John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

According to the boringly repetitive pronouncements of the opposition, climate change is either a myth concocted by the government to destroy our country or is a mysterious natural process that is beyond human control or understanding. Neither of these claims is supported by any evidence whatsoever. Instead, it is abundantly clear that the opposition, in an unprecedented campaign of denial, disinformation and deceit, is deliberately exploiting any misunderstandings about this critical issue in order to gain an immoral political advantage at the expense of public confidence in rational policies that are based on evidence and science.

Despite the opposition's relentless dismissal of the warnings of climate scientists, the ever-more frequent disasters such as record-breaking floods, bushfires and extreme heatwaves are increasingly linked by solid, objective evidence to global warming driven by carbon dioxide emissions. Of course, objective evidence is of no interest to the opposition and their supporters amongst the vested interests concerned only to ensure that nothing gets in the way of their unethical determination to dismantle any measures, such as the price on carbon and support for renewable energy, which may interfere with the expansion of the fossil-fuel industry.

I have previously detailed the clearly understood scientific evidence behind the government's decision to put a price on carbon and to expand the generation of electricity from carbon-free renewable sources such as solar and wind power. Yet, so unrelenting is the opposition's cacophony of deception, I believe it is necessary to recount the science and the warnings about the disastrous consequences of unrestricted carbon dioxide emissions. An understanding of these issues is vital if decisions are not to be made on the basis of ignorance, prejudice or unwillingness to even read the extensive documentation.

Here is the scientific evidence for the effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the climate and the oceans. These findings have been put to the test so often that they are regarded as facts by the overwhelming majority of scientists throughout the world. First, energy radiated by the sun in the visible spectrum passes through the atmosphere largely unimpeded and is either absorbed or scattered or reflected back to space by the atmosphere, by clouds and by the Earth's surface. The energy that is absorbed heats the surface and the atmosphere and raises the local temperature in proportion to the nature and latitude of the surface, either land or sea. Second, the heated surfaces emit energy in the longer-wave infrared spectrum in accordance with Planck's radiation law, and this energy, perceptible as heat, is lost to space, balancing the energy input from the sun.

Third, carbon dioxide, present in the atmosphere as a gas, is transparent to visible radiation but is partially opaque to invisible infrared radiation and, in proportion to its concentration, traps heat that would otherwise be lost to space by radiation. As the concentration of carbon dioxide increases, so the heat content and temperature of the atmosphere and the Earth's surface increases. Fourth, carbon dioxide molecules absorb energy at specific wavelengths in the infrared spectrum. The absorbed energy is transformed by collisions to other gas molecules and to the surfaces and increases the temperature of those gases and surfaces.

Fifth, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from about 280 parts per million at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to around 400 parts per million today and is currently increasing by around three parts per million per year. The total heat content of the atmosphere and oceans has increased in tandem with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and is continuing to rise. The amount of heat stored in the oceans is about 1,000 times that stored in the atmosphere and fluctuations in surface temperatures are caused by heat moving between the oceans and the atmosphere. There is no evidence that the planet is presently cooling.

Sixth, the atomic nucleus of elements consists of protons and neutrons and the number of neutrons affects the stability of an atom in radioactive decay. Carbon 14 has 14 neutrons and is a radioactive isotope of carbon produced by the bombardment of atoms of nitrogen by cosmic rays and has a half-life of around 5,730 years. Carbon 14 dating is used to determine the age of organic materials that contain carbon and this method of dating exploits the fact that when organisms die they cease to incorporate atmospheric carbon and the carbon 14 that they contain decays at a known rate. Obviously, any remains of plants or animals that formed fossil fuels millions of years ago will contain virtually no carbon 14. It is clear from measurements made since the 1950s that the ratio of atmospheric carbon 14 to carbon 12 has been declining as increasing quantities of carbon 12 have entered the atmosphere. Fossil fuels are the only significant source of the additional carbon 12 and despite claims to the contrary volcanoes emit no more than one per cent of the total volume of new carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere annually. Moreover, volcanoes are generally associated with a short-term reduction of global warming since the smoke and ash they emit reflects solar radiation back into space.

Despite this overwhelming weight of evidence supported by nearly two centuries of scientific study the Leader of the Opposition remains at heart a denier as this quote from The 7.30 Report on 27th of July 2009 shows:

I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.

Yet the Leader of the Opposition asks the Australian people to trust his own ill-informed judgement against that of the thousands of climate scientists and other experts who warn that Australia and the world are fast approaching a dangerous point of no return unless effective measures are taken to rapidly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions within this decade. I choose to trust the vast majority of acknowledged experts who understand the complexities of climate science. Is it any surprise that the opposition's so-called Direct Action policy is no more than a disjointed collection of unworkable proposals that will have a minimal effect on the growth of emissions and lacks any measures that will actually reduce the present volumes of emissions?

Statistically-significant increases in the frequency and intensity of climate related natural disasters driven by global warming have been observed in all parts of the world; not least in Australia where long-term records for rainfall and temperatures are now regularly broken while flood levels expected every 50 to 100 years now occur every second year. Do these often destructive events matter to the opposition? Evidently not, if you listen to the leader of the Nationals who, following the recent disastrous bushfires, dismissed concerns about emissions by saying on 9 January this year:

Indeed I guess to be more CO2 emissions from these fires and there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades.

That is what he said. Sadly, the Leader of the Nationals has guessed incorrectly because in fact the carbon dioxide released by these enormous fires produced the equivalent of only one week's worth of emissions from Australia's coal-fired power stations. That is a fact.

Moreover, the carbon dioxide emitted by bushfires is balanced by regrowth. Eucalypt forests regenerate and in a few years draw the emitted carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The same cannot be said of coal-fired power stations, since the slow formation of coal from the plants takes place over millions of years. Scientists warn that even a targeted reduction of carbon dioxide emissions of 25 per cent by 2020 is unlikely to be enough to avoid serious damage, yet at least that figure is a start. However, given the views of people like the Leader of the Nationals, any such rational policies would be entirely abandoned by a conservative government. The largest single source of carbon dioxide in our country is coal-fired power stations. Together they produce around a third or about 200 million tonnes of our total annual emissions. That is a fact.

Fortunately, the development of concentrating solar thermal energy collectors by scientists and engineers from the University of Sydney before 2006 makes it possible to replace as much as 75 per cent of the coal burned in those power stations. Yet, such was the hostility to this important development by the Howard government that the originating company decided to relocate to the United States, where under new ownership it now sells the same technology back to Australia. That is a national disgrace. I have no doubt that solar thermal collectors that could have been manufactured in Australia will substantially displace fossil fuels in existing power stations in the years to come, as the rest of the world moves rapidly to reduce emissions. Anyone who thinks that the coal industry has a long-term future should look to the story by Mr John Garnaut, published on 7 February this year in the Sydney Morning Herald, that warned that the Chinese government intends to cap coal consumption as the leadership shifts priorities towards energy conservation and efficiency. Recent history shows that the directives of the Chinese government are usually strongly enforced and it should be understood that the fossil fuel industry can no longer count on business as usual.

It is evident that a rapid transformation in the world's energy economy is under way, and countries like Australia and other fossil fuel exporters such as OPEC may well find that the market for their products is at risk of decline and even long-term collapse. Sweden, for instance, intends to cease importing oil by 2020 as renewable fuels and energy efficiency replace petroleum, while the United States has discovered the world's largest deposits of oil in its western states, sufficient for 400 years at its present rate of consumption. There is a so-called gas rush in our country as new technology makes it possible to extract methane from formerly inaccessible sources. Nowhere are the downsides to this development more apparent than in New South Wales. Thanks to the antediluvian policies of the present New South Wales Liberal-National government, homeowners in my electorate of Reid, which covers extensive Sydney Basin coal measures, are at risk of having their properties undermined by coal-seam gas drillers. In New South Wales carpetbaggers have been handed the right to drill where they please by a government controlled by climate change deniers, determined to expand the extraction of fossil fuels as they rob property owners everywhere of the value of their assets.

Although the Leader of the Opposition is glibly attempting to rebrand himself as trustworthy, his answer to Paul Bongiorno at the National Press Club on 31 January this year to a question about the price on carbon and the introduction of an emissions-trading scheme entirely discredited his deceptive facade of righteousness. Evidently unable to ignore a deeply embedded compulsion to give answers to suit the occasion, the Leader of the Opposition explicitly stated that:

…the rest of the world was not going anywhere near carbon taxes or emission trading schemes and that's why the Coalition is absolutely right to say no to a carbon tax and to say no to an emissions trading scheme.

I bring to the attention of the parliament that this statement is entirely false. The Leader of the Opposition seems to be unaware of the list of countries on his own direct action website which have introduced a price on carbon or have introduced emissions trading schemes or intend to do so in the near future—or, for that matter, those that should have been added to that incomplete catalogue, last updated in 2009. Are we to trust the Leader of the Opposition when he claims that countries like China, New Zealand, South Africa and Japan, or the European Union or states like California do not already price carbon or do not intend to introduce emissions trading schemes? Or should we trust those countries and California when they say they understand the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and have already introduced a price on carbon and emissions trading schemes or intend to do so?

I am sure that the vast majority of citizens in our country would rather trust the statements of those governments, determined to protect the interests of their people, rather than the unending deceptive claims of the present opposition, which are only interested in getting their hands on the keys to the Treasury by any means whatever. (Time expired)

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-13 because it allows me to examine one very important aspect of Australia’s transport initiatives that I think has been put on the back-burner. I refer to what is generally called the inland rail. This envisages an inland rail line from Melbourne to Brisbane or, to be exact, from the South Dynon yard in Melbourne to Acacia Ridge in Brisbane. It has been talked about for many years but in the serious sense since 1996. That is 17 years. One would have thought by now that we would have come to some sort of real resolution. I admit progress has been made and I certainly do not detract in any way from the people who put their efforts into it.

I am an unapologetic supporter of the idea of an inland rail. I know Everald Compton well, who has championed this cause when others have fallen by the wayside. His moves to form ATEC, the Australian Transport and Energy Corridor, were visionary. It not only envisaged a railway line from Melbourne to Brisbane but, in that corridor, to have gas and high-speed telecommunications. It envisaged the electronic and internet age that we now live in, even when those things were in their earliest manifestations. That group has now morphed into the ATEC Rail Group and they have widened their agenda. Amongst the other lines that they are looking at now is the Surat Basin line in your electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott. This is a $1.3 billion exercise. I understand that that will be able to go ahead without any major government contribution. Then there is the Border rail line from Moree to Toowoomba, at a cost of $1.5 billion. Both of these lines will help decentralise south-eastern Queensland. Still further ahead is a line from Mount Isa to Tennant Creek. Whether that is to be done in conjunction with an upgrade of the Townsville to Mount Isa line or a line from Gladstone to Mount Isa is immaterial. The point we need to recognise now is that there is a lot of mineral extraction going on in parts of Australia that we never envisaged before and we do not have the rail corridors to pick up a lot of this freight. We have a pretty shabby record as a nation when it comes to rail. This was largely because pre-Federation the colonies were self-governing entities and each built a rail system they thought was adequate for their needs. Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania chose narrow gauge because they wanted to push the lines out as far as they could, particularly Western Australia and Queensland, where they probably would have preferred standard gauge, but it was a matter of cost. Tasmania was a much smaller entity and probably did not need the heavy duty rail at that time. New South Wales chose the European standard gauge and Victoria the Irish wide gauge—five foot three. South Australia, which was sort of at the crossroads of all the systems, ended up with all three gauges.

We have had some improvements since but it took us until the 1970s to actually link up the capital city network from Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide to Perth, when the line was finally completed, and that was reducing the five foot three line to a four foot 8½ line between Melbourne and Adelaide—not the most satisfactory way of doing it and one which I reported on in a committee I chaired some years later. The concept was good.

Right up until comparatively recent times, although we had gauge right, we did not have our safety systems and signalling to a uniform standard, which meant drivers could not take trains across borders. That has been corrected to some extent. In fact, in the line from Brisbane to Kyogle the driver used to have to jump out and put the bars into the old device—I cannot remember its name—which allowed the train to continue to the next stop. That has only been removed in the last four or five years.

When you look at that it is a pretty sorry record. Even in the visionary Alice Springs to Darwin railway—and I applaud the concept of that—already we have recognised that the capacity of that line is not up to some of the minerals that it could be carrying right now. It should have been built to a higher standard with its bridges, culverts and track—sleepers and so on. So even there we have cut ourselves short.

In Queensland we tore up the railway line from South Brisbane to Tweed Heads through to the Gold Coast and within two decades we were putting it back again. But we have sold the corridor. That was not real smart. I am not saying that the corridor as it first stood was the ideal one, but we have to go very much further west to get a corridor and even now it is only part of the way down to the Gold Coast, to Robina. Our record has not been all that crash-hot.

One area that does give me a lot of heart is Western Australia. I recognise that the current government has done a tremendous amount and I also acknowledge the work of the National Party over there with their Royalties for Regions, allowing a lot of these things to happen. But it is a pleasure to go on any form of road or public transport from Perth right down to the Collie turn-off. Those roads are just remarkable. The roads are four and six lanes. They have bicycle tracks with different coloured asphalt demarcation so that you can see very clearly that that is not part of the road. Their spoon and table drains are properly battered so they can be regularly mowed. Their signage is superb. I imagine bushfire control is marvellous because they do not have trees up against the roadway. Then in various parts of that they have an electric train system running down the middle of it. In other words, they have got to a point where they have done something and they have done it well; they have done it once and they have done it well. I think whatever Compton wanted and still envisages is that we would do it once well. In a report I wrote once I quoted from Vince O'Rourke who, in my opinion, is the best railwayman in Australia. He said that with this inland railway we should do it once and do it well so we could double stack trains from Melbourne to Brisbane. That would be revolutionary, like nothing else we have in Australia.

I use this appropriations debate today to bring this back to the attention of government and, for that matter, to the attention of the opposition. We have talked about this endlessly. There have been eight or nine studies by both sides of politics and they have all gone to their neat pigeonholes on the walls of the department. I am not criticising the people who did them; what I am criticising is the lack of will to make things happen. We spent $9 billion on school halls and upgrading schools. I am not altogether a total critic of that. I know it has made a vast difference to many schools. I often ask myself if, say, in the $10 billion stimulus package, $5 billion of it had been spent on national infrastructure projects and $5 billion on school halls and the like, we may have had an even better result, one in which the whole nation could have taken some pride and from which we would have had future commercial benefit.

Another thing this inland rail envisages is a 20½-hour trip from Melbourne to Brisbane—in other words, you could turn a train around in 24 hours. That would make it competitive with road transport. The cost of it would be about $4.7 billion. That could be a mixture of government and private money. As we come towards the end of each year and see the road crash figures, we wring our hands and say: 'We have to do various things. We have to upgrade our roads to four lanes here and six lanes there. We need dividers down the middle of certain roads. We have to get trucks off the roads—there are too many trucks on the roads.' We wring our hands and do nothing about it. This would make a dramatic difference to the number of trucks on the road. That would not mean less business for trucks but it would mean that they would hub out of different locations, with less interstate trucking going on. That could be a large net benefit for the environment and for safety.

Also, the inland rail track from Melbourne to Brisbane would save seven hours in transport time and would be 170 kilometres shorter. I have a variation on it that I very much favour. I think the track should go from Moree to Inglewood, into Warwick, across the McPherson Range and come down into Rathdowney on the north coast line into the Brisbane. Not all people agree with me, nor does Mr Compton himself. I think Warwick already has the makings of a hub with transport companies like Wickhams and Frasers already located there and Woolworths having one of their major distribution centres there. Also, it would be a less expensive way of getting the link made between Melbourne and Brisbane. That is not to say that Toowoomba should not be included—it should. I think the existing narrow-gauge line from Warwick to Toowoomba should be upgraded so that Toowoomba would be integrated into this service. The important thing, however, is to get the thing done and to get the benefit of a Melbourne-to-Brisbane freight corridor completed with terminals organised at both ends so that we can achieve this 24-hour turnaround.

I would like to put that back on the agenda. I know times are tough for state and federal governments at present, but one of the things we lack in Australia at present is national vision. The Snowy Mountains scheme was an example of national vision with both sides of politics able to embrace this project. Australians would take pride in this inland rail as the start of a new rail network that opens up our country, with its vast resources and wealth, through the most productive corridor in Australia. It would change the whole economic direction of our country.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in support of Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) and the great ongoing work that Labor is doing in a range of areas to further our national prosperity and quality of life. This work is laying the foundations for a prosperous nation for generations to come. This government, since coming to power in 2007, has had some visionary policies that will lay down foundations for a fair and just society and for which those foundations will ensure prosperity for generations to come.

The NBN is an infrastructure project that will take us into the future. The NDIS will ensure that people with disabilities live with the dignity that they deserve. The Gonski review is so important for education. As we heard yesterday, if ever there were an antidote to poverty it is through education. These are visionary policies and plans for Australia's future to ensure that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have a better life than we do. We as members of parliament have done all that we can to fulfil our duty and ensure that that happens.

It has been evident here in Australia for over 100 years that further prosperity to uphold our quality of life is the Labor way, and we can see that in the history of Australia. In today's context, with the challenges for the current generations and the globalised world in which we live, this motive is epitomised by this government's focus on increasing our national workforce. We have seen over 800,000 jobs created since we came to government. We have also seen the improved skills of our workforce and productivity of organisations and businesses striving to realise what they can become.

Labor's focus on increasing prosperity and improving quality of life is quite obvious in our positive approach to superannuation, and we have heard a lot about superannuation this week. Labor created the superannuation guarantee, and back then the coalition opposed it. Labor increased the super guarantee to nine per cent, and the coalition opposed it. Today Labor is increasing the super guarantee from nine per cent to 12 per cent and, as all Australians know, again the coalition is opposing it. There is no single area of policy that has a greater positive impact on the quality of life of millions upon millions of senior Australians than Labor's superannuation policies, and yet we see again the same mantra from the coalition opposing it in every instance. Without superannuation almost all Australians would face retirement on the age pension, which pays far, far less than their wages through their working lives. Thanks to Labor, senior Australians are increasingly retiring on an income far in excess of the value of the age pension, maintaining a relatively high quality of life. In support of this end, Appropriation Bill (No. 3) before us allocates further moneys to the ATO, the Australian tax office, for the purpose of, among other things, securing the transfer of lost superannuation members' accounts to the ATO, from where they will be reunited with the account holders.

Many of us in this place as members of parliament would have spoken to constituents and had people come to our electorate offices to talk to us about superannuation—perhaps they had lost or were not sure where it was. So this is very important: reuniting people with their lost accounts is an excellent way and service provided by this government to assist members of the public to collect all superannuation that they have earned, pulling together what was often in many different accounts and helping people keep their future retirement savings working positively towards their later life.

Retirement often depends at this time on a combination of both private savings, superannuation and the age pension. Where a retiree's savings are such that the income deemed to be generated from those savings is moderate—still within the age pension income test—the person may be eligible for a part pension.

In response to regular constituent queries regarding deeming rates used to calculate income under the age pension income test, yesterday I asked the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Minister for Disability Reform, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, about government action in this area. The minister stated that the government is again reducing the deeming rate, effective on 20 March, and this will benefit some 740,000 pensioners around the nation—some 70,000 from within South Australia and my electorate of Hindmarsh, which has a very high population of seniors.

The lower deeming rate will decrease from three per cent to 2.5 per cent for financial investments up to $45,000 for single pensioners or $75,600 for a couple. The upper deeming rate will decrease from 4.5 per cent to four per cent for balances over these amounts.

Part pensioners will see an average increase to their pension of $6.80 a fortnight. This is not an increase in disposable income as much as the increase in September 2009 where single pensioners started receiving a full pension increase of over $30; it is an acknowledgement by the government of the situation of the economy, the responsible investment options for retirees and the returns being received by retirees from their investments. I would like to congratulate the minister and the government for recognising what is right and putting it into action.

The minister went on to announce that from 20 March Australian pensioners will start receiving the new clean energy supplement. Pensioners will get that either fortnightly or quarterly over the next year. For single pensioners that will be around $338 annually; for a couple, $510.

Towards the development of healthy superannuation accounts, we believe work and employment is good for people's self-esteem, social engagement and of course quality of life through heightened income and expenditure. We as a party see employment as a cornerstone of social integration and participation, and that is why we provide the training and support that we do to do help people into the workforce: the JET or Jobs Education and Training program, the university funding, the school funding that we have paid and the funding towards future Gonski-inspired appropriations.

This bill includes a further appropriation to the support for childcare assistance program delivered through the Jobs Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance program, the family day care community support program and the inclusion support subsidy. There is nothing better for a household, including a household with children, than having at least one adult engaged in employment as I said earlier. I am extremely proud that this government considers the assistance that many people may require to access the labour markets and employment, a public good worthy of support and funding. As much as we wish for people to be employed through the course of their lives, people can easily be left behind by being removed from the workforce for extended periods of time. Then comes the loss of skills and the maintenance of those skills through the loss of the workplace culture and participation in the workforce. It is extremely important to give every person the absolutely best chance that we possibly can to maintain their employability throughout life, through their mid-life and into their 50s and 60s. I commend this government's recognition of this fact and the policies that are in place to further people's quality of life through ongoing employment.

Where employment ceases through no fault of the employees, where a business goes bust and hard-earned employee entitlements are lost, this government has continued to look after employees' interests through the General Employee Entitlement and Redundancy Scheme, known as GEERS. GEERS has provided assistance to employees who have lost their employment and entitlements due to the liquidation or the bankruptcy of the employer. I am sure that all of us see many constituents who are in that situation of chasing moneys that are owed to them. In some cases, the loss of its employees' entitlements by a business may have been other than deliberate. Regrettably, in some cases, it seems apparent that the loss of those entitlements has been a callous and calculated act. The losses of these blameless employees can be tens of thousands of dollars, amounts which would take years and years to save. So I commend the government for its ongoing protection of employee entitlements and the quality of life that they deliver. Further appropriation towards GEERS is contained within this bill as well.

Of note to workers, GEERS was replaced as of 5 December 2012 by the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. It is not a coincidence that the provisions of these bills go to furthering workforce participation and furthering people's retirement savings. It is no coincidence that these appropriation bills go to the quality of life of Australians throughout their working lives and beyond into retirement. These are bread and butter issues on which Labor is principally focused. History tells us that these are policies that only Labor will deliver for the Australian people, our workforce and retirees. As I said, these are important appropriation bills that will lay down the foundations for future generations of Australians.

Unfortunately, this morning, approximately 70 to 90 people in my electorate woke to the news that they will be losing their jobs to offshoring. As many of you know, I have one of the largest call centres in Australia in my electorate, the Westpac call centre. Again we are seeing Westpac sack approximately 90 workers. The number announced yesterday was 70 workers; today I hear from the FSU that the number is closer to 90 or maybe even 100 who will be losing their jobs. Westpac and some of our banks are very profitable in this country. They are doing far better than most banks around the world. In fact, they have super-mega profits, and we see that in their returns every year. I feel that they have a duty to ensure that they give something back to the community. To see them offshore jobs just for the sake of making more profits is horrendous and terrible.

I have been advocating in this place for a long time for an Australian service logo. Just as you go into a supermarket and you buy a product and you want to know where it was made or where it was produced, I think an Australian service logo for the service industry would also serve consumers extremely well. They then can make up their minds and base their choices on the information they have. Knowing that their private information is going overseas they may make a different choice and walk and go to a different bank or a service industry that decides to service that particular customer's needs with an Australian workforce in Australia.

As I said, unlike some of our manufacturing people who are going overseas because they are really finding it tough, in this case in the finance sector area, especially in the banks, we are seeing our banks making mega profits and paying their CEOs millions of dollars, and there is no need to cut the workforce just so that they can make even bigger profits. I am very pleased to support those workers, and I have been on radio this morning talking about it. I will be speaking to the Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, Bill Shorten, later on today about this issue. I am pleased to support all the bills that have come to this House and I commend the bills to the House.

Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to use the opportunity of this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013 to express my concern about rising cost-of-living pressures hitting residents in my electorate and across Australia, and to express my dismay that the government's policies are making things worse.

As many in this chamber would be aware, essential goods and services have been going up in price way in excess of inflation or indeed wages. People tell me this in my community on a daily or weekly basis, and the stats back this up. The official ABS statistics show that the cost of electricity has gone up by 90 per cent since 2007, water by 64 per cent, gas by 60 per cent, education by 31 per cent and medical and hospital by 38 per cent. In the last 12 months, even childcare costs have gone up by 15 per cent. Cost-of-living pressures are indeed rising, and they are starting to hurt families in a very significant way. I receive correspondence and I receive telephone calls on a very regular basis from people who are struggling to make ends meet because of these price increases.

There are many reasons why the cost of living has been going up, but a significant reason in recent years is government policy. I would like to outline in four ways how the government's policy and the government's approach have contributed to the increase in cost-of-living pressures. The first, of course, is by running enormous budget deficits. In the last four years, the government has delivered the four largest budget deficits in Australian political history, and this year there will be a further budget deficit. We know that, if you run large budget deficits, that will have an impact on the cost of living. It is not just me or other members of the coalition who support this particular view. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer themselves have made exactly this point. The Prime Minister said that achieving surplus was 'the best thing that we can do to help families with cost-of-living pressures'. Wayne Swan said:

… meandering back to surplus … would compound the pressures in our economy and push up the cost of living for pensioners and working people.

And they are exactly right. By running such huge budget deficits, by continuing to run budget deficits, by abandoning their solemn promise to get the budget back to surplus, they are contributing to higher cost-of-living pressures for every Australian in the nation.

The second way the government are contributing to cost-of-living pressures is through specific measures that they have put in place. They introduced the carbon tax, which had an immediate effect on electricity prices and gas prices and, through those two things, every good and service in the nation. Electricity has gone up by at least 10 per cent in the last 12 months alone, and that is entirely due to the introduction of the carbon tax. Gas has gone up by nine per cent—also entirely due to the introduction of the carbon tax. How do we know this? Because the government's modelling before they introduced it said that those costs would go up by that amount. So they actually got the forecast right. They knew that costs were going to increase through the carbon tax, and that is exactly what happened.

Bear in mind, Mr Deputy Speaker Lyons, that these cost increases are occurring when the carbon tax is at $23 per tonne. As we know, the carbon tax is legislated to increase to $39 per tonne and it is then forecast to increase to an incredible $350 per tonne by 2050. So, a 15-times increase in the carbon tax is expected by this government by 2050. Imagine the impact that is going to have on electricity prices. Healthcare costs are going up because the government is taking the axe to the private health insurance rebate. They promised they would not, but they have already means tested the private health insurance rebate, which flows through on to everybody, and they are now proposing a further measure to abandon the ability to claim the additional penalties associated with not taking out private health insurance at the age of 30 against the rebate.

Childcare costs have also been increasing directly due to government policy. The government have decided that the staff-to-child ratios in childcare centres must be reduced. They have already been reduced for the nought- to two-year-olds. They will be reduced in future for the two- to four-years-olds. The Productivity Commission looked into this and said, 'If you go ahead, costs will go up by 15 per cent'. The government knew this, but they have gone ahead anyway. And what do you know? Costs have gone up by 15 per cent, and they will continue to go up as the government's proposals roll through to child care for the three- and four-year-olds.

The third area where they have put up the cost-of-living pressures is through the taxes that they have imposed. We all know about the government's taxes on cigarettes, alcohol and other products that working people use. They have actually introduced 21 new taxes since they were elected to government in 2007. Some of them are direct taxes on products that people use, but others are taxes on businesses, which then flow through to the products and services that those businesses offer.

The fourth area is in regulations. The government have introduced 20,000 new regulations over the five years since they were elected, and they have removed only 200. They promised one in, one out, but they have only removed 200 and have introduced 20,000. What these new regulations do is impose red tape and additional reporting requirements on businesses. What that then means is that business cost structures go up and to recoup those costs they then either have to put up the prices of their services or the goods they manufacture or they have to lay off workers. They are the two choices which they have in order to maintain their profitability.

So, in four ways the government have contributed to the cost of living increases: firstly, by running huge budget deficits; secondly, by introducing specific policies which put up costs in certain areas—electricity, gas, child care and private health insurance, for example; thirdly, by putting up particular taxes—21 in all across the board; and fourthly, by imposing 20,000 new regulations which make business costs so much higher, which then flow on to higher costs for the goods and services that those businesses produce. The government like to talk about their concern that prices have been going up, but when you examine what they have been doing they have, in fact, been contributing greatly to those increases in the cost of living. The astounding thing, though, is that when the government then get some political pressure upon them because costs have been increasing so much, their response is not to examine what they have been doing and remove some of the regulations, remove some of the taxes, tweak some of their policies to try to reduce those cost-of-living pressures or try to run budget surpluses. No, their response has been to spend more money on cash splashes. Last week, for example, the government introduced a bill for a further billion dollars of cash splashes to certain constituents in the community. It is all very well that those residents get a small amount of additional cash in the short term, but all of that cash was put on the government's credit card, all of it just contributes to the government's debt, all of it contributes to the government's yearly deficit. Hence we get into this vicious cycle. The government has taken us into debt, which puts up cost-of-living pressures. So the government then allocates some more cash, increasing the debt levels again, which then puts up cost-of-living pressures. And so the cycle continues. If we continue on that cycle the government will go broke. You simply cannot continue to allocate more and more cash and put it on the government credit card. It simply cannot be done.

So what should the government be doing to address cost-of-living pressures? It can do a number of things and it can do these things immediately. Firstly, it could get rid of the carbon tax. The carbon tax adds approximately $515 to a family's budget and it reduces business confidence. That would be the first and best thing they could do to reduce cost-of-living pressures on everyday families, including those in my electorate, and it would also be the best thing they could do to support our manufacturers. The second thing they should do is re-examine some of their policies which are increasing prices—their child-care policies and their attacks on the private health insurance rebate. Third, they should stop adding taxes and, where possible, they should reduce taxes to make it easier for everyday Australians and businesses. Lower taxes are in the coalition's DNA. Higher taxes are in the Labor Party's DNA. The fourth thing they should do is cut the regulations and get rid of the red tape which is starting to strangle our small businesses in particular so that they can grow and have confidence and their cost structures will be lower, which then means we can have lower-cost goods and services out in the community. Fifth, they should have a proper competition review, particularly into supermarkets, where many people have concerns that a lack of competition is contributing to higher prices.

That is a list of things the government should be doing. They could be doing those things immediately in order to take the cost-of-living pressures off everyday families. These are some of the things which the coalition will do if we are fortunate enough to be elected to government later this year. The cost-of-living pressures facing families is a very big issue. It is perhaps one of the greatest concerns that residents in my electorate express to me. But what the government have been doing is not alleviating cost-of-living pressures but the reverse. Through their taxes, through their policies and through their enormous budget deficits they have been putting up cost-of-living pressures for everyday families are making it harder for them.

We need to be doing the opposite. The coalition has a plan to reduce cost-of-living pressures, to get the budget back into surplus, to address some of those policies which are causing prices to go up and to remove the taxes. Those are the things that we can do if we are elected to government. They should be things that the government do immediately, but they will not. So we do require a change of government at the end of this year to take pressure off everyday families in my electorate and across Australia.

Laura Smyth (La Trobe, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to contribute to this morning's debate on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013 because appropriations debates are an opportunity to articulate one's vision as a government for the nation, and we certainly have articulated our vision for the nation through funding commitments since coming to office. It is an extraordinary history of investment in infrastructure, in education and in health to benefit communities such as mine in La Trobe.

It is extraordinary listening to a member from Victoria whose last contribution was to talk about what a government might do on coming to office. We all know about the 'gonna' government of Ted Baillieu—'woulda, coulda, shoulda'. 'We would, we might, we will at some point,' and then they proceed to dither and do nothing for an entire term. So it is extraordinary to listen to this sentiment, seemingly about national vision. Typically, when the Liberals come to office, we see them stagnate. We see them come to a standstill. We see infrastructure spending come to a standstill.

But, worse than that, we see them have a look at things that, hypothetically, a Labor government might have committed to in its term prior to, for instance, a government such as Ted Baillieu's coming to office—for instance, the funding commitment that has gone to the duplication of Clyde Road. We all know that under this government a funding commitment of around $30 million was made to the duplication of Clyde Road in my electorate. It was supported also by an investment made by the Brumby government for Clyde Road. At the time that those announcements were made, conservatives were very happy. I know the former member for La Trobe—who is now running again, it seems—was very happy to articulate his concern that this would be a completely ineffective project. People did not want to turn up and congratulate the initiative of this government and the Brumby government in investing in the duplication of a road in one of the growth areas in Melbourne. But now we find that the Victorian minister is very happy to put on a hard hat and a high-vis vest, come out and rebadge this as something that is good for the area and tremendously well supported by the Victorian government. Five minutes earlier it was something that required looking at, required additional work and required some serious thinking, and now, when it is something that is underway and that he and others on the conservative side understand is beneficial for a growing area, they decide that it is something that they want to support.

So, if we are talking about a vision for the nation, this side has it in spades—a vision for the nation which is backed up by the kinds of investments that we see made or secured through appropriation bills such as this and the appropriation bills and initiatives that have preceded it. In the context of the matters I was noting before about the growth area of Melbourne, and certainly the growth area in my electorate, I note today that there is some reporting on a recently commissioned report delivered today called One Melbourne or two? I look forward to the opportunity to consider that in some depth in the coming days. I understand that it is particularly focused on increased investment in Melbourne in those areas that are rapidly growing, including areas such as mine. I certainly know that growth continues to be speedy in the areas of Cardinia and Casey in my electorate, as it does in a number of other parts of Melbourne.

I thought it was worth speaking about that in the context of some of the investments that this government has made to support the growth corridors in Melbourne in order to support the growing population of Melbourne and the growing population of Victoria. It is worth bearing in mind that the investments that were made in Victoria under the Howard federal government at its time of departing office were around $89 per Victorian. At this time it has more than doubled: it has gone to just over $200 per Victorian today. All told, this government has provided an unprecedented $6.8 billion from our six-year Nation Building Program to rebuild and renew Victoria's road, rail and public transport infrastructure. These are incredibly important investments and it is this government, and certainly not the Baillieu government, which is making those kinds of forward-thinking investments, recognising some of the growth pressures in Melbourne and, I am sure, in a number of other cities around Australia. I thought it would be worth reflecting later in my remarks today on some of the specific investments that have gone ahead in electorates such as mine in terms of education infrastructure, health infrastructure, roads infrastructure and social and community amenities. I think that is appropriate to do. These are issues that I have raised in this place which I continue to raise formally and informally in advocating on behalf of communities right across my electorate but in particular, in the context of this discussion about growth, in Casey and Cardinia. I look forward to the opportunity to speak further with those councils about some of the findings that are presented in this report.

I would say, however, that in Victoria we have come to realise that any investments that are likely to be made in infrastructure and in growing communities come from this federal government. It is incredibly difficult, and many people will tell you that it is incredibly difficult, to get access to or find an opportunity to articulate the needs of growing communities to the Victorian Premier and to get any kind of meaningful response. We hear that regularly in the state.

The overall investment in health and education by this government has been extraordinary, and certainly in Victoria that has been the case. I would like to talk about some of those investments in health and education in my electorate and also some of the other investments in relation to social infrastructure, roads infrastructure and other commitments that we have made to support our growing population.

I note, as I have noted previously, that this government has made around $110 million in commitments and has delivered those commitments through the Building the Education Revolution program. But that is certainly not the only program that has gone to supporting capital works in my electorate. I am delighted to be able to say that we have invested heavily in trade training within my electorate, which is very much to the benefit of one of the growth regions of Melbourne. I can report to the House that Hillcrest Christian College has been the beneficiary of a trade training centre funding grant of $1.5 million to develop an equine trade training centre. That part of my electorate that is covered by Clyde and right across to Pakenham is an area that will certainly stand to benefit from this. There is a significant amount of interest in the equine industry. There are significant opportunities in the equine industry for young people and people who will be beneficiaries of education through this trade training centre. It shows the practical ways that this government is supporting prospects for employment and opportunity within the region.

Likewise we have made a commitment of almost $1.3 million in a trade training centre at Belgrave. This is a trade training centre which will provide opportunities for training in hospitality, among other things, to not only students at Belgrave Heights Christian College but also students throughout the Hills region of my electorate. So those are two significant investments. There have also been quite significant investments in capital expenditure in a number of other schools throughout my electorate such as Beaconhills College and Heritage College, amongst others. I could certainly go on with quite a comprehensive list.

But, turning to some of the other investments, I should note that prior to coming to office I was certainly an advocate for investment in a new facility for Outlook disability services, which operates in Pakenham for the benefit of residents and families in looking after people with disabilities, their carers and their providers of support. At the time I came to office it was clear to me that the facility they were operating in was absolutely rundown and in need of repair. It was really substandard. It was for that reason that I advocated for a funding commitment to be given to them so that in a growth area there could be a decent facility for people to go to seek assistance from Outlook, which provides disability services and which also operates some employment services within the region. It was for that reason that this government invested $3.2 million in the building of that new community centre—to support the work of Outlook. It is something that I was very proud to support.

Likewise there have been a series of other investments made by this government. This is all about our practical vision for the nation, articulated in electorates like mine and electorates right around the country. We have seen the commitment, for instance, through the regional and local community infrastructure grant with lighting at a recreation reserve in my electorate—Holm Park Recreation Reserve—some work at Pioneers Park and some work at Coonara Community House in Upper Ferntree Gully, which does fantastic work providing training to local residents and really being a place for the community to come together not only to seek training but also child care and a number of social initiatives. These are practical ways that we are supporting existing communities and growing communities.

It is appropriate in the context of this kind of appropriations debate that those things be revealed because so often we hear from the opposition, with their sort of two-speed response to everything we say—they are a two-speed opposition; all that they do is dead slow and stop; there is no initiative—that they anticipate we will never make appropriations for appropriate health, education or social investments. All the funds for new initiatives, like the NBN and significant road development, come from the infrastructure fairy. This is an opposition which carps repeatedly, but which does not reflect on the positive things—the significant investments in electorates such as mine, which are supported by appropriation bills such as these.

We have seen a very significant commitment from this government in child care, particularly in my electorate at the Upwey Early Learning Centre, where we have invested a very significant amount in developing a new childcare facility there—over $7 million. In addition, we have provided funding for primary health care infrastructure. We have provided around three-quarters of a million dollars in primary care infrastructure grants, which to date have supported three GP practices in my area. This has expanded the services that they can provide—additional rooms and additional infrastructure to support their existing patients and also to extend themselves into new parts of the community. That has certainly been received very favourably within my electorate.

There are an extraordinary number of investments that have been made by this government to my electorate. I am sure that those councils I referred to earlier that have commissioned the report, which is discussed in the media today and entitled One Melbourne or two?, are very much aware of the investments that this government has made in relation to local councils. Certainly, they have been the beneficiaries of Roads to Recovery funding repeatedly. For instance, Cardinia Shire Council received about $1.2 million in 2011 under that program. Casey council received about $1 million; the Yarra Ranges Shire Council, also in my electorate, received almost $2 million; and Knox City Council received about half a million dollars. Those figures are certainly replicated subsequently.

There has also been significant funding for the discrete Black Spot Program in my electorate. For instance, in Berwick at the intersection of Inglis and Buchanan roads and on Amber Crescent in Narre Warren. All of these investments are practical ways that this government is assisting people in growth regions and is assisting people right around the country. While those opposite would deny that these kinds of investments need to be made, and whereas those opposite will say that this is simply about spending for no good end and that it is seemingly wasted money, I suspect that the electors in my patch, as with electors right around the country in electorates which have benefited from Black Spot funding, Roads to Recovery funding, health investments, education investments and infrastructure investments—big and small—would be very reluctant to take the same view, very reluctant indeed.

These are practical investments which alter the lives of people right around the country, and particularly in growth areas. I am very pleased to be able to speak in favour of this appropriation bill, as I have been proud to speak in favour of the funding measures that this government has supported in the past.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

May I congratulate the member for La Trobe for recognising the great value of the Roads to Recovery program and the Black Spot Program, instigated by the Howard government. I wish her luck as she contests the next election against Jason Wood, the Liberal candidate, who was actually the member for La Trobe when these programs were introduced!

I say to the voters of La Trobe that if they like their Black Spot and Road to Recovery programs they should go to the authentic thing, and that would be Jason Wood.

It would be interesting to see how this budget would be explained in the context of the budget delivered in May of last year. These appropriation bills seek to adjust the services or activities area of the Commonwealth and also the capital work space. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 is presented as a way of redistributing or providing additional expenditure requirements that have arisen since the May budget. There is a range in there that relate to changes in the forecasting of programs, program uptakes and new insights, the timing of payments and the like, and they cover a range of activities including support for the childcare system and the General Employment Entitlement and Redundancy Scheme, or GEERS, system, another measure introduced by the Howard government for employees who had lost their entitlements where their employer became insolvent. There is an allocation of funding for the royal commission—and I hope that goes well—and the synchronisation that is needed with the state based inquiries that are underway.

There is also quite an extraordinary further provision of funding to deal with offshore asylum seeking, and it reminds us of the multiple billions that have had to be spent in border protection as a result of the abandonment of the effective and successful Howard government policies. I remind people in this place that when the Howard government left office there were four people in immigration detention—not 400, not 4,000, but four. Now we look at the thousands in our care as a consequence of Labor's failed border protection policies.

There is some interesting work, particularly in further funding for the tax office targeted compliance activities. This must be of enormous concern for the small-business community—$390 million was announced in MYEFO as a further injection of funding for the tax office to essentially crack down on small business. Small business is doing it hard enough now, and is always inclined to do the right thing in terms of its responsibilities. To see almost $400 million of additional funding to give small business an ever harder time at a time when the economy and government policy are making things very tough anyway must be of concern, particularly on the back of the Inspector-General's report.

That report found that targeted template metrics are used to have a look at BAS returns to identify variations and then trigger some audit and enforcement activity. It saw about 5,791 small businesses targeted through that templating strategy to be issued amended assessments, which the Inspector-General found to be false and unjustified, only to have to pay those amended assessments because they did not have the resources and the capacity to compete with the tax office. Now, on the back of that warning bell from the Inspector-General of Taxation there is another $390 million. Isn't it ironic that in MYEFO the only mention of positive small-business programs was what was being undertaken by the Chinese government to stimulate their economy—that was somehow going to allay concerns about a fall-off in Chinese growth, and that was good for the budget. That was the way MYEFO presented it. But in terms of small business there is $390 million for a further crackdown. There is an allocation in here for that.

In the capital work space, which is Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013, there has been some manoeuvring of funds within portfolios away from programs, and changes, particularly in Defence, in operations areas for new projects. There is also $45 million for ANSTO for detailed engineering designs as an equity injection into a nuclear medicine manufacturing facility. That will certainly be of interest. There is a further $32 million in capital funding to expand the immigration detention network—and I will not repeat my earlier comments.

This is interesting, because we have had MYEFO identifying an enormous deviation from a budget delivered only a couple of months earlier, and here we are doing further shuffling of funding at a time when there is already concern and uncertainty about the reliability of the government's forecasting, particularly when you look at things like the mining tax. When you take away the administrative costs and lost company tax revenue that tax really does not make much of a contribution at all to the revenue of the Commonwealth. We learnt today of a substantial warehousing of more than $1½ billion in credits that can be laid off by major companies against future mining tax liabilities. This is the so-called super profits tax, which is really better characterised as a super disaster in tax formulation that has caused uncertainty and a chill in mining investment and optimism in Australia for very little in terms of additional tax revenue.

What is not explained in these papers, though, is that on the back of record budget deficits, debt blowouts, wasteful spending, cost-of-living pressures and other debacles like those I have mentioned, is how the government is going to fund $120 billion of unfunded spending promises that were revealed by the Australian Financial Review. The government is keen on announcements, we understand that, and they are masters of political spin; but in doing the actual hard work of bringing forward a credible and sober plan to fund and implement these announcements and to then see that what is promised is actually followed through, their record is quite dismal. The Australian public is recognising that as an all-too-familiar characteristic of a divided and dysfunctional government.

The government has walked away from the non-negotiable budget surplus promise. That promise was made hundreds of times, even in writing; and some of the leading government ministers wrote to their constituents telling them it had been delivered, which was extraordinary. The irony is breathtaking. I know that for one the member for Deakin wrote to small businesses in his electorate proclaiming the delivery of a company tax cut which never appeared and, despite what the government would say, has never surfaced for a vote in the parliament. They withdrew that of their own volition and seek to blame others for it. It is interesting that that same letter from the member for Deakin heralded the appointment of the first small business minister, which was, again, wildly inaccurate—but there has been no correction or apology to the electorate or electors of Deakin for that error.

We are still seeing the ramifications of these budget variations washing through the Australian economy. Today, particularly, there was more evidence from the New South Wales Business Chamber about the extraordinarily negative effect the carbon tax is having on small business. It is not difficult to work out. In my own electorate, where about 11 per cent of all jobs are in the manufacturing sector, those small businesses and medium-sized enterprises need to be world-class every day because we know manufacturing is under pressure and we see offshore options rearing their head, at times, at a cheaper price—they undercut our local suppliers because they are free of burdens like the carbon tax. The carbon tax continues to act as a reverse tariff on a big part of our economy. For all those operating within it, it continues to erode confidence, optimism and consumer spending ambitions—prospects for the future that are really hurting small businesses that do not have deep balance sheets or the capacity to ride out a carbon tax that is set to rise and therefore further exacerbate its negative influence on the economy, on consumer and business confidence, and on the outlook for future opportunities and prospects.

Contrast that, in the small business area, with a clear, comprehensive plan to restore small business reward, hope and opportunity. It is actually the centrepiece of our plan Real Solutions for all Australians and I am happy to join my colleagues as I travel around the country explaining and working through that plan at small business forums. People understand that we have practical actions and commitments that will benefit the environment in which they operate and their prospects for the future, and they contrast that with the Gillard government's assurances of more of the same. I am reminded of the census index survey where only six per cent of small businesses thought that deal of government policies are helpful to them—six per cent. Perhaps that might even be kind, but that is the number. Clearly a message that should be going out widely to the Labor strategists in the Gillard government is that the small business community is awake up to them. The fourth minister in 14 months is unlikely to improve their prospects. The neglect of small business in the G20 business advisory group; no mention of small business in the Prime Minister's Press Club speech—these are example after example of disinterest and a lack of commitment to small business.

My community knows that small business is not only the engine room of the national economy, they are the providers of prosperity in communities like mine in the outer metropolitan area of Melbourne. That is why we are so focused on seeing the business back in small businesses and we will implement, if we get the opportunity, a plan that recognises and respects their work and the risks they take—something that this government continually fails to do.

The budget reinforces a number of concerns particularly of the 70,000 people who have private health insurance in my electorate. Various changes will mean the electors of Dunkley with private health insurance are likely to pay around $200 a year more for their private health insurance as a result of premium increases announced by the Minister for Health and other changes to the rebate—the incentive, the modest encouragement that has been available for people who choose from their own discretionary income to provide for their own health needs. Even that incentive is being eroded by this government, and that is of great concern to the nearly 70,000 people who have private health insurance in my electorate. The vast majority of families are on very modest incomes, and they go without so they can have their private health insurance—yet the government tries to portray health insurance as some kind of a plaything for the rich and famous. That is absolutely not the case.

In the private health space, not only is the private health sector important to the health care of the citizens I represent; it is also an important part of the economy. We have a number of private hospitals in my electorate that do outstanding work and community based hospitals like The Bays; I think of Beleura, I think of Peninsula Private Hospital, I think of the Frankston Private Hospital, to name those that are most prominent. At this time I am urging the state government to give clarity to the planning laws surrounding the proposed extension of the Peninsula Private Hospital. The site they are looking at has been identified as an anomaly to the urban growth boundary; there are planning processes in place for that but there is also a local planning scheme amendment that will shortly go to appeal. That process for the Peninsula Private Hospital's to expand its facilities in our electorate will be greatly assisted by clarity in the state planning policy. That is something that I will be encouraging.

It is an interesting picture. These are variations to a budget that has already had a very limited shelf life. It is a budget that caps four of the nation's biggest deficits in history, that have seen accumulated debts and deficits of $172 billion. We see borrowings continue to expand. We have a government that inherited a budget surplus, no net debt and $70 billion dollars in net assets. It has just turned that around as if throwing money around is the solution to every problem; it has not been discerning and disciplined in making sure that outlays are soberly assessed and carefully implemented so as to get full value for money for the taxpayer. It is not just the taxpayers of today—let us remember that debt is a burden that lands on the taxpayers of tomorrow in the form of higher taxes as the debt will be serviced for years to come. Around $7 billion now would be an extraordinary contribution to programs like the NDIS—an opportunity we do not have because we are busily servicing this escalating debt that has been the hallmark of this Labor administration.

I am optimistic that the Australian public will respond to the very clear plan that has been outlined by the Abbott coalition opposition. We are seeking to put forward clear strategies to strengthen the economy and build prosperity, so we have a safe and secure nation and so that individuals are not concerned about their own personal security. Mr Deputy Speaker, you must know about the anxiety people feel, about the uncertainty in the economy being added to by an ill-disciplined and dysfunctional government. That is not what the country needs now. Even the idea of adjusting the deeming rates has been captured with some cynicism by retirees wondering where the government has been for a number of years when there have been variations in the cash rate and the rates of return that people could get on their investments. It has not been adjusted for a long time. We need clear air for this country and a clear plan. Yesterday the Prime Minister's own department said the Prime Minister is focused on day-to-day issues. Nothing could be clearer than that. Where is the plan for the nation's future? That is where the energy should be, not just tactics on day-to-day political issues. (Time expired)

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Higher Education and Skills) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am taking the opportunity of this debate on Appropriation Bill (No.3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No.4) 2012-2013 before the parliament today to give an update on developments in my own area. Like the previous speaker, the member for Dunkley, most members like to talk about important projects and issues in their electorates. After the budget, I always take the opportunity to report on the initiatives offered to my local area. I can report to the chamber that, since the election of the Labor government in 2007, those budgets have delivered far more and far more effectively, and have been far more welcomed than the budgets of the previous 11 years of the Howard government. In our region, there are some significant challenges and I believe our government have the correct programs and the correct vision for our region and for the nation. I would like to outline some of the programs that were rolled out in the second half of last year in my region.

The first thing I can report is that in June, together with my colleague the member for Throsby, I was very pleased to welcome the Minister for Regional Australia, Minister for Regional Development and Local Government and Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, to the Illawarra to make an important announcement about funding under the Regional Development Australia Fund. Given that BlueScope Steel announced a restructuring in 2011, it was particularly important to have new programs available to help the region diversify and create social capital. Minister Crean came to the Illawarra on 6 June and announced two lots of funding. One was $5 million for the refurbishment of the Crown Street Mall in Wollongong, a project that is worth a total of $15 million. It is an important project, as the mall stands at the commercial centre of our region. A couple of weeks ago, I joined Mayor Gordon Bradbery to celebrate the turning-on of the free wi-fi in the mall, a popular modern attraction for commercial and retail sectors. The other funding was a contribution of $2.6 million towards to Warilla Southern Community Hub and Youth Foyer, worth a total of $5.15 million. It is another important social capital project. The member for Throsby and I are particularly pleased that this project is being delivered by an award-winning and well-regarded local organisation—Southern Youth and Family Services.

The two projects will create over 200 jobs. The hub will include some accommodation but will also provide education, employment and social services for homeless young people. The hub project builds on the first round of this particular grant program, Father Chris Riley's Youth Off The Streets project, which was awarded $2.26 million towards a $4.83 million project to transform a former juvenile detention centre, Keelong, into a new accommodation and school for young people with high needs. Next month Minister Crean will be back in the Illawarra to open that facility.

In August, Southern Youth and Family Services received almost $40,000 to deliver the Connect-Ed youth project in our region, which gets young people to design, build and paint signage for community facilities. In the process they gain skills in carpentry, signage and painting. It is a small example of the great projects that that service runs, funded by our government's commitment to building social capital in the regions.

In June, the region was also very pleased to receive $1.451 million for settlement services. Our region has a fantastic record of welcoming newly settled people, particularly refugees, into our region and the Illawarra Multicultural Services have an exemplary record of providing those sorts of supports and services—again, another indication of very important social capital-building through the government's commitment to these sorts of services.

In August, the University of Wollongong Graduate School of Medicine was successful in getting a grant of just over $800,000 in a number of stages to develop a telehealth skills training and implementation project. This is about working with the young trainee doctors who are at the graduate school of medicine to develop new ways of training them to use e-health services on the back of the National Broadband Network rollout. It is a good opportunity for our region to provide, as it always does, the leadership in innovation and new technologies. I will have a bit more to say about the NBN towards the end of my contribution.

Like many of us on this side of the House, I spent a lot of the second half of last year visiting great local schools and opening fantastic new Building the Education Revolution projects. They were, without doubt, universally welcomed by the community of every single school I went to. The sort of infrastructure that many of them could only have dreamed of waiting years and years to achieve was put in place under that stimulus program.

As part of that, I was really pleased in August—there was some remaining funding from the program in our area—that it was decided, between the state and federal government, to target special schools with that funding. We were really pleased to welcome $3.15 million in funding for the Para Meadows School in our area, enabling them to deliver some significant physical improvements to the school in their hall, a covered outdoor learning area and some new classrooms. I had the opportunity to join with the principal at the school to talk about that announcement and it was a great pleasure to go to the graduation of their students, who are always thrilled to have the opportunity to be at that school, to be supported by that school and to participate in the graduation ceremony. It is a great event at the end of the year.

The other really important significant announcement was the second round of the Illawarra Region Innovation and Investment Fund money. This was the fund that was set up post the BlueScope Steel announcement. The fund was set up on the basis of $20 million from the federal government, $5 million from BlueScope and $5 million from the state government. Its intention was to co-invest with interested companies in business opportunities, new job-creating opportunities, extensions of businesses and the establishment of new businesses, with the aim of creating jobs to diversify the economy in the region.

In November, the member for Throsby and I were very pleased to announce that the second round had funded 25 innovative businesses to a total of $17.2 million in grants. In effect, the outcome of that will be to create 512 jobs and to inject 48.8 million worth of investment into the region. That is, of course, a combination of the government funding with the matched funding. Many of these businesses were matching $2 or $3 for each dollar invested by the government. The co-investment grants, very pleasingly, covered a range of industries in our region, including new businesses and extensions of existing businesses in manufacturing, information services, health care, tourism, professional services and—excitingly for my own interests—in education and training.

So it was a very pleasing indication of the confidence and enthusiasm of businesses for our region and their willingness to invest, in partnership with the government, in new job creation opportunities. Those sustainable jobs for the future are terribly important to regions in transition like ours and are a great reflection of the promptness with which the Gillard government responded to that announcement and the tight work that we have done with our community. I want to pay great respect and thanks to the task force in our region, which was set up to address how to best invest and utilise this funding. We had leadership from across the region working together with government to make sure that we made the maximum benefit from this opportunity and this program. The member for Throsby and I made the announcement at Port Kembla's National Biodiesel Ltd site. It is a new investment opportunity in our region. It got a $2.86 million grant from the fund and it will be investing more than $14.3 million in the infrastructure project that will create 52 jobs. A similar grant was offered to CSC Australia Pty Ltd at Mount St Thomas. They are establishing a centre of excellence within their current technology park campus. This centre will include leading-edge services and security operations and will create 98 new jobs. These are examples of a government that understands the regions and when they need assistance. This government works in real partnership with the regions to deliver these outcomes, and our region is evidence of that.

I was very pleased to welcome, with my colleague the member for Throsby, the Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism, Martin Ferguson, to the region in the second half of last year. He was there to announce with us a $2.3 million emerging renewables program grant for BlueScope Steel. This was a great message about the future of this business in our region, a business with a long history and close ties with our region, and its capacity to move into new fields and to take up the opportunities that renewables and an economy based around a price on carbon can create for new products and services. It was a great opportunity to have a look at the research work being done in the research and development part of BlueScope around rooftop photovoltaic products. We were thrilled to have that great BlueScope program, which is obviously something that would disappear under those opposite, get funding.

I also acknowledge some programs that sometimes seem smaller but make a real difference to people at the local level. In November, we were very successful in getting nearly $140,000 worth of volunteer grants into the region for 37 organisations which got grants of between $1,000 and $5,000 to support them in their work. These organisations would have to do an awful lot of pie drives and cake stalls to make the sort of money that we give. It is small money by government grants sizes but it makes an enormous difference to communities. A range of local groups benefited, such as the Heathcote headquarters of the Rural Fire Brigade, the Bundeena Community Centre, the Bulli High School P&C, Project Contemporary Art Space Inc., the Older Women's Network and the West Illawarra Hockey Club. These grants covered a range of social activities and community activities that are well supported in the electorate.

I was also very pleased to take up and challenge the point that the former member for Dunkley made to talk about a $748,000 investment in small business in my region. The Illawarra ITEC is a great local organisation that provides small business advisory services. It has been very well received by businesses in the area. ITECs will provide over 392,000 separate advisory services for more than 207,000 small businesses around the country under this program. Our local one is very important to all the businesses across the region and it will be very welcome that it has received grant funding.

As you can see, there is so much that our government has delivered to the regions of Australia with our programs and priorities having real meaning for the regions, so I am going to struggle to cover all of the projects in my region in the time I have. I also want to identify the University of Wollongong in a great announcement under the education investment fund's most recent round. The university received $31 million for the Early Start-Changing Children's Future project. This will be a research and teaching facility that will target and have spokes into the regions of New South Wales to deliver high-quality education opportunities, training and research for early childhood education. It is a great initiative and I would like to acknowledge that there is a $7 million philanthropic gift to the university to be part of that project. It is a really good story all round, building on the significant money, over $100 million, that we have invested in the University of Wollongong to be a major driver in our region.

Finally, as the NBN is rolled out across my region, I anticipate that it will be a profound support for all those programs and make a great contribution to our region. (Time expired)

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on these appropriation bills. The south-west of Western Australia, the area I represent, in my view is the best region in the best state in the best country in the world. Those of us who are lucky enough to live there are always grateful that we have that opportunity. South-west people are also quite generous and they want to share the experience of the south-west with the rest of the nation and the rest of the world. We from the south-west want you to come and experience what is so amazing about our region. Come and see the sun going down over the ocean while you dine on fresh WA seafood and a glass of fine Margaret River or Geographe region wine. It is a wonderful experience. Visit our iconic forests: the majestic karri forests in the south and the jarrah forests further north. Perhaps you would rather surf at Smiths Beach at Yallingup or visit the dolphins in Koombana Bay in Bunbury. That is a simple snapshot of what the south-west has to offer.

We also have a lot to offer economically to not only the rest of the state but the nation. The south-west is also the engine room of the state of Western Australia, providing the state's energy and much of the industry which underpins the region's $15 billion economy. It is a mining region that produces $2 billion a year in minerals—a number that will soon grow with the additional coal exports that are planned. It is an agricultural region, with a turnover of over $600 million a year in some of the best quality food, mainly milk, vegetable and beef production. It is some of the best quality and most efficiently produced food in the world. I take this opportunity to recognise the agricultural sector and the agricultural exports as the reason we stayed out of technical recession.

We also have, as members here would know, one of the world's premium wine-producing regions. We would like to see everyone visit this jewel in the Australian crown. I also want to see investment in the south-west for local communities and for visitors so that they can enjoy what we have to offer. We do need a truly regional airport in the south-west, one that has the capacity to take direct flights from interstate and overseas so that tourists and locals for domestic purposes can come and go from the region effectively. Until there is a larger airport in the south-west with a greater capacity, tourists and those travelling domestically will have to continue to fly to Perth and then drive down to the south-west area. When you look at getting from Perth to the south-west, the completion of the Bunbury Outer Ring Road is an essential and urgent piece of infrastructure.

The Bunbury Outer Ring Road and port access road are being delivered. I attended the opening of stage 1 of the port access road in 2002. Stage 2 of that road and stage 1 of the Bunbury Outer Ring Road have both state and federal funding committed—budgeted at a cost of $170 million. Work started on this stage of the project with a ground-breaking ceremony that I attended in February 2012 and it is expected to be completed by midyear. The remaining stage of the Bunbury Outer Ring Road is estimated to cost over $260 million, but as yet these funds have not been committed. So we have a major road project that is two-thirds done but is not connected and will not be connected at either end. This is desperately needed. I call on the Labor government to finish the job on the Bunbury Outer Ring Road as soon as possible. In the longer term dual lanes from Perth to Margaret River are essential. It is certainly part of my long-term transport vision for the south-west. It will make the trip safer and it will make the trip more efficient for visitors and locals alike.

When visitors do get to the south-west I want them to be able to experience the great variety that it has to offer. This will mainly come through the myriad innovative and very hardworking small business owners, those who run chocolate or cheese factories or the vineyards you might visit. It will also be provided by the restaurateurs, who are also small business operators, as are your dive charter operator and your joy-flight pilot. All these people are waiting to provide you with the experience of a lifetime. I hope they will still be there when you get there. I hope that the new taxes applied by the Gillard government, like the carbon tax, have not put them out of business. The impact on regional Australia is very underestimated by this government. This tax impact means that you really should go sooner rather than later.

And we will see further increases. In 2014, for a start, the carbon tax will increase by a further five per cent on 1 July. Virtually everything that we eat, drink, use, consume or build with comes on the back of a truck. In 2014—and here is the rub if you live and work in regional areas or if you want to attract people to regional areas—road freight operators will lose 6.858c a litre off their diesel fuel rebate to pay for the carbon tax. So the cost to transport every single thing in rural and regional Australia will go up, and it will be those same small businesses and also the consumers that will have to wear that. On top of the recent 2.4c a litre rise in the diesel fuel excise, this will mean higher costs and greater impacts in all regional areas, including our South-West tourism operators. It does have a direct effect; if you are in small business every cent counts.

When you get to the South-West, like thousands of others from the east, you may decide that you do not want to leave. If you stay, I really do want you to be able to access all of the services and facilities you need. One of the things I want to see achieved is the provision of higher education in the cape region of the South-West. This is something I started working on back in 2010 with a very good cross-section of stakeholders, and our work continues. Our Capes Region Higher Education Taskforce members recently met with the first universities to respond to our document calling for expressions of interest sent out across the country late last November. With me at the two meetings in Perth, Thursday a week or so ago, were task force members Deputy Mayor Tom Tuffin, Jon Berry from the City of Busselton, and Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive Officer Ray McMillan. We met representatives from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Canberra. It was really encouraging already to be having those types of face-to-face meetings with people who want to learn more about the capes region and the great potential for tertiary education opportunities.

I know this is still very much early days in those discussions for the overall project, but our task force continues to work with stakeholders to develop a long-term strategy for tertiary education lifetime learning opportunities in capes region. But, with continuous population growth, the task force believes it needs to act now. We need to act now to deliver the best future in education outcomes.

There are 1,000 people a week coming into Western Australia, and this really needs to be considered by the government. There are 1,000 people a week and yet we see constant attacks on the economy of Western Australia. If you are one of those 1,000 and you decide to stay, I hope that we will soon be able to provide more lifetime learning opportunities in the region.

Naturally, when you come to the South-West, we want you not only to feel safe but to be safe. As you explore our beautiful coastline we want you to take care along those winding roads and through our forests. For those of you who cannot make the trip, I am going to bring the South-West back to Canberra again. On 18 June, I am bringing the South-West Sensations Showcase to parliament. Each one of you has received a save-the-date card and an invitation. You may well remember the 2011 showcase which gave you a great taste of the real South-West. It is coming back to parliament, and I invite you all to see, taste and hear what the region has to offer.

As good as the South-West is, there are issues that need to be addressed there. It is the third-fastest growing region in Australia. The government must be held to account over its funding for aged care. The government's changes to aged-care funding under the Living Longer, Living Better program, which came into effect on 1 July last year, was a reprehensible act that has cut the heart out of small regional aged-care service providers. When the Labor government spruiked their plan as the panacea for our aged-care system, they deliberately failed to tell the Australian people that this program is in fact an attempt to claw back $750 million from the aged-care sector over the next 2½ years. The practical real result, as opposed to the misrepresentations of the government, is that residential aged-care providers will get less funding for new patients than they got for patients last year. Aged-care providers right throughout the nation—and particularly the smaller the ones in rural and regional Australia—which are overlooked and forgotten by this government are affected very directly by this decision.

A very frail, elderly Australian entering aged care in the current year brings with them federal funding of around $56 to $63 a day less than did a resident admitted in the last financial year. Given the average turnover rate in aged-care facilities of around 50 per cent per annum, by the end of the current financial year half of the residents will be supported at this new lower rate. This is an attack on small regional aged-care operators and it is another slap in the face for regional communities by the Labor government, as is the attack on private health, the 61,000 plus people with private health cover in my electorate.

I want to raise the issue of cybersafety. As the internet expands and develops with faster speed and greater reach that threat is growing, particularly for our young people. This is why the need to educate Australians on how to protect themselves and their families is a priority. I believe it is a national problem that needs a national coordinated solution. Everything that I have seen and done to date tells me that education is the key. Cybersafety has to be part of the school curriculum so at least the generations that follow will know better how to protect themselves.

I have conducted cybersafety presentations in primary and high schools and in the community right across the length and breadth of my electorate for the past three years because I recognised very early on the risk and the threat to our great young people. I want them to be protected. Some of the most disturbing issues that I have dealt with when I go and talk to these young people is the amount of friends that eight- to 10-year-olds have on social websites and what they are exposed to by that contact. Some of the issues that I raise with them are the threats that they face perhaps from something as simple as geotagging or the exposure that they allow themselves through leaving their Bluetooth on. The internet is a fabulous tool but I want to be sure that the online experiences of these young people are safe and that they are enjoying themselves and are learning and that they are using this great resource for the best purpose. But they are at risk.

One thing that these young people often do not understand—as I hear when I meet and talk with them—is that what they put on the internet is actually there forever. Some have the view that, if they simply press the delete button on their computer, content is deleted. It is not. You sent it on the internet. The challenge is from bullying and we have young people at great risk from bullying. It is 24 hours a day, seven days a week for some young people and it is not just the quiet and vulnerable who are affected. It can be our most talented sportspersons, it can be our most academic or popular persons. No-one is excluded from this form of bullying. It brings great distress to young people, but they do not realise the risks that they are exposing themselves to.

My talking about the fake profiles that people generate, the case studies I deal with and the fact that I have had great support from the Australian Federal Police, the Western Australian police and our local police in presenting to these schools and community groups, leads to an awakening for some. That is why I believe that this is a national problem that needs a national solution through the national curriculum. So I will keep working on that outcome for this problem that is facing our young people in this nation.

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be speaking today on the additional estimates bills, the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013. They are the bills which seek the authority from parliament for additional expenditure of money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. They are also an opportunity for us to do a stocktake on the economic record of government, what it means for us in our local electorates, and where the challenges and threats are for ordinary Australian families when it comes to economic management in this country.

The total additional appropriation being sought through the bills before the House today is just over $1.27 billion. The total appropriation being sought in the first bill is approximately $600 million. This proposed appropriation arises from changes in the estimates of program expenditure, variation in the timing of payments, increases in forecast program take-up and policy decisions taken by the government in response to changed circumstances since the last budget. The major appropriations proposed in the bill come from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, which will receive an additional $85 million towards the support for the childcare assistance program to fund an increased demand for the Jobs, Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance Program. It is a good sign that there has been an increase in demand for this program. It means that there are more parents entering the workforce or entering training to assist them entering the workforce, and that is good for our economy. It is one of the reasons, when you compare the Australian unemployment rate to that around the world, we are at levels envied by just about every other country in the world. With all the turmoil going on in the international economy, unemployment rates below six per cent are nearly half that experienced in Europe and in the United States.

The government will also provide DEEWR with just over $48 million, primarily to support increased claims for assistance under the general employee entitlement and redundancy schemes where these were received before 5 December 2012. GEERS provides assistance to employees who lost their employment and entitlements due to the liquidation or bankruptcy of their employer. From 5 December 2012 GEERS was superseded by the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Scheme with the entitlements enshrined in legislation and supported through special appropriations—again, another indication of how this government is steadfastly ensuring that workers in this country work under fair and secure conditions and that when things go wrong we have got their back. We have not retreated to the law of the jungle, represented by Work Choices, but have steadfastly gone through and modernised our workplace relations laws to ensure that there is fairness and balance. When something goes wrong, ordinary workers have rights they can rely on including in the case of bankruptcy or liquidation, and where employers fail to have sufficient funds set aside to pay accrued entitlements we have a scheme in place, a scheme of last resort, to look after the workers in those circumstances.

In addition, the Attorney-General's Department will receive approximately $600 million, mainly in relation to the royal commission into the institutional responses to child sexual abuse. History will treat this government kindly, and the Prime Minister kindly, for having the courage to say that it is time we showed leadership and that we called this royal commission. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of victims of child sexual abuse around the country. For decades they have thought that their abuse and the circumstances they faced were not treated as credible, that nobody believed them. They have gone through their lives taking the psychological and other damage that has been done to them into their adult lives. Nobody believed them; they were not treated seriously. For the first time, they will have a whole-of-government response through this royal commission to ensure that their stories are heard and, where criminal acts have occurred, there will be an appropriate all-of-government response to those crimes visited upon those young children. The government will provide the Department of Immigration and Citizenship with approximately $37 million primarily for offshore asylum seeker management purposes as well as for visa compliance and status resolution. The Department of Human Services will be provided approximately $31 million mainly in relation to changed estimates of service delivery costs. The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service will be provided with approximately $24 million for increased border protection capability. The government will provide the Department of Health and Ageing with approximately $26 million as a part of its commitment to support Tasmania's healthcare system, to address challenges caused by Tasmania's ageing population, high rates of chronic disease and constraints in the state's health system as well as to equip it to meet future changes. Again, that is a clear commitment that this government has to ensuring the health needs of all citizens in Tasmania are met.

The government will provide approximately $19 million to the Australian Taxation Office mainly in relation to targeted tax compliance activities and transfer of lost superannuation member accounts to the ATO. The importance of that is to ensure that the retirement savings of Australian workers are not lost and are accredited to the accounts of those worker so they have the benefit of that money, which is legally their entitlement, through into their retirement. The government will provide the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism with approximately $14 million for additional establishment costs for the National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator and the remaining amounts that appear in Appropriation Bill No. 3 relate to estimates, variations and minor reclassifications and other minor measures.

Appropriation Bill No. 4 provides additional funding to agencies for payments direct to local government and some National Partnership payments through the states, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory; requirements for departmental equity injections; and requirements to create or acquire administered assets and to discharge administered liabilities. The total additional appropriation being sought in Appropriation Bill (No. 4) is approximately $66 million. The Department of Defence will receive an additional equity injection of approximately $469 million to align its appropriations with its work program. The Attorney-General will receive approximately $50 million, as I have said, to help it to deal with the institutional response to child sex abuse. An extra additional injection of $45 million goes to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation to complete a detailed engineering design for the construction of a nuclear medicine manufacturing facility and treatment plant. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship will receive an additional $32 million in capital funding. These are important additional appropriations to enable the government to meet its requirements but also to ensure that we continue with our excellent record of economic management, because on this side of the House we deal with the real world economy, not the imaginary economy of those on the coalition side of the House. They cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge that there has been a global financial crisis and that Australia, through the result of good government economic policy acting decisively and proportionately to the challenge that we faced, has been able to come through that crisis in a way that no other modern developed economy throughout the world has been able to do. That is why we have low levels of government debt, in fact one of the lowest levels of government debt as a proportion of GDP of any developed country in the world. Mr Deputy Speaker, compare our government debt, our gross debt to GDP ratio of below 10 per cent to that of Japan, which is struggling with a debt to GDP ratio in excess of 160 per cent, and you get to understand that we are in a very fortunate position indeed with low unemployment and interest rates lower than they were when we formed government. Indeed, the average family, which has a home mortgage of around $300,000, is now paying $5,000 a year less than when we came to office, because of low interest rates. If you want to talk about cost of living pressures on a family budget, one of the greatest fortnightly or monthly expenses that average families have to pay is the repayments on their home mortgage. Those are $5,000 a year less now than when we came to office as a result of good economic management and the decisions that have been taken by the Australian Labor Party in government.

I would also like to make some comment about the decisions that this government has made which have had a direct and important benefit to the local economy in my electorate of Throsby in the Illawarra, New South Wales. We were faced with the potential devastating impact of the restructure, perhaps even the closure, of the BlueScope steelworks at Port Kembla, an important employer but also an important creator of wealth in the Illawarra. It employs over 4,000 people directly or indirectly, but it also is an important provider of business to many small to medium-sized employers within the Illawarra. Faced with a high Australian dollar, high input costs, particularly for coal and iron ore, and competition from new steel mills in China and India, BlueScope have had to make some significant changes. We were threatened with the prospect of the complete closure of the mill.

As a result of a change in their production focus, switching from export markets to the domestic market, together with an injection of assistance through the steel industry structural adjustment program of this government, which provided over $300 million of structural adjustment assistance to BlueScope and OneSteel, that steel mill is still open.

I would like to say that this was a bipartisan position—that all parties represented in this parliament would see the importance of the steel industry to our economy and the importance of supporting BlueScope, OneSteel and the workers at those companies. But that was not the case. When all of those members—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They do not pay any. If you looked at the detail you would understand the ridiculousness of the statement. Look at the statements of the CEOs of BlueScope and OneSteel and you will realise that you really are on the wrong side of this argument. All of those opposite are on the wrong side of this argument. They had the opportunity to stick their hand in the air and vote in support of the jobs of steelworkers in this country, but instead they voted against the $300 million steel industry assistance program. They were blind to the needs of workers in my electorate. They put politics and ideology ahead of the needs of steelworkers in my electorate. They will be condemned for that.

We have put in place a number of other initiatives to assist manufacturing jobs in this country. We have put in place important co-investment schemes to ensure that we are assisting companies in the manufacturing industry to transform their businesses to clean energy technologies and to transform their production processes to make them cleaner and more sustainable. One measure that we have put in place over the last six months will make the difference between some of these businesses staying open or not. The anti-dumping measure that we put in place just before Christmas was the fourth in the raft of anti-dumping measures. If you go through the list of what large employers like BlueScope and OneSteel were asking for, each and every one of those measures has been taken up in the anti-dumping measures. We have heard not a word from those opposite on this measure. It is again an example of how those in the government, the Labor Party, have the interests of regions like ours in mind and why these bills should be commended to the House. (Time expired)

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I might just take the opportunity to put the member for Throsby straight. It is true that the coalition opposed the steel industry package but, of course, it came accompanied by the carbon tax package at $23 a tonne, rising to $29 a tonne over the next four years when the rest of the world is paying about $6 tonne, and the steel industry is paying the carbon tax. The steel industry assistance fund roughly compensated for that amount—in fact, a little more than compensated—but it will run out in four years, when the tax will continue to rise. Of course, it would not have needed that assistance had it not been for the advent of the carbon tax.

But I will come to Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013, which are formulated on the basis of the figures that were put into MYEFO back in October, now admitted by the Treasurer to be pretty much useless because it seems they cannot give the Australian people any indication at all as to what the deficit will be in just four months time when the end of the financial year will arrive. In fact, the MYEFO was virtually out of date before it was printed. In particular within the MYEFO are the estimations on the mining tax, which at that stage was supposed to raise $2 billion, which was down from the $3.2 billion in the budget, which was down from the $4 billion when the PM and Treasurer Swan signed the agreement with the three big miners, which was down from the $10½ billion which they originally thought it would raise over two years, which is down from the $12 billion that the original RSPT was supposed to raise. In addition to that, within the MYEFO papers was a forecast of a budget surplus of $1 billion which the Treasurer has now admitted is not going to be met. So while the opposition will not bar the process of appropriation bills, it is worth noting that the figures on which they are formulated are highly suspect.

I will come back to the mining tax, which is raising a lot of interest in the public at the moment, and quite rightly. Over the last six months it has raised $126 million dollars, less expenses. There is a $50 million cost to run this scheme and a foregone $38 million from income tax. That raises about $38 million net. I do not want to cause an argument with the good member for Casey, because he said in the chamber a couple of days ago that that amounted to $5.50 a head. Of course, he was talking about the gross amount, because the $38 million is about $2 a head. Now it seems quite likely the Obeid family has made more out of the resources boom than the mining tax, a lot more. It would be laughable if it were not so serious.

It is worth remembering how the Prime Minister came to power and how important this was in her surge to take the prime ministership. She said the Rudd government was a good government but it had lost its way, and she nominated three causes which she saw as needing immediate attention from the Prime Minister. One was to abandon the ETS and not have a carbon tax. Within months we saw a complete reversal of that policy. The second was to fix the flood of boat arrivals, but boat arrivals are going very well indeed!—a complete failure of government and also a significant part of the reason that there is no surplus. The third thing was to settle the mining tax. The mining tax was a political fix, a deal to get the mining industry to stop their very public campaign against the government leading up to the last election. Like Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, declared peace in our time. Her frontbench applauded, the caucus applauded, the electorate generally were pretty pleased, and the three big miners certainly applauded because they wrote the deal. In fact, BHP's Gerard Bond sent a draft of the tax to the Treasurer's office. The miners helped draft the tax, so no wonder they got a good deal.

The most essential flaw at the heart of the mining tax is the obligation of the Commonwealth to fund state royalties, and what an incentive that was for the states to lift royalties. Every time they lift royalties, the Commonwealth taxpayers foot the bill. How could the triumvirate of the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the resources minister ever agree to this? It was a guarantee to ensure that the tax would fail.

But perhaps the greatest sin of the mining tax was to spend all the money before it arrived—before they even knew how big it was—$14 billion over the forward estimates, cash for everyone. In fact, Santa had arrived in the form of company tax cuts, increases to superannuation, cash payments for low-income people, instant write-offs, regional infrastructure funds, school kid bonuses. Some of these things in themselves are not too bad, but they are all just blatant bribes. And now, except for the $38 million net raised by the tax, it is all borrowed money, adding to the net debt of $160 billion and the $50 billion off-budget spend on the NBN and the as yet undefined and not budgeted for Gonski and NDIS commitments. It is money borrowed that will take at least 10 years to repay, with interest bills in excess of $7 billion—hang onto your hat if interest rates go up again. So that is the mining tax.

I will move on and draw your attention this morning to a pretty sad state of misadministration within my electorate. It involves Port Augusta, a vibrant city at the north of the Spencer Gulf. Port Augusta is one of the great crossroads of Australia, and a place where the traffic for the main east-west and north-south corridors of rail and road intersect. It is the service centre for the north of South Australia, and southern Northern Territory. It is also a significant deliver of services to the Aboriginal community of the far north. There has been a long-term effort in Port Augusta to combat alcohol and drug abuse, particularly in the Indigenous community. The city attracts large numbers of visitors from the remote Aboriginal communities, particularly in the summer when they come south to get away from the heat and to visit family. Some gravitate to Davenport, some into the town camp, some are just generally throughout the community. They cause enormous difficulties in themselves, but if these people happen to be alcohol dependent they cause a lot more difficulty again.

The Port Augusta Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre was announced in 2007 and received support from the South Australian government in July 2008. It was to be funded from a commitment from COAG of $7 million to specifically address substance misuse in remote communities in South Australia. It was anticipated that the centre would start operations last year. Nothing has happened with that centre, I must say. Nothing at all. Questions were asked last year in the October estimates on my behalf. I was informed that the tender process, while delayed, was in the final stages of negotiation. I have recently been informed the tender process has now been abandoned completely and the government is no longer committed to building a facility in Port Augusta. This is extremely disappointing for me and for the Port Augusta community. While the Port Augusta community and the Port Augusta alcohol management team fully recognise there are desperate needs in other north-western communities, like Ceduna and Coober Pedy in particular, there is no doubt that if you are talking about a most central point to deliver the service to the most people, Port Augusta is essential. It is almost impossible to bypass.

The Port Augusta council received advice in April 2008 that Port Augusta had been suggested as the location and considered eligible for this funding because of the high number of people from remote communities visiting or accessing services in Port Augusta. Tenders for the project to build and operate the facility in Port Augusta were called for in 2010. It took until 2012 until the council was informed that the tenders were not being proceeded with and the new tender proposition would not require the centre to be contracted in Port Augusta.

In answer, again, to questions asked in estimates in October last year, we were informed that the delay for the Port Augusta rehabilitation centre facility had been due to the lack of access to a suitable site or service provider. The Port Augusta council informs me that it has suggested up to five different sites and offered to negotiate access, and has had very little feedback or interest from the Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health. They strongly refute that the department and the consultants used for the project, ARAP, have been working with the council to resolve the issues, as claimed in answers to questions at Senate estimates asked last year on my behalf. I have checked the available records and, to the best of my knowledge, just one meeting with the interested parties has been held in Port Augusta throughout the whole process—in more than four years. The news that there is no longer a commitment to build the centre in Port Augusta is a kick in the guts for the very hardworking Port Augusta Alcohol Management Group.

It absolutely seems amazing that the pledge—or what is left of it after the consultation fees—will now be allowed to fund two centres: one in the north-west as was planned and the other one in the south-east. The original grant was to combat drug and alcohol abuse in remote areas. I do not want to throw any mud on my southern cousins, but how on earth could anyone describe the south-east of South Australia as remote? Somebody should get an atlas out and have a look—92 per cent of the state is within the boundaries of my electorate, and I can guarantee that every remote Indigenous community within South Australia is within the electorate of Grey. There are no remote communities in the south-east.

The people in Port Augusta who have been working so hard—actually not working so hard for this project, because they have hardly been consulted, but hoping so much that this project was going to be delivered, are absolutely livid at the idea that half of this money, and we are waiting for answers from the government, or half of whatever is left will be spent in the south-east.

Going to broader issues just in closing, the Roxby decision has been a major setback for the region. Jobs continue to go—another 100 last week announced by BHP Billiton. We all hope for the best and that that project will get back on track—with the possible exception of the Greens, who may not hope for that. I think there is a feeling within the electorate that South Australia is probably blessed with similar resources to Queensland and Western Australia and yet seems to find it so hard to get projects on track and happening.

The optimists in the industry are now talking about the resources that will be freed up because of lack of progress at Roxby Downs and saying, 'This'll make our projects easier to deliver,' but we are not seeing evidence of that on the ground. Just to name a few, there are the IronClad and Iron Road iron ore projects on the Eyre Peninsula, and OZ Minerals at Carrapateena; Arafura are looking at building a rare-earth processing facility in Whyalla; there was Lincenergy's announcement of the discovery of $20 trillion worth of shale oil near Coober Pedy; there is a group working on the Braemar iron ore deposits nearer to the New South Wales border; and there are the Beach Energy and Rex Mineral copper prospects on Yorke Peninsula—and these are just a very small slice of the possibilities and plans for the electorate of Grey.

There are major infrastructure projects needed to deliver many of these projects, and I am going to run through a quick list in the time left available. I am very pleased that RDA Eyre Peninsula in Whyalla has listed, as a high priority, the redevelopment of the Thevenard port in the far west. There is a need to deliver new ports on the Eyre Peninsula and Spencer Gulf. Perhaps Port Spencer will be the one that will go ahead in conjunction with Centrex Metals. A duplication of the gas pipeline to the upper Spencer Gulf, probably terminating in Whyalla, is going to be needed before too many of these projects can go ahead. We need a new interconnector to Eyre Peninsula. There are vast wind and wave energy reserves, and, bearing in mind the current debate on wind farms, there are very few people for the wind farms to offend. We still have black spots all over the electorate for mobile phones. The roads have a $250 million backlog—and I am talking about the state roads here. There is $150 million a year, or thereabouts, raised in royalties in South Australia, which is just a very pale imitation of what is raised in Western Australia and Queensland. Very little of that is returning to the electorate of Grey, which is where it comes from. It is worth remembering not so much that the people of Grey feel they are entitled to that money, but if the rest of South Australia, if the rest of Australia, wants all of those vast resources in the Grey electorate to be developed, then the money needs to be spent there to enable those projects to go ahead.

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very, very pleased to stand and speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013, because it gives me an opportunity to speak about the economy and how the work that the government is doing, when it comes to managing the economy, is very positively affecting people in my electorate of Kingston.

We hear a lot about managing the economy. I am proud to be part of a government that has really been active, and ensured that it intervened during the global financial crisis. That is so important because, due to its activeness, it acted during the global financial crisis and we now see an economy that is 13 per cent larger than when it first entered office. It is also an economy that has a AAA credit rating from all three credit rating agencies—something the Howard government could never do. This is a very important accomplishment by the government. The government has not taken its eye off the road when it comes to guiding our economy to ensure that it continues to grow and continues to stay strong.

But it is not all just about a growing economy. When we talk about what is important for good economic management, we have to make sure of who we are managing it for. I am very pleased that the focus of this government has been not only on managing a strong economy but also on delivery for the people around this country, and in particular it is about ensuring that people have a job. Since Labor came to office, I am pleased that it has seen a continually relatively low unemployment rate compared to many, many places around the world. The creation of more than 850,000 jobs has occurred since it came to office. Quite frankly, that is an enormous achievement when we have seen what has been happening around the rest of the world.

I know that those on the other side do not like to hear about what is happening around the rest of the world. They like to live in a bubble where they ignore the fact that there has been a global financial crisis and the aftermath of that. They ignore the fact that there has been significant upheaval and in many, many developed countries significant unemployment. I am so pleased that our government has been focusing on people, focusing on their jobs and ensuring that they continue to have a good quality of life because they have jobs, they have an income.

It has always been Labor that has not only been focused on growth, and focused on growing our economy, but also focused on ensuring that that is delivering to people such as those in my electorate of Kingston. It has not just been about the good economic management. What we have also seen is that this government has delivered assistance to families that need it the most, ensuring that those who may be doing it tough—the fact is that while our unemployment has remained low, there are areas that are doing it tough—continue to get support and assistance. One part of that assistance that I am very pleased to have delivered to many families in my electorate of Kingston is the Schoolkids Bonus. Most of us would be aware, if we are listening to people in our electorates, that sending a child to school can be costly, especially with all the associated costs around uniforms and books. When I speak to parents, they are so desperate to give their children a very good education, but the costs around that can really add up. I am very pleased that the government moved, after originally allowing a number of school items to be tax-deductible, to provide the Schoolkids Bonus. Just in my electorate, in January it delivered to approximately 11,200 families, representing 19,750 primary and secondary students. These families have already received $205 for each child in primary school and $410 for each high school student. Of course, they will receive another payment in July. This has certainly been welcomed by families in my electorate.

I have to say that, after the opposition announced they were going to scrap it if they ever came into government, there was a lot of disappointment and concern around the electorate. In particular, families indicated that they were insulted when it was said by the opposition that families would just waste this money and not spend it on the educational needs of their children. I have to say that there were a lot of mums and dads that came up to me that were feeling quite insulted by this. I was at a shopping centre in Hallett Cove just after the opposition announced their position on this and the fact that they did not believe parents would spend it wisely, and I had a line-up of people wanting to tell me that they would spend it wisely and would spend it on their children's education. I certainly believe them.

But what is even more concerning from my perspective is not just the insult that the opposition gave to these families but the fact that they are going to scrap the schoolkids bonus. This is very concerning, because this has a significant impact for families while their children go to school. Indeed, if the Leader of the Opposition had his way, a typical family with two kids would be approximately $15,000 worse off during the course of their children's schooling. That is a significant burden to be placing on families that want to do the right thing—that want to buy the school uniforms and the school resources and perhaps a computer for their kids to share so that they can connect to the internet and be able to do their school projects. All those things assist kids at school and assist them when they go home at night to do their homework, and these families will have that money ripped away from them if the Leader of the Opposition ever gets his way.

But, of course, that is not the only area in which families in my electorate will find that they are worse off if the opposition ever does come to government. I was very proud once again of the government's decision to triple the tax-free threshold. This has a significant impact for many people in my electorate who are now out of the tax system and do not necessarily have to pay tax anymore. That is a massive saving to many people and provides assistance with the cost of living. But it is also an encouragement for people to enter the workforce and perhaps take up a part-time job, maybe only working one day a week. If they were doing this and found that they had to put in a tax return, it was all too hard. So what we have done is not only to take many, many people out of the tax system and allow them to have a little assistance with cost of living but also to create an incentive to contribute and to go back to work. For many people, that will be a big bonus. So I think this is very important, and indeed it affects many, many people in my local electorate.

In addition, the news of the scrapping of the 15 per cent tax on superannuation for low-income earners was very welcome. This was very popular in my electorate, because we are not only helping low-income earners with the cost of living now—with the tripling of the tax-free threshold—but also, by getting rid of that tax, helping them in the future. This allows them to accumulate more superannuation that will ultimately ensure that their quality of life is better in the future.

So these are two examples that really show that the government is not just managing the economy very well but also thinking about the people that it is managing it for. Unfortunately, I have had to report to my electorate that these two initiatives will be scrapped if the coalition ever come to government. They have indicated that they will reinstate tax for people earning $27,820 or lower. They will reintroduce it so that they have to pay tax after $6,000, so taking it back to the status quo as before. That has been very distressing for many people in my electorate.

In addition to that it has now been confirmed that the opposition, if ever in government, would reinstate the 15 per cent tax on superannuation for those earning $37,000 or below. It is so important not to put that tax back on. The reason it is so important is that these people, if they are low-income earners, are not going to have the same opportunity to accumulate superannuation over time. They really need a step-up and assistance when it comes to superannuation so that people are not living under the poverty line when they retire. This is a critically important thing for many women workers. Many women workers perhaps might be going back to work, once again, part-time—maybe a day or two days a week. If we do not help them build up their superannuation and ensure that they have a nest egg to retire on then we are going to be committing them to living below the poverty line when they retire.

So these two are really important, and I strongly urge the coalition not to scrap these but to change their policy and to say, 'We came out a bit negative, saying that we're going to scrap these things. We've changed our mind now and our policy is a bipartisan policy to help those lower-income earners really get help with the cost of living today and also help accumulating wealth for the future.'

At the beginning of my speech I made a very important point: when we are managing the economy well we also need to consider who we are managing it for. One of the things that I have been very pleased about is that the Labor Party has had a very responsible fiscal management strategy. We spent when it was needed, when we needed to save jobs and we actually needed to stimulate. Recently we have gone through one of the largest fiscal consolidations ever, because as the economy returns to growth that is the responsible thing to do.

Of course, this was not the attitude of the Howard government. As growth accelerated the Howard government spent more, fuelling interest rate rises. That was very burdensome for many, many people in my electorate. While the national average percentage of homes owned with a mortgage is 34.9 per cent, in my electorate it is 44.3 per cent. So if interest rates are high, this has an unrepresentative burden on my electorate.

What we have seen from the responsible economic management of this government is that those families, perhaps with a mortgage of $300,000 on a standard variable mortgage, are now paying $5,000 less in repayments each year than when the coalition left office. I remember a pamphlet coming out in my electorate in 2004 saying, 'Who do you trust to keep interest rates lower?' That was one done by the Howard government. Unfortunately for them, the evidence is in: it is actually Labor that manages the economy in the interests of people with a mortgage—the people facing these cost-of-living pressures—ensuring that we are considering what their needs are. As I said, we acted when we needed to to support people to keep their jobs, and we have acted now to ensure that we do not put any extra fiscal pressure on interest rates. We have done that well, and I know that this is certainly welcomed by people in my electorate.

As a member of the government, and as we go forward into 2013, I will continue to urge responsible economic management. This is quite in contrast to the coalition, if the spotlight were ever put on it. However, I will continue to be part of a government that does that, but does that by not forgetting who we are managing the economy for. As a government we will continue to deliver to those who need it most—those low-income earners and those people who really need our assistance—and we will continue to do that because that is why we are here and that is why we govern. I commend the bill to the House.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4). Firstly, I would like to rewind a little and go back to the time of the last election. The Prime Minister when speaking to the country identified four things that were key to a Labor government: first, she was going to fix the mining tax; second, she was going to fix the carbon tax; third, she was going to stop the boats; and, fourth, she was going to stop us going down the track towards a big Australia. In the time remaining to me today I would like to go through a few of those issues and how they have affected my constituents of Hughes.

First, there is the mining tax—an absolute rolled gold disaster. We have seen this government commit $14 billion of expenditure to a mining tax which we now realise will be lucky to raise anything more than a few million dollars. We have seen our Prime Minister and our Treasurer absolutely played off a break by the large mining companies. What it basically gets down to is a fundamental flaw in ideology. I would like to give the example of what was done with the company tax rate. Very simply, it is easy to sit down and see on paper that if we increase the tax rate, we get more money in. But in real life it does not work that way because when you increase rates of tax you have a disincentive for investment, and when you have a disincentive to invest you get less investment, fewer people taking risks, less economic growth and, therefore, you get less tax.

Take the example of what the last coalition government did about the company tax rate. Under the guidance of Peter Costello and John Howard, we lowered our company tax rate from 36 per cent to 30 per cent. I can remember at the time that those on the Labor side argued that lowering the company tax rate was terrible, that all these companies would be paying less tax, that the government would be getting less tax and that we would have less than needed for spending on our hospitals, roads and education. But look at the numbers and what actually happened. In 1999-2000 we raised approximately $24 billion worth of tax which the Commonwealth received from company tax, and that was at a rate of 36 per cent. If we fast-forward just eight years to when we lowered the rate of company tax to 30 per cent, the government received 144 per cent more revenue from the tax over that period of time. So, at a lower tax rate, the government received 144 per cent more revenue.

If we go back to the mid-1980s when the company tax rate was 49 per cent, that represented about 2.4 to 2.7 per cent of GDP. Fast-forward again to the last year of the Howard government and, at the lower tax rate of 30 per cent, we were getting 5.4 per cent GDP as company tax. That shows that the way to increase the pie, that is the money that we get to spend here in this House, is not to increase taxes; it is to remove the tax burden from companies, to take the tax burden off them and let them invest. It is exactly what we saw with the company tax rate but, unfortunately, we are seeing the exact opposite from this government.

The second rolled gold disaster is the carbon tax. It is an absolute and unmitigated disaster. What we have seen is a plunge in the EU carbon price, yet this Treasury and this government are still forecasting revenues based on an EU carbon price in 2015 of around $29 per tonne. If we look at some of the recent forecasts in some recent analysis, UBS forecast a price of equivalent of $8.86 in 2015. Deutsche Bank forecast a price of $13.67. In fact, at the end of last year, the eight leading European ratings agencies forecast a carbon price average in 2015 of just $14.60, and yet we have the Treasury forecasting in the forward estimates a price that is 100 per cent higher. But it gets worse. A few weeks ago, Societe Generale actually cut the forecast for 2013 back to the equivalent of just A$11. This is going to create a multibillion dollar black hole in the forward estimates. It completely undermines the entire premise of the carbon tax.

I would like to draw the House's attention to some of the adverse effects that Labor's carbon tax is actually having in my electorate of Hughes. Last year, 284 people drowned in Australia. On top of that, there were many more who suffered drowning but did not pass away. They survived, only to have ongoing brain injuries and to require treatment for the rest of their lives. We also note the figures showing that there has been a significant rise in the number of young people drowning in this country. In fact, Royal Lifesaving Society Australia said it believes the rapid increase in young adults drowning is undeniably linked to the fall in swimming and water safety skills in Australia. They have also said that the cost of swimming lessons is a key factor in parents actually giving their kids those swimming lessons and that there is a distinct link between the affordability of swimming lessons and the increasing rates of drowning of young adults. They are the facts. So what has this government done?

I draw your attention to a swim school in my electorate, called Menai Swim Academy. It is a small business which teaches children to swim. They have a 25-metre indoor pool in Menai. Their first three electricity bills since the carbon tax started show that their carbon tax bill for July, including GST, was $877; for August, it was $807; and, for September, it was $657. The carbon tax content is itemised on each of those bills. If we look at the first year, this one small business, one small swimming centre, will pay $10,000 in carbon tax in the first year. But we know that the carbon tax increases year after year, so they have actually forecast that by the year 2020 this one small swimming centre will be paying around $100,000 in carbon tax charges if this government is re-elected and continues on the path of its disastrous carbon tax.

We know that the Prime Minister has advised business to pass the arising costs on to consumers. What our Prime Minister is telling this small business is to pass on the costs to families that wish to teach their children to swim: $10,000 this year and $100,000 by 2020, just in the Menai area alone.

At a time when there is a direct link between the increased number of drownings and the higher prices of swimming lessons, I say to the government: if you are not going to remove the carbon tax in full, at least repeal it as it applies to swimming lessons. It has been done before with the GST. We should do it.

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is easy for you sit there and smile and laugh. We have families out there that might not be able to afford to pay for their kids to go to swimming lessons because of your carbon tax, so don't you sit there and laugh. I would also like to talk about one of the other great policies of this government—its policy to stop the boats.

Government members interjecting—

It is easy to laugh, yes. This is another great policy which I am sure that the member on the other side is quite proud of. Last year, we had a record number of boat arrivals. There were 274 boat arrivals, with 17,270 people. And we know the costs. The cost of these blow-outs to the taxpayer is $6.6 billion. That is $6.6 billion of taxpayers' funds that have been wasted on illegal boat arrivals. That is money that would otherwise have gone to our schools, our hospitals, our roads—all desperately needed. And what has the government actually forecast in the forward estimates? This is where it becomes amazing. Already this year 900 people have arrived illegally. That is the fastest start, the greatest number of arrivals, for any year on record. So it looks like this year will be worse than last year. But let us look at how the government has budgeted for this in the forward estimates. Amazingly, the government has actually budgeted for significant reductions in boat arrivals. In fact, the government is actually budgeting to have savings of $5 billion in reduced asylum seeker costs over the forward estimates, yet there is no change in policy. There is no change in policy and already this year we are seeing the numbers increasing ahead of last year and yet this government forecasts that it can save $5 billion over the forward estimates through reducing costs.

Why does all this matter? It matters because it does not give us the ability to do things that we need to do. In my electorate of Hughes there is a road, Heathcote Road, which is a 24 kilometre section. On that road, in the last five years we have seen 10 fatalities and many more serious injuries. So I am sure the people in my electorate were very excited when they read the press release from the foreign minister, who provided $15 million to rehabilitate 40 kilometres of road—not in Western Sydney or in southern Sydney or in other parts of Australia but on the island of Kiribati. The reason given was that the road had been undermined by rising sea levels and coastal erosion. How do I explain to people who live in my electorate, where we have a road that is 24 kilometres on which there have been 10 fatalities, that this government has no money for this road but was able to find $15 million to fix a road in Kiribati—supposedly because of coastal erosion and rising sea levels. But if we actually look at the tide gauges in Kiribati, we see that there have been no rising sea levels at all. But yet that is the excuse given for using $15 million of taxpayers' funds.

But, as I said, why does all this matter? We heard the member for Kingston talking about delivering for the people. But when this mob came to government they had $40 billion in the bank and a budget surplus, and they have blown the lot—every cent. But that is just the start. On top of that, so far to date, they have borrowed $200 billion to fund nothing other than reckless, wasteful and politically motivated spending. And the majority of that has been borrowed from overseas, from foreigners.

Let us just go through how we are going to have to pay this back. Let's just say we pay it back over 20 years. Including the interest repayments, it is going to cost Australian taxpayers the equivalent of $267 million a week every week for the next 20 years. I will put this in some perspective. Remember the great outcry over the sale of Cubbie Station, the privately owned property. Cubbie Station was sold to the Chinese for $247 million. I want all those who were concerned about the sale of Cubbie Station to think about this. Because of this government's reckless and wasteful spending, every week of the year for the next 20 years we are going to have to give away the equivalent of one Cubbie Station to pay off the debt that this mob have run up in just five years. There will be children who are not yet born who will be paying off Labor's debt. That is $14 billion a year. Just imagine what we could have done otherwise in the next 20 years with $14 billion a year. Australia simply cannot afford another three years of this Labor government.

Sitting suspended from 12:59 to 13:06

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013. In so doing, I will look at the record of the government on economic management—their record of waste, their record of mismanagement, their record of increased debt and deficits and their economic incompetence. Why is this important and why must we debate this in the Federation Chamber today? Because, at the end of the day, economic vandalism does not just hurt the government; it hurts the people of Australia, the people who will ultimately have to pay the bill.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have very tragically let down the people of Australia. Let us look at the Treasurer's record. First, on the carbon tax, it must be the first 'economic policy', as the Treasurer has labelled it, in history that introduces a cost, reduces output and, somehow, miraculously increases productivity. The Treasurer has a very warped understanding of exactly how productivity works. Today, on the front page of the Financial Review, we see that the carbon tax will create a $4 billion black hole in the budget. This is because the Treasurer refuses to bow down to reality and adjust his assumptions and his models. He is still suggesting that on 1 July 2015, when the Australian and European schemes will be linked, the price per tonne in Australia will be over $25—this at a time when we know that the European prices currently sit around $5 or $6 a tonne. On today's figures, this means, if the schemes are linked in 2015 and we have this dramatic difference in price, that we will see huge revenue shortfalls leaving a massive black hole.

Labor's carbon tax, which has been in place for less than one year, has already seen eight changes. The carbon tax is hurting Australian families because the supposed compensation provided for the introduction of the carbon tax starts making families worse off at $50,000 a year. Only the Labor Party could introduce a carbon tax that actually costs the budget money and hurts Australian families.

What of other promises that the Treasurer has made, like the surplus—or, dare I say, the lack thereof? It was not enough to simply deliver a surplus; the government said it was an 'economic imperative'. They are the ones who set the bar and they are the ones who have failed to reach it. In typical Treasurer fashion, he was quick to blame everybody else for his woes. He has blamed the Tea Party, he has blamed the opposition and, finally, he has ended up blaming the GFC because, he claims, this has received huge revenue right down to the books. But that is not the case when you examine the facts.

The 2007-08 federal budget estimated revenues of $287.3 billion in the year 2010-11, yet the actual revenue ultimately came in at $309.9 billion. So, prior to the GFC, the government predicted less revenue than it actually achieved. If the GFC were as damaging to revenue as the Treasurer would like us to believe, why would the subsequent three budgets increase revenue predictions by so much, in the middle of what he himself called 'the worst economic crisis in 75 years'? We know that this government is currently receiving more than $90 billion in a year in increased revenue over what was received during the last year of the coalition government.

The real issue here is that this government has a spending problem and it has a problem based on its own heroic and very unrealistic assumptions—the assumptions that it has made around, for instance, the mining tax and the amount of revenue that it claimed would be delivered as a result of its introduction. So let us now go to the mining tax.

After having said that the campaign against the carbon tax was just a hysterical fear campaign and after promising a surplus on 366 occasions, the government promised to introduce a mining tax. This mining tax was expected to deliver revenues of upwards of $2 billion a year—and that was after the government wrote down the amount it expected to receive from the mining tax in MYEFO late last year, from upwards of $3 billion. It is important for us to examine the mining tax because the government has linked the tax to spending worth up to $15 billion. But it has been revealed to us only in the last week that the mining tax has failed to deliver the revenue that was forecast. It has failed to deliver the $2 billion. In fact, it has only achieved $126 million, leading to a huge revenue shortfall, raising less than 90 per cent of what was forecast. What is wrong with this picture? Clearly, the government has designed a tax on our miners that is flawed—flawed from its inception. But do not just take my word for it; listen to the words of the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. He has said that the tinkering with the mining tax, the changes made by the current Treasurer and the current Prime Minister, has led to its ultimate design—a design that we have seen will now cost the budget and the Australian taxpayer, who will have to make up the shortfall. If this were not bad enough, let us remind ourselves of where we were only a few short years ago. A few short years ago, during the coalition government, we had a very different situation. We had a government that could manage the books, a government that had done the hard work over 11 years to pay back Labor's $96 billion of debt. Now this government has borrowed more than $200 billion and it took 11 years for the previous government to repay the previous debt; not only on that though, the previous coalition government was in fact able—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You might learn something if you listen. The previous government was able not only to repay debt but to deliver a surplus. In fact, the last years of the coalition government delivered a $20 billion surplus. What is the record of this current government? What is the record of Treasurer Wayne Swan? Is it one surplus, two, three or four? No, he has achieved a record of four deficits. Each and every year he delivers a deficit. The accumulated deficits now add up to over $172 billion. He cannot even get his forecast deficits right either. Last year he predicted, 18 months before the last budget, that it would be a $12 billion deficit; he then had to revise that up to $24 billion and of course it came in at $43 billion.

Government member interjecting—

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member opposite will cease interjecting.

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So even when Wayne Swan makes predictions of his deficits he gets the figures wildly wrong. This Treasurer has promised a surplus. In fact, he and the Prime Minister promised a surplus over 500 times.

Government member interjecting—

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I have asked the member opposite to cease interjecting. I do not wish to take it any further.

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He does not like listening to this because it is a record that even he knows in his heart of hearts he cannot be proud of and he cannot go into his electorate and talk up because it is a damning indictment of the incompetence of this government. While you laugh and you may think it is funny, it is certainly not funny to the millions of Australians, not only in this generation but in future generations, who will have to pay the price. You are borrowing from future generations because of your fiscal incompetence. I do feel for you, Ed, because unfortunately you will wear this.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Higgins will refer to people by their correct title.

Government member interjecting—

Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, you will have to bear the legacy of that. Let me come to what we will see in this upcoming year. The government have made a number of statements about their plans to address the structural deficit, a structural deficit that we know has increased dramatically under this government. What does this mean though when they say they are going to address the structural deficit? What does this mean when the Prime Minister says that she will—with her Treasurer in the upcoming budget—deliver a budget that is centred around Labor values? I will tell you what it means. It means that this government is planning to increase taxes yet again. Not satisfied with their raids on superannuation, not satisfied with their raids on private health insurance, the government is going to go back to the Australian people and reach into their pocket and take out their hard earned dollars to pay for their fiscal competence. That is what we can expect. The reason we can expect that is that this government has made more than $120 billion of promises which are completely and utterly unfunded. Not one dollar has been accounted for. Not one dollar is actually in the budget. And this is before you count what is already off the books: the NBN, which at last count is upwards of $50 billion, according to some estimates; and the 'Bob Brown bank', the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the green fund, at over $10 billion. In fact, we are in the bizarre situation now where we are borrowing money to give it away to failed energy entrepreneurs, because they cannot get financing from anywhere else, in the hope that this will somehow deliver a benefit.

I do not know about you, but I think to borrow money to do this does not sound like a wise idea, and it is certainly not something that the coalition will support in government. Instead we are going to repay debt, because we know that only in repaying debt and repaying the borrowings will we stop paying the very high interest bill which is now around $7 billion a year. That is $7 billion a year which, according to the Productivity Commission, is more than enough, combined with state and federal funding, to cover the annual funding of the National Disability Insurance Scheme which this government professes to hold deep in its heart as something it wishes to achieve.

First they need to get our economy back in order. They need to get our economy back in order and Treasurer Wayne Swan is most certainly not the person to do that. He has been condemned by his own words and by the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who has belled the cat on his incompetence, most recently in relation to the mining tax. Treasurer Swan should do the honourable thing and resign for the benefit of all Australians.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4). Financial management underpins everything that the federal government does. One of the frustrations as a member of this place is quite often the debate—the media and public attention get drawn into sideshows and other peripheral ideals and images when the role of the federal government is to provide an economic framework for other things to follow. We need to look after our defences, we need to take control of who can come and live in this country or visit this country and we need to look after those who struggle to care for themselves. Unfortunately we seem to have been sidetracked.

The financial situation of Australia is a disgrace; it is horrifying. When I speak to some of my friends and colleagues who were in this place at the end of the Keating-Hawke era, they remember the difficulty in repaying $96 billion in debt and the difficult decisions that were made. That figure is much, much higher now and it is going to be incredibly difficult to get the budget back in the black, and yet there is no clear pattern of infrastructure or other major reforms that we can show for that money.

There are two forms of debt. There is debt that is a useful tool. Before I came to this place I was a farmer and debt was one of the tools that I used. But it is one thing using debt to fund infrastructure or something of importance like defence spending and it is another thing to use it to fund the frivolous and mismanagement. Over the last five years the mismanagement of this place has been spoken about. The effect on an electorate like mine has been devastating. Much was said about the BER program. Every school in my electorate has a lovely sign out the front saying that this is brought to you by the federal government, but when this program becomes an issue the federal government runs a mile. I asked the minister in here about a very tragic circumstance for some of the contractors in my electorate, and he washed his hands of it. I will talk about Chris Catterall, a builder in Moree. He has been a builder all his life. He has a small business and he signed up to work on the BER program. He was assured that it was federal funding and everything would be fine but, due to the collapse of Reed Constructions, Chris is now $642,000 out of pocket and is given no comfort or indication of when he may be able to receive that funding. For a small operator like Chris, $642,000 is a lot of money, and I am sure he will not mind my saying that, at the age he is, it is going to affect his ability to retire when and how he was planning to.

Going back a few years earlier, Jarrod Kennedy, who is a metalworker in Dubbo, found out that due to the collapse of TCT Constructions he was not going to be paid for one of the jobs that he had done, a COLA in the Marra Creek school in western New South Wales. What did Jarrod do? He is an innovative young chap. He went out on a Sunday with a gang of men and a crane and he demolished the COLA and brought it home. It caused him a little grief for a while, but he felt that he had built it and was entitled to be paid for it. Those sorts of things are happening all the time.

The pink batts scheme: I have got a contractor in Dubbo who is out of pocket tens of thousands of dollars because of the difficulty in the paperwork and administering it. It may be things like because it is a rural property it does not have a street number, and so it is not accepted by the data methods that are used or there is doubling up on street numbers. There are administrative things like that and I believe the word has been put out to make it very difficult for these people to get their money. It is over budget and they have spent billions of dollars putting pink batts in and nearly as much money taking them out but there is collateral damage on the ground to small businesspeople who are having a go and thought they were safe because their were working for the government.

Take one of the larger decisions that was made, the carbon tax. In the last government, 2007-2010, I was asked once: 'What was my greatest achievement?' I said it would be part of the push that defeated the emissions trading scheme. Unfortunately, due to the change of mind of the Prime Minister at the last election, we ended up with the carbon tax. The week the carbon tax came in, the Kandos cement plant closed down—over 100 jobs; over 100 years of history producing cement in the Mudgee area. Because of the carbon tax, that plant is now uneconomical.

The great irony of this is that Mudgee has now become an area for wind farms, so on one side of Mudgee you have got the hills for the wind farms and, on the other side, you have got the coalmine. Because of policies that we have at the moment, the coal from Mudgee goes over to China, gets turned into wind farms, comes back and the cement that secures these wind towers to the hills, instead of being produced locally, comes through Sydney Heads on a ship from Asia and is trucked back to the midwest.

Other changes that this government has brought are the changes to the isolated child allowance. It is a great tragedy today that country kids have got 30 per cent less chance of gaining a tertiary education than their city counterparts. Due to protests and much of the lobbying done by this side of House, the government reinstated the allowance in a fashion but the means test means that many, many country people who live in urban areas are excluded. We have got people with two or three kids in towns like Dubbo, Mudgee, Inverell, Moree, Burke, Cobar and Warialda who are in the unenviable position of deciding which of their children should have a tertiary education and which of them should not. In the year 2013, I think every child in Australia should be entitled to proceed to the level of their ability and not be restricted because their parents cannot afford to send them to live away from home.

Regional development is another issue. I will acknowledge that in the last term of government I have had three projects in my electorate through the Regional Development Program. The towns that received this money—and I will acknowledge that Moree, Dubbo and Mudgee were pleased to get their projects up—were the only towns and the only councils that, due to the design of the program, were large enough to have the resources to actually put in an application. The application that Dubbo City Council put in for their regional athletics track cost, I think, in excess of $50,000. Smaller communities cannot spend that sort of money simply to put in a proposal. This goes to the fact that the minister's understanding of how regional areas work is clearly lacking. There are a whole heap of smaller communities that have had worthwhile projects—not million-dollar projects but ones where a couple of hundred thousand dollars would mean a lot to that community's ability to progress and move on. Up until this point, they have largely missed out. There is another round of the Regional Development Program coming out and we are hoping that some of these smaller communities might get a start there.

In relation to telecommunications, there has been much discussion in this place about the NBN; but what has not been discussed is the fact that there are still parts of Australia that have no mobile phone coverage, and so it does not matter that people talk about fast broadband speeds when you are excluded. With mobile phones now being the primary source of communication, to live in an area where you do not have mobile coverage is absolutely unthinkable. I will talk about the village of Goolma, which is on a busy crossroad, between three major towns: its entire valley is without mobile coverage. We have the issue now where emergency service messages are being delivered by mobile phone. People in such areas cannot get the call-out. I spoke to a rural fire service volunteer at Wellington who lives in an area with no mobile phone coverage. He did not get the call-out to a fire because he has no coverage.

This government raided the $2.7 billion that had been put aside for the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund; it is now gone. This is the pattern that we have been following—money that had been squirrelled away by the previous coalition government to fund ongoing infrastructure into the future has been raided. A lot of these failed programs have now become a future tax burden for our children and grandchildren. I do not think that they are going to be very impressed paying taxes in years to come for the insulation that went into their granddad's house that nearly burnt it down. This is the great tragedy of what is happening now.

The NBN is still years away from getting to my communities—if it ever does get there. The great irony is that Telstra saw Conroy coming from miles away. Most of my constituents gain their data through the Next G network—through 3G or 4G—which is not part of the NBN and never will be. We have here a proposal for the construction of a white elephant. The other misconception is that there is some sort of broadband desert out there. Most of my schools have fibre-optic cables connected to them. My hospitals have fibre-optic cables connected to them. I spoke to the principal of a large accounting firm in Dubbo on Saturday night who told me that they have very fast broadband. A lot of that is already there. The idea that the government somehow are the champions of broadband, and that nothing had happened before, is an absolute nonsense. If there is a change of government on 14 September, I look forward to getting some common sense and rationality into the broadband debate. The people of regional Australia know that they deserve to have fast broadband and mobile coverage, and we need to make sure that that happens.

Infrastructure, particularly in my part of the world, has not been a high priority for this government. We have spoken previously about the inland rail. If you want practical ways to reduce emissions in this country, taking the trucks off the Newell Highway and putting them on a train is a logical way of doing that. This has been spoken of for some time. The inland rail needs to happen. In the last heavy rainfall event that came down the east coast of Australia, we saw how Queensland became isolated freight-wise because of the reliance on transport up the east coast. An alternative, fast, efficient and cheap method of moving produce between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in an inland manner, and ultimately connecting through to Perth and Darwin through the inland port of Parkes, is something that is long overdue.

A lot could happen this year. But if on 14 September the Australian people do decide to go in a different direction—and I am certainly hoping that they do—it is going to be an enormous challenge for the coalition to clean up the mess that has been left and push Australia back in the right direction. (Time expired)

Sitting suspended from 13:37 to 15:30

Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013, and to raise my deep concerns about the direction in which this Labor government is taking Australia. As to the increase that is required in terms of the bill, the additional estimates bill seeks appropriation authority from the parliament for the additional expenditure of money for the consolidated fund revenue. It identifies a number of things, but in particular I note $37 million extra for offshore asylum seeker management purposes. It is a border issue that should have been controlled, and is of the making of Labor, that means that $37 million is being extracted—taken away from Australian families who are in need of that money.

In the last five years, this Labor government has taken a strong Australian economy from a $20 billion surplus, no net debt and $70 billion in net assets, to a whopping $147 billion net debt. This government is attempting in this bill to appropriate even more funds. It would seem that there are no bounds to the lengths to which this government will go to fund its addiction to wasteful spending.

It is clear that this Labor government is simply not able to manage our economy. This Labor government made promise after promise after promise that it would deliver a budget surplus this financial year. This government promised over 650 times that it would stick to its commitment to a budget surplus—650 times. It is easy to assume that a government could not forget a promise it had made 650 times. So adamant was this Labor government that it would deliver a budget surplus that we were told that a budget surplus was not negotiable, and people were ridiculed for suggesting that this Labor government would not stick to its promise. But, over the last few months, the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and their friends have been slowly sidestepping away from their promise. The Treasurer has been ducking and weaving, and now he openly speaks as if it was never a serious consideration that the government would deliver a budget surplus. As far as I am concerned, this was as good as an admission that the Treasurer had lost control of Australia's finances. It is clear that the Treasurer simply does not have the skills required to effectively manage the economy and deliver the prized promise of a budget surplus. Over the last four years under this Labor government our nation has seen the four biggest consecutive budget deficits on record. We have seen a cumulative total of $172 billion in budget deficits.

It is simply despicable that the Treasurer believes that it is he who is entitled to spend taxpayers' money without giving any due to consideration to the people of Australia. These budget deficits and the massive debt that we have acquired as a result of them is going to weigh heavily on the shoulders of the next generation of Australians to pay off the debt. This debt will take years and years and years to repay—all because this Prime Minister and this Treasurer could not control their addiction to spending.

This is a shameful legacy to leave behind for our children. This government's ability to waste and mismanage astounds me. Over the life of this government we have seen pink batts, school halls, cash for clunkers, and set-top boxes. There are so many examples of how this government has been wasteful I do not even know where to begin to cover the comprehensive list.

It is also becoming increasingly apparent that the wasteful spending is not the only problem that this government faces. It is becoming increasingly clear that this government not only has a spending problem but that it is completely unable to forecast. As I raised in this place earlier this week, the warning signs about our nation's economy have been clear for all to see—and yet somehow this Treasurer has not seen them. I can only imagine that this Treasurer has put his head in the sand. He has been refusing to listen to the feedback from industry and has been refusing to listen to the advice of the experts. This government, including the Treasurer, has a better grasp on how to deliver spin than how to deliver a budget surplus. We are here today discussing the appropriation of funds because of this Treasurer's inability to balance the books. This government has a $120 billion black hole of unfunded spending promises, and we have debated those in the chamber. He was counting on the mining tax to deliver the funds to cover these costs but now he has realised that his mining tax was a failure and he is looking elsewhere for the money that is required to fund those initiatives, including superannuation and the hit on self-funded retirees that is proposed in their thinking.

There is some good news for the people of Australia: there is a better way. The coalition have a strong track record on balancing the books and paying back the debt. A coalition government would immediately halve this government's wasteful spending and get our economy the fighting chance it needs. Rather than relying on cash grabs, the coalition has well-established, well-planned policies in place to get Australia back on track. The coalition will restore hope, reward and opportunity to all Australians. As was said before, and I will say it again, a coalition government will immediately rescind the carbon tax and we will get rid of the mining tax. Unlike with those opposite, the people of Australia can have faith that these promises would be followed through.

The coalition also has a better plan for education in our country because we believe that education is a cornerstone to the development of skills and knowledge and the ability of Australians to participate in a workforce that is diverse and is becoming more significant in this evolution into a global world and a global economy. Education provides the basis for the skilling that will enable them to be part of an emerging exciting future that provides so many opportunities. We believe that every child needs to have the opportunity of a quality education, and certainly in the chamber we discussed the proposed bill that looks at how the shape and future of education will be in Australia. That also requires the detail of expenditure.

Australia is recognised in the medical research arena. In the past decade alone Australia's health and medical research sector has produced three Nobel Prize winners. We recognise that funding for medical research is the best long-term investment a government can make in the health of Australian people. While the budget conditions are tough and the coalition is committed to returning the budget to surplus, we also recognise that funding of medical research needs to be consistent and ongoing to ensure Australia does not hollow out its capabilities in this field. The coalition has a plan for the health of our nation, and the plan includes the work undertaken by the Health and Ageing Committee, which has looked at the issues and implications of youth suicide, dementia and other elements, including a new inquiry which will look at border protection but also dental health. We will deliver better health services by putting local communities in charge of hospitals and improving cooperation with states and territories. Mental health is important. The coalition will support early psychosis prevention and intervention centres, or EPPICs. We understand that better services to mental health increase the employment opportunities of those suffering from the various mental illnesses.

We believe that our veterans need to be respected for their commitment and service to our nation through the fair indexation of their military superannuation. A coalition government will deliver fair indexation of the DFRDB and the DFRB military superannuation to our veterans.

For small business it is important that we support them. Small businesses are the engine room of our economy. We need to be doing everything we can to build a thriving small business sector. We will establish a dedicated advocate for small businesses in the form of an ombudsman, conduct a root and branch review of competition policy and get government off the back of small business by cutting $1 billion worth of red tape. A coalition government will put the small business minister in the cabinet, improve small business access to Commonwealth contracts, give small businesses a say in taxation and help small business attract and retain workers. We will protect the rights of independent contractors and the self-employed. The coalition will extend the unfair contract protections for small business. We are committed to building stronger small businesses within our community. We understand that our country needs to invest in infrastructure now to prepare for the future. We need a vision for the future and a plan to get there. The coalition will build the infrastructure that we need now to free up our congested road networks. We will build better infrastructure for Australia.

The coalition believes in real action that will have a genuine, long-lasting impact on our environment. We are not interested in just pretending to do something about the environment; we want to make a practical difference. We will support direct action through the coalition's Direct Action Plan in respect of the environment. We will deliver on our commitment to a five per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. We will establish a 15,000 strong green army charged with the clean-up and conservation of our environment. The coalition is committed to building greener local communities in which people can play a significant role in their own local areas.

We will also work to build stronger, safer communities. We will help people feel safe in their homes again. We will help local communities to be the very best they can be, with less crime and more community friendship. We will establish a new national safe streets program and expand the use of CCTV cameras for crime prevention and detection.

The coalition will ease the cost-of-living pressure for all Australians. Our commitment will be to abolish the carbon tax. We will work to keep interest rates low, we will protect and strengthen Medicare and private health-insurance and we will deliver more affordable and flexible child care.

In my electorate and in my local community I know that people are doing it tough. Many people are struggling with the daily grind to pay their bills and I know the cost of living is a significant concern. Our commitment to communities is important—to encourage the fabric of communities which know that their daily living is guaranteed and that the coalition has a better way. The coalition will restore hope for communities and families. We will reward those who seek and take up opportunities that enable them to be part of the workforce or to personally invest in small business for the betterment of all Australians.

I will continue to fight for what my community is concerned about. I will help build stronger communities that contribute to the economy not only of Western Australia but of all Australia, the community in which we all live.

It is important that we live within our means and that the budgets we allocate through the appropriations process are targeted to ease the pressure on Australian families. I acknowledge the need for particular initiatives in the security areas of this country, but our fundamental focus and the commitment I give is to the families who live in my electorate, to the communities that make up the electorate of Hasluck and certainly to the communities that make up Western Australia and this nation.

Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to talk today on these appropriation bills because it gives me the opportunity to highlight yet again the significant investment that Labor has made in my electorate of Canberra. It is significant that earlier today we heard that consumer confidence has risen to its highest level in just over two years. This surge has been attributed to Australia's optimism about the economy. In terms of infrastructure, health, education, schools funding and most importantly jobs and job security, this Labor government has delivered.

Last week I joined Minister Albanese, the ACT Chief Minister, Senator Kate Lundy, the member for Fraser, the member for Eden-Monaro and other members of the ACT government to launch the preliminary work on the new Majura Parkway in Canberra. This is a major infrastructure investment that will bring millions of dollars in benefits to my seat as well as the capital region, the Eden-Monaro, in Eden-Monaro, Fraser and throughout the region. Labor is investing in major and much-needed roadwork that will link the Federal and Monaro highways and ease congestion in Canberra and Queanbeyan,. For the first time ever,, the major highways in the north and the south will be linked.

This is one of those infrastructure projects that will make a lasting economic and social difference to thousands of people. It will boost productivity and will make transport and freight delivery more efficient, take heavy vehicles off suburban roads and create hundreds of jobs. This $288 million dual carriageway is being jointly funded by the ACT and federal Labor governments.

This major infrastructure investment follows another significant outlay in my electorate, one that I also opened with my colleague Minister Albanese. Last year, long-suffering commuters of the Tuggeranong Valley welcomed the duplication of 1.5 kilometres of the Monaro Highway. For years—actually, 40 years—motor vehicles and heavy trucks have been crawling along this stretch of road, with a single carriageway bridge located in the suburb of Fyshwick. An estimated 40,000 vehicles used this road every day. Thanks to the Labor government, we now have a new carriageway for motorists, after 40 years. We have waited a long time and it has finally arrived. It was a great day indeed when I joined with the minister to open the $18.5 million upgrade. There was also $1.5 million invested by the ACT government. With this investment in the Monaro Highway and the Majura Parkway, in the foreseeable future motorists and heavy transport operators will be able to drive from the Tuggeranong Valley in my electorate, on the south side, to Sydney along a dual carriageway. These projects are above and beyond the $409,000 Labor are investing in dangerous black spots on Canberra roads. This infrastructure investment by Labor shows our commitment to improving the transport needs of Canberra and the surrounding regions, and our commitment to boosting productivity, and I welcome this investment.

I also welcome our investment in education in Canberra and across the ACT, and our policy of making every school a great school, a world-class school. Between 2009 and 2012, Labor have almost doubled investment in schools, when compared to the previous four years, to around $65 billion. Our National Plan for School Improvement is the next step in our education reform agenda, providing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the way schools are funded and provide our children with a fair and high-quality education system, no matter what their background is, no matter where they live, no matter what their socioeconomic circumstances are and no matter what their parents' income is. Under the National Plan for School Improvement, the country has set the aspirational goal for Australia to be in the top five countries in the world in reading, maths and science by 2025. The plan will be phased in over six years from 2014 and will include a new way of funding schools, based on the need of the student. The government want to ensure we fund reforms that we know will work to lift the results of all students.

We are investing funding of $475 million over seven years to empower schools to make decisions at a local level, and participating education authorities in each state and territory have received more than $57 million in funding to implement the initiative over the 2012 and 2013 school years in 925 government and non-government schools across Australia. Each school is receiving a start-up grant of up to $50,000 and additional support for training and professional development. In the ACT, 12 schools, both government and non-government, have been selected to participate in the initiative over the 2012 and 2013 school years.

The Labor government have also invested significant money in boosting vocational education in the territory, including in my electorate of Canberra. We have invested over $8 million in the Tuggeranong Sustainable Living Trade Training Centre and $6 million in the Canberra Region Pathways Trade Training Centre.

It was a great pleasure to open one of these trade-training centres with the Prime Minister early last year at St Mary MacKillop College in my electorate, down south. It was like an MGM production! The principal there is quite an extraordinary man, and he is very passionate about his students, his school and St Mary MacKillop, and he put on an extraordinary event, with all the pathways of the school lined by school students not just from St Mary MacKillop but also from other Catholic schools around Canberra and the region. He is very connected into the region as well. There were students there from Catholic schools in Queanbeyan and elsewhere. It was extraordinary to see the adoration, frankly, that these students, the staff and the principal of this school had for the Prime Minister and to see the extraordinary trade-training centre that has been built as a result of our investment in education. The trades training centre has a cafe; there is an area where there is the frame of a house being constructed; it also has a woodwork area and a metalwork area. It is quite extraordinary—very different from my days at Donvale High, where we had one room allocated for metalwork and one room allocated for woodwork; it was all pretty basic I can assure you. I think the highlight of my achievements in metalwork was making a little man out of tin who held up pencils. There is a vast difference between what exists now and what happened in the seventies in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

The Labor government has also invested over $130 million for 136 Building the Education Revolution projects in Canberra, which have benefited 67 schools—67 schools which those opposite did not want to see funded and improved. I look forward to my Liberal opponent visiting these schools in Canberra and telling the students and their parents and the staff and principals why they opposed this investment in school education, because it has been so overwhelmingly well-received here. It amazes me that the Liberals would not support Labor's investment of $54 million to deliver more maths and science teachers, because in the ACT we have invested in so many areas, one being computers: 16,060 computers have been installed under the Digital Education Revolution National Secondary School Computer Fund. The Liberals in my electorate will be hard pressed to tell every parent, student and teacher about the benefits of the new libraries, multipurpose halls and covered outdoor learning areas, as I said, which have been so overwhelmingly well-received in my electorate.

Labor's investment in education is also matched by our investment in health. I am very proud to place on the record the investment that we have made in Canberra. There was $18½ million allocated to build the Canberra cancer centre at the Canberra Hospital, and almost $50 million to extend the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program—that is not just for here in Canberra but also across the nation, but it was announced here, at Canberra Hospital. There was $15 million for Canberra's GP superclinics, and earlier this week the federal Minister for Health and Ageing and my colleague the member for Fraser turned the first sod on the new ACT GP superclinic hub in northern Canberra. And I cannot stress enough the importance of Labor's $500 million blitz on dental public waiting lists. I have spoken in this chamber on the social and economic impact of poor dental health, and so I welcome with open arms this initiative.

In terms of Indigenous health, in September last year on behalf of the minister for health I had the great pleasure of launching the Indigenous Allied Health Australia national office here in Canberra, in my electorate, in Deakin. As the peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the IAHA, as it is known, plays a crucial role in developing and contributing to health policy and planning for their communities. The IAHA works with universities to increase the number of opportunities available to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, and this includes the development of a curriculum framework at all Australian universities for the teaching of Indigenous health within all health science courses. With a focus on the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, the IAHA is showing an increased effort to attend career markets to encourage more participation from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in allied health careers.

Closing the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation is a priority for our government. That is why it was such a privilege to launch this new national office and to announce, on behalf of the government, additional funding for the IAHA of $500,000 this financial year. This will facilitate an expansion of support and mentoring for Indigenous allied health professionals. It will allow increased engagement with Medicare Locals, and the funding will promote allied health as a career path for Indigenous Australians andincrease IAHA's online presence. These are all crucial initiatives for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders to close the gap in Indigenous health, and I was proud to be part of this launch and to represent the minister in delivering an additional half a million dollars in funding. As with education, it is those opposite who oppose investment in health and education. It is those opposite who always say no to almost every appropriation that will improve the lives of Australians and especially Australian families, and so when it comes to investing in families there is no more stark policy divide than our approach to helping families with much needed financial relief. The Schoolkids Bonus is delivering cash payments to 6,750 Canberra families with children at school. That means $410 for each child in primary school and $820 for each child in high school. The bonus has already seen millions of dollars spent in local shops on school equipment and uniforms and on other materials that children need for their education. Under the Schoolkids Bonus, children benefit, parents benefit and the local economy benefits; yet, it is a policy that those opposite want to axe—which is extraordinary.

I look forward to engaging with my Liberal opponent as to why he or she wants to take much needed payments from families and leave parents struggling to meet all the demands of educating their children. I wonder, too, if the Liberals plan to scrap Labor's increases in Family Tax Benefit A—payments which begin in July this year. And will they scrap the increases in the childcare rebate or the tax cuts we introduced to help those earning less than $80,000 per year?

I now turn to pensioners—my mother is a pensioner—as this is an area which I have got a very keen interest in. Deputy Speaker, as you know, those opposite have also opposed the measures that we introduced to help older Australians and Australian pensioners. Labor have already delivered the most significant reforms to the pension system since the introduction of the age pension in 1909. Our secure and sustainable pension reforms include pension increases, a new consolidated pensioner supplement, better indexation and a pensioner work bonus. Labor's landmark pension reforms have delivered increases of $172 per fortnight for singles on the maximum rate, and $182 per fortnight for pensioner couples on the maximum rate.

Finally, I want to turn to jobs and small business because these areas are also of significant interest to me. I used to have a small business before I came to this place. I am concerned for the future of Canberra, because the biggest issue here is managing the economy and ensuring job security. What those opposite are proposing is the abolition of 20,000 public service jobs—and that worries me significantly. This is one area of concern in my suburb of Weston Creek, because a lot of jobs, a lot of small businesses, a lot of families and a lot of homes are going to be affected. My mission, as is Labor's mission, is to ensure job security and the creation of jobs. We have created 800,000 jobs since we have been in government, and I want to ensure job security for Canberrans and for all Australians. I also ask those opposite to clarify where those 20,000 jobs are going to come from and whether they are going to come entirely from Canberra. As you know, Deputy Speaker, in 1996 we were a target. Are we going to be a target again for the 20,000 job losses? And which government departments and agencies are those opposite looking at?

The Labor government has a very strong record of investment across all areas, but especially in health, education and infrastructure—and I have just outlined that. It does surprise me, and I am sure many in my electorate, that those opposite oppose spending and investment that builds better roads, better teachers, constructs better schools, delivers better computers, invests in better health and supports all Australians from childhood through to old age.

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is always a pleasure to follow the member for Canberra. It is great to see the further centralisation of bureaucracy and spending in Canberra at the expense of the rest of Australia. I rise to speak today on the appropriation bills Nos (3) and (4) 2012-2013. The member for Canberra said in her contribution that we oppose spending money on health, education, infrastructure et cetera. Just for the member's edification, we do not oppose spending in any of those areas. What we are opposed to is spending that is wasteful and not properly targeted. We would much prefer to see the money spent in a sensible, thought-through manner so that we get better value for money from our funds. That brings me to the main point of my speech today: the government's inability to control their spending and, even worse, their basing of spending on forecasts that they have been plainly advised are incorrect. We see them as a government in denial. They are a government with a broken crystal ball that is obviously wreaking havoc over their forecasts. If the government were a corporation, I do not think the shareholders would respond too well to comments like, 'We expected a better year. We thought it would be rosy, so we spent everything that we had. Once that ran out, we borrowed some more money that we were going to pay back. But now who knows where we will get it?' The shareholders might well ask themselves: what on earth have they spent all the money on?

The little bits of correspondence you get along the way are instructive. Some of the money is being spent on pencils and sharpeners, of course. If it is not bad enough that they have spent $5 million on an ad campaign to promote a schoolkids bonus, telling people how they could access the assistance even though it was being paid straight into people's bank accounts, now we find they have spent even more money purchasing things to go inside schoolkids kits, promoting the Schoolkids Bonus, and parents kits, including things such as a pencil case, a ruler, mini coloured pencils, a sharpener, a lead pencil, a tote bag, a magnetic to-do list and a 2013 calendar. I would have thought that that is why the money was being paid to the families: to go to the stationery store and buy these things for the kids. Why does the department need to send out another marketing kit to the parents when they have already bought that stuff?

The government has already handed out the cash to the parents that was supposed to go to assist with those costs of getting kids back to school. It is perplexing to even try to understand why the government would need to spend more money on top of the advertising that was already pointless because the money was going straight into people's bank accounts.

Meanwhile, we have the Smith Family running a huge campaign at the moment to help disadvantaged children get back to school. Their website states:

Without the right uniform, bag or even books, they'll find it hard to fit in and will struggle to keep up.

It begs the question: if the government were really out to help families and children with the costs of schooling, why didn't they give the money directly to the Smith Family, or even to the schools, to ensure that the money actually goes to its intended purpose? We all know that, often, these cash handouts end up in electrical retailers' pockets or other places. The fact that the Smith Family are still out there doing what they do best, pushing for more support for disadvantaged children, has me seriously doubting this government's ability to improve the outcomes of our disadvantaged families. The government have been giving them a handout instead of a hand up and not looking for solutions to the problems that cause poverty in the first place.

Last Friday, I hosted the shadow minister for families, housing and human services in the electorate to meet with some of my local community service providers to discuss ways that we can improve the lives of our local families. Local community service representatives included representatives from NightLight, Rosies, Mothers Against Drugs, Lighthouse Calvary Care, the Soul Centre, Queensland police, the state government and Logan City Council. They all met to discuss issues such as homelessness, social inclusion and cost of living pressures on our families. One of these organisations, NightLight, shared a remarkable story of how they had helped a local person in our community. A 12-year-old boy had been found out on the streets. He had dropped out of school because he had never learned to read or write. That had created conflict for him at home. NightLight organised to have a tutor assist the boy, and the outcome was that eventually he got back into school to complete his education.

This is just one example of how the community as a whole can work together to find solutions to problems through empowering people to be able to end the cycle of poverty. This is a real example of how a local schoolkid was helped not through a cash handout from the government but through practical engagement with the community—working together. This is what we need more of. We need to stop the government's wasteful and profligate spending and provide additional funds to support these types of organisations, organisations which are actually at the coalface in our communities and are achieving wonderful outcomes on the ground.

On the topic of schoolkids, I believe this government has some serious work to do on the curriculum. They like to tout the benefits of the national curriculum, but we need to look at how to restore the quality of our education system, not just via an amount of money or a nice, big, shiny, new building but via outcomes for our students in reading, writing and arithmetic. In 10 years there has been a 40 per cent increase in school funding and yet we are falling behind. Funding, or spending money to solve problems, in most cases does not work if you do not deal with the underlying issues. Plans to improve basic literacy and numeracy under this government have failed despite $540 million being spent in this area over the past five years. An independent performance audit concluded that Labor's literacy and numeracy program is yet to make a statistically significant improvement in literacy and numeracy in any state.

Recently we conducted a survey of over 1,000 people in the electorate. Of those, 930 said that basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic were of great importance. We seem to have ventured off course somewhere, instead of returning to these basic, fundamental building blocks of education to give us a structure that would improve the education of young people.

Earlier today I compared a grade 8 examination from the US from 1895 against a grade 9 NAPLAN test paper. Here are a few of the questions you would need to be able to answer in 1895 in grade 8. I confess at the outset that I would have struggled big time. Under grammar, the questions include:

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.

2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.

3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph

4. What are the principal parts of a verb?

…   …   …

6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.

7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Another section was orthography. I had to look that up, but it means the rules of spelling and punctuation. Here are a couple of the questions:

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication.

…   …   …

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

In contrast, the majority of questions on NAPLAN's 'language conventions' paper gives students multiple-choice questions, providing the opportunity to take a stab at the answers. The paper asks students to correct some spelling errors, identify where some basic punctuation should appear and identify which sentences are wrong from a number of given examples, rather than them having to come up with the answers themselves. Over the years, despite how far we have come and how much money we have thrown at our schools, education results have declined. I would hazard to say that the exam questions from 1895 reinforce that point.

We want to have the best and most robust curriculum available to our students. All of us on both sides of politics agree that we need to improve the educational outcomes of our students. We know that having a robust, high-quality curriculum will create more opportunities for Australians as well as boost productivity. Not only will it boost productivity but it also gives student an opportunity through their education to become innovative and to use the technology that they will have at their hands when they enter the workforce. I believe a quality education is one of the areas that we need to focus our attention on.

As I said earlier, this government has a spending and forecasting problem, and I am very concerned that we still have no indication as to where all the money will come from to pay for things like Gonski, the dental scheme adjustments, the NDIS, the NBN and the like. This Labor government inherited in 2007 a net worth totalling $73 billion. Now we see that it is all gone and we have the biggest debt in Australian history and we are paying some $7 billion a year in interest on that net debt.

But what did we get for all that spending over the past five year? We got a $6.6 billion blowout on border protection policies and a $4.6 billion blowout in operating capital expenditure in relation to the National Broadband Network. There was nearly $70 million spent on advertising the carbon tax—which, before the last election, they said they would not introduce. There was $30 million spent on market research; $150 million a year spent on spin doctors to sell Labor's policies; $7 million spent on administration for the set-top box program—at $350 each when you could buy a set-top box from Harvey Norman and have it installed for 150 bucks; $1.4 million spent on origami style cardboard cut-out NBN Co. trucks to grace all of our offices; and another $10 million a year spent on checking what is said in the media about government agencies. The list goes on and on. They were just a few examples.

It is time for change and it is time to end this cycle of waste and misspending which will create a debt burden not just for the current generation but also for future generations. As we have talked about education extensively, it is those students who, when they enter the workforce and start earning, will be paying for this government's debt. Fortunately for the Australian people they will have a choice later this year—and they will have a clear choice. They will have a choice between a government that does not know how to stop spending and wasting money and a coalition that has a demonstrated track record of effective economic management and will provide hope, reward and opportunity for all Australians.

Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills and to follow the excellent contribution from the member for Forde in relation to the spending of the Australian government. I have spoken in relation to appropriations over the past five years that I have been in this place, and once again we see the government seeking funds to conduct the ordinary business of government—but in the context of a budgetary condition that you could only describe as absolute free fall.

Let us have a look at what is happening right now in the nation's budgetary situation—with perhaps the worst example of public policy in our era being the mining resource rent tax debacle. This has a profound impact on the economy's bottom line and the budget's bottom line and is another reason that the government will need to appropriate money at a rate that I think is completely unsustainable. I have spoken on many occasions on how already in the Australian budget every single dollar that is collected in individual income tax is sent out the door in the form of welfare—a completely unsustainable budget footing. What you have with a mining resource rent tax that does not bring in any revenue is, of course, a bad tax—something that discourages investment and hinders the ability of companies to plan securely for their future. But what is worse is to find a government of the calibre of this Labor government that spends up to $15 billion against money that is not going to ever come in. That is completely unsustainable expenditure. That is completely unsustainable expenditure. It is not the first time we have seen it from this government. Each day in question time we see a series of questions put to this government. What is it going to do to fix this situation? Why has it put $15 billion expenditure against no incoming revenue? How is this going to be funded? Of course, the Treasurer today was completely embarrassing when he really had no answer about how it was to be funded. Of course, he does not know how it is going to be funded—he has not thought about it. The only answer, of course, is borrowing, more borrowing—more debt and more deficit. Borrowing against the future of this country, borrowing against the future employment of this country, borrowing against the future generations who will have pay for the flagrant expenditure of this out-of-control Labor government.

We have seen the whiz-kids of the Labor Party come up with the slogans about the surplus. Not only did we see Penny Wong and the Treasurer on 650 occasions go out and say that we were going to get a surplus. We saw the wonder kids of the Labor Party put out on Twitter a little logo that said, 'Back to the surplus in 2012-13'—playing off the movie Back to the Future, thinking they were being clever. I know the member for Bruce is having a little chuckle. It is funny—'Back to the surplus 2012-13.' Those crazy Labor kids! What are they going to do next? The only problem is that the same people are running this country's government. I know I have found some sympathy in the member for Bruce about the state of the current government. 'Back to the surplus'—these crazy Labor kids running the government seem to think this is some kind of joke.

It is not funny. On 650 occasions you have the finance minister and the Treasurer announcing a surplus. You have the Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury announcing to his electors that he had already delivered a budget surplus—that is, all those families and businesses and honest hard-working people in Western Sydney have been told by their local member, who serves in this place as Assistant Treasurer, that he has delivered a budget surplus. He has delivered it! But he has refused to retract, to correct, to respond to his voters—to tell his electorate the truth, to update them that 'Back to the surplus' was just a movie concept. It was never going to get made; it was a low-budget film that was never going to get into production because the actors were too D-grade. On a serious note, he refuses to go out and front his electorate and tell them that his much vaunted budget surplus is never going to be delivered under this government.

Are we to believe that this is due to commodity prices? My answer is that I do not think so. We know for a fact that federal government revenue is now $70 billion higher than it was when the government took office. We know that just from MYEFO. Commodity price revenue is forecast to rise by $37 billion and the write-down was in the order of $3 billion to $4 billion. The write-down in commodity prices was just a small percentage of the total increase in government revenue, and yet this government says, 'Because we have lost a couple of billion on the commodity market, the entire budget is going to fall into chaos.' That is what we are supposed to believe from this government. What are the Australian public, investors, businesses, people from overseas to make of a government that seriously links its political fortunes and its ability to deliver a surplus to commodity prices? Commodity prices are volatile. Commodity prices will rise and fall. For the first time in this country's history we have the unedifying spectacle of a Treasurer who has gone to the media on a week-by-week basis essentially to say each week: 'Well, this week the surplus is not going to happen. I'm sorry, commodities are down.' Then the next week there is a bounce in the commodity prices and he starts to say, 'Well, look, maybe we'll get there.' This is an unsustainable approach to government. This is an unsustainable approach to managing the budget. No wonder we are in an economic climate where people are hanging onto their money. People are hanging onto their money because they know the kind of people who are running this Labor government. They know the kind of people who are running this country.

You cannot trust them. If you are a large mining company, you cannot trust the word of this government. We know what would happen if this government were re-elected in September. We know what they will do. Their word means nothing. Their signature means nothing. They will go to any length to cover up their own grave inadequacies and failings. The MRRT represents perhaps the single biggest public policy blunder in Australian history. It is a completely unedifying spectacle and it has serious consequences for ordinary people who lack confidence in the economic climate and the ability of the government to manage the economy.

In the context of this appropriations bill, I think it is important that we continue to talk about what Labor is doing to the budget and some of the expenditure, because expenditure is the problem. I mentioned that we have had $70 billion of increased revenue since Labor came to office; however, the problem is that we have had $90 billion worth of expenditure increases since Labor came to office. Expenditure has now reached proportions that mean that our deficit is becoming larger and larger. Of course, the government is right to say that comparatively, in an international context, our deficit is low; that is because of the conditions they inherited from the previous Howard government.

What we see now is this completely out-of-the-ether set of concepts—whether it be Gonski, whether it be the dental scheme, whether it be the National Disability Insurance Scheme or whether it be the NBN—and projects of a size and scale which makes them completely unaffordable. These projects, which are completely unsustainable in a budgetary context, are simply being announced to try to salvage the government's political fortunes. It is a daily exercise in this parliament. It is a daily exercise in the public arena. How can we afford to fund $6 billion for Gonski, billions of dollars for dental work, $4 billion to $5 billion for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and $40 billion for a National Broadband Network? Who is going to earn that money? Where are those funds going to come from? And who is going to pay for all that debt you will have to go into to try to fund these schemes?

Some of these ideas are worthy. Some of these ideas have merit. But you cannot fix the world's problems without having the how. You have to know how you are going to fix it. You have to know how you are going to fund it. If you do not have a plan to do that then you really have no idea how you are going to solve the problems that challenge us for the future. It is crazy to think that even with one of the most socialist governments of our time, it cannot even redistribute wealth properly. This is a government that cannot even take from the rich and give to the poor. They have buggered up the mining tax. It is a pretty simple job. The member for Bruce would know this. Socialists throughout history have been able to take from the rich and give to the poor. This is a government that cannot even do that. It is completely failing in all regards.

I want to turn to my electorate and some of the real plans and solutions that the coalition has. What I have been very pleased to see is the Leader of the Opposition bringing forward our plans for the next election. I am happy to lend the member for Bruce a copy of this booklet here, which is Our plan—real solutions for all Australians. It contains 21 points. He will find it good reading.

An honourable member: I'm sure it is a very quick read.

It is quick. It is not of the length of a speech by an Independent about forming government; it is really a concise summary of the plans that we intend to take to the election.

Mr Schultz interjecting—

No, Member for Hume, this is not confidential stuff—I am happy to gift a copy to the member for Bruce right now for his benefit. I think the most important part of this document, Our plan—real solutions for all Australians, is helping small business create stronger jobs growth. The economic plan that the coalition has is based around the understanding that small business is the fundamental driver of economic wealth in this country. It is not that business is the enemy, not that every time you change the industrial relations law or other forms of law that you ignore the impact on small business—the real drivers of economic growth and employment in this country—like the government does. It is about understanding that at the heart of government decisions we must ensure that the changes we make are friendly to small business. The five pillars that the coalition is talking about are very important: ensuring that we have a good mining sector; ensuring that growth is at the heart of the economy; stopping small businesses paying an extra 10 per cent for their electricity by removing the carbon tax; removing the wasteful and investment-discouraging tax of the minerals resource rent tax; and getting on with cutting red tape and reducing costs by $1 billion a year. It is an important plan, which focuses on manufacturing innovation, agricultural exports, advanced services, world-class education and research, and boosting our mining exports to make the most of our advantages in the international marketplace. It is a realistic plan and I think Australians can have some fundamental confidence in knowing what their government is going to be doing. That is the real criticism of this government and the people that run it: nobody in any sector of this economy knows what is going on with the federal government. Nobody can tell. It does not matter what sector you go to, everybody says the same thing: we cannot get an answer from the minister; we cannot get an understanding from that department about what is going on, about what is next, about what this legislation will do, what it means, where it will head. Nobody knows because the government do not know where they are heading with all of these programs.

But perhaps, as I have spoken about many times in this place, the most distressing thing about the budget and the appropriations and where this government is headed is of course defence expenditure. I have mentioned in this place before that the primary function of a federal government—in fact, one of the reasons for being of the federal government and the prime motivator—is having a Defence Force for Australia. The Labor Party's website says that the first priority of government must be the defence of the nation. The first priority! That is why it is shocking to this House to understand that the Defence portfolio has had its spending cut by 10.5 per cent in one year—the largest annual reduction since the end of the Korean War in 1953. When I saw the Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, standing at the dispatch box today, I thought, 'How does he stand at that dispatch box every day as the cabinet minister who took the biggest annual expenditure cut in his portfolio—such a significant cabinet portfolio?'

There are people in this chamber who have been in cabinet who are no longer in cabinet. How can you front up to parliament each day as the cabinet minister that lost 10.5 per cent out of your portfolio in such a critical and vital area? It is distressing I think for most Australians to understand that we are now ranked 65th in the world in defence spending. Considering we regard ourselves as one of the most advanced nations, with a role to play in our region, with a role to play in the free world, how can we sustain that mission for our ADF and our defence personnel if we are ranked 65th in the world in defence spending and we are sustaining 10.5 per cent cuts in the annual defence budget each year? That is the real consequence of economic mismanagement. The fundamental priorities of government suffer. The defence of our nation, which is at the very core of what this place is supposed to be about, is taking a substantial financial penalty. Not only that, but all of the ordinary families, businesses and hardworking people out there are suffering as a consequence of the fundamental economic mismanagement of the government.

It is time for a new government in Australia. It is time for a government that understands the economy and what drives growth and prosperity in an economy. It is time for this government to pack it in.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon on very important health issue for the nation and particularly for my own electorate of Maranoa. The topic is rather sensitive but I am taking this issue very seriously. I would like the government to take note of what I am saying, particularly in relation to this appropriation bill, to make sure that money could be appropriated to increase community and nationwide awareness of the issue that is growing across Australia—sexually transmissible infections, STIs. The Queensland Health department state:

Sexual health is not just for people who have had sex or have a Sexually Transmissible Infection (STI). It means taking care of your body, your health, and your partner's health and making decisions about having sex. Trying to avoid STIs is part of sexual health.

That is a direct lift from the Queensland Health department pamphlet promoting sexual health.

Previously there have been successful campaigns, even now, against smoking. Some of the images are graphic and I believe that has had an effect and is having an effect. We all know the effect that smoking can have on human health. It is important that we send a message, graphic as that is, in relation to smoking, across the nation. There have been ones about diabetes and how to avoid the possibility of diabetes because of its consequences on your health. We have had them on obesity as well. I believe these campaigns in relation to the health and wellbeing of our nation are important. I well remember the Grim Reaper campaign when the AIDS epidemic took off. It was graphic in its portrayal of what could happen but it sent a very, very strong message across the nation.

Australia-wide, there is now an alarming increase in sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS. In my electorate of Maranoa there is a new transient demographic that presents its own unique set of sexual health issues for my constituency. Education and awareness is the key, because the statistics are alarming. With HIV-AIDS, prevention is the only cure we have. The statistics for Queensland show increases for cases from 2007 in relation to gonorrhoea—some 1,328 cases were reported in 2007 and in the latest statistics available, for 2011, some 2,878 cases were reported, a doubling from 2007 to 2011. Chlamydia: 12,696 cases in 2007 and in 2011, 18,320 cases. Syphilis: some 200 cases in 2008 and in 2011, 340—almost a 60 per cent increase in reported cases. HIV: one diagnosis in 2008, five in 2009 and eight in 2010—so those reported cases are also rising, perhaps as small numbers but the trend is there.

In 2011, chlamydia was the most frequently reported notifiable condition in Australia with some 79,833 new notifications for persons aged 15 years and over, or 435 cases per 100,000 of our population. This is nearly seven times the rate of the most frequently reported notifiable STI, gonorrhoea. This rate has more than tripled over the past decade, increasing from 130 notifications per 100,000 in 2001.

The past decade has seen rates of sexually transmittable infections—STIs—increase across Australia. STIs are predominantly contracted through unsafe sexual practice and can show no symptoms. If untreated, STIs can have serious long-term consequences for a person's health. Do we need to bring back, perhaps as part of this program, the Grim Reaper-style health awareness programs that were put out during the AIDS epidemic, given the rapid progressive increase in reportable STIs? However, this year is 2013 and we are not in the 1980s. We know that HIV-AIDS and STI diseases are not limited to any particular demographic in our society.

My electorate has a new demographic emerging. A report tabled today by the member for New England on fly-in fly-out workers highlights some of the changes in demographics that are happening in my electorate and many of those rural and regional communities where resources are being developed and exploited. Being active is the 'common cold' of sexual health. People are taking more risks with their sexual health by dabbling in unprotected sex. The Daily Mercury reported:

Australian Medical Association (AMA) Queensland president Dr Richard Kidd said it was not just the young, single miners spreading diseases.

I am not suggesting it is the miners spreading it, but they are his words, not mine. The article continued:

'We're aware of anecdotal reports concerning pregnant women presenting with STIs, being treated, and getting a STI again before pregnancy concludes,' Dr Kidd said.

'So presumably their partners are infecting them again.'

Dr Kidd said the mix of a large disposable income and boredom meant fly-in, fly-out mine workers were responsible for the increase in cases of STIs in towns—

like those in my electorate in particular.

I think the committee report on fly-in fly-out practices that was tabled today by the member for New England touches on the social change that is occurring in many of our communities where these resources are located. While FIFO is not much of a holiday—I can assure you of that because I talk to many of these people—it can induce a disconnection from normal restraint and behavioural patterns, and we are seeing the results: we have seen a doubling of gonorrhoea over four to five years; we have seen an increase in syphilis by two-thirds in that same time, a 66 per cent increase; and an increase in chlamydia by one-third since 2007.

The other issue that is exacerbating the situation is the lack of doctors and nurses in mining towns. I was speaking with the Mayor of the Western Downs Regional Council only last Friday in my electorate and I asked: 'How many fly-in fly-out workers have we got in camps in the Western Downs Regional Council area?' They are trying to get an idea of that because of the impact it has on the traditional population of many of our towns. They do not know but they are trying to go to the mining companies and ask them just how many people are in the 40-odd camps that are located in the Western Downs. Their estimate is that they have got something like 24,000 workers in camps in the Western Downs region. I know, in my home town of Roma, there are camps of 3,000 or 4,000 people. I estimate that, in the Maranoa Regional Council area, there is something like 20,000 workers—most of them fly-in fly-out.

It is difficult for those communities when all of a sudden a population increase hits their town. It also has an impact on the ability of the local doctors and nurses who are dealing and coping with the existing population prior to fly-in fly-out workers. Because of the resources and the construction of these resource camps and the resource development, it has an impact on the ability of health services that are there to cope with this massive influx.

If I can use the figures that I was given towards the end of last year, in a town north of Roma—Injune, in fact—in 2008 there was something like 80 to 130 presentations per month at the local hospital, where there are a nurse and a doctor present. In January 2012, there were 1,000 presentations at that hospital. Compare that to 80 to 130 only three years earlier—the average since that time is about 600 to 700 a month. These are people who have legitimate health issues, who want to see a doctor or a nurse for whatever reason, but it has almost been impossible for the staff to cope. I commend the staff there for the work they are doing, but it highlights not only the significant change in demographics but also the challenge that is out there for all of us. I know that a number of mining companies have contributed to new facilities for communities but I am not aware of any support for increased health services where they are really needed.

What goes on behind closed doors is the individual's business, but let me take you on a tour of the local newspapers in my electorate. It is open for everyone to see. FIFO sex workers in Maranoa is the title:

'Misty' is a FIFO prostitute, one of hundreds to descend on Queensland's roaring mining towns in Surat and Galilee basins in the Maranoa.

She has a lot in common with her clients: she lives on the east coast but she's flexible about where she'll work.

I am astounded because the story the local paper ran stated what she could earn in a week. This is something quite new, I can assure you, to some of the towns and the local papers in my electorate, a very conservative area. But they ran the story. She remained anonymous in the sense that there was no photograph of her, but she said she was earning 'as much as $10,000 a week'. That is 10 times the average weekly wage. It goes on:

A sex worker can put their mobile phone number in an ad on the internet or in the local paper and they're free to go where the work is.

The only problem is finding a hotel room—

or a motel room—

in a town with such a transient population.

It is an issue. Whilst I know prostitution is a regulated industry, the lure of lucrative mining communities means that illegal prostitution activities are increasing and people are taking chances with their sexual health. Education and awareness is the key, because these figures that I have put on the Hansard this afternoon are quite alarming.

People should not be ashamed of visiting their local doctor. They should be prepared to go and have a check-up. Health professionals respect your privacy. They do not discuss your private business with anyone in the community. Also, the earlier you find an STI, the easier it is to treat and the less damage is done to your body. So don't be ashamed to talk about your sexual health and ask for a test if you think you might have an STI. Put your mind at ease.

What I am saying is that, with the changing demographics in many of these fly-in fly-out transient populations and the illegal prostitution that I know is out there, given some of the advertisements in the local papers and the reports that are flowing back, the risk of STIs is rising. The numbers that are now starting to be reported in relation to STIs are alarming. I call on the government, particularly in response or part-response to the report tabled in the House today on FIFO workers, to run awareness ads that target this issue of STIs and your sexual health. It is in the nation's interest.

Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I heard on the radio recently some comments about the Australian wind power industry. Much like the man who voiced them, they were sharp, tough, honest and uncompromising but fair. Dr Alan Watts is an exceptional Australian, a gentleman I am proud to know as a friend. Dr Alan Watts HDA, BSc, MB, ChB, LRCP, MRCS, a recipient of the prestigious Order of Australia for his services to medicine, has leapt to his feet in disgust to voice the silent experience of rural Australians who are shackled by the devastating impact of industrial wind development. Alan reminded those of us who had been sucked in by the clean, green, wind turbine daydream that we are paying through the nose for the high price of our ignorance and inner-city elitist ideology—and, worse, that we will continue to pay until such time as the dirty business which is the clean, green daydream of renewable energy ideals is replaced with sensible and achievable objectives. Said Alan:

Industrial wind is a fraud of enormous consequence whose foundation is based on greed, ignorance, subsidy and entrenched institutional deceit. People who value intellectual honesty should not allow themselves to be quietly fleeced by such industrial treachery or even by their government's callous … indifference.

He also said:

Wind industry propaganda flatters the gullible, exploits the well-intentioned …

And he said:

They plunder our environment while enriching foreigners all under the guise of some mythical societal benefit. They take our health, our land, our peace of mind and our taxes.

Why? Why do we continue to goose-step to the whoosh, whoosh, thump whim of industrial turbine power stations and the blind eye of the Gillard government? What is at stake and who is paying for it? The news ain't good, ladies and gentlemen. We are through our bills, our super funds and the green bastardisation of our national and cultural identity. This is government-sponsored fraud. All Australians, metropolitan and rural, are being sucker-punched by an industry ideology. The wind industry has squirrel-gripped this nation. Industry, in revolt of reason, would otherwise be trembling in their snake oil stained carbon footprints.

In 2007 several purse-pioneering union fat cats all resigned within a few short weeks from their directorships at Australian Super, the Australian super fund of the year. Where are they now? Greg Combet, former union boss and Julia Gillard's minister for climate change, tells us these turbines are necessary to mitigate the disastrous effects of global warming. So perhaps it was not a great look buying a beachfront property while all those polar bears are drowning.

Dr Watts and everyday Australians still believe in the little thing called democracy. The democracy we live in is charged to repel corruption through the protection of our legislation, not the lax interpretation. Last night I talked about the government sponsored fraud wind turbines. Where did this rural nightmare begin? Wind turbines were marketed by Enron, an energy trading company that was based in Houston, Texas. Enron was one of the most fraudulent corporations in the history of the United States. Enron Wind Systems was formed after the acquisition in January 1997 of Zond Corporation of California, the largest US developer of wind-powered electricity at the time. Enron went bankrupt in 2002 along with the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, one of the oldest accounting firms in the US. On 10 May 2002, following the Enron scandal, General Electric acquired the assets of Enron Wind Systems, continuing as GE Wind Energy. GE—imagination at work. You will note that the phrase 'imagination at work' does not invite a lawsuit for false advertising. The Gillard government's Clean Energy Future advertising package, however, is open to a case of false advertising, fraudulent misrepresentation and gross negligence. If you study the involvement of fraudulent companies in the wind industry, you begin to realise that this corporate misbehaviour has full government support. As with the Enron scandal, the wind industry would not be operating in Australia without its close financial relationship with our government agencies.

It does not stop at the federal level. There are also significant conflicts of interest within the New South Wales government. When politicians in government office embrace the idea that wind funds are intrinsically good in all situations as they are combating climate change, their decision-making becomes criminal through ignorance. They repeat the fraudulent misrepresentation that they have been lobbied with by the wind industry, such as wind turbines reduce GHG emissions; wind turbines generate renewable energy; this wind farm will generate enough electricity to power X number of homes with the actual figure being usually one-third of the quoted number. Fraudulent misrepresentation is when an individual fails to use reasonable care by giving advice negligently, as they are under a duty to use reasonable care to see that representation is correct and that the advice, information or opinion is reliable.

Eraring Energy is a state-owned corporation that manages a diverse set of electricity generating assets located throughout New South Wales. Eraring Energy has combined generating capacity of over 3,200 megawatts, including Eraring power station at 2,880 megawatts. Eraring Energy was established as a state-owned corporation on 2 August 2000 under the State Owned Corporations Act 1989, the Energy Services Corporation Act 1995 and this Energy Services Corporation (Eraring Energy) Regulations 2000. Eraring Energy owns the Blayney and Crookwell wind farms. The Crookwell Wind Farm is in my electorate in New South Wales. The Eraring Energy 'Gentrader' contract and renewables trading, together with corporate support, Treasury and information technology functions, are managed from the Sydney corporate office.

Renewable energy certificates are giving tremendous returns to the companies involved. The industry-union superannuation funds will soon have more money to invest in wind farms, with the Gillard government increasing the superannuation guarantee from nine per cent to 12 per cent by 2020. The REC is a political unit that an electrical retailer will purchase to comply with the law of the land. If the retailer does not have enough RECs—a percentage of electricity must be from a registered 'renewable' source—then it is fined by the federal government $65 per megawatt hour to make up the quota it has not purchased. That percentage is around five to eight at the moment and will be at 20 by 2020.

Australia currently has an oversupply of renewable energy certificates from the solar industry because of the government incentives. This has kept the REC price down, under $40, but look at what happens when these are worked through the system. To get to the $90 for a REC, it has been calculated that the $65 penalty is equivalent to $90, claimed as a business expense. Basically, one is a fine; one is a tax-deductible expense.

The renewable energy certificates scam runs out in 2030. The wind industry applies for a REC for each megawatt they produce and feed into the grid. The REC 'ticket' is then sold to a retailer of electricity if they need to meet the federal government's legislation. All of this scam is not transparent; in fact, I believe it is intentionally deceptive.

How is all of this relevant to my constituency? Let me walk you through what benefits my constituency would receive if there were a serious attempt to refocus on and change the direction of this get-rich-quick pot of gold for renewable energy opportunists. I will talk about the scale of subsidy in my electorate. In Hume alone, the subsidy for new wind turbines, excluding existing turbines, is set to reach $500 million to $1,000 million per year, or up to $10 billion over 10 years. This subsidy is equal to around $450,000 to $900,000 for each new turbine. Meanwhile, communities are at war with each other, adjacent landholders face serious land value losses and health issues continue to emerge.

If the wind industry subsidy for Hume were given to the electorate to spend, we commit we could do the following. We could reduce emissions by 50 per cent more than is achieved through the wind turbines. We could solve every major infrastructure problem inside the Hume electorate. To name a few things we could do in infrastructure, we could: duplicate the Barton Highway, $600 million; rebuild the Goulburn hospital, $150 million; set up CCTV cameras in every major town to prevent crime, $2 million; fix mobile phone and TV reception black spots—for example, in Crookwell, $2 million; and pay off the Yass council debt of $18 million for heightening the dam wall. After three years of using the subsidy to fix infrastructure problems, we could hand back all of the subsidy to the government to reduce electricity prices—up to $7 billion over seven years. We are prepared to give these numbers to the Parliamentary Budget Office or Treasury for verification because we know they are right.

Who benefits from the subsidies? In the end, the costs of the subsidies are worn by electricity consumers. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries are the wind companies. They receive this subsidy in the form of renewable energy certificates issued by the federal government when the power is generated and redeemed at market price. Despite the massive subsidies involved, investors are losing faith in these companies. Their share prices have dropped where they do not have other large businesses outside of wind. Raising money for wind projects is now extremely hard, with the only realistic options being to search for Chinese or other state sponsored capital, to fund the developments from profit or to look for more union sponsored money.

Does wind make sense as a source of power generation? One of the questions we need to answer is whether wind turbines are the most economic way to reduce carbon emissions. We can clearly say two things on this: first, the excessive cost of wind turbines makes them uneconomic unless they receive large subsidies relative to other means of reducing emissions; second, we should allow the most economic means of reducing carbon emissions to succeed without favouring one option over another. I will spend more time on both of these points.

Massive subsidies are required to support wind. The raw economics of wind demonstrate what a poor option it is. The cost of producing coal fired power is about $40 per megawatt hour. The cost of producing gas fired power is closer to $60 per megawatt hour, with half the CO2 emissions of coal. The cost of producing electricity from wind is around $100 to $120 per megawatt hour. Low utilisation and high capital costs are the main reasons for this. On top of this, wind requires backup power for times of low generation and this further weakens its economic case. Some argue that the costs of wind generation are coming down. However, the costs of other renewables, particularly solar, are expected to come down much faster. Wind energy is bringing down its costs by increasing the size of the turbines, and this is creating more community unease. If it is true that costs are coming down, let us use wind when it makes sense to do so, not before.

Another way of thinking about the economics of wind is to compare wind with other options for reducing carbon emissions. Using wind to reduce one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions costs around $60 to $80. Other means of reducing emissions cost less than $30—indeed, this government believes it can substantially reduce costs at the current level of carbon tax to around $25. The cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in Europe is below $10 per tonne. So, in order for wind investments to occur, large subsidies are required, and that is not just compared with other means of generating electricity but compared with other means of reducing emissions.

Who pays for these subsidies? These subsidies are built into electricity prices. We all pay more in our bills to subsidise wind and other renewables. The quantity subsidised increases each year and will continue to do so until 2020 at least. By 2020, we estimate that this subsidy could be as large as $3 billion. This will require tripling or more the number of turbines and, in all likelihood, the construction will not happen fast enough to meet the targets. The scale of the subsidies is an important reason for why wind turbines are going out of fashion in countries across the world.

In closing, all I have to say on this very complex subject is that all we need is a leader of strength to recognise that there is a very serious problem with the wind turbine industry in terms of offshore $2 companies ripping off, in a fraudulent way, taxpayers' resources as a way of funding their projects and taking the money offshore with them. The $52 billion that is currently in the system for this renewable energy exercise should be looked at, reconfigured and put into the reconstruction and restructuring of infrastructure in this great country of ours.

Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Under these two additional appropriations bills, the government is seeking to appropriate a further $1.27 billion from consolidated revenue. The reason the government has to make such a substantial raid on consolidated revenue is that, in true Labor fashion, it has once again run out of other people's money to spend. This is hardly surprising from a government that had a $120 billion black hole of unfunded spending promises.

The government has been forced to admit that it has lost control of the country's finances and has walked away from its so-called 'not negotiable' budget surplus promise for 2012-13. This is despite the fact that, on no fewer than 650 occasions, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Treasurer Wayne Swan and finance minister Penny Wong have repeated their promise to deliver a surplus. But broken promises are what this government specialises in. Who could forget the Prime Minister saying, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'? We all know how that turned out. When it comes to broken promises, the Gillard government should take instruction from President Obama's State of the Union Address today. I want to repeat what the Leader of the Opposition also quoted today. President Obama said: 'Our government shouldn't make promises we cannot keep, but we must keep the promises that we've already made.' I also wanted to quote President Obama, because I think that is a very important point. But, regrettably, when it comes to certainty, the Australian people can only depend on the Gillard government to deliver broken promises, budget deficits and more and more waste.

This government has delivered four of the biggest budget deficits in living history, with a cumulative value of $172 billion, which in effect means that the government has spent $172 billion more than it earned over the period. In 2011-12 net debt hit an unprecedented $147 billion. This means that we are paying almost $20 million a day in interest to service that enormous debt. That is an incredible reversal of the state of the health of the nation's finances, given that the government inherited a $20 billion surplus from the Howard government, no net debt and $70 billion in net assets.

In true Labor form, the government has sought to blame everyone else for its budgetary failings, and the excuses range from the GFC to lower world commodity prices and everything in between. But the reality is quite simple: the government does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. The government is now spending more than $90 billion a year more compared to the last year of the Howard government. Federal government revenue is now more than $70 billion higher compared to when Labor took office.

We have seen unprecedented levels of waste from this government and there are some unfortunate examples of Labor's greatest hits when it comes to waste. Thanks to Labor's failed border protection policy, the immigration budget has blown out to $6.6 billion in the last four years. The total cost of the NBN has increased by $3.2 billion, from $40.9 billion to $44.1 billion. Labor has spent more than $69.5 million advertising the carbon tax that the Prime Minister said we were not going to have under a government she led. That is an extra $69.5 million of expense of Labor's own creation. Labor is spending approximately $150 million on spin doctors to sell these failed policies.

The member for Griffith's travel bill in the first 12 months as foreign minister was $1.2 million. The Prime Minister clearly was quite happy to have the Australian taxpayer foot the bill to keep the foreign minister out of the country. And who could ever forget the $2.5 billion pink batt disaster? Then, of course, there is one of my personal favourites: the $2.4 million spent by the Department of Parliamentary Services on staff related and training purposes for courses that included—wait for it—advice on how to get a good night's sleep.

There have been many cuts in services and taxes. Labor has announced 27 new or increased taxes since coming to power. The government has made cuts to crucial areas like research, trades and training. In MYEFO there were cuts of $2 billion. Defence has been severely hit, with a $1.66 billion cut in MYEFO in addition to the $5.5 billion in cuts outlined in the budget. Now the Labor government's surplus pledge is gone we can expect that the spending and the borrowing will continue unabated.

Then there is Labor's plan to borrow $10 billion to spend on high-risk clean energy projects simply to appease the Greens. Labor has made $120 billion worth of unfunded spending promises for things like the NDIS, Gonski and dental services. As I mentioned, Labor also borrowed tens of billions of dollars to fund the rollout of the NBN, which would end up being this nation's greatest white elephant ever. The Treasurer's fiscal incompetence and dishonesty is on display once again—not only has he dumped his own 'iron-clad', 'failure is not an option' 'guarantee' to return the budget to surplus this year but also he personally designed a mining tax. But it is a mining tax that is an absolute dud of a tax. The government has virtually no money to pay for the $15 billion of promises it has linked to the mining tax. When I talk to families and businesses, I hear that the carbon tax is a massive act of economic self-harm. It has made us less competitive, made businesses less profitable and is gouging money out of households as energy prices rise.

The impact on the federal electorate of Brisbane is evident—my electors are suffering from the pain of Labor's economic incompetence. The Gillard government recently agreed to an increase in private health insurance premiums, so families and pensioners will have to pay an extra 5.6 per cent. That will drive more and more people out of the private health insurance sector and onto public hospital waiting lists. Every year under the Rudd-Gillard government Australian families have experienced private health insurance increases above the CPI.

The government is cutting $4 billion from private health over the next four years, with its new means test on the 30 per cent rebate. That will cost families up to an extra $1,200 a year—and this is on top of the latest premium increases, which will cost the average Australian family nearly $200 a year. Private health insurance is now unaffordable for many families in my electorate and for millions of people around the country who have it but earn less than $35,000 a year. This means that, as people quit or downgrade their health insurance, we will see more and more impost, longer and longer waiting lists and more and more demand on services in public hospitals.

There are 71,105 people in the Brisbane electorate, and 76.9 per cent rely on private health insurance. The policies of the Gillard government are putting more and more pressure on them. Many of them will have to review their health insurance, and many may decide to drop or lower their existing cover. The health system is already under pressure due to the Gillard government's $1.6 billion worth of cuts to public hospitals, which included a cut of $3.4 million to the Royal Children's Hospital in my electorate, in Herston. Hospital cutbacks, broken promises on private health insurance and continued private health insurance increases over and above CPI are taking their toll on families and putting more pressure on our hospital system.

Most parents in my electorate deserve affordable child care. Every child deserves a positive start to life. But this government's funding withdrawal for these services means that children with disabilities and special needs will now be placed in a much more difficult situation. Childcare affordability is one of the greatest cost pressures facing working families in my electorate. Waiting lists are getting longer, and there are many barriers for parents wanting to get back into the workforce. Fortunately, coalition policies are aimed at reducing the cost of child care and include a Productivity Commission inquiry reinstating funding cuts for occasional child care and a genuine paid parental leave scheme that will benefit working Australian families.

Three occasional day care centres in my electorate have had their funding cut or withdrawn by the federal government, and that is placing enormous pressure on families. This government is very long on rhetoric, particularly rhetoric about providing flexibility. That is exactly what the funding for these occasional day care centres provided. Families in the inner city area of Brisbane often tell me they want flexibility in their choice of child care, and I know that our paid parental scheme will provide that flexibility and provide child care when and where it is needed.

I am so disappointed that the Gillard government has withdrawn funding for the inclusive support subsidy for children with a disability or a special need. That is devastating for the parents—it means that parents of children with a disability cannot access a childcare place. They deserve a childcare place and the same access as every other child in child care. Despite the additional $1.27 billion of additional revenue this government is seeking from consolidated revenue, its budgetary incompetence has led to a disastrous cut in the health sector. This has hurt constituents in my area. There have been many other cuts, particularly the $390 million cut that removed rebates from lifetime health cover loading. There has been $1 billion robbed in dividends from Medibank that would have put downward pressure on premiums. As I mentioned, there was the $1 billion in cuts from dental health by abandoning chronically-ill patients on the public list and a number of low-income earners in Brisbane. Pensioners have been left high and dry by this devastating decision. Hundreds of millions in multiple cuts to the Medicare safety net, including maternity and IVF areas, limiting new medicines onto the PBS by politicising the process and a $1.6 billion cut, as I mentioned earlier, which has placed severe revenue restrictions on the Royal Children's Hospital. The dental health scheme has been a devastating development, particularly for those families.

I also want to talk about the cuts to the Department of Defence. Since 2009 the government has cut $24.5 billion from the Department of Defence budget. Apart from the obvious and alarming impacts these monstrous cuts have on the capability of the ADF, they have also impacted on the ability of the Department of Defence to contribute $5.4 million for a new entrance to the barracks off Samford Road to Enoggera Barracks. On 26 June last year Premier Newman announced revised plans for the Samford Road-Wardell intersection, which would include a new entrance to the Enoggera Army Barracks. Under this commitment the Queensland government would spend $65 million to upgrade two intersections at Enoggera to ease traffic congestion on Samford Road.

Senator Feeney, the Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, indicated in correspondence to the Queensland government that Defence would possibly contribute $5.4 million for the new entrance, but as yet there is no definite commitment for this money and seemingly there will be no commitment as a result of these bills. Regrettably, Senator Feeney refused again today in Senate estimates to provide an unequivocal commitment from the Gillard government to contribute $5.4 million to the project. Once again we see how this government's fiscal mismanagement has let down the hard-working men and women of the ADF at Enoggera Barracks, my constituents who live in the surrounding suburbs and who have to suffer incredible traffic congestion and the people of Brisbane as a whole. That is what you would expect from a government that is broke. The never-ending smorgasbord of service cuts just keep coming and coming. There is hope.

When 14 September comes around, Australians will get a chance to return the coalition to power. We will restore public finances, get rid of the waste and get Australia back on a fiscally responsible path. The coalition has a record; we have great credentials to stand on; we have done it before. We left a $20 billion surplus, no net debt and an unemployment rate of around four per cent. We did it before, and we will do it again. (Time expired)

Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do appreciate the opportunity to speak on these appropriation bills. I always say to our state candidates or to the school children who I speak to across Cowan that what we do here in the federal parliament is no game. It may appear to be a bit of a competition, a bit of a football match at times, but the reality is that the decisions that are made here actually impact out there on the ground on the lives of ordinary people. As members of parliament we should always remember that our job is not to be lord of the manor in our local areas but in fact to be the chief servant of those people in those areas. We are here to make the lives of ordinary Australians better. The reality of this is that we need to put in place measures that are going to have positive impacts across the whole broad spectrum of government. We are meant to be here to make sure people's lives are somehow better than they were before. In reference to that, I have heard on many occasions speeches by members of the current government about the terrible things the Howard government was responsible for—this is after the government last changed back to the coalition in 1996. I was in the Army at that stage, but when we look back on those times we must keep in mind that, if a mess is left, someone needs to clean it up. For those who leave the mess to then complain about the measures required to clean it up is pretty rich.

In this appropriations debate, we are talking about what is happening with the government's fiscal position right now, and it is a mess in every respect. A couple of us in the chamber have been here for the last five budgets, and on every occasion the figures in those budget speeches have proved to be wildly inaccurate. Excluding last year's budget, the other four budget speeches and positions that were outlined represent some $147 billion in collective deficits. As for the last one, at one point it was estimated to be a $22 billion deficit and then it turned out to be a $44 billion deficit. Now the government has clearly moved completely away from the promised, much-vaunted budget surplus and we can expect yet another budget in the red.

While some might say this is an economic problem, it is also obviously a political problem for the government. When the finance minister, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer say on 650 occasions that there is a cast-iron guarantee of a surplus—you make the big call and lift everything up to the highest levels, creating high expectations—and then that does not work out, you fall a lot further.

It is little wonder then that it was reported today, in the Financial Review, I believe, that the Edelman Trust Barometer for 2013—a survey of 31,000 people from around the world, across 26 countries, about trust and, in particular, trustworthiness in government—reveals that, of those 26 countries, in only one has the level of trust in the government fallen, and that is Australia. If we look at what has happened over the last three years, and even longer from a budget perspective, it is little wonder that confidence in this country is flailing.

As I have outlined, the budgets have been way off the mark, and I suspect that by the time we get to the final budget position—or the post-election budget position, anyway—we will find every budget and every MYEFO to be wildly inaccurate. So it is little wonder that the Australian people no longer have confidence in this government with regard to fiscal matters. The Prime Minister knows only too well that, when you promise things before an election, people do tend to remember them, particularly when it gets reported on the front pages of newspapers.

The government have a problem not only with fiscal issues and inaccurate budgets but also with their promises about things like 'no carbon tax'. I do not wish to labour this as it is certainly very clear in the minds of every person in this country, but what the Prime Minister promised and the Treasurer said before the election have been completely brushed aside. There has been plenty of spin, but the reality is that everybody remembers what was promised and what was delivered, and there is no correlation between the two.

Before I move on from the carbon tax being an issue of trust and a big problem for the government, it has also been reported that the falling carbon credit price across the world will account for another $4 billion of revenue that the government will not receive over the forward estimates. In fact the broken promise on the carbon tax is now having an impact upon the budget, so when the budget is being dragged down by the carbon tax as well that is another good reason that when Tony Abbott says there will be no carbon tax under a government he leads that is something the Australian people should well and truly welcome.

My next point is the mining tax. Again this was meant to be the great redistribution of wealth concept that the government likes to push. This was a big problem for the government before the 2010 election, but it did a few deals, worked a few things out and managed to quieten down the campaign against the mining tax. That deal was signed off by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and, as we know, the officials, the people who really knew what was going on, were left outside and the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister of this country, accepted full responsibility for this tax which the Treasurer stands behind still. They stuffed it up. They were more than happy to commit $15 billion of spending to this mining tax across the forward estimates. They believed that they were going to get $2 billion during this financial year alone, but as we know just $126 million of revenue has been accrued from the first six months of the tax. The costs of administering the tax will take away a fair bit of that as well. We will get to what that means for the Australian people soon, but I make the point again that this is the Prime Minister's and the Treasurer's tax, it did not work out, it stuffed up and we will see how accountable they are for their errors.

I also want to raise the matter of border security. I have spoken on this on many occasions since 2008, when the government changed the policy and suddenly boats started arriving. Ever since the current Prime Minister took over and ditched the former Prime Minister with the support Paul Howse and the union people, there has been something like $6.6 billion in blowouts to the budget. Across the forward estimates the government has estimated that some $5 billion would be saved because things would be so much better, but at the start of 2013 if anything the acceleration of their arrival of illegal immigrants by boat has been at record levels. There have been some 900 in just the last five or six weeks. The genie has not come out of the bottle, no-one has found the lamp to rub to try and find the answer, but fortunately we do have the answer because the answer worked last time. This government unwound it, but before it was unwound it was working. We do not need three wishes, we just need one election. The reality is that we have a government that suffers from a problem with regards to trust and that trust, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer and the 1,000 people in Australia who were surveyed, relates to poor performance and accountability. I know that this government tends to look at our questioning of them, our constructive criticism of them as being negative. It is easy to push that away, because if you talk about negativity then you do not have to accept accountability. Again, that is the problem that this country has at the moment with this government.

When we look through these matters—the budget and the failures over the five years of the budgets with all the figures; the carbon tax that was not meant to be but is and which makes the climate and this country no better, and in fact the budget worse off; a mining tax that has been a complete failure; and border security, which has also been an abject failure—we see that we have a situation where this government is borrowing a lot of money and that the debt this government is accruing will have to be paid for by the generations to come. It will have to be paid for by showing some restraint in spending in the future.

As I said at the start, when someone creates a mess it is rough for them, having created the mess, to then complain about measures used by the next person who has to clean up that mess. In amongst this, what we have is a situation where the government has built very high expectations with regard to education. According to Gonsky, billions of dollars a year will be required, and there is an expectation that that is all going to be paid for. But this government is bleeding cash at the moment and how they are going to plan to do this is not yet clear. At the same time, with regard to the interest payments that have been accrued through all these deficits—some $7 billion a year in interest payments alone—just counter that against how much the NDIS estimate cost. You can then see that maybe the downside for all this reckless spending, this inaccuracy in the budget figures, this inability to control borders, spending et cetera, is starting to have an impact upon real people. Those people who are in need of an NDIS, who have been promised it by this government, are going to be the ones who are going to be let down by the spending regime of this government and the failures of this government's policies.

I will go back to where I started, which was about our position. Our job as members of parliament, as members of a government or an opposition, is to make the people's lives in this country better. That is our duty, and that is why we are here. If we put things in place and make mistakes that are not going to make the people's lives in this country better, then we should step out of the way and give someone a go who will do a better job?

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

I rise—I would say with gladness but unfortunately I cannot—because of what is contained in the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013. It is a case of saddling up again for another spending expedition by the Gillard Labor government. Together these bills load an additional $1.27 billion in expenses into the economy's saddlebags—that is, $600.8 million in Appropriation Bill (No. 3) for, amongst other things, offshore asylum seeker management and visa compliance, with a bill of $37 million; visa and migration services and refugee settlement, with a bill of $23 million; increased water protection capability, with a bill of $24 million; and $19 million to help the Australian Taxation Office funnel potentially lost superannuation member accounts into government revenue.

Appropriation Bill (No. 4) will add a further $660 million worth of weight to the economic saddlebags—that is right, $660 million, the mark of the beast. I am starting to wonder, with all this lead in the saddlebags when the pony is going to crumble under the weight. Already the economy is straining under the weight of the biggest government debt ever on record. Already the Gillard, and previously the Rudd, Labor government has delivered the four biggest budget deficits on record, back to back. So they are on a roll, and who is at the reins? Economically speaking, it is the Treasurer—he is the culprit. The same Treasurer that abysmally failed to balance the books under the former Prime Minister, the member for Griffith, and who is continuing to be an abysmal failure for the current Prime Minister.

The reason behind that consistent failure and the consistent failure of the Labor Party is the fact that they only know one thing: they know how to tax and spend. 'Wasteful' Wayne—or the Treasurer, I should say, is a one-trick pony, and if I could borrow a line from that great musician Paul Simon:

One trick is all that horse can do.

Paul Simon might have had a premonition when he released the song One Trick Pony back in 1980—because that was before the member for Longman was born—and, as we all know, we have not seen a Labor government deliver a surplus in his lifetime. Just before Labor delivered their last surplus, Paul Simon wrote these words:

He's a one trick pony

One trick is all that horse can do

He does one trick only

It's the principal source of his revenue

That is exactly what we have in this Labor Treasurer: a pony whose only source of revenue is to tax

In five years, the Rudd and Gillard governments have done nothing to increase revenue other than tax. They have done nothing to grow the economy. They have done nothing to help manufacturing be more productive, nothing to encourage tourism in this country—and I acknowledge the shadow tourism minister here in the room—and nothing to boost agriculture. Instead, to find the extra revenue they need to feed their out-of-control spending habits, they simply jack up the taxes. Not content with taxing families alone, they borrow more money and they are adding to the debt that will be serviced and repaid by taxing the next generation. Today's debt, Labor's debt, is tomorrow's taxes; plain and simple.

The Gillard government is trying to convince us they are a low-taxing government, and there are two problems with making that claim. Firstly, the spending this year will be 23.8 per cent of GDP—that is $90 billion more than the last budget of the Howard government. It is all funded by taxes, as I said, taxes on families today and taxes on the next generation. The debt is tomorrow's taxes—that is how it is paid off. It is one trick and one trick only, and people can see through that trick and they are getting pretty sick of it. They are getting sick of it, because the things that they need are not being funded.

The infrastructure we need for a strong and prosperous Australia will never be funded by this government, because they are too busy trying to cling to power, too busy giving out cash to people in blatant vote-buying exercises and trying to hide the fact that it is the same money that they have actually taken away from them, only some of it got wasted in the process.

The legacy that this Labor government has built so far is an annual interest bill of $7 billion a year, $7 billion they have to tax Australians every year just to pay back the interest on the debt that they created in five years. In simple terms, it is $800,000 an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week—that is the interest bill. The biggest boom the country has ever seen, and Labor has created a debt so big it costs us $800,000 an hour in interest. While the wealth producing sectors and regions in the economy are crying out for infrastructure, we are wasting $800,000 an hour every hour in interest.

If 'Wasteful' Wayne had never taken the reins of this one-trick pony, we would have had $800,000 every hour available to spend on something important like the Bruce Highway in Queensland. In three days the money that could have fixed, say, Sandy Gully, a section on the Bruce Highway that floods every time there is a heavy shower, cutting off the port of Abbot Point from workers based in Mackay or nearby Bowen. In just over 18 days, those interest repayments on Labor's debt could have fully funded floodproofing the Goorganga Plains, which separates the Whitsunday Coast Airport from the Whitsunday Coast—one of our prime tourism destinations—or it could have been used to replace the Haughton River bridge in the Burdekin and floodproofed the approaches. In just over three weeks, those interest repayments on Labor's debt could have fully funded the Mackay ring road, a project that would make the region, which is producing so much wealth, even more productive. The ring road would connect an intensive industrial centre servicing the mines of the Bowen Basin while keeping dangerous heavy vehicles off local roads. These are big projects. They are important projects for the continued development of the wealth in this country, but, faced with the challenge of a shrinking income, the government plays to its strengths. It resorts to the only thing it knows: increase taxes and borrow more money, which taxes our children before they are even born.

At the same time as racking up debt and raising taxes, the Gillard Labor government still manage to cut funding for essential services. In the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, which the Treasurer delivered in October last year, we saw federal government cuts to state health funding. They cut the funding they were delivering to the states, not just from this year but from the last year as well. Current and retrospective cuts to the national health reform fund and the national healthcare special purpose payment leave the states copping the blame for federal Labor's savage cuts to health. In the 2012-13 budget released in May, the national healthcare special purpose payment for Queensland, for that year alone, was $2.545 billion. But, when that year's final budget outcome was released in September, the figure was reduced to $2.505 billion, a cut of $40 million. Again in the 2012-13 budget released in May, the national health reform funding for Queensland was supposed to be $2.724 billion, but when the Treasurer released MYEFO in October that figure was reduced to $2.661 billion, a cut of $63 million. So, combined, Queensland is forced to pass on federal Labor's health cuts of $103 million to regions that only have half a year in which to make up those savings.

In my electorate, the Gillard Labor government's health cuts translate to a $3.2 million cut to the Mackay Hospital and Health Service—a cut to their budget midway through the year. I have spoken to the independent chairman of the board of the hospital in Mackay and he has confirmed that the board is deliberating this month on how to find those savings. It is a real cut and his board has to find real savings, either by cutting staff, which is a prospect they do not want to face but may be forced to, or by cutting services at probably all the hospitals—the Mackay Base Hospital, the Sarina hospital, the Proserpine Hospital, the Bowen Hospital and the Warrambah hospital as well.

The Townsville Hospital and Health Service, in the northern part of my electorate, also face federal Labor health cuts of $7.8 million this year. They have already said that the cuts are going to be borne by numerous things, one of which is a cutback to the number of free bandages they hand out to patients. The federal government's cut means fewer bandages for patients. It is just disgraceful. How much can be saved by cutting back on those bandages I do not know—I do not think it will amount to much, actually. At some point, they will have to go further and find more savings. I have to say that it is truly disappointing to watch the Queensland Nurses Union just sitting on the sidelines on this issue, because everyone apart from them acknowledges that these are real cuts. It just shows that they are beholden to the Labor Party.

In the town of Home Hill in the Burdekin, which the Townsville health board services, they have this fantastic little local hospital, the Home Hill Hospital. It is a marginal hospital in terms of costs. It is quite possible that this hospital will have to be looked at and could suffer quite drastically when it comes to finding savings for the $7.8 million Gillard Labor government to the Townsville Health and Hospital Service. We are going to have to fight for the survival of that hospital because of this. These are the real things that are happening on the ground in my electorate because of the savage cuts imposed on health services right throughout Queensland. The Gillard Labor government are happy to roll out cuts to services across wealth-producing regions in North Queensland, but then they try to blame it on the state governments. It will not work. There has been no attempt to increase revenue from the region by fostering growth and investing in infrastructure and industry. In fact, we had the bizarre situation in the parliament last week when the Assistant Treasurer said spending money on infrastructure in North Queensland was investing in white elephants—white elephants, that is what he said. My North Queensland colleague the member for Herbert rightly challenged the Assistant Treasurer to nominate exactly which infrastructure projects in North Queensland he considered would be white elephants. I suggest that if the Assistant Treasurer should ever head north to explain himself to North Queenslanders he would have to leave the boat in the marina and take a drive on the Bruce Highway. The Bruce is the lifeblood of the north and responsible for an enormous amount of wealth generation. When it fails it is an obstacle to wealth generation. Investing in infrastructure like the Bruce Highway, our national highway, is not investing in a white elephant, it is investing in the future. It is investing in revenue streams that do not involve increasing taxes and taxing the next generation, taxing our children. In 2½ years this Labor government has done nothing positive that I can see.

The Gillard Labor government is focused on taxing the wealth creators. Instead of playing to Australia's strengths and supporting mining, supporting manufacturing, they have played to their strengths, taxing and waste. They have taxed the mining industry, creating uncertainty although delivering no money, but it has created a sovereign risk, deterring investment and costing jobs. There are 3,400 of them that the Queensland Resources Council said had been lost from across my state. They have taxed every business in the country with a carbon tax, every household in the country with a carbon tax on their electricity bills. You cannot tax a country into prosperity. If tax and waste is the only trick the Labor government can perform, it will never lead us to prosperity. It will lead to a slump, it will lead to lower GDP, decreased revenues, yet more tax and more cuts to services. What this country needs is a plan for a stronger, more prosperous economy through supporting and developing our strengths.

I spent the last two years travelling around my electorate of Dawson talking with families and engaging with industries and locals, and it is clear that North Queenslanders feel that the government has lost its way and continues to lose its way. Through conversations and surveys and other forms of engagement my constituents are telling me that the government lacks vision. They say this government lacks a plan for the future. North Queenslanders have also told me about their concerns, their hopes and their dreams. Through two years of information gathering, through community surveys, forums, my Fix the Bruce campaign where I had a comprehensive survey of the electorate on the Bruce Highway, through business forums, responses from newsletters. And I have got a whole of the electorate survey going out at the moment which has had a great response. We have had thousands of surveys flood back in. All that information I am going to use to create a roadmap for the region. That will be the plan I will be pushing for the next government to commit to for the benefit of my electorate and the nation as a whole, as we are a wealth generating region. The things that are going to be in that plan will be what the community wants and a lot of them I been talking about for the last two years in this place. But the Labor government has failed to listen to me and to the people and has failed to address those important issues. North Queensland, North Australia and Australia as a whole will not realise their full potential when saddled with a government that knows only one thing. It is time to put the one-trick pony out to pasture and it is time to get on with the job.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to speak to the Appropriation Bills (No. 3) and (No. 4) 2012-13, bills that seek to appropriate $1.7 billion for government departments and agencies. These are additional expenditure requirements which have arisen since the May budget was brought down. This Labor government, the highest spending government in Australian history—in fact they will spend over $90 billion more this year than the last budget of the Howard government—is once again asking for more money. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-13 seeks to appropriate $600.8 million arising from changes in the estimates of program expenditure, variations in the timing of payments, increases in forecasted program takeup and policy decisions taken by the government since the last budget. Appropriation Bill (No. 4) seeks appropriations totalling $666.36 million and includes $32 million in capital funding to expand the immigration detention network. For the layman, this simply means they have wasted the money and want more.

We on this side of the House, we the members of the fiscally responsible party of Australia, the coalition, left Labor with a $20 billion surplus and no net debt. Perhaps if we were watching an American sitcom or a satire on the governing of some Third World country, I would be smiling. I am not smiling and this is not a sitcom, although the past Labor years have certainly had the characters and the plots for a blockbuster Australian sitcom, the title of which may go along the lines of 'Dummy's Guide to Destroying the Country.' This government has created so much chaos in the political sphere that it—the chaos—has become the norm. Perhaps late at night in the corridors of this House, the Labor Party members listen to the Sex Pistols and live by the quotes of Sid Vicious:

Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don’t let them take you alive.

Before anyone asks, I am not a fan of the Sex Pistols, I just like interesting quotations.

Speaking of interesting quotations, on no fewer than 650 occasions did the Prime Minister, Wayne Swan the Treasurer and Penny Wong repeat their promise to deliver a surplus. Yes, 650 times the most senior of the Labor Party spruiked their budget surplus. Then, in the hope that Christmas festivities would detract from the announcement, Mr Swan, our Treasurer—the same Mr Swan who collected the world's best treasurer award—declared there would be no surplus after all. Rather than admit fault and take the blame for the use of wasteful spending and poor fiscal management, our Treasurer chose to blame 'a huge revenue whack…out of the blue.' Out of the blue? What blue is Mr Swan talking of? Is it the dark blue cloud of despair all Australians have been living under since Labor started wasting taxpayers' money. That is the only blue I can think our Treasurer was referencing because no thinking person—especially the world's best treasurer—would have imagined or believed, even in their wildest dreams, that this Labor government would deliver a promise, let alone a surplus. This government has delivered the four biggest budget deficits in history, with a cumulative value of $172 billion—meaning, in effect, that the government has spent $172 billion more than it has earned over this period. History tells us that this government did not have a revenue problem, it just has a revenue forecasting and spending problem. It has consistently assumed unrealistically high levels of future revenue, spent at those levels, and then cried, 'Woe is me,' when the politically inspired forecasts are not realised. The Prime Minister, in an election advertisement in 2010, stated:

Most importantly, I'll ensure the budget is in surplus by 2013.

In 2011, the same Prime Minister said in a speech:

My commitment to a surplus in 2012-13 was a promise made and it will be honoured

And then, in a speech I am sure she would rather forget, the Prime Minister in an address to the McKell Institute in July 2012 said:

We saved jobs, stayed out of recession and got back to surplus.

That was wishful thinking, I would say. This Labor government's own economic benchmark for the past three years has been a surplus in 2012-13. Now we are looking at world's best treasurer delivering his fifth consecutive deficit and Labor's 11th out of its last 11 budgets—surely a track record one would not be proud of.

Every year in office this government has increased its borrowings. The face value of Commonwealth securities on issue has increased from around $60 billion under the last years of the coalition government to over a quarter of a trillion dollars today. Labor has sought to increase the limit on the government's debt ceiling on four separate occasions. In 2008, the limit was amended to $75 billion. This was increased in 2009 to $200 billion. In 2011, the government increased this limit yet again to $250 billion. Finally, in the last budget they increased this limit to a record of $300 million. I am not a mathematician or an economic guru but I, along with the majority of Australians, have common sense; and common sense tells me that if you consistently spend more than you have, you are going to go broke. That is what we on this side of the House have been telling everyone for years. Australia is going broke at a rate of knots under this Labor government. Today's debt is tomorrow's taxes, and we know this government is not shy about introducing new taxes. This Labor government has announced 27 new or increased taxes since coming to power. I imagine you could find a lost tribe buried under the maze of paperwork shuffled around as they rob Peter to pay Paul. As George Bernard Shaw once said:

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

I suggest that the people of Durack, the largest electorate in Australia, my electorate, are sick of this government robbing them to pay for not only their eastern seaboard mistakes but, in the case of live exports, their international mistakes. I say 'mistakes' kindly—perhaps it is more so a direct act of Greens-hugging treachery.

The profound financial impact on graziers and associated businesses from the government's decision to ban live cattle exports to Indonesia on 7 June 2011 cannot be underestimated. In excess of 9,000 direct jobs are created by the live export trade throughout rural and regional Australia, and for every one direct job created in live export another 1.6 jobs are created in the wider community. Now we hear during Senate estimates that the aid package paid by the Australian government to Indonesia is to increase productivity in the Indonesian cattle industry. It actually exceeded the amount put into the northern Australian cattle industry as compensation for the shocking knee-jerk reaction in 2011 with the live export ban. This city-centric government has allocated $20 million to the Indonesian beef industry to improve its productivity but to date has allocated a mere $12.7 million to the Australian industry. It would appear our taxpayers' money is being used to boost another country's industry to the detriment of our own. It makes no sense to me or my constituents—in fact, little that this government does makes sense.

Where is the sense in unravelling strong and secure border protection policies—policies that worked so well during the Howard years? Already 2013 has seen more people arrive by illegal boats than was seen at the start of any other year on record, with more than 900 people having arrived since 1 January. This follows a record calendar year of boat arrivals in 2012, with 17,270 people landing on our shores. Since 2008, when Labor unravelled the secure border protection policy, and up until the end of 2012, Australia has seen the arrival of 546 illegal boats. Based on the 2011-12 figures, every boat is on average costing the taxpayer $12.8 million; $6.5 billion of taxpayers money has been wasted on trying to fix a problem that did not exist. There is no sense in reinventing the wheel. There never has been and never will be.

This government should admit it is wrong and that the Howard government was right and stop throwing good taxpayer money after bad. This government should be improving hospitals, increasing the educational opportunities for regional students and relieving Australian families of the cost of living burden rather than supporting economic opportunists who arrive on our shores and then knock on doors for more concessions.

Speaking of knocking on doors: people in this country and Durack in particular, in the days before the bungled minerals resource rent tax was introduced, used to have investors knocking on their doors, wanting to invest in the low sovereign risk minerals and resources industries of Australia. Now investors are comparing us with Africa and often deciding that that destination is more secure. Miners are already paying more tax than any other company structure in Australia. They are paying around 46c in the dollar when most companies are paying 30c in the dollar. Miners are paying billions and billions of dollars in royalties to states.

The mining tax, the bad tax, which resulted from a bad process, is complex, costly to administer, inefficient and does not raise any meaningful revenue. Yet the world's best Treasurer—and, Deputy Speaker, I am quite sure you know that I use that descriptive term with tongue firmly in cheek—yes, the Treasurer, Mr Swan, has spent all the money he stated the tax would raise, and more. The government wined and dined voters on money it did not have. Rather than the $2 billion the tax was expected to raise this half, it in fact gave a return of a paltry $126 million.—less than five per cent of the projected income. Considering the company tax forgone, plus the cost of administration, this is an economic blunder of monumental proportions.

It appears to me that this Labor government, rather than encouraging and supporting entrepreneurial Australians and companies, disparages and taxes them. We on this side of the House take a different approach. We like to support those individuals and companies who do well, for who else will finance this government's passive welfare mentality, a mentality that has bred contempt rather than admiration for those who succeed? It seems that across the eastern seaboard the tall poppy syndrome is alive and well. How dare there be rich people in Australia? How dare there be companies who have had a go? It seems that an army of spin doctors—about 1,600 as at 13 August 2012, staff employed by federal departments and agencies in media, communications, marketing and public affairs roles—on which this government spends $150 million a year, are earning their keep.

The following is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but some say the words are actually those of William Boetcker, a German born Presbyterian clergyman. Deputy Speaker, I will let you be the judge of the origin. I quote:

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.

You cannot establish security on borrowed money.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

I add my own to these words of truth and wisdom: you cannot live in a debt-free Australia with Labor at the helm.

The Prime Minister herself said, 'You can't run this country if you can't manage the budget.' I imagine that the history books, when written, will not favour this dark period in Australian politics, this dark period of debt, untruths and wastefulness. This government is a Clayton's government, living under Clayton's rules, full of Clayton's promises and Clayton's surpluses. It truly is the government you have when you do not have a government.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to address Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-2013 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-2013, which together are termed the additional estimates appropriation bills. These bills seek to appropriate funds from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for additional expenditure requirements that have arisen since the last budget. In total these bills seek to appropriate $1.27 billion for government departments and agencies.

I think it is timely when considering these bills to discuss Labor's record on economic management—or should I more correctly say economic mismanagement, to be exactly precise? When the government walked away from its so-called non-negotiable budget surplus promise for the next financial year, it was an admission that it had lost control of the economy. It lost control through wasteful and excessive spending, long after the global financial crisis gave it cover to do so. We have seen unprecedented levels of waste from this government: pink batts, overpriced school halls, cheques to dead people, blow-outs on border protection and, in my electorate of Paterson, an absolute mismanagement of the digital television switchover. These are symbols of this government's incompetence.

This government has delivered the four biggest budget deficits in our nation's history, with a cumulative value of $172 billion. Labor is now the highest spending government in Australia's history. At first it could almost get away with it because the previous coalition government left it with a $20 billion surplus, zero net debt and an unemployment rate of around four per cent. But now the continued economic mismanagement of this government is hurting the country. It is hurting every Australian, reaching right down to every constituent in Paterson, with the rising costs of living. I cannot stand by while Labor spends millions on a 'Get digital ready' television advertising campaign, for example, but invests a pittance in upgrading or installing new regional television towers in areas like Paterson, ignoring my warnings to upgrade them and address the issue at a local level. In November last year the analog television signal switched off in Paterson. For well over a year beforehand I repeatedly warned the government that entire suburbs would be without television reception if the digital towers in the area were not fully upgraded and more installed. This came on top of extensive delays for those residents who were eligible for the Household Assistance Scheme. Many pensioners, older Australians, veterans, and people with a disability and their carers were forced to wait months for the promised high-definition set-top box, demonstration of the new equipment and instructions on how to use it—and the 12-month warranty service and technical support. Once these residents finally received the Household Assistance Scheme package there were still problems and my office has been inundated with calls from residents whose television reception has actually worsened.

So after waiting months for a service promised to them by this government, a large number of these people have found that the service they were provided was subpar either because their antenna was aligned incorrectly or because their area actually receives very little digital television reception. Many of my constituents in Anna Bay were visited multiple times by government contracted technicians under the HAS scheme who, at first, aligned antennas in the area to the Mt Sugarloaf transmitter, which is almost 70 kilometres away, and provided very, very poor reception. This was done just weeks before the new self-help transmitter was due to be installed in Anna Bay itself. After multiple representations from my office on the half my constituents the technicians returned to these households and realigned the antennas to the new local transmitter.

The mind boggles at the kind of waste and mismanagement. I would love to know what the cost to the Australian taxpayer is for every return visit made by a government contracted technicians carrying out the HAS package. The waste and mismanagement continues. Just last week my office was contacted by Brian Hansford of Corlette in the Port Stephens area. This is a notorious black spot for digital television reception in my electorate, the subject of many speeches in this House. Many residents in these black spots are simply unable to pick up a digital television signal because of the geographical features of the local area. For these residents, the government subsidised Viewer Access Satellite Television—VAST—scheme and it is their only option.

After trying a range of things to get digital television reception, including an antenna, mast and booster, Mr Hansford was approved for the VAST scheme last month, after first being concerned he would not be granted approval and contacting my office for some help. After contacting the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, we confirmed that Mr Hansford was eligible to access VAST. But just last week Mr Hansford called my office to advise his application for VAST had been rejected.

The time line goes like this: Mr Hansford applies for VAST then calls my office because he is concerned his application will be rejected; my office confirms with Senator Conroy's office that he is eligible for the VAST; someone from the government's Digital Switchover Taskforce calls Mr Hansford and confirms his application will be approved. Then one week later Mr Hansford is told by VAST that his application has been rejected. This whole confused mess has come about because of the government's mismanagement of every aspect of the Digital Television Switchover, including their decision to waste millions of taxpayers' dollars on an advertising campaign to make themselves look good instead of investing in more television transmission towers.

What are Paterson residents who are not eligible for the Household Assistance Scheme meant to do now they have outlaid hundred or indeed thousands of dollars upgrading their televisions and antenna, like the government instructed them to do? They spent this money to get digital ready because the government told them to do so. The government, in fact, spent millions of on an advertising campaign to promote the switch-over and the steps Australians needed to take to continue to receive television services. What the government did not tell my constituents was that they were spending millions of dollars on positive PR campaigns and little or nothing on upgrading television towers servicing large parts of my electorate of Paterson. The areas of Bulahdelah, Tomaree Peninsula, Tilligerry Peninsula, Medowie, Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest, Booral, Brandy Hill, Dungog—all have a high number of residents who are unable to access sufficient digital television reception. My constituents have done everything right. They have upgraded their televisions, they have installed new antennas, and they have paid for boosters, set-top boxes and the increasing energy prices that now go along with operating their televisions, yet they have patchy or zero reception, where before they received a perfect signal from the analog system. I have contacted the minister many times with regard to regional upgrade requirements in these areas, but until such time as upgrades happen, if indeed they happen at all, my constituents are experiencing very poor and, in some cases, zero reception. This is a very serious matter. My constituents rely on their televisions for entertainment and as their news source, including news on events such as natural disasters. This is particularly so for older Australians, who make up a very high percentage of residents in the Paterson area. Depriving these people of television reception, after advising them to spend money they do not have to upgrade their existing television, is both irresponsible and heartless.

That is not to mention the community based nursing homes and lodges in my electorate, places like Bulahdelah Nursing Home, whose residents' only source of outside entertainment and communication is their television. There is no subsidy for these residences or the nursing homes. And what use is a VAST system when the local news is not broadcast until after 8 pm. Country people need local news and information at six o'clock, like the rest of the nation. To date I have made over 250 representations to Senator Conroy's office on behalf of my constituents, and that is only a small part of the number of people who have actually contacted my office. They have all experienced dramatically worse television reception since the switch-off of the analog signal. Make no mistake; this is one of the biggest problems in my electorate of Paterson at the moment. Local newspapers, the Port Stephens Examiner, the Maitland Mercury, the Dungog Chronicle, the Gloucester Advocate, the Great Lakes Advocate and the Myall Nota, have all covered this issue and are eagerly awaiting a solution to the problem, as indeed we all are.

The government's digital switch-over task force has attempted to explain away the reception problems in Paterson as a result of atmospheric ducting, meaning that on a hot and windy day signals from distant transmitter sites are carried further than normal, causing interference. I refuse to accept that it is my constituents who should accept poor television reception every time it is hot and windy, which is often the case in coastal areas like Port Stephens.

On the day the analog signals were switched off in Paterson, Nerida O'Loughlin from the Digital Ready Executive Director, appeared on ABC Newcastle and said:

The Government put in place a strong framework for introducing digital. Firstly the broadcasters are required under law to provide signal for digital which are equivalent coverage to what they had for analog.

Fail, fail, fail.

Under law, broadcasters must provide the same level of coverage that was provided by the analog signals before the switch-over. This has simply not happened and the minister is doing nothing about it. Last month I wrote to Senator Conroy and asked what the government was doing to ensure it keeps its promises and forced broadcasters to provide equivalent coverage under the digital television system. I am yet to receive a response. But actions speak louder than words. I am out there every day fighting for my constituents on this issue while the government has been conspicuously silent. I have used the term 'economic mismanagement' throughout this speech but, now, when I use this term in connection with the government I am not only referring to their incompetent administration of the digital television switch-over; I am also referring to the way that they have placed backroom deals and pork-barrelling above the interests of the people. Three years ago, Labor needed the member for Lyne, Rob Oakeshott, to help them form a government. Since that time, they have ignored the needs of Australians living in areas adjacent to the Lyne electorate in favour of pouring money into Mr Oakeshott's region.

The Bucketts Way is a road around 150 kilometres long. It runs from Tinonee near Taree in the Lyne electorate to Twelve Mile Creek near Medowie in my own electorate. It passes through the town of Gloucester in the electorate of Lyne. When the previous coalition government delivered $20 for funding upgrades to the Bucketts Way road, four council areas—Taree, Gloucester in the north, and Great Lakes and Port Stephens in the south—worked together to get the job done. The works were along the entire length of the road.

The Labor government allocated a further $10 million in funding for the Buckets Way, and guess where it all went. That is right. It went straight into Taree and Gloucester, which makes up about half the length of the road. Great Lakes and Port Stephens received nothing, despite Great Lakes preparing the report for the funding submission. The member for Lyne needs to understand that his constituents, particularly those in Gloucester, drive the entire length of Bucketts Way; they do not stop at the border of my electorate. They travel to Newcastle in the south and to Taree in the north. Upgrading the whole road and making it safe for everybody who travels on that road should be the priority. What is needed is passing lanes along the whole length of the road, not just in the member for Lyne's electorate.

Indeed, trucks from Armidale are now travelling to Newcastle via Thunderbolts Way and then Bucketts Way, because it is quicker for them to do so. This has increased not only the general traffic load on Bucketts Way but the heavy traffic load. Upgrading the entire length of the road and installing passing lanes is more pressing than ever before in the light of the safety concerns this presents. Yet these safety concerns mean nothing to the government and the member for Lyne, who are only concerned with shoring up their respective positions.

This latest injection of funds into Bucketts Way was not based on need nor on the report. It was based on looking after the best interests of this government and the member for Lyne, at the expense of anyone else who uses that road outside the Taree and Gloucester areas.

The additional estimates appropriation bills before us today have brought about a timely discussion of this government's economic mismanagement. The abandonment of a surplus that Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Penny Wong promised, on 650 occasions, that they would deliver is tantamount to an admission that they have lost control of the nation's finances. Members even put out glossy brochures claiming that they had actually delivered a surplus—more mendacious statements from a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who, remember, promised: 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.'

Federal government revenue is now more than $70 billion higher than it was when Labor took office. Yet, in 2011-12, net debt hit an unprecedented $147 billion. Regardless of the government's rhetoric it has a spending and a forecasting problem, not a revenue problem.

The mismanagement of the digital television switchover in the electorate of Paterson and the backroom deals that see funding directed to electorates based on anything other than need are both indicative of this government's economic approach. And, as we have seen, the approach is definitely not working. Given that it took over a decade to pay off the $96 billion debt that we inherited from the Keating government, I hate to think how many generations to come will have to suffer as we pay off this massive and mounting debt that this government cares very little about in accumulating on behalf of this nation.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2012-13 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2012-13. These two bills afford me the opportunity to speak on the general economic direction of our country and the gross incompetence that this Labor government has shown in managing the economy.

Firstly, with their Green partners, the Labor Party and the world's best Treasurer have managed to legislate a tax that raises almost no revenue. Instead of stealing $1 billion from miners over the first six months of this financial year to cover their budget black holes, the minerals resource rent tax raised only $126 million. Worse, the tax has cost the Australian tax office more than $50 million in administration, not to mention the increased compliance costs of businesses trying to deal with this complex, distorting, inefficient and costly tax. Quite simply, it is an absolute fiasco.

For the past 2½ years the coalition has been demanding that the Treasurer release the figures from the MRRT to the public for proper scrutiny. The response we received from a deeply embarrassed Treasurer, who knew the true extent of the costly consequences of his MRRT for the budget and for our economy, was weasel assertions that releasing information about the MRRT would be illegal.

The Treasurer claimed that releasing the information would be in breach of taxpayer confidential provisions for companies affected by the tax. The coalition simply did not accept this as an accurate explanation and, last week, the Senate ordered the tax commissioner to provide detail on how much revenue has been raised since 1 July, 2012. So last Friday the Treasurer backed down on his refusal to be transparent and, finally, publically released the detail.

On that day the Treasurer claimed:

The Government has always supported increased transparency in our tax system and we believe any revenue from the MRRT should be published …

If what the Treasurer says is true, the obvious question is: why, after 2½ years, after blocking every request from the coalition for more information on the original negotiations between himself, the Prime Minister and the big miners did he wait for the Senate to order him to release the MRRT revenue raised so far at a press conference?

The answer is that the Treasurer knew the tax commissioner would have to release the information, so he had to pretend that he was releasing the information. And not for one moment should we forget that mining companies have had to spend millions on compliance costs just to calculate that they do not have to pay the mining tax.

Let us look back at the history of Labor's shrinking MRRT. When the Prime Minister and the Treasurer first signed the MRRT heads of agreement, the tax was expected to raise $4 billion this financial year. In the most recent budget, it became $3 billion this financial year, and in the most recent Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, MYEFO, it became just $2 billion. The problem with the MRRT failing to raise revenue is that the expenses which were supposed to flow from the mining tax revenue are not volatile and are not linked to that revenue; they have become a permanent part of the expenses ledger in our budget.

Some of these unfunded measures include the cost to the government of increasing the superannuation guarantee rate; increases to welfare for Australians facing increasing cost-of-living pressures; and the schoolkids bonus for parents of students, without any evidence required that the money is actually being spent on education. All these measures are permanent parts of government expenditure, costing the government billions of taxpayers' money each year, while the mining tax raises next to nothing. By comparison, there is no new funding to the tune of $120 billion for proposed policies such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the Gonski education recommendations, an increase in the refugee intake and tens of billions of dollars of spending in Defence.

We also recently learnt from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that, in the September quarter alone, electricity prices increased by 15.3 per cent. While the carbon tax is not to blame for the entirety of that increase, it demonstrates that the carbon tax has increased the financial strain for all Australian households. Consequently, a coalition government will rescind the world's only economy-wide carbon tax. It will be a difficult job. Labor is not a party that respects the mandate of an incoming government with an electoral victory. Since the introduction of the carbon tax, the Labor government has amended the legislation eight times, which shows that the government has lost control of the tax and is making ad hoc changes on the run. On the first day of government, a coalition Prime Minister will have draft legislation prepared, and the first piece of legislation to be debated in parliament will be the repeal of the carbon tax.

We must repeal the carbon tax because of its deleterious effect on small business alone. In recent years, small businesses have not had a federal government that listens to their concerns. Small businesses are the backbone of the local and national economy. In recent years, small businesses have been doing it tough, and the Labor government has rarely concerned itself with addressing the very important issues that small businesses raise. This is a government without a single minister or parliamentary secretary with small business experience. Earlier this week, at Senate additional estimates, the Prime Minister's own department revealed that the Prime Minister rarely concerns herself with small business issues. The first assistant secretary from the industry, infrastructure and environment division told the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee:

Small business issues do not often come up in terms of issues that are before the Prime Minister or before the cabinet. I guess our focus of resource tends to focus on those issues which are before the Prime Minister or the cabinet.

Clearly this Labor-Greens government has absolutely no interest in addressing the real concerns of small business owners and managers, who employ nearly half the private sector in the country.

Since 2007, Australians have been slugged with Labor's carbon tax and mining tax and repeated broken promises on company tax and superannuation. Since 2007, successive Labor governments have increased an additional 20,900 regulations, while repealing only 104. They promised that they would follow a strict 'one in, one out' approach to the growth of regulation. Instead, for every one regulation removed, 200 regulations have been added. Through their actions, it is plain to see that the Labor government are absolutely committed to greater and greater regulation, more bureaucracy and increasing intrusion into business and into the marketplace. Not only have these decisions damaged Australia's investment attractiveness; they have also undermined confidence within our economy for consumers and small business.

That is why I am launching the Ryan small business survey, to hear the views of small businesses in Ryan about how I can work with the coalition to best improve business conditions. Small businesses in Ryan have told me how concerned they are about their businesses and how they have suffered, particularly because consumers are facing increasing cost-of-living pressures and are spending less across the board. While businesses have had to spend thousands of dollars on compliance and rising import costs, consumers are tightening their spending because of major price hikes in energy, childcare and private health insurance costs. One of my priorities as the member for Ryan is to help build a strong economy through lower taxes, more efficient government and more productive businesses that will deliver more jobs, higher wages and better services for families in Ryan.

During the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook process last year, Labor and their treasurer further demonstrated that they do not understand, nor do they care about, small business. The Treasurer announced that the annual regulatory levy on self-managed super funds—regardless of the level of contributions or the account balance—would increase by 36 per cent, supposed to raise an additional $320 million over four years and affecting more than 480,000 self-managed superannuation funds across the country.

The government announced that it would spend $390 million to continue the crackdown by the Australian Taxation Office on small businesses—part of their desperate attempt to find more cash to fill their $120 billion black hole. This comes at a time when small businesses are doing it tough, which is reflected in many alarming statistics. Small business insolvencies instigated by the tax office are up 116 per cent. The Inspector-General of Taxation has warned that more than 5,800 small businesses targeted by the ATO paid their default tax assessments simply because they could not afford to fight or correct the ATO. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry National Red Tape Survey found that 73 per cent of businesses are reporting an increase in regulation compliance costs over the past two years. According to Dun & Bradstreet's most recent Business Expectations Survey, businesses expect that both sales and selling prices will drop sharply in the March 2013 quarter. The government also cut the support for the Adult Australian Apprentices initiative, which will hurt not just small businesses but also older Australians. These policies have had a huge impact on the Australian economy, with our global competitiveness suffering greatly according to the most recent World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index. Australia's performance in terms of regulation has dropped 28 places since 2007-08 from 68th in the world to 96th. In pay and productivity, we have dropped from 40th in the world to 80th. In the extent and effect of taxation, our performance has dropped from 75th in 2007-08 to now 103rd in 2012-13.

In response to these alarming figures, the coalition has set out to repeal two of the biggest tax increases. There have been 27 new or increased taxes since the Labor Party came to power. We will rescind both the mining and carbon taxes. It will be an extremely tough job trying to return fiscal sanity to the budget and to the Australian economy. The government is now spending an extra $100 billion per year more than when the Howard government left office. The shadow treasurer, the member for North Sydney, and other coalition colleagues will need to find real savings and cut expenditure. It will be an extremely difficult job, but the coalition is up to the task. The coalition plans to achieve real reform in the area of business and small business.

In overarching terms, the federal coalition has important plans for the economy: (1) we will live within our means, (2) we will reduce taxation including abolishing the carbon and mining taxes, (3) we will grow the economic pie with a six-point productivity plan, and (4) we will engage more with our region. Under these four pillars, we will support small business. The coalition will relieve the red tape burden from Australia's small businesses by giving them the option to omit the compulsory superannuation payments made on behalf of workers directly to the ATO. We have committed to reducing the regulatory costs to all businesses by at least $1 billion a year, and to not changing current laws relating to the treatment of personal services income. We have committed to defending family enterprise and the self-employed from attacks by the ATO and the Fair Work Ombudsman, by not changing the existing personal services income tax laws. And we will conduct the first root-and-branch review of competition laws and deliver more competitive markets. Deregulation reform is part of the coalition's plan to free up Australia's businesses so that they can create more jobs and opportunities for all Australians. It is also part of our plan to help reduce the administrative burden on Australian community not-for-profit organisations, and allow them to focus more on their important work of strengthening local communities. The Productivity Commission has estimated that reducing unnecessary red tape could generate as much as $12 billion in extra GDP per year. Therefore the coalition is absolutely committed to reducing annual red tape by at least $1 billion for individuals, small businesses and society as a whole. Ultimately cutting red tape and improving conditions for small businesses are not just about improving the economy and providing the opportunity for growth. For a small business person red tape means less time with customers, less time earning money and, more importantly, less time with their families. Therefore it must be a priority of government to get out of the way, to ease conditions and regulations on small business so that businesses can grow, so they can get on with their job and encourage employment. The coalition will get small business growing again and creating more jobs by reducing business costs, by cutting taxes and by cutting red tape by $1 billion a year. We will restore hope, reward and opportunity for small businesses across Ryan and across the country. The coalition plan is for real action for all Australians.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end there it is.' So said Winston Churchill. The Department of Defence has a problem with accepting the truth. Questioned in 2004 regarding the joint strike fighter, Air Marshal Houston stated, 'The expectation is they will begin arriving in Australia by 2012.' He went on to say, 'It is a conservative estimate. That is when we would expect.' In 2005 he said, 'We are still planning on 2012.' In 2007, he again stated delivery would be in 2012 and the initial operational capability, or IOC, would be in 2014-15. In 2009 Dr Gumley, head of the Defence Materiel Organisation, said, 'The JSF is on schedule. I think the test program is running four or five months late.' To reiterate—'running on schedule'. We have been talking about 2012 and initial aircraft in 2014 with IOC—well, initially 2013 IOC—and he said, 'It is not something I lose much sleep about.' I do. And if I were Dr Gumley, he should have. Because ultimately these aircraft are not experiments in marketeering; rather they are tools young men and women in uniform will use to defend this great nation from enemies with superior technologies. It is a question about lives, not maintaining the extravagant livelihoods of Lockheed Martin executives.

In 2011, Air Vice Marshal Osley told parliament that the US JSF program manager, Vice Admiral Venlet, said, 'The program is now founded on a great deal of realism.' Air Vice Marshal Osley said, 'I think our estimate is now becoming a realistic estimate instead of a conservative estimate.' Then the IOC was taken to be 2018, and he reiterated his confidence on this numerous times in testimony. But a few months ago we were told that this has now slipped to 2020, and Bill Sweetman of Aviation Week and Space Technology, the trade bible, states that IOC in the US is only likely to be in 2020. Even if this does not slip, how would you like to order a 1991 VN Commodore and finally take delivery when the competition is producing the FG, or current model, Falcons? How competitive would that VN Commodore be? Should you stick with your VN Commodore? The Department of Defence seems to think so. On Defence's risk management matrix, a slip of merely 12 months is considered an extreme level of risk, yet the program is now over half a decade late and there are no flags being thrown up.

In 2005, Air Marshal Houston said, 'Currently the indicators are that the flyaway costs for the F-35 will be about $45 million.' In 2006, Air Commodore Harvey is talking about 'approximately $US47 million on 2002 base year'. We are getting them early, so Harvey said 'approximately $55 million average for our fleet'. Then in 2008, Dr Gumley stated that he would be surprised if we paid more than about $75 million a copy for the aircraft measured in 2008 dollars, 'assuming we buy at least 75, or three squadrons'. I was told by Defence in then Minister Nelson's office that the average unit procurement cost that was being worked on by Defence was $131 million per unit. So why did Dr Gumley say he would be surprised if we paid more than $75 million each? Defence deliberately talk costs that make up the price instead of the price, so that they can obfuscate.

In 2010, then Air Vice Marshal Harvey, in talking about fleet, said it was $75 million in 2008 dollars at a 0.92 exchange rate. The Government Accountability Office in the United States, talking about average procurement cost of the JSF, said it has gone up from $69 million in October 2001. In April 2010 it was up to $114 million each. In June 2010, after a Nunn-McCurdy breach, it was revised to $133 million per copy. Using the risk management matrix at 10 per cent, increase in cost is severe and a combination of severe and almost certainly means that you will have a category of extreme level of risk. Once again, why no red flags?

Air Power Australia are routinely denigrated by Defence which will obviously have a negative impact on the work they get as well as organisations such as REPSIM. The reason they are denigrated is that they have the audacity to criticise the JSF program. Problematically for Defence they tend to be accurate, whereas Defence woefully fails. Take cost, for example. In 2006-07, Air Power Australia had an estimate of between $136 million and $176 million, far more accurate than Defence talking about significantly less than $100 million. Were they just deliberately misleading parliament, given they had admitted the $131 million average unit procurement cost to me in 2007? They tend to hide behind many definitions of cost, deliberately obfuscating failed projects by throwing various prices and costs out there.

Air Vice Marshal Osley also boasted of no foreign customers having pulled out and he even boasted of it 'not being beyond my level of expertise to comment on politics in Canada' before assuring us that it was just politics in Canada and Canada would stay in. In fact Canada has pulled out of the program. The Danes have ordered advanced F-16s as a stopgap which I am told will likely become the final capability—in other words, they will dump the JSF as well. The Dutch are prevaricating and the probability is that they will pull out.

As I have said, there has been unfair criticism of APA by Defence. As an example, Air Vice Marshal Osley stated of APA's criticisms of the F-35's aerodynamic performance that it was:

… inconsistent with years of detailed analysis undertaken by Defence, the JSF Program Office, Lockheed Martin and the eight other partner nations.

He further stated that their analysis was:

… basically flawed through incorrect assumptions and the lack of knowledge of the classified F-35 performance information.

The Joint Operational Requirements Document, or JORD, had specifications on various measures of performance. For acceleration at 30,000 feet the objective was 40 seconds or less and the threshold or bare minimum was 55 seconds. We were told by Defence that it would meet spec and Tom Burbage, head of the JSF program with Lockheed Martin, misled parliament in March last year by stating: 'The airplane will continue to be well in excess of its basic requirement. The aircraft is meeting all other requirements to date.' He stated 'other' because it failed to meet the range requirement of 590 nautical miles and they have conveniently changed the definition of the requirement for the A-model which Defence recommends we get so that it could reach spec.

In terms of that acceleration spec, the JSF program office in the US has asked the Joint Requirements Oversight Committee, or JROC, to relax the requirement to 63 seconds which is similar to the performance of a 50-year-old F-4 Phantom—so much for meetings spec. In 2006, APA calculated the A-model would take over 60 seconds for acceleration which has now proven correct. This is on record at the same time that Defence and LockMart were telling us it was meeting or exceeding spec. Whose analysis is flawed now?

Similarly, for turn performance, the aircraft had an objective to sustain six g at 15,000 feet with a bare minimum threshold of 5.3 g. In 2006, APA calculated it could only sustain 4.7 g, at the same time that Defence and LockMart were assuring us that it would meet spec. Once again, JPO has requested JROC to relax the spec to 4.6 g. This is less than said 50-year-old F-4 Phantom, which was known as a truck for its turn performance at the time. Whose analysis is flawed now? So much for the years of detailed analysis undertaken by Defence, the JSF program office, Lockheed Martin and eight other partner nations.

This aircraft has had very austere specifications placed on it in the JORD, and LockMart has designed the aircraft not to meet the objectives—which were not much of a stretch anyway—but with the bare minimum threshold specs, and have failed to even meet them. They have a weight problem with the aircraft, and military aircraft always put on weight. This aircraft is only 270 pounds under the maximum allowable empty weight according to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. They have even gone so far as to remove fuel stop valves and extinguishers in the dry bays, which, according to the DOT&E, increases the aircraft's vulnerability to ground fire by 25 per cent compared with legacy aircraft.

But this program is based on magic! Because, in terms of the fundamentals of air combat, this aircraft is a comprehensive and hugely expensive failure. It is a $1 trillion program over its life, so no wonder we are getting so much spin and so little substance. By every measure, the aircraft is an outlier. We are told that this aircraft will let the missiles do the work—no need for high aerodynamic performance; it will all occur at beyond visual range. So why do they crow about the 50 degree angle of attack capability which is only important in close combat? The reason is that, according to Defence and LockMart, the JSF is the answer, and therefore anything it can do is important and great but what it cannot do is irrelevant. They are quite willing to mislead, lie and obfuscate—anything to ensure the continuation of this white elephant.

Remember, even if it achieves the 2020 IOC, this turkey will be in service until 2060 or so. Do you really think it will be remotely competitive then? Why are the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans and indeed LockMart with its other fighter, the F-22, spending so much money for these aircraft to have supermanoeuvrability and supercruise—or the ability to cruise supersonically without using afterburner—if it is not important? Indeed, the JSF will have to light up the sky to get into a position to fight using a lot of fuel-hungry and very hot afterburners which can be seen from a long distance away, just to get to the speed required to do that. Does the JSF program really have the ultimate and only correct view of air combat, a view that bets against the basics of air combat that have been shown to be fundamental to air combat time and again over the last century, despite people having bet against said fundamentals on numerous occasions? Are those who designed the J-20, J-31, F-22, Eurofighter, Gripen and Rafale all wrong? Are the fundamentals of air combat and the wisdom of the likes of John Boyd and von Clausewitz all wrong, and only the mighty Lockheed Martin Fort Worth division is correct?

I want Tom Burbage, the head of the JSF program with Lockheed Martin, to come to parliament and explain why he did not give false and misleading information to this parliament. If we do not insist on full transparency, our fighting men and women will be the ones to pay the price, not those in Russell offices or the boardrooms of Lockheed Martin. Finally, no doubt Defence and LockMart will state that the magic is classified and hidden, and we will have to take them on trust that it truly is revolutionary, it will change the nature of air combat, and that is why it is a world-beater. The problem is, on all unclassified measures where we have had the opportunity to compare the facts with what they have assured us is correct, they have been shown to be wrong. Furthermore, when independent experts have been demonstrated to be correct on these measures where Defence and Lockheed Martin have failed so dismally, when they warn us that the JSF is uncompetitive, I believe we should take what they have to say extremely seriously and demand evidence from Defence and LockMart. We should demand that they show us, not simply assure us. In the final analysis, facts are stubborn things and I am more stubborn still.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There has been much discussion about the leaked draft paper on the development of Northern Australia. I have touched on a couple of these issues in other speeches in this House. Today, I would like to expand on what we have to do to make this natural evolution of Australia a reality. My leader, Tony Abbott, has often said there is nothing new in politics and that it has all been experienced before. It is very much like the lines in the Beatles song All you need is love: 'There's nothing we can do that can't be done'. What we have here is an opportunity. People will always tell you that opportunity knocks but once. My belief is that opportunity knocks all the time and that we just have to answer the door.

There are three areas of interest to me in the development of the North: getting the base right, water security and energy security. If we get these right in the first place, we can do anything. For the purpose of this debate, I will restrict my comments to North Queensland, but this applies across the top of Australia. As my good friend and mentor Senator Ian Macdonald always tells me, you have seen nothing until you have seen the top of Australia. By 'getting the base right', I refer mainly to the science.

For example, we have nearly 25 river systems in the north and west of my state. They run into the Pacific Ocean, the Murray-Darling and Lake Eyre. We know very little about most of these. If we are to be the food bowl of Asia, we must ensure that we do not end up with another Murray-Darling basin, with the problems that we have there with water, salinity and crop selection. We must complete good baseline research to set us up to ensure that we get the best result with the least consequences. Damien Burrows from TropWATER at James Cook University is already active, and should be, in conjunction with the university. He has the brief to tell us what could be done and what impact it might have. From there, good decisions can be made. Damien is very good to me. He speaks to me using little words, as well as pictures. He tells me what every Australian should all ready know: anything we do has as an impact. What we have to do is risk-manage that impact. We have to see if we can live with those consequences.

You will see that throughout my contribution I am referring to people and organisations that already exist. We do not need to reinvent the wheel here. James Cook University—JCU—is the only Australian university to include in its charter the need to be relevant to the tropical world. That is why I was proud to be able to go to the 2010 election with a commitment for the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine—AITHM. It will be based at James Cook University's Townsville and Cairns campuses. Nearly half the world's population lives between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The establishment of the AITHM is essential not only for handling the risks that confront us, but also to provide the base for the scientific research which will provide real income streams into our country as our neighbours develop. Issues such as infant mortality, malaria, cholera, TB and the like have to be addressed as they are already impacting on hospitals and health services in the Cape, Cairns and Townsville. We can be a major part of the solution here for basic health matters in all tropical countries. Or we can miss this opportunity. Again, the people central to this are already in place. We have, at James Cook University, a school of medicine, a school of allied health and even a school of veterinary science, which are all headed up by people with a passion and an intimate knowledge of what is needed here. Ian Wronski has been pushing for this for an age. If we get this established, we can lead the world in tropical medicine and health.

This will play into our direct world in that our Aboriginal and Islander peoples were the ones most susceptible to H1N1 virus, or bird flu. With places like Papua New Guinea having real issues with drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, cholera and other diseases, we must be vigilant and proactive on this front. Certainly we are not, and we regularly see cases presenting at the hospitals in Cairns and Townsville which require enormously expensive treatments. The real pressure is on the Thursday Island Hospital. The member for Leichhardt is no stranger to making the points relating to the lack of attention paid by this government to the health concerns of our people and of our closest neighbours, Torres Strait Islanders. Former Mayor of Townsville Tony Mooney would always say the closest capital city to Townsville is not Brisbane; it is in fact Port Moresby. That is how close it is.

With the Australian Institute of Marine Science, or AIMS, we have an organisation which can look after the front of Australia. We have major port developments along the Queensland coast. There is to be major dredging at Abbot Point to facilitate the export of coal. I am in favour of development, and it must be stated that the industry has the correct permits and all the approvals in place. But we are talking about a lot of dirt here. Surely we can get AIMS and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to have a quick look at what we are proposing and act as honest brokers in this process. Is it possible that we could build a jetty instead of dredging and achieve the same result? It is certainly worth having that discussion.

We have the Gulf of Carpentaria, an important prawn and fish breeding ground. We have dugongs and turtles. We need to be sure that these industries and natural inhabitants get the best consideration before we go too far. We already have projects up and running. We have cassava plantations in the Burdekin supplying an Asian market. We have Wagyu beef production in the tick-free areas around Hughenden and Corfield. We are doing these things now. Those are just two of the things that we are doing.

We should not be afraid to have this discussion, because we have, already in place, the people who can make it happen. We need appropriate infrastructure to get this to happen right. I would draw this chamber's attention to a report commissioned by the Mount Isa Townsville Economic Development Zone in conjunction with Infrastructure Australia, the MITEZ 50-year infrastructure plan: interim report of February 2012. To a large extent it establishes the blueprint for what we have to do here. It addresses the ports, rails and roads. It looks at the current fragmentation of the supply chain west of Townsville. It addresses the unsustainable reliance on taxpayer funds for infrastructure. It makes suggestions on investment models and tries to outline a plan whereby private and public sector investment can achieve a real return.

Again, this is not groundbreaking stuff; this is a discussion we should be having. People are out there having these discussions right now. As a parliament, and certainly as an alternative government, we should be engaging with these people much more than we currently do. Again, the wheel has been invented. We can cherry-pick ideas, for goodness sake, for great national results. Add the Productivity Commission to these discussions and we will have everyone we could possibly want to get great plans made.

I will say this until I am no longer in this place: we live on a dry continent but we have, in the north of Australia, access to so much quality water it is beyond a joke. The Fitzroy, Burdekin and Ord schemes, to name but three river schemes in the north of this country, provide a freshwater resource for everything we could want to do. With water, we can grow anything and live anywhere. If we want our business plan to be right for the future of Australia, we should look at what our markets want internally and externally. We have to hit our markets with certainty, and our price and quality must be right. There is no point being the best car manufacturer in the world if no-one wants to buy the cars we produce. Similarly, there is no point producing a crop which no-one will eat or use.

Energy security and certainty is another measure we need to address. Energy security should be broken up into four parts, as far as I am concerned: production, industrial usage, transportation, and residential and commercial usage. Currently the north of my state gets power from Gladstone. It costs the state government something like $600 million a year to get North Queensland its electricity. I would like serious consideration to be given to establishing a baseload power station to the west of Townsville and a establishing a link to the national grid from that. Consumers currently using diesel generation to the west of Townsville could then weigh up the cost of accessing the baseload power using the life of their enterprise and current cost of generation. That to me just makes sense.

My line of thinking extends to what we can export to the rest of the world—most notably, our neighbours who are growing. If we were to establish a coal-fired power station at Pentland, at the top of the Galilee Basin—which is rich in thermal coal—and integrate the MBD algae project from James Cook University into its design, we could provide cheap, coal-fired power with zero carbon emissions. Indonesia, as its middle class emerges, is looking to establish thermal coal power stations on its islands as people strive for more services. If we could export this technology to Indonesia and to countries like Indonesia that are experiencing such growth, we could have a massive export earner here.

We cannot talk about energy security without talking about Labor's carbon tax. We cannot be internationally competitive with the world's biggest and only economy-wide carbon tax holding our manufacturing industry back. We have to get rid of it. Yes, we have to do our bit for the environment, and industry has been working more cleanly and efficiently for over a generation. We must support innovation and expertise and not send industry overseas. Energy security for the transport sector means much more than diesel. We have to look at the tracks on which we run our trains and think of ways we can better use our rail lines and ports and improve road conditions and the mileage we get from the trucks we use. The transport sector is also about to come under the wrath of the carbon tax. We must be more efficient but not more expensive.

Households can be more efficient, and we need to look at how communities provide heating and cooling. For example, we could look at how the water-based cooling used at James Cook University could be integrated into town plans and properly designed settlements and towns. By using the water for cooling and heating outside of peak times, they have significantly reduced the university's reliance on baseload electricity. We should be developing this as a base for a modern settlement and getting everybody's cost down. This goes for shopping centres and office buildings as well. We can export these models around the world. In fact, Adelaide would be absolutely perfect for it.

The trick here is how we pay for it. We all know that this government has blown a huge hole in the national savings. There are lots of things you can do when you are delivering $20 billion surpluses and you have $70 billion in net savings and zero net debt. Conversely, there is very little you can afford when your outgoings are so much higher than your income—sooner or later you have to make the payments. But, just like business, we simply cannot stand still and not do anything; standing still is actually going backwards. We have to be looking at where we can get a return on our investment from. We have to be creative with the partnerships on funding of infrastructure and projects. We have to be looking for dividends in the short, medium and long term.

Developing the north of the country and the north of my state fits all these models. You will note that I have not addressed mining. That is because they already think about these things. They already look to the long term. They already do their sums. Instead of belting them with new taxes, we could do worse than sitting down with them and getting some advice.

From rice at Giru to iron ore at Kimberley, we can do the lot. We have the people in place up there. What they need is the people down here to look at this seriously and have some vision, take some advice and get on board. Sure, I am proud of the place I call my home. Sure, I will easily admit to having a vested interest in the development of the north. But so would, or so should, every person who has a child or a friend who may want a job or a home in the future.

All these things can happen, and that is just to the west of Townsville; we have not even thought about what we could bring to such countries as Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to the north of us and how important this region is to the future of the world. We have not discussed what could happen in the Northern Territory, north of Western Australia, and into the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea. Let us be very clear about this. This is not a boom. This should be slow, positive, sustainable growth. Let us be innovative and creative. Let us develop the north. You know it makes sense.

Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to talk about some serious health issues that have arisen in my electorate and the failure of this government to provide sufficient funding for programs to address them. As anyone who has experienced a serious illness knows, poor health can impact on many areas of your life—some would even say that without your health you have nothing. Yet health in this area has suffered greatly under this government.

Typically, though, the government does not want to take responsibility and instead is trying to shift the blame to the state government. In Queensland in particular, the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, only last month claimed the Queensland government was responsible for cuts to public hospital funding despite the cuts appearing in his own budget papers. The most recent figures in the final budget outcome for 2011-12 in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2012-13 clearly showed that the total federal funding for health will fall by $988 million this year. Yet the Queensland government knows that health is a priority and will increase the Queensland health budget by $860 million in this financial year. I would like to highlight a statement made to the Queensland parliament on 28 November 2012, in which Health Minister Springborg said:

The key difference in Health under this government, compared to its predecessor, is that Health dollars matter …

Health dollars buy operations. They buy beds. They pay staff. They are what enables us to improve the health of Queenslanders. The good management of Health dollars enables improved facilities and services. With good management, we extend our reach into remote area health. It enables better access to advanced medicine. It facilitates research and we reap the benefits.

This clearly shows that the LNP is committed to ensuring that Queensland Health is able to provide vital front-line services in the face of challenges left to the department, including a bungled payroll system that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and a waiting list of patients that has left nearly 200,000 Queenslanders stranded.

Labor's budgetary mismanagement is so bad that, at the time of the change of government, the combined 2011-12 budgets for health districts and corporate head offices were $130 million in the red. While these challenges are immense, Queensland's ability to address these issues has been significantly eroded by the actions of the federal Labor government. Here again, I am quoting Minister Springborg:

The Labor government is gone, but the legacy of Labor’s financial mismanagement remains and the burden it imposes gets worse. Why? Because while the LNP strives to fix these serious problems we are sabotaged by a growing problem with Labor financial mismanagement in Canberra.

He goes on to describe the unheralded midyear budget cuts imposed by the federal Treasurer, who has cut $382 million from the Queensland Health budget over four years. Because economic forecasts are so badly mismanaged by the Treasurer, two years of unforeseen and punitive cuts to Queensland Health will be felt in just seven months. In my electorate, that is $6.5 million from the Cairns Base Hospital and health service and $900,000 from each of the Cape York and Torres Strait-Northern Peninsula services. A total of $103 million will be deducted from Queensland Health by the Commonwealth between December 2012 and June 2013. This equates to some 1,000 jobs state wide, stripping the department of the capacity for 84,000 births, 15,000 hip replacements or 112,000 tonsillectomies.

Why is it not a priority for the federal Treasurer? In my electorate of Leichhardt, these cuts have been felt in the key area of mental health, especially in the provision of mental health services for young people. The Time Out house in Cairns has been a major resource for young people aged between 15 and 25 with mental illnesses, providing critical residential and outreach support services. Over the past three years, it has provided short-term accommodation for 38 people, supported more than 100 young people in an outreach program and made a huge difference to the lives of young people and their families. Yet, with the federal Treasurer's cuts, Queensland Health could no longer afford to fund this service, and the house was due to be shut on 28 February. Staff members were in the process of moving clients to hospitals and homes, selling furniture and looking for new jobs.

I became actively involved with this only last week. I was seriously concerned about the outcomes for two young people who are accommodated in that area. It had taken a couple of years for those families to find them an appropriate level of accommodation. At last, they were somewhere that was age-specific, and it was making a significant difference to the lives of those young people. I am pleased to announce today that, after some very significant lobbying by Ivan Frkovic, State Manager of Queensland Aftercare, the state government has agreed to continue to fund the centre for an extra six months. I congratulate Health Minister Springborg and his office for their efforts and their foresight, compassion and understanding of the seriousness of the situation. This funding extension will allow for the residential care to continue; but, unfortunately, not for the outreach support service. I was able to ring the family of one of the young people who was staying there. They had already removed their young person, and I asked them to take them back last Monday to give them a chance to stay there, which they readily did. It is certainly my intention to fight for a funding commitment for this centre in the upcoming federal election. Mental health has long been a priority for the coalition—and this program's success, I can assure you, cannot be ignored.

Another area of concern that I have been raising consistently in this place is in relation to the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis. It is a major issue that Queensland Health has been forced to deal with on behalf of the federal government. Papua New Guinean nationals, particularly those from the Western Province area, who have tuberculosis have been coming across the border seeking support and treatment in Queensland. Many times, as I said, I have spoken in this House about this issue, so I think most people would be familiar with the fact that the islands of Saibai and Boigu, which are to the very north of my electorate in the Torres Strait, are located within only a few kilometres from the Papua New Guinean coastline.

For a number years, health clinics on Saibai and Boigu were treating people who had come across that narrow strait seeking better health services than what were available to them or, in some cases were almost non-existent, in their region. Other more seriously ill people made the journey to Cairns, such as 20-year-old Catherina Abraham. She will spend the next 2½ years in an isolation ward at the Cairns Base Hospital, where she is being treated for Extensively Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. The cost of that treatment to Queensland Health will be in excess of $1 million, provided that young lady survives the treatment.

For the 2009-10 and 2010-11 financial years, Queensland Health estimates that the provision of health services to PNG nationals who travel through the Torres Strait Treaty Zone and present to Queensland Health facilities exceeded $32.7 million. After chasing reimbursement from the federal government numerous times, in June last year Queensland Health was forced to sign off on a project agreement to receive $8.1 million or forfeit the entire amount. To this day, Queensland Health has yet to receive the remaining $24.6 million. I ask the question: how can the state government be expected to properly fund programs when it is obviously being hamstrung by the federal government?

When I hear that a 15-year-old girl in my electorate has had to live in an adult psychiatric unit in the Cairns Base Hospital because there is no mental health ward for adolescents and young people in North Queensland and that the closest facilities are in Townsville, Brisbane, it certainly disgusts me. The girl's mother has written to me several times, desperate for assistance and outcomes, saying that her daughter 'will continue indefinitely in this extremely inappropriate living environment while medication experiments and other treatment fumbles continue'. At the same time, she tells me that the Medicare rebate for occupational therapy has been slashed. Instead of 16 visits a year, in 2013 she will be able to access only six sessions, with an additional four if it is an acute situation. She wrote:

I request that you apply your attention to this immediate issue as it will place my family, my child and many other critical and needy families and their young people in a very precarious situation.

I certainly wish that Treasurer Swan would come up to my electorate and spend a few hours in the shoes of this family.

These cuts are in addition to the nearly $4 billion that has been slashed from private health insurance and the $1 billion a year from dental health through the closure of the Medicare Chronic Disease Dental Scheme. The Chronic Disease Dental Scheme shut down on 30 November. That was a grave mistake, because in our regional area and in our Indigenous and remote communities there is an absolutely vital need for this service. The statistics are quite sobering—51 per cent of our Indigenous children under the age of five have been hospitalised for dental treatment compared to 34 per cent of non-Indigenous children; Indigenous people between the age of 17 and 20 are 8.2 times more likely to have decayed teeth; and 49 per cent of Indigenous adults between the age of 35 and 54 avoid certain foods because of their oral health problems compared to 17 per cent of other Australians—so much for closing the gap. It does not matter what your background is as delays in getting better treatment given these conditions mean the particular condition worsens and at the end of the day this means major surgery. Figures for 2009 showed that in the Cairns and Hinterland health district dental conditions were second only to diabetes complications as the most common cause of potentially avoidable hospitalisations. With a rate of 353 hospitalisations per 100,000 people, the Cairns and Hinterland rate is significantly higher than the wider Queensland rate of 267 incidents per 100,000 people. Unfortunately, given that the new child dental scheme does not commence until 1 January 2014, this means that there would be a gap of some 13 months in seeing young people, and I fear for these children who may remain untreated as to what impact that will have on their overall health. In addition, Labor's proposal for adults does not commence until July 2014, which is 19 months after the Medicare scheme closes. Until then more than one million patients who would have been eligible for the chronic disease dental scheme will lose access to timely dental treatment.

Despite these dire needs, this government chooses to cut the funding to this scheme. No doubt these cuts will be used to fund schoolkids bonuses and process asylum seekers or plug some other parts of this government's enormous budget black hole, which is growing every day. I can certainly tell you that where it will not be going, and that is towards the provision of health services to deal with the extremely serious alcohol and drug dependency issues in the remote Indigenous communities in Cape York. I watched the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap statement in parliament last week and was very disappointed with her comments. She talked about how winding back the alcohol management plans would result in rivers of grog and added that the interests of Indigenous children would come before the interests of the alcohol industry. In my electorate there are nine shires with alcohol management plans that are in place plus two communities where alcohol is restricted under the Cape York welfare reform trial. Surrounding townships have been negatively impacted by the influx of people with alcohol problems who have been forced to move to new areas because the Gillard government has refused to fund the appropriate medical and social infrastructure and services they need.

If the Prime Minister really cared and if she were really serious about dealing with alcohol problems in remote communities, it would be reflected in her actions. That would start with an investment in medical detox centres in the regional health facilities along with the establishment of healing centres in adjoining community outstations. There is also a need for a significant increase in the placement of alcohol and drug counselling and mental health experts in these remote areas and these regional areas. This is the kind of action that would demonstrate a genuine commitment to this very complex problem. This would certainly contribute to the closing of the gap, not the political rhetoric that we are seeing at the moment.

To close, I can only shake my head in sadness as I look at these four key areas of health that I have mentioned tonight and at the impact that the loss of services is having on the people in my electorate. The legacy of this government will be one of absolute waste of money through pink batts, school halls and immigration blow-outs. Its financial mismanagement is demonstrated by four consecutive record budget deficits and a $120 billion black hole of unfunded promises. We can do much, much better and I look forward to the opportunity of doing so after 14 September.

Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is my privilege to stand before this chamber today and speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4), which seek to appropriate $1.27 billion from consolidated revenue for government departments and agencies. What the bills before the chamber today confirm is that you cannot take the government at its word. Back in 2007, when the member for Griffith was seeking to become Prime Minister, he said to the Australian people that he would be an 'economic conservative with a capital c'. He tried to put to rest the Australian public's concerns that they have with Labor governments: easy come, easy go, with no understanding of what it means to get deeper and deeper into debt, no understanding of what it means to have interest payments that cripple future generations, no understanding of what it means to see waste and mismanagement on a grand scale that has probably never been seen before in Australia. But that is what we have seen since Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007 and handed the baton reluctantly to the member for Lalor, who put the knife into his back to become Prime Minister of Australia. But that is what we have seen since Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007 and handed the baton reluctantly to the member for Lalor, who put the knife into his back to become Prime Minister of Australia. Do not look at what this government says; look at what this government does.

Since 2010 they have promised the Australian people that they will bring this budget into surplus—that has come from the Prime Minister's mouth alone on more than 165 occasions. 'Failure is not an option,' is what the Prime Minister said. The Treasurer said a surplus would be coming Australia's way on more than 360 occasions. He said it would come 'hell or high water'. The Minister for Finance and Deregulation said on more than 140 occasions that a surplus was 'non-negotiable'. This so-called rolled gold guarantee became a commitment, which then became an objective, then became a guiding principle, then was an expectation and now, we know, will never, ever be delivered.

This is just not good enough. The Howard-Costello government bequeathed a golden legacy to the Labor Party and to all Australians in 2007: a $20 billion surplus, more than $70 billion in the bank, zero government debt—let me say that again: zero government debt—a more than 20 per cent increase in real wages, more than two million new jobs and the lowest unemployment and inflation in three decades. Not a bad record for a government of nearly 12 years. That is what we left you, but what we have seen in its place is the four largest budget deficits in the history of the Commonwealth, spending which is nearly $100 billion a year higher now than it was under the last year of the Howard government and, as I said, record and graphic waste and mismanagement. In fact, the interest bill alone is more than $20 million a day. The debt ceiling has been increased to $300 billion and Australians know that, if we did not have any debt repayments, we could build a major teaching hospital in every state capital of this country every year. Think about that—a new teaching hospital in every capital city every year, from the interest payments alone. Forget about paying back your $145 billion of net debt; I am talking about the interest payments. That is what is crippling the next generation.

So I have no confidence that the Labor Party will be able to get government spending down from where it is today at 23.8 per cent of GDP. In the last year of the Howard-Costello government it was 23.1 per cent. You will not get that spending down.

This Labor government has no plan to create jobs. When John Howard and Peter Costello came to office in March 1996, the unemployment rate was 8.4 per cent. When they left office in November 2007, the rate of unemployment was 4.5 per cent. Under this Gillard government, the unemployment rate has increased by one per cent to 5.4 per cent. Worse still, youth unemployment is reaching very, very disturbingly high levels: almost 14 per cent compared to the 9.8 per cent it was in November 2007. In fact, the unemployment rate for Indigenous Australians is even higher, rising to 18.1 per cent in 2010, from 13.8 per cent in 2007. Interestingly, the Labor Party does not believe in the Work for the Dole scheme. This was one of the great initiatives of the Howard government that Tony Abbott pushed so hard. In fact, the number of people on Work for the Dole has gone down from 22,362 in April 2005 to 12,789 as of 31 August 2012. When Wayne Swan, the Treasurer of this country, says to the Australian people, 'I will create 500,000 new jobs,' he has to explain why he has only created 186,000. Wayne, where are the 320,000 extra new jobs you promised? In fact, we the coalition, based on our record of economic success, will create one million new jobs over the next five years and two million jobs over the next decade. One of the great punishments for Australian businesses is the rising tax burden under this government—27 new taxes. We know about the daddy of them all, the carbon tax, and we know about the great mining tax, which not only produced a risk to investment in this country but was so well-designed by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer that it produced $126 million of revenue—one tenth of what was promised—and they spent $50 million on its implementation. And they have promised $15 billion in expenditure for revenue that has not actually transpired.

I can tell you about some other taxes that this government has overseen: the alcopops tax, a new tax on Australians working overseas, cuts to superannuation and increased taxes there, restrictions on business losses, changes to the employee share scheme, which is extremely regrettable because it acts a handbrake on innovation. The LPG excise increase, a cigarette tax increase, a luxury car tax increase, and, of course, do not forget the private health insurance rebate, which is now means tested. Let's not forget Nicola Roxon, the member for Gellibrand, and the Prime Minister promised on consecutive occasions that they would not touch private health insurance. They said to nearly half the country with private health insurance, 'We will not touch it.' But in the same way as the carbon tax was implemented without promising that at the last election—in fact, promising that we would never have one—so too with private health insurance. You promised you wouldn't touch it and you put a means test on the rebate. I could go on—duty free tobacco, mature age worker offset, heavy vehicle user charge increases. It goes on and on. That is what this government has overseen.

What it means is that you are taxing the Australian public—the businesses and families and individuals more. You would think you would have this ballooning revenue, but because you are stamping out innovation and industry and entrepreneurship, it means there is now a smaller economy than there should be. It means that you do not have the money to spend on important things like defence. Defence spending under this government has fallen to its lowest level since 1938—1.56 per cent of GDP. This is despite the fact that under the Howard government we kept defence spending at around two per cent of GDP, even when we had to pay back your $96 billion of debt in 1996. If you look around our region, it is not so quiet, is it? Today there is the fallout from the nuclear test in North Korea. We see an increase in tension between Japan and China and we know there are other obvious tensions in the area related to the Islamic terrorist threat.

What has this government done in light of this growing need for a national security policy with conviction and with funding? It has cut defence spending. The Singaporeans are spending more than 3½ per cent of GDP on defence; the Indians more than two per cent; the South Koreans more than 2½ per cent; the Americans a whopping 4.7 per cent; and we are down to1.56 per cent. Madam Deputy Speaker, how do you explain that poor performance by this government? Our local defence industry has lost more than 5,000 jobs under the Labor government's term in office. It is just not good enough.

When we focus on aspirational Australians, we are trying to encourage them to save. We are thinking about how can we get them to save for their retirement through superannuation, but you have reduced the concessional contribution tax, you have cut the government's super co-contribution—which under the Howard government was $1,500—and you have cut it down to $500. You have basically put another $8 billion of taxes on the superannuation industry. Small business is doing it really tough under the tens and tens of thousands of new regulations that you have imposed. Red tape, green tape, whatever colour tape you want a name it, you have introduced more of that.

There was the $1.4 billion blow out in the computers in schools program. There is a hidden hit list that the minister for education has got in his bottom drawer ready to pull out at a politically opportune time. The so-called Gonski proposal, which is completely unfunded, is part of your $120-billion black hole that this Labor government has when it comes to its finances.

Industrial regulation is a particular interest of mine because I feel that under this Labor government we have a minister for the unions in the member for Maribyrnong. In fact he was called by Kathy Jackson of the HSU 'Dracula in charge of the blood bank'. That is what she called a fellow unionist in the member for Maribyrnong: Dracula in charge of the blood bank. You got rid of the ABCC, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, for an industry which employs 10 per cent of all Victorians, which has done so much to put a cop on the beat, to stamp out lawlessness in this important sector, and you allowed the Greens to come onto the floor of the chamber and propose even more radical amendments.

Jac Nasser, the chairman of BHP, one of Australia's most notable largest companies, used BHP's Queensland coal business as an example of the increase in strikes and industrial disputation. He said there were 3,200 incidents of industrial action last year alone. And that there was an additional 500 notices withdrawing that action given on less than 24 hours notice. In fact the Fair Work Act has seen union power increase in more than 120 areas. This lack of flexibility, this lack of productivity, this increase in militancy is all a result of the increased regulation that the government has overseen in industrial relations.

One of the other big problems of this government is scandals: the Craig Thomson scandal, the AWU scandal, the Peter Slipper scandal. They have reduced the public's confidence in our system. It has been unfortunately a plague on both houses but responsibility has not been on our side of the chamber; it has been on the other side of the chamber. I look at scandals related to the Australian network tender, the pink batts, the set-top boxes, the carbon tax advertising scheme, the border protection failures—more than 30,000 unauthorised arrivals and more than 500 boats. I tell you what is more rehearsed than a kabuki actor: it is not James Ashby, as was referred to by the Ministers for Foreign Affairs; it is this government and its very per poor performance because we all saw it coming.

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The great Baroness Thatcher once said, 'The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.' With four consecutive record deficits totalling a cumulative value of $172 billion net government debt hitting unprecedented levels in excess of $147 billion and a $120-billion budget black hole, the economic mismanagement of the Gillard Labor government is beyond anything ever seen before. Frivolously, they are spending the hard earned money of Australian taxpayers—the mums and dads of Darwin and Palmerston— squandering the future and racking up debt that will have to be payed back by our kids' kids.

Only the coalition can build a powerhouse economy through lower taxes, more efficient government and more productive businesses. On this side of the House we are ready to restore hope, reward and opportunity and we have a plan that will deliver real solutions for all Australians. This is in contrast to the Gillard Labor government, which is plagued with instability, uncertainty and policy on the run. This government's pathetic inability to govern would almost be pitiful if they were not gambling with the future of our kids.

On 20 December last year as people were preparing for annual leave, children were finishing school for the year and families were being reunited, Treasurer Swan announced on the quiet that he could not deliver his promised surplus. This is the same surplus that was promised over 500 times by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. As if this was not bad enough, the members on the government benches went out and put out taxpayer funded newsletters across Australia saying, 'We delivered a surplus.' Can you believe it? 'We have already delivered a surplus.' What a joke. How naive does this Labor government think the Australian people really are?

On 28 April 2011 Treasurer Swan said on the 7.30 program with Chris Uhlmann: 'We see the surplus in 2012-13 as being absolutely fundamental.' On 11 May 2011 on the ABC AM program Prime Minister Gillard said, 'It is vital to get the budget back into surplus. That is the best thing that we can do to help families with cost of living pressures.' What an absolute joke. How misleading, how despicable and how deceitful. To use a term that is used quite frequently by those on the other side, how mendacious. The Treasurer and Prime Minister have deserted their ironclad guarantee to return the budget to surplus. Constituents in my electorate tell me they are not surprised that the Gillard Labor government is reneging on its promise to deliver a surplus. They say that this is the same government that would not cut the private health insurance rebate and would not introduce a carbon tax. My constituents say that with the Labor government having these broken promises under their belt, why wouldn't they break their budget surplus promise too? I have to agree.

We know that Labor and the Prime Minister just cannot be trusted. How can my electorate trust the Prime Minister when one of my constituents who is a member of the Gillard Labor government and a staunch Labor supporter, Senator Trish Crossin, cannot even trust the Prime Minister? The question remains, is the Prime Minister so afraid of another leadership challenge that she chose to ignore Territorians, chose to ignore her own rank-and-file members and shafted a senator who was dedicated to the Labor cause but she was also dedicated to the member for Griffith. Poor Senator Crossin. There has been a lot of comment across the territory about the Prime Minister's captain's pick saying that it would not have happened in any other jurisdiction in Australia. So why does the Prime Minister thinks that she knows better than Territorians? Ted Dunstan of Karama said about the Gillard Labor government in a letter to the editor in the Northern Territory News today: 'We have been badly mistreated by the Federals in Canberra, neglected, dictated to and overridden. We can and should do something about this. This time we can send four representatives to Canberra, all CLP, no Labor, to express our disgust and outrage over the treatment handed out at the hands of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her dysfunctional anti-Territory government.' Ted's sentiment is being replicated across my community. My electorate is fed up with the Gillard Labor government, which is neglecting Territorians, and a Gillard Labor government that thinks it knows better than all of us.

Further proof that the Gillard Labor government is out of touch with Territorians was their response last week to the leaked discussion paper on developing Northern Australia. Straightaway the government attacked the plan. They labelled it wacky and ridiculed the coalition for a lack of detail. However, if they had paid any attention to local media commentary on the discussion paper, they would have seen that there was a positive and constructive response to the paper. On 7 February the NT News labelled the plan a 'Boom with a view', and on 8 February its editorial said that 'Coalition leader Tony Abbott 's vision for northern Australia is exciting'. But instead of responding in a practical way and taking on the broad ideas of the discussion paper to develop Northern Australia, the Gillard Labor government played politics, slammed the coalition and, once again, neglected Territorians. It is no wonder that the Territory is struggling, with government treating them with such contempt. According to recent figures, confidence is down and only further proof of this comes from the latest retail figures from the ABS: in the lead-up to Christmas we saw clothing sales down by 0.7 per cent in the Territory, in November retail spending fell by 0.9 per cent, and in the September quarter retail fell by 0.3 per cent.

Nothing is exempt from this bad Labor government. Small business is being strangled. Since 2000, over 20,000 new regulations have been placed on business and only 104 have been removed by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. This is particularly interesting because it was supposed to be one-in one-out and obviously they are quite behind—I think there are about 19,900 that need to be taken out.

An honourable member: That many!

Yes—if it was the one-for-one rule. Businesses across the Top End are also feeling the widespread effects of the Labor Gillard government's appalling knee-jerk reaction to the live export ban in 2011. We on this side fully support the $1 billion live export industry and we welcome today the first shipment of live buffalo to leave Darwin since the introduction of the new animal welfare regulations.

Now let us look at Labor's record on border security and defence spending. Since Labor came into power in 2007 over 30,000 people have arrived illegally by boat. Over $6.6 billion has been spent by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments on the asylum-seeker debacle, all of their own making.—and yet in MYEFO they announced $1.66 billion worth of defence cuts. This is on top of the $5.5 billion already outlined in the budget. In the past four years, $25 billion has been cut from the defence budget—even though the Gillard Labor government has cumulatively spent $172 billion more than they have earned during the same period. The total cuts amount to about 10.5 per cent of the total defence budget. We have not seen this level of cuts since the Korean War. Australia's spending on defence as a percentage of GDP ranks about 65th in the world. The United States currently spends around 4.7 per cent of GDP, and the United Kingdom spends around 2.6 per cent of GDP in defence. However, the Gillard government this year will spend a mere 1.49 per cent of GDP on defence, the lowest ever level since 1937.

Defence personnel make up a high proportion of my electorate, with just under 10 per cent of the electorate being defence people. Many of these are young, single ADF members aged in their early 20s. I am so proud to have been part of the campaign that the coalition successfully mounted last year with widespread community support, which forced the Gillard Labor government to backflip on its disgraceful cuts that would have otherwise seen around 22,000 single ADF members aged 21 and over denied the entitlement to travel home to see their families at Christmas time.

An honourable member: Hear, hear! Well done, Natasha.

Only a coalition government will stand up for our most valuable defence assets, and they are our defence personnel. That is why the coalition has committed—if we are fortunate enough to form government later this year—to restoring defence funding at three per cent real growth out to 2017-18 as soon as we can afford it. The cuts cannot go on any longer. Our national security is being put at risk. In a rare public warning, the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, cautioned the Gillard Labor government, saying that 'the current straitened fiscal climate poses a risk to the Army’s approved plan for development out to 2030'. It is not only Defence that is suffering the MYEFO cuts. The Gillard Labor government announced $3.9 billion in education cuts, which Treasurer Wayne Swan claimed as being responsible. This is not responsible; this is reckless. In the past five years literacy and numeracy results around Australia have been going backwards. Sadly, in every single category of reading, persuasive writing, grammar, punctuation, spelling and numeracy, the Territory is the worst-performing jurisdiction in Australia, with around 30 per cent fewer Territory students than students elsewhere in the country achieving the national minimum standard.

In 2012 only 62.3 per cent of year 3 students in the Territory reached the minimum standard for grammar and punctuation. Nationally, that figure was 92.9 per cent of students. In 2012 only 55 per cent of year 9 students in the Territory reached the minimum standard for persuasive writing. Nationally, the figure was 81.7 per cent. This is just not good enough. It is not acceptable that Territory students are allowed to be so far behind students in the rest of Australia. The Gillard Labor government’s actions to cut $3.9 billion from education in MYEFO is not responsible, as the Treasurer claims; it is completely and utterly irresponsible, and I am sure every single Territorian will agree with me.

The NAPLAN results for Territory students are going backwards. Of the students who were in year 3 in 2009, 68.5 per cent met the minimum standard for reading. When they completed NAPLAN again in 2011 this number had dropped to 61.8 per cent. In 2008, 75.9 per cent of year 7 Territory students reached the national minimum in numeracy. In 2010 when this group was tested again, the figure had fallen to 70.5 per cent.

In January, Kormilda College, a fantastic private school in my electorate, the largest boarding school for Indigenous students in the Territory, announced they were considering closing their boarding house because funding cuts by the Gillard Labor government were making it unsustainable for the school to continue providing boarding facilities for Indigenous students. If this occurs, 220 students from outback communities across the Territory will be forced to leave Kormilda, and where will they go?

Just last week the Prime Minister spoke about educational opportunities for everyone in her Closing the Gap speech, yet it is her cuts that are stripping a chance to be educated from Territory kids from remote communities. Kormilda is currently running at a shortfall of $500,000 thanks to Labor’s cuts. In a bid to reduce the impact of this and maintain the Indigenous program, since 2009 the school has reduced enrolment numbers and cut around a quarter of their staff. I have raised this before in this place, yet the cuts have still occurred. Kormilda's principal, David Shinkfield, has said, 'We are in financial difficulties based on the change in funding that is taking place.'

I am fed up and my electorate is fed up with the way in which the Gillard Labor government trivialises the lives of Territorians. Only the coalition has a plan for Australia. Only the coalition can restore hope, reward and opportunity for the people of Solomon, for the people of Australia.

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Solomon for her excellent speech. It is right: Australia needs a vision, the Territory needs a vision and Victoria needs a vision. The Gillard government are asleep at the wheel when it comes to providing a vision for this country’s future. There is no plan; there is no direction. They have no idea. This week we have seen it loud and clear. We have seen it writ large with the mining tax debacle.

I must admit that, when I had time on Sunday morning to watch Insiders, I found it quite amusing. I was listing to the discussion and debate, and there was George Megalogenis. George is usually reasonable. He is not someone to go out on a limb, to be a little bit outlandish. On the subject of the mining tax, he had this to say: 'If you spend the money before you actually have an understanding of how much revenue you are going to get from it, you are bordering on the idiot territory.' I must admit, I chuckled to myself, because I thought: George has got it in one. Sadly, we have a Treasurer who is bordering on the idiot territory, because there is $15 billion worth of expenditure linked to the mining tax. How much, in the first six months, has the mining tax collected? $126 million. That is an enormous discrepancy. That is fiscally irresponsible. That needs addressing.

But the Treasurer has a track record when it comes to this type of discrepancy. If you look at the last four budgets that have been delivered, they have delivered the four largest budget deficits in Australia's history. And where has all the money gone? What have we got to show for it? Defence expenditure, mentioned by the member for Solomon, is at the lowest level we have seen since before the Second World War. Yet we have had the four largest budget deficits in Australia's history. Look at road funding; take my electorate: we have actually had money removed from the duplication of the Western Highway to go to a project in Sydney that the private sector would have been happy to fund. These are the types of policies we are seeing. We are seeing the money actually disappearing, yet we are seeing it spent at record levels. And it is time that that stopped, because if we are not careful this country could face having the credit agencies looking at us and seriously asking: 'Where is this government heading? Is Australia now heading into serious sovereign risk territory?' And will they look to downgrade us?

It is going to be very interesting to see what happens now that we have it on the record. With the Charter of Budget Honesty, we potentially can now get an idea of structural deficits and whether this country has a structural deficit problem. If we do, that could have lasting implications. The Treasurer has to bring his spending under control. It has real consequences given what has happened. Our dollar is stuck at a reasonably high level, in the $1.03 to $1.05 range.

A government member: It is a strong economy.

The member opposite says it is a strong economy. But if we had not had the four largest budget deficits on record, the Reserve Bank could have reduced interest rates even lower. When you compare our interest rates with those of the rest of the world—the US, Japan, the EU—they are significantly higher, which means we continue to get money coming into this country to take advantage of our comparatively higher interest rates, and that keeps pressure on our dollar. Do your economics 101 and you will see that that is what occurs. Look at the interest rates in Japan, the US and the EU, and look at our interest rates. Our interest rates are higher. I think our Reserve Bank has not been able to lower them as they have liked because they have an eye on this government's wilful and wasteful spending. That has consequences for our manufacturing sector and it has consequences for our agricultural sector.

And you have to combine these policies—this fiscal ineptitude—with other policies that this government has brought in. Our agricultural sector is having to deal with a high Australian dollar. And what is the helping hand that they get from the Gillard government? They get a carbon tax. What does that mean for the bottom line? Let us take the dairy industry: Murray Goulburn's carbon tax bill, $14 million. Can they pass that on internationally? No; it is a tradeable commodity on the international market. So what do they have to do? They have to pass it back on to the dairy farmer. And what is the dairy farmer dealing with? Increased electricity costs because of the carbon tax. For an average dairy farmer, the estimate is that increased electricity costs are $7½ thousand. So the dairy processors, the dairy manufacturers, are having to pass on their costs from the carbon tax plus you are getting a real electricity hit to our dairy farmers.

Take the beef industry. We heard the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in the parliament today talking about the fabulous work being done to reduce costs for our abattoirs. There is no doubt that investment in technology can bring down the cost of electricity for our abattoirs, but it does not mean that you have to hit them with a carbon tax at the moment. The minister's talk of farmers marching in the streets because of these wonderful developments and saying, 'Please keep the carbon tax,' shows that he has created his own personal biodigester. He is actually the one that is producing a lot of methane and a lot of liquid fertiliser by saying that he thinks that the farmers are going to be marching in favour of the carbon tax. He needs to get out of this parliament and go and actually speak to a few farmers. They are doing it tough at the moment. They are seeing the cost of doing business going up and they are seeing all these pressures being put on them. And the last thing they need is a gratuitous minister for climate change telling them that a biodigester is going to be the solution to all their problems. It just does not cut it, and if he got out of his office he would see that.

So we are seeing government policies that are impacting on the cost of doing business. And it is not just the carbon tax; there is also the issue of regulation, both red tape and green tape, which keeps being added to the cost of doing business. So our retailers are suffering, our manufacturers are suffering, our agricultural producers are suffering all because this government has a penchant to increase not only the tax burden but also the amount of red tape and green tape that has to be dealt with. We have seen the consequences of that. It makes it harder for our businesses, especially when they have to trade, to be able to compete internationally if they keep getting bound up in all this regulation.

One of the clear things that an Abbott-led coalition government would do if elected is cut down this red tape. In our vision for Australia, in our vision for Victoria, we want to eliminate this red tape. We want to free businesses to be able to invest, to be able to employ and to be able to get on and do what they do best, which is generate wealth, so that that wealth can then be passed on down into the community and the whole community benefits from it.

What are some of the other aspects that we are seeing that are hurting businesses? The member for Kooyong mentioned the downsizing of the workplace cop who was making sure that we were not seeing intimidation and thuggery in our workplaces. Look at what we have in Victoria at the moment. We have a so-called community picket line which is stopping a construction projection in Werribee—ultimately, hurting Victorian business and our ability to finish infrastructure projects on time and on cost. What has been Bill Shorten's response to this? Bill Shorten's response to this so-called picket line—which has, in evidence given to the Fair Work Commission, been linked to the AMWU—has not been to come out and say that, if the AMWU are involved in this community picket line they should desist. No; he has not only given support to the community picket line but also said that he understood the concerns that this community picket line has towards those people who are legally and lawfully employed on this project. The issue has been raised about four Filipino workers on 457 visas. My understanding is that those 457 visas were issued by the Gillard government six months ago. You cannot issue the visas and allow these people to lawfully work on this infrastructure project and then turn around when there is a community picket line against their employment and have sympathy for no-one else but those on the community picket, especially when it is your own government which has approved those 457 visas.

This is the type of attitude that is just making it harder and harder to do business both in Victoria and across the country, which means that our economy is suffering. We need some clear guidance. We need a real plan. We have to make sure we get back to stability in government. We have to make sure that we get back to stability with the way policies are delivered and implemented.

Take superannuation as another example. There is uncertainty in that sector because they know that the government are looking for money. They know that they want to go after superannuation because there is money there that the government can go after. So we are seeing real uncertainty in that sector. What would be wrong with the government just coming out and saying: 'We're going to leave super alone. We've made enough changes. We've fiddled around with it enough. We've tried to rip enough money out of it.' Why not just give that sector certainty by saying, 'No, you can have some stability; we're going to leave you alone'?

But it seems, given that this Treasurer has produced the four largest budget deficits in Australia's history, that he is desperately looking to find money anywhere and he does not care what that does to the confidence in particular industries. He is just going to go looking for his cash. It is almost time that those opposite realised that the Treasurer, in the way that he has performed, has become an absolute weak link in their government. I think there is probably a need—and it might be almost too late—for them to try and address that, because, as we have seen with the mining tax, as we have seen with his promise to create half a million jobs, as we have seen with his promises to make sure that we had a budget surplus, which he has now had to embarrassingly back down on, he basically is not up to the job. It is getting to the stage where the way he has to stand up in question time and defend his record is almost Monty Pythonesque because, in the end, he is now defending the indefensible. It is funny to see the faces on those opposite when he does get up, trying to defend the indefensible, because they know that that is what is occurring as well. As we debate this appropriations bill, I hope that this will be the last time we have to do so with this Treasurer in place.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 19:54.