George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

You certainly did criticise it. You claimed it was a rort and all the rest of. The reality is that that was a tourism benefit for Tasmania which the Labor Party were opposed to, so shame on them. I want to speak on the appropriation bill and the associated bills. These bills are really the mop and bucket that we have with this budget. They are the broom, the scrubbing brush and the dustpan which are required to clean up the mess left behind by six years of Labor waste and incompetence.

There is a well-established political cycle in this country. A Labor government comes in and takes a perfectly good economy and a perfectly good budget and goes about trashing them. That is what we saw throughout the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd debacle—waste and incompetence, throwing money around, hoping that if they gave away enough free money they would have more people voting for them. Eventually people saw through that. They saw that Labor was breaking the bank, trashing the house and booking of the bills to a debit that would be paid by the next generation. The Australian people took out some of the trash on election night. It was a pretty full wheelie bin that night. We all know that even after the wheelie bin was emptied by the electoral garbage truck, that the house would still be left in somewhat of a mess. That is why the Liberal-National government made sombre commitments to the Australian people before the election.

We promised we would stop the boats, a problem created by Labor and the Greens when they were in office. We have fixed it already with our policies, which Labor and the Greens said would not work. We are stopping the boats, even though the rudderless Leader of the Opposition cannot bring himself to admit it.

We promised we would axe the carbon tax. That is an easy promise we thought we would be able to achieve by now. You would think we would be able to achieve it, particularly given that the Labor Party—and we have members of the Labor Party opposite smiling and laughing about it—promised themselves in their flyers that they were going to scrap the carbon tax. In fact, they said it had been scrapped. But now, no, they are voting against scrapping it. They are clinging onto the carbon tax in the Senate like a one-year-old clinging onto its gran's security blanket.

Most importantly, we promised that we would clean up Labor's mess by getting the budget back under control. That is what we are doing, even though Labor is doing its best to hamper the clean-up crew. We promised that we were going to build the roads and infrastructure of the 21st century. Of all of the measures outlined in this budget, the unprecedented investment in infrastructure is what will help my electorate the most. Of all the feedback that I have ever received as a member of parliament, through emails, phone calls, letters and talking to people face-to-face in the street and at different events, by far the biggest issue and the most raised issue is the Bruce Highway, followed closely by the local roads in general.

Queensland is a very large state. Our road network is critical—particularly, the new 1,700 kilometres of the Bruce Highway, which is a major arterial road connecting all the coastal regions. The Bruce Highway package, the $6.7 billion that we are going to invest—and a lot of that funding is contained over the forward estimates as outlined in the budget—includes projects like the Mackay ring road. The Mackay ring road is an interesting infrastructure piece because Labor talked about it a lot when they were in power but they never did anything about it. They actually tried to tell the public that it was in the budget, but when we went through the figures it was not. In fact, that was exposed in Senate estimates at the end of the Gillard road, when Senator Ian MacDonald actually questioned the head of Regional Development Australia about it and what was there for it. We found out that nothing was actually allocated to the Mackay ring road. This budget includes the dollars—over half a billion dollars—and it includes the dates. In 2016 we are going to start construction. That is what people want to know.

We have $20 million from the federal government and another $5 million from the states to do the detailed planning and preservation. There is actually $11 million in the budget for 2014-15. We have $428 million that is going to go to that $540 million total, with some state funds, to do the construction of stage 1 of the Mackay ring road. That is going to be vitally important for the Mackay area. It is going to be the largest piece of infrastructure we have ever seen in that area, and it is going to lift the local economy in leaps and bounds. We have had a downturn in the mining sector—thank you very much, Labor Party, partly because of your carbon tax and your mining tax—but now, on the back of that downturn, we are able to offer this big infrastructure project and get all the construction jobs flowing from that.

In the northern part of my electorate, the Sandy Gully Bridge is another important piece of infrastructure. It floods every time we get a bit of rain in the Bowen area. There is a $46 million federal contribution to that $57 million project that is going to get some state funds as well. This year there is $2.5 million dollars allocated for the detailed design work. Yellow Gin Creek Bridge, also in the north of my electorate, will get a $36 million federal contribution, along with some state funds. There will be up to $45 million to upgrade that bridge and flood-proof it. Again, for the detailed design work there is $4 million in this federal budget for 2014-15. The rest of it for both those projects, Sandy Gully and Yellow Gin, will be in the outlying years of the forward estimates.

Also completing work in this coming financial year is the Vantassel Street to Cluden duplication in the Townsville end of my electorate, and a minor upgrade to the Burdekin Bridge, which is definitely something that is needed. There will be continuing funds for fixing up black spots and increasing overtaking lanes. That is vitally important but there are also other local projects that the Liberal-National government is delivering on in my electorate.

We are shifting the junior soccer grounds and assisting in that exercise with a $1 million contribution. It is a million dollars that the Labor Party promised back in 2010—2010, and yet it never, ever happened. Guess what? We are now delivering it, because the program that they were going to fund it out of had wound up, so we have gone and found additional money in the budget to keep that project alive.

The Mackay gymnastics centre will be given an upgrade, creating a new extension to their existing premises with $750,000. We will have mobile CCTV units given to the local council with assistance of $200,000. We are going to light up some of the inner city car parks with an extra $200,000 to make them safer for late-night shoppers and workers who leave at night. There are Green Army projects that are doing excellent work with the Eco Barge in the Whitsundays and also work on the Don River.

North Queensland is the economic engine room of this country. We make a major contribution to the economy through agriculture, tourism, and mining. Regional centres like Mackay service the mining projects of Central Queensland, in particular the Bowen Basin. Skills training and education are an important part of providing that service through trades learning and through universities.

While the 400-kilometre long electorate of Dawson does not technically include a university at this stage, we do have many full-time students as residents. CQ University's Mackay campus is only a few 100 metres from the southern boundary of the electorate and James Cook University is only a few hundred metres from our northern boundary. And students in North Queensland, who are probably less exposed to the lies, deceit and the exaggeration in the southern media, are scratching their heads when they see Bill Shorten's protégés in the far left movement bashing police and squealing into a microphone about how no one will be able to afford to go to university anymore.

The students who actually took the time to educate themselves, instead of just printing out the union lines, listening to the Leader of the Opposition and then taking to the streets to chant the misinformation to the TV cameras, know that anyone can afford to go to university. No-one has to pay their portion of university expenses

up-front—although they do have to pay their compulsory union fees up-front, which the other side brought in. No-one has to start repaying their student loans until they start earning more than $50,000 a year. That is pretty fair. That has got to be fair in anyone's books.

When you take into consideration the higher incomes earned by university graduates—around 75 per cent more than a nongraduate—paying half the course fees is a pretty darn good investment. You don't have to put your money down until the investment starts paying dividends.

The 'I want everything for free' sense of entitlement from the students we see revolting in the streets must come across as even more revolting to the hairdressers, the waitresses, the mechanics, and all the other non-university graduates who have to contribute through their tax dollars to university education. The protesting students are not happy about only half of their university fees area being paid by those lower-paid workers.

This budget does not stop anyone from going to university. In fact, it encourages more people to take on further education through subbachelor training by giving them access to the same system of student loans as university systems. Further, education providers will be required to divert 20 per cent of any additional revenue they receive from deregulation for student places to Commonwealth scholarships and other support for disadvantaged students.

Those Commonwealth scholarships will create major new support for regional students to go to university. I am proud to say students in North Queensland have not been led astray by the hype and hysteria propagated by the opposition leader. All the bleating in the world will not turn Labor's scurrilous lies about education, health, and pensioners into reality.

Hysteria about cuts from those opposite could easily have been hosed down by reading the budget. Even comparing it with Labor's last budget in forward estimates this budget, represented by these bills, actually increases school funding to record highs. This Liberal-National budget invests record recurrent funding of $64½ billion in government and non-government schools over the next four years—that is, $1.2 billion more than the previous government would have spent over the forward estimates—to ensure schools in all states and territories receive extra funding.

It is a similar story in health, where the campaign of deceit from the Labor Party runs contrary to the facts. The facts, which show that funding to states for hospital services increases by more than nine per cent, or $1.3 billion a year, next year; in 2015-16, by more than nine per cent, or $1.4 billion, a year; in 2016-17, by more than nine per cent, or $1½ billion, a year. In 2017-18, it goes up by more than six per cent, or $1.1 billion, a year. In Queensland, hospital funding will increase each year, from $3.1 billion in 2014-15, to $3.8 billion in 2017-18.

So even more scurrilous are the lies that have been told about pension cuts. Those opposite should hang their heads in shame for the way they have scared pensioners with their alarmist campaign of deceit. The pension will continue to rise twice a year every year. Poor old pensioners are being wheeled out and taken for a ride by all those opposite. The way that Labor and the Greens kick the pensioners around like a political football says a lot about how they treat the generation that created the wealth that Labor squandered. None of those opposite—not one—has mentioned the fact that they are blocking the repeal of the carbon tax, which is the most unnecessary impost on every household and family, including pensioners. This campaign of deceit and lies about the budget has scared pensioners, it has incited violence amongst the students and it has distracted people from what is really important: getting this budget back under control while we still actually can. This bill and this budget delivers on that most important promise we made to the Australian people. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context