Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a great honour—a great privilege, in fact—to be part of a government that has the right priorities for Australia and particularly the right priorities for regional and Middle Australia. On 1 July, the Albanese Labor government will be ensuring that every Australian taxpayer gets a tax cut, and nine in 10 Tasmanian taxpayers will be getting a bigger tax cut than they would have under the now-to-be-discarded stage 3.

The Albanese Labor government is determined to ensure Australians earn more. We want people to earn more; we're backing higher wages. We want people to earn more and keep more of what they earn—not like those opposite, who want Australians to work longer for less. When you hear some of the debate that has been going on over the past week and a half over these tax cuts, you wouldn't believe that those opposite are getting set to actually support these tax cuts, because all the debate has been around how critical they are of the fact that the tax cuts under stage 3 have changed. I have a message for those opposite. If they truly believe that the stage 3 tax cuts are better for this country, then they should vote for them. They have the opportunity. They can vote for the stage 3 tax cuts unchanged and, if they have their way and that goes through the Senate, then the stage 3 tax cuts remain as they are currently legislated. If they truly believe that those stage 3 tax cuts are the best option for this nation, then they should stand by their words and vote for them. But, instead, we hear that they're going to vote for the Labor government's changes because the evidence is clear: the Labor government's changes to tax cuts are better for the vast majority of Australian taxpayers and most particularly lower- and middle-income Australians. That shows that we have the right priorities for the nation.

While we're talking about the right priorities, that brings me to my home state of Tasmania, because you may have heard the news today that Tasmania is going to yet another early election. We have four-year state election terms in Tasmania. Three years ago, the Liberal government went to an election a year early, citing all sorts of reasons, and now, today, they've announced again that they're going a year early. So, rather than getting two four-year terms over eight years, we're getting two three-year terms, equalling six years. This is the sort of 'strong, stable majority Liberal government' that Tasmanians were promised but never received.

Three years ago, of course, Tasmanians elected a Peter Gutwein led majority Liberal government, and, in the three years since, that government has absolutely imploded. Peter Gutwein's gone. He was replaced by Jeremy Rockliff—nice guy, but, gee, it's a hapless government that he leads. They've lost minister after minister after minister. They've lost two of their members to the crossbench. It is diabolical for the state and terrible for investor confidence. They can't manage the health system. They can't manage education. The place is falling apart under the Liberal government, and we desperately need a change.

That's where I come to the right priorities for Tasmania—because Rebecca White is a strong Labor leader in the great tradition of strong Labor leaders. She has youth, but she also has experience. She grew up on a farm, she knows the value of hard work and she knows the value of getting that work done. She's got the right priorities for Tasmania, and I feel actually privileged to call her a friend.

One of the things that Rebecca's going to do if elected Premier on 23 March is expand the services of 18 regional and rural hospitals. A Labor government led by Rebecca will establish a dedicated fund for upgrading regional hospital infrastructure, giving local communities the resources to invest in things like X-ray, ultrasound or ECG machines, diagnostic equipment, extra beds, new rooms and more, and it will expand local services to include 24/7 emergency care, rehabilitation and more. This stands in stark contrast to the failures in regional health under the current minority Liberal government.

I'm pleased to say there will be regional and rural hospital upgrades for a number of district and regional hospitals around Tasmania, including in my electorate of Lyons. The New Norfolk District Hospital, Midlands Multi-Purpose Health Centre in Oatlands, Campbell Town Health and Community Service, Deloraine District Hospital, St Helens District Hospital and Community Centre, St Marys Community Health Centre, May Shaw Health Centre in Swansea, Toosey Aged and Community Care in Longford and Tasman Multi-Purpose Service down in Nubeena can all look forward to upgrades under a Tasmanian Labor government led by Rebecca White.

A Labor government under Rebecca White will also upgrade six local ambulance stations to operate 24/7, because where you live shouldn't determine whether you live or die in an emergency. Labor will upgrade ambulance stations in six regional centres to operate 24/7, with staffing by permanent paramedics. Of those six, three are in my electorate. There's Nubeena down there on the Tasman Peninsula, Swansea on the east coast and Oatlands in the midlands. It's a very important initiative by Rebecca White and the Tasmania Labor team.

We all know that it's getting more difficult to hire doctors and health professionals for the regions. Labor has a plan to offer free degrees for local doctors, nurses and health workers in order to get more people on the books in hospitals in local communities. We know Tasmania needs more nurses, paramedics, doctors and allied health workers. They are the backbone of our public health system. Labor, under Rebecca White, has a plan to attract and train 150 new health workers by offering free university degrees to encourage them to come to Tasmania and work in Tasmania for at least three years. These are great health initiatives from the Tasmanian Labor team.

There are a whole raft of other priority plan areas from the Labor team under Rebecca, including on housing and education. There are all sorts of areas that Labor is focusing on. Rebecca White has the right priorities for Tasmania. She has been laser focused during her term as opposition leader on holding the failed Liberal minority government to account. The cost of living, health and housing have been Rebecca White's priorities and they will be the priorities of Rebecca White as Premier. I look forward to 23 March and the election of a Rebecca White Labor government in Tasmania.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I am just checking this is Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 we are debating here. I appreciate the previous member's comments on the Tasmanian political scene, which he is very entitled to make on an appropriation bill, but I might come within the envelope of the more than $600 million of Commonwealth government expenditure that we can comment on when talking about appropriation here in this chamber. In particular, as we know, this is a way for the government to revise and adjust their budget predictions through the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. So this is the government implementing the MYEFO from late last year, which had a lot of things of great concern to me and my community. Regrettably, the most significant is the adjustments to infrastructure funding. We should really call them cuts to infrastructure funding. I know my electorate is not alone. So many parts of the country saw some tragic decisions by this government thanks to the minister's review of the very, very impressive forward program of infrastructure investment the previous government had announced. The current government went to the election claiming they were going to honour it. Much like many other things, whether it be the $275 cut to electricity prices or the legislated stage 3 tax cuts, the infrastructure cut is just another example of the now government saying one thing to get elected and doing a very different thing after that election. Again, I predict that the people of this country will take a very dim view of this and, when they go to the ballot box in the next 12 months or so, have a lot to say about a government that has broken so many promises.

This one's very significant and acute for my community. Most people who are not from Adelaide would be surprised to hear this, but Adelaide is the only capital city that has Highway 1 running through its suburbs. If you circumnavigate Australia, when you get to the big cities or, frankly, even a lot of small towns, you will almost always take a bypass. But due to a range of quirks of history it is the case that, in Adelaide, Highway 1 runs through the suburbs of the city. It goes through the suburbs of my electorate along what's called Portrush Road. The starkest example of the madness of the situation is that heavy freight going from Melbourne to Perth travels through my electorate. There are some 18 traffic lights and seven schools literally upon this thoroughfare. It is just not acceptable that in 2024 we have the major freight route around continental Australia going through the suburbs of a city of over 1.3 million people.

The previous government had a plan to change all of that. The government I was a member of, the Morrison government, developed with the then state Liberal government, the Marshall government, a vision for the Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass. That would have seen all that heavy freight I've just outlined leaving what's called the Southern Expressway before it goes through the Adelaide Hills—so around Monarto—and then travelling up around the back of the Adelaide Hills, rather than through suburban Adelaide, to connect with where most of that freight is looking to go: either to Port Adelaide or on to Port Augusta or Darwin or wherever. And obviously it would have worked in reverse when the freight was flowing in the opposite direction.

It makes a lot of sense, and it has been talked about for some time. We even, finally, in the last couple of years, thanks to the work of those two governments, saw all of the stakeholders, all of the industry groups and all of the local councils that would be on the new route come together and express their support for this project. We did all that work.

Then we announced and put funding in the budget for the Truro bypass, which is in the member for Barker's electorate. That is the first step in a series of projects that would see that bypass constructed. That was a very clear show of faith and show of commitment to this bypass—to getting this heavy freight out of suburban Adelaide—by the previous Morrison government and the state Liberal government.

To be fair to the state Labor government that was elected some two years ago, they kept the funding for their part of the deal in their budget. In fact, they delivered two budgets where the funding of the Marshall government was left in there by that new government. Until late last year, it seemed fanciful and farcical that, for a funded project—one which had the support of Infrastructure Australia and of Infrastructure South Australia, the state government's commensurate body; one which a state Labor government continued to remain committed to; one for which funding had been outlined years earlier and was in the forward estimates of budgets; and where the federal Labor government had gone to an election saying it was going to honour and to proceed with all of these projects that we had announced and, in this case, put funding into and secured funding for—just before Christmas, that funding would be ripped away.

Let's understand the significance of this project and the betrayal. I obviously speak for the interests of my electorate and how they are affected, but it impacts not just the electorate of Sturt. I mentioned that this project is actually in the member for Barker's electorate, and of course he is devastated at the impact on his community of seeing that this great opportunity to get freight out of the township of Truro has been defunded by the Albanese government. Indeed, it's not just members of the opposition. The member for Mayo—of course, an Independent member—who represents the Adelaide Hills, is just as passionate about getting these heavy trucks out of her electorate. There are literally deaths from this heavy freight at what's called the tollgate, which is in my electorate but it is actually on the route of all the commuters that are coming from the member for Mayo's electorate into and out of metropolitan Adelaide. That is a very dangerous part of the Adelaide metropolitan road network that would be transformed if all that heavy freight wasn't having to come down in low gear, constantly having issues with braking and, at times, running right through an extremely busy intersection.

Even the Labor member for Boothby has said—at least, at public meetings full of residents that are furious about this—that she's supportive of this and is going to talk to the minister and work on securing funding for it. Well, good luck. We look forward to seeing that happen, because you don't say one thing to your community and then do a different thing here in Canberra. At those meetings, these comments are made—and people record these meetings, evidently. The good thing is: there's no ambiguity, confusion or ability for someone to say, 'No, I didn't say that,' when it has been recorded. That's the very helpful thing about recording these public meetings.

So we wish the member for Boothby well on delivering on her commitment to get this project funded. But it would surprise me that the government would defund project a few months ago and then re-fund it, when, in the meantime, they've rubbished the project and had all sorts of disparaging things to say about it, months and months later. I hope that they have a conversion on the road to Damascus on this point. I fear that won't be the case, and, therefore, I'm very committed to fighting at the community level alongside colleagues like the member for Barker and the member for Mayo to make sure that we show just how furious the people of Adelaide—in fact, the people of South Australia—are about this disgraceful betrayal.

It is such a logical project that will deliver such significant productivity improvements to the Australian freight network. We're talking about investing in Highway 1. Like I say, the beneficiaries of investing in this are not just my constituents, who I prioritise. If you're sending heavy freight from Melbourne to Perth or vice versa, then there's a benefit from a productivity point of view for that freight. There are enormous road safety benefits to this. The Road Transport Association in South Australia warmly welcomed the broader concept of the bypass when it was funded and said that, despite the fact that the route is longer, there's a lot of sense and efficiency for the road transport sector in shifting off the carriageway through suburban Adelaide to instead go around the back of the Adelaide Hills. So it's a completely logical project, and it concerns us greatly that this comes against the backdrop of so many other broken promises, as I outlined earlier in my contribution.

It makes us start to wonder if we can take this government at their word on anything. I say that because, as we approach the next election, we're going to have all sorts of other things said by this government that fall into the category of promises like cutting electricity bills by $275, honouring stage 3 tax cuts or building the Truro bypass. The people of my electorate—like the people across this country—are quite reasonably going to wonder why they would believe anything they say. Why would this government expect the people of this country to believe anything they say? Now what we know is that, if this government goes to the next election making commitments to my electorate, to my home state or to all Australians, all that means is that it's something they will say before an election to get elected and then conveniently decide that they don't have to do after the election. It's a pretty fundamental part of our democracy. People should be expecting governments to honour commitments that they campaign on. They should expect that the promises they take to elections—just as in the case of this government—should be honoured when they are elected.

We're, potentially, on the cusp of a very frightening scenario around naval shipbuilding, which we're told about through all these leaks coming out of the defence department. It's good to see the defence department is leaking as consistently under this government as it was under the previous government. As per usual we read all this speculation—the softening of the ground for some major realignment of the surface shipbuilding program through the review that was commissioned by the government coming out of the Defence Strategic Review. Part of that review was to have another review. The review recommended by that review has been with the government for many months now, and apparently it is being announced next week. What I'll be looking for is to see whether the commitments that were made to my home state of South Australia on shipbuilding are honoured. There's a bit of a pattern here, isn't there? It seems like no matter what the commitment was—whether it's in defence, infrastructure, cost of living or tax—it all seems to change after an election. It all seems to be different. There are always very convenient weasel words that are put around these things.

At the end of the day, if that surface ship review sees a loss of continuous shipbuilding and jobs in my home state of South Australia, I promise you there will be hell to pay in the state of South Australia. And, if there's some kind of trickery, where they say, 'Look, what we're doing is just slightly scaling back the number of frigates, but then there are going to be these other vessels that we'll get to. You'll all still get continuous shipbuilding'—if there's any fraud like that, people just won't buy it. They will not buy it. We can already see that the South Australian Premier seems to have been given quiet advance notice of this bad news for South Australia so he can figure out his spin and lines and try and make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. He's already adjusting all his commentary in saying, 'The nine vessels isn't what's key; it's all about continuous shipbuilding.' I suspect there's going to be some kind of attempt to say, 'Look, we're doing six frigates and we're building some alternate vessels on top of that, and we're going to work through the detail of it all, but don't worry; it's all going to happen in South Australia'—just like they were going to build the Truro bypass and haven't, just like they were going to cut our power bills by $275 a year and haven't, and just like they were going to honour the stage 3 tax cuts and haven't.

When this comes up next week, if the leaks out of Defence in the media are true, we will watch for that and we will know what it really means if that's the announcement—that is, a breach of trust again with the people of South Australia and a broken promise by this government that goes to elections and says one thing and does another thing. When the people of South Australia and of my electorate of Sturt get the chance to adjudicate on that, I'm pretty confident what the message will be, loud and clear, at the ballot box.

Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to my colleagues in the chamber. It may be that we have to break and go to the other place, but we'll come back when that happens.

We have spoken so much about the cost-of-living issues facing Australian families, for good reason; it is the No. 1 issue facing families throughout this nation. It's one thing to identify a problem; the onus is on us to find solutions. We've spoken about the two key levers being fiscal and monetary policy. It is our contention and submission that all that work is being left to the Reserve Bank. The only blunt tool they have is interest rates, and that blunt tool hits a section of the economy and the nation harder than any other: young Australians who are paying off a mortgage.

We know that the average income has dropped in real terms by $8,000 for Australians. But, for those paying a mortgage, in addition to that $8,000 drop in real income is an average increase in repayments for a mortgage of $24,000—so $8,000 plus $24,000, for the average. As land increases in cost, and the cost of buying a house or a unit rises as you get closer to the city, like in seats like mine, those costs are exponentially higher. But we work in averages here, and, in my seat, housing is more expensive, food is more expensive and transport is more expensive, and people are earning less and hurting more.

If we leave it to the Reserve Bank, it means we're not turning our minds to all the tools we have in this place and in the executive through fiscal policy. I'd like to speak to two. One is spending and the other is productivity, and this government is not doing enough on either; in fact, it's not doing anything on either. Before we get to the particular tools you can use in fiscal policy, I'd like to briefly speak about trust. Trust in the institution of the executive, the government, and the institution of the parliament is paramount. These are serious problems, and Australians are hurting. But, if they don't trust us to look after their interests above our own, what's the point?

I've got a table in my office; I call it the pool room. If there's a particularly good report or article, that gets to go in the pool room.

An honourable member: Straight to the pool room!

Straight to the pool room! That table, the pool room, keeps building, and today I added another article to it. I keep this one here, and I keep coming back to it. It's the Edelman trust report. It's been running for about 28 years. It's an annual report, and this is the 2023 report about the trust barometer; I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to say in 2024! In 2023 they saw one of the greatest drops in trust in government since they've been running this report for Australia. We are not alone in this around the world, but the drop here sees, as a percentage, only 45 per cent of Australians trusting the government. That's not asked and conducted in a partisan way; it's conducted as an institution: 'The institution of government, do you trust it?' Sadly, with the way that real tax reform has been thrown in the bin, and the manner timing in which it has been conducted, weeks before a by-election, I'm confident—and I say it with regret—that that number will drop again this year when we see the Edelman trust report. Whatever the merits of the particular change—and we have supported that for good reason—how the decision was made matters and the timing matters, because Australians will be looking to this government to solve the serious problems that they have, particularly when it comes to spending and productivity.

With that I would like to turn to the issue of spending. Another document that is in the pool room for good reason is the 2023 Intergenerational report. I urge all members to come back to this document whenever they can.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16:40 to 16:52

My reference to the pool room in my office was not a reference to a billiard table; it was a reference to a table where documents and reports go if they have said something of note that's worth coming back to. One of those documents that lives in my pool room is the Intergenerational report. If you go to chapter 7, it talks about government spending. There are some alarming numbers in there about government spending. It's important to note that, along with increasing productivity, constraining proportionate government spending is key to keeping inflation down and, therefore, key to keeping interest rates and mortgage payments down.

When you look at issues of government spending, the whole Intergenerational report looks at a timescale that, with due respect to the press gallery, they are not really interested in. It is a timescale that goes back through many governments, and it will go ahead through many governments. There is a chart on page 144 that I urge all members to have a look at. It is chart 7.2, titled 'Real Australian Government spending per person'. It is measured in real dollars per person as at 2022-23 prices. So there's no claim that this is about inflation. It is not a story of inflation; it is a story of a real increase in spending. At the turn of this century, in 2001 and 2002, government spending per person in real dollars was just above $15,000. At the moment, it is just under $25,000 per person. I'm not going to pretend there wasn't a spike on the previous government's watch. That was, of course, because of the extraordinary circumstances of COVID. So there was a spike and then it came back down. The bit that comes back down is what I am referring to. It is now sitting at just under $25,000 of government spending per person in this country. If you look at the trajectory forward, you will see that in 2062, in just under 40 years, when another generation of Australians will be here, they will be paying, in real terms, $40,000 per person. That is not adjusted for inflation; that's in real terms.

If we as a nation are to continue to be a prosperous and free country that is able to provide all of the services that Australians want and expect from us, to allow people to have a standard of living that is better than the generations that have come before them—and that's why it's called the 'intergenerational report'—we collectively have to turn our minds to the issue of government spending. We have to. Of course, there is a variety of departments and ministries. You have just to stick your head out the window as you drive around Canberra to know how much of that money is spent on this town. It's a lovely town, but that is all money that is sent here by Australians.

Australia is changing. We're getting older, and there are certain challenges that come with that. We don't pretend they don't occur. The five fastest-growing areas are health, aged care, NDIS, defence and, No. 5, interest on government debt. Interest on government debt is the fifth-largest and fastest-growing expenditure item. We're caught in this vicious cycle whereby, in not properly pulling our weight in terms of fiscal policy, one of the fastest-growing areas contributing to inflation is government debt. We have seen this movie play out before. The then Labor opposition to John Howard didn't like that John Howard noted that Liberals would constrain government spending and therefore reduce interest rates. They didn't like that, but that's what the evidence shows. That's what the economic theory shows. It's not something that's just part of a talking point. We have seen what actually happens if government spending is unconstrained. That is something that all of us on both sides of the aisle need to turn our minds to.

I'd now like to turn to the second lever of fiscal policy, which is productivity. I'm on the House Standing Committee on Economics, and we are finishing up a report into productivity and dynamism in Australia. I thank all of the groups and individuals who have made submissions. I thank my colleagues on that committee from the government but also from the crossbench. It has been conducted in the spirit I hope future generations would appreciate. Some of the things we have learnt—without giving the game away for the report that we still have to sign off on—include that our economy lends itself to monopolies and oligopolies.

The theory behind monopolies and oligopolies—I will stick with oligopolies—is quite simple. It is an example of market failure where we're not truly competitive. Where there is a limited number of firms or providers, whether it's manufacturing or services, it will necessarily lead to a rise in prices. Australians know that. They know that when it comes to shopping for food, where you've got two providers, Coles and Woolworths, occupying 60 per cent of the market. They know that when it comes to airlines, where you have a dominant player in Qantas, who have only ever really had one other competitor. They know that when it comes to banks, where we really have a four-pillar banking system. And they know it in a variety of other areas. I love going to Bunnings and getting my Bunnings sausage, but it does strike me that a lot of smaller, family hardware businesses no longer exist. One of the appeals and advantages for oligopoly firms is that, in the short term, they get to offer discount prices, often at a loss. But we know from repeated history that, over the long term, those reductions are recovered many times over.

So we need to turn our minds to productivity, and there are so many options for us to look at to increase productivity, including actual tax reform. And this isn't the time to relitigate the stage 3 changes and what they mean for aspiration and opportunity in this country. But that change, removing the 37c bracket, was critical tax reform that wasn't just about productivity on a spreadsheet. It was productivity in our souls and in our minds, where young Australians who study hard and work hard say, 'I'm not in that bracket now, but I really want to be and I'm going to back myself to get there.' That's what aspiration is. It's not just a word. It's in people's souls and their minds and how they conduct themselves and how they act and the decisions that they make. It's the fire in the belly that has made this country great.

That's why we back aspiration. That's why we should look for policies that reward effort and aspiration. The true inequity in this country is that those who can truly afford to look down on their fellow Australians have got enough assets to engage accountants and lawyers to manage their affairs so they're not actually paying the sort of tax that young Australians seeking to get ahead are. They're not doing that. But I'm not here to relitigate the stage 3 tax reforms.

The other is industrial relations. Industrial relations are key to every sector of our economy and our society. When you listen to the minister bringing forward productivity-killing bill after productivity-killing bill, from the talking points you would think that we are living in a Charles Dickens novel—that we are in the early stages of industrialisation, where you've got big fat-cat bosses, and Oliver Twist and other poor, wretched creatures are living a slavelike existence. That's not the modern economy or existence that we have now.

I will come back to the documents in the pool room now, but we need to tell this government that, when it comes to looking after Australians, they are dreaming.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) | Link to this | Hansard source

Prior to the election, the Prime Minister and Labor candidates, members and senators, made a lot of promises and pledges. They said they were going to do politics better. They said they were going to be accountable and transparent. Unfortunately, they haven't been.

I'm pleased to be able to rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 because many of us weren't permitted to speak on Appropriation Bill (No.1) because Labor guillotined the debate. They gagged the debate—wanted to rush it through. Appropriation bills are important because they allow the proper financing of the government's functions, and this bill, as well as others, provides the legislative authority for additional funding for government agencies to allow, as it were, the government to do what it needs to do. So that's important. And the government is doing what it needs to do insofar as the various departments et cetera will have the appropriate amount of money for the fiscal year ahead. But the government is not doing what it needs to do when it comes to regional Australia. There are many examples which are a blight on what the government is rolling out—on what the government is doing.

Just this week the government announced changes made by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Senator Murray Watt. I feel for the senator. It's a difficult job, being an agriculture minister in a Labor government, because they don't have the capacity to really have a vision for regional Australia, let alone farming in those areas. They have so many competing interests in cabinet, and the regions usually aren't one of them. Farming and agriculture certainly are not part of the mix when the caucus get together and decide where they're going to spend money, where they will have a focus and where they will do what's right—or what they think is right—for and on behalf of Australians.

If the biosecurity levy model put in place by this government were not so disgraceful, it would be laughable. In no other country would farmers be expected to pay the biosecurity levies of imported foods from another nation, but in this country they are! Our hardworking farmers, already under siege because of the policies of those opposite, are being asked to pay a biosecurity protection levy for goods that are coming in from their competitors—imported products from other countries—which are going to sit alongside our farmers' products on the same supermarket shelves in Australian cities and towns. How ridiculous! How nonsensical! How embarrassing! I am aghast at this.

Minister Watt has announced that there will be a 30 per cent reduction of this proposed biosecurity protection levy, but it's already too high. The levy shouldn't be there at all, yet farmers are expected to say, 'Alleluia! Let the sunshine in,' because there's been a 30 per cent reduction in what they were going to have to pay. We should be so lucky! The levy shouldn't be there at all. There should be no levy. Why should Australian farmers pay the biosecurity levy for their competitors? I would love to know the answer to that question. I would love to know why it should be paid by our farmers, who are doing it so tough and who largely propped up this country, with their friends in mining, through COVID. They still put food on our tables. They still put food on ships and in the bellies of planes to go overseas to help our balance of payments. Our farmers feed our nation and many others besides, and yet what do they cop from the Labor government? They cop kicks in the guts all the time, like these biosecurity charges.

Don't just take my word for it. The Chief Executive Officer of Grain Producers Australia, Colin Bettles—I know him well—said:

Our view is that we spend enough on levies already and that the government should spend what they have better.

I couldn't have said it better myself. He continued:

We already pay 1.02 per cent of our bottom line in compulsory levies that go to research and development and biosecurity and global market access.

That's good, because we need R&D. We need to improve what we're doing. I admire the work being done at Charles Sturt University at Wagga Wagga, particularly in the space of chickpeas and other products. They have a world-class equine laboratory there, where they're doing research not just into horses but into veterinary science. The work that they're doing for agriculture and through the drought hub and everything else is second to none.

Labor members opposite should know that part of that research and development is at the Graham Centre, named after a former Labor state agriculture minister, Eddie Graham, who was a very good man. But that was back in the fifties, when Labor actually cared about the regions. They have long since stopped caring about the regions and certainly about farming.

Mr Bettles was quite right when he added:

It's ridiculous for the government to call us the only beneficiaries of biosecurity, it's fundamentally flawed logic … enough is enough.

People like Mr Bettles would now be expected to bow and scrape at the feet of the Labor cabinet because they have reduced the biosecurity levy. He should be so thankful that they have reduced what is an unnecessary charge! It defies logic. There was another interesting quote, from Terry O'Leary. He raises watermelons in the Queensland town of Chinchilla, in the Western Downs of that fine state, in the seat of Maranoa. He said:

I think it's disgusting the way they are treating us as a cash cow—

This is a fascinating quote—

You wouldn't go to the State of Origin and expect players to pay for security at the front gate out of their own pockets. So why should farmers?

Good point! It's a very good point.

When you look at horticulture, 32 per cent of the industry is considering leaving.

That's almost a third. That's not just because of the biosecurity levies but also because of the changes to the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, where farmers are expected to pay workers for a minimum 30 hours a week, every week—even during unseasonable conditions when there possibly might not be any work.

All farmers know that you should be paid a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. Those people who use foreign labour, who do not do that—who exploit the systems—should be reported, should be charged and have the full force of authorities brought against them. But, in the main—the absolute extreme main—our farmers rely on Pacific workers. They do the right thing by Pacific workers; they pay Pacific workers the right amount. Yet, under the union conspired laws put in by those opposite, they're now going to get whacked again. They're going to get whacked for having their competitors' products. They're going to be charged for the biosecurity for overseas competitors. They're going to get whacked and have to pay workers to sit around and do nothing when there's no work to be done, under the new union conspired, union inspired, union led rules that are taking over PALM. We have Mr O'Leary saying it is ridiculous that Labor is putting a tax on an industry that is shrinking, and this will affect our food security.

The members here, who represent the electorates of O'Connor, Nicholls and Casey, know how important food security is, particularly my regional colleagues. The member for O'Connor is very upset about how his sheep farmers are being treated with the live export nonsense that is going on through this parliament and through this nation. No other country in the world has an Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System in place, where animal welfare is placed at No.1—and it should be. But we are now facing the prospect that we will just outsource animal welfare to other countries who couldn't give two hoots about sheep, cattle or anything else they are exporting live. But we do. Our farmers do. They take exception to the fact they get accused by the member for Clark, and many others besides, who say that they don't put animal welfare as their No.1 priority. I'll tell you what else they put down as a priority, and that's making a quid. Farmers shouldn't have to do something for nothing. Farmers shouldn't have to be hit all the time by charges and levies, whether it's for biosecurity or to be told they aren't animal welfare conscious. This is just nonsense!

It's hard enough to farm in this nation now without the Labor government putting on all these imposts and impositions. When they do—as they probably will—ban all animal exports, those export trades and routes will be taken up by countries who don't care at all about animal welfare! Suffer, the poor sheep, as they will. That is what will happen. But they'll go to their little NIMBY meetings, they'll have their tofu, they'll sit around drinking their chamomile tea and they'll say: 'Aren't we good? We stopped the sheep trade. Aren't we good?' But they won't even care about the sheep that will be on the ships, that won't be having their pant score measured, that won't have airflow on the ships, like we do, and when they die they'll just get thrown overboard. It's a disgrace. We in this country outsource so much these days to countries that just don't care. It is a nonsense.

Then, as the member for Nicholls will rightly say, we have the changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. My goodness! We in the Nationals, and regional Liberals too, fought so hard against the draft Basin Plan back in 2010. There we were with Labor wanting just about every available drop of water sent out the mouth of the Murray. The mouth of the Murray was not even put on the early maps of Australia because it was banked up by sand. But never let the historical facts get in the way of a good environmental story. The Murray, before man-made interventions such as weirs, locks and dams, dried up often. It did. People had picnics in the dry creek beds and the riverbeds of our various ephemeral streams.

Yet what do Labor want to do? They want to take the water away. They want to buy it out of our communities. What happens when a farmer in stress and distress sells their water? The price of water goes through the roof because the government has just intervened and that farmer takes their money and they leave the community. It leaves the community literally high and dry. It is not just the farming community that suffers. It is the hairdresser, the motor mechanic and the school.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:16 to 17:27

The decision by this government to fund Foodbank to the tune of $14 million today and the decision to fund an advertising campaign for its stage 3 tax cuts to the tune of $40 million says just about everything about this government and its priorities. What a disgrace—how shameful that is! That is $14 million for those hardworking charities who do so much, particularly in our regional communities. People are going to Foodbank and people going to St Vincent de Paul and other charitable organisations—people who've never had to present themselves before but have to because of the cost-of-living crisis—and here we have a government spending $40 million on advertising, on spin doctors, on marketing. What a disgrace! Those Labor members who were in that caucus who made that decision should take a good long hard look at themselves tonight. The public know. They will remember, and they will vote accordingly at the next election.

Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 and cognate bills. The purpose of the three appropriation bills is to release money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the annual services of the government. We don't stand in the way of that. I can tell you that it's very good to be speaking about this today. I wanted to speak on the appropriation bill following the May budget, but I didn't get the chance. There were many speakers lined up who didn't get the chance because the government ended the debate. It was incredibly inappropriate that we members, who are elected and are sent here to speak on behalf of our constituents, didn't get to talk about the most important thing—the appropriation of taxpayer money and the expenditure of such. So it's nice to be able to speak today—although I did reflect on the speech I was going to deliver last May and what I have to say today, and, unfortunately, it's devastating to report that things have got worse and are getting worse. If regional Australia was a dartboard, the walls around it would be full of holes. The government aren't spending less; they're spending a lot more, but they're spending less in regional and rural Australia.

When I go around my wonderful electorate of Nicholls—one of my favourite parts of my job—people will ask, 'Are you enjoying it?' I say: 'Yes. Parts of it are difficult, but there are parts that are enjoyable.' One of the most enjoyable things is talking to schoolchildren, mostly in primary schools, and having a conversation about what it is we do up here and what the Australian democracy is all about. That leads to a fascinating conversation. It boils down to two major things we're here for. Firstly, we're here to enact legislation. I explain that to kids; I say: 'We make rules and we try to balance things. We try to balance the rights of people, the responsibilities of people and the good of society, and we have debates about that.' The people of Nicholls have sent me here, and the people of Bendigo have sent you here, Deputy Speaker Chesters. We are probably from different ideological traditions, but we have debates about what those rules should be. That's a form of democracy that has seen Australia prosper as one of the most successful nations, if not the most successful nation, on the globe.

We also appropriate money in a variety of ways from taxpayers, and we decide how to spend it. That's also a massive responsibility. It's our job to work out what's appropriate to take from people and businesses, and it's our job to make sure we spend that money wisely, efficiently and on things and investments that are going to lead to the advancement of our nation and our economy. At the moment, we're all talking about cost of living because it's the biggest issue for people. When I'm in the chamber, I hear, 'We're giving people money for this, we're giving people money for that, making this cheaper and making that cheaper', which is, essentially, using taxpayer money to hand out money. That's a debate we can have, and I'm not opposed to that in general. We're also talking about tax cuts, which our side sees as redistribution and the other side sees as fairness. But I would remind those opposite that the tax system is designed not as a tool necessarily of redistribution but for providing for Australia's economic future.

We're not talking about the root cause of the cost of living, and I find that really frustrating. We're skirting around the edges. The success of Australia's economy is based on the success of Australia's businesses, and that means the success of Australia's entrepreneurship—people who invest money to try and make something that didn't exist before, whether it be a good or a service, and sell that in a competitive way that improves the lives of Australians and/or makes us internationally competitive. That's what we're here to do. There's a safety net to make sure that people don't suffer. I take the point of the member for Menzies, who said that if you were sitting in the chamber listening to the Labor members you'd think we'd been living in some sort of Dickensian world where everyone is doing absolutely terribly; they're doing worse now than they were under the coalition government! Generally, modern Australia has been a partnership between the employer—so businesses—the capital and the labour. And that partnership is essential. The businesses can't do it without the labour, and the labour won't exist if the businesses aren't successful and profitable. I think, with the policies of this government, we are moving away from that. I think that's regrettable and it will have poor long-term impacts on our nation.

I will give you some examples—firstly, on regional infrastructure. If we're going to take taxpayers' money from them, it can't just be a redistribution exercise: 'You can have some here,' and 'You can have some there.' There's got to be a strategic approach: 'What could we invest in that would make the Australian economy perform better?' If you were in a business, you'd say, 'Okay, we've got a surplus,' or, 'We've got a profit,' or, 'We've got a certain amount of money we can expend.' Smart business people would say: 'How would we spend that money to make our business more competitive and more profitable into the future?' Now, we argue that regional infrastructure can do that, because regional Australia is the engine room of the nation's economic prosperity. Whether it be agriculture, manufacturing or mining, a lot of it happens in regional Australia.

That's not to dismiss the people who live in metropolitan areas of this country; they make a great contribution, too. But, because of the bulk of population being in those areas, we sometimes feel that they get an inordinate voice in this nation through our democracy. That's why we're here, from the regions—to fight for the people who live there and to explain the economic benefit that comes out of those places.

Now, regional infrastructure is a real passion of mine. In my previous job, I worked for an organisation called the Committee for Greater Shepparton, and we tried to advocate regional infrastructure being built. I must say, not coming from a particularly partisan background as a young person, I had a lot of admiration for the Hawke and Keating governments; they made me impressed with Labor for a while, but that was cured a bit later on. When I was the CEO of the Committee for Greater Shepparton, I found the coalition government really responsive on building and funding regional infrastructure.

The Echuca-Moama Bridge was a fantastic bridge project. That bridge over the Murray River, linking those twin towns, improved the connectivity from southern New South Wales to that part of the west of my electorate. That has made a huge difference. That was funded by the coalition—really pushed, particularly, by then Minister Chester, who I want to congratulate on that. I spoke in this place the other day of many of my opponents at the last election—not the Labor Party; other opponents, at my last election—whose platform was 'We need to kick out the Nats because they don't do anything for our electorate.' And what was the platform—the literal platform—that they used for that? They stood on top of the Echuca-Moama Bridge—$360 million for which had been delivered by the National Party.

Be that as it may, there's been some significant rail infrastructure, which is moving more professional people to Shepparton because not only have we got better trains between Shepparton and Melbourne but we're going to have extra services. That was delivered by my friend the member for Riverina when he was in his portfolio in the previous government.

There are other building blocks of the economy that people in metropolitan areas might not appreciate. I come back to the agricultural production of the Murray-Darling Basin and what that has meant for the Australian nation for over 100 years: the construction of channels which take water from the Murray and Goulburn Rivers in my electorate, through a network of farms, and deliver that water, so that areas that once grew very little now grow pastures, lucerne crops and corn crops, that all feed the dairy industry, and fruit crops—peaches, apples and pears. I'm so proud that that's a part of Australia that I represent. But, for those people to continue doing that, they need a government that says, 'Okay; we're going to spend money and make rules,' as I say to those grade 6 kids, 'that increases your ability to do that, because it's good for Australia, it's good for our own people here and it's also good because we export a lot of that produce to China, to South-East Asia, to South Asia and to the Middle East.' That provides sustainable jobs for people and it provides economic income for this nation.

So what do the Labor Party do about it when they come to government? Based on ideological tangents, the Minister for the Environment and Water has decided to rip up what was an agreement under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and basically make it much harder for our horticulturalists and dairy farmers to grow the food that sustains Australia and provides export dollars for this nation. It threatens small communities that have sprung up because of hard work, because of the combination between capital and labour. Someone put their own money into a farm or a factory. People from all over the world came to work on that farm or in that factory and create something really special. There are communities across my electorate—Numurkah, Nathalia, Stanhope, Echuca, Cobram, Shepparton—where that Australian miracle has happened. Capital has been invested, labour has turned up and everyone's done well out of it. The people who invested the capital have done well because these are profitable businesses because this was back in a time when government said, 'Our responsibility is to make sure we've got the building blocks for you to be profitable.' The people who worked in those industries were winners because they moved to a beautiful part of regional Australia, bought their own houses, raised their families in caring and nurturing communities and have been part of something really special. Those people are proud to have worked in places like SPC, Bega and Kagome.

That's all threatened by this government's attitude towards agriculture policy and water policy in the new, brutal Murray-Darling Basin Plan regime. It's also threatened by the IR laws. What I was talking about just a few moments ago in relation to the success that I've seen growing up in the seat of Nicholls—and this is the case anywhere in Australia—is that it's the partnership between capital and labour. 'I do well if you work hard and throw yourself into this job.' That's what capital says. Labour says, 'I've still got a job if you're profitable.' That partnership is what it's all about, and it's worked so well in the Goulburn Valley and other parts of Australia. But what we're seeing now is bringing the conflict back—the mean, nasty employer is trying to screw over the poor little worker. The modern Australia that we were moving towards where it's a partnership and the employer wants to keep good workers, so they give flexibility but say, 'I might need to give you a phone call on the weekend if something happens and I don't know what's going on'—all of those arrangements and agreements are being torn apart by this conflict that's being created out of nothing. I think that's regrettable and I think our economy will suffer for it. I hope we can rejig our direction as a nation and get back to productivity when we're talking about the economy.

Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

What a fantastic contribution to end on productivity, a point that I will take further. I am going to make the obvious observation and repeat what has been said. The incursion of conflict into a conversation on productivity is something that is detrimental to all Australians across the workforce and all Australians full stop. How we do what we need to do, how we get together and produce what we need to produce, relies upon a conversation between employees and employers. In speaking on this appropriation bill, the context the last budget was delivered in, with the IR changes since and the regulatory framework we've seen—and I want to speak to a lot of these things—has led to the growth of this conflict again. I think it is something that is well worth us raising.

I want to address what is clearly becoming the biggest issue in the Australian economy, which is: how do we improve productivity levels? It is often pointed out that over about 20 years we have seen a downturn in productivity in Australia and in other Western countries as well, but there is nothing that compares to the significant downturn we have seen over the last 18-odd months, where productivity in Australia fell through the floor and was at a level we had never recorded before. We have never seen this level of productivity drop. It's important that we address this.

I think the Australian people rightly recognise real wages as an important issue. This government ran on the agenda of raising real wages. But, as has been pointed out repeatedly and was again by the RBA in presenting to the economics committee just last week, productivity is crucial to real wages growth. There are historical links between them. For generations we have seen the labour movement acknowledge the need for productivity. We have seen employers acknowledge the need for productivity improvements as a means of increasing real wages. I always point to: what does 'good' look like? I point back again to the Howard era, 1996 to 2007, when real wages grew by 21.5 per cent in a time when we saw high levels of productivity. There is no surprise that those two things went together. We need to look at the policy settings that were deployed during that time to understand how we got those results.

There are a lot of things that can impact on productivity. We just heard the RBA governor talk on some of these—skills, investment, taxation policy and IR. All of these things have an impact on productivity. But my biggest concern has been and remains that, unless those policy levers are used, the default for driving productivity is going to be unemployment. That is a significant concern for all of us when in an economic situation like we are.

I want to address some of these areas. The hope amongst economists is that, having had this catastrophic fall in productivity in Australia, we can normalise and rebound. When the RBA suggested that, they admitted they were being very, very optimistic that productivity would normalise and come back. When pressed on what was in their modelling that would drive productivity, they admitted that assumptions around skills and business investment were unlikely to play any key role in driving productivity in the short term. In fact, while they may have long-term impacts, there is no significant change in the skills and investment policy settings that we see today to previous, so they don't expect that to be any significant driver in that normalisation process. If we go back and we look at that, what are some of the things that have changed during this term of government? What is the new norm? If we are able to normalise, what will that new norm look like? I think we can see that each one of these is a downward pressure or at best a neutral situation.

We talk about business investment in new technology. One of the policy settings that the previous government deployed with great success when it came to driving productivity was the instant asset write-off. When we talk about technology, we need to see that not all technology is made by Apple or exists in the cloud. Sometimes it's a coffee machine that uses less water or heats up faster. Sometimes it's a tractor that doesn't stop as often as my uncle's does. Sometimes it's a small improvement, and the investment in that by small business has a cumulative impact. You're not looking at revolutionary steps forward in productivity; you're looking at small gains that could be made from one-off investments. So, facing the realisation that productivity had fallen off a cliff, as we saw last year, the coalition called on the government to restore tax relief for small businesses and boost productivity by extending the instant asset write-off and to extend the value of assets eligible to $30,000. Sadly, the government didn't take up these measures. This was a policy setting that has been deployed well. It has been acknowledged everywhere as a productivity driver, but the government hasn't chosen to take that up. I hope they will look at that again because, without that investment and without that incentive to invest, we're leaving that lever alone.

If we speak about skills, one of the saddest pieces of information we saw come out last week was that the number of people in apprenticeships and traineeships is 50,000 fewer than during the Morrison government. That could be responsive to drivers of the day. What's important to point out is that, even if we take that as a normalisation pressure itself, it's still fewer skilled people entering the workforce. It reinforces the conversation with the RBA. Skills are unlikely to be a driver of productivity in the short term and, certainly, in the medium term. It may well come again in the long term, if that number can be turned around, but it's not there for us at the moment.

With regard to technology, I'll refer to an article in the Australian by Patrick Commins:

An adviser to the Fair Work Commission says the next generation of Australians may not be better off than their parents because of "abysmally low" productivity, and the Albanese government's industrial relations reforms threaten unforeseen consequences with little … pay-off for the vast bulk of workers.

In terms of the future that we're seeing created for us and the threats to productivity, the important point is that they're not just threats to us now. If we are unable to address productivity now and turn that number around, the impact is not just going to be felt by us now but by future generations. What it condemns us to is continued lower real wage growth, which is what we have seen. Real wages have not been growing.

Further into the article is where we get a feel for economists' views on the current policy settings with regard to productivity. The article says:

With little obvious appetite for meaningful reform in areas such as taxation, and with workplace changes promising a less flexible workplace … coming generations may no longer be better off than the ones that preceded them.

If we look at the IR legislation that has come through, across the board, there is nowhere in that suite of legislation where we can point to something that has a genuine upward pressure on productivity. In fact, as has been pointed out repeatedly, the expectation is that the IR reforms that have come through do very little to increase productivity and will drive them lower. An article in the AFR says, 'In both tax and IR, poor process and playing politics has produced bad policy outcomes.' In the IR space, unfortunately, we've seen from this government steps that are quite regressive in terms of the workforce situation it's trying to apply. There is no doubt that IR reform is an important part of a Labor or a coalition government's agenda, but, when the policy settings are driving productivity down in a period like this, they will have long-term impacts. My genuine concern is that we have missed the opportunity to drive skills investment and to address tax reform. The clear link established in the 2008 OECD report is that high tax at a corporate level and on income tax has a negative pressure on productivity. o, when we don't address tax reform in a meaningful way, and when we have IR legislation that goes negative, the only pathway to recovering productivity left to us is unemployment.

I refer to another view, that of Innes Willox in the AFR:

Australian chief executives are looking to the year ahead more anxious and uncertain about the national economy than they have felt for more than a decade.

The government often talks about a wasted decade. It would appear that businesses viewed the last decade quite differently. The quote continues:

This focus on productivity-enhancing measures ranks far ahead of expected funding of capital expenditure and research and development.

Businesses note that they need to find productivity. But the concern is that, the more we invest in technology, the worse off the employment trajectory will be. What we're talking about in technology for some of these big tech corporations is AI. We're talking about replacing the workforce. This is not beneficial for employment figures.

I can't help but be drawn to this point that, without a clear plan to address productivity with anything other than rising unemployment, the future gets bleaker and bleaker. It's a question of who the future gets bleaker for, because largely what we're talking about is entry-level workers in the workforce. They're likely to be lower paid and likely to be less educated. We've already seen a shrinking manufacturing sector for decades, and now further pressures on these jobs mean that the prospects are very grim.

We're a country that has relied upon social mobility. We rely upon that not just for those going through school but afterwards, and that requires jobs for people who work with their hands outside of air-conditioned offices. That means people who didn't get qualifications while young but still have the willingness to work hard and push ahead. Pressures on their employment levels in a situation like this are incredibly difficult, particularly for regional communities, like mine, that simply have a different spread of workforce than you will see in city electorates. In Groom we are heavily reliant on mining, manufacturing and transport. We're a place that does all the work that leaves you with dirt underneath your fingernails and calluses on your hands. These are exactly the jobs that are being put at risk when you put the wrong policy settings in place.

Without a key focus, without a policy direction that addresses productivity, the Australian people are being left in the lurch. There is little hope on the horizon that we see from the government, with its continued drive towards regressive IR legislation that puts the Fair Work Commission between the employer and the employee. I think that's probably one of the hardest pills to swallow. We've come to accept that enterprise bargaining was a vehicle whereby agreements could be made between employers and those in the workplace directly, but under this government we have seen continued moves to push the Fair Work Commission between those two groups. As we've seen in the Productivity Commission report, when you move away from individual contracts, you drive lower productivity.

Of all the challenges this government faces, none are greater than returning our productivity to prepandemic levels. Unfortunately, where we stand today is that, even if we are, as the RBA governor optimistically puts, capable of normalising productivity levels, the new norm with the policy settings that we now see in place is lower than what the norm was previously—be it in skills, where we see fewer apprenticeships and traineeships, or be it in investment, where we see lower investment in new technologies. We see taxation policy and IR reform that depowers individuals. The forecast for productivity growth is grim.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in relation to the wild storms which have caused enormous damage and had a huge impact on my home state of Victoria over the past 24 hours. Deputy Speaker Chesters, I know you, as a regional member, are well aware of the impact of these storms right across our regional communities. Firstly, I do want to acknowledge the tragic loss of life which has occurred in Mirboo North, with the death of a local farmer as a result of the storms. For those members in this place whose communities are still facing danger right now, I pass on my enormous sympathies, and my thoughts are with you. Obviously, there are bushfires still active in the communities surrounding the seats of Wannon and Mallee, bordering the seat of Ballarat and also near Bendigo. I want to acknowledge that we have lost a life already, as well as to appeal to those people now involved in the clean-up—householders and residents—to please take care. The clean-up after these major storm events is often as dangerous as the storm itself. There have been many occasions in the past where trees have fallen on people who have been involved in the clean-up activities, so please take care as you undertake that clean-up work.

In that same vein, I need to acknowledge the extraordinary effort of our emergency services crews, our volunteers from groups like the SES and the CFA, the professional crews, the shire contractors, the shire workers themselves, people involved in the clean-up activities, and the crews that are out there right now trying to restore power and telecommunications networks across the state. These people are out there doing an incredible job, working against the clock in cleaning up after nature's ferocious storm swept across our state.

It's worth reflecting that we got to this point as a direct result of large transmission lines coming down, which tripped four units at Loy Yang in my electorate of Gippsland and forced load shedding and disruption to power across hundreds of thousands of homes. As we stand here tonight, there are still thousands of Victorians experiencing another night without power and with unreliable communications. It's also worth reflecting that the Loy Yang Power Station is still an incredibly important part of the energy mix in my home state of Victoria. In fact, we still receive in Victoria in the order of 60 per cent of our generating capacity from a brown-coal-fired power station in Latrobe Valley. It's an incredibly important part of the energy mix in my home state. In the light of this storm event, it's inevitable there'll be conversations about energy security and reliability. I am concerned that there is a reckless rush to transition to renewable energy at the expense of reliable baseload energy. We need to make sure we get the balance right. By no means am I someone who doesn't believe in the importance of renewable energy, but I also understand you need to have a reliable and affordable source of energy for households, for families trying to meet their family budget, and for business and industry and manufacturing. They need a reliable and affordable source of energy.

We've got to learn some lessons from storm events like this. The conversation now in large parts of regional Australia is becoming quite heated around the transmission lines associated with establishing new renewable energy locations. Part of that conversation is around the fact that there is no plan whatsoever to put those transmission lines underground. The very cause of this dramatic disruption to Victoria today has been the major failure of transmission lines causing the Loy Yang units to trip and disrupting power supplies right across the state. We need to have this conversation about undergrounding transmission lines. It was one of the recommendations of the Black Saturday bushfire royal commission. We understand as regional people that quite often bushfires are starting as a result of powerlines being disrupted, sparking and causing fires, which then spread and cause enormous damage, including loss of life. There's a huge logistical challenge on right now right across parts of my electorate of Gippsland to simply restore power because of the damage caused by trees falling over powerlines and the disruption that is then causing the community.

This disruption is something that people need to think about. People need to think about how these disruptions occur. When the power goes out you can no longer operate the petrol bowser, so fuel becomes a problem in some of my towns. When the power goes out, the EFTPOS machines aren't working either because the telecommunications network is compromised, so people who don't have cash are having trouble doing transactions. When the power goes out, you have issues at supermarkets with a rush on food. When the power goes out, householders with food in the fridge or food in the freezer start to worry about the wastage. These are all important considerations with an event like this. I do wish the crews all the luck in the world as they go about trying to re-establish power to vast numbers of impacted communities, which are almost inevitably some of the most remote locations and smaller country towns in Victoria.

I know for a fact that there are towns and communities in my electorate right now who don't even have access to triple 0. If there were an emergency, they wouldn't be able to call triple 0 to get some help. So I appeal to people in my community who may be listening on the radio or something else to make sure you check in on your friends and family. Do a welfare check on those in your neighbourhood to make sure that they're okay. Check on your friends at this difficult time.

We are very dependent on our telecommunications. Some will have battery backup; others won't. They're supplying generators to try and restore the power. But, without the energy being provided to those telecommunications towers, a whole range of other impacts are felt throughout the community, and there are still thousands of Victorians, thousands of Gippslanders, who are without power tonight.

On the bright side, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, as you well know, regional people are practical, resilient people. We've been through very similar events in the past, and most people have a bit of a backup plan. But there are some lessons here for the Victorian government to learn. Whose stupid idea was it to introduce a ban on gas connections to new households in Victoria? What a spectacularly stupid idea by the environment minister. Right now in Gippsland, with no power, people are using their gas stoves. They've got an alternative source of energy. But in the future, if there are no gas cooktops in these houses, when there's no power, what will people do? We've got to plan a more resilient system. It's complete madness for the Victorian minister to be banning gas connections to new households in Victoria and making people dependent on only one form of energy.

Those on this side of the House are determined to play a practical role in the energy debate in this country. We understand how important a reliable and affordable source of energy is not just for Victoria but for every state. What we saw yesterday in Victoria, ironically, was that there was plenty of wind around, but there was too much wind, so the wind turbines didn't work. Wind turbines simply don't work when you exceed the specifications. Again, having a weather dependent form of energy in the future, without the reliability of the baseload supply from other sources such as coal or gas, is complete economic and, I would say, social madness which will cause enormous problems, going forward.

I will give you an example from a friend of mine I was just talking to tonight. He'd dropped into one of the hardware stores and he reported to me—what a surprise—they'd sold out of generators. People have been down there today buying generators. They've sold out of any camping gas cookers. Again, people are preparing to be without power for an extended period of time. The staff at the hardware store were showing customers around by torchlight, and they were giving them handwritten receipts and writing down the details of their credit cards. People without cash were still able to buy things, and I thank the hardware store operators for doing that to allow the economy to still function. But at some point they're going to have to reconcile all those purchases. Handwritten receipts will have to do for now. I think we're finding cash is king in Gippsland right now. A lot of people are relying now on cash to make even the most basic purchases.

So we do need a resilient system when it comes to energy. The events in Victoria over the last 24 hours have certainly exposed some of the fragilities of—and perhaps shown a lot of us to not take for granted—the systems we have in place, because, when they go down, it becomes very difficult for our community to function. We've got to have this debate without the zealotry. Just forget about the zealotry. There are people at the extremes of the debate on both sides. Forget the zealots. Work out practical systems that are reliable and affordable for the Australian community.

Speaking of zealotry, I want to use my remaining time in the debate tonight to reflect a little bit on the native hardwood timber industry in the state of Victoria, or the former native hardwood timber industry in the state of Victoria. The decision made by the Andrews government and endorsed by the Allan government was based on science—political science. There wasn't an ounce of environmental science behind the decision to ban the harvesting of all native hardwood timber in my home state of Victoria.

Deputy Speaker Wilkie, your home state of Tasmania has a third of the timber available to it that Victoria has—a third. Victoria's got three times as much timber on public land. There are now logs being harvested in Tasmania, floated across Bass Strait, processed in Victoria into high-value products and sold into the Melbourne market. So supply is still being met. Demand is still there for this product, but it is complete environmental madness to think that Victoria taking timber from other places is the best way to manage our future demand for hardwood timber in my home state. When it comes to timber, there are two choices: you use your own wood or you use someone else's. The Victorian government, in an act of complete political bastardry, shut down the entire industry in six months and committed Victoria to just taking wood from other places. Now Victoria brings in timber from Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland, and our net imports of timber vastly exceed our exports. We are just taking timber now from countries with lower environmental protocols and selling it off in the Melbourne market.

Right now there is a very impressive project in the heart of Melbourne: the St Kilda Pier. It is a beautiful project, a great project, a multimillion dollar project. The timber for that project is coming from North Queensland and the Northern Territory. It is madness to think that a state with three times the timber resources of Tasmania will not be using any of the hardwood timber on public land into the future. I'm sure that at some point in the future reality will strike and a new government with half a brain in its head will work out a policy that allows the hardwood timber industry to be restored, but who in the private sector is going to invest in that industry, going forward, with the risk of a state government potentially shutting them down again? Who is going to put the money up?

The big issue is not only the loss of jobs, which is significant enough. It's not only the fact that we're now raiding other countries and other states for our timber supply. The other big loss is the very people I talked about in my first comments here today: the volunteers at the CFA and the SES—the people out there with chainsaws, clearing roads to get access to properties. These are people with practical bush skills. When they lose their jobs, they don't stay around. They've got no reason to stay around. If there's no job for them anymore, these people with practical bush skills will leave my community. We're already seeing that. People with skills in the bush, people who can use heavy equipment, people who have knowledge and understanding of how the forest can be managed—they're going to leave, and they are leaving, because there are no jobs for them in the hardwood timber industry.

Particularly in times of emergency, you can't replace them with someone who just jumps in a bulldozer once or twice a year over summer to clear a firebreak. We find that, during emergency situations, the contractors who work in the timber industry are the ones who have the skills to keep our communities safe. They have the practical bush skills. They know how to use the harvest equipment and the bulldozers—the large equipment—to keep our communities safe. Those people won't be there anymore.

Those are the social, economic and environmental consequences of a political decision to shut down the hardwood timber industry for one reason only: Greens preferences in the city. There is no science to justify shutting down the entire hardwood timber industry in Victoria, only political science. It was all about gutless Labor MPs in my home state of Victoria not having the courage to stand up for blue-collar workers. Not one of them in the federal or state parliament lower house had the guts to stand up for blue-collar workers, because they've sold their souls for Greens preferences. That has been the most appalling decision I've seen a government make in my 15 years as a member of parliament. There is no logic behind it, and we're seeing massive social and economic disruption in my community of Gippsland. The environmental consequences of a poorly maintained natural bush reserve in the future will be felt by all of us.

Leaving the bush unattended and unmanaged is a recipe for disaster. All of the bushfires which occurred in the Black Summer in my community started on public land. They all started by natural causes—lightning—when the bush was dry after a long season of drought weather. It's poorly managed public land that is the worst neighbour to have if you're living in a community in Gippsland. If they don't have resources on the ground to do that practical work, my communities are put at greater risk. I say as a matter of philosophy and a matter of principle that, if my community is expected to be the custodian of a vast public land estate, it should get jobs associated with managing that public land estate, whether it's through a sustainable and world-class timber industry or natural resource management activities to keep our communities safe. I thank the House.

Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the first questions I would like to ask is: where is the government's bill to appropriate $2½ million from the Consolidated Revenue Fund to continue to pay for the next stage of Mulgoa Road—the upgrade that my electorate so desperately needs? We already know the answer. It will never happen under the Albanese Labor government, after they axed funding for local infrastructure projects right across the board in my community and right throughout Western Sydney. Mulgoa Road's next upgrade was going to widen lanes at three key junctions to provide much-needed traffic relief. The government doesn't care about Glenmore Park mums and dads getting home sooner and safer. The government doesn't care about Regentville seniors who need help to take their grandkids to and from footy training during peak hour or to pick them up from school. And they certainly don't care about Penrith parents jumping off the M4 to get home to make dinner for their family. This government doesn't care about seniors in Jamisontown who might miss important doctor appointments because of the enormous amount of traffic, continual traffic, on Mulgoa Road.

Over $200 million for Mulgoa Road is only a fraction of the damage the Labor government is doing to my part of Western Sydney by not delivering on infrastructure commitments. In fact, there are over $5 billion of funds promised by this government in the mid-year budget of October 2022 for needed infrastructure and transport projects, for the futureproofing of the growth of Western Sydney, that have just gone—$5 billion cut from Western Sydney infrastructure.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

How much?

Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) | Link to this | Hansard source

Five billion dollars of much-needed infrastructure right across the board to support our growing community, including the Western Sydney international airport. The infrastructure minister ripped this away, and it's an absolute shame.

It's a pity they have taken away funding to review upgrades for Luddenham Road to the airport. These are key road projects to do with Australia's newest international airport. The community of Luddenham are crying out for information and support from the Labor government, the infrastructure minister and the infrastructure department. Rather than help one of the most impacted communities adjacent to Western Sydney airport, the Labor infrastructure minister cut planning funding to upgrade Luddenham Road, which would have helped freight and nearby locals get around the airport. Unbelievably, the infrastructure minister cut funding for the M7-M12 interchange. But—wait for this—this road wasn't in planning; this road had already started. They've cut the funding, and the Commonwealth are no longer involved in a major project that had already started.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Sounds like Queensland!

Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) | Link to this | Hansard source

That's Western Sydney, New South Wales—the forgotten region, according to this Labor government. The project would have seen the M7 widened, and, importantly, would have connected the new M12 and assisted with links to the airport. This is not a tiny little local airport; this is an international airport of significance for our whole country.

Where are the tens of millions of dollars with which we were going to upgrade our community car parks in St Marys and Kingswood, in this growing Western Sydney? They've been cut. St Marys has a heavy rail train which is over capacity daily, and St Marys is also going to get a new metro site; it's the key link between Sydney and Western Sydney airport. The community surrounding St Marys is growing, yet the government has decided to cut its car park. How do the locals get to and from the airport in a growing populated area? Penrith City Council had already spent funds in planning for this car park, and, likewise with Kingswood, the Labor government has cut funding for their car park as well.

We also had planning money for Werrington Arterial stage 2 slashed. The planning was going to look at ways the road corridor would be improved and deal with congestion, with locals going to and from St Marys and Marsden Park and working hubs in the little business hubs around that area. It would have reviewed links to Werrington Road and the Great Western Highway for upgrades. The community around that area have for years been saying they desperately need this upgrade. It would have helped the constant logjam being faced by those living in Cambridge Gardens, Cambridge Park, Werrington, Werrington County, Werrington Downs and along Dunheved Road.

This is a vital corridor in the heart of my Lindsay electorate. At the 2019 election, I secured over $60 million funding to upgrade this Penrith City Council road. Throughout the last period of government I was able to double the commitment and get the full amount, $127 million, for the full upgrade of the road, because the state government didn't chip in. Unfortunately, the Labor Party, desperate for votes in Lindsay at the last election, promised that when in government they would fast-track the development of Dunheved Road and its upgrade. They even allotted funds to this during the election campaign. But here we are, in 2024, waiting for construction to begin. Penrith City Council officials told me that the road could not be fast-tracked, so, again, this was just another Labor lie.

The community desperately needs the upgrade of Dunheved Road to begin. It was 2019 when they secured the funds. The funds are there; the building just has to start. Labor coming in and making a promise that they knew they couldn't stick to was real desperation. It was really sad for my community. It's a pity that the Albanese government just doesn't care enough about Western Sydney to really invest, as opposed to stripping away funds from our growing community. Western Sydney represents the Australian dream, where you can get a house with enough space for a growing family. It is a beautiful place to live, in my part of the world. New homes continue to pop up to support the many young people and our newest citizens to take part in the Australian dream. It is so unfortunate that these Aussies are being let down by the Albanese Labor government.

The need for more infrastructure is just going to grow. Cutting more than $5 billion will hinder how long it will take to get to job sites in the morning for our tradies. It will impact how long it will take for Penrith residents to get to work in the Penrith CBD—or beyond, to Parramatta and the city—and our new aerotropolis, which is only a couple of years away. It will impact the whole of Western Sydney and the way people travel across the region for kids' sport on the weekend—for those who can afford to still go, which brings me to my next point about the cost-of-living crisis that is impacting so many families.

You just have to step out onto the streets of my electorate for somebody to come up and speak with you about how hard it is out there right now with groceries, petrol, mortgage and rents. Grocery increases are causing Foodbank services in Lindsay to more than double their regular distribution. I know this is a common story right now, right across our country, but we should not be getting used to this story. It is dire out there. We need to be doing something about it. 'We' need to be doing something about it? The Labor government needs to be doing something about it, because they have the levers and the mechanisms to make change. There are dual-income families lining up at the Penrith Community Kitchen and Mama Lana's—extraordinary local community groups who do so much for people in need.

I know my Nationals and regional Liberal colleagues have been talking about the impact of the Labor government's remodelling of the fresh food tax and water changes causing issues in the market. Let's take the agriculture minister's rejig of the Biosecurity Protection Levy. That will cause Aussie farmers to have to pay more, for the biosecurity costs of international importers. This will impact everyone. The farmers in the semirural parts of my electorate—whether in Luddenham, Londonderry or Agnes Banks—will not be happy with this next hit on them from Labor.

We're building an airport in Western Sydney to make it easier for local Western Sydney producers to get their products to the world. It could be extraordinary, yet locals will be slugged with these costs. Then they'll be passed on to the consumers, who are already struggling to pay for their groceries. This is more nonsensical Labor Party ideology impacting Aussies and impacting our local small businesses. Again, we have the truckies being taxed, which is impacting the many, many local truckies in my electorate. Does the Labor government understand that these added costs on businesses which provide our food and deliver essential products are part of what is fuelling this cost-of-living crisis?

The Assistant Treasurer, in his second reading speech, had the audacity to proclaim a surplus that this government is responsible for and that Australians should be so grateful for what is being done for us. The previous government started the immense budgetary repairs this nation needed. That was the coalition government. Then we were hit with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Those opposite seem to forget this. The interest rate increases have slammed Western Sydney families. 60 Minutes aired locals who are now facing pressures on weekend sport and their kids going to school. They are having to cut back. It is having a real impact on young people as well. A mother from Londonderry who is so financially stressed wrote to me saying she's thinking of selling up and moving to the bush because Western Sydney is no longer affordable. Rental pressures are hitting low-income earners and young people right across Lindsay, including in St Mary's. What about the $275 reduction in energy bill costs? That seems to have been forgotten by everyone in the Albanese Labor government. It certainly has not been forgotten by people in my community of Lindsay.

Over half of the Lindsay community travel to work by car. This is higher than the New South Wales average and is due to a lack of public transport options and the nature of work. Again, it is extraordinary that infrastructure such as roads and also commuter car parks is being cut. These car users include people like tradies that need to get to work and build those homes for the growing population in Western Sydney, people who are working from home. We have a hospital in my electorate which is one of the biggest employers. People are travelling there as well. There are teachers, nurses and people working at our local university.

These infrastructure cuts, these promises and inflation impacting on the family budget are all issues the government actually has the levers to address. They just aren't. Why aren't they doing it? Why aren't they trying to help people in my community? I think the fact is the Albanese Labor government simply doesn't care.

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

I rise tonight to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 and express my concern about how the Albanese Labor government seems to have abandoned regional Australia and particularly my electorate in a whole range of ways. In some ways, I can't believe it's on purpose. I think it's out of just a lack of understanding and ignorance about how things work.

One little program I was particularly proud of and that I was involved in way back in 2013 was the Stronger Communities Program. Any member would know the benefit of those small grants—$150,000 per electorate. Those small grants that went to sporting clubs, service clubs and the like were so well received. It wasn't a lot of money, but in a small rural community it can free up a committee to actually do what they would like to do, whether it's coach a footy team or look after a local community service club. It does help them not having to raise those funds. That's been abandoned.

The Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program was a great boon to communities through local government. It now no longer exists. If you drive right around Australia, including in my electorate, you can see fantastic projects that were funded under this scheme. It's gone.

On the program that is particularly close to my heart, Inland Rail, the minister has been completely incompetent. The minister commissioned Kerry Schott to do a review. The Schott report was critical of some aspects, largely at the management level and the board level. The Schott review clearly reinforced the business case—the need for the Inland Rail—and the importance of it going from Melbourne to Brisbane. For those who might not understand, the Inland Rail is an intermodal capital city link. It's designed to take the pressure off the highway system for that city-to-city freight that goes up and down—the truck that goes up and down the Newell Highway in my electorate every 70 seconds. The Inland Rail would save millions of tonnes of carbon. It's very efficient. One train would replace 150 trucks. That's the business case, from the outskirts of Melbourne to the outskirts of Brisbane. What's particularly exciting for my electorate, though, is it then gives a high-capacity, high-quality railway line for my exporters to send grain, cotton or other produce to port. At the moment, the link that the previous government funded, that connects the parts of the Inland Rail that are completed to the port of Newcastle, has already been a great boon to the grain growers in my electorate.

There is a bit of misunderstanding about Brisbane. There's this thought that there'll be no connection to the port of Brisbane and that there will be difficulty around that. But, once the Inland Rail gets to a point—and I think the current government might be looking at Ebenezer—with that link that would go from there to the Brisbane to Sydney line, there already is a standard gauge connection to the port of Brisbane. You can't double-stack grain or cotton or minerals, for that matter. So that connection will already be there.

For the minister to basically put on hold the project north of Narromine has created great uncertainty. There has been the removal of the funding for the grade separations that local councils fought so hard for. The one in Moree in particular was actually part of the original funding for Inland Rail, so it wasn't additional infrastructure spending that they could remove, but they did. The grade separation and the bridge that would cross the Newell Highway and the Inland Rail to the special activation precinct that is going to be built at Moree was a vital part of infrastructure that would eventually lead to a heavy vehicle ring road around Moree. In communities right through my electorate, there has been enormous commitment. Whether it is Moree council, Narrabri, Gilgandra or Narromine, they have all put in an enormous effort and an enormous amount of resources to get to this point. Now they're being told that it's going to be pushed back to 2027. It's just not acceptable.

You've got to understand that, on the strength of the announcements that Inland Rail was to be constructed, people have invested in trucks and earthmoving equipment. A large number of Indigenous people in Moree undertook training and were working very, very hard and very successfully on the completed Narrabri to North Star stage 1 section. They've all just been put on ice. They've gone from employment back onto unemployment because of this break in the progress. So I call on the government to get that project going again because, if it loses momentum, the possibility of doing this project in a timely manner just gets harder and harder. Sadly, despite my efforts and my offer to help—because I have an understanding of this project—the only interaction I've had from the government was when they tried to get me charged with trespass because I had the temerity to have a photograph taken on a level crossing near a railway line. That's the small-mindedness that we have to deal with.

I'll go to health and the changes to the distribution priority areas. For those who don't know, the DPA, or distribution priority area, program encouraged overseas trained doctors in particular, as part of their obligation, to go to a regional area. And it worked quite successfully. The first thing this government did was to open up distribution priority areas to peri-urban and large regional areas. The week that that was announced, Western Health—an area with small western towns—lost six doctors to places like Wollongong, Geelong and Newcastle, because there was no financial reason for those doctors to stay there. That has had an enormous impact on the health delivery for my town.

I've got to point out that the Parkes electorate is just under half of New South Wales. It has the second-highest Indigenous population, percentagewise, of any electorate in this House. My frustration is that there has been a lot of discussion from this government about helping the livelihood and welfare of Aboriginal people; at the same time, they're taking away all the projects, all the programs and all the funding that employ these people: Inland Rail; removing doctors through LRCI; taking 450 extra gigalitres of water from the Murray-Darling Basin—that production water. Who do you think is employed by that? What would be the biggest employer in a town like Moree? It's the irrigation industry. Who works in that industry? Aboriginal people. It's absolutely scandalous—not to mention the corporates. We have bank CEOs who won't work on Australia Day to show their affinity with Aboriginal people, while they close the branches at Lake Cargelligo, Warren, Gilgandra, Moree and Gunnedah. Who's impacted by that? Aboriginal people—particularly older people, who would struggle with the technology to go online. So the duplicity and double standards coming out of here, with ideology, pontificating about their greatness, while absolutely gutting the very people they say they represent, is scandalous.

There are the changes to aged care. With the best of intentions—and I don't want to have a crack at Minister Wells, because she's been personally quite helpful with some of the issues I've got—these issues have been caused by the changes to have 24/7 registered nurses in country aged-care facilities. So these facilities struggle with compliance. They're paying exorbitant wages for agency nurses to fly-in fly-out at towns like Broken Hill and Cobar. Last week in Broken Hill, in an effort to free up critical care beds, Far West health told 19 frail aged people that they had to move. I spoke to a person whose father has been told he has to go to Balranald, 450 kilometres away. He has dementia. His wife has dementia. They can't live at home; they can't live unsupervised. So here you have these people who've been together all their lives, and, for the last years or months of their lives, they're 450 kilometres apart! This is what happens when you have government policy that doesn't understand regional Australia—not to mention the attacks we saw on community pharmacy. Hopefully, we've seen some sanity come back.

There was the divisive nature of the Voice campaign. As I said, I've got the second-highest percentage of Aboriginal people in my electorate. They voted 80 per cent no. The Aboriginal people of Wilcannia, Bourke, Brewarrina, Moree—towns with very, very high Indigenous populations—said: 'No. We want to manage our own affairs. We don't want another bureaucracy in Canberra. We just want to be like everyone else.' In here, once again, I was accused of racism and all sorts of things. The Aboriginal people in my electorate are people. They have the same issues as everyone else. They want to educate their kids. They want to be able to see a doctor. They want to have somewhere for their parents to go when they can't look after themselves. They want a job. It got caught up in this ridiculous debate that absolutely divided families in my electorate.

On the water buybacks—water is life in my electorate. This is such an ideologically driven thing, because the 450 extra gigalitres wasn't part of the Basin Plan. One of the advantages of being in this place for a while is that you get a bit of a memory for what's gone on. The extra 450 gigs wasn't part of the Basin Plan. It wasn't part of the plan that was agreed upon in a bipartisan way. It wasn't part of the plan I voted on. It was a political fix for Senate votes in South Australia cooked up by Julia Gillard and the current Leader of the House, Tony Burke, in the lead-up to the 2013 election. It can't be delivered, but, basically, that water has now been removed. If you want to know what happens when water is removed from a community, I welcome anyone to come and visit me in Collarenebri. When Minister Wong purchased the water from Collymongle station, the biggest and probably only employer in the district closed down, and we went from being a prosperous community to being a welfare town.

It's a frustration—it really is a frustration. With the benefit of doubt, I don't think the Labor government is deliberately trying to attack my electorate, but inadvertently, through their lack of understanding and ignorance on every level that you'd like to mention, the people of my electorate are copping it. They're starting to come up to me in great despair. I haven't even touched on the IR laws, where some of the larger farms will need to have a union organiser. They are going to be trying to take over the shearing industry, which has prospered since the AWU declined. I could go on for much longer. I am terribly concerned. The sooner this government either wakes up to itself or moves on and lets someone that knows regional Australia come in and run the country, the better.

Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2023-2024 is an important bill to speak on. Spending money is one of the core functions of government, and how they do that has ramifications and significant impacts. We also know that, despite the size of the budget, how we spend it is crucial. We don't have unlimited resources.

So it's interesting that, today of all days, we look at government spending. We saw their announcement earlier today of about $14 million for food banks. That is important money. I'm lucky to have a lot of great food banks that I've been able to visit in my community. They play a crucial role and, unfortunately, are needed more than ever. I often think about the Mustard Tree Op Shop & Cafe in Lilydale. I visited them in May last year—it was quite a few months ago that I visited them. They have been in Lilydale for over 30 years. May last year was the biggest month on record for them for demand. It has only gotten worse since. I have been out there since May, and it has gotten worse since.

But it is interesting that, at the same time as this government has committed $14 million to food banks, we hear in Senate estimates that it has committed $40 million of taxpayer money to sell its broken promise on the stage 3 tax cuts. We have $14 million for food banks in a cost-of-living crisis, and we have $40 million of taxpayer money, as the Minister for Finance said in Senate estimates, to sell their broken promise for the stage 3 tax cuts. That example really shows everything that is wrong with the priorities of the Albanese government. It's why, after 20 months of the Albanese government, Australians are struggling so much with this cost-of-living crisis. There is a focus—a $40 million focus, as we found out today—on spin, optics and looking like they're doing something, but there is only a $14 million focus, which is a lot less, on actually giving money to food banks to make a tangible difference in my community and every community across the country. I think about $14 million, and that won't go very far across the country; it is very much a token effort. It is better than nothing—a bit like the stage 3 tax cuts of $15 a week in five months time—but not enough and not soon enough.

These are some of the challenges that we're facing, and a lot of the challenges we face are due to the decisions that have been made by the government. Government spending has a direct impact on inflation and on interest rates. If a government spends more, that drives up demand, drives up inflation and forces the RBA governor to increase interest rates. We've seen that, with 12 increases in interest rates since this government was elected. We talk about government spending, and we see the MYEFO reports that show the Labor government has spent, in the last 18 months, about $209 billion more than the coalition committed in its last budget. That's before we include the $45 billion in off-budget spending that's not part of that $209 billion; that's a cheap little accounting trick by the Treasurer to spend money but not put it in the budget. The reality in the real world and in an economy is: whether it's on budget or off budget, it still drives demand, still drives inflation and still forces the RBA governor to increase interest rates.

As economist Chris Richardson said recently in the AFR:

The rough trade-off is that interest rates would be a quarter of a percentage point lower than they'd otherwise have been if the government cut spending by about $6 billion over the coming year or if it raised taxes by about $9 billion … to leave the RBA (and hence borrowers) bearing the brunt of the inflation fight, as it allows the government to blame someone else for the pain that many are feeling.

As the new Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, said in November last year:

… the remaining inflation challenge … is increasingly homegrown and demand driven.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

No word about Putin there!

Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

No word about Putin at all, Member for Fisher! She won't say it because she can't, and I understand and respect that, but you see $209 billion of spending and $45 billion in off-budget spending—that drives a lot of demand and a lot of homegrown demand. We can join the dots there on the RBA governor's words.

She also said:

While labour costs are a big part of the increase, huge increases in the cost of energy, rent, and insurance are all keeping inflation higher for longer. In the September inflation report, energy (utilities) prices increased more than 12% year-on-year and insurance premia increased more than 8% year-on-year.

A 12 per cent year-on-year increase in energy prices—well, that $275 reduction in power bills is well gone. We know why the Prime Minister was happy to make that commitment 97 times, I think it was, before the election and not one time after.

The Australian people know prices are not coming down; they're going up. This is what happens: you spend more, you don't actually have a plan to address cost of living, you commit $40 million to sell a plan of $15 a week in five months, and you give $14 million to food banks. When your priorities are wrong, it makes it harder and harder for the Australian people. An Australian who was on $55,000 when Labor came to government has seen their real buying power decrease by almost $4,000 because of the $209 billion in additional spending plus the $45 billion off budget. It's driving inflation and driving costs up.

Those opposite like to say: 'We've delivered a surplus. We've delivered a surplus, and that's solved all the problems.' There's a problem with a surplus: there's a headline, but there are two sides to how a budget surplus is delivered. There are increases in revenue, and there are decreases in spending. If the revenue was increasing, but the spending is also going up, even though it's not going up as much, it still drives inflation. The Treasurer likes to take credit for the surplus, but what he doesn't talk about is what's driving that surplus. The reality is that, as the budget papers confirm, it's increased revenues coming in. It's soaring iron ore and coal exports that are delivering the trade surplus. It's commodity prices that are helping to deliver that $4 billion surplus. As EY's chief economist, Cherelle Murphy, commented last year in May about the budget:

The $36.9 billion deficit projection for 2022-23 was revised to a modest $4.2 billion surplus … through a combination of higher company and personal income tax receipts and conservative commodity price forecasts. The surplus projection ends there, as positive cyclical forces fade and the economy slows.

The position of the Budget is expected to worsen after 2024-25 as tax receipts moderate, along with spending pressures across the forward estimates.

We've seen that those tax receipts have increased, and that's why we're likely to get another surplus this year. Dr Steven Kennedy, Secretary to the Treasury, has flagged in Senate estimates this week that the higher than assumed commodity prices are going to continue to increase government revenue. He's said that there are further upside risks to the tax receipts. He went on to say, 'Over the four-year forward estimates period, there was a $39.5 billion improvement, driven by soaring personal income taxes and company taxes.'

That is the detail that matters when we talk about a surplus in a high inflation environment. It is whether you're bringing demand out of the economy or whether you're continuing to feed demand into the economy. The Treasurer can stand in the House at question time and talk about a surplus, but it's not actually bringing inflation down because inflation is being driven by higher receipts on tax—your personal tax. The little trick this government played is that they're happy to change stage 3, but they don't talk about how they let the low- and middle-income tax offset lapse last year—the $1,500. Many people in my community and across the country in July and August last year were desperate for a tax return because the cost of living is so tough. When they put their tax return in, they were disappointed. They were disappointed because the $1,500 that they'd received in the previous years was no longer there. What had happened is the government made the decision to let the low- and middle-income tax offset lapse, which is fine. We didn't talk about it, because that was part of stage 1, stage 2 and stage 3 of the tax cut package that they voted for in 2019.

An honourable member interjecting—

Yes, we did legislate that legislation, and then this government has shown in the last two weeks that they're prepared to change the legislation when it comes to tax. So they're prepared to change the legislation to give the Australian people $15 a week extra in five months, but this government wasn't prepared to change the legislation last year to give the Australian people $1,500 straightaway in July or August when they did their tax return, when they needed it.

This is what the Australian people know: everything has gone up under this government, despite the promises of the Prime Minister during the campaign. Food has gone up more than nine per cent. Housing has gone up more than 12 per cent. Electricity is up by 23 per cent, despite that promise to reduce bills by $275. Gas has gone up by more than 29 per cent, and every resident in Casey knows this when they get their bills or go to the grocery store. Energy and gas in particular are important because they hit the Australian people in two ways. They hit you when the bill comes in, but they hit you every time you go to the grocery store. I worked in food manufacturing for many years prior to this role, and energy was one of the largest costs in manufacturing our food. It wasn't just our largest cost; it was one of the largest costs in the materials that we bought. When you go into the supermarket, you need to understand that the food manufacturer is being hit with increased costs. I'm not going to defend Woolworths and Coles, but they've been hit with increased costs. Those coolrooms and distribution centres they have are incurring increased costs.

And it goes further back. Take corn chips as an example. The farmer that grows that corn is being hit with increased cost, and this all gets passed along the line so, when you get to the supermarket, you get groceries at a higher price. That's the reality. That is why it is so important that you bring energy prices down: because it affects the whole community. That's not even to talk about the community groups that are impacted: those sporting clubs, charities, food banks that have to pay those higher energy prices. This is what we've seen. The Prime Minister himself admitted at the National Press Club that their policies aren't working and they don't have the cost-of-living crisis under control. That's why he made the decision to break his word that he committed a hundred times to the Australian people. That's been the big change. The war in Russia and Ukraine was many years ago. It was there when he made these promises. What has changed is that this government doesn't have any solutions for the Australian people.

Everyone knows that. They know it when they put the petrol in their car. They know it when they have to pay for the supplies for their children's education, when they go to the grocery store, when their rates come in from council, when their rent is higher than last year and when their mortgage has gone up 12 times in the last 18 months.

Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) | Link to this | Hansard source

I understand the member for Casey is the last speaker from the opposition on this group of bills. I thank them for their contribution and I sympathise with his confusion. It's very difficult for the member for Casey and all other members of the coalition to grasp the fact that we would deliver a surplus but not deliver coffee cups advertising the surplus! We're more focused on substance than the marketing.

But genuinely I'd like to thank all members who've contributed to the debate on the additional estimates appropriation bills 2023-24. Sometimes lost in the fog of the parliamentary debate is the fact that these bills are actually seeking authority from the parliament for additional expenditure of money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the remainder of 2023-24, an important purpose. Passage of the bills will ensure continuity of government programs, which I'm sure is something that all members of this place are concerned about, and provide for the commencement of new activities agreed by the government since the 2023-24 budget. I outlined those in the introductory speech on these bills in the House. They will also ensure the Commonwealth's ability to meet its obligations for the remainder of this financial year as they fall due.

In introducing the bills, the government has already highlighted some of the more significant items provided for in these bills. The total appropriation sought through the bills is approximately $11 billion. I once again genuinely thank the honourable members of the House who have contributed to the debate. With those brief concluding comments, I commend the bills to the House.

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that this bill be now read a second time.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.