and respects the work that they do.

Of course, we know this government has failed also in the area of border protection policy, with an additional cost of over $330 million in this year alone. When the Rudd Labor government was elected in 2007, illegal immigration was barely a blip on the political radar or on the budget papers due to the Howard government's strong border protection policies. But, when the Labor government started to roll back the coalition's border protection policies in favour of a policy proudly authored by the now Prime Minister, the boats started arriving and costs started to grow—costs that are being met by the taxpaying men and women of Australia. The additional estimates released by the government recently show a blow-out of a third of the budget in asylum seeker costs: some $866 million to 2014-15. This is almost $560 million more than the figure released in MYEFO only two months ago. The immigration budget now is $2.7 billion for this year alone. Processing and detaining boat arrivals has become a multibillion dollar task which is draining funds away from more productive tasks.

The government would not have had to rip $2.4 billion out of private health insurance if it had not dismantled the Howard government's strong border protection policies. The irony of the government's wasteful spending is that the Prime Minister promised before the last election that she would maintain spending restraint, yet everywhere you look there are cost blow-outs. Unfortunately, we have come to realise just what a promise from this Prime Minister is worth and we now know a promise from this Prime Minister is worth absolutely nothing. The member for Griffith knows the value of a promise by this Prime Minister. He knows more than anyone.

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