Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence Industry and Support) Share this | Hansard source

This is a great opportunity for me to really bell the cat and put the last nail in the coffin on the coalition's attempts to portray itself as the better economic manager in this country. That really hasn't been true for a number of decades now. To put this situation in context, look at the reforms that the Hawke-Keating government delivered to us. They really set the platform for the 26 years of unbroken growth that we've had. The Howard government did contribute the institution of APRA but, beyond that, throughout the years, the main thing that they bequeathed to us was structural deficits. In order to address debt-and-deficit issues in the first half of their time in government, they sold off $76 billion of Commonwealth assets—sold off the farm, effectively. That gave you a short-term sugar hit, but, to give you an example of the impacts of that in the long term, we can take the RG Casey Building. They sold that for $200 million. We've now paid $300 million and more in rent on that facility. So, that immediate sugar hit has left us with long-term structural deficit outcomes.

In addition to that, you can then look at what they were able to benefit from with the mining boom. Out of the mining boom they spent money like there was no tomorrow, so we had ridiculous spending initiatives like the baby bonus. Then we come to the dividend imputation measure they introduced. Keating introduced a measure there which tried to eliminate the double-taxation issue that was going on at the time, where the company tax factor was piled on with taxes on the profits from dividends, which was a sound measure. But then what Howard did was allow, in effect, a double dip there. At the time, that resulted in a $550 million hit to the budget. Now we're looking at an $8 billion to $10 billion hit to the budget, and, if you draw a line through that exponential curve, there was going to be a point where the dividend imputation was going to consume the entire federal budget.

This is an unsustainable situation. Somebody has to get out and have the guts and the bravery to get out there in the Australian public and argue the case that this has to be done now for future generations. What this government is doing is intergenerational theft: PAYE taxpayers, all those young workers out there now, are going to be sustaining these people who claim, 'This is because we wanted to be independent of pensions.' Well, it's still government money, whatever you call it, and it's unsustainable. One thing that people have to factor in with that issue is that part of your retirement income will be health costs and aged-care services. The only way we can make that affordable, and not make it a user-pays American-style system—which I'm sure no Australian wants to see—is to be able to afford funding those services. The only way we can do that is to make sure we take the prudent measures Labor has put forward—fiscally responsible and prudent—that will deliver better savings and deficit reduction than the government is offering.

How are we doing that? Removing that dividend imputation is the first part of the story. The rest includes: reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax, what we're doing on trusts, and what we're doing on not giving $80 billion away to big companies and, of course, on the $140 billion giveaway of tax relief to the wealthy. There are so many measures in that that would more than underpin what we want to do to make sure that people in their retirements are well looked-after and that they're not having to pay more—which will eat into their retirement income—on health services.

When I talk about the economic credibility of this government being destroyed, never mind the 30 polls in a row; let's look at the statistics. What we've seen since 2013 is that there's been an extraordinary boom in global trade, domestic commerce and company profits around the world. So there should have been a significant uplift for Australia in that context, and we should have been maintaining our position relative to the rest of the OECD. But what have we seen instead? From 2009 to 2013, Australia's economic growth was close to the top of the 34 richest countries in the OECD. We've now slipped to 23rd in the list.

When you look at productivity, we've now dropped to the lowest level since 2012 in the context of the washout of the GFC. Unemployment has now risen from the level which we were at in 2013. Those one million jobs that the government like to claim they created was the track that should have been happening as a year-on-year average with that economic pick-up, but it has actually been below world trends and a lot of that has been casualised. We are now at one of the highest casualisation rates in the OECD, and that's extremely disturbing. In terms of our jobless rate, in 2013 we were ranked seventh in the OECD; now we're down to 17th. So the government is losing here, and its economic credibility is completely destroyed in the context of how we should be looking at this picture in relation to other like nations.

Then you look at Malcolm Turnbull. He comes into government and we all think he has been wanting to do this job for a long time and so the Prime Minister must obviously have an agenda, but we were sadly disappointed. I am very grateful to the folks at The Marcus Review, who have well documented the thought bubble failures of Malcolm Turnbull since he became Prime Minister. There was what they described in November 2015 as 'super tax episode 1', where Turnbull floated the thought bubble about a super contribution tax rate from 15 per cent to a flat rate 15 per cent discount on the contributor's marginal income tax. That disappeared. He rethought the negative gearing cap in March 2016 and the capital gains tax issue. That disappeared. On 30 March, he talked about building a 'taxation revolution'—another Penrith Park thought bubble in the tradition of Tony Abbott, with all those broken promises. So he has been undoing, effectively, the evolution in our federation of taxation on a more efficient basis. It would have completely destroyed our progressive revolution and evolution in that space. That was an utterly hopeless proposition. I think it was one that he picked up from the former member for Eden-Monaro, who had that as part of his policy proposals, which he set out to the IPA, and that sank without a trace.

In April 2016, he said that the tax revolution was not going to happen, and that was April Fools' Day. So, no doubt, that was very appropriate on 1 April. And then there was 'super tax episode 2', where he tried to outlift Labor by increasing super contribution rates for anybody earning over $180,000. That died. Turnbull thought about building a high-speed rail revolution in 2016, and that died. Then, in May 2016, we had 'super tax episode 3', where he talked about having another go at raising more revenue by fiddling with people's super. That confused everybody, in particular, Julie Bishop, the foreign minister, who was unable to explain that on radio, famously. In May 2016, both the Treasurer and the Prime Minister announced corporate tax cuts over a period of 10 years, which has absolutely no chance of happening. Then the Prime Minister crashed that plane into a mountain. It became a complete disaster when he tried to do an interview on that regarding the costings. In August 2016, he announced that he wanted to change the GST distribution system, and many interpreted that to mean that he was going to improve Western Australia's share of the GST. Actually, that wasn't what was proposed. He left them trying to work out exactly what was being proposed, and we still don't know, frankly.

It's a terrible record of his time in government. At the same time, we all know the 2014 budget was cruel, vindictive. It really hurt the most vulnerable in our community. People think maybe the government have walked away from that. Well, a lot of those things are still floating around in subsequent budgets, like raising the pension age to 70 and trying to cut the energy supplement for our pensioners. Now we see their cuts to education and health, which is, to be clear, the cuts to the funding that was flowing from Labor under the health and hospital agreement and Gonski. There has definitely been a cut relative to that funding that was flowing. So they can't pretend there hasn't been. The idea that they're increasing their funding is like saying: 'We'll take four wheels off your car and we'll put one back on, so we're raising the funding. You should be grateful.' That is the classic style of this government. It's all been mythology.

I'm proud of Labor's budget initiatives, which would include bringing back a better hospital fund of $2.8 billion. Health is a big issue in my region. MRI scan facilities in hospitals would be really well received. There is what we want to do with private health insurance. Our initiatives in particular for TAFE—it is so essential for the workforce of the future—would be really well received. I'd love to talk more about the chaos in shipbuilding, which has increased since the last time I recited those issues, the OPV being the latest disaster in that space, which the Audit Office has highlighted, and also this mix-and-match effort the government have tried to make—it has been a disaster. So they're wasting a lot of money in that space.

On the Snowy 2.0 project, I'd like to point out that in the Marsden Jacob Associates report on the feasibility of Snowy Hydro 2.0, their own flagship proposal—which actually wasn't theirs; it was Snowy's—clearly sets out that, in order for Snowy 2.0 to be feasible, to be most successful in the new economic environment, you have to have an ambitious renewable energy target. They set out a long-term commitment of 60 per cent renewables by 2040. So the very report that establishes the viability, the economics and the market dynamics of Snowy Hydro 2.0 points out you have to have Labor's ambitious renewable energy targets to make it substantially a financial goer.

In the time that I have left I would like to briefly comment on the issue of the malarial medicines, which has been very significant for veterans in recent times. A lot of our veterans suffered from effectively what was experimentation with new drugs. I was very fortunate in all my deployments to have used the drug doxycycline before these new experimentations came in. But we're now seeing a really significant issue emerging about the effects of those experimental drugs known as the quinolones family, including tafenoquine. I've had long discussions and communications with Stuart McCarthy, the president of the quinolone veterans and families group, and also Professor Jane Quinn of Charles Sturt University, who's working with that family group and helping the families and veterans.

We really need to see some more vigorous action in this space. We need to get down to the nuts and bolts of how the big drug companies have been working in this space, because we've got some real suspicions and issues around that. We need to have a claims process that is cleaned up here. We know the UK are already accepting some claims in this space. It's really the neuropsychological aspects that have to be resolved very quickly now. We need an open and transparent outreach program that's a cooperative venture between the VVCS, DVA and veterans as soon as possible. We're really keen to work with the government on this issue. We would like to see Darren Chester, the new Minister for Veterans' Affairs, meet with Stuart McCarthy and Jane Quinn. There's a lot of material that they've put together, which is available to any journalist. It's been sent to the government. If any journalist would like to reach out to me to get that material, I have copies of it. This is very serious, because we've had issues of perhaps an interconnection with suicides and other neurological problems as well as physiological problems. This process needs to be resolved; it needs to be open and transparent. We need to engage closely with the veterans groups and the professor and medical experts on this and get it resolved. I've been pleased to work with retired Colonel Ray Martin in Townsville on this. He's been really vigorous and hardworking on behalf of veterans in this space.

The member for Solomon, Luke Gosling, and other members of Labor have been very engaged on this issue, including the member for Herbert, Cath O'Toole, in particular, with so many veterans in her space, and Shayne Neumann. They have all been very vigorous in working with me and engaging with Amanda Rishworth, our shadow minister for veterans' affairs. They are all really determined to make sure we get a result on this. We're not in government, so that is obviously a big constriction, but we've been happy to try and reach out to ministers in the government; there have been so many of them in the veterans space, so hopefully we get some stability with my good friend the member for Gippsland, who I know will be concerned to do the right thing here. Obviously it's a big challenge getting your head around this whole issue with the family of quinolone medicines. We should draw on the examples and evidence emerging from overseas, but we need to do our own inquiry on this, and we need to do it deep and we need to do it fast. We need to see that happening now. I urge the government to engage with Stuart McCarthy and Jane Quinn at the earliest possible opportunity. We really do need to get the Specialist Medical Review Council review embracing the issues in relation to support for the veterans and families. But there is a bigger story to be told here that the veterans groups and families are concerned with in relation to how drug companies have operated and the various suspicions and concerns about that in relation to the information that's available on the impact and effect of these drugs.

We also need Defence to be much more rigorous in how it implements new drugs in these spaces. I know, from talking to fellow veterans who deployed with me to Iraq for example, that some people who took the drugs and vaccinations related to the chemical weapons threat we faced there now suffer some of the severe side effects of those drugs. We need Defence to be really careful with this stuff in the future. We're talking about people here, not guinea pigs, and I think we're united across the aisles here on wanting to see something happen urgently in this space.

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