Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. The opposition has put forward a second reading amendment that condemns the government for its poor performance in securing Australia’s long-term economic fundamentals. We have heard lots of debate in this House over recent months about the lack of investment in skills, our declining investment in education, the appalling inaction over our crumbling infrastructure and our poor trade performance. But today I would like to address the government’s failure to build the fundamentals on which families—whether they be singles or couples, with or without children, or retirees—build their future. We have had considerable debate about the issues surrounding the fundamentals: the ability to move in and out of the workforce with ease, family-friendly workplaces, an industrial relations process that supports family-friendly workplaces, the need for child care, access to quality education for both parents and children, appropriate support for people trying to return to the workplace, the ability for a family to build assets over its life and support for those who care for disabled or infirm relatives.

I am sad to say that the government has failed overwhelmingly in building these fundamentals for families, and in the budget last year and in these new appropriation bills we see nothing that will alleviate the situation that families find themselves in at the moment. We need families to do what families want to do. We need them to build their future, save for a rainy day, save for their retirement, have children and raise and educate those children well. We need them to build all those community networks, through schools and workplaces, that provide additional capacity for our communities to cope with stress and trauma.

Getting the fundamentals right for our family units, whatever those family units might look like, is as essential to our long-term strength as a nation as getting the fundamentals of the economy right. When families fail or when we fail families, all of us, not just the families, pay the cost. We the taxpayer become the de facto family. We support family members through retirement. We support them through periods of unemployment. We all pay additional health costs and crime costs if children are not well supported in their upbringing. We provide unemployment benefits. We also pay through insecurity and angst about the future.

It is timely to look at the needs of families this week as we discuss in the main chamber of the House the issue of RU486, which, once again, raises the debate on abortion. I do not believe it is ever appropriate for us to talk about the decisions that women make not to have children without talking about how we can make it easier for women to decide to have children and about the pressures that are placed on women and families that lead to those decisions.

So let us look at some of the fundamentals. One issue that immediately comes to mind and is raised in my electorate over and over again—and, I assume, is raised in every electorate—is that of child care. It is one of the biggest issues for families and it is causing the most difficult times for women trying to return to the workplace. Child-care costs have risen to five times higher than the consumer price index in the last financial year alone and over 50 per cent since 2000. Parents’ choice to care for their own children and not participate in the paid labour force deserves respect, but so does a parent’s choice to mix paid work with their caring responsibilities. Most families these days would say they have no option—that mixing the raising of children with work is a necessity for both parents. Figures released recently by the Australian Bureau of Statistics demonstrate this. There are more than 250,000 women who want to work but are unable to do so because of a lack of affordable child care. Yet the government response to this has been very poor. There was the introduction of a rebate which was available to those who can afford child care in the first place but it provides no assistance whatsoever to the poorly-paid women who cannot afford it in the first place.

The Barriers and incentives to labour force participation survey released this week shows that child care is one of the top barriers to work. Problems finding suitable or affordable child care is the No. 1 reason that women who want to work are not looking for work. Almost 98,000 mothers who want to work are unable to start within four weeks because of child care and family factors that prevent them, and another 160,000 women who want to work or work more hours and consider themselves available to start immediately are not looking for work due to child care and family factors. A lack of jobs with suitable conditions was the reason for another 80,000 people having difficulty obtaining work or more paid hours. This all demonstrates a need for more flexible working arrangements but also a considerable need for the government to act on the lack of availability of child-care places.

The greatest child-care shortages and the highest fees are for children under school age. If a mother with a child under five cannot find long day care or family day care at a suitable location, they simply cannot work. Increasing after school care places, which we have seen the government do—and we must acknowledge that—does not fix this problem. The government sees child-care costs as a cost for families to bear; on this side of the House, we believe it is a crucial investment for governments to make, and it is one of the fundamentals that underpins a family’s ability to work for its future. The shortage of affordable child care is a drag on our economy but, equally, it is a significant drag on a family’s ability to build its future. On our side, we believe it is necessary to start collecting data on shortages straightaway, to increase the direct investment in long day care places, to remove the disincentives for employer investment in child care by extending the categories of employer expenditure on child care that are fringe benefits tax exempt, and by increasing the child-care benefit itself.

People remaining at home because of the lack of child care are an extraordinary untapped potential for the economy. Quite often, they are people with skills, people wanting to return to the workforce, but they are also an untapped potential for a family—a wasted resource in that economic family unit that the families themselves want to put to use for their own benefit. Again, we need families to do what families want to do, and we must start providing the fundamentals that allow them to do that.

The government’s new industrial relations laws will only make the situation for families worse—and worsen the child-care crisis, for that matter. The new IR legislation changes will allow employers to require parents to work irregular and family-unfriendly hours, including early mornings, nights, weekends and public holidays, without overtime or penalty rates. Yet across Australia there are only eight child-care centres that are open on both Saturdays and Sundays, and only two child-care centres that are open 24 hours. What are Australian parents expected to do about child care when their bosses expect them to work all hours and at short notice? Again, there is no answer from the government to this fundamental question.

Australians are already working longer hours—the longest in the OECD—and much of that work is already unpaid. In June 2005 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission revealed that the hours of paid and unpaid work parents do each day cause an alarming level of exhaustion, with a majority of parents reporting feeling always or nearly always stressed and with around 35 per cent of Sydney fathers spending more time commuting than they do with their children. That is a very sad state that we find ourselves in—that families are so stretched now, trying to balance work and family life, that the quality of time they spend with their children, and indeed the number of hours they spend with their children, is insufficient at best.

The flexibility that the government champions in this new industrial workplace is a one-way flexibility designed for the benefit of the employers. The government’s proposals will lead to unpredictability of pay and working conditions. Two factors—predictability of pay and predictability of working hours and conditions—are essential for families as they make the choices in the short term and the long term as they plan their time together, as they plan the picking up of children, as they plan the sharing of parental responsibilities and, for that matter, the sharing of earnings between the two partners. Unpredictable hours affect family life. It is not possible to arrange child care, let alone commit to training the kids’ soccer teams. I have spoken to several couples in my electorate, who both work casual hours, who are unable from one day to the next to commit to each other as couples need to do to share in the parenting of their children.

Unpredictable pay affects the family budget. Most of us assume that all those things we take for granted like receiving pay on a regular basis for regular hours is the norm. It is not the norm under this new industrial relations system. You cannot get a car loan, let alone a mortgage, if you do not have regular working hours and regular pay. This places an extraordinary burden on families. It reduces their capacity to save for their retirement, to build assets and to save for a rainy day. Predictable pay and predictable hours are fundamental to any family seeking to build a good future for themselves. Again, we all need families to do what families want to do: build a secure future for themselves and build good strong relationships between them and their children.

The government’s rhetoric is that individuals will be able to negotiate greater family-friendly agreements with their employers. Isn’t that necessary in this day and age when both parents are working? Isn’t it essential, when both parents spend part of their day in the workplace, that we have arrangements between families and employers that allow families to balance those sometimes competing realities?

But the reality is that 93 per cent of employees in the private sector who are now on individual contracts have no additional family-friendly rights because of those AWAs. Recent research reveals that fewer than one in 12 AWAs provide paid maternity leave. Only one in 20 provides paid paternity leave, and one in 25 provides unpaid purchased leave, such as extra leave during school holidays. Individual contracts, as we see them now, are clearly hostile to family life. If anything, the new industrial relations legislation makes it possible for those contracts to be even worse than they are now. There is nothing in the industrial relations legislation that encourages workers to give away more than they need to give away now.

Penalty rates were lost in more than half the number of individual contracts. Annual leave was lost in more than one in three individual contracts, and sick leave was traded away in more than one in four individual contracts. Again, we need families to do what families want to do, including the ability of families to organise holidays so they can take care of their children during school holidays, to be home when their children are sick and to know that they have two days on the weekend to spend with their children. These are fundamentals of family life; they are not luxuries. They are the fundamentals on which families build their future and build their relationships between parent and child.

The new Welfare to Work legislation is another blow to the fundamentals that underpin families—in this case, single parent families. The new Welfare to Work regulation will essentially trap over half a million single parent families on welfare. If they move off welfare for even a short period—because they return to the workplace or because they form a new relationship or reconcile with their partner—when they come back onto welfare, if they need to do that, they will come onto a much harsher system of sole parent pension or Newstart. Already, parents in my area are starting to consider their future income from the sole parent pension when they make those decisions to return to the workforce.

The vast majority of parents in Australia do return to the workforce. In fact, 70 per cent return to the workforce by the time their child turns three. This new Welfare to Work regulation punishes new sole parents when they apply for the pension. It makes it more difficult, not less, for sole parents to develop the financial base that they need for their families. Again, sole parents, too, want to do the right thing in the main. We need them to be able to do the things that they want to do—that is, develop a secure financial base for their families, return to work and find meaningful well-paid work that fits in with the needs of their family responsibilities.

In 1966 the proportion of women in the workforce was around 35 per cent. It is now around 56.3 per cent. And as to the question of maternity leave, more mothers are returning to the workforce than ever before. As I said, nearly 70 per cent of mothers are back in the workforce by the time their child has turned three. The sole parents of Australia are not slackers; in most cases they are overworked in their parenting role alone, and now a vast majority of them seek to balance unfriendly work hours with the needs of the family. In many cases, we see an underutilisation of the skills of sole parents. We see them returning to the workforce at a considerably lower skill level than before they had their children and working fewer hours than they would like. Again, this is a waste of resources for the economy, but it is also a significant waste of resources for single parent families seeking to build a strong future for their children.

The new legislation makes work less attractive than welfare. Under the new changes, through tax and a reduction in benefits the Howard government will take back as much as 75c of every dollar a welfare recipient earns. According to respected independent research, single parents will work for an effective return of as little as $3.88 an hour. An even more alarming issue for me about the Welfare to Work reform is that it strips sole parents of access to training support. Under the Howard government’s welfare changes, when single parents are dumped onto the dole they will be refused access to the pensioner education supplement, which was a bonus to working age pension recipients seeking to improve their job prospects through approved training or education. Given that many of these parents spend considerable time out of the workforce and given that so many of them—in fact, most single parents—have no post-school qualifications, real training that assists them back into the workforce is one of the fundamental things that they need to build a good strong family. Again, if they do not build a good strong family, we the taxpayers pick up the tab in many ways. And so we should pick up the tab, but equally we should make it possible for these sole parents, desperate to do the right thing for their families, to build the fundamentals that underpin their work efforts in that regard as quickly as we can. Training is fundamental for families, and not just for parents returning to the workforce but for parents and their children generally.

The increases in HECS fees and the shortage of TAFE places have placed additional drains on families. HECS fees in particular place an extraordinary financial burden on families just at a time when they should be accumulating assets—when they are saving for their first mortgage and really setting themselves up as families. It is a significant drain and absolutely the opposite of the way we should be supporting families at that crucial time of their first 10 years. Workforce characteristics are also working very much against families. Australians are working longer hours than ever before—the longest in the OECD—and around 35 per cent of Sydney fathers spend more time commuting than they do with their children.

Women’s earning capacity is drastically altered by time spent out of the workforce. There is not any Australian research into this, but US research shows that leaving the workforce for just three years results in a one-third drop in earnings if you return to the workforce full-time, or $250,000 on average over the remainder of your working life. Again, what an extraordinary situation it is when we are in a time of skills shortages and we are prepared to waste the potential of so many parents who spend time, quite appropriately—and, we should say, thankfully—out of the workforce taking care of their children. If we cannot find ways for parents to move in and out of the workforce without this significant drop in earning potential, then we really are not providing families with what they need to do the right thing for their future.

How can we allow this to continue? It is an extraordinary waste of resources for the economy. A couple of years of lighter work should not be a career death sentence for either men or women. I have been talking here about women, but I can equally talk about men. Men who choose in the early years of their children’s lives to back off from their career paths talk about that being a death sentence for their careers. They too suffer earnings drops for the rest of their career lives. We as a society should be supporting parents—both men and women—who choose to move in and out of the workforce. We should be finding ways to make our work environment, culturally and through industrial relations, much more family-friendly. It is in nobody’s interests that we are getting the fundamentals of family life so profoundly wrong, that we are not building the fundamentals to support families while they strengthen themselves for their future. It is not in the family’s interest or in the individual’s interest to be underused and feel frustrated by a lack of career opportunities and a lack of flexible working arrangements. It is not in the employer’s interests in the long run and it is not in the taxpayer’s interests. We must get this right. (Time expired)

Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the appropriation bills. Today I wish to raise two totally different issues, both very close to my heart. The first relates to the events in Iraq and Pakistan. Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, you represent an area—very proudly, I know—in which a large proportion of Australia’s defence arrangements are centred, in Townsville and Thuringowa.

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia’s largest Army base.

Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I know you seize every opportunity to extol the virtues of our armed services. I compliment the role that our troops are playing overseas but, as a pacifist, I am really worried as I raise the first issue—that is, what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the manifestations and the media coverage from both Iraq and Afghanistan, I think it has gone off the radar. Today as I looked at one of the websites it highlighted to me that in 32 days time we will be celebrating the third anniversary of the second war in Iraq. On 19 March 2003 most of us were watching with shock and awe as America declared war on Iraq. There were the coalition forces, Britain and Australia, and we saw the firepower and result of that war.

It is interesting to note that in the war, which started on 19 March 2003, 137 Americans died—a very small number. It was obvious that, due to the way in which the war was waged, Iraq suffered enormous casualties and the Americans only 137 deaths. One remembers on 1 May 2003 George Bush flying out on the aircraft carrier dressed as a pilot, wearing a helmet and a Mae West, saying, ‘Mission accomplished,’ and a big banner flying. Since ‘mission accomplished’, 2,128 Americans have died. A total of 137 died in the war and, since then, 2,128 have died.

On 13 December 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured. Since then, 1,798 Americans have died. The handover to the provisional government was on 29 June 2004 and since then 1,399 Americans have died. The election was held on 31 January 2005 and since then  829 Americans have died. From all reports, any mention by the media—TV or print—about the coverage of American bodies being returned home has been virtually censored. It is all done at the Air Force base. When the first bodies came back we saw the typical way in which American soldiers are returned, with the escort, slope arms, coffins carried by representatives of the armed services, draped in the American flag, the flag folded, and the mourning relatives.

After a while, as I have said, the toll started to mount: to 2,265 since the war began. The toll since the war was theoretically all over is 2,128. It has all become too embarrassing. The sad thing is that 204 deaths have been from coalition troops. Even sadder, as one realises that a couple of thousand deaths is pretty serious, is that there have been 16,549 Americans wounded. A report on the war on terror states that ‘one in every 10 soldiers evacuated to the army’s biggest military hospital in Europe was sent there for mental problems’. We have heard about Agent Orange and stress related illness from the Vietnam War, and from the first Iraqi war about depleted uranium shells and the like. We are creating a monster.

Over a thousand soldiers have been evacuated to Europe because of mental problems. Yet none of this makes it into the media. All we hear is that we have democracy in Iraq, we are trying Saddam Hussein, through the farce that is the court trial over there, and that things are going well and everyone is pulling out. We hear that the Japanese are going and it looks like our Australian contingent of 400 or 500 troops are coming home because they are no longer needed to support the Japanese, and then we are off to Afghanistan.

There is a perception in Australia that, ‘We’ve captured Saddam. We’ve had elections. Okay, there’s a bit of a hassle between the Shiah and the Sunni, but the Kurds up north are all happy because they’ve got their own little part of the Iraqi homeland.’ But if you look behind the scenes you find something else. Here is some of the war news for Monday of this week, and it is really sad. In Baghdad the former minister of electricity escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb went off near his convoy. Three of his bodyguards and a woman passing nearby were wounded. In Ramadi a police colonel and a brigadier were killed on Sunday by gunmen in two different incidents. In Baquba gunmen killed four people driving in their car. One worked for the ruling Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. In another incident two policemen were killed and one was wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol. In Hilla two policemen were killed and another wounded. In another area a policeman was killed and two others wounded. And it so goes on, a daily occurrence. Yet there is a perception in Australia, in America and in Britain that everything is rosy, that they are training the Iraqi troops to take over and that everything is going to be fine. The news also states:

Last week, the Pentagon said it will ask Congress to almost triple the anti-IED budget, from $1.2 billion to $3.3 billion. The new money is for quicker rollout of more vehicles with V-shaped hulls to deflect blasts and a further expansion of the most reliable jamming technology

$US 3.3 billion. We do not hear anything about this; we are being brainwashed into accepting that everything is fine. We hear talk about an exit strategy from Iraq, but it is all too hard. And now, as I say, we are in Afghanistan. It is interesting to note that this report also says:

There are now lethal similarities in the methods used by the insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nato commanders acknowledge that terrorist techniques are being imported from Iraq to Afghanistan and Islamist fighters are entering the country in ever-increasing numbers from Pakistan.

The place where this is most evident is the province of Helmand, where most of the British forces will be deployed, and where a resurgent Taliban and their al-Qaida allies have killed almost 100 US and Afghan troops in the past few months.

That 100 is ‘the total number lost by British troops in the Iraq war’. But we do not hear any of this. All we hear is the good news.

The sad thing is that 25 deaths have occurred this month, and these are just the statistics from the American and coalition forces. As usual, it is the Iraqis who are paying the highest price. Thank God, among our troops, we have lost one soldier in Afghanistan. I do not think we have lost anybody in Iraq, but I might be wrong. At least one is a small number.

When we peel the onion even further, we find some wonderful things about the Coalition Provisional Authority, the body set up to rule Iraq before the elections, headed by President Bush’s favourite man, Paul Bremmer. It is interesting to look at some of the legal orders that he issued by decree. I will cite one which I think is a classic. It says:

Within a few days of the order being passed, mass produced chicken legs were dumped on the Iraqi economy by US companies, forcing the market price of chicken down to 71p a kilogram, below the cheapest price that Iraqi producers could sustain. Those chicken legs were surplus to the US market because the average American prefers breast meat. Before the invasion, those chicken legs would most likely have been sold as pet food.

Order 39 permitted full foreign ownership of a wide range of state owned assets. The intention is that over 200 state owned enterprises—including electricity, telecommunications and the pharmaceutical industry—will be sold off, permitting 100 percent foreign ownership of banks, mines and factories. The decree allowed these firms to move their profits out of the country.

The biggest scandal involved reconstruction contracts. In one period between 2003 and 2004, more than 80 percent of prime contracts were given to US firms, with the remainder split between British, Australian, Italian, Israeli, Jordanian and Iraqi firms. One source estimates the total received by Iraqi firms during the CPA’s rule at around 2 percent.

So who is making all the money? I raise these issues because, as I said, we do not hear about them. They are all below the radar. When the Minister for Defence or the Minister for Foreign Affairs are asked questions in the House at question time, democracy reigns, everything is under control, and because, thank God, we have not suffered any casualties in Iraq we are told we should, ‘Be alarmed, but don’t be concerned.’

On a totally different note, I raise another issue that is close to my heart—aged care and the role of nurses and carers in that industry. Nurses, both enrolled and registered, and the carers involved in the nursing homes in my electorate of Franklin and in the electorate of Denison—our borders abut—

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We don’t need passports.

Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, we don’t need passports. Nursing homes in my electorate and in the electorate of the honourable member for Denison are run by not-for-profit church organisations. They do a wonderful job. I know for a fact that they are having real trouble employing registered and enrolled nurses. The carers who work in conjunction with the nurses to look after the needs of the frail aged, the infirm and those suffering, unfortunately, from dementia are receiving less in wages than those who work in the state hospital sector.

This is a real crisis. I know several nurses and carers who work in the aged care sector and I know for a fact that many of them have to work double shifts. They have such a love for the clients they service that they are almost part of the family. When deaths do occur, as they do, in nursing homes on a fairly regular basis there is a real sense of loss and grief. This makes the job even harder, because even when you are under enormous stress—you have this love for the job that you do; you are not being recompensed financially for it—there is a willingness, if you are asked to do a double shift or someone is sick or has family concerns necessitating their not being able to do their shift, to fill in and do the job. I have had the pleasure of visiting nursing homes, and I know the honourable member for Denison has likewise, and it really worries me that there is not a concerted effort by both state and Commonwealth governments, especially in the health sector, to ensure that the nurses, both enrolled and registered, and the carers have the same wage structure as those who are working in the Royal Hobart Hospital or the Launceston General Hospital in Tasmania.

As we know, there is a huge nursing shortage. In a couple of months I will be 65 and one contemplates what might take place in the next 20-odd years. My father is 87 and my mother is 86, so hopefully I have got another 20-odd years, God willing, to walk on this earth, but when you visit the nursing homes and you see people in that transition from their home to home and community care, then going into a hostel, then into a nursing home and then into high care you do think about what is happening. Who knows, dementia strikes at random and if you are part of that system you know that the people who are going to look after you are doing a fantastic job. I have nothing but admiration for the nurses and the carers in the aged care sector, but it worries me that they are being paid a heck of a lot less than their counterparts working in the hospitals. It is not just in Tasmania but right across the nation.

I compliment the government in allocating a whole lot of money in the area of mental health this week as a result of the COAG meeting, but all the statistics show that in the next 20 years the age cohort is going to increase enormously and we need to put something in place now. We are training countless doctors, but the numbers of nurses are declining. Why wouldn’t they be declining when nurses can earn far more in other areas in our community? So I say to state and Commonwealth governments and to the health ministers: pay a visit; take off your ministerial coat and be the local member and go and visit the nursing homes at 11 o’clock at night when there is a transition shift and at seven o’clock in the morning when there is a transition shift; spend some time and talk to the nurses and the carers and the dons and just see what is happening. As I said, these are the unsung heroes. I thank the House for the opportunity to raise these two issues which, as I said at the outset, are very dear to my heart.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In talking to these appropriation bills can I start by mentioning something that I was not going to raise today but which arises from the speech of the honourable member for Franklin. Late last year in the main chamber I referred to Iraq as a four-letter word that we did not often hear, and I thank yet again the honourable member for Franklin, in his consistent way, for raising that particular issue of silence as well as the chilling statistics to demonstrate what continues to happen in Iraq. The fact is that at no stage was there an exit strategy. As the honourable member for Franklin outlined, the winning of the war was a simple thing—what an unfair contest the military might of the coalition, especially the United States, versus the Iraqi forces, whether based on intelligence that was flawed or intelligence that was deliberately not interpreted in the right way, was.

But at that time many of us said that the great challenge was not that aspect; the great challenge was winning peace. I have seen nothing in the years since that convince me that those that are the great minds of the coalition of the willing have learnt anything or understand that aspect. I conclude my reference to Iraq by saying one thing: I am sick and tired of the likes of the foreign minister in question time haranguing the opposition for having an alternative view. There is this fixation that we were happy to see Saddam continue unchecked.

What really galls me is this assumption that in the United States or the United Kingdom the government view is the only view expressed. I do not know where Alexander has been when he has been listening to the US congress, but the foreign minister should listen carefully. There is a large body of opinion that believes the US administration is on the wrong trail. As I have said often, if I were a member of the British Labour Party caucus, all along the journey I would have been a member of the substantial minority which, on every occasion the Blair government has escalated its involvement, has opposed involvement. This nonsense that in some way an opinion that is in disagreement with the governments of these three countries is disloyal or lacking in reality is too dismissive of something that is now a very complex question that the global community really has to look at with much greater care than it does at the moment.

It is my intention today to make reference to a study that was released this week and which has been mentioned around this place—that is, the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index. The interpretation of this body of work in the popular press talks about electorates being the happiest or the saddest. I stress that in what is a fairly technical and academic paper the researchers attempted to look at relative personal wellbeing throughout the electorates on the basis of certain criteria. It was most appropriate that an article in the Herald Sun article yesterday described how the researchers went out to the electorate of Gorton—which the Herald Sun has interpreted, by using this index, as being the saddest of the Victorian electorates—and talked to a Kings Park mum, Lilyana Mukevska. She had just given birth to a son in Sunshine Hospital and she was ecstatic with life. She is quoted as saying:

‘My family is fantastic. They make you laugh and share their points of view.’

The seat of Scullin, in the Victorian context, is listed as the fifth saddest. I would think that I could find plenty of my constituents who are happy with their lot but would like to see it better. When we look at this index of wellbeing we should extract the components that have been used to build it up. I would acknowledge that the people I represent have a great deal of stress in the challenges of their daily life, which they contest with a cheery heart, and need our understanding and assistance. They do not need a government that makes life tougher. They do not need a government that puts in place policies that do not give them a chance to improve their lot and reach their hopes and aspirations.

As I have often said in this place, government policy at a national level should understand the regional impacts. For instance, when the new legislation on sole parent pensions and disability pensions is put in place on 1 July, the government should understand that in electorates like mine and the electorate of the member for Holt, who is present in the Main Committee chamber—two electorates that are mentioned among those five electorates—it is going to make things worse. It is going to affect the ability of the large number of people affected by this legislation to progress.

The thing that characterises most of the electorates mentioned in this article is that they are outer urban electorates where the pressures go to things like the amount of time that people have to expend to go about their business—the distance to work, the distance to child care and other important services. This is another area on which the federal government has walked away. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage said unanimously in its Sustainable Cities report that the federal government should be looking at the ways in which it involves itself in the outer urban areas of our major cities to invest in public transport. What do we get when that is put to the Minister for Transport and Regional Services? We get: public transport is a state issue. The people on the outer urban fringe do not want to be told whose responsibility it is; they want to be involved in the solutions. I think solutions will only be achieved when there is cooperation from all spheres of government, the private sector and the community.

The federal government, in its collection of petrol excise and in the way it can show leadership, should be involved in this matter. If it is all right for the federal government to be involved in the provision of roads by whipping out all sorts of programs that it uses as pork-barrelling exercises for marginal seats—RONIs and things like that—why can it not be involved in a shared way in public transport? In addressing the needs of the time-poor residents of my electorate, that would be one way the government could have an effect.

There are other burgeoning factors such as the cost of health. According to the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, the electorate of Scullin gets a low score on health and standard of living. It does not help that we have a continuing increase in family medical bills and a government that is driven by trying to get people to go into private health insurance when over the last five years the cost of private insurance has risen by 40 per cent. Over Christmas, it grew a further seven per cent. What do we see? We see a scheme that subsidises private insurance without any recognition of what might be happening in the outcomes of the provision of health services.

My electorate has a high migrant population, many of whom came here in the post-war migration and worked successfully in the large manufacturing concerns that surrounded the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Some moved from inner urban areas such as Carlton and Collingwood and typically bought a fibro shack down at Dromana or Rye. Now they find that, because of the way the market is working, the value of their simple shack down at Dromana, just based on the value of the land, has become exorbitantly high. How does this affect them? It affects them as pensioners—pensioners who were denied the access to occupational superannuation during their working life—because of the way that it affects the assets test. I do not decry the assets test. It was a way in which we made the distribution of government assistance fair. Mr Deputy Speaker, in a previous life, you knew the agony that Labor governments went through in implementing that policy, but it was correct. What I say now is that we should recognise that as a device to distribute economic resources fairly there are aberrations in the way in which it is now impacting on the lifestyle decisions of some pensioners in a disproportionate way. Typically we have people being denied benefit because, in their simple lifestyle, something that was of relatively low value has increased. They are denied the enjoyment of that in retirement because at the end of the day, to survive, their only option is to divest themselves of that investment and put it in another form of investment so that they can get an ongoing income.

Another anomaly is that some of them kept their workers cottages in inner Melbourne and used them for rental purposes, and when the asset value and income from these rentals were in a relatively fair proportion they could survive. Now, regrettably, even though the asset value has gone up, the return on income has not gone up in the same way, and therefore the impact of the way in which the income and assets test actually impinges on them has become greater.

This is a policy that needs some refining. We need to be creative in the way in which we can ensure that those people can enjoy life—they do not want an increased lifestyle; they want to pursue a lifestyle commensurate with what they had expected when they retired. We should be able to twig that, especially when we have the scandal about the way family payments have developed unchecked, without putting in place income tests, let alone someone ever thinking that they should be asset tested. Now we see the wealthy being given the same benefit or, in fact, a larger benefit than the poor. Under this draconian legislation, which will come into place on 1 July, we see single mothers expected to work for what adds up to about $3 an hour.

When I talk about these pressures that affect the wellbeing of the people I represent, I would also like to recognise that in our area things that are positive continue to happen. Some of them are small; some of them are large. They might be an organisation such as Churinga, operated by St John of God, an adult training support service that has asked local MPs to display the artwork of the people who use their service. I proudly display the colourful and vibrant artwork of three members of the Churinga community. That is the way you get the community involved and vibrant. It is projects like NARTT—the Northern Assessment, Referral and Treatment Team—which is a cooperative between non-government organisations, the local community health centre and the police that actively endeavours to intervene, especially in the area of drugs. NARTT acknowledges that drugs are entwined with domestic violence and crime, and it intervenes with proper counselling and help to ensure that the people who are finding the stresses that lead them to this type of antisocial behaviour do not just directly go to courts but are given an opportunity to be involved in programs that will keep them out of courts.

The final positive thing I want to mention is the work of organisations like NorthLink/NIETL and the Northern ACC. These are organisations that have blossomed under policies of Labor governments at state and federal levels. On Friday, I participated in a briefing session sponsored by NorthLink/NIETL and the Northern Area Consultative Committee, which local, federal and state members attended. My colleague the honourable member for Batman, Martin Ferguson, was there and so were state members such as Peter Batchelor and Jenny Mikakos, Lily D’Ambrosio and Danielle Green. Other members’ offices were represented—two federal members and three state members. At this meeting they put to us aspects of importance in economic development and job creation in the north. For instance, one of the great opportunities that is arising for the north is the location of the National Biosecurity Centre at La Trobe University. This will see the amalgamation of four or five state department of primary industries sites on the one site. It is going to provide some 450 science based jobs and it is recognition that in the north we have the opportunity to display the skills that are required for a centre such as this. It also enables us to display the cooperation that we can see between a tertiary institution like La Trobe University and the local community.

It is also important because this is the second annual gathering where local members have come together with these organisations to campaign on things of benefit to the north. Last year, in January, we successfully had a meeting that led to a concerted effort to ensure that the wholesale market was relocated to Epping. This was a successful campaign. As I said then, what it saw was the cooperation that was required between the people who represent the north in promoting the north.

In the two minutes that I have left, I want to refer to the debate that is going on in the main chamber at the moment with regard to the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill 2005 [2006]. It is unlikely that I will get an opportunity to speak in that debate. As I have said to those constituents that I have been able to get back to who have put their views to me, I will be supporting the bill. I thank all those constituents who have given of their time and opinion. I have treated each of their contributions seriously and they have helped me in the consideration of my position. As I have said to those that I have spoken to, simply put, much of the public debate about this bill has complicated the issue. This is a simple decision for us as legislators to decide how we believe a drug that can be used for lawful means should be best studied for its safety and efficacy.

I believe that there is nothing about RU486 that means that it should be treated in any different way to other drugs that are made available to the Australian community. The Therapeutic Goods Administration is put in place by the legislation and regulation of this parliament. It is given criteria for its work. These people are the experts. We rely on these people for all other groupings of drugs and there is nothing I can see that would give me reason to believe that we should put it separately.

I do not come to this position on the basis of any beliefs of the present Minister for Health and Ageing. The fact is that a minister for health that might be pro-choice might be the decision maker. But it is an anomaly that we have a drug or a grouping of drugs that should be set aside for special treatment. I believe that the TGA is best placed to ensure the safety and efficacy of a drug that can be used for a legal reason. (Time expired)

Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to address Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. In relation to Appropriation Bill (No. 3), I note, for the edification of Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, who is not here at present, the $54.6 million that is spent on the Australian Federal Police, particularly in the area of policing airports. In reflecting on this and the role of the Australian Federal Police, and in undertaking a little research with respect to that fine body, its responsibilities, its tasks and its level of resourcing, I have come to the conclusion that this federal government has miserably failed that particular organisation in providing the appropriate level of financial resourcing to ensure that the Australian Federal Police has the person power that is required to perform the tasks that have been stipulated.

I would like to start my reflection on this particular matter by quoting the Prime Minister. The quote is from a speech by the Prime Minister at the official opening of the AFP training village in Canberra on 23 June 2005. He said:

Events of the last five years have totally transformed both the demands and the expectations of the Australian community on the Australian Federal Police. In that five year period we’ve seen the threatening arrival of international terrorism, and we’ve seen the emergence of an ongoing need on the part of this country in cooperation with our friends in the Pacific Region to involve ourselves in the restoration of conditions of law and order and cooperation with the police services and governments of those countries.

In that short time, the Federal Police has had demands placed on it which go as far beyond the demands that have been placed on an organisation in terms of change as any I have seen at a federal level. I want to put on record a counter-response to the Prime Minister’s statement by the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Federal Police Association, Jim Torr, on 28 June 2005. It is about the reality of what sworn police officers—sworn AFP officers in particular—face in executing their duties. Jim Torr said:

The Australian Federal Police is today fighting with one arm tied behind its back. Huge increases in the taskings since September 11 have not been matched with comprehensive, consultative strategic planning.

Significant increases in the government funding have not been translated into sustained permanent staffing outcomes. The men and women of the AFP continue to perform to a world class standard but the AFP provides no staffing or surge capacity certainty. The future operating environment has not been adequately considered, analysed and modelled. The AFP lurches through sporadic recruiting bursts and reactionary operational responses.

Its time for strategic planning over a 10 year time frame with a goal to achieving sustained operational capability and flexibility with budget certainty. The people of Australia and our other stake holders deserve no less.

In a particularly instructive paper by Organisational Architects—a key issues paper titled ‘A planned future for the Australian Federal Police’—the issue of the AFP and its staffing shortfalls was extensively addressed. I want to quote selected sections of the paper to highlight and amplify the problem that sworn police officers have in executing their duties on behalf of the Australian Federal Police. They will illustrate the problems that we face, with very severe consequences to policing of certain areas in the Australian community. The executive summary states:

While the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has a greater role in the National Security of Australia than ever before its staffing level is approximately the same as it was 20 years ago. Moreover, during the past 20 years there have been dramatic variations in staffing that have not been linked to the changing mission of the AFP.

Unlike Australia’s Defence establishment, the AFP has been predominantly managed on an inherently budget driven and short-term basis without public discussion in relation to its future funding and capability requirements. Evidence of this can be seen in the ongoing tasking of AFP resources to international operations without action being taken to ensure that “traditional” responsibilities are being adequately back filled.

The AFP is today so important to the National Interest that it should be subject to a process similar to the Defence White Paper and thereby be able to project resourcing, environmental modelling and capability development up to ten years into the future.

Best practise environmental and strategic modelling requires that the planning for the AFP be conducted in an open, consultative and strategic fashion, and that this planning involve: consultation with the public and other stakeholders, a rational identification and assessment of the various risks to Australia’s interests, commitment to forward budget expenditure, and a coherent resourcing model for future linkages to existing and planned Defence and other National capabilities.

Members in this place may recall that the AFP was formed in 1979 following the Hilton bombing in Sydney. Since that time, the AFP has assumed the role of Australia’s leading investigative agency in relation to illicit narcotics, criminal attack on Commonwealth revenue, political corruption, e-crime, people-smuggling and a number of other crimes. The AFP evolved through the eighties as an organisation principally focused on illicit narcotics trafficking and major fraud against the Commonwealth. A comprehensive network of international liaison officers was established and ties with foreign police established and strengthened.

In 1988 the AFP was made up of 2,771 sworn members and 547 unsworn members, a total of 3,368 employees. However, a reduction in the size of the AFP commenced at this point and continued until 1999, when the AFP employed 1,887 sworn members and 690 staff members, a total of 2,577 employees. From 1999 to 2003 the organisation again began to increase in size to a maximum staffing of 3,496. In 2004, numbers had reduced again slightly to 3,473. Between 30 June 2004 and 30 June 2005 the AFP’s unsworn number rose by 144 but the sworn police number decreased by 16, leaving a staff total of 3,601. Basically they are indicating that there is a substantial drop in the number of sworn police officers. To illustrate the point: 20 years ago in 1985, when the world environment was much different and the AFP’s task was less, the AFP had 2,838 sworn police while, as at July 2005, it had 2, 310 sworn police. That is a loss of 500 sworn police officers.

A review was conducted into the second half of the nineties—the Ayers review—when the AFP achieved a high public profile largely through their work in the areas of people-smuggling investigations, East Timor deployments and an increased role in cooperation with Pacific rim neighbours, particularly in the provision of training. In 1998, due to critical staff shortages and lobbying by the AFPA, Prime Minister Howard announced the Ayers review. As a consequence of that review, we saw large budget increases for the AFP, which were reflected in the previously mentioned increase in numbers from 1999. However, since 2001 the AFP has been without a long-term strategic plan, which I find quite amazing given the task that this organisation is required to perform—again, with no effective public accountability.

Then we had September 11 2001, after which the role of the AFP changed in a very profound way. No arm of government had been more affected by September 11 than the AFP. It is now understood that terrorists have no return address and that conventional military responses are very often inappropriate. As a result, police, including the AFP, are now absorbing more and more of what we have previously identified as military roles. Since September 11, if you think of those declining numbers of sworn police officers, over 600 AFP employees have been diverted from what they were doing on 10 September 2001 to new counter-terrorism functions. This retasking of AFP resources, though fully warranted by the circumstances and the environment following September 11, has led to a real shortfall in resourcing in traditional areas of AFP responsibility. The AFPA is not aware of any strategic planning that has been conducted to accommodate future AFP responses to the changed global environment. To all intents and purposes, the AFP is still planning with a pre-September 11 mind-set.

Since September 11, the AFP has been thrust more into the public consciousness. The AFP seems to be everywhere at once. Its new focus on counter-terrorism cannot exist in a discrete counter-terrorism only framework. A vacuum is formed in investigations of other crime types which produce counter-terrorism intelligence as an important by-product—for example, narcotics, identity fraud and money trafficking. It is worth noting that the Madrid atrocities involved active drug offenders.

Concerning planning requirements at the current time, what I can do for the edification of the chamber is detail AFP functions and sworn police numbers over 20 years and contrast the functions they were required to perform in 1985 with the functions they were required to perform in 2004.

One of the AFP’s key functions is ACT policing, as the member for Fraser will know. The AFP conducted that policing in 1985 and they still did so in 2004. The second is Australia’s remote territories policing. They did that in 1985 and they also did that in 2004. Narcotics was one of their responsibilities in 1985 and still was in 2004. Commonwealth revenue fraud was one of their duties in 1985 and they still performed that duty in 2004. Political corruption investigations they performed in 1985 and were still required to perform in 2004. Diplomatic and VIP security they performed in 1985 and were still required to perform in 2004. Witness protection they were required to perform in 1985 and were still required to perform in 2004.

Special event security planning they were not required to provide in 1985, but they were required to provide this in 2004. People-smuggling they were not required to investigate in 1985, but that was part of their parameters of duties in 2004. E-crime involving internet and child pornography they were not required to explore in 1985 but they were required to explore in 2004. E-crime which constitutes attacks on business continuity they were not required to investigate in 1985 but they were required to investigate in 2004. Sexual servitude they were not required to investigate in 1985 but it was one of the parameters of their responsibilities in 2004. Child sex tourism they were not required to investigate in 1985, but they were required to perform that duty in 2004. Sky marshals, air security officers, they were not required to provide in 1985 but were required to provide in 2004.

International deployment for the United Nations they obviously were required to provide in 1985 and they continue to provide that facility to this day. International deployment for Australian response to events they were not required to provide in 1985 but they were required to provide this in 2004. International disaster response was not one of the parameters listed in 1985 but they were required to respond to these events in 2004. International police training—we have seen that occur in the Solomon Islands in particular—they were not required to provide in 1985 but were required to provide in 2004. Interpol liaison was not a duty that was required in 1985 but it was required in 2004.

One of the key changes where they have lost an area of responsibility, which I think they should have retained, is policing at federal airports, which they were required to provide and supervise in 1985. For some bizarre reason, they no longer have control of that, which I think leads to serious issues with respect to airport security.

In essence, what is happening to the AFP—and I understand it—is that the AFP is now suffering a shortfall of resources in its traditional areas of responsibility, such as community policing and general criminal investigations. It is trying to take on its new expanded role with a total staffing level, as I have said in this place on two occasions, which is the same as it was 20 years ago, with the number of sworn officers reduced by 528 or almost 20 per cent. As I have said, over 600 AFP members are directly involved in counter-terrorism functions both in Australia and offshore, including the 400-strong International Deployment Group. At times, since 11 September 2001, the AFP has had nearly 10 per cent of its people serving overseas—compare this with a much lower percentage of the Australian Defence Force on duty offshore—with serious implications for performing their domestic functions. Their ability to do so is much reduced.

Faced with these constraints, the AFP has effectively found it impossible to backfill the vital positions it needs to keep up its traditional area of responsibilities. And it is believed within the AFPA and by the sworn officers that if the public were fully aware of the significance of these gaps, including skyrocketing stress factors on individual officers doing their best with inadequate resources, there would be an immediate and loud outcry.

In the words of those connected with the AFPA, the inescapable by-product of these personnel gaps has been a worrying vacuum in the investigation of crimes which are the backbone of AFP operations. Yet it is, as I said before, these very tasks—narcotics, identity fraud and money-trafficking crimes, for example—which are inextricably linked to terrorism. If the government is seriously concerned about adequately arming and resourcing its police forces, particularly the AFP, in continuing their functions then it would address this as a serious issue.

There is another serious issue—that is, that the AFP is not accountable to any one particular parliamentary committee. You have the Australian Crime Commission, for example, which has to answer to the Australian Crime Commission committee. You have DSD, ASIO, ASIS and DIGO and a range of other intelligence organisations, which have to answer to the joint intelligence committee, and yet this very important body is not accountable to any parliamentary committee for its oversight, which I find quite stunning. I know the government specialises in lack of accountability, but we are asking the sworn officers who put their lives on the line for the benefit of our community to not have protection, to not have some of their grievances discussed by the duly elected representatives that are elected here to represent them and to not have the oversight protection of a parliamentary committee.

Make no mistake about it: they are very serious concerns that I have detailed to this place about operational shortfalls. These will obviously impact on domestic resourcing and the capacity to investigate some of the areas that I have just mentioned, and that is unacceptable. This government prides itself on being strong on crime and strong on security, but when it comes down to the test, when it comes down to laying its money on the table—it does not matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on spin—this government, by this document and by the reports emanating out of the Federal Police, is clearly abrogating its duty to adequately resource a key front-line agency in the fight against terrorism, the fight against narcotics, identity fraud and money trafficking. I am just wondering when the Prime Minister, who prides himself on being strong on these security matters, will actually take some direct action to fix these shortfalls.

We will continue to raise these matters and press these matters in parliament. I believe the AFP will be before the estimates committee tomorrow, where these and other issues will be raised. This is a structure, an organisation, which has serious operational concerns. If we do not fix this issue, if we do not provide accountability, then this organisation will continue not to be able to perform its domestic functions. We will not let the government off the hook with respect to this; we will continue to come into this place until the government assumes its responsibility to adequately support and adequately resource a key crime-fighting agency in this country.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. I do so in order to explain some of the concerns I have about the way in which the Commonwealth has failed to adequately fund important infrastructure in the electorate of Gorton. There is no doubt, quite justifiably, there is concern shared amongst community members in my electorate that they are not getting their fair share of resources to provide the important infrastructure required for one of the fastest growing areas of Melbourne.

I was contacted yesterday and asked to comment on a survey or a review of all the electorates in Australia. I was asked to comment on why it was that the electorate of Gorton was allegedly the one with the lowest level of satisfaction. I do not think that is true and I challenge the assertions made by those eminent academics who have tried to find a measure for happiness, because I go around my electorate, whether it be to the New Year’s Eve Lunar Festival at St Albans or the Keilor Gift held this Sunday, a magnificent race in Victoria, or indeed many other festivals and events such as the festival held in Glengala Road at St Andrew’s Church. It is a great Greek-Cypriot festival where thousands flock every year to celebrate and enjoy themselves with their families. I see a lot of happiness in my electorate. I see people who are very community minded and very welcoming to not only people from outside the area but also their neighbours.

I challenge the assertion made by this survey that the residents in the electorate are not happy. But we could be happier. I can assure you that if we were able to fix some of the major transport blockages that are created by the lack of resources from the Commonwealth there would be many commuters much happier than they are currently. I can visit the Western Highway at 8.30 on any weekday morning and find the traffic at a standstill. The Western Highway in my electorate is a car park; it is effectively not moving or is moving very slowly. That is causing great frustration to the community in Caroline Springs, Burnside, Deer Park, Kings Park and Ardeer.

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who’s funding the Deer Park bypass?

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will get to that. The member for Deakin has raised an important issue. It has taken a lot of effort by locals to campaign very effectively, as they have done, to finally achieve a commitment for the commencement of the construction of the Deer Park bypass this year. But it has been very late in providing this important piece of transport infrastructure and it will be some years before we see the final completion of that bypass. For many years ahead constituents of the electorate, particularly in the south-west region, are going to be frustrated. This will add to any unhappiness that they may experience in their everyday lives.

The Commonwealth certainly made a commitment, but it is very late in the piece to be ensuring that that vital piece of infrastructure is built. It will benefit not only residents in my electorate but also residents in Melton, Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat. Indeed, it will be important for freight users between Adelaide and Melbourne. It is the second most used highway in Victoria and it has been neglected. In my view, it has been neglected primarily because the Commonwealth has not seen fit to focus on that area. It does not see any electoral advantage in doing so. It does not see benefits in terms of seats going to government. Areas with less merit and less reasoned argument about transport use have received Commonwealth money. Indeed, Queensland has had far more from the Commonwealth purse per capita than Victoria in terms of transport needs. This is something that should be addressed quickly.

The other transport area that is a real burden and problem for the constituents of my electorate is the failure of the Commonwealth to fund proper overpass intersections, or flyovers, along the Calder Highway. We have a situation where fatalities are becoming the norm on the Calder Highway between the CBD and Sunbury. In particular, there are a number of intersections—such as Robertsons Road, Calder Park Drive and Sunshine Avenue—where major accidents are occurring. They are occurring because we have ground level intersections on a major freeway. It is not good enough for the Commonwealth to ignore the plight of the community that uses that stretch of freeway and those that live very close to the freeway who are seeking to turn onto and off the Calder Highway while going into and out of the city. It is also causing problems for people that are obviously using it as a freeway to go, for example, from Melbourne’s CBD to Bendigo. We should not have so close to the CBD ground level intersections on such a major transport route. It is unsafe and it congests traffic; it leads to all sorts of problems.

Why Gorton is alleged to be one of the unhappiest electorates is anyone’s guess. I refute that, but I can point to those deficiencies in areas of Commonwealth expenditure that certainly would not make the people that live in my neck of the woods happy. Quite seriously, I have had to speak to bereaved family members who have lost relatives as a result of the dangers that clearly continue to exist because of the ground level intersections on the freeway.

There are other comparisons that one can draw. This survey talked about the happiness of people in electorates. That is a very difficult thing to quantify or qualify. It is true that if you make comparisons between electorates you find they are very different. You have the metropolitan and regional and rural divide and you have coastal communities and communities that reside within the centre of Australia, so you have many variables with the electorates of this great country. When I look at a number of comparisons, it does concern me that there is such a gap in opportunities between constituents in one area of the country as opposed to those in other areas. I quite often say that if you look at the socioeconomic demographic of the electorate of Gorton you see it is actually quite similar—maybe without the difficulties of distance—to those in country seats.

If you look at the income levels and employment opportunities, you see their differences are not as great as one would hope they would be. For example, why is a 10-year-old in the Prime Minister’s seat four times more likely to have access to a computer at home than such a child in the electorate of Gorton? Why is a 10-year-old child in the Prime Minister’s seat four times more likely to be online and able to access the internet than such a child in the electorate of Gorton? Why is a constituent in the Prime Minister’s seat three times more likely to be undertaking postsecondary education than a constituent in Gorton? By the way, I am not only making the point of comparison between a Labor seat and a government held seat. Quite clearly, you see a big divide in many respects when you look at rural and metropolitan seats. You see seats held by Nationals, Liberals and Independents in country Australia that have inherent disadvantages above and beyond the tyranny of distance. I think it is true to say, for example, that the effects of the Work Choices legislation upon workers in country areas will be worse, relatively speaking, than—

Phillip Barresi (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You don’t know that!

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is my assertion, Member for Deakin. I respect the member for Deakin. He is a very decent Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment and Workplace Relations. I am his deputy; I quite often to defer to him, at least in administrative matters, because he has got the numbers. It is true to say, and I am making an assertion, that the effects of the Work Choices act in the country will be compounded because of where people live. When you reduce the security of employment in smaller communities, the chances of finding work are smaller and people are going to have greater difficulty if you increase exponentially the precarious nature of work.

We know we are now the most casualised workforce amongst all OECD countries. More than one-quarter of our workforce is casualised. And what does the government do to redress this? It introduces legislation that will accelerate the casualisation of work and accelerate the precarious nature of employment for people who require security and certainty. It would be dishonest for members of parliament to say that we can do all things, that we can regulate all matters of things that are beyond our control. It would be wrong for us to pretend that we can turn back the clock to a time where almost all employment would be Monday to Friday day shift. That is not possible, nor is it necessarily preferable. But we should not be introducing laws in this country that will allow employers to unreasonably treat their employees, to unfairly sack their workforce without any legal recourse. To legally enact a law to say, ‘Yes, you may well be unfairly sacked but you have nowhere to go; we’re not interested,’ is not something most Australians would accept. That would be another reason why all the electorates in this country would be a little unhappier, and they will all know about the unhappiness as the Work Choices act unfortunately takes effect throughout the course of this year.

I started my speech on the appropriation bills talking about the lack of resources in my electorate. If I compared my electorate to one that is not too far away—not Deakin; I will leave Deakin alone, although it once was a marginal, so I should check the grants that Deakin received—say, McEwen, held by Fran Bailey, and the number of sports grants that the member for McEwen received leading up to the last election, she received 17 out of 27 of the grants that were given under that heading in the nation. I have got to give her credit for being able to lobby whichever minister was responsible, but those constituents in my electorate who are not that far away from the communities in McEwen are wondering why they received none, although applications were made. They are forever receiving far fewer grants, whether it is in the area of education or sport, compared with other electorates that are close by which are, in socioeconomic terms, better off.

Labor governments of the past have done this. I do not think they have made it an art form like the Howard government. The pork-barrelling is extraordinary; it has got to the point where it is hard to say it without scratching your head as to how they can get away with this sort of rorting. But it is about time all governments of all colours—I do not care who is elected—start worrying about the marginalised and not the marginals. Start worrying about the people who are disenfranchised, who lack resources in the areas of education and health, who have transport needs that are not being addressed and where merit is not even in the argument as to where Commonwealth expenditure goes. There has got to be a way in which we can get rid of what people believe they need to do to stay in government or to get elected—that is, to bribe people in marginal seats. This bribing or rorting that goes on, this disproportionate allocation of Commonwealth money to areas that are not necessarily in need—certainly not in as much need as other areas—is a national disgrace.

Something must be done to ensure that, from now on, governments do not allocate Commonwealth resources on the basis of purely electoral benefit for the party in government but focus on the needs of Australian citizens, treat them equally and attend to their needs where help is most wanted. Unfortunately, the government does not have any interest in doing that. It is therefore important that this obsession with marginal electorates—at the expense of the marginalised—should be raised in this place, and publicly, as often as possible. We have a very sceptical and cynical electorate who believe they should make safe government seats marginal because it is the only way they are going to get anything. Whether it be a safe Labor, Liberal or Nationals seat, the electorate think they had better make it marginal because they cannot get anything from government unless government thinks it can determine the election outcome in an electorate by giving money to the region.

We have to change that view, and we can only do that when we have an accountable government which bases its decisions on the needs of the nation and allocates money on the basis of merit and does not pork-barrel for electoral advantage. It may be some time before those new criteria take hold, but ultimately I think the community will demand it of government because too many constituents go without. There are certainly constituents in my electorate who are not properly attended to, not only by the Commonwealth but also by other governments. I think it is about time that attitude towards pork-barrelling changed.

Stephen Smith (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. Australia’s living standard fell from about the highest in the world at the beginning of the 1900s to nearly 20th by 1990. Largely because of the major structural economic changes effected by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, Australia is now enjoying the second quarter of its 15th year of continuous economic growth. As a result, our relevant international position in terms of living standards has risen from 19th in 1990 to eighth in 2004. But Australia still faces significant economic challenges that this government is either unwilling or unable to address—challenges that include the parlous state of our nation’s productivity, industry and export trade performance; challenges that with national political leadership can be met and overcome.

During the 1990s, Australia enjoyed our best run of productivity growth on record. Against the United States, we went from 79 per cent of the US productivity rate in 1983 to 86 per cent by 1998, but since that time we have gone backwards. We are now at 81 per cent of the United States productivity rate. Since 2002, we have fallen behind the OECD average. For every quarter of the past year, our national productivity has been negative.

In terms of our trade performance, Australia today has a massive $450 billion foreign debt. That is up from the nearly $210 billion foreign debt when John Howard first came to power in 1996. Today it soars above the debt of countries we might have once considered economic basket cases—countries like Argentina, Brazil and Russia—and we are beaten only by Qatar and Iceland. I now know where Mr Howard and Mr Costello have hidden the debt truck: under the desert sands of Qatar or under the ice of Iceland. In the 1990s, Australian foreign debt was around 40 per cent of GDP. Due to increases in the current account deficit, foreign debt is now around 51 per cent of GDP, with a current account deficit trending as a proportion of GDP at about six per cent. With GDP at around $890 billion, this amounts to more than $50 billion of new debt every year. Despite the favourable historic high prices that Australia receives for our commodity exports and the best terms of trade we have seen in more than 30 years, the Treasurer still manages to run a current account deficit in the order of $60 billion—some six per cent of GDP.

These challenges, in terms of productivity, trade and exports, are the result of 10 long years of economic complacency—a complacency characterised by short-term politics rather than long-term planning; a complacency that has the potential to do real damage to our economy and our economic future. This neglect has been particularly evident within areas under my direct shadow ministerial responsibility—those of industry and infrastructure, and today both of those areas are hot topics in our national debate. The problem for our nation is that they are policy areas that the Howard government has neglected for 10 long years. Instead of focusing on the real drivers of productivity, the government has pursued an ideological obsession that the Prime Minister has had since the 1960s: a slashing of wages and conditions for ordinary working Australians—an approach which will not deliver a productivity benefit for our nation.

The government’s approach to industrial relations is both extreme and unfair, and it is neither sensible nor economically efficient. Last year, the Prime Minister argued that his industrial relations changes were essential to the future economic benefit of our nation. The Prime Minister argued that these changes were needed to maintain and build on Australia’s economic performance. The Prime Minister and the government assert that these changes are the magic bullet needed to improve employment, wages and productivity. At the time the legislation passed in the parliament at the end of last year, the Prime Minister’s benchmark claims were that these changes would increase employment and reduce unemployment, increase national and workplace productivity, and provide a boost to the economy.

Let us examine those various assertions. By removing the independent umpire, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, from setting the level of the minimum wage, the government seeks to realise its ambition of a reduction in real terms of the value of the minimum wage. In the government’s view, reducing the value of the minimum wage in real terms will lead to an increase in employment. But Australian and overseas experience shows that the assertion that high minimum wage levels inevitably lead to high levels of unemployment does not stack up. The Australian experience shows that it is possible to have falling unemployment while experiencing real wages growth. In Australia, we have experienced annual minimum wage increases over the past five years at the same time as unemployment has fallen. Over the past five years, jobs growth has increased by 10.4 per cent while minimum wages have grown by 5.3 per cent in real terms.

International evidence also questions the government’s claims. In the United States, over the past five years jobs growth has risen by only 2.9 per cent while the minimum wage in real terms has fallen by a massive 12 per cent. We have better employment levels for men aged between 25 and 65, while those mature age workers who did not complete high school also have a better employment record in Australia than in the US. During a similar period in the United Kingdom, the minimum wage has more than doubled from around £2.30 to its current level of £5.05, whilst employment has risen by a significant 4.4 per cent.

At the same time as seeking to reduce the minimum wage for the fundamentally flawed view that it will increase employment, the government talks up the alleged benefits of these changes. The Prime Minister uses as his justification for this the fact that since 1996 real wages have increased by more than 15 per cent compared to less than two per cent during Labor’s period in office.  But that ignores that, during Labor’s period in office, disposable income for average Australian families increased by more than 40 per cent through the so-called social wage, which constituted elements such as superannuation and a universal health care system, both of which the current Prime Minister vigorously opposed. And it ignores the most important measure of real wage growth, namely, against the level of inflation. When Labor came to office in 1983 it inherited a 10 per cent inflation rate from then Treasurer, John Howard. When it left office 13 years later in 1996 Australia’s inflation rate was just two per cent.

On the issue of real wages growth, the empirical evidence simply does not support the government’s assertions that these benefits will come from a deregulated labour market. We only have to look at research undertaken by Professor David Peetz of Griffith University to see that. Professor Peetz’s research shows that labour productivity growth prior to the prices and incomes accord of the 1980s averaged 2.6 per cent annually. The introduction in 1983 of the accord radically altered this, and through the shift to enterprise bargaining we saw labour productivity eventually peak at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent during the years 1994-2000. Contrast this with the current productivity cycle, which according to Peetz commenced in 1999-2000—the first full cycle subject to the government’s Workplace Relations Act 1996 with its emphasis on individual contracts—and annual labour productivity growth has fallen to just 2.3 per cent.

My own state, Western Australia, stands alone as an example of the most egregious consequences of the policy approach being implemented by John Howard. In Western Australia, between 1994 and 1996 around five per cent of employees had agreements that provided below award rates in their agreements. By 1998 this had climbed to around 25 per cent of all agreements registered with the Western Australia Commissioner of Workplace Agreements. This meant that under the Court-Kierath industrial relations system labour productivity fell to an average annual growth rate of 3.8 per cent, compared to 6.29 per cent under the current state government’s industrial relations system, a year-on-year increase of nearly 10 per cent in 2003-04.

How productivity will be improved as a result of the government’s industrial relations changes has never been explained. It has only been asserted, despite being one of the government’s central assertions. Certainly, neither the Treasury nor the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations claim any economic analysis of their own to that effect.

The government’s approach has been to equate productivity improvements with lower wages. Simply put, the government’s extreme industrial relations changes will see Australia introduce a system of labour market changes that will drag wages and conditions down, may or will increase profits, but will not increase productivity or efficiency. This is because an industrial relations system that suppresses labour costs reduces the incentive of business to focus on capital investment and other more sophisticated sources of competitive advantage.

And that is the likely outcome of these changes. We only need to look to New Zealand for proof of the impact of this approach, where according to a 2004 New Zealand Treasury report:

… changes in factor market regulation may have changed firms’ incentive to source output growth from employing more labour versus investing more in physical capital, because of a change in the relative price of labour to capital.

The New Zealand industrial relations experience served to discourage investment and innovation, with the result that Australia’s labour productivity is now more than 23 per cent higher than New Zealand’s. Even the Commonwealth Treasury here has echoed this sentiment, saying in advice to the Treasurer on 6 October that, as a result of the government’s changes, labour productivity growth may be ‘suppressed’.

The government’s assertion that its industrial relations changes will fix any economic problems Australia faces is not just simplistic, it ignores the real drivers of productivity in our economy: the knowledge and skills of our workforce, the ability to innovate through quality research and development and the adequacy of our infrastructure.

In dealing with these issues, let me return to Australia’s external imbalance, particularly our current account deficit, as it is the clearest manifestation of the government’s complacency and neglect in these areas. While one of the causes of Australia’s current account deficit has been a lack of domestic savings, the current account deficit has really come to the fore as our trade deficit has ballooned. The Howard government has to date presided over 45 monthly trade deficits in a row, the longest run of any Australian government—and it is still continuing. Australia’s share of world exports has now fallen from a high of 1.22 per cent in 1989 to 0.94 per cent today, its lowest level since records began in 1946. This is not surprising when, over the past five years, manufactured exports have grown by a trend rate of only 1.7 per cent while at the same time manufactured imports have grown by 5.4 per cent. And according to ABS estimates, our negative net export position reduced economic growth by 0.3 per cent in the September quarter last year.

In 2004-05 Australia’s trade deficit in goods and services stood at nearly $26 billion, with a deficit in manufactured goods of more than $88 billion. Is it any wonder then that we have seen manufacturing decline as a proportion of GDP to its current level of 12.6 per cent, down from 19 per cent in 1975? If manufacturing continues to shrink as a share of GDP then our current account deficit will continue to grow. While export growth generally is less than half that achieved under Labor, our manufacturing exports are even more dire. Today, manufactured exports are growing at only 3.6 per cent, more than four times smaller than the growth recorded under Labor. Particularly disturbing is the composition of our manufacturing export performance.

One of the biggest failures of the Howard-Costello government has been that it has let slip Labor’s focus on the export of elaborately transformed manufactures. While knowledge-intensive manufacturing accounts for 8.4 per cent of the economic value add in Europe, it accounts for only three per cent of the value add in Australia. Worse still, while Australia’s share of knowledge-intensive manufacturing was rising strongly during the early 1990s, it has declined since 1995 by an average 1.5 per cent a year. This is impacting on our jobs market and our skills formation. If the Australian Industry Group, AiG, is right, over 40,000 manufacturing jobs are being lost each year, year in, year out. That ultimately will hurt our skills base and our ability to innovate in the future. There is little doubt that Australian manufacturing is bleeding—so much so that if these trends were to continue Australia would cease to have a manufacturing industry by about 2025.

We cannot prosper as a nation by simply lowering wages and neglecting efforts that encourage industry innovation and productivity. We need to continue to seek out ways to work smarter, not just harder. This means it is essential that we look creatively at adopting measures to boost research and development innovation, not relying on labour market participation or labour market deregulation. Australian business innovation today is at only half the average of OECD nations, a situation achieved in the 1980s and early 1990s when taxation arrangements encouraged companies to triple their investment in research and development. Now into our 15th year of continuous economic growth, Australia remains near the bottom of the international research and development league table, with a meagre 0.89 per cent of GDP for R&D expenditure, against an OECD average of 1.5 per cent of GDP. That is 15th on the OECD table, half the effort achieved by the United States, a third of Sweden and substantially less than both Germany and Belgium. Today, expenditure on R&D is no better than it was nearly 10 years ago when this government came to office. This should obviously be a much higher and greater investment.

Since 1996, business investment in research and development has been growing at only 2.6 per cent, while in the previous decade R&D investment grew at 11.4 per cent. In manufacturing the fall has been even more pronounced, with R&D growth of 10.5 per cent to 1996, down to just 0.8 per cent a year since then. Research conducted by Melbourne university in its 2005 R&D and intellectual property scoreboard found that, of the over 5,000 Australian companies that undertake any form of R&D, fewer than 50 spent more than $10 million on it in 2003-04. That scored us a rating of C minus.

Meanwhile, our international competitors are marching ahead. Companies in China have been boosting expenditure on R&D at a rate of 21 per cent a year. The Howard-Costello government has no policy or political strategy to deal with these issues. At best it does not understand them; at worst it does not care about them.

Labor’s approach in government was to recognise that a viable and vibrant manufacturing industry relied on our ability to be globally competitive and to build on our success by encouraging a culture of innovation and exporting. Australia needs an economy where manufacturing plays its part as a producer of technology, alongside goods and services rich in intellectual property. Commonsense sees that the future of a modern, dynamic, successful manufacturing industry must be based on a foundation of skills, quality and innovation. This requires national leadership from the Commonwealth to develop a comprehensive national industry strategy, to revitalise the COAG Industry and Technology Ministerial Council, and to expand and encourage joint research and development activities to move Australian industries and exports up the value chain. Of course, the Howard government simply will not do this.

The government’s neglect of the productive capacity of our economy is not confined to just manufacturing. After 10 years of government economic complacency, Australia’s competitive edge is being further undermined by an economy pressing up against capacity constraints—a direct result of the deterioration in our key infrastructure assets. Speaking to the Committee for Melbourne in July 1995, John Howard said:

… I’ve been struck by the need to improve the coordination of infrastructure policy at the Commonwealth-State level.

In November 2005, John Howard told the Australian Davos Connection’s infrastructure conference:

… no-one disputes that better coordination across different levels of Government is an important part of getting the right environment for … [infrastructure] investment.

The problem is that, over 10 years, there has been no tangible progress. While the recent COAG outcome on infrastructure is a positive step, it comes off the back of 10 years of neglect and indifference and has the trappings of a government seeking a political fix to a substantial public policy problem.

The approach to infrastructure adopted at last Friday’s COAG meeting was not only belated but vastly inadequate. The COAG communique merely agrees to think about reform rather than undertake actual reform itself. According to communique timelines, no progress will be seen until at least 2007, while a number of potentially substantive issues are pushed back until well into 2010-11.

In addition, the communique contained no reference to any independent coordinating body, an initiative long called for by the infrastructure sector itself. There was no plan for any audit of national infrastructure assets, merely a report every five years, with little or no accountability or transparency.

In a modern, dynamic and outwardly looking Australian economy, real productivity improvements can only come from a commitment to the adequacy of our infrastructure; a commitment to the education, skills and training of our workforce; and a commitment to our ability to support and foster innovation and the commercialisation of our ideas. Such commitments represent an investment in our nation’s future, not something to be viewed merely as an expense or a budgetary item.

In contrast to the government, Labor recognises that the current national process for the integrated coordination and planning of our future infrastructure requirements is either dysfunctional or does not exist. Labor believes that there needs to be a more mature, collaborative relationship between the Commonwealth and the states, the territories and local government. That is why Labor believes that the Commonwealth should work with the states to give priority to long-term strategic planning of the nation’s infrastructure needs.

Strategic planning for our national infrastructure needs is complex. It requires cooperation amongst the three tiers of government and it requires sound research and projections of likely trends in population growth, economic development, exports, consumer demand and technology.

That is why a federal Labor government will conduct a national infrastructure audit; establish a national infrastructure priority list; create Infrastructure Australia, a Commonwealth body to drive rebuilding; and seek to reduce complex and overlapping regulations between the Commonwealth and the states. The priorities of this government encompass none of these commitments—commitments that would substantively and sustainably increase the productive capacity and capability of our nation.

The period since 1996 is a missed opportunity that has hurt Australia’s ability to remain internationally competitive—a fact that is being acutely felt today. Although the government makes noises about the need to improve productivity, it is trying to achieve this through an industrial relations approach which will likely reduce wages, particularly at the lower end of the scale.

Australia needs a government that is committed to the national interest and long-term solutions rather than political considerations and short-term fixes. Australia needs a government that has a vision and is committed to building an economy geared towards long-term production, not just short-term consumption. The Howard-Costello government is not the government to do that. Only a federal Labor government will effect that long-term planning for our nation’s future.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am indebted to the honourable member for Chisholm for allowing me to take her spot on the list for the debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. What we are dealing with in these appropriation bills covers a very wide range of activities of the Commonwealth where there have been adjustments to (1) the original budget outlays and (2) the actual programs that have been undertaken. In part that is because there have been necessary adjustments as the year has gone on, being initiatives as well as changes to what was originally proposed, because circumstances have changed. That is why we have debate on these additional appropriations. That is also why we have a half-yearly report to indicate, given what was proposed initially, where Australia has got to in terms of its budget half-way along. So a lot of the material that is contained in these appropriation bills was dealt with last December in terms of changes.

I will make a general point, just as I have in all appropriations debates: it is much harder now than it was 10 years ago to participate in a debate on the budget and further appropriations because the specifics of what is being done are clouded by the way in which they are reported. There is the new method of looking at how the budget is done, not on a cash basis but on an accrual basis, and also the way in which it is stated, with goals, outcomes and so on. If you look at the core statements themselves—appropriation bills Nos 3 and 4, as well as the statement of savings—you do not actually get a handle on what is practically being done. They satisfy the Treasury’s conditions for this mode of accounting but I do not think they would satisfy ordinary individuals in Australia or certainly me, as a member of parliament, or others, because what we are actually interested in is how the administered actions of government through practical programs impact on people or impact on government departments and the way in which they carry out their business.

What is covered in these appropriations is very important. I will give you one instance. There is an extra $155.8 million going to the Department of Defence. If you go to the general papers on this, they will tell you that the outcome that they are looking at is the defence of the Commonwealth of Australia and, if necessary, the defence of Australia by action overseas. That really tells us nothing except what the generality is. But in the minister’s second reading speech and also in what are invaluable papers—the portfolio additional estimates statements for the Defence portfolio, and there are also the Attorney-General’s and Transport ones, which I will be referring to—you actually find out what it is about—and the PAES are usually locked away in the Table Office. If you look at what it is about, you see that of that order of money $40.9 million has gone to provide a special forces task group in Afghanistan. That has been raised through mid-year because it is a specific response to the deteriorating strategic situation in Afghanistan. The fact is there was a specific request for more Australian troops to be sent there. That has been supported by the Leader of the Opposition and members of the opposition. In order to facilitate that, another part of it—$16 million—is there to fund the deployment of helicopters and support elements in Afghanistan. That is an extremely important part of our forward defence posture in an age of war on terror. As the opposition has pointed out, what is fundamental here is that we do not want to see—and certainly President Musharraf, next door in Pakistan, does not want to see—the reimposition throughout Afghanistan of the power of the Taliban, having been beaten in Afghanistan, by their being able to defeat troops on the ground and overturn the democratically elected government of Afghanistan, which is battling, after so many decades of hostilities, to try to rebuild its country with assistance from Australia and others. So practically, you can look at it and say, ‘Yes, that’s good and that should be supported.’

Also there is a series that particularly bears on security in relation to Sydney airport and airports across Australia. If we go to the particulars of the portfolio additional estimates statements in the Department of Transport and Regional Services portfolio, we find in the administered programs at page 17 a special provision of $4.9 million for aviation security and strengthening international air cargo security arrangements in Australia. Regionally—which bears on Bankstown as a regional airport, but the specifics of this are for those that are further away from the main cities—there has been a change in the way funds are allocated. In aviation security enhancements, there is a regional airport 24-hour closed circuit television pilot study which is important not only for members in regional seats but in my instance in Bankstown, with Bankstown Airport in the middle of Sydney, to be assured that we have a much better security situation and that we can cover, 24 hours a day, attempts to get into Bankstown, which is a very short distance from Kingsford Smith and 22 kilometres from the CBD. That is very important, and there is an associated allocation of funds for aviation security enhancements in regional passenger screening, because we know that there has not been enough previously given to screening people at regional airports. Most people then fly into Sydney, and there is a great deal, of course, between Sydney and Canberra and between the capital cities of Australia, but there is still an open security hole which this money is trying to be directed to.

Further, on page 18, we see that there is not only that allocation for international air cargo security arrangements but also a surface transport security enhancement, which would be welcomed, and a strengthening of the security and crime information service. There is an attempt to put that together. Regarding more specifics on this, I am indebted to the minister’s second reading speech, and I just wish we had a lot more material like this from the government so that we could make a better assessment of what is happening. Generally, $11.9 million of the $22.5 million to improve aviation security has been provided to the Department of Transport and Regional Services to improve the security of international passenger aircraft through increased inspection of air cargo. That is a vital thing that has not been done at a high enough level yet, and that money goes partway to helping to solve that problem. We know there is still a significant problem of container traffic through our ports and seaways, but this addresses that in aviation. There is $10.6 million allocated to the Australian Customs Service to increase airside patrols at airports.

Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, you would be aware, as would other members, that there has been a continuing concern and coverage in the media generated from concerns arising in the parliament that, while a range of measures to increase security have been taken for the broad travelling public, we have massive security holes in terms of airside security staff at the airport, people working for Qantas and the security area. In the past six months, part of the change in the funding provided was to try to pull those things together.

When these matters were dealt with previously, I asked the former Minister for Transport and Regional Services, the Hon. John Anderson, whether or not he could assure the House that the arrangements that had been made to ensure that people working at Sydney airport had been properly security cleared were now in place. I got a fairly strong answer to say that that had all been done, but I indicated to him further in argument that the information I had been given was that there was a key problem in terms of the hierarchy of security at Sydney airport and at others. That goes to the fact that it is not the government taking responsibility for what happens there: those services have been leased out. There are private companies which are the head companies to provide security services. They have given guarantees to the government that their people have been security cleared and so on. When you go down the chain, those major security companies which provide services to State Rail and Sydney airport then go to subcontractors. I indicated in argument that that is an area that particularly needs to be looked at: whether those subcontractors fulfil those requirements. And the subcontractors themselves go to sole traders.

I received some information just recently which indicates that, whatever changes have been made and whatever guarantees have been given that this is an area of concern in terms of security at Sydney airport—and at others, but particularly at Sydney—it has not been resolved. The major companies have difficulties with particular subcontractors, and there is competition between subcontractors and between sole traders to get work. The government has been told that there are issues to do with people passing security testing, and, more importantly, the cash rates that people are being paid, whether there is appropriate workers compensation being paid by these companies, whether or not there is an associated situation where there may in fact be fraud against the Commonwealth and whether there may be a deliberate use of social security payments to supplement people’s wages. This is an area that continues to need very specific scrutiny by the government.

I want to make a quick comparison here between Australia and the United States. At the end of the parliamentary break I went to Hawaii for eight days. It is a very different proposition going into the United States than it is travelling within Australia or, indeed, coming into this parliament. Our security situation in the parliament is strict, and we are strict in Australia as well, but in the United States, given the events of 11 September 2001, and the other events which have occurred and which have seemingly been foiled in the United States, there is a very high degree of concentration on providing aircraft security.

The difference between the way Australia does it and the way America does it is underlined by this simple fact: anywhere you travel in Australia, given the information there has been recently—highlighted by security footage that has been taken and the revelations that on the airside area it has been possible for people to put drugs or other material into people’s bags—it has been a pressing situation that people make sure that their bags are locked and secured. There is even a service now where you can wrap the whole thing up completely so it cannot be gotten into. In the United States, the situation was that they did not want any locks on the bags at all. They knew if we were coming from Australia we would have locks on our bags, and they simply told us: ‘We’re going to inspect them. It’s better for you to stay here and unlock them if we need them to be unlocked, because otherwise we’re just going to cut them open and you can forget having locks at all.’ They said, ‘Americans know not to lock their bags because that’s the kind of security environment we’ve got here.’

Security at airports in the United States has not been provided by private companies. It is not a question of head companies then going to subcontractors who then go to sole traders. The United States actually employs people directly. They are government employees that they security test, that they have responsibility for, that they use to try to guarantee that they will not have the holes in their security that have been alleged in ours and, in fact, proven in the past with the problems airside. It is a different approach to government. People do not well enough understand that the bastion of private enterprise, the United States, is also the bastion of federal government and state governments acting on their responsibility to ensure the safety of their communities. They do not worry about (1) being a rule-bound society or (2) the fact they see it as their direct responsibility to provide direct services and for the government to ensure the safety of the travelling public.

We have still got a big potential and probably actual security problem because we have not got government employees doing this work. It disturbs me that the allegations that have been put to me recently may have point and purpose, and it may well be the situation that some companies operating at Sydney and at other airports are breaking the law and that some companies may be telling the government and government authorities that the situation is entirely different—not just in security terms but in broader terms about workers compensation, the remuneration they get and so on. People may cut corners in order to get the work, but those cut corners may lead to the travelling public being in peril.

I entirely endorse the moneys that have been proposed for the regional area, not only to pick up on regional security at airports—televising in that pilot—but also to improve other regional security. I would also endorse what has been done here not only with aircraft cargo in the international container area but also specifically to knit together the crime prevention unit and to increase security on air side. It is also vitally important that this new combination, which has arisen as a result of matters raised within this parliament and has been revealed in terms of investigations of what the actuality is, goes forward with fully open eyes and with an effort to see that these private contractors are brought under very close scrutiny to ensure that the safety of the travelling public and the operations of those significant pieces of infrastructure are not undone.

As part of that, there is a further tranche of moneys involved in these appropriations of $54.6 million to the Australian Federal Police for their airport policing measures. There is $27.2 million for phase 1 of community policing at airports, $18.2 million to provide a first response counter-terrorism capability at relevant airports, and $9.2 million to establish joint airport investigation teams with the Australian Customs Service which will also receive an additional $1 million for this initiative.

The very last point is the key to ensuring that the current situation does not become a security concern. If the allegations that have been put to me are correct, the joint airport investigation teams—where Australian Federal Police will work more closely with the Customs Service—will take up a series of points that have been put to them and look structurally at just what the problems are. I would far prefer the situation we had previously where we had government instrumentalities in charge of those services, where there was a direct responsibility that could lead right back to a federal government minister and where there could be cooperation between the state and federal governments to ensure that our fundamental infrastructure is not compromised.

We have seen in recent trials and in trials going back some time now initial allegations about people who had come to the notice of not only the Federal Police but also the state police, ASIO and others. We have seen with people charged in relation to terrorist activities that Sydney airport has been a key part of the concern in relation to that antiterrorist activity. The fundamental backdoor that can be used is not John or Jill Public walking in off the street to fly to Melbourne, Brisbane or somewhere else. The screening services that we have there work particularly well. They are not as severe as the United States where they tell you to take your shoes and just about everything else as well because you may as well save yourself time. Likewise, when it comes to testing for explosives we have—and I have encountered this at Canberra airport twice now—the same kind of facility as they have in the United States. They test as a matter of course—they do not just test a selection of people—for explosives to ensure that people cannot take C4 and other plastic explosives onboard and damage everyone.

The most vulnerable part is that there could always be a significant chance that people working for the American federal authorities at those airports could take part in terrorist activities or could have slipped through the security net. But the comparison is very simple. There is a much greater chance of that, as has already been demonstrated in the past, if governments do not have control of the situation, if they are at arm’s length and if they are reliant upon information from private companies that probably do not know who they have employed. When they go to subcontractors and the subcontractors go to sole traders competing against each other, the security holes are there. The evidence that I have heard recently is disturbing and I would ask the relevant minister to please follow this closely for everyone’s benefit. (Time expired)

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I always say that you can always trust a man with hair on his face. I would like to say that the member for Blaxland is a very trustworthy person. I wish to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006. In particular, I would like to refer to the additional funds of $1.2 million allocated towards the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, which include items such as fishing adjustments, timber industry support and drought related exceptional circumstances. I want to relate those to some activities within the Department of the Environment and Heritage, because I believe that the spending within that department is having a harmful effect on how some of our land management is being carried out.

I do not believe these two departments work together in their overall consideration of land management. While one area is in crisis because it is tied up in red tape, another is being fed large sums of money to lock up very usable and sustainable land. I am particularly concerned about the changes in a number of pieces of legislation, including the Nature Conservation Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Bill 2005, the Forest Practices Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Bill 2005 and the Forest Practices Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Regulations 2005. They are all aimed at trying to control activities on private land.

Some of this was raised under the regional forest agreement bills, but the rest came though as additional legislation under another hat altogether. Like the recent fisheries legislation, it seems to have been drawn up without consultation with any reference to those who will be most affected by it. Tasmania is not the only place that has suffered from this very heavy handed approach to legislation. I ask the question: who is actually paying the cost of all this work and to what end? Huge amounts of information have been collected, as can be seen by documents on the net and provided by various researchers.

However, the starting point appears to be wrong and, therefore, a lot of work will have to be done again if the federal government is serious about the consultation process. Recently in Tasmania there has been widespread concern, so much so that a group of farmers and retired farmers got together and called a public meeting to see what is going on. The ABC’s Landline was invited, too, and the main thrust of that meeting was to seek answers about what was going on and why this was being done without consultation.

Six months went by and another meeting was called. By this time, some of the legislation under discussion had been received and one of the farmers, Don McShane, sifted through all the information provided and came up with some questions and some interpretations. Don did an excellent and very precise job on the material and has kindly lent me his notes as background for this speech. The discussion paper put out to look at threatened non-forest vegetation had all the hallmarks of being written by someone working off a theoretical base who had been asked to undertake a study on how to deal with threatened species without really seeing if the species are threatened and what their extent is in Tasmania.

Many of these species are prolific on farmland that has only been used for grazing. They could only be threatened if all the land was suddenly intensively farmed for cropping, as has happened with the vegetable farmers and dairy farmers on the north-west coast of Tasmania. Many farmers are puzzled by this, because they have not changed their land use generally for some time, and many of the areas discussed are sheep and cattle grazing runs. They cannot see why any species on them should be any more threatened now than it was 30 years or 60 years ago. So any comment through the consultation process would have had some basis from which to start.

The question that was raised here was whether there were not more workable ways of achieving the required outcome. For instance, in the explanation for the requirement of a regulatory impact statement, the introduction to that paper made the point that the Treasury and Finance Regulation Review Unit made an initial assessment that the proposed legislative amendments to restrict the clearance and conversion of threatened non-forest vegetation communities on private land would impose major restrictions on competition and have a significant negative impact on business.

This is not a very encouraging start. Farmers are not going to be asked to place voluntary restrictions on the use of their land so as to save species that might be threatened or that might be threatened if farmers change the use of their land in the future. The reason given for this was that Tasmania was out of step with the rest of Australia, that there had been public and political pressure to restrict the use of certain private lands and that there was a gap in the legislation in that some non-threatened, non-forest vegetation communities were not explicitly covered so that all non-forest vegetation communities would end up being protected, whether they were threatened or not. Questions were asked at the meeting about why Tasmania was out of step, who was complaining or putting on the pressure and whether the gap would mean that all unimproved farming land would be locked up. The notes on the legislation certainly did not provide any answers to that.

Using this legislation as a guideline, it would mean that, if farmers wanted to apply fertilisers to their land or plough it up, they would require the equivalent of a forest practices plan. At the moment, a forest practices plan can require the use of a professional planner to draw up a plan to harvest timber that would take into account all of the forestry regulations on water zones, species on the ground, biodiversity and everything else that the forester had to deal with. This can cost up to $5,000 each and a minimum of about $600, depending on how many reports are required, just to plough a paddock to get some better grass for your stock.

The midlands and the east coast of Tasmania consist of a lot of rocky ground and steep slopes. They are unlikely to have strong pressure on them for change. As Don says, do the authors of this legislation understand what the application of seed and fertiliser or the use of technology such as direct drilling can do to stony ground? Some farmers have achieved amazing results, particularly in better economic times. Yet, within all of this, there seems to be little reference to where the farmer can find the additional funds to afford to carry out these changes. If they do decide to carry out some minor land conversion and they fall foul of the legislation, the fines can be enormous. The penalties for noncompliance go up to $100,000.

What are we dealing with here? Talk about using a jackhammer to crack a nut! Farmers know what sort of impact their activities have on their land. They would be stupid not to know, because it affects their livelihoods. They have bought their land in good faith to undertake what is required to run a sustainable and profitable farm. Legislation that comes out of the blue without any discussion with the land user because somebody somewhere is worried about a few native plants but cannot actually say what those plants are, the extent of their range in Tasmania and whether they would indeed be harmed by current farming practices where they occur has to be considered unfair. It is not what people expect in Australia and it is not what Tasmania is all about anyway.

If there are concerns and if farmers are consulted and assisted in ensuring that enough of the species are left to assist with biodiversity, the rest is not necessary. Where there is a need to develop reserves, appropriate compensation should be available and management plans drawn up by the farmer and the management body to ensure that any impact from the reserved land does not impinge on the farmer’s land. As with forestry, some stewardship arrangements can be made available so that the farmer can be encouraged to look after that part of his or her farm that is required to be reserved.

After experience with the assessment for forestry compensation, many farmers are cagey about allowing just anyone to assess the value of their land in production. An acceptable system should be to ensure that there is a standard assessment process that everybody knows about and that there is a profit market of valuation on the land to be reserved. There should also be an understanding that many farmers use their farms as their superannuation and that when they come to the end of their working life they need to have something of improved value to sell to give them some retirement prospect, like any other businesspeople.

The regulatory impact statement talks about ‘potential compensation to affected landowners in prescribed circumstances’. However, it also states that ‘up to a certain point of duty of care, landowners are expected to provide environmental protection on their properties without compensation’, but there is no description of the point of duty of care, should this apply. As usual with this sort of thing, it is so indefinite that any interpretation can be used by those who make the regulations. The questions have to be asked: do we need more controls; what on earth are we going to control next—maybe it is the number of sheep and cattle each farmer is allowed; and do we not think that control has just spun out of control?

Many comments and concerns came out of the meeting, but the bottom line is that policies that fail to engage the cooperation of landowners will themselves ultimately fail. This group is deeply concerned about the outcome. They are certainly not stupid and will resist any efforts to have anything forced upon them. But they are willing to talk and see something sensible come out of this. The preferred option is something like the model developed for the Regional Forest Agreements Private Forest Reserve Program, but there has to be an agreement between the state and federal governments to undertake a proper consultation and be provided with proper scientific data on which to develop any guidelines. The stuff that has been provided so far is totally inadequate and from the wrong perspective.

If funds are to be spent on this sort of activity where the federal government is trying to appease some of its greener constituents, let us get it onto a rational basis so that if a new environmental policy is being developed it at least starts with the proper information, the scientific basis and the likely impact on the traditional land users, whether they be European or Aboriginal. Australians are proud of their land ownership because few people around the world have the sort of acreage that we have in our care. No-one wants to really ruin it for the future. Past practices have pushed farming into some pretty marginal land—but then economics have driven them out again. Those who are farming today are on the lookout for new ideas and new ways of helping the earth to produce our needs. We should be funding research and development, especially to assist with things like drought proofing, having more skilled people and keeping them healthy and housed. It is here that our farmers need some practical assistance, not having someone to tell them how to conserve their land and being left to grow weeds, promote bushfires and become unproductive in every sense.

This can be much better handled and I believe that this government should be well advised to take heed of what that meeting and the one that was held at Oaklands had to say. There is an avenue for negotiations to restart. There is a will between both state and federal parties to vary the agreements. And, quite honestly, it is vital that this be done. Any further funds spent on developing a hollow case is not what this is all about. If this government were fair dinkum then there should be no ifs and buts; it should be on the road to a new agreement by now. I look forward to seeing something more positive come out of this and not seeing more money being wasted.

The present position that applies is one where a farmer 10 years ago ploughed up his sags and land that had been used for grazing for the last 100 years and put in poppies. Because the price of wool was not giving the return that it used to, he looked to the poppy industry and the spud industry. That was okay 10 years ago. His neighbour now is forced to look for an alternative way to return money, to get a new cash flow, and he is being denied that opportunity. This, in anybody’s opinion, is very unfair and denies natural justice.

When we look at these issues, if areas have to be set aside to safeguard biodiversity, then that is in the public interest. This occurred in my electorate, in the Mole Creek area, where karsts exist and where people sit above caves and have sinkholes on their properties. Their lives were put on hold for years because of the disruption that was put on them when land use issues took over and people were denied the right to harvest their forests because it was said that there were karsts beneath them. I do not mind having a public interest. I believe in the public interest. I believe that government has a responsibility to take care of the public interest. But, if we are going to look after biodiversity and things like karsts and the cave systems that apply within our country, and if we say that this is in the interests of the public, then the public has to pay for the public interest.

There are all sorts of opportunities that can be developed, like the stewardships where some landowners will fence off certain areas and will only use those for grazing and they can be paid rent on a yearly basis. There are some taxation issues with that, which are difficult, but it is still an income. There are some people who are quite willing to do that and have already gone into those sorts of arrangements. These are quite acceptable processes that we can continue to develop to enhance these programs. However, we are coming along and saying to a person who, 10 years ago or less, saw their neighbours plough up the sags and grasses and put in the poppies and spuds because wool was in a downturn and they could not make the same amount from the property that they used to with the same management techniques or processes, so they had to look for another cash flow: ‘You cannot do what your neighbour did 10 years ago, and we’re not going to compensate you. But it’s in the public interest. That’s why you can’t do it.’

There is something wrong when that happens, and natural justice is being denied to people. As I said, I am about the public interest if it needs to be put forward, but I am also about natural justice. You would think that The Nationals would have some sort of an interest in this kind of legislation when it goes through this parliament, but The Nationals seem to have let these bills go through without any consideration. That is probably one reason why people say that that party is now failing rural and regional Australia.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006, I would like to raise some issues of concern in my electorate. I do that in the context of the second reading amendment moved by the member for Melbourne on behalf of the opposition because while the government is quick to pat itself on the back for its economic credentials and the size of the surplus it is failing—in my electorate, certainly—to create opportunities and invest in the services and infrastructure that we need to maintain the economic growth and prosperity that Australia has been enjoying over the last 15 years or so.

In particular, I would like to talk about Telstra. I did not plan to raise Telstra, its services and the National Party’s sell-out of my electorate and other regional areas in agreeing to sell Telstra late last year but, when I opened the Financial Review on Tuesday morning and saw the article about the exchange at Senate estimates between Senator Ian Macdonald and Senator Coonan, I could not resist. While we expect to see a bit of conflict and biffo between Labor senators and government ministers, you can imagine my surprise and glee at seeing government members doing the same thing. It seems that the regional members in the government are starting to wake up to the contempt with which they will be treated by a privatised Telstra.

The issue that Senator Macdonald raised was the government’s 2001 election promise of mobile coverage for our highways. He mentioned a number of regions in Queensland, as you would expect from a senator representing Queensland. In particular, he mentioned the span of coastline between Rockhampton and Mackay. That is a road travelled by me when I service the northern part of my electorate and also by many of my constituents. I was pleased to hear the senator make those remarks because that is an incredibly busy stretch of road which has a reputation for being a high accident zone. The issue of mobile coverage on that stretch of highway is very important to people in my electorate and visitors to our electorate as well.

It is not just the area between Rockhampton and Mackay that is a problem for people in my electorate. Also when you travel on the highway west of Rockhampton, which is increasingly popular for tourism and also for the mining workforce in our area as the coal boom continues apace in the Central Highlands and the Bowen Basin, you find big gaps in mobile phone coverage. Far from the government living up to its promise of providing coverage on these highways, we know very well that has not happened, and the exchange between Senator Macdonald and Senator Coonan at estimates the other day seems to indicate that the government is now washing its hands of that promise.

People ask me, ‘Is mobile phone coverage an issue in your electorate?’ People in my electorate can tell you exactly where the phone cuts out. When you drive out of Rocky to Westwood it cuts out. When you drive north of Rocky and get to Yaamba it cuts out. People can tell you, within a few kilometres, exactly where the coverage cuts in and out, so anyone who thinks this is not an issue in my electorate is kidding themselves. The blame is laid squarely at the feet of Telstra and increasingly at the feet of those government members who voted to sell Telstra and privatise it completely. I applaud Senator Macdonald’s stand on this matter and I join him in condemning the government for failing yet again to carry out an election promise and for betraying the people of rural and regional Australia by moving to privatise the rest of Telstra.

Another good one from Telstra is its decision to shelve the CDMA network in favour of the so-called 3G technology.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

As I was saying before the break, another Telstra issue that is causing some concern in my electorate is Telstra’s decision to shelve the CDMA network in favour of the 3G technology before the software that will enable this technology to gain coverage comparable with current equipment is designed. This is incredible; people in my electorate cannot believe that they went out and bought the gear and the CDMA handsets in order to plug into the CDMA network, all on the urging of Telstra when that was the technology of choice. That Telstra is going to turn around and throw that out is unacceptable and is causing a great deal of anger in my region.

Another area that I wanted to speak about that is of concern to people in my electorate and electorates right across the country is aged care. In surveys that I conduct in my electorate it shows up consistently as an issue of major concern to people and a priority area for governments to focus on. I am sure that is the same for many other electorates. There have been a couple of issues in my local area just in the last couple of months that have really brought this to the forefront, and both of these issues relate to the staffing shortages—the workforce shortages—that we know about in aged care.

One is the instance of the Blue Care facility—a brand new facility on the Capricorn Coast, which is a very fast growing region and particularly popular among retirees. These extra beds have been sought by the people of the Capricorn Coast since before 1998. This issue was around before I got elected. We have finally managed to get those places for the Capricorn Coast; I think it was announced at the end of 2001. The facility is built; it is sitting there waiting to open and up until a few weeks ago it had not been able to open because of Blue Care’s inability to find staff. It is in Yeppoon, of all places. It is a beautiful place with a fantastic lifestyle, and still this facility is unable to find adequate registered nurses to open its doors to the elderly residents of the Capricorn Coast who, as I say, have been waiting for this facility for some seven or eight years.

Another issue that has arisen recently is that of the John Cani hostel in Mount Morgan, which is a small rural town 30 kilometres west of Rockhampton. Unfortunately, it has been sanctioned by the Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency, though that is not the issue that I want to discuss today. The management there have already taken steps to address those problems, but the report that led to the sanctions really comes back again to staffing issues. It is just impossible to find qualified staff for aged care facilities. The federal government has known about this for years now; the problems are well known. The biggest problem that everyone talks about is the lack of parity—the gap that exists between wages earned by nurses in the public and acute care sectors in our hospitals and the wages earned by nurses in the aged care sector. As my colleague Senator McLucas has demonstrated, the wages gap between those two sectors has actually increased from $84.48 per week in 2002 to $191.83 per week in 2005. Is it any wonder that aged care providers are finding it difficult to recruit and retain staff when nurses can get such better wages and conditions elsewhere?

The government has acknowledged this problem. It committed $211 million in the 2002-03 budget to ensure that aged care facilities provided better wages and conditions and a further $877 million in the 2004-05 budget. But the problem is that this funding was not tied to wages and conditions. So the funding can go to aged care providers but those providers could be spending it on anything. The government has acknowledged the problem and made the funding available, but it has not gone that extra step to make sure it is fixing the problem. The government has been quite lazy and complacent about this very important issue. In the meantime the discrepancy in wages continues to blow out and the shortage of qualified nursing staff in aged care facilities is placing more and more pressure on providers, making it harder and harder to provide quality care to residents in nursing homes. As I said, there have been two classic and different examples of that in my electorate just in the last couple of months. There is a lot of work to be done by the government. In fact, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee, which conducted an inquiry into aged care last year, recommended that the government address that issue. The money is there to go into wages for aged care nurses, so let’s make sure it happens.

One of the things highlighted in Labor’s second reading amendment is this issue of the government having a surplus due to quite good economic conditions—and many of us on this side would say that that is a product of good luck rather than good management and comes off the back of many of the reforms of the Labor government in the nineties—but we are not necessarily seeing those funds returning to electorates like mine. And the boom in the coal industry that is occurring now in my electorate is contributing a great deal to the revenue coming to the government.

There are two projects on the agenda in my electorate where two communities are getting in and having a go. They are pulling together private contributions from industry to make local projects happen and we are waiting on the federal government to do its bit to help make those projects a reality. The first one is the Moura airstrip. Moura is a mining community in the Banana Shire. It is a very fast-growing community. In the middle of last year, a $1 billion expansion to the coalmine that operates there was announced. The shire council is keen to upgrade the airstrip in the township of Moura, partly to support the industry there and in recognition that, when you have thousands of miners working in the community, emergency services facilities are always very important. There is always the risk in a dangerous occupation like that that people will need urgent medical attention.

The mining industry has stumped up $300,000—Anglo Coal has put in $300,000—and the state government has contributed $230,000 already towards the project to make the Moura airstrip an all-weather runway, in recognition of the growth in the town. The project is expected to cost $820,000 in total. The council is very keen for the federal government to come on board and put in a share of funding to help that project go ahead. I understand an application is with the area consultative committee and it is getting quite a bit of support from our local area consultative committee. I hope that Minister Truss will look very carefully at that application and recognise that the community has already put forward a big contribution on its own behalf, through the coal company, and that the state government is also on board. We need a demonstration from the federal government that it recognises the importance of this project and the opportunities that a community like Moura is identifying for itself and that Moura needs that partnership to make it a reality.

The other project is in the town of Blackwater—another booming coalmining town in my electorate. The project is to build a health facility and a gym on the site of the current PCYC facility. That is also a project that has great community support, which is demonstrated by the support of the council and also the local mining companies. There is a consortium of four or five mining companies, including Wesfarmers and BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance, together with Thiess and Yarrabee mines and a local contractor TWM, who between them are putting up $350,000 for the project. They are also seeking a federal and state partnership and funding to help make that project happen.

So, again, I would call on the federal government and particularly Minister Truss to recognise what these communities in my electorate are doing for themselves and to support that important project. The project will really enhance the lifestyle in Blackwater by providing that important sporting facility. The facility will also accommodate an allied health centre to attract more health professionals to Blackwater and will generally improve the health of citizens by making the sporting facilities available.

Finally, I want to shift tack altogether and talk about the number of calls and visitors that I am getting to my office complaining about telemarketers. Telemarketers are becoming one of the biggest gripes for constituents in my electorate and the issue is only getting worse. Last week, I had Mrs Meek, who is 83 years old, contact my office about an issue she had with a telecommunications company. Mrs Meek had received a bill from a company that she had never heard of before who were charging her for a service that she was unaware she was using. Upon investigation from my office, it was discovered that Mrs Meek had been switched from Telstra to another company after one of these telemarketing calls. Mrs Meek said that she never gave anyone permission to switch her phone but that she listened to what the telemarketer had to offer before kindly rejecting their offer.

This is not an isolated case. My office is handling many more of these complaints of telecommunication carrier switches without approval from the customer involved. These telemarketers particularly prey on the elderly by asking questions that will garner a positive response. This is then all they need to switch that person’s calls to them. This is an outrageous practice and needs to be reviewed immediately.

At the other end of the spectrum, from the elderly people contacting my office, there are young families. There is nothing more annoying for Australian families than the telephone ringing while dinner is being prepared or eaten. Anyone who has had the displeasure of answering the phone under the presumption that it may be important only to find that it is a telemarketer ringing to waste their valuable time, knows why. Many individuals have expressed to me that they no longer answer the phone at dinner time simply due to the possibility that the caller may be a telemarketer trying to sell them something they do not really want or need. These calls seem to come at the worst possible time, and many people are reporting numerous calls in one day. For example, one woman in my electorate reported a total of 15 calls in a single day. Even my electorate office, it appears, is not immune from these calls, with my staff reporting several calls every week from telemarketers trying to sell everything from insurance to holidays. So I can certainly understand why many of my constituents become angry with the callers.

Labor’s proposed Do Not Call Register is an idea that is appealing to everyone I speak to who has had the unfortunate experience of being swamped by telemarketing calls. Our proposal to fine companies that breach the list would see a massive reduction in the number of calls being made in this country. Anything that can reduce these annoying invasions of privacy should be looked at by the government. But they are ignoring our proposal simply because they were not the ones that came up with it. Instead, the telecommunications minister asserts that she needs another 12 months to implement something in this area. This is crazy. Australians want a Do Not Call Register and they want it now.

The common thread in these issues I am raising is that while the government wants to pat itself on the back for its apparently successful management of the economy—although dark clouds are gathering, from some of the figures that we see—it is just out of touch with what is really going to make a difference in people’s lives. As I said, telecommunications infrastructure, aged care and things like addressing these nuisance calls from telemarketers are important in my electorate. (Time expired)

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is a stark difference between the government and Labor in addressing Australia’s and the world’s most serious environmental challenge, that of climate change. The Howard government argue that economic growth and protecting the environment are incompatible. They are wrong. The Howard government also argue that economic growth and taking strong clear steps to avoid dangerous climate change are incompatible. They are wrong again. The Howard government argue that one comes at the cost of the other. This is not only old thinking, it is wrong in economics. The challenge of both economics and the environment is the same: to improve our quality of life. Our quality of life is affected when we are worse off for losing our job, but our quality of life is also affected because we are worse off when we suffer from water shortages or land use changes.

The Howard government has taken far too long to address the devastating symptoms of climate change. Critically, the Howard government is even slower to wake up to the real causes of climate change. The reason the Howard government is taking no meaningful steps to avoid dangerous climate change is because it is split over whether climate change is actually happening. Even amongst those in the government who agree that climate change is happening there is a serious split over what to do about it. No wonder the policies are a mess! Australia cannot afford to suffer through the inconsistencies of the Howard government’s policies.

These days you just do not know where the government stands. When it comes to whether climate change is happening, on the one hand the Minister for the Environment and Heritage said that climate change is a ‘very serious threat to Australia’. The next day he was in court challenging the very existence of climate change. One day the Department of the Environment and Heritage was highlighting coral bleaching and the dramatic impact climate change would have on the Great Barrier Reef. The next day the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources said:

I think the Reef is in good shape. Those areas where it is being closely managed…it is probably in better shape than it has been for years.

This contradicts the AGO report Climate change risk and vulnerability, which stated in 2005:

Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef are expected to see multiple dimensions of change. The Reef itself is likely to suffer from coral bleaching events, which have long recovery times and flow on effects for the whole ecosystem. Climate model projections suggest that within 40 years water temperatures could be above the survival limit of corals.

With his comments—denying that the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching as a result of climate change—the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources is defying all the signs and, once again, is contradicting the Minister for the Environment and Heritage. The Minister for the Environment and Heritage says that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Yet, under the government’s policies, greenhouse gas emissions will—according to a report from ABARE—on a best case scenario, increase by 70 per cent to 80 per cent by 2050. On the one hand, we need to reduce emissions by 60 per cent while, on the other hand, emissions will actually increase by 70 per cent to 80 per cent under the government’s policies. That is the most optimistic assessment, if all the proposals discussed at the Asia-Pacific climate pact are adopted.

Not only is the government divided on whether climate change is happening; it is also divided on policy. With respect to the Kyoto protocol, in 1997 the Prime Minister himself proclaimed that the protocol was, ‘A win for the environment and a win for jobs’. Since then, the Prime Minister has backflipped. Now the Howard government regards the Kyoto protocol with the same affection as The Nationals’ party room regards Senator McGauran. In December 2005 the environment minister said the Kyoto protocol was ‘almost buried’. Yet recently he said, ‘There has been no stronger supporter of Kyoto than the Howard government.’ Of course, Australia is one of only two industrialised countries that have not ratified Kyoto, and we are the highest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. While the Prime Minister recently acknowledged that climate change was not a myth, he said the debate over climate change was a choice between the economy and the environment. Unbelievably, given the threat that climate change poses, once again the Prime Minister has chosen to cast our response to this threat in ideological terms. Just like with the wheat for weapons scandal, this is a government that governs in its own political interest, not in the national interest.

Labor believes the debate over climate change is a debate about old ways or new paths. Pressured by vested interests, the Prime Minister has chosen the wrong path. The debate over climate change is really about what kind of society we want to live in. It is not about blame; it is about finding solutions. We need to act; delay is not an option. Just last week British Prime Minister Tony Blair indicated that if the world does not take strong action within seven years it may well be too late to avoid dangerous climate change.

The debate over climate change is also a debate about the Australian economy—whether we will be an economy of the future and whether we will prepare for the carbon constrained future, which will be a feature of all economies in coming decades. It is also about the future of rural Australia—how our rural communities will adapt to an even drier continent. It is about smarter and more efficient use of precious resources such as water. It is about getting the new design of our homes and our buildings right and about being smart regarding energy efficiency. It is about using the new agricultural technologies and having the new household appliances. It is about managing the new service industries that will arise from this. The threat of a changing climate must make us look at how we use and apply our skills and technologies in the future. Do we apply our resources in a way which ignores where we need to be in future years? Labor believes that a national emissions trading scheme is the best way to reduce CO emissions in the most efficient way possible. By using market based mechanisms as a legal compliance tool, we will achieve the outcome in the most efficient manner.

Putting a value on carbon encourages industry to use less carbon and to use cleaner energy and sends a signal about the value of carbon in the economy. I have just met with BHP Billiton representatives in my Parliament House office. One of these executives of BHP Billiton—one of our great corporations—talked about the options that are available to them and the need to have price signals when it comes to carbon if they are to make effective choices that protect their economic interests and look after the environment. Only yesterday at Senate estimates the environment minister said he supports emissions trading and price signals. Yet all through 2005 he was saying it was too expensive and would not work. On 31 July, 2005, the foreign minister said:

We know that emissions can’t continue at their current rate. That’s going to require research, collaborative research. It’s also going to mean we’ll have to investigate price signals coming from energy … By changing price signals, obviously that leads to changes in the investment patterns. You can get more investment into cleaner energy through changing pricing signals …

About three weeks ago, in a speech in Los Angeles, the Treasurer said:

A market based solution will give the right signal to producers and to consumers. It will make clear the opportunity cost of using energy resources, thereby encouraging more and better investment in additional sources of supply and improving the efficiency with which they are used ...

He also said:

Price signals in an efficient open market will promote new and more efficient investment ...

So the Treasurer, the foreign minister and the environment minister are all on the record talking about price signals. There are really only two forms of price signals: emissions trading—opening it up to the market though a cap and trade system—or having a carbon tax. The Howard government says that it opposes both. It is an extraordinarily contradictory position that is stifling the Australian economy, because investors need certainty, and if investment is going to be channelled into industry in a way which protects our long-term future then those price signals are needed—and they are needed now.

What does the government say? The environment minister says we need price signals but not just yet. It is absurd to argue that what will be the world’s biggest market, the carbon trading market, is a positive development and that Australia should engage in that market but not yet. So we should wait for the world to get a jump on us before we enter that market, giving everyone else a head start! It is an absurdly contradictory position, but of course it is not the only contradiction that is there, because the environment minister says that the climate pact strategy is complementary with the Kyoto protocol and with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yesterday in Senate estimates when officials from the department were asked who was working on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and who was working on the Asia-Pacific climate pact—where the obligations are the same except one has six countries and one has 189 countries involved including all of the six—an official advised the Senate committee that they were the same people by and large doing the same work, which is consistent with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And yet the government refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol.

It refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol in spite of the fact that it argues that we are going to meet our target under Kyoto. So we are giving up the economic opportunities that are available through instruments such as the clean development mechanism where nations can gain carbon credits for investments in clean energy in developing countries. This is an instrument of which there are already 60 projects under way and more than 500 in the pipeline. It is a mechanism which Australia, due to our geographical location in the world, is particularly well placed to take advantage of. Yet the government refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol because it says that voluntary approaches are enough by themselves.

Margaret Beckett, the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and head of the EU delegation to the recent UN climate change summit in Montreal, said:

The public debate has opened up wide differences between those who argue we should go forward with compulsory targets to cut emissions and those who argue new technology is the way ahead. I believe this is a false choice. The one is no use without the other.

But without mechanisms in the form of compulsory action, such as targets to cut emissions, existing and new technologies will never be rolled out on the scale we need.

To be absolutely clear: the UK believes voluntary measures can be helpful, but compulsory action is a surer way of delivering results. That is why the UK is a strong supporter of the Kyoto Protocol.

And that is why the Australian Labor Party is a strong supporter of the Kyoto protocol. The Howard government’s lack of action on climate change will hurt our economy.

The appalling approach to Australia’s solar energy industry is a stark example of where the government has it all wrong. The Howard government is being grossly irresponsible and short-sighted in slashing solar electricity rebates to community organisations and schools. It is simply bad policy to phase out the financial incentives for residential and commercial solar power installations. It is appalling that the Howard government has already halved the maximum rebate to community organisations and will gradually phase out the amount that can be claimed by private home owners. The reality is that this rebate has played a major role in encouraging Australian organisations and householders to take up photovoltaic systems which produce low-cost electricity and emit no greenhouse gas emissions. The future economy is evidenced by the fact that the global market for solar accelerated 65 per cent in 2004. What economic managers would not want to be a part of that action? Australia was well placed to be the Silicon Valley of solar energy 10 years ago. But, after nearly a decade of being starved of support, it is hard to see us returning to that position.

The government’s big deception is that greenhouse gas emissions are on track. The truth is that we will only meet the target because of the actions of the Queensland and New South Wales state Labor governments. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, in the matter of public importance debate in the federal parliament yesterday, said that it did not matter whether we are going to meet the target, thereby hiding the fact that under the federal government’s policy, because the land use changes had not been taken into account yet, greenhouse gas emissions in Australia actually rose by 23 per cent between 1990 and 2003. Even taking into account land use changes, the projections from the Australian Greenhouse Office are that there will be a 23 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.

This contrasts extraordinarily with what is going on in other parts of the world. China has just announced a 15 per cent mandatory renewable energy target. Most nations in Europe, and the European Union as a whole, have targets of around 20 per cent by the year 2020. Developing countries are engaged in these issues as well—countries such as Brazil and South Africa. Yet here in Australia we have a two per cent mandatory renewable energy target, which has been reached, and support for the renewable energy industry is declining because of that.

The truth is that we do need new technology. It is a matter of how it is applied. If you do not have market based mechanisms then you will not have that application. Governments need to use a combination of technology push and market pull policies to drive innovation in clean and efficient energy use and production. The argument for waiting for emissions trading contradicts all experience. It is the triumph of hope over experience, because innovation comes in response to market demand. It does not come by itself. That is why that market demand needs to be created.

We need a multipronged strategy to join the global community in avoiding dangerous climate change. We should ratify the Kyoto protocol, introduce a national emissions trading scheme to encourage clean energy use, introduce a climate change trigger into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and substantially increase the mandatory renewable energy target. This is the challenge which faces us. We have a responsibility to future generations to take up that challenge.

Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today in the debate on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 to discuss a range of issues relating to the Veterans’ Affairs portfolio. I wish to bring to the attention of the parliament some of the anniversaries and circumstances currently relating to that area. Firstly, I would like to talk briefly about national service and particularly the fact that yesterday was ‘Nasho Day’. There have been a range of celebrations and commemorations occurring across the nation over the last week for the work that was done by national servicemen in two schemes, particularly post the Second World War, between 1951 and 1959, and between 1965 and 1972, when some 300,000 Australians served.

The 1951 scheme was introduced by the Liberal government of the time. It was the third such scheme that had existed in Australia since Federation. Eighteen-year-old men were required to partake. There were different ways that they could do their service. They could do 176 days of military training in a lump or as a mixture of regular Army service and serving with the then Citizens Military Forces. That scheme went through to 1959. Some 227,000 young Australians served over that time.

The scheme that is probably more in the public mind is that which existed between 1965 and 1972, under which many people who served eventually went to Vietnam. People would remember that in those circumstances a birthday ballot was used for 20-year-olds. People had to register and then took their chance in what was effectively a form of lottery. If they were selected, they went on to serve. It was normally for two years full time in the regular Army, then three years part time in the reserves. From 1965 to 1972, 19,450 national servicemen served in the Vietnam War, with 202 killed and 1,279 wounded. National servicemen also served in Malaysia and Borneo during the Indonesian confrontation.

The scheme was abolished on 5 December 1972, when Labor was elected to government. During that period from January 1965 to December 1972 some 63,000 national servicemen gave between 18 months and two years of full-time service. Many famous Australians were servicemen under this scheme—people like Bill Hayden, former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, Sir James Hardy, Dougie Walters and, of course, Normie Rowe.

For those who were involved, one thing the Australian government has done is to produce national service medals. Some 110,000 of those have been given out to a large number of national servicemen in recent times. In my own electorate, when ceremonies have been held to grant medals to a number of national servicemen, it has been interesting to talk to them about their experiences and what they actually did. I found that the experiences varied from activities done closer to home to what occurred overseas. It certainly gave one a real understanding—and I always hate to use the word ‘understanding’ when talking about veterans, because I know there is an awful lot that I do not understand about what many of them have been through. It certainly gave a sense of the very differing tasks that people undertook in the service of their country. We certainly owe them all a debt for that service, as well as our respect and thanks. It is always good to be able to acknowledge the work that they did on behalf of their country and the fact that they were prepared to serve when they were needed.

I also acknowledge that today, 15 February, marks the 64th anniversary of the fall of Singapore. The fall of Singapore represented the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. As we know, 15,000 Australians were there at the time. A total of 80,000 troops—Indian, Australian and British—became prisoners of war when Singapore fell. Singapore was often seen as being a fortress. In fact, it was also known as the Gibraltar of the Far East—impregnable and an underlying linchpin of the British defences in the region. But, as we now know, when you are expecting an attack from the sea and point your defences in that direction and the attack comes from the other way, things do not work so well. The nature of the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula certainly took the allies by surprise. It was a very speedy attack, and they were certainly very effective in prosecuting that attack.

I recently visited Singapore and looked at aspects of the defences there. I saw at first hand some of the historical monuments which relate to what occurred and also paid my respects at the cemetery. I think I gained some sense of what had occurred. It was certainly a major victory for the Japanese and a significant setback for the allies with respect to the conduct of the war. As we know, many thousands of Australians and other personnel were imprisoned. That led effectively to the establishment of the Changi prisoner of war camp.

Changi was quite an unusual prisoner of war camp because it was more of a series of camps located on the Changi peninsula. For visitors, there is a place to pay your respects in the form of a museum and a chapel. There have been a number of Changi chapels—there is one at Duntroon which I would urge members, if they get the chance, to go and look at. The chapel that is presently located at Changi has been moved on several occasions because Changi, for most of that period, has been an operating prison. It was effectively also a transit stop for many servicemen being taken across to Thailand for the building of the Thai-Burma railway—the death railway. Again, I urge members, if they ever have the chance to go there, to look at the museum there. It is funded by the Australian government and provides an excellent opportunity to gain some understanding of what our troops went through when constructing the railway. I found it an incredibly moving experience to go there and to view some of the works that were undertaken and to gain some sort of understanding of the enormous sacrifice made by many with respect to that construction.

I also had the opportunity to go to Taiwan. While I was there, I saw an exhibition on the prisoners of war who had been interned in Taiwan. I had not been aware, until just before I got there, that Australian officers above the rank of colonel had been moved to what was then known as Formosa from Changi as part of a relocation by the Japanese. It was interesting realising that there was an Australian connection to a place that many of us had not realised there had been in the context of World War II. But the Burma-Thailand railway is quite an amazing construction job and an amazing tale of human courage in adversity and savagery. If you link that back, as I have, to the fall of Singapore, it is a day which relates to that time.

The other anniversary that is coming up is this Sunday, 19 February, which marks the 64th anniversary of the first bombing raids on Darwin in World War II. Members would be aware that something like 243 lives were lost in Darwin and between 300 and 400 were wounded. On 19 February, 188 planes were launched against Darwin, a harbour that was at that stage full of ships. The first of two waves of aerial attacks began just before 10 am, and the city was devastated in the space of 40 minutes. Eight ships were sunk, two were beached and later refloated and many of the other 35 ships in the harbour were damaged by bombs or machine-gun fire. Darwin town and the RAAF aerodrome were also heavily damaged by the raid. A second raid of 54 bombers was launched two hours later on the same day.

The raids on 19 February were the first two of 64 raids against the Darwin area and its nearby airfields, which bore the brunt of Japanese attacks on mainland Australia. Of course, Darwin was not the only area that was attacked by air by the Japanese. Townsville, Katherine, Wyndham, Derby, Broome and Port Hedland were also bombed at various times. The final raid on Darwin took place on 12 November 1943 but, as I said, that was after some 64 raids over that period of time. When you go to Darwin, there are some areas you can look at that relate to that and give you an idea of what they went through in that area.

The other thing I wanted to mention today is a recent decision taken by the government which I was very pleased to see, and that was that the service of the Australian peacekeeping contingent in Rwanda be recognised by the government, beyond being hazardous, as being warlike. I spoke in the parliament on Monday to a motion regarding this matter and was very pleased to hear—in fact, while we were conducting the debate—that the government had made a decision to accept that particular suggestion that we had made. It has been a matter of debate for some time, and it has been a matter of real concern in the veterans’ community that what the peacekeepers went through with respect to the horrors of what occurred in Rwanda was deserving of recognition. I am very pleased to see that the government picked up on that.

It is a good start for the new minister, in the circumstances, to redress what was a wrong. I am on the record as saying it was a failure of policy from the Labor government when we were in government, but I also want to stress that we are talking about events in 1994 and 1995, and the full horror of what occurred at that time was not really understood until sometime since. It has certainly been understood, though, for a lot of years now. Although it is true to say that we made a mistake in the first place, I still believe it was a mistake that was understandable at the time, given what was known. I do not think that there is any excuse for the fact that action has not been taken over the years since that time, but I am very glad to see that the government has now moved on that particular issue.

I want to assure the minister that Labor will be bringing forward other initiatives that I hope he would also be prepared to look at in the months and year or so to come. We will be coming up with a number of suggestions for him about how we can better look after the interests of our diggers and ensure that they get a fair deal. I will have a few things to say about that over the months to come and I look forward to him being prepared to again, hopefully, pick up on some of the initiatives that we will be bringing forward.

In respect of that there is one issue that I would particularly like to talk about today and that relates to the issue of mental health problems in relation to the veterans’ community. We have to remember that, when we talk about those sorts of issues, it is not just the veterans who are affected; it is also the veterans’ families—their kids, their partners, their families. Their families are in a situation where, although they may not have served themselves, they have to deal with the consequences of service and the circumstances that that produces in relation to their lives. There is no doubt that when there have been examinations done of the circumstances of veterans’ families there are issues that need to be dealt with and dealt with properly.

When you are looking at mental health issues, you will find that some very disturbing statistics have come to light in recent years, particularly about the circumstances of veterans and their children. For example, in regard to the children of Vietnam veterans, it is established that they are three times more likely to commit suicide, 1.2 times more likely to die from illness and 1.8 times more likely to die by accident. They are frightening statistics about what is happening to a component of our population who are clearly suffering in a way that many of us have not had to deal with.

This country in many ways has grappled with the legacy of Vietnam in terms of how you actually deal with it and understand it. I have learnt a lot about that while being a member of parliament and I have learnt a lot about it in the last few months, but I do not pretend to understand all of it. However, I do understand that there is a requirement from government and political parties to grapple with what needs to be done to try and address some of those issues. At the moment, the current minister has on his desk, I believe, a report regarding the question of a full-blown feasibility health study of the children of Vietnam veterans. I urge the minister to consider that matter incredibly seriously. It is a matter which is in need of serious action. I am confident that the minister understands that because I believe he does have some understanding of the issues that we are talking about here today. I want to assure him that Labor is prepared to get behind such a study. Labor sees the need for it and wants to ensure that it actually occurs.

I will not go through some of the disturbing stories I have heard about the circumstances of veterans’ kids and their families, other than to say that there is absolutely no doubt that a study is needed. The detail needs to be worked out carefully and it has to be done. I hope this minister will see it as a priority in his time administering the portfolio. It will not be a quick study, because there are no quick solutions to the sorts of problems that veterans’ families have gone through. But it is something that needs to be done and it is something that needs to be taken care of by this government. We stand ready to support the government in terms of taking real and effective action to deal with these particular issues.

Looking at the question of the health of veterans themselves, again the statistics are appalling. We know that 30 per cent of Vietnam veterans report experiencing panic attacks, 31 per cent report suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, 41 per cent report anxiety disorders, 45 per cent report depression, about 30 per cent report a problem with alcohol and 30 per cent report their partners suffer from stress, anxiety or depression. Again, there are issues there that need to be addressed. There have been health studies in relation to the issues with veterans and there are more to come. There will be more issues that need to be dealt with.

With some of the recent debate with respect to mental health issues, it is clear that there is now a greater understanding in the community in a more general sense that mental health issues need to be taken seriously; that there are issues for government and for the community to deal with. I urge the parliament not to forget that a substantial component of what we are dealing with in relation to those mental health issues relates to the veterans’ community. These are not new problems. Over the years, veterans from wars have had these problems, and I guess there is a better understanding now than there was. In previous generations there were issues such as shell shock in terms of the First World War, and there was always that sense, ‘Uncle Bill, he was at the war. He’s a bit funny now.’ Now there is a better understanding of those sorts of problems and the sorts of implications that they have. It is something that the government has to look at. With respect to veterans’ families, the study that the minister has on his desk for consideration and for action needs to be embraced, and I would certainly urge him to do so.

Graham Edwards (Cowan, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary (Defence and Veterans' Affairs)) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are a range of issues that I want to try to get through in the time available to me today, but first of all I want to deal with the issue once again of medals for members of the Australian Defence Force. There are two different categories of medals I want to pursue today, and I want to ask the minister—when the minister gets around to responding in detail—to tell the people of Australia and particularly the veteran community what has happened to these medals. These are medals which were promised a couple of years ago. The first medal I want to ask the minister to tell us about is the medal which was announced on Saturday, 26 June 2004 by the Hon. Mal Brough, the then Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence. On that day the minister announced—and I will quote from his press release, headed ‘Medal to recognise service in defence of Australia’:

The Howard Government has today announced the intention to establish a new medal that recognises volunteer service in the Australian Defence Force.

All relevant approvals are now being sought to allow the award of this medal.

The Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence, Mal Brough, said those who had served for a total of six years in the Australian Defence Force, regular or reserve, would be eligible and the medal would be backdated to recognise past service.

The minister went on to say, in the body of his press release:

It is anticipated that once a design has been finalised and the medals have been struck, the issuing of medals could begin around middle of 2005.

In another press release which the same minister put out, dated 11 July 2004, the minister said this:

The Australian Government has received notification of ‘in principle’ approval by the Queen for the establishment of the Australian Defence Medal for members of the ADF who have provided six years service in the Nation’s defence.

The minister went on to say:

... the Government was on track to call for applications by eligible serving and ex-service men and women by the end of the year.

That was at the end of 2004. This medal seems to have fallen into a big black hole since then, and no-one from the government side is able to tell me or those people who have been promised this medal where it is at, what the criteria are or when the medal will be ready for issue. At the time that the minister made this announcement, it was of course in the lead-up to the last election. I think it is one thing for a minister to make a promise to the defence community prior to an election. Having done that, this government has a responsibility to now make that medal available. I want the minister to tell me when this medal will be ready for issue and when the government will be calling for applications, because I understand that they are telling people who might be eligible not to put their applications in at this stage.

The other thing I would like the minister to tell me and the veteran community is what the criteria will be for this medal. The minister has announced that people who will be eligible for the medal are those who have served for a total of six years in the Australian Defence Force, regular or reserve. I want to know what provision the government is making for those people who, through no fault of their own, have had to leave the defence forces because of injury—for instance, a veteran who was hurt during his tasking within the ADF and, as a result of those injuries or wounds, was forced to retire and who, therefore, would not meet the six-year criterion. Will that person be eligible for this ADF medal? I certainly hope that a person in those circumstances would be eligible.

I also want to know what provision the minister is making to ensure that women who, in previous years, had a requirement to seek discharge when they were married or became pregnant are recognised. These women were serving the nation and may have met their four-year engagement period. Why aren’t they being recognised? Is the minister going to recognise those women who may have been forced out because of pregnancy or marriage?

These are questions which the defence community—members of the ADF, past and present—are very keen to get answers to. I think the government run the risk of being accused of playing politics with the defence community. They made this announcement, as I said, in the lead-up to the last election. They said that these medals would be available in a very short period of time. They have not been made available.

The other matter I want to turn to also relates to campaign medals, this time for ADF personnel who served in Iraq and, before that, in Afghanistan. The government made an announcement, again quite some time ago, about these medals. It is five years since our troops first went into Afghanistan, and these campaign medals have not seen the light of day. Last year, on 3 August, the then Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence, De-Anne Kelly, in a press release headed ‘Campaign medals for ADF personnel’, said:

Campaign medals for Australian Defence Force personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq are set to be issued by year’s end ...

That was at the end of 2005. Likewise, these medals have not seen the light of day. The minister, in the body of her press release, said:

A contract for the manufacture of these campaign medals was signed on April 26 this year.

That was the day after Anzac Day last year. Anzac Day 2006 is looming. It is only a couple of months away. It seems to me that, yet again, the campaign medal will not be ready for another Anzac Day for those veterans who, as long as five years ago, served our nation in Afghanistan and are currently serving in Iraq.

This is an absolute disgrace. It is a national disgrace. In my view, someone should be made accountable for these problems. Someone in the government should be telling these veterans some truth about where their medals are and when they will be available. We do not want any more press releases with false promises. We want to know where these medals are.

I have had the opportunity to discuss the matter of these medals with members of the government. Indeed, we went as a delegation to visit our troops in Bagram a few years ago as members of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, and when we came back we raised the issue with the then Minister for Defence, Minister Hill, and asked him to ensure that these troops received their own campaign medal. The minister wrote back and said that it was not the intention of government to issue a campaign medal for the Afghanistan campaign despite the fact that the Brits had decided to do it and that the Americans had decided to do it.

The government subsequently had a change of heart. I think that it was in 2004 that they announced that there would be a campaign medal. I know that members opposite are highly embarrassed about the fact that these promises have been made to our veterans but they have not yet been made good. I know that there is an amount of anger from those members opposite and, like me and other members on this side, they feel that our veterans have been let down over this issue.

I took this matter up with the then Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence, the Hon. De-Anne Kelly, and she said that it did not matter; they had been recognised because they had received the Australian Active Service Medal. That is fine. So they should have received the Australian Active Service Medal. But the Australian Active Service Medal does not identify the particular campaign that these members of the ADF have served in. The AASM does not do that. I call on the minister, newly appointed—and I am not criticising him for this—to come into the committee and during the discussion later on to tell the veteran community of Australia where the medals are, when the government will be calling for applications and when the medals will be issued. I think that our veteran community is entitled to some honesty and some truth in these matters, not just false promises made hastily before an election and which have not yet been made good by this government post election despite many opportunities for the government to do so.

The other issue that I want to touch on is the Australian government’s Investing in Our Schools program. I know that a lot of schools around Australia have benefited from this program. I know that a lot of members on both sides of the House have done a lot of work to try to ensure that their schools all benefit from this program. But I ask the Minister for Education, Science and Training to tell me why it is that education support centres in schools in Western Australia—schools within their own right—do not appear to be eligible for this funding. I have a copy of a letter here—and I will not name the school—which says:

Dear Principal,

I wish to advise that unfortunately your application for a grant ... for the Playground Upgrade under the Australian Government Investing in Our Schools Programme ... has not been successful on this occasion. Unfortunately your school’s application has not been deemed suitable for assessment because it does not comply to the administrative Guidelines for the IOSP ... When assessed it was found that your school’s proposed project, despite assistance from this Department, including requests for additional information, has not met mandatory requirements set out in the Administrative Guidelines.

The letter goes on to say that the school will have a number of opportunities to access this funding. It urges the school to review their application and encourages them to apply again.

I think it would be handy for this school community, before they sit down and do all the work that is necessary, if they could be advised whether or not education support centres are actually going to be eligible for this funding. Education support centres in Western Australia have been encouraged over the years, by both federal and state authorities, to become part of the main school community. They have been encouraged to work with just one P&C or one parent body. They have been encouraged to integrate within the broader and bigger schools. I think there is a lot of value in that. But it comes as a real shock to them to be told that, despite this advice over the years, they are not going to be counted or considered when it comes to this sort of funding.

I suspect that schools in Western Australia may be at a disadvantage to similar types of schools in the eastern states. I am sure that no government or minister would set out to do this deliberately, and it may be that there has just been a hiccup in the policy in a way which has excluded education support centres. I would ask the minister to have a look at this policy situation. I am sure that this school, and other schools, will be able to go back and review their funding. But before they sit down and do all the work that is necessary, and before they put the required time, energy and effort into their applications to make sure that they are done properly, professionally and fully, perhaps the minister might be able to give us some guidelines.

The difficulty is that the education support centres are separate schools within bigger schools. In other areas they have been encouraged to amalgamate to work with one P&C body and to become part of the school community. Where they have done that, and done it successfully, they should not be penalised with a refusal of funding in these circumstances. I look forward to the minister responding in due course to the points that I have raised.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The appropriation bills which are before the Main Committee today should be straightforward—dealing with annual operating costs of government. Yet when we consider just how the money is being divided up—with the government continuing to waste money on advertising itself when there are people who are struggling to survive—one must question exactly where and how money is appropriated.

Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 deals with funding for departments and agencies, such as $167.1 million for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. This is going toward industrial relations laws and Job Network—and what an awful job the government has done in these two areas. Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006 deals with the tied grants to the states, in addition to storing antivirals, the Afghanistan task force, airport security and more industrial relations. While I hold some reservations about the efficacy of one or two of these allocations, there is a need for action, although belated, in the others.

What I wish to focus on today is where the money is not going and how the government is short-changing Australians for the future. Specifically, I refer to the second reading amendment, in the name of the member for Melbourne, which seeks that the government reverse the reduction in public education and training investment and notes that the government’s extreme industrial relations laws will lower wages and conditions for many workers and do nothing to enhance productivity or economic growth.

This government has lost the plot when it comes to skills investment in people in this country. At a time when unemployment has increased and employers are desperate for skilled workers this government refuses to act sensibly on the skills crisis. What the government has done is increase the numbers of professional and skilled immigrants by approximately the same number as the shortfall in successful applications to TAFE. While in some quarters this may be viewed as a solution simply because it brings the required skills into Australia, it is a quick fix. For every skilled worker brought into Australia, the government has turned one away from TAFE. Do not get me wrong—I understand and accept the need for skilled immigrants but this short-term solution ignores the real problem. Australia’s skills crisis has been caused by 10 long years of government incompetence and inadequate funding of education and training.

The mining industry has recorded a 35 per cent increase in job vacancies over the past year while for the construction industry there has been a 36 per cent increase. In the electricity, gas and water supply industries there has been a massive 150 per cent increase. What does this government do? It brings those people in from overseas while many Australians who would like to work full time, rather than work in two or three part-time jobs, are unable to gain entry into TAFE. The Productivity Commission’s Report on government services 2006 found that government recurrent expenditure on vocational education and training totalled $3.9 billion in 2004—a real decrease of 3.1 per cent from 2003. The same report found that real government recurrent spending in the VET sector, per person aged 15 to 64 years, in 2004 dollars was $284.90. In 2000, this figure was $292.20.

The investment in VET focuses on ensuring that industry has a highly skilled workforce to support strong performance in the global economy. It also should strengthen communities and regions economically and socially through learning and employment. Yet this government persists in underfunding the skilling of our population. Surely it takes no imagination to understand that the failure to invest in skills is hurting job seekers and hurting business. There can be no argument that there are insufficient people to fill job vacancies. On the other hand there are over 1.7 million Australians who are either officially unemployed or not reflected in the unemployment figures. There are another 600,000 who are in part-time work but want more work than they can get. The government refuses to invest in improving the skills of these people yet tens of thousands of people are turned away from TAFE each year.

In the Productivity Commission report I referred to earlier, education preface table B.5 shows that 2.6 million people aged 15 to 64 applied to enrol in an educational institution in 2004 and, of those, 91.8 per cent were actually studying in 2004, 5.4 per cent deferred study and 2.8 per cent were unable to gain placement. On my calculations that is in excess of 70,000 people who were unable to gain a place at TAFE or another higher educational institution. These are unacceptable figures—totally unacceptable. The problem is exacerbated by the crisis in the noncompletion of apprenticeships. Between 25 and 30 per cent of all people who start apprenticeships do not complete them. Those are wasted skills that this nation is missing out on.

Labor has announced its policy of providing completion bonuses to students undertaking those courses to encourage them to stay on and complete their studies. This is a genuine incentive so that those people who start out on this opportunity to create a career in a trade, and complete it, will get a financial reward from the government when they do. Last year, the government introduced the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005. This represented the government’s inadequate attempt to address the major skills shortages faced by our community today. It is about time the government understood that investment in Australia in a number of key sectors is currently being held back because of the major skills shortages that exist in the Australian economy. What is the government’s solution? The government’s solution was that bill.

I am of the view that the Commonwealth should cooperate with the state and territory governments on the all-important issue of apprenticeship training. Instead of that, the government is duplicating existing skilling structures. The government has effectively decided to avoid cooperation and coordination. It is putting taxpayers’ money into bricks and mortar rather than the training of young Australians. Perhaps it is about time some members of the government got out and talked to some of the companies about their immediate demands to overcome the skills shortages which are currently holding back investment in Australia, undermining job creation, reducing exports and reducing the size of a potential economic cake that all Australians should benefit from.

I want to remind the chamber of Labor’s commitments at the last election. The commitments were immediate. They were about creating some 36,000 new vocational education and training places each year and trying to assist young people to stay at school to commence apprenticeships. To address the skills shortage, Labor offered to pay TAFE fees for secondary students who wanted to get a vocational qualification—that is, those who would commence an apprenticeship at school and partly complete it. When they finished school they would be not only job ready but also attractive to employers, because part of their apprenticeship—the initial year—would have been completed at school. They would also have completed, appropriately, years 11 and 12.

Public investment in our universities and TAFEs has fallen eight per cent since 1995. The OECD average is a 38 per cent increase. Australia was the only developed country to reduce its investment. The OECD released its Education at a glance: OECD indicators 2005 report early in 2006. One of the performance indicators measured by the report is the amount of tertiary education funding coming from private sources. In Australia this has increased to more than 50 per cent. The report notes on page 4 of the executive summary that this increase can be indicative of a decline in the spending on public education as a percentage of GDP. The report also notes that in some countries tertiary institutions are now relying more heavily on private sources of funding, such as fees, than they did in the 1990s. With Mexico, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Turkey and the United Kingdom, private contribution in Australia rose by more than five percentage points from 1995 to 2002.

There is a case for some private funding within the tertiary sector, but Australia is increasingly dependent on this form of education. The premise is unacceptable, both in terms of public policy and in terms of equity. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that citizens are able to access publicly funded education if they want to go beyond secondary study, yet this government has actually decreased its recurrent expenditure on training and education. Even if the equity argument falls on the deaf ears of the government, then surely an economic argument must make sense. Australia’s productivity and economic performance can surely only improve with skilled workers in trades and industry. This government, through its extreme industrial relations changes, will depress wages and conditions and will do nothing to increase productivity and participation.

The government’s approach is to make small changes at the margins and not to confront the real barriers to training in Australia. The truth is that industry wants these tradespeople now. All the government can say is, ‘We have the solution: we are going to increase skilled migration.’ That is unacceptable. We have to have trained Australians now to fill these skill vacancies. We have to focus on real skills development and get incentives in place to get people into meaningful, secure jobs. If we are to increase productivity in Australia and skill the Australian workforce, we need to invest in our own nation and our own people. We need to create opportunities. From creating opportunities from our citizens, we get growth, we get productivity increases and we lay a solid foundation for the future.

This government is about to celebrate 10 years in office. In my opinion, there is not a lot to celebrate. There are a lot of superficial arguments about the successes that have been achieved by this government but, when one goes to the substance and the detail, one sees that there are few successes, particularly in this area. You cannot turn around after 10 years and keep saying, ‘Blame the Hawke or the Keating Labor governments.’ After 10 years in office, we need to see the substance from this government. We are not getting substance; we are getting rhetoric. We are getting rhetoric that is ideologically driven but outcomes that are questionable. I think history, when it passes judgment on this government, will be very savage, because the truth is that they promise big but achieve little. That is the history in this area.

Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006 and to support the amendments moved by my colleague the shadow minister for finance. I support the amendments because, while the government likes to talk up its economic management credentials, its lack of real investment in our community is beginning to show. Just this week the Reserve Bank said:

Australia’s export performance over recent years has been disappointing, despite the generally favourable international conditions.

Export prices are booming due to high commodity prices; however, export volumes are stagnant. The government’s neglect of infrastructure over the past 10 years has meant we cannot fully take advantage of the international commodities boom. Of course, part of that infrastructure is knowledge and skills. Our trade deficit in December 2005 was $1.7 billion, the 45th deficit in a row. The current account deficit remains one of the highest in the OECD, at around six per cent of GDP. No other large commodity-exporting country runs a deficit as large as Australia’s.

An examination of these appropriation bills can tell us a lot about our economy and the effect it is having on the services to our communities. Obviously, there will be many people out there who demonstrate to us every day in our jobs that our services are not as strong as they should be. When savings measures are deducted, these bills combined allow the government to spend an additional $3.5 billion. A lot of that spending, though, is for fixes that the Howard government has had to conjure up to offset the neglect and complacency—or just incompetency—that has built up after 10 long years in power.

For example, in these bills there is an extra $110.7 million for industrial relations programs. But why the need for this additional money? I do not remember that from the election. What happened between May, when the budget was delivered, and now? Just a couple of weeks after the budget, the Howard government released its six-page plan for a modern workplace. This document proposed a whole range of fine-sounding measures to simplify and modernise our industrial relations system. They were fine sounding until the Australian people in the subsequent weeks and months actually worked out that behind all the cheery headings was the most extreme, unfair and regressive workplace legislation ever proposed in this country.

We found that the new Fair Pay Commission had no legislated need to consider fairness when setting the minimum wage and no legislated need to raise the minimum wage each year. We found that there would now be only five guaranteed minimum conditions. We found that the no disadvantage test was being abolished, meaning that collective and individual agreements no longer had to be at least as good as the relevant award. We found that the Australian Industrial Relations Commission was being gutted of pretty much all of its functions. And we found that unfair dismissal protection was being abolished for four million Australians. Forever mean and tricky! I do not remember any of that in the election campaign.

The Australian people did not think any of this sounded quite so good to them once they had had a look at it. So the government, apparently shocked that the Australian people did not share their vision for dismantling workplace rights, went into damage control—always a very costly process. This is where we come to the extra $110 million. They called in the spin doctors, the PR gurus and the advertisers. They thought up a great new name: Work Choices. That must have cost a bit. They printed pamphlets and pulped them when they forgot to put the word ‘fairness’ on the front. They set up call centres where the operators read back to callers the information printed in the pamphlets. It was a classic, and inept, propaganda blitz. It was classic damage control, and it cost the taxpayer $55 million. Almost half of the extra money the Howard government sought for their industrial relations programs was actually spent on covering the cost of advertising those programs.

Meanwhile, these bills also seek $52.4 million for the Job Network, to assist highly disadvantaged job seekers. Again, the government has failed to get its policies right in the first place. Instead of focusing on the existing shortcomings of the Job Network, the Howard government decided to embark upon its so-called Welfare to Work reforms last year. In my electorate of Newcastle last year, 10½ thousand people were receiving either disability or single parent payments. We are a regional capital. That is 11.6 per cent of the population. Thankfully, though, this group have been spared the worst excesses of this government because they are already receiving these benefits. But the government should not be cutting anyone’s disability or parenting payments. It should instead be providing the right incentives and support for all people to move into meaningful work. For women, particularly, child care is always an issue.

The Job Network is a terribly complex system for both the people out of work and the providers within the system who are supposed to be helping them to locate jobs. In a recent example, a constituent came to my office and reported how he was trying to access vocational training through his Job Network provider. He was a mature aged job seeker, over 45, and his Job Network provider apparently did not know he was entitled to access a training account to allow him to pay for books, equipment and course fees. Instead, he was advised that he would need to go out and do six months worth of Work for the Dole to earn training credits first. It is absolutely ridiculous that a Job Network provider, let alone the job seeker himself, had not been informed or did not know that he could access these training accounts.

Another complex area is the Personal Support Program within the Job Network system, which is for people with multiple and extreme barriers to employment, such as drug dependency, mental illness or extreme disadvantage. The aim of the PSP is not to get these people a job in the short term. Rather, it runs over 24 months and is designed to address the barriers to employment that they face. However, a constituent on the PSP recently came to my office, thrilled that he had finally obtained a job offer and requesting assistance to buy the boots and blues required on the work site the following day. Under the PSP, his provider could not access the money to buy him the equipment that he needed to take up his job. Any person on the Newstart allowance would be able to access that money, but this person could not because he was on PSP.

That is just ridiculous. That is the sort of incompetence we see every day in our office—that sort of anomaly. I hope the additional funding for disadvantaged job seekers helps to ensure that situations like this do not continue to arise. The Job Network has always been overly complex and overly expensive. It has been bailed out over and over and it has never delivered optimal outcomes for job seekers. Again, the Howard government is seeking money to fix up bad policy.

Another big ticket item covered by these bills is the extra money for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, now aptly titled DIMA. There is an additional $41.2 million for DIMA, of which almost half, $16.2 million, is to implement its response to the Palmer and Comrie reports into the wrongful incarceration of Cornelia Rau and the wrongful deportation of Vivian Alvarez. So, again, we have half the extra expenditure for a program being taken up to fix the mistakes that this government could have avoided by having a half-decent program in place in the first place.

I do not begrudge the spending of this money if it really does improve detention arrangements and is not just wasted on DIMA’s new corporate culture change—their coffee mugs, their screen savers and their brand new mission statement on everything. But it is money that needs to be spent correctly to improve the situation. It is a serious, systemic, institutional problem that the Howard government has bred into the department. Do not spend any more on spin.

I note that Minister Vanstone has now admitted that DIMA is looking at another case of wrongful detention of a person with mental illness—one of about 200 cases of wrongful detention currently being examined by the Ombudsman. I sincerely hope we are not here again this time next year passing additional appropriations to fund the government’s poor response to these cases born of their own incompetence. The government should be able to get it right in the first place.

I would also look at airport security, for which around $132.7 million is being appropriated. Again, I welcome additional funding to keep our travelling public safe. But again, you have to question how the Howard government keeps letting these issues slide until finally public outrage forces it to act. As Deputy Chair of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, which is inquiring into airport security for the second time in three years, I have seen the inside of a great number of airports—as has the member for Dobell opposite. It did not take me long to realise that something needed to be done about airport security. It is worrying that it took the Howard government until it was finally publicly embarrassed by the baggage handler wearing that infamous camel outfit at Sydney airport to call in an outside expert, Sir John Wheeler, to investigate. It is also worrying that, in the rush to cover up its lack of cohesive policy, even the fixes it is forced into are rarely comprehensive.

On the issue of airport security, I am pleased that it has committed $18.2 million to provide a first response counter-terrorism capability at relevant airports. But I would rather have continuous on-the-ground programs that actually build a security culture. These relevant airports unfortunately and inexplicably exclude the fastest growing regional airport in the country—Newcastle airport. Indeed, I am surprised that the member for Paterson, in whose electorate it is actually located and who was until very recently the Chair of the JCPAA investigating airport security, has apparently never publicly raised this issue. I suppose, along with the neglect of the Williamtown Boeing workers who have been locked out for 260 days without a pay cheque, it is just another example of that local member, Mr Baldwin, failing to go in to bat for the people in the electorate of Paterson. There were 757,450 passengers who passed through Newcastle airport last year, an increase of 65 per cent on the previous year. It is a vitally important piece of infrastructure for our region and for our state. Yet the Howard government has not seen fit to provide it with the same amount of protection afforded to other regional airports.

There are other areas in these appropriation bills where, with a little prodding of his good friend the Prime Minister, the member for Paterson could have secured much better outcomes for the region that he is part of and that I am part of. Newcastle’s port is the largest coal-exporting port in the world. It is the final link in the chain that sees our minerals shipped out to markets around the world. There are some in the community who are concerned about the contribution of greenhouse gases to global warming, and in July last year the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, blocked access to the port of Newcastle and to the coal loaders.

This situation was resolved quickly and peacefully, to the credit of the Newcastle Port Corporation and the state government. And this in itself tells a tale about the Howard government’s commitment to port security. This is an issue of national importance, but the federal government has consistently failed to implement a comprehensive protection regime. The government legislated for a national port security regime in 2003, but this legislation still sits before the parliament as we speak. Currently, around eight different federal agencies have some responsibility for port security, but there remains significant concern that no-one is really in charge. We need Labor’s department of homeland security, with its own dedicated minister, to better coordinate these agencies and work closely with the states and port operators.

Each year around 1,300 overseas ships arrive in Newcastle port, and for more than 75 per cent of these Newcastle is the first port of call. Some of these do carry dangerous cargoes such as ammonium nitrate. We need proper security checks on foreign flagged vessels arriving at our ports to ensure they identify their crew and cargo accurately 48 hours before arrival so the required checks can be carried out. We also need a sensible approach from the government on the issuing of maritime security cards for people working in our ports. Unfortunately, the Howard government has not seen fit to prioritise this aspect of transport security in either its 2005-06 budget or in these appropriations bills before us today.

Another piece of infrastructure for the people of Newcastle and the people of the Hunter region long neglected by the Howard government is the upgrade to our Energy Australia Stadium. The New South Wales Labor government put in $30 million towards the stadium upgrade. At the 2004 election, federal Labor promised to put in $20 million. The Howard government has never offered a cent. The tourism and leisure industries are growing in our region and bringing employment and investment opportunities with them. Our stadium is a big part of that economic opportunity. People from all over our region support the sporting teams which play out of Energy Australia Stadium. All Labor members in the Hunter have committed to funding for its upgrade. Has the member for Paterson prevailed upon his Prime Minister to do the same? It does not seem so. As he is now the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources it is time he pulled his finger out for the Hunter!

Similarly, why hasn’t he forced the government to provide Medicare funding for the positron emission tomography, PET, scanner at the Mater Hospital? We do have one—it is funded through a special fund set up by doctors themselves. This PET scanner is vital in the diagnosis and staging of many cancers. There is mounting scientific evidence that PET scans save lives and spare very ill people from unnecessary surgery and other radical treatment. The PET scanner at the Mater serves an area from Newcastle to the Queensland border. It would cost $11 million a year to fund. Without funding, people needing a Medicare funded scan have to travel to Sydney. I have asked the Minister for Health and Ageing repeatedly to provide this funding. The two bills before us add $3.5 billion to the budget. There is a surplus of $13 billion. Why can’t the Howard government find $11 million to provide this life-saving technology to the people of the Hunter and northern New South Wales? The member for Paterson says he has lobbied the health minister for a Medicare licence. That is good. I just wish he would hurry up and get an answer for those people who are ill and who need this technology. The minister’s standard response has been that PET scans are ‘under review’. I have heard that before! The last deadline for the completion of that review passed in July last year. It is long overdue and it is time for action.

It is also time for action on long-term funding for the Hunter’s General Practice Access After Hours scheme. This program provides vital access to general practice services to our community outside of normal surgery hours. It is acknowledged around the country as the leading model for providing these kinds of GP services. However, since its inception, the Howard government has consistently declined to provide it with the secure, long-term funding it needs and deserves. Each year it seems the member for Paterson makes a big show of stepping in to ‘save’ the service by securing another year or so of funding. In August 2004, following Labor’s announcement that it would provide ongoing funding to the service, assuring it of continuous funding, the member for Paterson announced that the Howard government would provide two years trial funding. I suppose this got good headlines—‘Lease of life for doctors scheme’ was one of them—but one year later, late last year, the member for Paterson was able to announce that he has stepped in to once again save the service. Again, good headlines: ‘Abbott saves five GP clinics’. The problem is it is only another two years funding, not the certainty of a five-year agreement that doctors groups, Labor and the community have been asking for. I may sound cynical, but it seems the member for Paterson is more interested in a yearly good-news media announcement than long-term funding for an essential service.

Similarly, respite care in our region does not receive the secure ongoing funding it deserves. Respite care is funded quarterly, leaving people who are caring for sick or elderly loved ones unsure as to whether they will have access to respite services in the future. One of my constituents, Tom Potter, was so fed up with these arrangements that late last year he made his concerns public via the media, and his distress was obvious. He also put his concerns to me on numerous occasions. Tom was the carer for his wife, Beryl. Tragically, just over a week after Tom had talked to the media, I was attending his funeral. He is a great loss to our community, to his family and particularly to his wife. The care he gave was a great example to us all—absolute devotion. There are carers like Tom Potter in all our communities around Australia and they need more support. There is none in the bills we are debating.

Also in my electorate, Newcastle University still faces a challenging future. A good start could be to match Labor’s promise to create an additional 80 medical places at the university. This would assist both the university and the community through the training of doctors who will be more likely to stay and work in their own community. My region, like many around Australia, is also suffering a chronic shortage of child-care places, particularly for people doing shiftwork or those doing extra hours. With more shiftwork and longer hours set to be the norm under the government’s industrial relations changes, we need to start sorting this out now. The Bureau of Statistics says families are paying 62 per cent more for child care than they were four years ago. This skyrocketing cost only adds to the problems people are having in accessing this essential family service.

So what is happening with these appropriations bills is quite stark. We have the Howard government looking for more money to patch up its mistakes in areas like industrial relations, the Job Network, immigration and airport security. Meanwhile, without a coherent policy approach to things like child care, education and health care, these areas continue to be neglected. This neglect is not acceptable for the people of Newcastle; it is not acceptable for the people of this country. Similarly, with our economy showing such imbalance at the moment in a time of great prosperity and opportunity it also reflects very badly on this government that it has not invested in knowledge and research and development. It has not invested in supply chains and infrastructure and it certainly has not invested in its people in terms of skills and training. That neglect is showing very clearly with no change in those economic imbalances. That is unbelievable for Australians. We know we are capable of much more. The Howard government stands condemned. These bills just expose more neglect, more incompetence and certainly more disregard for the basic needs of Australian people and their communities.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I want to return to a topic which has quite rightly dominated parliament this past month. That topic is the scandal of Australia’s complicity in the corruption of the oil for food program in Iraq. Day after day, last week and this week, we have seen the Deputy Prime Minister floundering around during question time. This week the Deputy Prime Minister has repeatedly refused to answer elementary questions about which documents were supplied to the Volcker inquiry. In question time he and the government object to giving yes or no answers. But this is a minister who does not know whether it is yes or no. He does not seem to know anything. He has not seen any of the 14 reports that warned Australia about these corrupt payments. Either he is lamentably ignorant about his own government’s actions or he has something to hide. He has refused to tell us why the government failed to acknowledge the numerous warnings it had about the behaviour of the AWB executives in Baghdad, most recently in the 2003 report by the US Department of Defense, hardly a secret report. One wonders what all of the military attaches we employ both in Baghdad and Washington thought when they saw this report and then, as is their duty, reported it to the government. It was a case of blind eye to the telescope, deaf ear to their ear trumpets: Minister Vaile and his happy band of National Party ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ people paid no attention. The minister has refused to fulfil his basic duty as a minister, which is to give a proper account of his and his government’s actions to the House.

This week we have also seen yet another display of this government’s arrogance. The government told officials appearing before the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee not to answer questions relating to the AWB scandal. How can we judge the appropriations that are made in this House if elementary things like bureaucrats appearing before the Senate estimates committee are changed so that they are no longer to be asked difficult questions? Senator Minchin refused to answer questions relating to the source and timing of this directive. Labor’s Senate leader, Chris Evans, quite rightly pointed to this decision as a ‘cover-up aimed at avoiding accountability’. In 30 years no government has dared appear before a Senate estimates committee with such a brazen refusal to account for its actions or to allow public servants to answer questions. Last year Labor warned this would happen when the government took over control of the Senate. Now we are seeing Labor’s predictions being fulfilled. This is an arrogant government out of touch and increasingly out of control. This government is doing everything in its power to avoid accountability in relation to the AWB scandal or, as the member for Griffith correctly called it this week, the ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal.

It is not surprising that the AWB scandal is doing increasing damage to Australia’s reputation abroad and to our trade prospects and our wheat farmers. It is not the opposition, as the government weakly protests, that are the cause of this; it is, above all, the Deputy Prime Minister. The very seasoned political correspondent Dennis Shanahan today described the minister as ‘over-cautious’ and ‘uncertain’, with an ‘insufficient grasp of detail’, and an absolutely unacceptable person to be in this ministry. That was on the front page of today’s Australian. Dennis Shanahan, the chief political correspondent of the Australian, is not always the strongest critic of the government so, coming from him, that is surely a devastating indictment of the Deputy Prime Minister.

It now appears that we are going to lose $800 million in wheat sales to Iraq. The new democratically elected government in Iraq is understandably not amused to learn that the AWB has been bribing Saddam Hussein—the dictator who exiled, imprisoned and tortured them—to the tune of $300 million. It is all very well for the Prime Minister to write on behalf of individual wheat farmers and emote about them losing these big contracts, but, if his ministers were doing their job at the time, the wheat farmers would not be in the position that they are now. Why would any public official in Iraq, who was under threat of his very life at any time from the insurgents there, care less about people who provided $300 million to fund the very people who were trying to shoot them in the streets? There are plenty of other places where Iraq can buy its wheat.

Ultimately, the AWB and its National Party mates will have defeated their own purpose. By seeking to bribe their way into the Iraqi wheat market, they have bribed their way out of it. I certainly hope that the permanent loss of wheat and other trade is not the case, but we all know where the responsibility will lie. The Australian government may claim the AWB was a private company, but that is a fiction. The Iraqis know it is a monopoly acting on behalf of Australia. No wonder the Prime Minister has signalled that the AWB may lose its monopoly—and so it should, and I will return to that subject.

It is astonishing to me, to many taxpayers and to many members of this parliament that a person who could orchestrate all of this—Mr Lindberg, who resigned—could be earning a salary four times that of the Prime Minister of Australia. How such people end up in charge of major corporations like this—dolts who ruin Australia’s trade with this part of the world for short-term interest—surpasses all understanding.

Frankly, I think there are more serious aspects to the damage this scandal has done to Australia—even more serious than the potential loss of a valuable wheat market—including the odium we will incur as it becomes more widely known that the money paid by the Wheat Board as kickbacks to Iraq was used to subsidise suicide bombers. It will become known all over the world: Australian antiterrorist rhetoric on the one hand, but give dough to the bad guys in reality.

In November 2004 Republican congressman Henry Hyde’s House Committee on Foreign Affairs heard that Saddam used some $10 billion he raked in from corruption of the oil for food program to subsidise suicide bombers and to reward the families of so-called ‘martyrs’ after their attacks. Funds were transferred to an account in the Rafidain Bank in Jordan and then withdrawn by Iraq’s Ambassador to Jordan and handed over to the Arab Liberation Front. The ALF is an Iraqi funded group within the PLO which then made payments to ‘martyr’ families. Rahib al-Maleh, an ALF operative, paid out $20 million in cheques from the same bank that our AWB money was paid into—that is, the Rafidain Bank. He told ABC’s Jerusalem correspondent, Mark Willacy, on 8 February that he would not rule out that some of that money came from the Australian Wheat Board.

We now know that the largest component of the corrupt kickbacks paid to Iraq came from Australia, from our monopoly Australian Wheat Board—and the government cannot prove that the Australian Wheat Board money did not finish up in the hands of these homicide bombers. The government protests that there is no evidence that AWB money was spent in this way. That is not true. We know from the excellent report compiled by the Iraq Survey Group, known as the Duelfer report, that the great majority of money Saddam milked from the oil for food program was spent on illegal arms purchases. All of that money came from the illegal oil sales to Turkey, Jordan and Syria. Duelfer tells us that the money gained from the kickbacks on food imports was not spent on arms purchases—so it must have been spent on something else. Once again, we know from Duelfer that it was spent on two other objectives of Saddam’s rorting of the oil for food program: bribing foreign politicians, like the execrable Galloway, and UN officials like Benon Sevan, who ran the program for the United Nations. The second purpose was gaining favour with radical Islamists by making payments to the families of homicide bombers.

This money trail is not a difficult thing to figure out. We know that the kickback money was paid into the Rafidain Bank in Amman. We know that the money to pay the ‘martyr’ families was withdrawn from the same branch of the same bank during the same period of time that the AWB payments were going in. It is not hard to join up this particular set of dots. Unless Mark Vaile himself marked the bills, he cannot prove that these fungible, discretionary funds that Australia effectively provided to the Baath regime in Iraq were not used for these nefarious purposes.

These revelations are particularly shocking for many people all around Australia, including people in my electorate who have been personally touched by the homicide bombing campaign against Israeli citizens which has killed more than 1,000 people since 2000. This is no joke, Mr Downer, foreign minister. This should be shocking to those Australians who have taken at face value the government’s rhetoric about the war against terrorism. The war against terrorism, if it is to succeed, requires constant vigilance against the ceaseless efforts of terrorist groups to get their hands on funds. The companies which rorted oil for food and which paid kickbacks to the Saddam regime are all guilty of indirectly abetting terrorism. And the government is guilty of lacking the necessary vigilance to prevent this happening. The Deputy Prime Minister is particularly guilty. He has been completely negligent in his responsibility to see that any of the 14 reports that appeared before Volcker led to action by the Australian government to prevent this huge amount of money being rorted, some of which was used to subsidise homicide bombers.

How did this scandalous state of affairs come about? For years Australia has effectively had two foreign policies. One is the Howard-Downer policy, rhetorically pro-American and pro-Israeli, which now holds that Saddam Hussein’s regime was so evil that we had to intervene in Iraq and overthrow him, though it did not advance that as the primary reason before the intervention in Iraq. As former parliamentary whip Fred Daly once said, ‘The Country Party has two policies: one for people and one for sheep.’ That is as true today as it was then. The National Party has its own foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, where it saw Saddam as a valued customer who needed to be flattered and pandered to so he would buy our wheat—if necessary, with $300 million in illegal bribes.

This is the same two-track, doublespeak policy which sees the foreign minister condemning Syrian sponsorship of terrorism in Iraq and the Syrian regime’s occupation of Lebanon while, at the same time, it sees Australia welcoming 12 dubious Syrian diplomats for purposes which have still not been made clear but are probably linked to some murky trade deal cooked up by some mate in the National Party. By contrast, Ukraine, which has a population three times the size of Syria’s, has been begging for Australian diplomatic representation—but of course they, with 50 million people, do not ‘deserve’ diplomatic representation.

These kinds of people are terrorising the Lebanese community in Australia, and these 12 Syrian diplomats are here for purposes that go completely against the rhetoric of this Howard government. Mr Howard and Mr Downer will be very embarrassed if these issues became more the focus of public attention, particularly the role of these Syrian diplomats and this double-track foreign policy where they subcontract all of the Middle East to the National Party so they can continue their rorts in that part of the world.

Few Australians noticed this two-faced foreign policy until Paul Volcker found that the Australian Wheat Board was the biggest single source of kickbacks to Iraq under the corrupt oil for food program. Volcker revealed that the AWB paid trucking charges of $290 million to a company called Alia—a bogus trucking company owned by a wealthy Iraqi family with strong connections to Saddam. This trucking company had no trucks. It is a company that did not move one tonne of wheat off the docks at Umm Qasr yet pocketed $300 million for its services. The AWB insist that its payments to Alia were approved by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. If this is true, it seems hard to believe that ministers were not informed and equally hard to believe that they accepted without question that $300 million should be forked out for trucking fees to a dubious trucking company.

We are yet to learn the full truth of this. It has not been proven at the Cole royal commission that ministers knew what the AWB was up to in Iraq. But even if they did not know they are far from off the hook. It was the government’s job to know what its monopoly wheat seller was doing. Moreover, the government was warned many times that these bribes were being paid to the Saddam regime. This week the opposition has documented no less than 15 occasions on which the government was warned what the AWB was up to. The UN first raised concerns about the irregular payments to the Iraqi regime in January 2000—six whole years ago. The Australian mission at the UN passed the warning to DFAT in Canberra. The UN asked again in March 2000: ‘What was going on with the Australian payments?’ In October 2000, AWB wrote to DFAT seeking DFAT’s approval for its arrangement with Alia. In March 2001 the New York Times carried this issue on its front page. We have diplomats in New York and Washington who presumably read the New York Times. It outlined in accurate detail Saddam’s misuse of oil for food, including the use of ‘bogus additional charges linked to inland transportation’ or commodity contracts, including wheat. In August 2002 the then agriculture minister, Mr Truss, was warned by a prominent Victorian grain merchant that the AWB was paying bribes to the Saddam Hussein regime.

Minister Truss did not believe him and told this public-minded citizen to stop spreading such stories. It reminds me of the great Jewish comedian in New York who says of people like the minister: they never met anyone; they never knew anyone; someone else was responsible, not them—it was a little fellow working in the basement. They never read these reports. They are paid to read these reports but they did not read them. It is a farce.

In 2003 an Australian representative on the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Michael Long, received a memorandum of instruction from the CPA asking him to identify which contracts under the oil for food program have a kickback or a surcharge, often of 10 per cent. The memorandum said:

We need to know what percentage kickback or “after-sales service fee” was involved in the Extra Fees category. Your Ministry is likely aware of this charge so please work with them to identify and indicate on the matrix.

I repeat those words: ‘Your ministry’—the Australian ministry—‘is likely to be aware of this charge.’ This was sent to an Australian official who would have read those words, and I am sure they were passed back to Canberra. Mr Long forwarded this memorandum of instruction to DFAT. Apparently no-one thought to tell the minister—blind eye to the telescope again.

In September 2003 the US Department of Defense published a report on the misuse of the oil for food program. It found the AWB contracts were ‘potentially overpriced’ to the tune of $US14.8 million. Soon after, Treasury officials working on secondment in the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, as part of the CPA, forwarded to Canberra a report that found that the Saddam regime required 10 per cent of the face value of the contracts to be paid directly to the regime. Finally, in September 2004 the Duelfer report, compiled with all the resources of the CIA and based on the best intelligence available, found that Saddam used illicit funds and kickbacks through the oil for food program ‘to procure sanction military goods and equipment’. It is beyond belief that no-one in DFAT, Trade, Agriculture or Prime Minister and Cabinet read or understood this report, or that it never occurred to any of these officials to warn their ministers about its content.

If that is what happened, a lot of people should lose their jobs—not just the executives of the AWB. As the member for Wills quite rightly argued, if we were to apply the criteria of the legislation that we recently passed against the financing of terrorism, these people should be in jail and for a very long time for effectively being the biggest funders of terrorists in the Western world. We have been the biggest funders of terrorists in the Western world—Australia, a country which rhetorically and practically through the excellent work of all of its security agencies, has worked very effectively and openly against terrorism—because one part of our government has not been watching what our wheat monopoly has been doing, despite 14 or 15 warnings over six years.

It seems to me that the Deputy Prime Minister is in particularly hot water. It is the National Party which insists that the AWB retain its monopoly over Australian wheat sales, even though it is now a private company—a situation almost guaranteed to breed corruption. The AWB chairman at the time of the payments in Iraq, Trevor Flugge, is a former National Party parliamentary candidate. The shadow foreign minister, the honourable member for Griffith, has rightly described the AWB as the ‘National Party abroad’. It is often said that while the Liberals are born to rule the Nationals are born to rort. This time they may have gone a rort too far. It is not for the first time that Liberal Party ministers have been put in the position of having to cover-up for the National Party’s trail of rorts.

Reports today suggest that the Minister for Foreign Affairs may have aided the AWB in watering down the Volcker inquiry’s findings into the AWB kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime. It seems that last October the minister met with the disgraced AWB CEO, Lindberg—who was paid four times as much as the Prime Minister—in Canberra. It is claimed that the minister asked our then Ambassador to the UN, John Dauth, to set up a meeting between AWB executives and Mr Volcker in New York. That meeting, we are told, led to a watering down of the allegations that the Volcker report eventually made against the AWB. That is another absolute disgrace, if that is true. The Minister for Foreign Affairs must answer these allegations: did the minister, his office or his department meet with Mr Lindberg or any AWB officials to discuss the watering down of the Volcker inquiry? Did the Australian officials at the UN have any role in trying to soften Volcker’s conclusions on AWB?

Finally, I will turn to another casualty of the AWB scandal—the so-called single desk system of selling Australian wheat. This policy has been in existence for many years. I acknowledge that it has had its supporters on both sides of politics. In the past it may have served Australian wheat growers, but it appears that some of the benefits that the single desk has brought to wheat growers may have resulted in the longstanding practice of paying kickbacks, bribes and commissions to corrupt regimes so that they will take our wheat. It is not acceptable, either ethically or practically, for people to say that this is what needs to be done to operate in this part of the world.

What the Australian Wheat Board, the National Party and this incompetent Deputy Prime Minister have done is to effectively shoot Australia in the foot. By paying these bribes we have alienated the new democratic Iraq, just like the ‘Big Australian’, BHP, has alienated Iraq forever and prevented Australia from getting any access to develop the Halfayah oilfields. Why would they give access to Australia when BHP on the one hand tried to give a soft loan to Saddam of $100 million in 1997 or made the so-called charitable donation through its front organisation, Tigris Petroleum, of one million tonnes of wheat—$5 million worth—in 1995? It is absolutely unacceptable.

In a free market economy, state monopolies should not be acceptable either. The days of the single desk are numbered. Australian wheat growers need to face that fact. In fact, I am sure that they will do much better with a whole series of companies representing them honestly abroad. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Ms Burke) adjourned.