Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely, Senator Conroy. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I am on the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit. There was an ANAO report on productivity and in direct questioning I said, 'Does this mean that the workers on the project have taken the money and not done the work?' 'No, Senator, it doesn't mean that at all. It means that there has been considerable redesign and that the work has been done three times.' So this focus on productivity should not at the workers' site in Adelaide; it should be a bit further up the food chain. Maybe it should be the people in Defence who have not done their job properly and have contributed to loss of productivity. Maybe there are those in the minister's office who have not done their job properly. But the workers in Adelaide clearly have been productive and efficient. It has been redesigned coming out of Spain and that has caused this loss in productivity. But I do not want to dwell on that. I just wanted to put that on the record.

But let us very clear about the debate before the Senate this morning and the astounding contributions from Senator Bernardi and Senator Macdonald. In your absence, Mr Deputy President, I was in the chair for both of those contributions, and I think it is a little rich of Senator Fierravanti-Wells, when she cannot convince her own side of the merit of her argument, to come in here and try to lambast us in the opposition. Very clearly, there are a lot of people who are extremely concerned at this budget that I have had the opportunity of speaking to like pensioners who are appalled at the changes; motorists—in fact, anybody who drives a car, particularly those in regional Australia—are incensed at this impost that has been brought in. The sick and elderly who rely on medical services on a very frequent basis—weekly, fortnightly. This morning I received a contribution from a doctor who looks after an aged-care facility. He tells me there is not a great percentage of doctors who even practise in the aged-care system. A lot of that has been left to particular GPs, and they do not have the wherewithal and are not going to be able to say to people in aged-care facilities 'you cannot have your weekly doctor's visit unless you have $7.00'. They are very upset about that.

Then there is the family tax benefit. Despite the fact that they cannot win over Senator MacDonald, Senator Bernardi and a whole cohort of Nationals, particularly with respect to the fuel excise payments—the parental leave scheme has caused tremendous dissent. Senator MacDonald was quite right: on one hand you want lower company taxes, so we are going to give them a one-and-a-half per cent tax cut, and I support that. On the other hand, you are going to give them a 1½ per cent levy for the paid parental leave scheme. A very confusing message and not easy to sell unless you put up a great big barrage of debt, debt, debt; crisis, crisis, crisis. Let's frighten the punters into thinking they have to fundamentally change the way Australia operates. We have had Medicare operating very, very well, and it is not a question of a $7.00 copayment; there are probably plenty of people in the community who can pay $7.00. It is about the principle of universal free health care in this country, which has been around for a very long time and in my view should stay. When you start tinkering at the edges, it is the people at the lower end who always feel that in a very demonstrable and unconscionable way. When I asked if they had done any modelling in senate estimates about the capacity of people to pay the $7.00—people who may have a mental illness or a history of mental illness who need regular visits to their practitioner—did you do any studying or modelling on that? 'No, we didn't; we just brought it in'; was the answer. We are just going to bring it in and fit people up with it.

But even that icon of conservatism, Mr John Howard, has a bit to say. Family tax benefits are not welfare payments—they are tax breaks. So you can only draw the conclusion from that that this government has added a new tax on families by taking away the family tax benefits. It is actually a new tax, something they promised they would never do.