I have received a message from the Senate informing the House that Senator Johnston has been discharged from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity and that Senator Fierravanti-Wells has been appointed a member of the committee.
On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security I present the committee’s report entitled Review of administration and expenditure No. 7: Australian intelligence agencies.
Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.
I move:
That the House take note of the report.
In accordance with standing order 39, the debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for a later hour this day.
by leave—I move:
That the order of the day be referred to the Main Committee for debate.
Question agreed to.
Bill and explanatory memorandum presented by Dr Emerson.
Bill read a first time.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
Schedule 1 to this bill implements the first part of the government’s decision to reform Australia’s foreign source income anti-tax-deferral (attribution) rules that was announced as part of the 2009-10 budget.
This schedule repeals the foreign investment fund, or FIF, provisions and the deemed present entitlement rules that are contained in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936.
This measure will assist Australian managed funds and other businesses to compete internationally by reducing the complexity and compliance costs that are associated with the making of foreign investments.
The repeal of the FIF and deemed present entitlement rules further contributes to the government’s objective of promoting Australia as a financial hub in our region. This will support Australian jobs.
This measure, being part of wider reforms to better target Australia’s attribution rules, will also further simplify the taxation law and bring consolidation of the two income tax acts a significant step closer.
Full details of the measures in this bill are contained in the explanatory memorandum.
Debate (on motion by Mr Coulton) adjourned.
Bill and explanatory memorandum presented by Dr Emerson.
Bill read a first time.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
This bill will increase the Medicare levy low-income thresholds for individuals and families in line with increases in the consumer price index. The low-income threshold in the Medicare levy surcharge provisions will be similarly increased. These changes will ensure that low-income individuals and families will continue to be exempt from the Medicare levy and/or the Medicare levy surcharge.
The bill will also increase the Medicare levy low-income threshold for pensioners below age pension age to ensure that individuals in this cohort receive the full benefit of the increase in the pension announced by the government in the 2009-10 budget and that they do not pay the Medicare levy when they do not have an income tax liability.
The amendments will apply to the 2009-10 year of income and later income years.
Full details of the measures in this bill are contained in the explanatory memorandum.
Debate (on motion by Mr Coulton) adjourned.
Bill and explanatory memorandum presented by Dr Emerson.
Bill read a first time.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
This bill, together with the supporting bill, the Income Tax Rates Amendment (Research and Development) Bill 2010, introduces a new research and development tax incentive to replace the outdated and complex R&D tax concession.
The new incentive is the biggest reform to the business R&D landscape in the last decade. It is all about boosting investment in R&D, strengthening Australian companies and supporting jobs. It provides for increased assistance for genuine R&D and redistributes support in favour of small and medium sized enterprises—the engine room of our economy.
Our intention is to lift Australia’s R&D performance by encouraging many more businesses to benefit from the scheme, ensuring Australia’s place as a clever country. R&D activities contribute to innovation by creating new knowledge and technologies—increasing productivity, jobs and economic growth, and allowing Australia to respond to present and future challenges.
The two core components of the new incentive are a 45 per cent refundable tax offset for companies with a turnover of less than $20 million and a 40 per cent non-refundable tax offset for all other companies.
The 45 per cent refundable tax offset doubles the current base rate available to SMEs, and the 40 per cent non-refundable tax offset raises the base rate for larger companies by one-third.
The tax offsets are calculated on the basis of expenditure on eligible R&D activities and the decline in value of depreciating assets used for eligible R&D activities.
Small innovative firms are big winners from the new R&D tax incentive, with greater access to cash refunds for their R&D expenditure and more generous rates of assistance.
For example, suppose a company with a turnover of $10 million spends $1 million on eligible R&D activities in an income year and is in a tax loss position. Under the new R&D tax incentive that company will be entitled to a cash refund of $450,000.
Under the existing R&D tax concession the company will only receive a tax deduction worth $375,000 and there is zero benefit until the company starts to turn a profit. In this way, the incentive will help small innovative companies when they need it the most.
The new R&D tax incentive better focuses public support towards genuine R&D activities. The key elements of this approach are a clearer definition of core R&D activities, a robust test for supporting R&D activities and stronger administration of the tax incentive.
These changes will ensure that the new R&D tax incentive rewards a company’s genuine R&D, not business-as-usual activities.
Recognising the pervasive nature of information technology in a modern economy, the new R&D tax incentive will ensure most software R&D is treated consistently with R&D occurring in other sectors. Other activities that were specifically excluded from being considered core R&D activities have been substantially rationalised to further improve the incentive.
Importantly, this bill further opens up the new R&D tax incentive to foreign corporations that are resident in Australia and those that carry on R&D activities through a permanent establishment in Australia.
It also ensures the new incentive will be available for expenditure on eligible R&D activities conducted in Australia, regardless of where the resulting intellectual property is held.
This will strengthen the case for companies to conduct R&D activities locally.
On an underlying cash basis the new R&D tax incentive is expected to be budget neutral over its first four years of operation.
To ensure a smooth transition to the new R&D tax incentive the 2009-10 budget provided an additional $38 million over four years for administrative agencies to support companies through the transition.
To improve certainty for taxpayers AusIndustry will provide improved public guidance material and will introduce a new system of private binding rulings, called ‘advance findings’.
This bill also represents a significant step in simplifying the income tax law. In addition to being drafted in plain English the new provisions to be inserted in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 are less than one-third of the length of the provisions they replace in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936.
The Tax Laws Amendment (Research and Development) Bill 2010 will deliver much-needed reform to public support for business innovation. It will deliver a substantial incentive for companies to conduct R&D in Australia. It recognises that the innovation dividend for the economy will come from refocusing public support on genuine R&D, not routine business activities.
Full details of the amendments in this bill are contained in the combined explanatory memorandum to this bill and the supporting bill, the Income Tax Rates Amendment (Research and Development) Bill 2010.
Debate (on motion by Mr Coulton) adjourned.
Bill presented by Dr Emerson.
Bill read a first time.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
This bill supports the Tax Laws Amendment (Research and Development) Bill 2010, which introduces a new research and development tax incentive to replace the outdated and complex R&D tax concession.
Together the bills clarify the treatment of government grants under the new R&D tax incentive.
Where an entity’s research and development expenditure eligible for an R&D tax offset is funded from a government grant or recouped from government, the potential double benefit is clawed back.
This is achieved by the entity paying an additional amount of income tax equal to 10 per cent of the relevant grant or recoupment amount. This form of adjustment is much easier for taxpayers and administrators than current arrangements because it avoids the need to recalculate tax offset entitlements for previous years.
This bill contains the necessary amendments to the Income Tax Rates Act 1986, which in accordance with normal government practice are contained in a bill separate from the other amendments.
Full details of the amendments in this bill are contained in the combined explanatory memorandum to this bill and the Tax Laws Amendment (Research and Development) Bill.
Debate (on motion by Mr Coulton) adjourned.
Bill and explanatory memorandum presented by Mr Butler.
Bill read a first time.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I am very pleased today to be introducing the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Amendment Bill 2010 which implements a reform agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments on 3 July 2008—one of the early harvest reforms.
This amendment reflects the government’s strong commitment to microeconomic reform. In particular this amendment supports the goal of reducing the level of unnecessary or poorly designed regulation, with its resulting negative impact on Australian business.
While regulation is essential for the proper functioning of society and the economy, the challenge for government is to deliver effective and efficient regulation. In doing this, we must ensure that the regulation is effective in addressing an identified problem, and that it does this in a way that is not unduly onerous or duplicative in nature.
This amendment is part of a package of reforms being pursued by the government in relation to the regulation of chemicals and plastics, which followed a study by the Productivity Commission in 2008. The reforms have been agreed to by all states and territories through COAG, as part of the ‘Seamless National Economy’ reform agenda.
Specifically, this reform will address the delay and uncertainty for users of agricultural and veterinary chemicals, who are typically primary producers, which results from overlapping regulatory responsibilities for setting maximum residue limits of chemicals allowed to be present in food.
Under the existing arrangements, both the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) have a role in establishing safe limits for agricultural and veterinary chemical residues. The APVMA does this in the course of issuing registrations and permits for agricultural and veterinary chemical products. FSANZ, with its role in establishing and maintaining food standards, is responsible for incorporating maximum residue limits into the Food Standards Code.
Both regulatory systems are charged with the protection of public health and safety. Both rely on rigorous scientific assessment. But while both systems work well to ensure the safety of Australians, the overlapping regulatory responsibilities of the two agencies lead, in certain circumstances, to significant delays in decisions which mean a product might be grown on a farm but cannot be sold as a food for some months later.
This results from the time lag of nine to 12 months which occurs between when the APVMA establishes a maximum residue limit in relation to an agricultural or veterinary chemical product, and when FSANZ is able to effect a corresponding modification to the Food Standards Code.
Amendments to the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Act 1991, designed to improve the operation of the food regulation system in response to consumer, industry and government feedback, were most recently made in 2007. These included changes intended to streamline the process for establishing maximum residue limits in the Food Standards Code. The amendments achieved a modest reduction in the timelines for modifying the Food Standards Code, through giving FSANZ early notice of any applications to the APVMA for chemical products that would be likely to result in a change to a maximum residue limit.
However, the 2007 amendments did not address the fundamental problem with setting maximum residue limits: the duplication of the scientific assessment and decision-making process, and the resulting significant time delay for primary producers.
The amendments I am presenting to the House today will fix this problem once and for all, by streamlining the decision-making process for determining maximum residue limits. Under the new system, if the APVMA makes a decision on setting a maximum residue limit, in the course of approving a chemical product registration or permit application, then the APVMA can use that decision to vary the maximum residue limits standard in the Food Standards Code. FSANZ, as the scientific experts in food safety, will retain responsibility for the dietary modelling that the APVMA will rely on to establish safe chemical residue limits.
These amendments will not jeopardise the protection of public health and safety in any way. In over 10 years of the system’s operation, there has never been an occasion where FSANZ has not adjusted the Food Standards Code in line with the maximum residue limits set by the APVMA. Instead, these amendments reduce duplicative administrative processes, and herald a new era of better integration of the roles of the two regulatory agencies.
All states and territories, which are partners in the joint food regulation system, have been consulted on the bill and are committed to ensuring the system continues to protect public health and safety, whilst also promoting improvements in regulatory efficiencies.
Debate (on motion by Mr Coulton) adjourned.
On behalf of the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, I move:
That, in accordance with the provisions of the Public Works Committee Act 1969, the following proposed work be referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works for consideration and report: Integrated fit-out of new leased premises for the Australian Taxation Office at 12-26 Franklin Street, Adelaide, South Australia.
The Australian Taxation Office—ATO—proposes to undertake an integrated fit-out of new leased premises at 12-26 Franklin Street, Adelaide, South Australia. The new premises will replace the existing three ATO locations in the Adelaide CBD. The leases for two of these properties will expire in 2012, with the remaining lease due to expire in 2014. It is expected that the co-location into a single new building will provide the ATO with considerable advantages in building design, operations, performance and efficiency, long-term viability and maintenance. The estimated out-turn cost of the proposal is $52.9 million, plus GST. Subject to parliamentary approval, the proposed integrated fit-out works are scheduled to start in May 2011 and be completed by 31 October 2012. The developer will initiate work on site with the excavation and pier drilling of the basement areas commencing in August this year. Groundworks will begin in September. The ATO is expected to take up occupancy of the building in November 2012. I commend the motion to the House.
Question agreed to.
I present the report from the Publications Committee sitting in conference with the Publications Committee of the Senate, incorporating a report of the committee’s activities. Copies of the report are being placed on the table. I seek leave to move that the House agree to the report and to make a short statement.
Leave granted.
In May 2006 the Joint Committee on Publications presented its report on the Distribution of parliamentary papers series. The committee’s report made 23 recommendations, of which nine related to electronic publication and options for developing an electronic parliamentary papers series. The committee’s recommendations were supported by both the Presiding Officers and the government. However, the significant costs in both capital and human resources and the possibility of these costs being duplicated in the parliament and across government were noted at the time as significant concerns.
Given the technological and whole of government developments that have occurred since the committee’s report in 2006, the committee has this morning resolved to undertake a short inquiry on the development of an electronic parliamentary papers series. The committee will seek input from interested parties and will present its report to both houses on 24 June 2010.
The committee has also undertaken a review of compliance of departments and agencies with printing standards for the parliamentary papers series. That review indicates a general level of compliance. The main areas of noncompliance relate to the use of ‘bleeding’ and full colour printing. At its meeting this morning the committee resolved to continue to make departments and agencies aware of printing standards and to undertake a second compliance review later this year. I move:
That the report be agreed to.
Question agreed to.
Bill returned from Main Committee with an unresolved question; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
by leave—I will not go through all the issues raised in the Main Committee, but I do thank the House for returning the Veterans’ Entitlements Amendment (Income Support Measures) Bill 2010 to the chamber to deal with what in my view is a very important amendment. The amendment, for those who were not in the Main Committee, encapsulates the issue that surrounds particularly our Second World War veterans who did not qualify for what is currently, under the Veterans’ Entitlements Act, called qualifying service. They served their nation during the Second World War—they enlisted and they did as they were ordered to do. In some cases soldiers went overseas and fought in various theatres of war, in which case they qualified for various health card and other benefits. Those soldiers who served during that time but did not go overseas or were not in the Darwin or Townsville areas and some other areas in Papua New Guinea during the conflict, so were not in areas where an angry shot was fired, do not have qualifying service and as a consequence do not receive the gold card for health care.
I understand the reasons and I noted with interest Justice Clarke’s report of a few years back. There have been a number of reports on this issue. I have moved my second reading amendment so that both sides of the parliament can actually think about where these people actually sit in our nation. They enlisted, they were prepared to serve and they would have served wherever they were sent. In a lot of cases soldiers were sent overseas, and now they receive the benefits. Most of these people are well into their eighties, and most of them are requiring some degree of health care. Some of them consider themselves to be second-class soldiers. A few years ago a man in his nineties went to his grave—and I had fought for this amendment for many years; I first introduced this amendment in 2002—thinking he was a second-class soldier because he served for five years and was never ordered to go overseas. I made the point in the Main Committee—and I do thank the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs for being here—that my father served in the Middle East. I am very proud of that, but if the Japanese had broken through in New Guinea he would have been next to useless in defending Australia. The people who would have been the most useful were the soldiers who were still in Australia, because they had been ordered to stay in Australia just in case these events occurred. As history has unfolded, obviously the Japanese did not break through. Those men are considered to be different from those who gave service similar to my father’s. They do not receive those benefits.
I just say to the House—and I know the rules of money bills—that the amendment is essentially about sending the message that we do actually care about those people. The people we are talking about are dying at the rate of 800 a month, so this is not an exponential budgetary commitment that is going to be made; it is more a recognition that they are equal to those who served overseas. Those people may well have only been on a boat near New Guinea and were never shot at, but, because there had been reports of submarines in those areas—sight unseen—they qualify for the gold card. Others who were there six months later do not qualify for the gold card.
I will not say any more than that. People can refer to what I said in the Main Committee. I just ask members to give real consideration to this amendment. It does not require the government to suddenly find additional funds in the budget, but it does show some good faith to those men and women who are still alive and do not have qualifying service but gave unqualified service to this nation and were prepared to die for it, and they should be recognised through the granting of the gold card for health purposes.
by leave—I will be brief. I would like to praise the minister for being in the House. In the state parliament, ministers were always in the House for their legislation and so were the heads of departments. I bring the attention of the House to the fact that the minister is in the House. That is very rare in this place. One of the reasons we had good government during the Goss-Kevin Rudd years in Queensland and the Bjelke-Petersen years was that the minister would always be in House for legislation and the head of his department would always be there. You have to face the music. In every well-run organisation that I know it is demanded that the CEO turn up and face the music. I have seen only two ministers do that in this place, so I give the minister very great credit. And once again I praise Minister Burke, who also does that.
by leave—Mr Acting Deputy Speaker Scott, I acknowledge your long-term interest and work in this area over many years. It is appropriate on this occasion that I address a couple of the comments made by earlier speakers. Firstly, I address the member for Kennedy and thank him for his kind words. I have to admit that I am not always in the chamber, but I always make sure that if I am in my office I have the telecasted debate on and am therefore cognisant of the issues. That is what many of us do. I also acknowledge that the shadow minister is in the chamber, which again shows her interest in these matters. I acknowledge that in the circumstances.
With respect to the substantive issue, this is a very emotional question. The member for New England made the point about how many of our World War II veterans see themselves and their service. On a bipartisan note across the chamber, I have no doubt that if you were in uniform during World War II—and, as we know, it was a conflict that involved the entire country; my grandfather on one side was in the situation where he worked in a protected industry, so he was not, in fact, allowed to enlist—
As was mine.
Indeed, and this was the case for many. These are very rough figures, but to give you some idea—and it depends on who you talk to—about a million Australians were in uniform in World War II. I have heard figures of just under a million; I have heard figures of about 1.1 million. The split between those who served overseas, and therefore satisfy the requirements of qualifying service, and those who stayed in Australia is roughly fifty-fifty. I do not have an absolutely firm figure, but it is in the region of half a million people.
The issue is that, in the situation the country faced at that time, the entire country played a very active role. Many fought overseas; many were prepared to fight and were here in Australia to defend our country. We do not in any way, in my view, try and separate the valour, the courage and the commitment of those who served their country at that time. That has never been the intention of governments of any persuasion over the last 60-plus years since World War II occurred. What governments have done, basically back to the time after World War I—since the modern repatriation system was put in place, which is now approaching its 100th birthday—is look to the question of causality and the actual consequences of involvement in conflicts faced by people who wore uniforms and were part of our forces. What we have tried to do overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis is ensure that, if there are impacts on people as a result of their service, they are supported and compensated for that. We do not always get it right and often we are in situations where, over time, there is a better realisation of the actual impacts, and in those circumstances adjustments are made to the system. Sadly and tragically, that often means that those changes occur a long time after the event, and on occasions the support that is provided is such that you can say, ‘It has been too little and too late.’ That is an unfortunate aspect of the way the system has operated on occasions.
Sadly and tragically, that means that those changes occur often a long time after the event and in a situation where on occasions the support that is provided is such that for many you can look at it and say it has been too little and too late. That is an unfortunate aspect of the way the system has operated on occasions. I argue very strongly that there has also been a very beneficial element to it in terms of the nature of the standards of proof that are applied in allowing people to qualify for various levels of support and for recognising that benefit of the doubt, particularly for those who have served in a forward area.
The concept of qualifying service itself dates back to that period after World War I. There have been a number of considerations of the issue of, if you like, what people actually faced rather than the question of what they were prepared to face. That is why I say very much it goes away from the question of the courage of those who volunteered, because they all were courageous in volunteering. It goes to the question of what was the impact of that volunteering given the question of where they were serving at the end of the day. There have been studies that have shown back in the 1930s that if people served in a forward area and faced a hostile enemy then there is certainly evidence to suggest that there were almost indefinable or unquantifiable health impacts for those in that situation. What that has meant is that that ought to be allowed to be part of what you consider when you set up your beneficial system. It goes to a thing called the burnt-out digger effect, which was established in the 1940s and was the basis for the establishment of the service pension, which again is a qualifying service entitlement. With the service pension you access it five years earlier than the age pension, which is effectively recognition of the fact that your life expectancy may well have been impacted upon by the nature of the service that you gave.
The problem that the member for New England highlighted about the inconsistencies with respect to what you may have faced in Australia versus what you may have faced depending on where you served overseas is acknowledged. There is no question that there are, in my view, some interesting elements to the way that has developed over time. In order to be beneficial, governments have taken the view that you do not take things off people in those circumstances where they have been granted them and you try and be as open and as fair as you can be around the question of how people do qualify. But the underlying premise has been that question about incurred danger, that question about facing actual danger from hostile forces of an enemy. That has been the basis of the system as it has gone through. I note we have got two former ministers in the chamber. I acknowledge the member for Dunkley and the member for Maranoa, and the shadow minister as well. We have all had cases come across our desks where I am sure we have faced real questions about the decision that we take. But we understand why the legislation is set up in that way. Although I sometimes see cases where I wish I had the discretion to do something else, I understand that if you start meddling with those underlying elements of the system you in fact endanger the system as a whole, which is not something that really you can do.
I do not want to get into the question about cost because I do not think this is an issue which should be viewed in that light. But as the member for New England has raised it I do have to make a couple of points in relation to that. According to the records and the advice from my department, the average cost for a gold card this year will be around the $16,000 mark, $16,000 or $16,500. That is when you take the number of gold cards that we provide and the amount of expenditure on health care provision to those people. That has been rising significantly in recent years because we are, as the member pointed out, losing this generation at an incredibly advancing rate given their advanced years but also the health care costs they face at that time of their life are significantly above the average. Studies have been done which show that in the last couple of years of someone’s life if they are of an advanced age the health care costs can go into the hundreds of thousands, given the nature of the requirements often for emergency care, emergency hospitalisation and emergency surgery. So when we look at that average cost we also need to recognise the fact that the actual costs for people in that generation and that age group are significantly higher. So, although I do not think it should be seen substantially as a cost issue, there are actually costs to the budget in terms of making those decisions.
Historically, when you look back at what happened here, sometimes arguments are put that adjustments were made to the system, for example in the early 1970s to extend gold card qualifying service in effect and therefore healthcare access, which these days is a gold card, to all World War I veterans, including those who did not go. The argument is that it has been so many more years after World War II since that time that you ought to make the move and go down that same track. It does miss a couple of points. For one thing, back at that time we did not have the comprehensive healthcare system that we have these days, so the question of what was provided in terms of, for want of a better word, the public system at that stage compared to what is now provided through the systems that we have in place is quite different. I think that is an important part of the nature of why those sorts of questions were addressed. Also, at that time we had a repatriation hospital system which had the capacity to absorb those veterans as part of what was provided. We now operate a very different system with different implications for the way it is costed and the way it actually operates.
But the point I want to make sure the House is clear on—and I know it is a point that both sides of the House agree on—is that we value the service of all of our veterans and war widows. We know that all of them gave what they could. Many of them paid a terrible price, some at the time and some since, and we value that service. But the nature of the benefits system that we operate and have operated over almost the past century relates to the question of problems directly related to service or, in the case of qualifying service, a recognition that although elements of that are intangible they are real and ought to be considered in deciding what support to provide in the circumstances. This does produce, on occasion, inconsistencies. There are, on occasion, cases where, as a decision maker, you wish you could do something more. But overall the system has served the country well. In international terms it is no doubt a system which is the envy of other parts of the world. We have to work on improving it, and we should always be working to improve it, but we should also recognise that it is a system that has underlying components that should be valued and maintained.
The question is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.
A division having been called and the bells having been rung—
As there are fewer than five members on the side of the noes, I declare the question resolved in the affirmative in accordance with standing order 127. The names of those members who are in the minority will be recorded in the Votes and Proceedings.
Question agreed to, Mr Windsor and Mr Katter voting no.
The question now is that the bill be now read a second time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Debate resumed from 12 May, on motion by Mr Clare:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I am pleased to continue speaking on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010but without my phone today, which caused me considerable grief last night! I will not go over what was said last night, due to time constraints, but I do want to talk about the Clontarf Foundation and the role that it plays in Indigenous education, which is quite outstanding and involves strong mentoring by leading Aboriginal figures who come to the academies. The foundation is under the strong leadership of Gerard Neesham and a board of directors led by Ross Kelly. They have had some huge success stories, including this year Lewis Jetta, the 14th pick in the AFL draft. The staff include former AFL players such as Dale Kickett and Shannon Motlop.
This program began in 2000. When it commenced, there were only 25 students enrolled at the Waterford academy. I was pleased to go there with Mr Philip Ruddock, who was then the minister with carriage of Aboriginal affairs. ATSIC at the time owed the academy something like $30,000 and they would not hand the money over. When the minister turned up, that encouraged the ATSIC commissioner at the time, Farley Garlett—I actually went to school with Farley—to hand over the money. It was the first tranche of federal funds, realistically, that went into this program.
From that fledgling single academy in Waterford, there are now 36 academies across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Victoria, educating some 2,300 students and employing some 106 staff. In Western Australia the academies are far-reaching, established in places such as East Kimberley, Casuarina, Halls Creek, Derby and Esperance. There are 1,174 students in Western Australia, 856 in the Northern Territory and 150 in five academies in Victoria—and the numbers are continuing to grow. On that note, I will be doing my best to make sure that there is an academy in the Armadale area of my electorate, because there is a large Indigenous population there. I will be doing my best to speak to the Western Australian Minister for Education, Liz Constable, about that.
These academies attach themselves to existing high schools. It is a really good model, because the high school enjoys the attachment of the football academy and obviously there is infrastructure there for the academies in terms of buildings, administration, playing fields et cetera. One of the three schools in the Armadale area—Armadale Senior High School, Kelmscott Senior High School or Cecil Andrews Senior High School—would be a very good fit for this academy. I know that Gerard Neesham sees the potential.
As I said, there is a large Aboriginal population in Armadale, and this would be an opportunity to have a lot of these boys who do not attend school to attend school and in a meaningful way engage with the education system. As Gerard has said to me, many of these Indigenous boys have lost the pattern of sociable life. For example, their sleep pattern is totally out of kilter. They sleep most of the day, get up late in the afternoon and then are attracted to nefarious activities in the evenings and at night. If you can get them back into the proper sleep pattern of people who operate during the day, they can engage in meaningful work and education.
The member for Brand last night gave a number of case studies and successful examples of involvement in the lives of individuals in the academy. All the staff are passionate about the program and its success. These people vigorously apply for positions with the Clontarf Foundation, and why wouldn’t they when it has results like these? The Clontarf Foundation, since its inception 10 years ago, has consistently placed 75 per cent of year 12 leavers into employment within the first 12 months after leaving school—typically into traineeships and apprenticeships. At one stage in Western Australia, when the foundation had been going for just a few years, one in four year 12 boys of Indigenous origin was in Clontarf. Getting Indigenous boys to finish year 12 was a real problem and yet, with such a small operation, Clontarf had one in four in its program.
This program also supports a healthy lifestyle, reduces petty crime among Indigenous youths, encourages discipline, improves self-esteem and teaches general life skills. Student numbers completing school consistently increase each year that the program operates in any location. Student numbers are typically low in senior years in the first few years at the new location but they increase steadily. In 2009 there were 112 year 12 graduates across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Clontarf’s school retention rates average over 90 per cent, compared to 2009 overall retention rates for Indigenous students of just 46 per cent. What a successful outcome. Over 75 per cent of year 12 graduates transition successfully to full-time employment within six months of graduating. That is one of the points that need to be made—that there is a pathway after school through this program, that people find apprenticeships and jobs through so many of the foundation’s sponsors.
Clontarf are quite clever in the way that they arrange their funding. They get federal funding, which we are talking about today; funding from the state governments that they are involved with and the Territory government, obviously; and corporate funding. I remember going to the opening of the Broome academy. They had Michael Chaney there on behalf of the National Australia Bank and a representative of Goldman Sachs. Corporate funding is very important as well so that you are not compromised by one source of funding. Having that diverse funding stream also allows you some sort of autonomy, because you are not reliant on just one group of people.
Projected year 12 graduates in 2010 are over 200, with close to 400 year 12 graduates expected by 2011. Clontarf has a development plan to expand the program significantly and reach even more corners of Australia. If Clontarf remained as it is now by 2012 it would have 2,500 students in Clontarf programs at schools and 400 students completing year 12. But they want to exceed this and the Prime Minister asked them to come up with a plan to do so. They did, and now it is up to the Prime Minister to make sure that this money flows. If this Clontarf plan was implemented the outcomes more than double to 5,730 students in Clontarf programs in 2012, skyrocketing to almost 10,000 students in 2014, with 1,600 of those Indigenous students completing year 12. Those are the projections that we would like to see. These are grand but very achievable plans with worthwhile results. But it all comes at a cost. To reach that level of expansion will take operating costs to $65 million in 2014 to be divided between the federal government, state governments and the private sector.
Historically Clontarf have always battled to secure funding. In 2003 I was pleased to be a part of the announcements when then Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon. Dr Brendan Nelson, granted the program $500,000. I recall Ross and Gerard flying from Perth on the midnight horror and turning up to Brendan’s office with me trying to convince the minister that was a good thing to fund. And he did. He continued to see the merits of this program and continued the funding such that in 2005 he announced federal funding of up to $1.92 million over four years. This was continued by the coalition government through the next minister, the Hon. Julie Bishop, the member for Curtin.
After ignoring non-recurrent items of a capital nature—buildings et cetera—the cost of doing this in 2009 was assessed at $17.75 million, an increase of $9 million over the previous year. But this needs to be put into context. This must be understood by not only governments but those in the community who say: ‘Why do we have a specific Aboriginal program? Why isn’t there a program for migrant kids or kids from disadvantaged backgrounds?’ It is because of the massive incarceration rate of Aboriginal men. The figures vary from state to state, but a recent figure from Western Australia suggested that the cost of keeping somebody in prison for 12 months was heading towards $200,000. When you look at that and then look at this program, which has so many young Aboriginal men in it whose lives are being focused rather than drifting, you can see why this is money well spent. We owe it to the next generation of Indigenous young men and their families. We have had what seems to have been a lost generation of Aboriginal direction. Now, programs like this are putting these boys in particular on a sound footing for the future, not only in terms of the education process which allows them to see a better way but in terms of their role in the community and in employment—in the workforce. This is money well spent.
I could go on about all the figures et cetera, but in my last minute I want to say that the federal government in the budget seems to have rolled over the recurrent funding. But, as I have outlined to you, this is a growing program. I know that Gerard and the whole Clontarf Foundation are very nervous about the future funding that is needed to expand this program all around Australia. The same is going to be asked of the corporate world and state governments. I know that the Prime Minister is supportive of this program, as is his minister. I ask that they ensure that the funding does flow for this very worthy program. Those of us on this side of the House support this initiative.
I am not normally a fan of the contributions in this chamber from the member for Canning, but I will commend him on his contribution on this occasion. I too rise to speak in support of the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. Before the Leader of the Opposition accuses me of formalism and tokenism, I would also like to proudly recognise the traditional owners and thank them for their continuing stewardship of this wonderful land of ours.
If we are to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, school attendance rates in remote Indigenous communities must be improved. There is no other way forward. There are about 2,000 Indigenous children of compulsory school age in the Northern Territory who are not enrolled in school. That means that one in five Aboriginal children in remote communities in the Northern Territory is not even enrolled in school. A further 2,500 are not attending regularly. Furthermore, about 8,000 Indigenous children attend school only 60 per cent of the time on average—there are two in five days when they are not even at school. That is no way to get a continuous education and improve.
The Rudd government has already taken some measures to improve attendance for some families by linking Centrelink payments to school attendance. The Sporting Chance program takes a more innovative approach to encourage school attendance. It is more of a carrot than a stick. Through sport and recreation, this program helps Indigenous children from rural and remote areas engage in school. In Australia, there is nothing quite like sport with the power to knock down barriers and inspire pride. Some of the most effective programs for young Indigenous people are the ones linking sporting and education opportunities.
In March, Warren Mundine, the Chair of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:
To me developing indigenous sport is about capitalising on one of our top strengths—our sporting infrastructure and culture—to motivate individuals to go for it and to get the best out of life.
… … …
Sport is one way of helping to close the gap on indigenous disadvantage. The federal government’s Sporting Chance Program, which uses sport and recreation to lift the level of engagement of indigenous students to improve their educational outcomes, is one example where results are starting to show.
The aim of the Sporting Chance Program is to meet the COAG targets for closing the gap: to halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievement for Indigenous children within a decade, and to halve the gap for Indigenous students in Year 12 attainment or equivalent by 2020.
Indigenous Australians—as I am sure you would well know, Deputy Speaker Scott, because of your electorate—have made a remarkable contribution to this country’s reputation as a sporting giant. They include people like Cathy Freeman; Nova Peris-Kneebone; Evonne Goolagong Cawley; Michael Long, former Essendon captain, two-time premiership player and two-time All Australian and AFL Hall of Fame inductee; Steve Renouf; Dale Shearer, who I will claim as a St George boy; Johnathan Thurston, Scott Prince, Mal Meninga, Artie Beetson and many others—all world beaters in their chosen sports.
It is no surprise then that when I was a kid growing up in St George in western Queensland it was not the pale-skin kids you feared on the sporting fields, it was the Murris. Deputy Speaker, with a little indulgence I will make a racist observation. Generally speaking, the Murris in St George were stronger, faster and better coordinated than the whitefellas. It strikes me that despite their superior skills and strength most of the Murri kids I grew up with did not go on to greatness in sport. The exceptions were Dale Shearer, who had an international career, and maybe two other guys: Robert Clements and Woopy Evans.
Most of them did not go on to sporting careers. However, with the proper support, resources and encouragement, I am sure that many of the Murri kids of today could achieve anything in sport, and in life for that matter. Obviously, if you are successful in sport you make other connections and you get other opportunities. With a little bit of guidance and support even front-rowers can go on to have post rugby league careers! But such was and is the nature of Indigenous disadvantage that many of the Murri kids that I grew up with, sadly, did not make it. Some of them did not really make it in life, as I detailed in my first speech, but I will not revisit that here; that is a bit too sad. It is the same with education—literacy and numeracy. The smart kids never received the tools that we need to access the workforce and the dignity that usually comes with being in the workforce.
With the right support, resources and encouragement we will see Indigenous students rise above disadvantage and close the gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes. As Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly said, ‘From little things, bit things grow,’ and the Sporting Chance Program has already had much success to this end. The Clontarf Foundation school based sports academies, as detailed by the member for Canning, are achieving school attendance rates of nearly 80 per cent and now have 2,300 students enrolled in 36 schools. They give hope. They give opportunity. They change lives and they even save lives.
That is why the Rudd government is providing additional funds to expand the program—in total, $42 million over four years. This year the funding will support 22 organisations to deliver 59 projects including 54 school-based sports academies and five education engagement projects. These 59 projects have the potential to benefit 10,000 students.
This bill is a key part of the Rudd government’s efforts to halve the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in reading, writing and numeracy within a decade. Indigenous education, school attendance and school retention rates are simply not good enough and we must do more to support Indigenous communities to improve education. The Sporting Chance Program is part of a raft of measures to boost Indigenous education, including: an additional 200 teachers for the Northern Territory; three boarding facilities in the Northern Territory; the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program that was introduced by the opposition; and the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program.
This bill will appropriate $492 million for 2010 to 2012 so the Commonwealth can fund targeted and strategic projects to improve education outcomes for Indigenous people. It transfers funding for the Sporting Chance Program from the annual administered expense of DEEWR to the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000. In doing so this bill ensures the government can continue to provide national leadership and coordination of efforts to close the gap and improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians so that it too can save lives and change lives. I commend the bill to the House.
The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010 is legislation that obviously will be supported by all persons in the House. It recognises the practical aspects of assisting Indigenous or Aboriginal people. It recognises that they have inherent sporting skills. It recognises the professionalism of sport in this day and age—in other words sport is a respectable means of earning a living, which should always be the target of our education system.
My purpose originally is to draw to the attention of the House why these provisions have been recognised by the government and are eventually being acted upon. Most of this was proven originally by the one-time coach—I think the first—of the Fremantle Dockers, Gerard Neesham. He was a very capable footballer in his own right and someone who consequently gained the respect of young people whose focus on sporting heroes is well understood. The reality is that Gerard, at his own initiative, went down to the Clontarf Boys Home—where a school was established and where the school population was primarily Indigenous—and started a football team. There was a simple rule for those who wanted to play in that football team: they had to be at school at nine o’clock and participate until closing time. So it was not a compulsion but an incentive for those young people who wanted to play sport.
They knew and understood how other kids they knew had risen to the peak of sporting attainment, particularly—as it is in Western Australia and as it was with Neesham—in the Australian Football League. It is probably where Indigenous people, Aboriginals, excel, and I think that might be because there is a higher degree of skill required in AFL as compared to just brute strength or the ability to run fast enough in a straight line. As we see as we watch these games from time to time, the ability of those people to have the football on a string is amazing. They seem to be able to anticipate which way it is going to bounce and many other things, which gives them a very high degree of skill and excellence in those sports. The Neesham initiative has expanded and is now known as the Clontarf Foundation. It has activities throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and probably in other parts of Australia.
This bill, as the second reading speech advises, amends the table in a subsection 14B(1) of the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to include additional funding for the Sporting Chance Program in order to bring it into the Commonwealth suite of targeted assistance measures and to adjust the 2010-12 appropriations agreed as part of the new federal financial relations network. That, as I said, is the initiative of government, and this will be money well spent.
It is a bit of a change because it is my observation, having been closely associated with Aboriginal people for 50 years, that much of the moneys that the Australian parliament has allocated since 1967 have not been to the benefit of Aboriginal people, particularly the youth. It has been a substantial benefit to people whom I refer to as the Aboriginal elite: those that got an education in mission schools to which they had been delivered—some say stolen—and were able to participate in the funding arrangements. Please remember that, prior to 1967, the Australian parliament was forbidden by the Constitution to make any provisions for Aboriginal people.
It is a great misfortune, considering the billions that have been allocated since, to look around and see the disadvantage that still exists with those people. I believe it has increased, not decreased, since that time. When I commenced my close association with the town of Carnarvon in 1958, where 37 per cent of the population were Aboriginal, they were all employed. They were employed because they were not even eligible for unemployment benefits under the peculiarities of the Constitution. They were wards of the state. They made a major contribution to the construction of the North West Coastal Highway between Northampton and Onslow, or in the vicinity of Onslow, during that period. They were skilled grader drivers and truck drivers. They had all those skills, and in fact the third-in-charge of that program was Aboriginal. He was highly regarded and frequently referred to rather than the two university-qualified engineers who held the positions above him. This bloke just knew how to build roads, and, I might add, in quite unusual circumstances. The usual forms of road base were not available throughout that road distance. The road base was a sand-clay mix—and it was very effective—mainly because the normal gravel deposits that we expect to find around Australia did not exist along that route.
So these people could do all that. Of course, many of them chose to remain in their Aboriginals lands, which had become pastoral properties. For a variety of quite sensible reasons they tended to locate their living arrangements close to the pastoral homestead. As such, they were a highly skilled labour pool for the pastoralists. We have heard all the stories of how they were treated as slave labour and all those sorts of things. They were paid the award when they worked, and, whilst their circumstances were not what we understand today to be appropriate in terms of housing and things of that nature, theirs was a township, and they were frequently assisted by the pastoralists with additional food supplies and things of that nature—notwithstanding that they had a free run of the property to do the hunting and gathering that had been their practice prior to the arrival of the colonists, if you like.
All of these matters point to the fact that, when the Australian parliament became involved, with the best will in the world, it did not know what it was talking about and it encouraged these people to be mendicant. Today, we have a piece of legislation that recognizes the high sporting skills and capacity of these people and that sport is as good a form of employment as any other. But, without a basic education at the end, the funds they have accumulated during their relatively short period as elite athletes can be dissipated, and of course they can be subject to fraud and corruption. So the education component is equally important to developing these people’s skills so that they can reach the top in elite sport, and they do so with ease, and that is to the credit.
The point I wish to make in the first instance is that the fact this is termed the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act must never neglect the Neesham principle that if you want to be in the footy team you have to be at school for the full working day. There must be the opportunity to learn. There are adequate examples around the place of some of these young people having very successful careers after their period as elite sportsmen or sportswomen. One might refer to Cathy Freeman, a heroine in our society. Evonne Goolagong Cawley is another in the sport of tennis. The skills and natural skills across most sports are the same.
Having made these points and having welcomed this government initiative, I repeat how tragic the Australian parliament’s efforts and this government’s efforts have been in addressing the housing needs of people whom I fear should not be encouraged to stay on tribal lands in our modern society, because hunting and gathering is no longer accepted in the Australian context as being adequate for a person’s sustenance. We say to them—and I have an ironic anecdote I might refer to in a minute—‘These are your traditional lands, but if you don’t stay on them you might lose them.’ I do not know that they would, but by staying there they are left in an environment where there is no sport and no education of consequence because the kids do not go to the schooling that is offered. Their living standards deteriorate. The standard of the accommodation provided by the Australian government deteriorates and it deteriorates primarily because of the methods of construction. They are not suitable.
I was delighted to have a letter published by the Australian newspaper—it does not happen very often—the day after it ran a big article about another failure in a housing construction program for Indigenous people. There was a large coloured photograph of a house that was under construction. From the framework, it looked to have a single glass window, which would have been three or four metres wide and probably two or three metres high. Why should you not have that much glass in these sorts of houses? Firstly, glass is too fragile but, more importantly, it emits heat. We all know about the effects of a glasshouse on vegetables and crops. It is not a good idea. Secondly, the structure required expert tradesmen who can make a lot of money in the cities and want twice as much to go to remote areas and construct that sort of housing. Furthermore, once the house’s framing is up you put plasterboard type products on the walls. They are not durable. They are too easily damaged. I read with sadness the other day of a woman, photographed in her house, which was a shambles, who advised that her house had been broken into and trashed while she had been away. She had gone somewhere, for whatever reason, and had come back to find that this had occurred to her house. It reflects on her as the tenant, and that is extremely sad, but one does not have to go very far to see the status of housing that was built with good intent.
Thirdly, the basic roof design of the house came from Europe. This is ideal when it is snowing for half the year, but it lacks natural flowthrough of air, which provides the best form of air conditioning. Houses which accommodate a semi-open space as the preferred means of living and where the benefits of a breeze can be utilised are not considered in their design.
I am pleased to say that Mr Kerry Stokes’s Wigmores business is prepared to assist me with some machinery. I have had an offer to build what I think is appropriate housing for these people—me personally, with a pick and shovel and a cement mixer to assist them build their own houses out of tilt-up concrete. Tilt-up concrete today is the preferred structural or cladding material for just about every commercial building in Australia, and I can point to some excellent houses that have been built in that fashion. The advantage is that a tractor suitable to handle a three-point linkage cement mixer and a front-end loader are virtually all the machinery needed to construct this sort of housing on site. That is assuming there is, as there typically is, a washed sand resource, which is usually found in even the smallest of creeks. The technology has been around for years. You pour the floor and then you pour the walls on the floor horizontally. You stand them up with a front-end loader and put a roof over them. The design that is required, and I have discussed this with many Aboriginal people, is for accommodation—that is, bedrooms, kitchens, ablutions et cetera—to be separated by a significant width of breezeway and probably with a facility therein for an open fire.
So you have a typical house which happens to be rectangular. It is robust, it has been built by the very people who are going to occupy it, it can be as long as you like and in hot weather, rather than rely on the broken-down air conditioner or the broken-down generator set that is needed for its functioning, you turn around and shift your bed out into the breezeway. But you are still under a roof if it rains, you have the other protections available and even the roofing can be constructed using manufactured trusses and things of that nature. The walls can be painted with the right colour and the right type of paint that allows for easy repair if graffiti or something else is applied to it. I now have to go off to the concrete construction people to see if they will provide sufficient cement and the other products needed. A mould is needed. It is very simple and can be reused over and over again.
In response to my letter to the editor on these matters, I received a letter from a charitable trust in, of all places, Tasmania. The trust has gone down this technology road and created a construction base to make these sorts of slabs with the purpose in mind of picking them up, putting them on a truck, taking them somewhere else and building a house. I find that a good idea but not really the answer you need when you are talking of seriously remote places.
The boundaries of my electorate, for example, have been changed dramatically. I am a Western Australian member, but I have an Aboriginal community that treats Alice Springs as its town centre. While I was speaking with members of that community on a phone hook-up the other day, their spokesman said to me: ‘You really think you could do that for us, Mr Tuckey? They have just come down here and built a house for $500,000, and nobody wants to live in it. It is too hot, the air conditioning breaks down and we really have not got the generating capacity to support too many of those. It is an absolute pain.’ Yet the community could be building its own housing which could be very durable and have all the necessities of a home. In simple practical terms, I would have all the piping and so on coming through the wall rather than under the building so that it would be easy to service. You can do all those sorts of things if you know anything about building.
You might wonder what I do in my spare time. I am rebuilding my own home. I am an owner-builder. My son and I recently laid out about 75 square metres of concrete in two one-hour sessions and then I trowelled it all off. I reckon it was good fun, and I would love to be able to take my skills out into the country and assist people to do things for themselves. In a sense, that is what this targeted policy is about: do something for yourself; learn at school and become an elite athlete. That is wonderful. But back there in the lands people need accommodation, and if they can build it for themselves there are no delays and there is no breakdown in the process. (Time expired)
I too take the opportunity to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. For several decades governments from both sides of politics have committed resources and adopted strategies aimed at reducing Indigenous disadvantage in Australia. It would be fair to say that over the years some progress has been made, but that, regrettably, there has not been nearly enough. In recognition of that, the Rudd government, on coming to office, signed a statement of intent with Indigenous people of Australia on 20 March 2008 outlining a vision for the future of Indigenous Australians and identifying core areas of focus. Those areas were life expectancy, educational achievements and employment opportunities. Key targets were set, and the Prime Minister committed to providing annual reports to parliament on the national efforts and progress being made on closing the gap. The first of these reports was presented on 26 February 2009 and the second on 11 February 2010.
This bill is fundamental to the government’s Closing the Gap strategy. It is an administrative bill which essentially transfers funding for the 2009-10 budget measures Closing the Gap Sporting Chance Program from the annual administered expense of the minister’s department—Appropriation Act (No. 1) 2009-2010—to the Indigenous Education Targeted Assistance Act 2000. This bill is required because funding under the Indigenous Education Targeted Assistance Act did not include the additional appropriation for the Closing the Gap Sporting Chance Program announced in the 2009-10 budget. The Sporting Chance Program is one of the innovative measures aimed at closing the gap and is funded through the act to support improvements in Indigenous education outcomes.
As I have said on many other occasions in this House, I believe that education is critical to overcoming disadvantage and securing the future security and prosperity of both individuals and the nation. Achieving the education goals of halving the gap in literacy and numeracy achievement, halving gaps in Year 12 or equivalent attainment and seeing that every Indigenous four-year-old in remote communities has the opportunity to access an early learning program is a key objective in achieving employment targets and overcoming Indigenous disadvantage.
Over the years I have taken considerable interest in the plight of Indigenous Australians. My view is that one of the reasons why we have had only limited success in overcoming Indigenous disadvantage is that we have not taken sufficient account of the diversity of Indigenous communities around the country and the diversity of the situations that they find themselves in. Not surprisingly, there is a diversity of views on what is needed among Indigenous people themselves. I am sure that all of us in this place could quote Indigenous leaders over the years who have made different suggestions about what governments can and cannot do and should and should not do if they want to help Indigenous people overcome disadvantage. I am aware that governments over the years have in good faith listened to and taken advice from those Indigenous leaders.
In my own experience, however, the reality is that those Indigenous leaders, as well intentioned as they are, often only represent one aspect of the views of Indigenous people. Certainly in the area of Adelaide that I come from, which is home to a significant number of Indigenous people, when talking to Indigenous leaders I have come across these problems. I hear a diversity of views about what should be done to assist them—in fact, I hear them disagreeing amongst themselves about what is best. This highlights to me that it is not necessarily the case that anybody is wrong; it is more likely the case that each of them is right, but right because they understand well the people they represent. The reality for their own people is not necessarily the same as it is for others. When one looks around the country one comes to understand that there will be differences not only because of diverse Indigenous tribal backgrounds but also because each part of Australia undoubtedly finds itself in a unique circumstance. One starts to understand why there is no one single program that will address and overcome all of the issues that Indigenous people are confronted with.
It is absolutely the case that, because there are different circumstances and individuals among different communities, we need individual responses and relevant programs if we are to meet the needs of Indigenous people around Australia—and we need a diversity of responses and programs. That is why I support this bill. The bill supports a range of measures associated with Indigenous programs, allowing flexibility for those making the decisions to tap into the most suitable programs for their community.
I want to focus my remarks in particular on the Sporting Chance Program, and I note that a number of other speakers in this debate have done so already. The Sporting Chance Program is resulting in some very good outcomes, with data collected from projects in 2009 indicating that the average attendance rate for academy students was 79 per cent. That is a remarkable achievement. The average rate for all Indigenous students in the schools where the projects were in place was 73 per cent—again, an outstanding achievement. More than half of the academy students were reported by the schools to be improving their school performance and many were also reported to have made significant gains in their self-esteem and behaviour. I am not surprised at all by those results.
The Sporting Chance Program uses sport and recreation as a hook to better engage Indigenous boys and girls in their schooling, to improve education and employment outcomes. There were 42 Sporting Chance projects in 2009, comprising 37 school based sports academies and five engagement strategies supporting about 9,000 students. In 2010 an additional 17 sports academies will commence across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Victoria, supporting about 1,000 students, which will bring the total number of students supported under the program to 10,000. Ten of these new academies will be for girls and funded as part of the $10 million expansion of the program. I must say it is heartening to see that this program is as much for girls as it is for boys—so it should be.
If there is one area of Australian life where over the years Indigenous Australians have excelled, it is sport. Over the years, Indigenous Australians, regardless of where they originated from, regardless of the support they had and regardless of their level of disadvantage, have shown that if they apply themselves they can succeed in sport, and many of them have—in fact, they have succeeded against all odds and overcome barriers that many others might not face. Importantly, when they have succeeded they have been embraced by the whole Australian community. That is one of the fundamental aspects of sport and this program. If we are ever going to overcome Indigenous disadvantage, it is critical that Indigenous people be embraced and accepted by the rest of society. We all know in this place that Australians love their sport and nothing unites Australians, regardless of their backgrounds, more than their sporting heroes. Sport can be a terrific pathway for Indigenous people to make the most of their unique skills and improve their own lives and the lives of those who, in turn, are inspired by them.
A number of speakers in the course of this debate have mentioned different Indigenous people who have succeeded in sports. Without a doubt, all of us could name some very successful athletes and sportspeople from an Indigenous background. I will not focus on that in particular, but I do say this: over the years an incredible number of Indigenous people have excelled in sport. As a result of their successes, they have without doubt inspired other Indigenous people, from all over this country, to also have a go. The wonderful thing about sport is that it offers an opportunity for people who do not necessarily have academic skills but have skills in other areas. Furthermore, sport offers an opportunity to just about everyone because of the diverse range of sporting activities available to the community.
For that reason, I have always been a strong advocate and supporter of children being able to participate in a sport of their choice, regardless of whether they aspire to become an elite sportsperson. Apart from the obvious health benefits, sporting participation builds characteristics which serve individuals well in whatever else they do in life. This applies to all young Australians, whether they are Indigenous young people or non-Indigenous young people. The characteristics that are built through sport include discipline, responsibility, hard work and team building—and one could go on. These skills are all developed if a person commits themselves to their sport.
But sport can in fact transform a person’s life, much more so than just that. And there have been many sportspeople in this country who, through their sport and nothing else, have gone on to make a career that otherwise might not been open to them if it had not been for their sports performance. And while I accept that sport and education need to be linked, and in this case the objective is to get young people into education, sport in its own right can be a pathway to a career. In that respect, one of the high schools in my electorate, Banksia Park International High School, as recently as last year included sport as a curriculum activity within the school—not sport per se to just play in team sports and compete against others, but sport as an industry sector because of the opportunities that arise through sports participation and sports involvement. Whether you are a participant, whether you are a coach, whether you are an official, whether you are a journalist, whether you are a commentator or whether you are an administrator: there is a whole industry attached to sport. So getting young people involved in sport is not only one way of ensuring that they stay at school, but in fact it also opens the doors for them in so many other ways. Again, I have seen that with so many sportspeople, and in particular with Indigenous sportspeople.
Many of the Indigenous sportspeople who became stars, like so many others in their community, were not terribly well educated. But, as a result of being able to apply their sporting skills and becoming elite sportspeople, they were later on offered opportunities in life which would never have existed for them. In turn, and importantly, they have also gone on to inspire many others from their communities, and that is wonderful to see.
A number of those sportspeople who have been successful have originated from the parts of Adelaide that I have come from and I have known many of them personally. And while I will not go through each and every one of them, I will take a moment to pay tribute to Travis Dodd. Travis Dodd is the captain of Adelaide United soccer team. They played a Korean team last night; unfortunately, in time-on they were not able to win. He is a person I know well. He is a young person who has grown up through the grassroots sports clubs in the area and has gone on to be, in my view, one of the best soccer players we have in Australia. He serves as an inspiration to so many other children in the region, and I have seen him at various community and school functions addressing young people and speaking to them about the opportunities available to them. Again, a role model, a person who inspires others and an idol, he is certainly someone who does Australia proud. He is someone who has been embraced by the entire soccer community, and I would say the broader community of Adelaide, because of what he has been able to achieve.
It is people like that who ultimately will play a big role in ensuring that this kind of program is successful because it is people like that who will in fact give hope to Indigenous children, wherever they might be in Australia, that they too might one day be able to achieve the same goals as people like Travis. And so this program, which is using sport as a hook to get kids involved—because we all know that most Indigenous children, like other Australian children, do love their sport and we know that most of them have special skills and they see that there is a real opportunity for them—is a terrific way of, in turn, getting them to school. Undoubtedly, once they are at school, if they can focus on their schoolwork as well, that will add to building the opportunities for them that will come about through a better education. It is a terrific program. I commend all involved who over the years have been associated with it. I certainly commend the minister for allocating the additional resources to it, and I look forward to getting more reports about just how effective the program has been. I commend this bill to the House.
The bill that we are discussing in the parliament today, the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010, amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, which was introduced by the former government. It provides an additional $10.93 million for the Sporting Chance Program, which was announced in the 2009-10 budget. It is a great program. It engages Indigenous children in school and education through sporting programs. It was first announced in the 2006-07 budget by the previous coalition government, and since being implemented has proved to be so successful. I am pleased that members of the current government have recognised just how successful this program has been.
In 2010, 22 groups will provide 59 projects for nearly 5,000 Indigenous students. It is very important to my electorate. I have some 8,000 Indigenous Australians on the electoral roll in Herbert, a number of them being on Palm Island. There are Indigenous students throughout the schooling system in Townsville, and certainly they understand and the schools understand the benefits of the Sporting Chance Program. I am proud to say I have a football team in my electorate, which is not doing quite as well as we would all like it to do at the moment. It is called the Cowboys in the NRL competition. The point I want to make is that many of the Cowboys are Indigenous players, and we are very proud of that. We are very proud of the development programs that the Cowboys run for up-and-coming players and the way that they take Indigenous Australians into that program. It underlines just how successful the involvement of Indigenous Australians in sporting programs can be. They love their sport.
In an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald in March, Warren Mundine, the Chairman of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, spoke about the positive way in which sporting programs can help disadvantaged young Indigenous Australians. He talked about the Indigenous Football Festival that was held in Townsville. More than 180 Indigenous kids participated in 2009 and it was a wonderful experience for many of these teenagers, some of whom had never seen the ocean until that week—remarkable. I have no doubt that the 2010 festival will be equally as successful, and I am proud of Townsville’s participation in such an important event.
There are many opportunities for Indigenous young people to do better and to involve themselves in the community. Indigenous children are just as capable as any other child of succeeding in our community. I have always promoted the need to make Indigenous families aware of how their children can become involved in a local sporting club and of the benefits of doing so. In Townsville there are just so many sporting opportunities, and we should be doing everything we can to involve Indigenous youths in one of their passions, sport. Too often Indigenous youths are involved in antisocial behaviour. That seems to occur across Australia; it certainly occurs in Townsville. It is probably because they do not get the proper parental direction, or they have nothing meaningful to do with their lives, or they just do not know how to be involved in the wider community.
There are avenues other than sport, and one that comes to mind is participation in the Australian Defence Force Cadets. Those young Indigenous men and women who do join cadet units have the time of their lives. I encourage Indigenous youth to participate. In Townsville we have cadet units representing all three services, and Indigenous cadets have risen through to the highest ranks of these services. It is a mark of what can be achieved. As the parliament will know, in the last government I had ministerial responsibility for cadets, and I never failed to be impressed with the young men and women in the cadet forces. They are future leaders of our country.
At times I was equally unimpressed with the bureaucratic nature of the head office system than ran the cadets. Just last month I was talking to one wing of the Australian Air Force Cadets, which runs a squadron at RAAF Townsville. These conversations often include horror stories about the bureaucracy in cadets. They reveal the stupid decisions that are made in the so-called interests of workplace health and safety, and they serve to demonstrate that there is a lack of common sense in the cadet system. They also reinforce the cadet culture of being risk averse—it is easier to say no than to say yes. Roadblocks are the order of the day, rather than a can-do attitude. One of those roadblocks seems to be Squadron Leader Robert Tandy, who appears to have a reputation among the staff of being a bureaucrat who so typifies the defence attitude that it is easier to be inflexible and just say no. I appeal to all officers in cadet branch to rethink how they exercise their command responsibilities and decisions, and to change their culture to one of can do rather than cannot do. The Australian Defence Force Cadets is a wonderful organisation and it should be given every support.
Everyone in this parliament is committed to Indigenous programs. The Rudd Labor government has made a lot of promises under their Closing the Gap initiative, for example; however, we need more than just words. Indigenous Australians are counting on the Prime Minister to deliver real action and real results in education, housing and health care, and of course in sporting opportunities. Unfortunately Mr Rudd is all talk. The bill today provides more funding for a successful coalition government program. This is highly commendable and I thank the government for supporting the coalition initiative that has been developed over so many years. The previous coalition government was committed to Indigenous programs, and in 2007-08 we spent $4 billion on Indigenous programs and services. There was a 67 per cent real increase on the amount that had be spent by the Keating Labor government in 1995-96. The coalition government was particularly committed to Indigenous education through initiatives such as the Sporting Chance Program. From 1998 to 2005, the participation of Indigenous students in year 12 increased from 32 to 40 per cent. Participation in year 11 increased from 52 to 62 per cent. But we can do better, and we must do better. Certainly education is one of the ways of the future for Indigenous Australians. These are just some of the projects and outcomes of the previous coalition government. The Rudd Labor government has professed the same commitment, but we are yet to see any real action. There is a long way to go in Indigenous education, and on such an important issue the Rudd government needs to do more than just expand coalition initiatives.
Late last year I travelled the Plenty Highway, driving from Alice Springs through to Winton—600 kilometres of dirt across the centre of Australia. In the middle of the drive we stopped at an Indigenous community. I though to myself that this was a community that was different. I have seen a lot of Indigenous communities across Australia. It was almost like Warburton, which is a very remote community in your state, Deputy Speaker Moylan. There was a new feel about this community. I went to the takeaway for breakfast. It was all clean and tidy, with an Indigenous workforce resplendent in their freshly ironed uniforms. All in the middle of nowhere. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a white woman. She had lived in Indigenous communities all her life, and she was fiercely proud, and so were the staff, of this takeaway. I said to this woman that, as members of parliament, we struggle to know what to do best for Indigenous Australia, because the more we do the more things do not seem to change. She said, with classic country logic, ‘Forget about the current generation; you will never change them. All you have to do is make sure the kids go to school. If they get a good education, Indigenous Australia will change forever, for the best.’ There we go. The Sporting Chance Program is one of the programs that can keep kids at school, and we as a parliament should be very mindful of those very simple but very powerful thoughts from the middle of the Northern Territory. I thank the House.
I strongly support much of what the member for Herbert said about education. In fact it was Noel Pearson who said, and I hope I am quoting him correctly, that there is no self-esteem and self-worth without capability, and there is no road to capability without education. I am immensely frustrated after 2½ years of this government because in that time we have seen Central Australia frozen under an intervention that has not be reformed or improved. I find it quite galling that we waste time in this chamber in 2010 talking about a $10 million appropriation when we have a billion-dollar tragedy rolling out in Central Australia. After 2½ years, this government are almost frozen in the headlights of the Indigenous intervention. They do not know where to go and they do not know how to reform it. They are like a government walking on a Martian landscape, unable to step off and say, ‘This can be improved, this can be changed and these people can actually benefit from the lessons that have been learnt since 2007.’ Within the first six to nine months you could see the intervention was succeeding. Albeit with some barnacles on the edges and some minor reforms needed, it was succeeding. We have had a series of almost endless reports, investigations, inquiries and reviews into what is going on in Central Australia.
Let me tell you, one person has broken through, and that is Noel Pearson with his work in Cape York, through the Cape York Institute and Cape York Partnerships. The government does not deserve Noel Pearson; it does not deserve the outcomes that we are going to see out of the review by KPMG next month. The government does not know what to do when there is an obvious solution, which is breaking the cycle of destruction in remote and Indigenous Australia and replacing it with a series of positive social norms. That is the lesson that Pearson taught us and that is what was effectively implemented in Central Australia. But there is enormous frustration that the Rudd government is simply without ideas. We have had 2½ years of its rolling off figures about Indigenous disadvantage. It really annoys me. It may want to set a ‘closing the gap’ figure for 2020, long after the Prime Minister is gone and unable to account for his lack of action. The Prime Minister is quite happy to apologise for the actions of others, generations ago, but is unable to face up to his own inaction and apologise for that.
I am really frustrated because there are huge numbers of kids who do not go to school, and we should be finding a solution. That is not just to be done in this chamber; I speak about my own state and an appalling education department that has been slack on attendance at school. For too long, since the seventies, it has been a matter of: ‘You don’t have to go to school if you really don’t feel like it.’ Also: ‘You deserve your welfare—that’s unconditional—but, if you’re going to beat up your kids, drink all night, sleep all day and not send the kids to school, we’re not going to even touch your welfare.’ That was Labor’s socialist attitude that persisted for decades. It was only broken by Mal Brough in 2007. After three years, we finally have a chance to break the paternalistic way of thinking about Central Australia, and the government is not improving the situation. The government is not acting at all. The government gives us the absolutely insulting waste of time to talk about a $10 million sports grant that keeps all the pollies busy in Canberra.
I love the program; it is a great program. It barely deserves to be a piece of legislation. It should be a tick-off bit of regulation done by the departments to keep the great program going. But is anyone on that side going to talk about the kids who still do not go to school in those communities? No. What they do on the Labor side of politics is take urban Indigenous Australia and remote Indigenous Australia, put all the figures together and say, ‘Forty-seven per cent of kids go to school.’ The figures show that 80 per cent of kids in the city go to school and still only 20 per cent in Indigenous and remote Australia go to school. That is the tragedy. The tragedy is that the eye has been taken off the ball in remote Australia. As you travel around that area you will find—outside of where Pearson has intervened—that between 20 and 30 per cent turn up at school. They are all ticked off in the morning and they disappear by lunchtime. Nothing happens in many remote schools after lunch. I am not going to tell people how to run their lives, but, as far as I know, going to school is the law of this land. I do not think that should be compromised in any way, shape or form.
You have heard all the nice, warm accolades about the program and the importance of education, but we as a body, we as a corpus, do nothing to ensure that parents are encouraged to send their kids to school, and we pay a price when they do not. We are sitting around and watching an evolving train wreck that has been going on for three decades. If you pay a parent who is beating up their kids, exposing them to pornography or sleeping in all morning and not sending their kids to school the same welfare as a grandmother who picks up the pieces, what kind of white message does that send to Indigenous Australia? ‘You’re all worth the same’—that is the message it sends. So, forget about trying to break the destructive cycles in communities—‘You are all paid the same because, under white Australia since 1974, you are all worth the same.’ There is no reward for sending your kids to school.
Of course, what is the point of going to school if there are no jobs and no genuine, well-formed belief that employment is at the other end of education? Let’s never forget that many of us in mainstream Australia go to school because we can see the rewards in earnings, opportunities, approbation, degrees and licensure, but none of that is available in Indigenous Australia. There is no hope of that kind of reward at the end of attending school. In a way I can understand why turning up to play sport is perhaps the only thing left for Aboriginal kids, but I see a day when sport is part of an appropriate balance in Indigenous Australia, not the only thing they can ever hope for. That has continued under this government which wastes legislative time on an absolutely paltry movement of money when billion-dollar disasters are evolving around us.
What can we do? There is a KPMG report coming out about Cape York next month and in it will be compelling statistics about Aurukun, where school attendance has gone from 40 per cent to closer to 70 per cent. In Hope Vale and Mossman Gorge there are drops in violence to the point where I believe they have had to change employment levels in hospitals. There simply is not the queue of trauma as a result of alcohol fuelled violence in those communities anymore. When the doors open at the hospital on Monday morning, there are fewer people waiting to have bones fixed and wounds sewn up. That is what can be achieved. We can break this senseless cycle of destruction.
But it will not happen, as I have pointed out before, as long as we do not enforce school attendance, as long as education departments palm responsibility off to school principals. How can a school principal in a remote community enforce attendance without support from authorities? It has to come from departments and political leaders. And when students all clear out of school at lunchtime there has to be a way of bringing them back. Education departments need to ask themselves that introspective question: what are we doing in the classrooms that is failing to engage Indigenous kids, the kids who cannot even hear the teacher because we have not rigged up the audiology assistance devices that could make teachers heard more easily? We have got education departments that are effectively saying, ‘Take our syllabus or leave it.’ Teachers are highly inexperienced and incredibly compassionate and committed, but they stay there one or two years and move on in many cases. We have not found a way to get security of tenure and longstanding teachers in many of these communities. That remains a challenge too.
I conclude what I say about state education departments with this simple comment. Our curriculum cannot be take it or leave it. We need an Indigenous focused curriculum with changes made to engage kids to stay after lunch and not disappear off home. But at the moment our appalling attendance records for schools are far worse than they even look, because we know for sure that schools are ticking these kids off at nine o’clock and they are disappearing at 10. We need to find a better way of doing it. It was Pearson who described that cycle of dysfunction that begins with nocturnal activities in crowded, inadequate housing, leading to people going to bed at two or three in the morning and not waking up until midday, kids not being sent to school and not being given a decent breakfast. Once you fall away from education, we have got that there. As you go through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9, levels of Indigenous reading literacy fall from 75 per cent to 66 per cent. We know it is the same for Indigenous writing, falling from 79 to 70 and ultimately to 60 per cent by grade 9. The numeracy levels are a little more stable, around 75 per cent all the way through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. But don’t be fooled, because they include urban, regional and remote Australia. When you tease them out, we have a massive tragedy unfolding in Central Australia.
I put a simple challenge to this government: step out from the headlights. You are doing nothing in Central Australia as a government to improve this intervention. How can it be justified, after Mal Brough introduced the intervention in July 2007 and this government took over by November, that we have that Indigenous intervention in those prescribed communities still unreformed three years later? That is a national tragedy, to be quarantining the income of well-meaning families doing the right thing and sending their kids to school. We are going to see from Cape York a far more effective result by making it not so much optional but running through a family commission system, through a different structure. How many years do we have to wait before we will reform what is happening in Central Australia? It is utterly appalling that entire communities like Timber Creek, Lajamanu, Kakarindji and Yuendumu all live on quarantine regardless of whether you are complying or not, regardless of whether you are actually getting rid of the grog, sending your kids to school, paying your rent. These families should be rewarded, not punished. At what point did it occur to the Labor federal government to actually start to reward people doing the right thing? They stood around and watched it, frozen on the sidelines, half not wanting to change the intervention for fear of losing votes in the mainstream but the other half not actually knowing how to change it. It is so foreign to the genetic makeup of the Labor Party, they really do not know where to go to next. Every time I see the Indigenous minister stand up I pray hard, saying, ‘Do not just sit and look at that intervention like some kind of spectator in a grandstand. Let’s get it right.’
When the Prime Minister threw across a challenge to the then opposition leader to be bipartisan about this, there was a one-off statement at the time of the apology and of course nothing since. All those promises to go and visit Indigenous Australia, to report each year on the outcomes, have fallen away until, of course, the opposition had to remind the Prime Minister. The greatest tragedy here is a Prime Minister who is all tetchiness and all promises but the actual outcomes are so far away we will never be able to measure this individual as Prime Minister because all the goals are 2020. All I ask for in a Prime Minister is someone to be accountable for what he or she does right now, this year. I tell you what the record of this Prime Minister is: no reform of this intervention, no way of acknowledging the great parents doing great things. We know from Pearson’s work that if you take an average Indigenous community about half of them will eventually have some form of notification for abuse of tenancy, of alcohol, of education attendance or safety for kids or a magistrate’s court order. And when they go before a commission a number of them are quarantined. But we know one thing. Of the people who go into a 12-month quarantine the majority of them come out of it improving. We know another thing. After 12 months only about 10 to 15 per cent of a community ends up on quarantine for a longer period of time. They are the non-responsive segment of a community, about 10 to 15 per cent. And for the first time in Australia’s Indigenous history we can focus on a group that needs help most. Up until 2007, utter chaos reigned through the entire community. It was almost impossible for a single mum or grandmother to stick her head up to stick up for kids without having it knocked off.
Pearson has proved we can break that cycle, but this government has not lived up to the expectation that it would act on his recommendations. Here we are tragically midway through 2010 with simply no action at all in this area. It is the greatest tragedy of all. Two years ago we should have been helping the 50 per cent of Indigenous remote Australians who made the decision to break that social nexus and do the right thing for their kids. Two years ago we should have been helping the 10 per cent of Indigenous Australia who refused to look after their kids. But nothing has happened. Kids still flee starving to their grandmothers. They watch on as there is alcohol fuelled violence in those households. Why? Because no matter how you quarantine their income they still keep doing it. My challenge to this Prime Minister is: what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the hard cases who say, ‘Quarantine my income, couldn’t care less. I’ll humbug relatives, I’ll be okay.’ How do you deal with that defiance? This government has no answer. Communities are asking for a solution, they are asking for the government to stand up, but it is not. This Labor government has sat around and watched as a spectator the intervention and left it completely unreformed, and I think it is a great tragedy to impose that on well-meaning people.
I personally believe that our Prime Minister wants to leave it like this for as long as he can to make life under the intervention as tough as possible in the hope of getting Indigenous Australia to hate the intervention. It is time to learn from it. Pearson has given us the formula; the results will be released in a few weeks. We will then learn the importance of education—of truly attending. We will learn the importance of having Indigenous-specific and relevant education that keeps Indigenous Australians at school, and the importance of addressing hearing. Not only do hearing problems lead to poor educational outcomes but also, when Indigenous Australians first run into police, the fact that in many cases they cannot hear, let alone understand, the police leads to a sudden escalation of trouble and often to their being incarcerated when otherwise they might not be.
We have still seen no law reform on the other side. These kids who have no education build a criminal resume faster than they build a capability resume. They end up, after maybe getting one verbal warning if they are lucky, being hauled before white courts. They are lucky to even have someone to be able to translate the charges into their own language. They are lucky to even have an Indigenous elder there to act as an amicus. They are lucky to even have a sympathetic magistrate who considers diversion. Until we can have a mature Indigenous Australia that can actually sanction, incarcerate and rehabilitate its own people, what is the point of having white courts that continue to fail Indigenous Australia? How long does this federal government have to look at the problem and do nothing? That other side is full of Labor lawyers. You would think that maybe in their quiet moments, when they had little to do, they would look at reforming Indigenous law. But they are not bringing Indigenous culture into our white mainstream courts, which are still horribly painful foreign places to be. These young Indigenous people simply know no other way, and jail becomes a warmer place with a warmer embrace than their own community. That is a tragedy that this Prime Minister should have picked up on long ago, but we are just now debating $10 million for Indigenous sport in the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. All I say is what a ridiculous waste of legislative time for a great program when we could be addressing the really big challenges.
In the end we know that when you go away to jail there are three square meals a day and, if you are an Indigenous Australian, many of your mates are there. When people come home to a community, some of them say, out of bravado, ‘It was a great place to go and I can’t wait to get back.’ But I know most of them must hate it there because of the loss of connection to their land, which means so much to remote Australians. So why have we not come to a point where we help the elders to support these young people? I have made the point before: this government since the intervention still pays these great people who are committed to Indigenous culture the same amount of money as paid to parents who are abusing their kids. This government found no way through that, no way to reward Indigenous Australians who support the court process. You do not pay them anything, apart from a bit of transport, to actually support a court process. You do not pay Indigenous elders to go and rehabilitate these young people. You are not even looking for solutions—for example, incarcerating these young Indigenous Australians, if we have to, closer to their communities, where they can retain a connection with their elders. What is happening? We are simply sending them off via white courts into white jails and letting them rot. That is the reality. In fact, if they are there for less than a year, they do not even have access to rehabilitation programs—they have to be long-term offenders. So what do they do? They offend again, at twice the rate as for non-Indigenous Australia, and get themselves a long sentence. Then they finally get some access to rehabilitation.
This might sound in many ways like a directionless rant about the challenges that face us. But I could not let this debate go without saying that what we are legislating for here today is not where the game is at. There are no Indigenous Australians here in this chamber to talk about this. But grasp the nettle and do the serious stuff in remote Indigenous Australia. Get a hint from what Pearson is doing and let us fix this intervention and make it work for 2010. That intervention was okay for 2007, but reform is long overdue for those local communities out there. The Rudd government over there are quite prepared to make billion dollar promises on anything that will win them a vote. Let us see this Labor government under Kevin Rudd do something for Indigenous Australia that gets these young families back on track and keeps young people out of incarceration. As we have all noted in this debate, it starts by keeping them at school.
I will not delay the House long, but I wish to address the House on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. The opposition does in fact support this bill as drafted, but I think all of us in Australia are entirely unhappy about the level of performance, or success, of Indigenous students. We do not believe that enough assistance has been given to Indigenous students to enable them to compete with other Australians. I think all of us are in favour of equality of opportunity so that Indigenous students are in fact able to perform along with non-Indigenous students.
As a country we have a lot to not be proud of with respect to Indigenous affairs. It is a scandal that Indigenous Australians live for a substantially shorter time than non-Indigenous Australians. All of us are very keen, wherever possible, to try to redress Indigenous disadvantage. Thus I said at the outset that we are not happy with the level of success of Indigenous students. If it is possible to give them an extra push along, an extra hand to help them to achieve at the levels of other Australians, then this is an important initiative and an important principle that all of us on both sides of the chamber would support.
This bill is a step in the right direction. While the opposition strongly supports the principle of equality for Indigenous Australians, I must say that the government’s rhetoric on Indigenous Australians has been long and loud but their performance has been completely inadequate. I think that many people voted for the Rudd Labor government in the 2007 election with an expectation that there would be an increased focus on Indigenous disadvantage. The people who voted on that basis would, of course, be sincerely disappointed. They believed that the Rudd Labor government would place a greater emphasis on redressing Indigenous disadvantage but, sadly, this has been another area where the Rudd Labor government has let down the Australian people.
I think it is important also to look at what the Liberal-National government did when we were in office prior to the 2007 election, in particular the initiative taken in the Northern Territory. It is important at times to think beyond the square and to look at failed systems which have not been assisting Indigenous Australians. Where those failed systems continue to fail, at great cost to the Australian community, it is important—and in fact it is a responsibility of governments—to think about how we can achieve successful outcomes in a better way. That was the approach taken by the Howard government prior to the election in 2007. It was a policy which was strongly supported by many in the Indigenous community.
We are all about practical reconciliation. We want to bring about a situation where Indigenous Australians are equal with non-Indigenous Australians in all areas. We want to see them achieve to the same level as non-Indigenous Australians. We want to see them in schools and universities. We want to see them filling the ranks of all the professions in our country. We want Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to achieve successfully at a high level. That is one of the reasons why the former Howard government was prepared to take a course of action which was criticised by some people—because we felt that the tired old solution of the past, of simply throwing money at the problem, was not achieving what it was intended to achieve.
The Leader of the Opposition has taken a particular interest in Indigenous affairs. Prior to his election as leader, he was a shadow minister in this area. We are very fortunate to have the honourable member for Warringah as the Leader of the Opposition because, in him, we have someone who understands what the former Howard government did and understands the shortcomings of the Rudd Labor government in the area of Indigenous affairs.
This bill amends the funding tables in the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to include the additional $10.93 million allocated to the Sporting Chance Program announced in the 2009-10 budget. There is no additional appropriation in this bill. It transfers the amount of money—almost $11 million—from the Appropriation Act (No. 1) to the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 from 1 January 2010. The appropriation was considered as part of the 2009-10 budget process.
Honourable members would be aware that the Sporting Chance Program was a conception of the former Liberal-National government. It was announced many years ago—in the budget of 2006-07, I think. This program is an initiative which is actually achieving its desired outcomes in engaging Indigenous boys and girls in school through involvement with sport. If children can be encouraged to play sport—for fitness but also to play the sport to achieve excellent levels—then this is one way of redressing disadvantage.
I think all Australians felt a great sense of pride when we saw Cathy Freeman achieving what she achieved. And there have been so many other Indigenous sports men and women who have carried the flag of Australia, who have stood up and been counted. They are used as role models for other Indigenous and, I suspect, non-Indigenous Australians. That is a really important step. That is why the Sporting Chance Program of the former Howard government has been really successful.
The government has made promises to Indigenous Australians through Closing the Gap, yet has failed to deliver any new programs or to deliver any improvements in Indigenous education outcomes. The only successes being achieved by the Rudd Labor government in this area are through the programs of the former Howard government.
There is so much more to be done in the area of redressing Indigenous disadvantage. I do not think as a country we can hold our heads high or be proud of how we have collectively, over the last 200 years, handled the issue of Indigenous affairs. I think all of us have as an aspiration the redressing of Indigenous disadvantage so that Indigenous Australians are able to achieve to the same level as non-Indigenous Australians. Unfortunately the government has talked a lot—there has been a tremendous amount of rhetoric—but in this area, as in so many other areas, the government has been short on achievement. That compares not very favourably with many of the excellent outcomes achieved by the former Howard government.
Having said that, more should be done. This bill is a step in the right direction and I hope that the government does seriously seek to redress Aboriginal disadvantage. It has to get beyond tokenism. It has to get beyond the idea that, by throwing money at the problem, it is going to solve the problem. Indigenous Australians deserve objective attention to the problem. They need a bipartisan approach so that we are able ultimately to see Indigenous Australians achieving at the same level as other Australians. I commend the bill to the House.
in reply—I thank the members who participated in this debate. The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010 makes minor adjustments to the appropriations under the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, the IE(TA) Act, to include additional appropriations announced in the 2009-10 budget for the Sporting Chance Program. Appropriations transferred from Appropriation Act (No. 1) to the act total $10.93 million. This will make an important contribution to closing the gap between the education outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I commend the bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Debate resumed from 17 March, on motion by Mr Griffin:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I am pleased to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 Measures No. 2) Bill 2010. This bill contains six schedules. Four of them are pretty much uncontroversial. There are a couple that the coalition senators in the Senate Economics Legislation Committee have found some problems with and I would like to bring to the attention of the House those problems today. Broadly, I will go through the schedules and briefly discuss each one.
Schedule 1 amends the non-commercial loan rules in division 7A of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 to prevent a shareholder of a private company or an associate accessing tax-free dividends from the provision of company assets for less than their market value. Other technical amendments have also been made to strengthen the non-commercial loan rules to ensure that they operate in accordance with their original policy intent and cannot be circumvented by the use of closely held corporate limited partnerships or interposed entities.
Schedule 2 to this bill amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936, the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and the Taxation Administration Act 1953 to extend the existing arrangements for tax file number withholding to cover closely held trusts, including family trusts. The information collected by the ATO under these amendments will facilitate data matching and allow the ATO to check whether the assessable income of beneficiaries of these trusts correctly includes their share of the net income of the trust.
Schedule 3 to this bill amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to exempt from income tax the Higher Education Contribution Scheme-Higher Education Loan Program benefit, the HECS-HELP benefit. The HECS-HELP benefit was an initiative first introduced in the 2008-09 budget. The benefit gives eligible recipient in their compulsory HECS debt repayment and/or their HELP debt repayment or, in some cases where a repayment is not required due to low income, a direct reduction in their HELP debt.
Schedule 4 to this bill amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to update the list of deductible gift recipients to include two new entities and extend the period for which another deductible gift recipient may collect deductible gifts.
Schedule 5 to this bill amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to make the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute Ltd, the institute, income tax exemption for a four-year period. The central objective of the institute is to accelerate the commercial development of carbon capture and storage projects to contribute to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The information and expertise developed by the institute is to be disseminate broadly and globally for the benefit of both the Australian and global carbon capture and storage communities.
Schedule 6 to this bill amends various taxation laws to repeal over 100 unlimited amendment periods. As a result, a number of provisions which provide the Commissioner of Taxation with indefinite time to amend taxpayers’ assessments are replaced with the existing amendment provisions, which have certain finite periods. The removal of these unlimited amendment periods will improve certainty for taxpayers in their taxation affairs and contribute to reducing the volume of unnecessary provisions in the taxation laws.
I will now go back to schedule 1, which is the most contentious schedule in this tax laws administration bill, and summarise the new law that is proposed in that schedule. The existing law is that when a private company provides an asset to a shareholder or an associate of the shareholder for use other than a transfer of property, a payment for the purposes of division 7A will arise. There are three exemptions to this treatment. They are for the minor use of company assets, for certain payments that would otherwise be allowable as a once only deduction to the user of the asset and for the use of certain residences. Broadly, subdivision EA of division 7A operates where a private company has an unpaid present entitlement to income of a trust and the trust makes a payment, loan or forgiveness of debt to a shareholder of the private company or an associate of the shareholder in particular circumstances.
These amendments ensure that the operation of the subdivision cannot be circumvented by interposing an entity between the trust making a payment or a loan to a shareholder or between the trust and the private company that holds an unpaid present entitlement to an amount from the net income of the trust. Other technical amendments are also made to strengthen the non-commercial loan rules to ensure that they cannot be circumvented by the use of corporate limited partnerships, which are partnerships that are taxed like a company. Amendments are also made to put beyond doubt that division 7A applies to arrangements that involve a non-resident private company making a payment, loan or forgiveness of debt to a resident shareholder or their associate. That is schedule 1 of the bill.
The Senate Economics Legislation Committee had a very short hearing and did very well to come up with the recommendations that they did. I would like to run through the recommendations that were agreed to by the entire committee—government and non-government senators. Recommendation 1 was that the committee recommends that the bill be amended so that company title apartments where the company title arrangement, its memorandum and articles create a right for the occupier are clearly excluded from its coverage before the bill is passed. Everybody involved would agree that that is absolutely essentially. Those who occupy their residences by way of a company title arrangement—somewhat analogous to a strata title but not exactly the same—cannot possibly be conceived to be receiving a deemed dividend from the corporation that issues the title.
The second recommendation is:
The committee recommends that the Commissioner of Taxation review Draft Ruling 2009/D8 following passage of the Schedule 1 amendments to ensure it is operating appropriately.
I would say that this draft ruling is a divergence from the views expressed in the draft, with the underlying policy intent of division 7A. The concerns that have been raised with me about this draft ruling have been many and have been everywhere. I would like to draw the House’s attention to a submission by the professional bodies. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, the CPA, Superannuation Australia-Taxpayers Australia, the National Institute of Accountants, the Taxation Institute of Australia and the Secretary-General of the Law Council of Australia have made a joint submission on this draft tax ruling. That was in February this year and it concerns exposure draft legislation that deals with this subject, I understand.
The strength of the views expressed in this submission about draft tax ruling 2009/D8, demand a response from the Assistant Treasurer and from the ATO. I am not confident that the ATO appreciates the level of concern that this sector is expressing. I would like to quote briefly from the remarks in their submission. They say:
The collective view of the professional bodies is that the draft Ruling contradicts the underlying legislative purpose of section 109D and Subdivision EA—
the operative provisions—
of Division 7A, contains various arguments which are legally flawed, makes the operation of Subdivision EA effectively redundant and creates adverse tax consequences for trusts and corporate beneficiaries including double taxation. Accordingly, it should be withdrawn.
They go on to say:
In our view the crux of the problem is the mechanics of Division 6 of the Income Tax Assessment Act (1936) (the ITAA(1936))—
division 6 is pretty old—
which requires a trustee to appoint income in favour of beneficiaries by 30 June.
Otherwise the issue of an unpaid present entitlement arises. They continue:
We believe there is widespread if not universal agreement that the structure of Division 6 is inappropriate for modern day trusts and warrants review.
In my perusal of the ubiquitous Henry review I saw that it has recommended—I think it was in recommendation 36—that there be undertaken a complete rewrite of trust law as it applies to tax so that we are not constantly faced with the overlay of a set of laws relating to trusts onto modern-day tax structures. There are those who say that businesses should not operate through trust structures. We would completely disagree. What is needed is a rewrite of the law, and that is needed urgently. So I would encourage the government to be brave about many of the recommendations in the Henry review and certainly be brave about recommendation 36, which does not require any expenditure; it just requires a direction that energy be applied to rewriting the trust tax provisions. I know that it is not simple but it needs to start quite quickly.
Further, the professional bodies make the point in their submission that, as it is currently issued, the draft ruling introduces ideas and concepts as to when a deemed dividend might arise where there is an unpaid present entitlement. Importantly, it does not provide any clear and definitive interpretations which will enable tax practitioners and their clients to comply with division 7A with any degree of certainty. In particular, the draft ruling does not provide any guidance as to the point in time at which a subsisting unpaid present entitlement will flip over and be regarded as the provision of financial accommodation, and hence a loan for division 7A purposes. As the draft ruling currently stands, where a trustee resolves on or before 30 June to appoint the year’s income in favour of a corporate beneficiary, neither the trustee nor the corporate beneficiary will be able to identify whether they have reached this ruling unless the distribution is paid out on that day—on 30 June. That, quite clearly, is unacceptable.
The confusion that would arise will inevitably lead to non-compliance and possibly further litigation. This draft ruling has also been expressed as being prospective, and we on this side of the House would certainly urge the commissioner, if he insists on applying the approach that it contains—and I am sure that certain of the issues raised will be tightened up in any final ruling—to apply it on a fully prospective basis.
That was recommendation 2 of the Senate Economics Legislation Committee, which links in to draft tax ruling 2009/D8, but in terms of the present bill I will move forward through the recommendations. Recommendation 3 was about the schedule that deems present entitlement and about which concerns have been raised. It says:
The committee recommends that Item 2 of the bill dealing with the commencement date of the provisions be amended to reflect that Schedule 1 takes effect from 1 July 2010.
It is quite ridiculous that it should take effect from 1 July 2009. The recommendation of the whole committee goes on:
The committee is of the view that this time frame strikes the appropriate balance between providing taxpayers with time to prepare for the changes with the need to strengthen the integrity of the tax laws.
Now I am going to move to the discussions that coalition senators had. They take these recommendations further but it is important to note that these three recommendations I have mentioned were recommendations of the whole committee. The remaining recommendations that the whole committee made were that schedule 5, schedule 4 and schedule 3 be passed unchanged, without amendment, and that schedule 2 and schedule 6 of the bill be passed.
I now move to the comments that were made by coalition senators about the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 Measures No. 2) Bill 2010. They say:
Coalition Senators are extremely concerned about the way the Government has pursued this legislation and pushed this inquiry along. It is highly inappropriate for a Committee Report to be tabled on Budget Night when the Chair of the Committee has held their part of the report until the day before the report is due to be tabled.
It really does not provide the coalition senators, or any members of the committee, the opportunity to make coherent comments within such a short time table of tabling. Having said that, I think the comments made have been well expressed. They have obviously been prepared for longer than that, and those concerns expressed to the senators during the committee hearings have been heard and have been reflected.
The committee was apparently not briefed by Treasury officials prior to the commencement of hearings held on 28, 29 and 30 April. In fact, Treasury did not appear to before the committee until the last day of hearings, on 30 April 2010. I would like to mention that the Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, has been the subject of a motion in the Senate this morning. Apparently, Dr Henry had announced that he would be unavailable for Senate estimates later on this month. The Senate has passed a motion that he will make himself available. There is an order of the Senate that the secretary will make himself available for Senate estimates. I think that is a good thing. I do not think there is any reason why Treasury and its leaders and officials should not participate in a fully open and transparent process at such an important time for tax reform.
Moving back to the specific comments made about the legislation, I return to schedule 1, non-commercial loans. There were many submissions concentrated on the problems with schedule 1. I have received copies of ones from the Institute of Chartered Accountants and from the Law Council of Australia raising serious concerns. They are summarised in the committee report this way: ‘Several submitters argued that the introduction of section 109CA was too broad.’ The Institute of Chartered Accountants evidence stated:
… the scope of the proposed use of asset rules reaches well past what was stated in the budget night announcement. There was no indication on budget night or in the budget papers that company assets merely available for use, rather than in fact put to use, by shareholders would be caught by the new laws.
… … …
The proposed amendments will apply in respect of virtually any asset of a private company, regardless of when that asset was acquired, and it will operate to deem a dividend to the shareholders of a company where the company has merely provided an asset for the use of a shareholder or their associate, without any disguised or other distribution of company profits.
The extension of the division goes well beyond the original intent of the division. It will apply where there is no transfer of company resources away from the company, it will apply where those assets being used were not acquired with company profits and it will apply where there are simply no company profits. It will deem a dividend regardless.
… … …
In many cases—whether it is for asset protection, succession or other reasons—individuals will use a company structure funded from their own after-tax moneys to hold assets. The money used on those circumstances by the company is the shareholder’s own after-tax funds. It is not company profits. The bill will, however, tax the use of such an asset acquired in that fashion as if it was a dividend made out of profits, which it is not.
As far as the complications that this would bring to the tax profession itself, they said:
… we would have to look at every asset that a company holds and work out if those assets would be used by the shareholders or be available for use by the shareholders. We would then have to ascertain if there is any risk in terms of them being used or available to be used by way of the technical definition in the act … small businesses understand exactly what that definition means and how wide that definition can be. We then would require them to keep track of their use or their availability for use on an annual basis and we—the tax profession—would then have to ask them to value those uses, so we would have to get a market valuation for each of those. We then would have to determine whether those are under the exceptions—to the new provisions.
They are proposing to introduce a minor benefit exception for infrequent use or if it is under $300 in value.
So there is another calculation. They continued:
It would have to be ascertained whether it falls within those exceptions.
There is therefore a significant level of compliance for small business taxpayers. We have had the government trumpeting all of their changes in the budget and in the Henry review that make life easier for small businesses. A great deal of small businesses operate with a trust and company structure, maybe 50 to 70 per cent of the ones typically in every town in Australia. So this is a serious addition to the compliance burden of those businesses. And, of course, you consider the penalties that may flow when calculations are made wrongly or you consider the additional cost for taxpayers in terms of the compliance burden, because their accountants and their agents are making these calculations on their behalf. The committee report states:
The Coalition senators argue that there needs to be a reasonable interpretation of personal use so that if a taxpayer drives a work ute from home to work and home again, and has a personal vehicle, there should be no penalty.
That is an interesting example. Under the fringe benefits tax legislation that would be an exempt fringe benefit, whereas under division 7A it would be taxable. So the fringe benefits legislation recognizes that it is not taxable, but this legislation would bring it in as a deemed dividend. The report stated:
An additional issue was the lack of knowledge among the small business community regarding the legal obligations that arise from the establishment and operation of companies, and the onus—
the enormous onus—
placed on legal and tax advisers.
So recommendation 1 from the coalition senators is:
… that there be an increased level of education made available to small businesses entering into business arrangements and restructuring businesses, and that tax and legal advisors be encouraged to ensure that the appropriate structures and arrangements are being put in place.
1.11 The Coalition supports the view of the Law Council regarding the treatment of the owner of a company title apartment. It is inappropriate to treat the owners as though the company was giving them a benefit, imposing a large tax on them which would not be imposed on someone who owned a similar apartment under strata title.
The coalition supports recommendation 1 of the entire committee.
Subdivision EB received considerable debate from Dominion Private Clients, who appeared before the committee. They said:
The point of schedule 1 to the bill is to expand the operation of division 7A to cover interposed entities and, in a vanilla case… they work in an appropriate manner; however, there are cases where there are a multitude of trusts in a group. Just to illustrate, the first slide—
they are obviously showing a presentation here—
is a … case that is meant to be covered by proposed sections 109XF, XG and XH. In the diagram, you will see that there is a trust that distributes income to a corporate beneficiary—‘distribute’ meaning that the trust resolves to make a gift to the corporate beneficiary … It generally remains unpaid for a period of time. Then that trust subsequently makes a loan to an interposed entity … and then that interposed entity makes a loan to a shareholder. Sections 109XF, XG and XH are meant to say that the trust, by making the loans through the interposed entity to the shareholder, is actually deemed to have caused this … notional loan between the corporate beneficiary and that shareholder … And the reason for that is that that original—
loan—
was ostensibly sourced from the distribution made by the trustees for the beneficiary.
The coalition supports recommendation 2 of the full committee report. The retrospectivity of the bill was also of considerable concern, particularly given that this bill is coming in so late in the financial year. The coalition supports recommendation 3, as this will allow the relevant structures to reorganise, or make appropriate record-keeping changes, to ensure that they are not caught short at the end of financial year 2009-10. There were some other minor remarks, which I will not go into.
In conclusion, the coalition has pointed out that the rush associated with this bill, where some submissions and witnesses expressed substantial concern about the speed at which the bill and, as a result, this inquiry, has been pushed through. We continue to express disappointment in the government for holding rushed hearings into poorly drafted legislation, which leaves numerous unintended and inadequately examined consequences and really does not serve the interests of the Australian people.
We all know that taxation law is complex and is not of a lot of interest to a lot of people. But where we might see complicated provisions that seem awfully detailed and overly expressed, what comes out can be quite different. As soon as you translate this rather mind-numbing list of provisions to an ordinary company running a business and doing its best in a small town, and you see the effect of additional costs for an accountant or being told that private use of a vehicle––purchased by the company with after-tax dollars for which the company is not claiming any deductions for running costs––could give rise to a deemed dividend of thousands of dollars stretching back over time, you realise we have to be very careful that we do not become too draconian and that we carefully examine the consequences of every single change to tax law that we may put in place here.
We are very good at trumpeting the good things when we make reforms that make life easier and that make the tax laws simpler. But we sometimes appear to run away from the unintended consequences of other legislative provisions. These are described as integrity measures. That tends to make people think it is to make absolutely certain no-one is cheating the system and getting something they should not, or finding loopholes and operating their businesses through them and therefore, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tax not being collected. I do not believe those things are true. I believe that the vast majority of small businesses are doing their very best. The deadweight burden of compliance that is forced on them by the government can make life extremely difficult.
In conclusion, while many of the schedules in this bill do not give rise to concerns by the opposition, schedule one certainly does and the short time frame with which we have received this report from the Senate Economics Legislation Committee and I have not studied it in as much detail as I would like to have, I would hope that the Assistant Treasurer takes note of our comments. We certainly reserve the right to move amendments relating to our very serious concerns in the Senate, when this bill arrives in that place.
I rise today to lend my support to the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 Measures No. 2) Bill 2010 It is timely to have the opportunity to speak on this bill, only days after the government delivered what can only be described as a responsible budget that will strengthen our economy, help families and secure our economic future. I for one am proud, Mr Deputy Speaker, as no doubt you are, to be a member of a responsible government that has taken steps to halve the peak debt with a view to bringing our budget back to surplus within three years. I would have thought that is something to be applauded and congratulated by those opposite. I would like to hear tonight, as we line-up to hear the Leader of the Opposition, how he intends to support that noble aim of delivering, for the Australian people, a budget back into surplus.
Let us not forget that bringing it back into surplus within three years, given the fact that we have faced the worst economic crisis in 75 years is something that should not be easily forgotten. It comes on top of very decisive decision-making to keep our economy strong, to protect jobs, during this financial crisis. This is real action that has certainly made a difference, particularly where I come from in the south-west of Sydney. I note the Minister for Housing, Tanya Plibersek, at the table. She has visited my electorate on a number of occasions to look at job-creating programs in social housing. It not only makes a difference for creating jobs in those areas, but also makes a real difference to the lives of people in the south-west of Sydney who are in need of social housing. So on behalf of those people, Minister, I do thank you.
Many families, seniors and young people have benefited from our Nation Building Program, a package that was, let us not forget, opposed at every opportunity by the opposition. Let us not forget, also, that these actions took place in face of the world’s worst global economic crisis in 75 years. These were a world wide set of challenges that this government met head on, with a view to taking positive steps to create jobs and stimulate the economy.
I look forward to seeing, tonight, just how the opposition plans to cut government spending. They certainly talk tough from that side of the House and we will all be listening, and no doubt the rest of the Australian population will, as to how the alternative Prime Minister of this country plans to lead this country forward. That cannot take place on rhetoric alone.
One of the things I did speak briefly about was the creation of jobs. Building the Education Revolution has had an impact on 9,500 schools throughout the country. In my electorate of Werriwa alone, over $100,000 has been spent at over 60 schools on much-needed community infrastructure projects, including the upgrading of sporting fields, community centres and new playgrounds. Our partnerships with local government—in my case, Liverpool and Campbelltown—have been very good and very constructive. Through its partnership with local government, the government not only has produced this much-needed community infrastructure in a timely way but, most importantly, has created jobs for our people.
One of the other very significant things in south-western Sydney is the $140 million upgrade of the Hume Highway, the F5 project, in my electorate. I was very happy that NACE, a local engineering company based in Liverpool, got that work. One other thing I would like to mention is the $8 million we committed to upgrade the Campbelltown City Stadium. It was my pleasure to open the stadium on 2 May for the first home game between the Wests Tigers and the Eastern Suburbs Roosters. As a one-eyed Tigers supporter, I was extremely disappointed that the Tigers did not win their first game at the venue. But the players, the broadcasters and everyone who turned up on the day—and it was a capacity crowd—all appreciated the renovations and new facilities established at the stadium. These are things that governments working with communities can do. The Campbelltown City Stadium was a partnership arrangement we entered into with the local government. That is what a federal government should be doing—creating local infrastructure and local jobs by empowering those who have the plans and the equipment to deliver these projects in a timely way.
Last week I had the opportunity to open the Minto Public School facility. It was one of the first commenced and first completed school based projects. As a matter of fact, the Prime Minister has visited this school twice. He went out there to do the turning of the sod for this particular school. It was very good to see this project come to fruition. I congratulate the principal, Vickie Craze, the parents and the tradespeople who worked on the site to deliver this very important project. I also recognise all those in the school community who have been involved with it, particularly Fiona Fernandez, from the P&C. This shows what we can do if we decide to work constructively and cooperatively. I also congratulate the two school captains—Jasmin Sofatu and Rachel Bonig.
I know what those projects are doing across my area and I also know about the jobs they are creating. My youngest son, Jonathan, a carpenter/builder, has been putting up schools all around the countryside. I have seen what he and many of the young people who live locally and work with him are doing. They are building in my immediate area and also travelling around. This is creating jobs, building our schools and creating skill sets for the future of which we can be justifiably proud.
I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to visit Cabramatta High School with the Deputy Prime Minister to see firsthand how a project was being rolled out. Given that this visit was during the school holidays, I was particularly impressed that a lot of the students turned up in school uniform to meet the Deputy Prime Minister and proudly show off their school. I thank the principal, Beth Goodwin, and the school captains, Andrew Kouch and Diana Nguyen, for their warm welcome. I was very impressed to see young people so committed to what they are doing and looking to the future. They know that education is the way ahead to participate in our economy in the future.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I know that you have been waiting for me to return to the bill, and I will do that now. I will always support a bill that benefits the Australian people, particularly those in my region, which is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. This bill makes a number of amendments, which I will address individually. The amendments in schedule 1 will amend the non-commercial loans rules in division 7A of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936. The amendments will prevent shareholders of private companies, or associates of those shareholders, from accessing free dividends from the use of company assets for less than their market value. Other technical amendments are also being made in that schedule to strengthen the non-commercial loans rules and to ensure that they operate in accordance with the original policy intent. This measure is designed to remove the inconsistent treatment between shareholders and employees of private companies to ensure that the shareholders of private companies pay their fair share of tax. It is estimated that the saving from this measure alone will be some $30 million over the forward estimates.
Schedule 2 improves the fairness and integrity of the tax system by extending the current tax file number withholding arrangements to closely held trusts, including family trusts. This measure will improve the fairness and integrity of the tax system by equipping the Taxation Office with the information necessary to data match the amounts distributed by trustees of closely held trusts and family trusts with amounts reported in the beneficiary’s income tax return. This measure will extend the existing tax file number withholding system to shed light on amounts distributed by closely held trusts and family trusts and identify unreported income to ensure that beneficiaries of trusts pay their fair share of tax.
Schedule 3, in accordance with previous budget announcements and to provide legal certainty, is proposed to exempt from income tax the value of the HECS-HELP benefit to eligible recipients. The HECS-HELP benefit provides certain maths, science, teaching and nursing graduates who go on to work in related occupations a refund of around half their HECS-HELP repayments for up to five years. Ensuring the value of the benefit is tax exempt provides support for this valuable program. This amendment is being introduced to provide certainty to taxpayers. It was never intended that the value of the HECS-HELP benefit would be included as assessable income and subject to income tax. The ATO have advised that currently no taxpayers have had to pay tax on the value of a HECS-HELP benefit received. This amendment will clarify the position to ensure that situation remains.
Schedule 4—an important amendment—amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to specifically list two new organisations as deductible gift recipients and extend the time another organisation can receive deductible gifts. The schedule specifically lists two new organisations. The Bali Peace Park Association will create a peace park on the land where the bomb was detonated in Bali on 12 October 2002 and where, tragically, 202 people were killed, including 88 Australians. The other organisation named is the Sichuan Earthquake Surviving Children’s Education Fund—you will recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, that dreadful earthquake in China—which will provide assistance in the reconstruction of schools in that province following that earthquake on 12 May 2008. It also extends the period in which the Yachad Accelerated Learning Project Ltd can collect deductible gifts. These important amendments will allow these organisations to collect tax deductible gifts and provide them with certainty about their tax status in the future.
Schedule 5 amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. These amendments will make the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute income tax exempt for a four-year period. Carbon capture and storage is one of the fundamental components of clean coal technology. Australia being one of the largest if not the largest exporter of coal, we are doing a lot of research and development into carbon capture and storage or geosequestration in order for it to operate more efficiently. This institute will be income tax exempt for a predetermined period of four years. This institute was formally launched by the Prime Minister on 16 April 2009. The institute is a non-profit organisation that aims to accelerate the development and global adoption of safe as well as commercially and environmentally sustainable carbon capture and storage technology. The information and expertise developed by the institute is to be disseminated broadly and globally to the benefit of both the Australian and the global carbon capture and storage communities. Supporting the institute by making it income tax exempt is a part of the government’s strategy to mitigate the risks of climate change.
Schedule 6 repeals over 100 provisions of tax law that provide the commissioner with an unlimited period to make amendments to taxpayers’ assessments. By repealing these provisions, it will limit the relevant amendment periods to the standard two- and four-year periods. The removal of these unlimited amendment periods will assist in providing more certainty to taxpayers in their taxation affairs and contribute to reducing the volume of unnecessary provisions in our tax laws. I commend the bill to the House.
I thank the member for Werriwa for his contribution. Out of interest, in schedule 4 you were discussing the earthquake in China and I have visited the site in China where the terrible earthquake took place.
I thank those members who contributed to this debate on the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 Measures No. 2) Bill 2010, including the very fine contribution from the member for Werriwa. The amendments in schedule 1 will strengthen the operation of non-commercial loans to ensure that benefits provided by a private company to its shareholders or their associates, such as the private use of yachts or holiday homes, will need to be provided at market rates or the use of the asset may give rise to deemed dividends under division 7A.
The changes include a range of technical amendments to strengthen the operation of these rules to ensure that they cannot be circumvented by the use of corporate limited partnerships or by interposing entities between the private company and the shareholder. These amendments will provide more consistent treatment between shareholders and employees of private companies to ensure that the shareholders of private companies pay their fair share of tax whilst also ensuring that the rural and small business communities are not unintentionally impacted.
Schedule 2 is a fairness and integrity measure. The core focus of the amendments is to ensure that an eligible beneficiary who receives a distribution or is entitled to trust income from a closely held trust or family trust pays his or her fair share of tax. By extending the tax file number withholding arrangements to closely held trusts and family trusts, the Australian Taxation Office will be able to collect tax file number information to enable them to data-match trust distributions with the amounts reported in a beneficiary’s tax return. This measure will encourage beneficiaries to comply with their obligations under taxation law and help to reduce nonreporting and underreporting of income.
Schedule 3 exempts from income tax the value of the benefit received by eligible recipients of the HECS-HELP benefit. The HECS-HELP benefit reduces a person’s HECS and/or HELP debt repayment or in some cases, where a repayment is not required due to low income, directly reduces their HELP debt. An individual can apply for a HECS-HELP benefit when he or she has studied an eligible course in mathematics, science, nursing or teaching and then enters the workforce in an approved field. The value of the HECS-HELP benefit will be made income tax exempt, with application from 1 July 2008.
Schedule 4 amends the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to make the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute Ltd income tax exempt for a four-year period. The institute will accelerate the development and global adoption of environmentally sustainable carbon capture and storage technology. It will drive the commercialisation of carbon capture and storage technologies. The institute will contribute to global action on climate change. The information and expertise developed by the institute will be disseminated broadly and globally, to the benefit of both the Australian and the global carbon capture and storage communities. This government is working to mitigate the risks of climate change, and supporting the institute is part of that strategy.
Schedule 5 amends the list of deductible gift recipients in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. Taxpayers can claim income tax deductions for certain gifts to organisations with deductible gift recipient status, assisting organisations to attract public donations and support. This schedule adds two new organisations to the act. The Sichuan Earthquake Surviving Children’s Education Fund will provide assistance in the reconstruction of schools in the Sichuan province in China and to children in the Sichuan province, following the earthquake on 12 May 2008. The Bali Peace Park Association Inc. will create a peace park on the land where the terrorist bomb was detonated on 12 October 2002. The schedule also extends the period in which Yachad Accelerated Learning Project Ltd can collect deductible gifts by another three years.
Schedule 6 repeals over 100 unlimited amendment periods from the income tax laws. The repeal of these provisions will address the lack of certainty experienced by taxpayers who have an unlimited amendment period and also reduce the volume of unnecessary provisions in the tax laws. I commend this bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Debate resumed from 18 March, on motion by Mr Gray:
That this bill be now read a second time.
The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010, which was introduced in March, will enable satellite digital broadcasting. As members know, Australia is converting to digital television. That switch-over begins in the Mildura region in less than 50 days—and I am very pleased that my friend and colleague the member for Mallee is here with me in the chamber. The switch-over must run smoothly. I will address the substance of this bill and some of the issues at stake more broadly, and point out some of the critical issues the government have been failing on to date which we call on them to rectify to avoid a television train wreck on switch-over day in the Mildura region.
As I said, this bill will provide for a satellite service when that switch-over from analog to digital television occurs. There will always be a need for a satellite service, and that is why this legislation is before us. This bill will provide the important architecture and licensing regime for the proposed satellite service. As the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy made clear back in March, it will set out the conditions of the satellite service, including authorisations and exemptions for commercial television programming, local content obligations and all of the operational features of that satellite.
We on this side of the House say that every opportunity must be taken to provide Australians with terrestrial television coverage. At the moment many areas in regional Australia have benefited from self-help towers to overcome television black spots. People in those communities have been receiving television reception as a result of those self-help towers. Back in January the government announced that the broadcasters had agreed to upgrade around 100 of the 600 self-help towers to digital, which will mean that, when the switch-over occurs, those 100 communities will receive digital television as they receive analog television today.
Where those towers are not upgraded, households and businesses in those regions will require a satellite service. Of course everyone supports legislation to provide for a satellite service, because it will always be needed, but the point is it should be a last resort and it should be for areas that cannot receive a signal from a television tower. Most recently the broadcasters identified 87 sites that would be upgraded. In some areas there are towers that they have deemed may not need upgrading because they will receive a digital signal but over and above that people will be requiring a satellite service. Of course, a satellite service costs money. The government is proposing some subsidies, but the cost of every satellite service is borne by every household.
As I said at the beginning of my contribution, the switch-over begins in Mildura. I have had an opportunity to visit the Mildura region with the member for Mallee, who will speak after me in this debate. Every day for the last year or so the member for Mallee has warned the government that the area is not yet adequately prepared for the switch-over. The minister maintains that everything will go smoothly on switch-over day. This switch-over day is of critical importance to the people of Mildura.
There has been an education campaign, but we maintain that it has been inadequate. The member for Mallee will outline in great detail the deficiencies that need to be overcome in that short space of time. The people of the Mildura region will have to sprint flat out just to have a hope of having a smooth switch-over. The great risk is that, because of the government’s inadequate planning and preparation, some people in that region will find that switch-over day is television switch-off day for them.
There are not just issues with the cost of a satellite service for households; there are costs and preparation for other households, particularly with respect to cabling and antennas. These have not been widely communicated at all by the minister or the government. Steve Petschel from Teletune in Mildura, who is an expert in the area, has expressed concerns publicly. He said the installers and the workforce are going to be overwhelmed with work at the last minute. He has made that very clear, and the member for Mallee will enlarge on that in his contribution.
At the end of my contribution I will be moving a second reading amendment. In that amendment we call on the government to recognise some of the critical issues and we point out the government’s lack of understanding to date. We want the government to guarantee that Australians receiving analog television today will not lose their signal on switch-over days across Australia as a result of their policy failure and their failed implementation that we have seen on so many levels.
Of course, the satellite licensing regime that is embodied in this legislation must proceed, but we are here today again warning the government that its effort to date is unsatisfactory. The people who will pay the price for that will be those in regional Australia who will have their analog switched off earlier than the rest of us, starting in less than 50 days time in Mildura. On every occasion that the minister has had concerns expressed to him he has dismissed them. He has said that everything will be all right on the day.
The people of the Mildura region deserve certainty. They have not had that from this minister. Those throughout the rest of regional Australia deserve certainty as well. Where it is possible for people in regional Australia to receive digital television from a self-help tower, they should. Where they are receiving a television signal today from a self-help tower they rightly expect that when the switch over to digital television occurs they will be able to receive that same signal without having to go to the expense of paying for a satellite service. The member for Mallee wants the switch-over to go well. He has worked tirelessly on behalf of his constituents. He has pointed out serious problems along the way and some of those, thanks to his effort, have been rectified. But there is still a lot of work to do in the Mildura region, and after Mildura other regional areas will begin the same process as the analog signal is switched off.
Mr Deputy Speaker Schultz, today I move an amendment on behalf of the coalition. That amendment, circulated in my name, is as follows:
That all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:“whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:
I call on the government to take heed of the warnings we are giving today. To date, their effort has not been good enough, and in the coming weeks they will need to lift their game if they are to avoid a television train wreck in the region.
I rise to support the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 and, obviously, to oppose the amendment moved by the member for Casey. This is an important bill for regional Australia. It is an important bill to close the digital divide that exists in Australia, a digital divide that is the legacy of 10 years of confusion and inaction by the Howard government. And what we see from the member for Casey is yet another commitment to inaction. That is what his motion represents—more inaction, cementing the digital divide that already exists in Australia that they created under the Howard government. Because they diddled and fiddled and waited all that time, confused and sitting on their hands, they created and cemented a digital divide.
The digital divide threatens to separate Australia into regions which are information rich and regions which are information poor, and in the process it condemns some Australians to lower standards of living, restricting their opportunities and their rights to participate. It was a terrible thing that the Howard government did to this country, not just on digital TV but also on broadband. We know very well about the digital divide there. We know that their inaction, their special deals—a bit here and there—resulted in a system which was riven with inequality. It was a regional divide. And today they are talking about cementing that again with inaction instead of action. Rather than passing a bill, they will be moving a motion that does nothing—inaction, basically
Getting back to the bill, I want to talk about two areas in my electorate which have had really significant TV reception problems for some time. For years under the old analog system both of those problems were serious issues. Craigmore and Hillbank have been experiencing television reception problems for the last 20 years. The Para Escarpment basically lies in the shadow of Mount Lofty, which has caused all sorts of TV reception problems over the years. Some people simply cannot get any signal at all. Despite having spent hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on antennas and boosters and the like, they still often cannot receive a signal.
My Labor predecessor in the seat of Bonython, Martyn Evans, improved SBS and ABC coverage by obtaining funding for a tower in Elizabeth South. Sadly, the commercial broadcasters would not come to the party on that occasion because there was some dispute about the local community providing funding for the maintenance of that tower. It created a Mexican stand-off which cost the residents of Craigmore and Hillbank a lot, in that they were not able to watch the tennis or the cricket or the footy on channels 10, 9 or 7. We have a suburb of 10,000 people across northern Adelaide with intermittent or very poor television coverage.
The previous government was well aware of these problems. My Liberal predecessor in Wakefield, David Fawcett, surveyed the area many times, yet we never ever saw concrete action by the previous government to resolve the problems. There was plenty of surveying, plenty of inaction, plenty of ‘if only we could do this or do that’—but never any solutions. The problem with the opposition amendment is that it cements the digital divide; that is what it is all about. When I doorknocked the Craigmore area as a candidate this issue quickly became my No. 1 priority. We got an election commitment from the then Rudd opposition. That became a budget commitment that morphed into proper signal testing in the area, and from June we will have an operational tower which will improve TV reception across Hillbank and Craigmore and give those 10,000 people the same rights as every other Australian. I know there are many in Craigmore and Hillbank who have waited decades for better TV reception. All the technical advice that we have had indicates that this tower will provide that long-awaited coverage. If people want to talk about the switch-over, the proof will be in the pudding. In my case I have found that a problem that existed for 20 years, a problem that my predecessor knew about and surveyed but never actually got a solution for, has been resolved under this government.
So the proof is in the pudding with these things, and I would just urge the public to ignore the opposition’s cries and to march onward into the future with digital television. It is going to be a great advantage. This bill provides regional Australians for the first time with a satellite service that encompasses both national and commercial channels, delivered over a common satellite platform. Access will be through a satellite dish and a set-top box. All Australians living in remote TV licence areas will have access to the new commercial satellite service. And any Australians in regional or metropolitan television licence areas who do not receive adequate digital television services in their terrestrial licence area will also have access. So what this bill does is provide a new layer of protection and a new layer of service to those Australians who have experienced these problems in the past. That will certainly reassure some of my electors in the country areas, particularly those in the Clare Valley. The Clare Valley is a beautiful place, but all the things that make it beautiful: the valleys, the hills, the native fauna or flora—one of those; the flora—
Trees!
Yes, trees. All those things that make it beautiful also make TV reception in the area somewhat problematic. That is a problem I have been made aware of by the Northern Argus, which is a great country paper. I will be doing everything I can to maximise the opportunities for better coverage during the switch-over and to minimise the problems people might face. I think this bill represents action; it represents moving into the future. There will always be concerns and people will rightly have some apprehension about the switch-over, but that does not mean that we should not move forward or that the country should be held back. It certainly does not mean that we should cement in a digital divide in this country which was created by the previous government. We have just got to get on and embrace the future. This bill helps us do that and I commend it to the House.
I am very pleased to offer some useful comments on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. It is vital that this bill gets the support of the chamber because there are 48 days to go before the provisions in it are going to be needed in my constituency. I might briefly take the opportunity to rebut the remarks made by the member for Wakefield. Obviously the particular region he referred to did not have a hardworking member to make sure that the Howard government’s black spot program was implemented. Across my region, three black spot programs went some way towards addressing the television challenges that confronted my constituents, and I want to make some comment about all of that in my remarks today. It has been an interesting journey.
I can recall sitting right here in December 2008, just before Christmas, after the government had tabled its switch-over schedule, and being advised that the transmitter at Yatpool, for Mildura, was to be the first. I groaned, ‘Oh, no!’ and was initially a little cynical as to why Mildura was first. But after a while I accepted that there were good, logical reasons why we should be the first pilot. Mildura happened to have the largest concentration of digital reception of any community across Australia—as high as 78 per cent. There were special reasons for that, which I will address later; it is the flat earth. Whilst initially as a community we resented the fact that we would be the guinea pigs, to use that euphemistic phrase, it made a lot of sense. And together, as a community, we saw it as a huge opportunity to have the huge number of television challenges we confronted finally addressed, once and for all. Digital television offers a huge amount of advantages but we know, as we learnt from the switch-off of the analog mobile phone service, that it does not offer the advantages that the analog signal provided in geographic coverage because analog had the ability to go around trees and bounce off clouds. That creates a particular issue for regional Australia, and we have learnt that as a result of the last 18 months of conversion that we have been through.
My story on television goes back even further than that, to when I was first elected in 1993. At that time Mildura was one of those peculiar licence areas scattered across Australia which were referred to in those days as the solus markets. At the time of full aggregation, through the mid-eighties, the TV channels in these markets were privately owned operations. They were scattered across Australia—I know there was one at Renmark, out of Loxton, one at Griffith, I think, and one at Darwin. It was successfully argued that a locally owned television service could not cope with the competition that full aggregation with three commercial channels would bring and the market pressure that that would put on. Mildura, at that time, had only two channels. It had the ABC and one commercial channel which had recently been purchased by one of the regional networks—WIN Television.
I set about addressing a commitment I had made. In the 1993 election campaign, I said: ‘Send me to Canberra. Send me. I will get some common sense into this. Mildura, like any other community, is entitled to full aggregation.’ There were complaints from tourists—because Mildura is a tourist destination of some note—which came through the various tourist authorities and from individuals. Out of that exercise I learned how much significance Australians place on their sport. Mildura could not get the football or the tennis because they only had one commercial provider and did not have the scope for the transmission. So I called a public meeting and I persuaded what was then the Australian Broadcasting Authority to attend. They were a bit reluctant, because bureaucrats do not like to expose themselves to public meetings. There were over 3,000 people present at that public meeting. They were a bit cranky. I admired the Australian Broadcasting Authority bureaucrats, who tried to explain how they were bound by difficult legal constraints arising out of the peculiar licensing arrangements in Mildura. But we ignored that. Thousands of signatures on petition after petition were tabled in this chamber and sent to the Australian Broadcasting Authority.
Over a period of time I was successful in persuading the authority and the relevant minister at the time to put to tender the provision of an additional licence for that solus licence area. That was not easy to achieve. The existing commercial broadcaster challenged it in the Administrative Appeals Tribunals. There were a range of acrimonious exchanges between me and that broadcaster. I was accused of threatening the important local news service they provided—they argued that the competition of an extra broadcaster would mean that Mildura would lose that service. I was able to persuade the broadcaster that it would give them an enormous market advantage if they saved that news, and to this day Mildura still gets its local news. That gives that network a marketing advantage.
Thankfully, the licence went to tender and was purchased by the other very strong regional broadcaster, Prime TV. Then, as a result of the Howard initiatives, we got SBS shortly after 1998. So we had two commercial channels and we had the ABC and SBS. I was getting there and at each successive election I would say: ‘This is unfinished business. Send me back again. I told you it would take a long time.’ There were legal constraints to getting the third commercial channel—effectively the Southern Cross Television or Channel 10 signal. They have the licence to broadcast AFL football, and if my constituents cannot watch their footy they put enormous pressure on. Out of that, I was able to convince the two commercial operators to form a joint venture to get around the legal constraints, purchase the Channel 10 signal and jointly broadcast it. People were so grateful that Mildura Digital Television started broadcasting the football on 1 January 2006. I thought then, ‘My television problems are now over.’
However, that still left a lot of those communities around the fringes. A particular interest has been Murrayville, a community right on the western boundary. It is on the South Australian border, adjacent to the member for Barker’s electorate, and is not legally within the licence area of Sunraysia. They are in a remote zone and they have to get their access via satellite from a signal that comes out of Darwin—basically they watch Imparja. Murrayville is a terrific little township. They had their 100th anniversary over Easter. It is part of the Mildura Rural City Council. They want and, I always thought, they deserve to be able to watch the local news. It can report on council matters and make that community feel part of a very strong local government area. I am pleased to say that this legislation delivers them exactly that outcome and I was able to announce that at their centenary. There were 4,000 or 5,000 people there and they cheered, because that is how significant their television is to them. A lot of them rely on television for their view of the world. It is the way they become informed—about what happens in this place for some of them, if they are interested—but most particularly it is for the cricket and the football. Of course, down our way it is AFL, but there are some NRL enthusiasts in Victoria. It is also for motor racing. I had not realised there were so many petrolheads with an interest in motor racing. Now all that is all available in Mildura.
That is part of the reason why I sat here and groaned when I saw that schedule, but I have reconciled this. I discussed it with my community and we have come to the conclusion that this is a terrific opportunity for us—a tremendous opportunity. I resolved to work in cooperation with the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy. He knows that. I have operated in every way in extreme good faith and, although it has taken some time to get the bureaucrats to acknowledge it, he has agreed to every single request that I have put to him—including the delivery of service to Murrayville.
This has been some exercise in the last 12 months and we have to make it easier for the future. My remarks here today and my support for the amendment we have moved are, contrary to the member for Wakefield’s interpretation, to reinforce the point and the suggestions I want to make as my contribution today. Spare other communities some of the uncertainty we have confronted. Spare other communities the enormous expense. We need to start off by saying that it is not just a simple matter of purchasing a digital set-top box; it is about purchasing the correct set-top box. Beyond that, you need attention to your cabling. Some of it is 20 years old and has deteriorated. Beyond that again, you need good advice on the installation of the aerial and the direction in which it is pointed.
In the early stages, people thought that all they had to do was buy a box, but they were confronted with ongoing challenges. To this day, that is still happening. It has taken far too long for the task force to get out there and communicate. I know they will be reading my remarks and I do not intend them to be critical in any way. When you are the pilot, there will be hiccups and it takes a long time to get the momentum going. It took too long to have the local representative appointed. That did not happen until this year. They should have been on the ground with communication occurring much earlier. The doorknocking that has occurred has only been happening in the last month and, from today, there are 48 days to go.
I am advised that the concentration is now up to 90 per cent. That still leaves 10 per cent, which is a large number of viewers. In fact, even yesterday I got a phone call from a constituent who said, ‘Why are you always banging on about the TV?’ They did not know that switch-off day is looming in 48 days time. That is one, and for every one there are another ten. When you consider that the predominant regions of regional Australia are to be included in the switch-off by mid next year, the broadcasting authority needs to be out there earlier and there need to be locally appointed raconteurs. Our raconteur is a lady by the name of Kellie Boyce and she has done a great job. She is actually employed by the Mildura Rural City Council, but the position is funded by the federal government. Those people need to be on the ground a lot earlier.
The minister announced very early that those people on fixed incomes and social security would get some assistance with the purchase of their set-top box. In fact, seniors on the age pension were going to have their entire costs met—whatever was required. Sadly, they relied on printed media to get that message out when the concentration of readers is probably less than 20 per cent. Some of those people who were eligible for legitimate support went in and purchased what they were advised they needed, but by that process they disqualified themselves from the assistance. That has left some angst in the community. The minister is aware of that. I have certainly conveyed it to him.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority needs to be out there now measuring signal strength. I was amazed when I drew attention to the problems we were having in Robinvale, which is a very strong community on the Murray River with a district population of well over 10,000 that embraces the member for Farrer’s electorate at Euston. I was writing and making representations because we had some problems with digital reception in Robinvale. I was advised by the engineers that there were no problems at all based on the theory. The reality is that the digital signal gets interfered with so quickly by an obstacle, whether it is a tree or a wheat silo. It is particularly interfered with by mobile phone towers because they use the same technology. To this day I suspect that was the problem in Robinvale. It took too long for that message to be heard, but I am pleased to say the solution has been the installation of a repeater at Robinvale. The early suggestion that half of the township of Robinvale would get their reception from satellite and the other side of the street would get theirs terrestrially was just a nonsense comment that divided the community. That has been addressed.
Ouyen was a particular problem, and I am pleased to say that has been fixed. The networks have installed a transmitter at Ouyen and I was advised this morning that it is operating and they are satisfied with the signal. With 48 days to go, I am very concerned because I am advised that the set-top box for satellite reception will not be in the Mildura community until mid-June, or maybe earlier. That is a short space of time for people to make a quiet assessment of the quality of the two alternative signals. They can use the terrestrial signal if it is unreliable, but they need to be able to make an assessment because they are being asked to make a significant investment. Some of them have already spent a lot of money. In fact, a lot of their investment has been wasted. Setting aside the capital costs of buying a new digital television, the antenna costs can mount to thousands of dollars. The retailers and suppliers have complained that they have had to return to properties time and time again, which has caused extra costs to the customers. To be told after all of that expense that you need to invest another $600 for satellite reception is creating enormous angst. I am very concerned that, come the deadline, there is going to be some cranky, bad media about that.
I have tried my best to work in good faith with the minister and, to his credit, he has responded to every request I have made. I am not churlish enough to speak disparagingly about that. We as a community accept the fact that there were going to be problems. We were always first and they are going to learn from us. This amendment reinforces the comments I am making here—get it right by 1 July in Mildura. I am not persuaded by the assurances that I have had from the minister. He continues to believe that he can get it all done. He continues to believe that, even with the short amount of time that will be left after the digital satellite boxes are available, it can still be achieved. But I am pleading with the minister and I have been doing so for quite a long time now. Open your mind to extending that deadline. Get it right in Mildura. The rest of the nation is watching. The rest of the nation is enthusiastic about the opportunities digital television provides. If you get it wrong in Mildura, they will get to know about it and it will make them nervous about their future opportunities. The minister has heard that call and I think he has learnt, as have I, the task force and the networks.
I am very pleased to offer a few commendations. I was delighted to see the way the networks have cooperated in this venture. They put their normally competitive marketing spirit aside in the interests of viewers. In fact, the minister has asked them to fund a lot of the decisions that have been made—repeaters at Underbool and the replacement of a self-help scheme, a new transmitter at Ouyen and a new transmitter at Robinvale. I understood the reasons why the minister offered them substantial rebates on their licences. I understood immediately when I saw that announced because they are being asked to make significant contributions. They have put their own resources on the table, and they are as keen as the community is to make sure that this transition is as smooth as possible.
I have to confess that my heart is in my mouth, and the shadow minister has also put on the record the way he views the matter. I do not want a wreck; I want a successful outcome. I want to see this used so that Mildura has a wonderful marketing opportunity to showcase itself to the rest of the nation. I have had that spirit of cooperation all along, so I am not going to be churlish about it, but I do ask that for the sake of the future we learn well the lessons that have emerged from the case of Mildura in the last 12 months.
I go back to that period from 1993 right through to 2006, when I finally got the solution for the large suburb of Mildura, and commend and put on the public record the wonderful support I had from Giles Tanner. Giles will probably see these remarks because he is currently the general manager of the digital transmission division of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Without him, we could not have achieved what people told us was going to be impossible: getting networks to cooperate so that the people of Mildura can have the benefits of complete aggregations.
I am looking forward to a successful outcome. To reinforce the comments I have made here, I have expressed my concerns and seconded the resolution put by the shadow minister. But I do plead with the minister: do not close off the option of making the deadline 1 July; give people an opportunity and a little bit of space to make the assessments they need to make about the quality of the picture. (Time expired)
I rise to speak in support of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 and strongly oppose the jeremiad amendment proposed by the member for Casey. Digital television has given Australians access to a whole new world of free content and high-definition television. As someone with two young children, I should perhaps declare an interest here. I particularly love the ABC and some of the pay-TV channels and the way that they help out with babysitting and educating children. However, unfortunately there are still some areas in this land of sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges that do not receive a quality digital signal, and these are usually in the valleys between the sapphire-misted mountains. We are the flattest continent, but we still have significant mountains. That is why the Rudd government has committed to funding a new commercial digital satellite broadcasting service to improve reception for these black spots. I am very optimistic about the rollout in the Mallee. Unfortunately, hearing from the member for Casey and the member for Mallee reminded me of another poem, Said Hanrahan. In it, Hanrahan says, ‘We’ll all be rooned’. Hearing their speeches—‘it ain’t gonna work; it ain’t gonna work; we’ll all be rooned’—was like listening to Bill and Ben Hanrahan. It was like a cacophony of Cassandra voices. But I am a little bit more optimistic, and I have received assurances from Minister Conroy that the consultation and rollout will occur and will be a wonderful thing.
This bill amends the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and the Copyright Act 1968 to establish the new commercial digital satellite broadcasting service. It creates three new commercial television licence areas for the new satellite service. The licence areas will cover the Northern Territory and Queensland; the ACT, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria; and Western Australia. The satellite service will deliver both national and commercial channels through satellite dish and set-top box. This is an important step in ensuring that all Australians can access digital television. The digital television services of the national broadcasters will be delivered by satellite using the same satellite platform as is used to deliver the commercial digital television services provided by satellite broadcasting service licensees.
Access to commercial channels will be overseen by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, and managed by a conditional access system administered by regional broadcasters. It is expected that commercial digital television channels on the new satellite service will be provided by existing remote commercial television broadcasting licensees; however, if a licensee is unable to provide one or more digital television channels, they will be required to provide equivalent replacement channels from a metropolitan broadcasting licensee. Satellite licensees will have the flexibility to adjust programming such as local sporting events or advertising more relevant to the local audience subject to commercial agreement.
The bill also introduces a statutory licensing scheme into the Copyright Act 1968 to allow the use of programming provided to a satellite service licensee by the remote, regional or metropolitan broadcaster. The new satellite service will provide news and information sourced from the regional commercial broadcasters operating in the relevant satellite licence area. The regional commercial broadcasters will be required to make available local news and programs to the relevant satellite licensee. If a satellite service ignores its licence conditions regarding digital television and local news, the Australian Communications and Media Authority will have the power to cancel the licence and reallocate it to another provider—an example of that simple concept of use it or lose it.
The Rudd government wants to ensure that digital television is fully available to all Australians, no matter where they live. That is why the conditions this bill places on satellite licensees are so comprehensive. The bill also ensures that commercial free-to-air digital services, including multichannels like 7TWO, Go! and One HD, can be provided anywhere in Australia. Under current rules, commercial broadcasters are not allowed to provide the full range of digital television services in a small number of licence areas where, historically, there have been fewer than two commercial broadcasters.
I began with a reference to Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country and I will finish with a reference to that poem. I love the far horizons and the jewel-sea of my country, but the land of the Rainbow Gold does throw up a lot of challenges for media and communications. We are such a huge continent. Queensland, for example, is a very spread out state—even though the population is concentrated in the south-east corner, there are significant cities scattered throughout, like Toowoomba, Townsville, Mackay, Cairns and Rockhampton—so there are challenges for media and communications in terms of rolling things out. However, a good government should not allow the tyranny of distance to prevent some Australians from accessing digital television. This bill will ensure that we have a workable framework in place to secure the future of digital television via satellite for all Australians. I commend the bill to the House.
I rise today to address the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. This is a very important bill for the electorate of Paterson, where many of my constituents struggle with very poor or no digital television services. Sometimes they get no digital reception whatsoever. Television is a vital form of entertainment which has become a huge part of Australian culture. Ever since it first reached homes in September 1956, television has been a popular form of entertainment for kids through to seniors. Importantly, television also allows us to see vital weather messages, emergency warnings, news and sport in our local areas. Furthermore, it is important to advertisers, who use TV to showcase their products to a local audience. Its uses are multifold.
Analog transmission has, until now, been used quite successfully by broadcasters to reach their audience. However, as time has passed we have seen significant advances in technology and the advent of digital television. This brings with it some great advantages such as new channels and a clearer picture. However, for many residents in my electorate of Paterson, these advantages are out of reach because the Rudd Labor government has failed to keep local infrastructure up to date. With analog television now to be switched off, my constituents need a guarantee that services will be upgraded and upgraded soon. Time is of the essence. This proposed legislation goes some way to help address problems with digital TV in the Paterson electorate, but I am concerned about value for money, cost, time management and the provision of local content under Labor’s plan.
The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill has been designed largely to establish a satellite service. The service will allow residents in black-spot areas who cannot access terrestrial digital TV to watch via satellite instead. Specifically, the bill will change the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and the Copyright Act 1968. Some of the major points are as follows. A satellite digital television service will be established under a new licensing agreement, which will include three satellite licence areas. ABC and SBS will be provided on a statewide basis via this satellite, whilst channels ABC2, ABC3, ABC HD, SBS TWO and SBS HD will be provided to five areas, with Paterson to be part of the south-eastern Australian zone. This zone will include New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. Satellite broadcasts must include content tailored to local broadcast areas. Free-to-air broadcasters will switch off their analog signal by the end of 2013. Also, it is important to understand that only 87 of the 698 self-help retransmission sites will be upgraded by broadcasters under the agreement with the Rudd Labor government.
Mr Deputy Speaker, in order to explain my concerns with this legislation, please allow me to give some background on what has been taking place in the Paterson electorate. Over the past few months I have received more than 1,100 complaints about digital television reception in my electorate. These have come by phone, email and letter—many people have made contact with me to complain about the lack of digital TV reception. I have also personally visited a number of homes to see their television screens with my own eyes. In addition, many people also took time to respond to a detailed survey I distributed across my electorate, which has given me much more information on where specific trouble areas are. To all of those residents who put in the effort to help resolve this issue, I say thank you. To date, the largest number of complaints have come from Anna Bay, closely followed by Tea Gardens, Forster, Boat Harbour and Stroud respectively. These areas contain widespread black spots which need to be addressed urgently through upgrades. However, there are also problem areas in East Maitland, Gloucester and Dungog, which means that all local government areas in my electorate are affected by this problem to some extent.
The Maitland Mercury reported on the woes of one such affected constituent on 28 April this year. The article, by Briony Snedden, reads:
What Dave Ramsay can watch on television depends on the weather.
The slightest shift in wind speed or an increase in temperature can affect the digital reception at his Gresford home, leaving Mr Ramsay to watch a flickering screen with no sound.
He is the most recent to complain about digital reception in the rural outreaches neighbouring Maitland, joining a growing list of disgruntled television viewers across the Paterson electorate.
Mr Ramsay invested in a new digital television last year, only to discover his best chance of watching commercial stations was when it rained and the air was denser and the signal was less prone to scatter.
He said there were no problems with analogue transmission.
‘It’s heartbreaking when you’ve spent the money (on a new TV) and you can’t watch it,’ he said yesterday.
Mr Ramsay said Channel 7 was non-existent during the day, but he could sometimes watch it at night.
Similarly, Channel 9 was impossible to watch during the day, but from 4.30pm began to improve.
But Mr Ramsay said the quality of reception could change in a moment.
‘I have been watching a program and halfway through it pixelates, and there’s no sound,’ he said.
‘Once that happens, that’s it—you’ve lost it.’
Mr Ramsay was a linesman in the air force, and installed antennas and aerials.
But he said when he contacted the stations and the Government about the problem, he was ‘treated like an idiot’.
It is a disgrace that Mr Ramsay feels as though the government regards him as an idiot. There are big and real problems with television in my electorate and we desperately need upgrades before the analog signal is switched off in 2013. In response to complaints such as those by Mr Ramsay, I have written to Minister Stephen Conroy on several occasions to ask for a clear time frame on when local services will be upgraded and what content they will broadcast. His replies have failed to satisfy the questions of my constituents, who genuinely fear they will be left with blank screens when analog signals are switched off.
I discussed these fears directly with local residents at three separate forums earlier this month—held at Dungog, Forster and Soldiers Point—and Senator Mary Jo Fisher also visited residents to hear their concerns direct as chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts. The two most common issues raised with me at these forums were reliability and cost. As for the latter, many residents in my electorate of Paterson are elderly and live on very tight budgets. It is these same people who often rely on their television for relatively cheap news and entertainment. If satellites are to be installed at a cost of $650, how are locals going to afford that sort of cash? Yes, Minister Conroy has promised to subsidise, which is expected to be around $400, but that still leaves residents having to fork out $250 and possibly even more if there are installation problems.
As I have repeatedly said, this is why we really need definitive dates for the upgrade of towers and we need them soon so that those who will need to rely on satellite equipment know so. Armed with this knowledge, these residents can plan for the added costs of purchasing satellite equipment and having it installed. The second reason my constituents need to be given an answer soon is so that they do not purchase expensive yet useless equipment. One Vacy woman who attended my forum in Dungog this month explained how she had just bought a new antenna to pick up the digital signal at a cost of $1,100, only to find out that she cannot get any digital or television reception. Had this woman known she would need to rely on a satellite, she obviously would not have wasted all of that money on unreliable technology.
The Rudd Labor government is largely to blame for this waste, and the reason is the Prime Minister has spent a massive amount of taxpayers’ money on advertising his new digital network in local papers. Had all of his advertising money been used on upgrades instead, my constituents could be enjoying quality, uninterrupted television. Instead they have been encouraged by this Rudd Labor government to go out and buy expensive set-top boxes for digital ready televisions, only to get them home and find out the digital network itself is not ready. To make matters even worse, some of the digital televisions now being sold cannot receive analog signals at all, so buyers cannot even switch back to analog, which would at least deliver some coverage. So it is a cruel message for my constituents. The phrase ‘get digital ready’ has been splashed all over our newspapers and television screens, yet residents are getting ready for a network which is clearly not ready itself.
Residents in my electorate need to know now whether to invest in a new television or whether they will simply have to sit back and wait for this satellite service to be delivered. They do not deserve to see misleading advertisements, paid for with their own taxpayer dollars, which advertise a digital network which they will never be able to watch. So they deserve a new satellite service as soon as possible. In fact, they just need clarity.
It is important to remember that residents are not the only stakeholders who need urgent information prepared. The effects of this legislation are wide-reaching. Technicians will need to know the details of the digital rollout in order to prepare their businesses and staff for increased demand. They will also need to ensure that they have enough equipment ready and the right equipment to help deliver this technology to the households that have been desperately waiting for it. Local councils also need to be a high priority, but seem to have been forgotten by the Rudd Labor government. Take for example Dungog council, which only allows one satellite dish per household roof as outlined in its development control plan. Now that many locals cannot access quality television at the moment, they have chosen to pay for subscription TV such as Foxtel or Austar. This means they already have a dish on the roof, and since that new satellite service will also require a dish, households now face the prospect of having two satellite dishes. This means they will either have to submit an expensive development application to council just to have a satellite service installed, or councils will need to make changes to their control plans. There needs to be more consultation on this program so problems can be ironed out in time to ensure a smooth and quick transition.
This digital rollout needs to be thought about from a business perspective. Businesses need to have smart goals—that is, goals that are specifically measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. This is something that all successful groups have in common, yet the Rudd Labor government has failed to do so. Prime Minister Rudd has failed to deliver a specific time frame for digital tower upgrades or satellite rollout. He has failed to explain who will need to rely on the satellite. He has set a date for an analog switch-off but is not doing enough to now guarantee future services.
People in my electorate are already struggling with television reception, and it is clear through the complaints I have received they want action and they want action now. Let me be clear: although ours is a regional area, my constituents deserve quality television, including the latest technology—the same as anyone else in the city. That is why I fought hard to have a television transmitter at Gan Gan upgraded to a digital signal. Unfortunately, the Rudd Labor government has failed to continue such vital upgrades since taking over government, so there are still six self-help retransmission sites which need to be upgraded in the Paterson electorate.
According to this bill, our commercial broadcasters have agreed to pay for the upgrade of 87 self-help sites. That is less than one-eighth of the 698 eligible sites across Australia. Of these 87 sites to be upgraded, four are in the electorate of Paterson. Those sites are: Booral, Stroud, Forster and Smiths Lake. Unfortunately, it seems that the tower at Elizabeth Beach is set to miss out, set to be serviced by satellite instead. And the irony of this is the Elizabeth Beach transmitter sits between the Forster and Smiths Lake transmitters. It is just simply defying belief.
Further, there has been no mention whatsoever of the Dungog nominal transmission site which needs to be upgraded to rectify its signal strength. Similarly, there has been no mention whatsoever of the Gan Gan tower. I fought hard for these upgrades to this tower and the former coalition government invested in omni-directional services, yet they have now been shut off with many residents left in the dark. This raises questions about value for money in Labor’s plan which I am extremely concerned about, and a review needs to happen urgently.
Allow me to use Great Lakes to demonstrate my concerns. The council has been given the option to upgrade its Elizabeth Beach retransmission site at a cost of about $100,000. This upgrade would allow locals to be able to access terrestrial digital TV—local TV. Unfortunately, neither the Rudd Labor government nor broadcasters will pay for it. No, if the Elizabeth Beach site is to be upgraded, the council has to fork out for the upgrades. On the other hand, if Elizabeth Beach is not upgraded, households will be provided with a $400 subsidy for a satellite dish. This would be paid for by the Rudd Labor government, using taxpayer dollars.
The problem is this: there are approximately 950 households that currently rely on the Elizabeth Beach site to watch television. If this tower is not upgraded, and all these residents claim a subsidy for the satellite service, the Rudd Labor government will have to spend almost $400,000. That is four times the amount of taxpayer money it would cost to upgrade the Elizabeth Beach tower. So if the Rudd Labor government simply paid for the tower upgrade, that would be a saving to taxpayers of $300,000 and it would not include any outlay from the council. That is two birds, one stone—three birds in fact, because more of my local constituents would then have access to terrestrial digital television rather than satellite. That means they would have access to specifically local, regional channels such as Prime and NBN designed for the Hunter and mid-north coast, without having to resort to satellite, which will need to service the entire south-eastern Australia zone of NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT.
This is a blatant example of the Rudd Labor government’s failure to think smart and use taxpayer dollars wisely, as demonstrated in the budget this week. Just this year we have been forced to watch blatant waste through Prime Minister Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution program, which has seen some classrooms erected for more than the cost of a luxury home. In fact, one school in my electorate, Booral Public School, received a double prefabricated classroom for $850,000. For the same price, another school got three classrooms, a basketball court and rainwater tanks. In my experience taxpayers are more than happy to invest in the education of our children, but what they do demand is value for money, which simply has not been evident at all in the BER program. Prime Minister Rudd obviously has not learnt his lesson and I would urge him to rethink the number of retransmission sites which are to be upgraded. Residents in the Paterson electorate deserve to have each and every tower upgraded, in order to give them the best chance at accessing terrestrial local digital television.
This Rudd Labor government will not invest in upgrading all our towers to digital. This is the same government which gave our broadcasters a $250 million discount in licensing fees, but failed to secure upgrades in those areas that really needed them. I am here to remind the Prime Minister that regional areas need urgent technology upgrades. People in the Paterson electorate deserve absolutely nothing less than the same services available to those in the city.
This brings me to another point of importance within the legislation, local content. Of course, Australian governments have always worked hard to ensure that people have access to relevant news and information through our commercial television broadcasters. It is not only for safety that people know what is going on in their local area but also so that people can stay informed about their local community and make a contribution. If you live in East Maitland, for example, I would argue most people would much rather read the Maitland Mercury, the Star or the Newcastle Herald rather than, say, the Canberra Times. While the latter is in no way of lesser quality, the issue here is proximity and relevance. I believe wholeheartedly that it needs to be the same with television—local content for local people; local news, local advertising, local community connection .
The Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 does address the issue of local content and I am pleased that this has been considered. However, the legislation indicates that satellite service providers will be required to present local news and information ‘as soon as practicable’. Therefore I would like to again stress the importance of local news, local sport, local weather, local community service announcements and local advertising. It is vital that the phrase ‘as soon as practicable’ does indeed translate into a timely news service which is aired at a practical time for my constituents.
Clearly, over the past five decades television has become an integral part of life for many Australians. It should be not only enhanced but also protected. Therefore, it is vital that this legislation be made a priority and that action be taken urgently. Of course, our Prime Minister is known for his talk rather than his action. But I am here for the people of Paterson and I will continue to hold the Rudd Labor government to account until clear, uninterrupted television can be viewed on the screens of every household. I have grave reservations about part of this bill and the ability of this government to roll out a quality service to my constituents. I remind the House that this Rudd Labor government stripped $2 billion from the regional telecommunications infrastructure black spot fund in December 2008. That is the sort of money that could have been spent on digital upgrades in my electorate.
It is always a pleasure to speak on the matter of community television, given in this instance the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010, which refers to the commencement of digital satellite broadcasting services. Unfortunately the member for Paterson’s glass is never half full; it is always half empty. He is always full of doomsday predictions. Yet I find it very interesting, as is the case with most criticisms that are levelled at this government by the member for Paterson, that most of the origins of what we are talking about come from the former government. They include the process to bring about digital television in Australia.
Another thing I remind the member for Paterson about is that where we have community TV black-spot translators—and I congratulate again the former government on assisting those communities—many of those areas of reception did not receive analog television reception. There are many, many households around those areas that find it difficult to receive analog reception, who do not get television reception or who have to go to the satellite program to receive any reception at all. This legislation provides digital television and ensures that commitment to every Australian. But, if you listen to the member for Paterson, we are taking television reception away from people. It is absurd. If you go through his argument, that is exactly where it belongs—in the absurd basket.
This legislation will bring us into the 21st century. It deals with the transition to digital TV. Everybody in this House who has had anything to do with television reception—and all of us are affected by it, particularly in rural and regional Australia and particularly in areas such as where I come from in Tassie, where the topography is very mixed—knows that getting TV reception can be a very problematic and difficult situation. This legislation sets out the structural framework and regulations to allow every Australian to receive digital television reception. In instances where you cannot receive terrestrial digital signals, this legislation is intended to provide access to satellite digital television reception—not just reception but the full suite of digital channels available in metropolitan Australia. Without a lot of experience in metropolitan Australia myself, I would add that there are black spots with digital transmission even inside metropolitan areas. The great advantage with this legislation, as my friend the member for Dunkley knows very well, is that it will allow people to receive digital television through satellite. In Australia you cannot totally rely on terrestrial signals—we know that—particularly where I come from. I know the member for Dunkley would accede that point at least, through his very good advocacy for better television reception in Australia over the years. I am happy to acknowledge that.
Why are we moving to digital television? It is something that the former government set in train, quite rightly, and we are implementing it. So I do not want to hear about all the tit-for-tat stuff—that under us there is ruination—when in fact we are complementing what came before us; we have created a framework for it to happen. It will not be without problems, as any reception of television and any changeover will be. You do not need to be Cassandra to predict that. It is important that Australia keeps pace with worldwide changes in technology. Overseas programs, for instance—for those interested who are listening—are increasingly being recorded in the digital format only. That is why you get dotted lines across some of your television screens—the programs are filmed for digital reception. Australian TV shows need to be recorded in digital format to be easily exported overseas. In Australia, TV is currently broadcast via both digital and analog signals. We need to free up broadcast space. It gives us greater options. Turning off the analog signals will free up space that could be used for other services for the community. The present system is costly and inefficient.
Those who have moved from analog to digital or visit people who have digital will know there is no doubt that it improves your viewing experience. The picture and sound quality on digital TV is much better. Pictures on digital television can be seen in widescreen. You still have the free-to-air channels, plus some new ones, so you have more choice. For the consumer it is absolutely terrific. As someone who lives in a valley and has to get analog signals from a community translator, there is a marked qualitative difference in looking at a digital picture—which I have to get via satellite at the moment, through Austar. It is fantastic. To see all the possibilities of channels through the spectrum is wonderful.
Digital television provides vastly improved picture and sound quality, including widescreen pictures, as I mentioned. There is digital audio—again, fantastic—including radio broadcasts. Digital television also offers the benefits of many more channels and content. For example, when you get the old analog ABC, you get ABC and that is it. You would never have heard of ABC1. With digital you have ABC1, ABC2 and ABC3, and they are only broadcast in digital. SBS has SBS2 in digital. The Seven, Nine and Ten Networks have introduced high-definition digital channels. The Ten Network launched a digital-only sports channel, named ONE, in March 2009; the Seven Network launched free-to-air digital channel 7TWO in November 2009. Gradually, each of the free-to-air television broadcasters will be introducing new digital channels and content.
I would say to the member for Paterson, who quite rightly takes seriously the comments of his constituents about their television reception: yes, people are having problems. They are having problems whether they are receiving analog or digital. There are lots of reasons why people are experiencing problems. For a start, if you do not have the appropriate antenna, appropriately positioned and appropriately connected, you will have trouble receiving signals, whether they are analog or digital. You could have the best digital TV in the world, but with a poor antenna connection or poor direction you are in trouble. I am talking about the tools of the trade. Clearly, if you are going to invest in a set-top box and/or a digital television, like anything in the consumer world it is about buyer beware—take care, inform yourself, take advice. You cannot blame the government for a poor antenna or a cruddy old TV, as the member for Paterson was implying. That is silly stuff. We as consumers have to take responsibility, otherwise the nanny state has gone mad.
Commercial TV broadcasters are in a very lucrative business. The government has been working with them to reconvert analog terrestrial sites to digital, 87 of them—only 87, said the member for Paterson. I would like them all done because I looked on the list and mine is on there. I was really pleased to find that. They will be rebroadcasting to digital, converting to digital, and that is fantastic. But I have to say that even in my own township of Forth, which will get a digital conversion, it will not allow everyone in my valley to receive TV. They are going to the satellite, and that is what we are doing with this, warts and all.
There are going to be implementation issues, there is no doubt about it, but they can include an issue as small as someone not having the right equipment or not taking the right advice or, worst of all, not seeking the right advice. We have got to be responsible for our commercial decisions. There is a website, and I know not everyone is on the web but for broadcast’s sake I would like to point out that www.digitalready.gov.au is sitting there on the net ready for people to click in and try and get as much information as possible. Ring antenna experts, ring your TV mechanics, ring and go to your TV stores and take care. Do not buy the first thing they offer you. For a start, find out if digital television reception exists in your area. The member for Paterson was blaming us for someone buying a television set when they did not even have digital television transmission. I mean, fair is fair. Those selling things in stores have got to be responsible too, and if people do not have digital TV transmission and reception then selling people a digital television is questionable. If you do and they have got an analog thing, you have got to make sure they can receive an analog signal and then make sure that the antenna is right. So people must take care, because half the problem is blaming the tools, rather than the signal itself.
Those areas that currently have a community translator—black spots, if you like—will receive a subsidy from us. I believe it is around $400 but I am not sure whether it is has been absolutely set at that. This is to help people convert to digital, to get a set-top box, a satellite box, and then the dish and installation. We are going to assist in that process. I hope that our contribution is the greatest proportion of the cost involved. I hope that our subsidy will allow people to do that. I know the technologies are getting better and better each time and I know that those people doing installations will be doing critical mass installations. I agree with some of the other speakers that it is absolutely important that those people involved in the digital conversion have this transitional time frame to take note, to take care, to get informed and be prepared with their equipment to go out and start installing and implementing. I know those people listening to this are taking that on board, and it is very important. The person getting the new digital service has a responsibility too as a receiver to make sure we are doing the sensible thing.
People might be thinking, ‘Sid, you haven’t spoken about satellite reception.’ Effectively what we are doing is creating the regulatory framework to allow people to receive essentially what metropolitan Australia is now receiving by terrestrial digital signals. I think that is absolutely marvellous, that there is going to be equitable reception of those services. We are regulating, in a pretty regulated market I have to say, to say what is going to happen with our satellite footprints. I think there are three major zones or footprints. Mine is south-east Australia and it comes into my part of beautiful, beautiful Tasmania. What are we going to do about our local news? As the member for Paterson quite rightly said, as one of the two things he got right, we value our local programming, and I suppose we value our local ads. On local news, this legislation sets out how we are going to get that. When I first heard about this I said, ‘This is a logistical nightmare how to work this out.’ But boffins in the trade know a lot more than I do, and essentially what it is doing is mandating that local news will be available, say, an hour after it is transmitted by the normal commercial digital channels. It will be available to me through the red spot so that I can home in on my local news and see my mug on the telly, and others, to share in good news. I get the impression that I will be able to get others’ news as well. There will be a news channel floating around that I will be red-spotting on and I think that is a clever, sensible and practical way for me to get my local news. So I congratulate those people that have worked within the industry, and they include the commercial channels, for making this possible. It is the same with local content. There are regulations within this, and I will not trouble people with all the details of it, but those arrangements for local content are mandated in the legislation.
I would point out too that some communities are a little bit concerned about how are they going to get their digital signal. It is not a question of whether—we will get it all right. And it is not weather, which the member for Paterson was going on about. I suggest that is problems with the antenna. There are 87 sites that the government has negotiated with the commercial channels for conversion of existing self-help sites. I notice that in my region Forth, my lovely little village, is one of them. Paloona up the road in the Forth Valley is another. Then there are Ringarooma and the upper Derwent Valley, in the seat of Lyons, Hillwood and Meeandah and Lesley Vale.
They are fortunate to be able to receive a commercial conversion, which is not to say that everyone there is going to get the signal. But—and this is the great thing about this legislation and also honours our election commitment—everyone will receive digital reception, because they will be able to access a satellite system. I note too that something like 44 digital-only terrestrial transmission sites that are owned and operated by the broadcasters may receive conversions from the commercial channels—they are called gap fillers—to enhance the digital signal and increase what is called the wider digital footprint. I notice that Currie on beautiful King Island is one of those, as are Derby, Maydena and St Helens in Tasmania—all beautiful spots, by the way, in which to receive your television reception.
Unlike the member for Paterson, I think this is wonderful news. I am asking people who are going to convert their households to digital television reception to take care, note the availability or otherwise of the signal and when it is available and, of course, take advice, because you are purchasing reasonably expensive equipment that is going to last you a long time. Remember that, as with a lot of things, sometimes you need experts to help you and there will be a lot of people in the commercial sector who will be able to give you advice along with the technicians who are going to undertake the conversions. I congratulate the government on the legislation. I really look forward to getting digital television in my valley along with everyone else. This also honours the commitment that all Australians will receive an equitable signal from digital television.
For that sales job I think the member for Braddon has an alternative career on the Digital Switchover Taskforce as the salesperson for digital switchover around Tasmania, in particular. He certainly has a passion for digital TV. I agree with part of what the member for Braddon said. It is a wonderful service and it will benefit many people. Many people now get the benefit of the additional stations and the additional content that we are seeing. As a young family we have a great use for ABC3, the kids channel, which in a previous life I was very passionate about ensuring. I was very pleased when it went ahead and I again congratulate Mark Scott on his initiative with that.
However, unfortunately, as with so many Rudd government programs, the problem here is not the idea but the implementation of the program itself. That is why I very strongly support the member for Casey, the shadow minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, in his second reading amendment to the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 which condemns the government for its lack of understanding and its inability to implement what is a very important digital switchover. In my electorate, the electorate of Mayo, which has similar issues to those of the electorate of Braddon with topography and the like, there is no greater example of the failure of the Rudd government to implement this digital switchover in a coherent and well thought through and planned fashion. Unfortunately, that means that yet again more taxpayers’ money will be wasted by a government that simply cannot implement a program.
In my electorate two areas in particular have a challenge with digital television. The first is Yankalilla where, pleasingly, thanks to the good work of Senator Mary Jo Fisher, as was revealed recently in a Senate committee, five retransmission towers will be upgraded. That is good news. We are now seeking meetings with the broadcasters to ensure that that happens quickly—not in 2013 but quickly. I congratulate Mayor Peter Whitford, his deputy and the Yankalilla Council for the work they have done in ensuring that Yankalilla will be picked up in this process, as it seems it will be. Yankalilla, not far from Adelaide but in a very hilly part of South Australia—a beautiful part of South Australia—has many valleys and peaks and has traditionally had problems with television. In fact, it only got analog television not that many years ago, thanks to black spot funding for the self-help towers there. It is a relief for those people who will be able to get digital TV.
Some people in Yankalilla, particularly in the Inman Valley, will require the satellite service. I think the satellite service does have some value, and in that respect I support some of the actions of the government. There is of course a concern about the cost for people installing the satellite service. Some clarity of how much it will cost them will be important in the next little while so that people can start to plan around whether they will be able to get those services or not. Some people will get far better television coverage than they have ever had before, which is a good thing and will give them more opportunities.
So, with Yankalilla, it does appear that the broadcasters have done the right thing and have come on board. I congratulate them for that, because unfortunately the Rudd government has completely ignored the concerns of that area. The Yankalilla Council last year had a public meeting, which I attended with my state colleague Michael Pengelly. An invitation was sent to Senator Conroy; he did not attend. An invitation was sent to all the South Australian Labor senators and none of those people attended. There was a representative from the Digital Switchover Taskforce and she did a sterling job representing the political masters of the government. That is not actually her role, but she did a tremendous job in fulfilling it that night and answering what questions she could. However, the government’s approach shows a complete lack of understanding of regional and rural Australia and its needs when it comes to issues like digital television and the services that people expect in metropolitan areas which should be delivered in regional areas, particularly in areas like Yankalilla, which are not that far away from metropolitan Adelaide.
The second area where we have an ongoing concern is in the Adelaide Hills Council district. It is the Forreston repeater station, which covers Forreston obviously, Cudlee Creek and, more importantly, Gumeracha—in the sense that there are more people in Gumeracha, not that they are more important. That issue is not yet resolved. These places were on the B list which was tabled at the Senate committee I mentioned earlier. It is claimed they will be covered by upgrades to current towers, or gap fillers. However, there is no clarity about this at this point in time.
We are seeking to meet with Free TV and the broadcasters to see whether we can get some clarity about how they think the people in these areas are going to be covered. We are hoping to ensure that they will be covered. The people at Gumeracha are very conscious that they cannot get digital TV right now. They are 20 kilometres away from the Mount Lofty television tower which services the whole of Adelaide but they cannot actually get digital TV from that tower. It just shows the problem with the topography, which is an ongoing issue. However, it makes sense that, if these areas are going to be picked up, they should be picked up now so that communities can be relieved of these concerns and we do not have ongoing uncertainty.
I disagree with the member for Braddon: I think people do have an expectation when they buy these products that the government is telling them to buy—with ads on television, in newspapers and so forth—that they will be able to use them, particularly in a place not that far from a major broadcast tower. So there is a need for that issue to be resolved more quickly.
The member for Casey, the shadow minister, who is doing a very good job on this issue, visited my electorate only two weeks ago. We sat down with the Adelaide Hills Council and local concerned residents and we talked about an action plan to ensure that the government is aware of these problems and an action plan to ensure that we know that the implementation of digital TV for these people will go ahead. We are planning to talk to Free TV with the Adelaide Hills Council and ensure that they are picked up and that these people will be able, sooner rather than later, to get the great benefits that digital TV offers.
Digital TV does offer excellent benefits for consumers. It offers more content and it offers a genuine future for TV going into this century. It was initially the idea of the former government, and it was a good idea. It is a good thing that the Rudd government is implementing it. Unfortunately the implementation is the problem, as it is with so many other programs—the insulation program, the solar panels program, the Deputy Prime Minister’s memorial hall program. The fact that these programs have been implemented so badly that they are costing much more money than initially thought is reflected by the dip in the opinion polls for those on the other side in recent times. Unfortunately we have seen that with the digital TV implementation also.
Again, people in regional and rural Australia are the ones who first miss out, because there is just no understanding of their issues on that side. There are so few on that side who live outside the city confines.
What about me?
Except, of course, the member for Wakefield. I know he also has several digital TV issues in his electorate. I heard his contribution earlier on. He is trying, with a forced smile, to endure what is happening with this issue. I know he is very concerned privately about not getting digital TV in certain parts of his electorate, which is a very beautiful part of South Australia—not quite as nice as the Adelaide Hills, but a nice part of South Australia.
I’ve got better wines!
He does have some areas which have some very high-quality wine. I will agree about that with the member for Wakefield, although in my electorate of course we do have Langhorne Creek and Adelaide Hills wineries.
Government members interjecting—
We are in bipartisan agreement that we have very high-quality red wine in South Australia.
The second reading amendment moved by the member for Casey, the shadow minister, is a very good one and it highlights the issues that are not being addressed by this government. The amendment reads:
… the House:
I think that is ultimately the point here—that this government just cannot implement a program. The Australian people are seeing that day in, day out. That is our greatest concern, and it is a concern that I am sure the Leader of the Opposition will rightly point out in the very highly anticipated address he will make tonight to the Australian people. This government cannot implement a program. It is spending far too much money because it cannot implement programs. It is costing the future generations of our country massively with its debt. This issue highlights that particularly. The digital TV implementation is as bad as the implementation of the insulation program, the Green Loans Program and the solar panels program. It is going to be another one of these issues which unfortunately cost the Australian people too much money, too much in higher taxes. We have seen a great big new tax this week to pay for all these failures.
I commend the second reading amendment moved by the member for Casey. With those few remarks, I will conclude.
You’d love to keep going for another minute. You really would!
If you insist, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will keep going. The failure of program implementation by this government is so vast that I could keep going for longer—long enough surely for Mr Speaker to be ready to hand over to question time. Mr Speaker?
Order! It being approximately 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the member will have leave to continue speaking—if he is so inclined, but I think he is happy—when the debate is resumed.
I inform the House that the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs will be absent from question time today as she is attending the Gregory National Park handover to traditional owners with the Governor-General. The Minister for Housing and the Minister for Status of Women will answer questions on her behalf. Furthermore, the Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Services Delivery will be absent attending the same handover ceremony at Gregory National Park. The Minister for Health and Ageing will answer questions on his behalf.
My question is to the Prime Minister. Does the Prime Minister agree with the reported view of the Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Henry, expressed at a private briefing yesterday that a drop off in mining as a result of the Rudd government’s mining tax is not all bad?
Together with the Treasurer, I come from the great state of Queensland, and we are strongly supportive of the mining industry and its future. I am also advised that Dr Henry has rejected the reports of his comments and believes that the resource superprofits tax will grow the mining sector and the economy. I also say to the Leader of the Opposition that if he looked at the independent modelling provided by the Treasury on the impact of the tax measures that we have proposed he would see that they in fact result in an increase in overall activity in the mining sector. I draw his attention to the impact which the petroleum resource and rent tax has had on offshore investment in Australia in the 25 years since it was introduced. I would further draw his attention to the fact that by bringing in the new taxation concessionary treatment for the exploration industry, along with the impact on smaller miners of taxing profits not volumes, the overall activity in the sector will increase rather than decrease.
The fundamental challenges of economic reform for Australia are boosting the competitiveness globally of our economy for the long term, making sure that we are boosting the competitiveness of our businesses and their tax rates—the same for our small businesses—and the various other reforms that will be funded by a resource superprofits tax.
My question is to the Prime Minister. How is the government reforming the economy to secure Australia’s long-term prosperity?
I thank the honourable member for his question. The government is indeed committed to making major economic reforms to make the economy stronger and to build a fairer future for all Australians. As I travel round the country, what families want is an ability to work harder, save more and give greater opportunities to their kids. On top of that, they want something to look forward to for their retirement. The No. 1 priority which delivers on the above is to make sure that we are building the foundations of a strong economy. The government, through the budget and in actions taken earlier, is doing this in three specific ways. Firstly, we took strong and decisive action to keep Australia from falling into recession during the global financial crisis. Secondly, we took strong action in the budget to bring the budget back to surplus three years early and to bring it back to surplus before any other major advanced economy in the world. Thirdly, we have built a program of reform to set up Australia for the future.
On the question of reform, we must ensure that we are building strong foundations for the future. The Leader of the Opposition just made reference to the Secretary of the Treasury. In his tax review, the Secretary of the Treasury told the Australian people that we face a challenge in terms of the long-term competitiveness of our companies. That goes to the decision that we have taken in response: ensuring that we bring the company tax rate down. In the past, under the previous government we saw the rate remain static, with Australia among the least competitive nations across the OECD. Now it will fall in the centre ground of the OECD.
The Secretary of the Treasury also told us that Australia needed to boost its national savings. In response to that, we have done two things. Firstly, we are cutting the tax on bank savings. Secondly, we are also boosting superannuation for all Australians for decades and decades ahead, lifting the overall pool of national savings. We are also investing in our nation’s future infrastructure, not just through the $22 billion package contained in the statements made by the infrastructure minister on budget day but through building a further $5.6 billion fund over time to build roads, rails and ports and provide the future foundation stones for long-term economic growth.
Twenty-five years ago, when the Hawke Labor government introduced the petroleum resource rent tax, the Australian people and the Australian economy got behind that major reform because it was able to facilitate long-term and decent stability in the taxation system for our offshore resources. Most critically, it provided a fairer share for all Australians. That is what we seek to do with the resources superprofits tax.
Again I go back to the recommendations of the Secretary of the Treasury. He has recommended that what we need to do is to reform the way in which our resources onshore are taxed. He said that we need to replace the patchwork of existing royalties right across the states with a better system. He said that we need to have a system which does better than royalties, which are based on volumes not profits. That means that less profitable mines pay as much in royalties as more profitable mines at present. Furthermore, royalties discourage the development of minerals deposits with larger extraction costs. This is the reason why within the industry we have had such a strong level of support for changing the overall regime. Furthermore, royalties are not flexible enough to adequately share the benefits of the boom. Royalties are based on volumes not profits, and they have not been keeping pace with the mining boom. Bear this in mind: royalties have gone from taking $1 in $3 in mining profits 10 years ago to taking $1 in $7 in mining profits today.
Furthermore, the resources superprofit tax is a better way to share the profits of Australia’s natural resources with all Australians. That is why we, the government, are embarked upon this fundamental reform—because this will enable major infrastructure projects to proceed. It will enable, on top of that, a way to fund the superannuation earnings of Australian workers; a way to fund the future tax cuts for all Australian companies, including small businesses; a way to fund the changes that take place when it comes to taxation simplification proposals for 6.5 million Australians; and a way to fund the new taxation treatment of Australian bank deposits.
This is about not just delivering a reform to the mining industry which independent modelling demonstrates will boost activity, but building a fairer Australia for the future. This reform is good for the economy. This reform is good for the mining industry. It is also good for building the foundations of a fairer Australia for the future, because this government and this party in government believes in building a strong Australia, a secure Australia, a fair Australia—an Australia which will provide a proper future for our children.
My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to a speech last year in which he said that failure to act immediately on climate change represented ‘absolute political cowardice and absolute failure of leadership’. Given that the Prime Minister has junked the government’s signature climate change policy, is he admitting to being a failed leader and a political coward?
I welcome each and every question from the opposition on the question of climate change, because the Deputy Leader of the Opposition just stood up and addressed the parliament and asked this on behalf of the Leader of the Opposition, who has this as his core belief on climate change: that climate change is absolute crap. That is his view: that climate change is absolute crap, to which he has now added the proposition that, in fact, when you look at the history of climate change, the world was hotter in Jesus’ time.
Can I say to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition that, as she asks this question on behalf of the Leader of the Opposition, she also does so on behalf of a party which is now dominated by climate change sceptics. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, through his deputy, that this government looks forward to fighting the next election on climate change, against those opposite. We look forward to fighting it on climate change at the next election because we accept climate change science; those opposite reject climate change science. We, on this side of the House, have ratified Kyoto; those on that side of the House refused to ratify Kyoto. We, on this side of the House, boosted the renewable energy target to 20 per cent; those opposite failed to do so. We, on this side of the House, negotiated an emissions trading scheme in good faith; those opposite, led by the Leader of the Opposition, initially supported it—
Honourable members interjecting—
The member for Mayo and others in the chamber might take a deep breath and just sit quietly. Certainly, I had an expectation that those on my left might want to see the end of the day’s proceedings from within the chamber.
Only 51 per cent!
Order! The Leader of the House is not assisting. The suggestion to take a deep breath was, of course, to the Leader of the House, as it was to everybody, but it is clear that people think that they can run the House from their places by interjecting on everybody in the chamber. That is not allowed under the standing orders and if people really want to try my patience today, they have picked the wrong day.
Here in this parliament we face the extraordinary spectacle of those opposite, having voted down the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, now blaming the Australian government for not passing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. That is the ultimate irony of the proposition which they put. When the member for Wentworth negotiated the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the Leader of the Opposition stood up and said, ‘This country needs a carbon pollution reduction scheme.’ He said that it needed an ETS now, and then he spotted the political opportunity to assassinate the member for Wentworth, and that is what he then proceeded to do. On one occasion they voted it down; on a second occasion they voted against it, and then they did so again.
At Copenhagen, the rest of the world sought to bring about an agreement; here in Australia they barracked in the hope that Copenhagen would fail. The government, notwithstanding the opposition from those opposite, remains committed to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, we intend to get on with the job of ensuring that we can bring about necessary action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there is one thing we cannot change, and that is that this Leader of the Opposition stood up and assassinated his predecessor—
Opposition members interjecting—
Order! The Prime Minister will resume his seat again. Earlier on this week, people on my left asked for the withdrawal of comments that, in a political debate sense, I thought did not require withdrawal. But, if people think that language that would seem strange in the playground, such as ‘coward’ and ‘gutless wonder’, are part of the debate by way of interjection, I am sorry: they are wrong. I think that, given that they are senior members of the opposition, they might have thought about their comments.
This government, on the question of climate change, has confronted two realities. Firstly, those opposite decided to U-turn completely in supporting the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. They voted it down in the Senate and the Greens voted it down in the Senate. The second thing which occurred was that, at the Copenhagen conference, global action on climate change was not as substantial as the rest of the international community had hoped. As a consequence, if the government is re-elected, we will reintroduce the ETS legislation at the end of the current Kyoto commitment period. That is why we would do so, on the basis that global action on climate change is clear.
On that note, I would draw the attention of the opposition and the parliament at large to reports today contained in the American media about the impending content of the American Power Act. The American Power Act also deals with the same question of climate change. It also deals with the question of putting a cap on carbon pollution, making polluters pay and compensating households. I would draw their attention also to the fact that, when it comes to the passage of this bill, the reports contained in the US media today indicate that the measures would become operational from 2013. That is the commencement of the new period subsequent to the Kyoto commitment period. So I draw to the attention of those opposite that the rest of the world is acting on climate change.
The outcome from Copenhagen was not as substantial as those of us who participated in that conference wanted. The government’s ETS legislation has been voted down by those opposite and by the Greens in the Senate. The government remains committed to its greenhouse gas reduction targets. The government remains committed to the principle of an emissions trading scheme as the best way of bringing about greenhouse gas reductions and the cheapest way of doing so.
But my challenge to those opposite, if they have any skerrick of commitment on the question of climate change, is to answer this: how is it that, in the 21st century, you could support this Leader of the Opposition, who says that the world was hotter in Jesus’ time? How could you actually hold to a belief, in defiance of total science around the world, that somehow in the last 2000 years the world has become cooler, not warmer? How could you stand behind a leader who says that the industrial revolution, in effect, did not happen? The core divide between us is that this Leader of the Opposition does not believe in climate change. He has said it is ‘absolute crap’. He has rejected the science and he now tells us that it was hotter in the time of Jesus of Nazareth than it is today. I would say to the Leader of the Opposition: that view is positively weird.
My question is to the Treasurer. I ask: what role is responsible economic management playing in the budget’s return to surplus and why is ongoing fiscal discipline so important?
I thank the member for Longman for his question because this government, through responsible economic management, is bringing the budget back into the black in three years—three years early. This represents the fastest positive turnaround in the budget since the early 1960s. That is because we take responsible economic management very seriously. We took it very seriously last year, when jobs were threatened in this economy. When we created jobs by putting in place the stimulus and worked with small business and the business community, we supported jobs in electorates like Longman. Electorates like Longman are usually the first types of electorate which feel the full steel of a recession, where many people are put out of work when demand falls off a cliff. But, because we supported people in electorates like Longman—we got in there with small business and supported employment—unemployment in this country is now the envy of the developed world.
Of course, supporting jobs is the most fundamental thing a government can do. Putting the framework in place for the long-term is also a fundamental thing we can do to ensure the prosperity of all of our people, to ensure they have job security. We are providing that through our long-term economic frameworks. That is what we have done in the budget delivered this week. Because the economy is recovering, because there is a return to above-trend growth, we have put in place the very strict fiscal rules that we said we would put in place last year when we took the responsible action to support employment and small business in the Australian economy. The benefits of that have been felt right around this country and right around all of the electorates in this House.
It is just a pity that, at that critical stage of our history, those opposite opposed all of those measures, because, as we build on that success and go forward, we are in a far better position than just about any other advanced economy. We are not wading through the rubble of a recession, of prolonged and high unemployment and of massive business closures, like they are in countries in Europe and like they are in the United States, because Australia did something special last year and Australia is doing something very special this year: putting in place our tight fiscal rules, a very big fiscal turnaround through expenditure restraint, through the application of our two per cent rule. That is so important.
So the challenge for the opposition leader tonight, the challenge for the opposition, is to tell the whole of Australia when they will bring the budget back to surplus. When will they bring it back to surplus? And how will they bring it back to surplus? They have already had something like $15.7 billion worth of unfunded promises. How are they going to meet all of those and bring the budget back to surplus, to show the restraint we now need to build on the success of the last year or so? How are they going to do that? This is their day of reckoning.
They come into this House time and time again and oppose essential savings measures, and then somehow pretend to be fiscal conservatives. It would make a cat laugh. These people opposite are just not serious when it comes to economic policy. They are not serious. This is what the shadow Treasurer had to say on Sky News. He was asked: ‘If the Coalition were to win this year’s election, would you have a surplus in 2011-12?’ He said: ‘We would move faster’. Well, we will see how fast they can move tonight. We will see how credible they are tonight. They must outline a fully-funded and fully-costed pathway to surplus. If they do not, they will reveal themselves for what they are: empty vessels and very risky for this country’s future.
My question is, again, to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to the comments of Rio Tinto chief, Tom Albanese, that Rio would not have invested $38 billion in Australia over the past decade if this great new mining tax had been in place. Does the Prime minister stand by the government’s expectation that mining investment will expand 20 per cent in the next two years?
I draw the Leader of the Opposition’s attention to my answer to his first question, concerning the impact of the range of measures contained in the government’s response to the Henry-commissioned report. They go to preferential taxation arrangements now for the exploration industry, a new tax regime for smaller miners in the sense that they are now advantaged by a tax on profits rather than a tax on volume, as well as the overall impact of the decision to bring down the company tax rate. I would draw the Leader of the Opposition’s attention, again, to the independent modelling commissioned by the Treasury through Econtech, which demonstrates that putting these measures together results in an overall increase in the level of mining activity in the economy. It makes that projection at 5.5 per cent over time. It is done by taking all those individual inputs into account.
The second thing I would say to the Leader of the Opposition is that it is inevitable when you seek to bring about a new taxation regime for the mining industry in Australia, and one that involves higher taxes for a number of participants in that industry, they are going to object. They are going to complain, because they are going to be paying more money to the Australian people via the general revenue. For the overall impact on the Australian community, it is important to bear this in mind. What we are doing is ensuring that there is a fair share for the mining industry but, equally, a fair share for the Australian people, who own this resource.
Mr Speaker, a point of order on relevance: the Prime Minister was asked that in light of Tom Albanese’s statements about Rio Tinto not investing $38 billion had there been a mining tax, would he stand by the assumptions in the budget that it would grow by 20 per cent in the next two years?
Honourable members interjecting—
Order! The House will come to order. The Prime Minister is responding to the question. The Prime Minister has the call.
The Leader of the Opposition’s question went to the overall impact of this response to the Henry Review on the future of the mining industry and I responded specifically by pointing his attention to the conclusion of the Econtech modelling and the 5.5 per cent increase in mining activity, which results from that.
My second response to the Leader of the Opposition’s question went to the overall impact of what the government seeks to do through this reform. It is to ensure the Australian people also get a fair share from the resources—which, ultimately, they the Australian people own; a fairer share in terms of better superannuation for all working Australians; a fairer share in terms of bringing down the tax rate, including special tax breaks for our small businesses; and, furthermore, ensuring that we use those resources to invest in our country’s future infrastructure needs, in the road, the rail and the port which, everywhere across the country, we hear representations about.
I conclude my response to the Leader of the Opposition in these terms. I understand that yesterday the Leader of the Opposition suggested in question time that the Australian gas company Santos was not proceeding with a $15 billion LNG project in Gladstone because of the resources superprofits tax. I also draw the House’s attention to what the CEO of Santos, Mr Knox, has said. He said, ‘There are all sorts of factors. Obviously, the uncertainty of the supertax is something we are going to have to manage,’ that is true, ‘but I would not directly attribute it to that.’ For transparency and clarity in the debate, if the Leader of the Opposition is going to report the comments of various mining executives around the country, he should do so with accuracy. This is an important debate for the future.
I would also draw people’s attention to what happened in our national debate in the mid-eighties, when we brought in the petroleum resource rent tax. Everyone at that stage predicted doom and gloom and the collapse of the entire offshore mining industry. It did not happen. It has produced, instead, one of the most vibrant exploration and production platforms that we have seen in the Australian resources sector in the last quarter of a century, including our largest resources project, the Gorgon Project—also under a tax at 40 per cent, I would note.
I draw the attention of those opposite to the fact that, when it comes to superprofits from the resource industry, 60 per cent of those superprofits are retained by the companies concerned. I think it is important that we have some balance in this debate as the government seeks, responsibly, to negotiate the detail, the implementation and the transition of this proposed set of new arrangements with the mining industry. This is, however, part of a broader reform for the industry at large and for the general economy.
My question is to the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. Why is it important that there is bipartisan support for the government’s strict fiscal rules and for returning the budget to surplus by 2012-13?
I thank the member for Franklin for her question. It is very important that we have bipartisan support for the government’s strict fiscal rules and indeed for the government’s commitment to get the budget back into surplus by 2012-13. Tonight, we will get some indication of whether or not we do have bipartisan support for those commitments. Tonight is the big test for the Leader of the Opposition. Is he going to put his money where his mouth is? This morning I released a chart, which shows the track record so far. The red is where the existing unfunded commitments of the opposition would take the budget deficit and would keep it in deficit in the two years when it is projected to be in surplus by the government.
I have also released a table which outlines the specific commitments—the actual promises—made by the opposition over that period, which total $15.7 billion and have not been funded. There is no provision made for these promises in their projections thus far. The net effect of these promises would be to move the 2012-13 budget, currently projected to be in surplus to the tune of $1 billion, to a deficit of $4.4 billion and to move the 2013-14 budget, currently projected to be in surplus to the tune of $5.4 billion, to a $450 million deficit. That is before we even get to the very salient question of how the opposition is going to deal with the government’s tax package, where they are clearly indicating that they are going to oppose the resource superprofits tax that delivers $12 billion to the forward estimates. But what are they going to do with respect to the actual things that it is dedicated to funding, such as the 28 per cent company tax, the improvements in tax for small business, the improvements in tax for the mining sector and the improvements in infrastructure for resource sector states? If they try to have a bob each way, as they typically do, then they are going to have to fund those things as well. So on top of the $15.7 billion black hole that is already there, there will be billions upon billions of dollars in extra commitments that they will have to fund.
The outcome of their position thus far is that there would be no surpluses over the four years of the forward estimates. The deficit would be bigger in every year and it would take longer for the Australian government to pay off its debt. So there are four key tests that the Leader of the Opposition has to meet tonight. First, he has to explain where that $15.7 billion for past promises is coming from, let alone any that he chooses to make in his budget reply speech tonight. Second, if the opposition is proposing to oppose the resource superprofits tax, will they also oppose the cuts in business taxes, the cuts in small business taxes, the investment in infrastructure and the investment in superannuation through reduced taxes that that is funding? If they will not oppose those things, how do they propose to fund their commitment? Third, will they commit to matching all of the government’s budget rules, including the extension of the two per cent spending cap to the point where the budget is in surplus to the tune of one per cent of GDP? Finally, will they guarantee that the 2012-13 and 2013-14 financial year budgets will be in surplus, notwithstanding the commitments that they choose to make prior to the election?
Just today, the new and latest shadow finance minister—he is number five for this term of parliament—stated at the doors:
A Coalition government would, under any circumstances, bring the budget back into surplus well before a Labor government could.
He already has $15.7 billion to find, and his leader has not even delivered his budget reply speech. We have not had a response to the government’s tax package, and he is promising he will have a surplus before the government is projecting it. But the facts, of course, tell a very different story.
The amazing thing is that my words, literally as I was speaking them, were going out of date. I got back to the office and finally got around to reading today’s Age, where I discovered that the opposition is proposing to block one of the government’s saving measures, a modest cut in the childcare tax rebate of about $80 million over four years. They are proposing to block that as well, so the $15.7 billion black hole just keeps mounting. It is like a meter that keeps ticking over. Amusingly enough, this article had next to it another article, and it seems that the opposition are not unique in their inconsistency, because this article from the Age attacking the government for being too harsh in this spending cut was juxtaposed against another article, an opinion piece masquerading as a news story, attacking the government for not cutting enough in the budget. So inconsistency on these issues is not unique to the opposition.
Tonight is ‘put up or shut up’ time for the Leader of the Opposition. The debt and deficit campaign is dead. Is he going to give it a decent funeral and a decent burial? Tonight we find out whether the Leader of the Opposition can be trusted with the nation’s finances or whether our view, that he is a giant risk to the Australian economy and a giant risk to the nation’s finances, will be dramatically confirmed.
My question is to the Treasurer. I refer the Treasurer to his speech on 4 May 2010 in which he said:
… the most significant ‘spend’ in the entire tax package is over $8 billion every year in State government royalties that will be refunded or credited to mining companies.
If the Treasurer is budgeting $9 billion a year from his tax and he is spending $8 billion every year, in his words, on refunds and credits, exactly how much in gross terms and at its peak is the Treasurer expecting to collect each year from his new mining tax?
I would just make the point that the revenue figures take into account the rebating of the royalties. It is obvious to everyone except the member opposite.
What is the number?
I am not going into all the details of the funding of it. You have the net revenue. It is there for all to see. It is there for the shadow Treasurer to see. The royalties are rebated—
Order! The Treasurer will resume his seat. Has the Treasurer concluded?
Yes.
Then I will call the member for Deakin.
My question is to the Minister for Human Services and Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law. How will the resources superprofits tax help to grow our national savings and retirement incomes? What impact would blocking this reform have on Australians who are looking to save for retirement? Are there any other threats to Australia’s retirement savings?
I thank the member for his question and his long interest in the retirement incomes of Australians. The government believes that Australians who save should be supported. Australians who take the initiative to put money aside should be encouraged, because we believe that saving is good for the individual and good for the nation.
We have backed that belief with action to provide tax relief for people who save through bank accounts, credit unions, building societies, bonds, annuities and other savings vehicles, action to support low-income earners by effectively giving them back their contributions tax on superannuation, action to help people over 50 who want to put a little bit of extra money aside for their retirement, and action to increase the retirement incomes of Australians by increasing the superannuation guarantee.
The costs to the government of these actions are funded by the Resource Super Profits Tax. The budget papers make it clear that the cost of our tax concessions for savers is $950 million over the next four years, a cost funded by the Resource Super Profits Tax. The budget papers make it clear that the cost of refunding the contributions tax to low-income earners is $830 million over the next four years, funded by the Resource Super Profits Tax. The cost of our measures to help people over 50 save is $1.3 billion over the next four years, funded by the Resource Super Profits Tax. This is a key point: the budget papers also make it clear—the shadow Treasurer either did not read them or did not understand them—that the cost to the government of increasing the superannuation guarantee reaches $3.6 billion a year when the superannuation guarantee hits 12 per cent, funded by the Resource Super Profits Tax.
I am asked by the member for Deakin what the impact would be of blocking the Resource Super Profits Tax. I am happy to answer that question, but it is also a question that the Leader of the Opposition might care to answer this evening. He might care to explain, for example, to a 30-year-old on average weekly earnings why he wants to deny them an increase in their retirement income of $108,000. He might care to explain to a 30-year-old woman on average weekly earnings who has two periods of maternity leave and works for a while part-time why he wants to deny her $78,000 from her retirement lump sum. And he might want to explain to somebody over 50 nearing retirement who, now that the kids are off their hands and maybe they have paid off their mortgage, wants to put a little bit extra aside for their retirement. Maybe that is a woman who has missed out on some time at work because she has raised children. He might want to explain to them why he wants to deny them help to boost their superannuation.
While the Leader of the Opposition is on his feet tonight, he might also want to explain his plan for retirement incomes. I shared with the House earlier the Leader of the Opposition’s plan as outlined in his manifesto for the prime ministership, Battlelines. This is his plan to tax people on their superannuation at their marginal tax rate. What would this mean for Australians? The Leader of the Opposition might want to expand on it tonight, but I am happy to provide the House with some information. It would mean, for example, that a 30-year-old who under the current arrangements would retire with a lump sum of $456,000 would, under the Abbott plan, retire with $245,000. The Leader of the Opposition might want to explain why he wants to take $212,000 from an average worker today aged 30 on average weekly earnings.
The Abbott plan would also mean less take-home pay—less pay in the wallets of Australians on a weekly basis. It would mean $1,900 a year less for somebody on average weekly earnings, which is $36 a week less. Well done, Tony! That is his plan, as outlined in his manifesto.
Order! The minister will refer to members by their titles. The member for Mackellar on a point of order.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would refer you to page 553 of the Practice and I would ask with regard to relevance that the minister be ruled out of order. The Practice states:
… a Minister ‘should not engage in irrelevances’, such as contrasting the Government and Opposition …
I would ask you to ask him to sit down or else answer the question as it was asked.
Order! Page 553 goes on to say:
On other occasions such comments have been permitted …
Mrs Bronwyn Bishop interjecting
I understand the submission being put to me by the member for Mackellar, but I was illustrating that this is not an exact science. I would hate to give the lecture about the Procedure Committee again, but my concern is that this is in the area where debate is allowed in the answers which is ruled out in the questions. That is how the standing orders and practice stand at the moment, until the House decides otherwise. The minister is responding to the question and I am sure that he is coming to a finale.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. To be fair to the Leader of the Opposition, maybe he did not know this was the impact of the Abbott plan when he wrote it in Battlelines. Maybe he did not think it through, because we all know who does not understand economics. That is why one of his former cabinet colleagues told the Weekend Australian:
It always drove us crazy that he is not financially minded. He’d get an idea, which was always big and grand, and he tended to ignore everyone’s objections …
Tonight he has a chance to correct his errors and actually back superannuation for Australians. But I have a feeling that at eight o’clock tonight it will be clear that, when it comes to governments and superannuation, Labor is not the best friend superannuation has ever had; Labor is the only friend superannuation has ever had.
My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to the comments of Mick Davis, the Chief Executive Officer of Xstrata, who said in reference to his Australian operations:
We have generated total revenues of $44 billion. We have paid expenses of $22 billion, incurred taxes of $5 billion and invested $18 billion over that time. This has required us—
Xstrata—
to inject a further net $1 billion into Australia from cash generated in other regions.
In other words, there has been no leakage of profits from Australia—rather the other way round …
Given that the Prime Minister has said that profits from mining have disappeared ‘out the back door and overseas’, does he have the courage to admit that he is wrong, or is he suggesting that Mr Davis is not telling the truth?
I would draw the member for Groom’s attention to the reasons for the government embracing a resources superprofits tax. Firstly, within the mining industry itself, it seeks to reform the way in which this is done—a tax on volume is what underpins the existing royalties regime. We will replace that with a tax on profits because we want to expand the industry over time. Secondly, by bringing the other tax changes into the mining industry we are also expanding the base of the industry by encouraging smaller mining companies to get into their operations earlier and not be slugged with a tax on volumes up front. Furthermore, this also provides stability for the taxation regime long term, as the PRRT regime did 25 years ago.
Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order going to relevance. The question is: does the Prime Minister admit that he is wrong about profits going out the back door and overseas, or is Mr Davis a liar?
There was a long preamble question first.
An opposition member interjecting—
Preamble, quote—there were a lot of words before the last bit. And as I have said before, while those that think that there is a specific way in which questions should be asked, whether they think that it is yes or no, or tick box A or tick box B, that has not been the way in which this place has worked in the past. The Prime Minister is responding to the question; the Prime Minister has the call.
I would also remind the member for Groom of one core fact: 10 years ago, for every dollar which was collected in mining royalties across Australia, $3 went in mining profits. Ten years later, for every dollar collected in mining royalties, now $7 goes in profits.
I simply draw the attention of those opposite to the fact that what we are seeking to do through this reform is two things: providing a fair return for the mining industry on the one hand, but a fair return for all Australians on the other. That is a fair return for those who legitimately expect decent retirement income through better super for workers—people who also expect a better return when it comes to bringing down the tax rates currently being imposed on all Australian businesses, including 2.4 million small businesses. And, thirdly, making it possible for our economy to grow by building the infrastructure Australia needs for the 21st century. That is the underpinning rationale for what we are doing and, in terms of the particular comments from a representative of a particular company which the member for Groom reflects on, I would say to him again: in a debate where we the government are seeking to tax big mining companies more, they are going to object to it and they are going to complain about it and there is going to be a lot of noise about it. That is inevitable. Our responsibility is to make sure these reforms work for the long-term national interest, boost the competitiveness of our companies overall, boost our infrastructure, boost our pool of national savings. We the government intend to get on with the task.
My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. Minister. How is the government’s transport and community infrastructure investment being received in the parliament and the electorate? Are there any other proposals for government investment?
I thank the member for Werriwa for his question and indeed for his consistent and ongoing interest in infrastructure development, both for the nation and for the south-west suburbs of Sydney. Some great progress is indeed being made on the F5 upgrade. The section between St Andrews Road and Raby Road is running some six months ahead of schedule and it is running on budget. The member for Werriwa has always voted for the Nation Building Program, as well as always supporting the community infrastructure measures that the government has put in place, including the $8 million that the government committed to upgrade Campbelltown stadium, which was completed in time for the West Tigers’ first home game of this year. But those opposite are not quite as consistent.
We know that the member for Werriwa supports the resources rent tax. We know that he supports the $5 billion in infrastructure that will come as a result of that. And those opposite? We are not quite sure. We are not sure whether they support the increase in nine per cent to 12 per cent in superannuation. We are not sure whether they support the cut in company tax because they have one message here and another in their electorates. In here they say they are concerned about debt and deficit, but right around the country they are in their electorates—particularly in the areas of my portfolio—making massive multi-billion-dollar commitments—unfunded, uncosted, just making those commitments out there. They are trying to con the electorate.
Which ones are they?
I am asked who made the commitment. I have had four shadow infrastructure ministers so far—not quite the same number as shadow finance ministers—and some of you might remember who the third shadow infrastructure minister was, even though there were no speeches, no questions in the parliament and just one media release, but there was one commitment. And to give the member for Groom credit, he made it on day 1. He peaked early. On day 1 in his own electorate he committed $1.75 billion for the Toowoomba bypass—day 1, in his electorate. So what we want to see tonight in the Leader of the Opposition’s budget response is this. Will the $1.75 billion be there, or will he dump it just like he dumped the deal that was done by the member for Groom on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme? We will see that tonight. They had 12 years to act and did nothing about it, but on day 1 made a $1.75 billion commitment. There was of course a $6 billion commitment two weeks ago from the Leader of the National Party, but we might hear some more about that on another day. I am sure that will be there tonight as well.
We do have some more creative coalition members across there—those who say one thing in the parliament and another in their electorate. They vote against projects here, but they are champions of them and claim victory when they go back to their electorate. There is no-one better at that than the member for Gippsland. There is a wealth of material on the member for Gippsland. Here he is in his newsletter: ‘Princes Highway duplication gets started’. I wonder where the funding for that came from? The Nation Building Program that he voted against and that was brought forward as part of the economic stimulus plan that he voted against. So there he is, out there saying how terrific it is. But it does not have to be the big projects; it can be the smaller ones as well. He also voted against the community infrastructure part of the economic stimulus plan, but here he is, under the heading ‘$7 million boost for sport’:
Darren Chester discusses the benefits of the new sports complex with Joan Foot, Sale Netball Association and Johnny Paraskevas, Construction Manager …
So we are creating jobs in his electorate under the program that he voted against. But there is more from the member for Gippsland. He has been out there promising extensions to the Princes Highway. There is not a day goes past that this bloke does not spend a million bucks. Not a day goes past—but we will see it all there in the opposition leader’s response tonight.
When it comes to waste, of course there is one program that comes to mind—the regional rorts program. We all recall it. We recall the Gunnedah ethanol plant that did not exist; we recall the train line that burned down; we recall the dog food—who could forget the dog food and the two-headed dog; and of course we recall the cheese factory in the electorate of Indi—the cheese factory that got $22,000 of taxpayers’ money paid to it on 28 June 2007. There was only one problem—it had shut its doors in March 2007. You would think the member for Indi would know that this was a dodgy program and that now instead of paying for-profit organisations—
Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The minister seems to have omitted the fact that that project was endorsed by the state Labor government—his mates.
The honourable member for Indi knows that that is not a point of order.
The member for Indi has never seen a trough she didn’t like. You would think that she would have learned—
Mr Speaker, on a point of order: the opposition finds that personal aside against the member for Indi insulting and we would ask that he withdraw.
I did not hear it but I saw the reaction. Based on the reaction of those I could see, it would suit the conveniences of the House if the minister were to withdraw.
I withdraw, Mr Speaker. The member for Indi I think would know exactly what this program was about and why it is known as the regional rorts program. You would think, leading up to the Leader of the Opposition’s speech tonight about fiscal responsibility and about how responsible they are going to be and how they are going to cut back that deficit and debt, that the last thing they would do is what the member for Indi did this week on ABC radio when she said, and I am not making this up, that she would like to see ‘some sort of re-establishment of the regional partnership program’. You are kidding!
Mr Speaker, on a point of order—
The minister will resume his seat. I indicate to the member for Mackellar that that is it; the minister has resumed his seat, either voluntarily or as he was going to be asked to sit down. It is nothing necessarily to do with the member for Mackellar coming to the dispatch box!
My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer confirm that all of the spending announcements associated with the government’s great big new mining tax are a growing recurrent cost to the budget? Given that the Treasurer will spin every dollar of the new mining tax, what happens to the budget if the tax does not raise the $12 billion in the budget?
We have made it very clear that if the tax is not passed and if the revenue is not there, we cannot proceed with the measures that we have outlined. We are confident the tax will raise the $12 billion and we can proceed with the measures that those opposite—
Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order on relevance. The question was what will happen if the tax does not raise $12 billion.
The Treasurer is 15 seconds into his answer.
He is being coached. Davis Cup rules don’t apply here.
Order! If people perhaps listened and did not interject they would get the full 15-seconds worth. The Treasurer has the call.
I have made it very clear that every cent of the $12 billion raised from this tax over the forward estimates will be spent on the very important initiatives that the finance minister and other ministers were talking about before. Now I have the hypothetical question, ‘Well what if it doesn’t raise the $12 billion?’ We are confident that it will. We are confident that this is a very fair tax, and we are going to invest the proceeds in economic reform.
What those opposite are so embarrassed about is that we are up to the challenge of putting incentive in the tax system, cutting the corporate rate, giving a $5,000 instant write-off for small businesses and boosting superannuation in this country. They are acutely embarrassed that their negative position in this House, because they do not want to see Australians get a fair share of their mineral resources, is going to result in the fact that tax cuts will not go to small businesses or that other investment in infrastructure will not happen or that the corporate rate will not be cut. There is going to be a very high price paid by the opposition for them refusing to pass these very important initiatives which go to the heart of the economic reform challenge we face as a nation.
My question is to the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy. How will small business and independent contractors benefit from the government’s tax breaks for small business? Are there any threats to these reforms?
Are there any threats! I thank the member for Parramatta for her question and acknowledge that the member for Parramatta ran a successful small business and we will be meeting with the Parramatta Chamber of Commerce to discuss small-business issues in the local area in the very near future. The government supported Australia’s small businesses and our tradies during the global economic recession and we will support them again during the economic recovery. The instant write-off of assets valued at up to $5,000 will allow small businesses and tradies to immediately write off the full value of equipment and tools, like laptop computers, office equipment, welding equipment, ride-on lawnmowers, Makita table saws, Gentech electric generators, display cabinets for retailers, coffee-making machines for cafes, double-door fridges and industrial dishwashers for restaurants and, I am advised, 300-millimetre Birko meat slicers—that reminds me of the opposition leader, really. The instant write-off measures will improve cash flow and profitability for Australia’s 2.4 million small businesses and our tradies. Australia’s 720,000 small-business companies will benefit from an early start in the reduction in the company tax rate from 30c to 28c. That will start for small businesses on 1 July 2012.
I was asked by the member for Parramatta whether there are any threats to these wonderful initiatives, to these tax breaks for small businesses. I have to report that there are threats in the form of the Leader of the Opposition. The small-business tax benefits are to be funded by the resource superprofits tax, but the Leader of the Opposition has said that he will attempt to use the coalition numbers in the Senate to block the passage of the resource superprofits tax. Of course, if the opposition leader succeeds in his attempts to block the resource superprofits tax, he will deny a tax break to every small business in this country. What has the coalition got against small business when we supported them through the economic downturn? Those opposite opposed the stimulus and opposed the support that we provided during the economic downturn, and when we want to give small business some credit for the way they managed the economic downturn and give them a tax break to invest in productive assets during the economic recovery, what does the opposition leader say? ‘No—deny them those benefits.’ He will do everything he possibly can to achieve that outcome by blocking the resource superprofits tax.
The opposition leader must explain tonight, in his budget reply, why he would abandon small businesses and tradies. He must detail his spending cuts and explain his treachery to Australia’s tradies and small businesses. This is a man who supports the New Zealand model of economic recession by telling Australian small businesses that a good old-fashioned recession will be great for them—a little bit of discipline, a little bit of leanness and a little bit of meanness in the tough world out there in the marketplace. This is what this right-wing extremist describes as tough love. The right-wing extremist sitting opposite describes this as tough love. My advice to small business is this: watch out if the opposition leader tries to embrace you with his tough love, because he will squeeze the life out of you and expect you to thank him for it in the morning.
I have drafted some words for the opposition leader’s budget reply speech tonight that he might find useful. I offer them in a spirit of generosity. He should say: ‘Tonight I will explain why I intend to deny a much deserved tax break to every small business and tradie in Australia.’ Mr Speaker, as you know, as I know and as everyone here knows, the Rudd government is the best friend small business has ever had.
My question is to the Treasurer. Can the Treasurer confirm that his supertax on resource profits will also apply to quarrying for sand and gravel and to mining limestone for cement production? Why wouldn’t an Australian cement production company simply move to China or Indonesia, neither of which is proposing a great big new tax on mining?
Those companies that are involved in those activities are welcome to talk to the Treasury through our consultation process. I have no intention in this House today of defining or setting the boundaries for that.
Mr Laming interjecting
I remind the member for Bowman, given the prominent seat that he is in, that he might wish to be here towards the end of today’s proceedings.
My question is to the Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister for Social Inclusion. Would the minister update the House on today’s labour force figures and the importance of and the recognition of investments the government is making to support jobs?
I thank the member for Corangamite for his question. Earlier today I was at the Canberra Institute of Technology meeting with some apprentices and with Parliamentary Secretary Jason Clare was trying my hand at some trade skills. Needless to say I was not very good at the welding; Parliamentary Secretary Jason Clare was far better at it. But apart from trying our hand at trade skills, we were there to look at the great facilities and the new equipment that have been funded through the government’s Better TAFE Facilities program as part of our nation-building infrastructure package. Of course, this investment is part of what has kept 200,000 Australians in work during these days of the global recession and these difficult economic times.
Earlier today as well the labour force figures for the month of April were released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and they show that the unemployment rate has remained steady at 5.4 per cent. In April employment increased by 33,700 to just over 11 million Australians employed. We have got to look at this result in the context of what this nation has achieved during the global financial crisis and global recession. Let us remember that our Treasury predicted when this started that unemployment would reach 8½ per cent. Today’s figures confirm the benefits of economic stimulus and the benefits of the nation working together to keep people employed during this economic challenge. And we should note that Australia has created 225,000 jobs in a period of time when nations around the world were shedding employment. The recent budget has updated our unemployment forecast. We expect unemployment to continue to fall and to be at 4¾ per cent by the June quarter of 2012.
This does mean that economic stimulus has been supporting jobs, and I am asked about recognition of the investments for economic stimulus and the good that they have done. I am pleased that I can advise the House that I received a letter from Abbotsleigh, from a school, about their Building the Education Revolution program. The letter from Judith Poole, the headmistress, reads as follows:
Thank you for your recent letter regarding the opening ceremony for the new Junior School infants wing and early learning centre last weekend. The chairman was delighted to read out your good wishes to the 1,100-strong crowd as part of the official ceremony. Please find enclosed a copy of the official program and photos of the plaque and unveiling. The weather was kind to us and we have received glowing reports from all that visit the Junior School on the high standard of facilities that government funding has enabled us to provide our local community.
I thought that was a wonderful letter, a fantastic letter of recognition, and with some excitement I went to look at the photograph of the unveiling of the plaque. I thought, ‘That’s fantastic. I’m so sorry I could not be there but let’s have a look at the moment when the plaque was unveiled.’ What did I find? I found a photo, and who would you believe is on it? It is none other than the member for Bradfield—so famous for opposing Building the Education Revolution in this House that he actually got thrown out of the parliament because he was so opposed to Building the Education Revolution. There he is standing next to the unveiling of the plaque.
The Deputy Prime Minister has made her point with the photo.
I am full of a spirit of goodwill towards the member for Bradfield, so I thought to myself, ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have gone to an opening ceremony for a program he opposed. I’m sure he wouldn’t have stood next to a plaque for a program that he did not vote for, that he did not want one dollar spent on, that he did not want one job created with. Obviously what has happened is that he just happened to be passing by and somehow someone has grabbed him and roped him into the photo.’ I did not think the member for Bradfield would be exhibiting this kind of hypocrisy in his local electorate.
Anyway, I kept looking at the things that I had been sent by Abbotsleigh and they had also sent me the program for the opening ceremony. So I had a good look at that and it was full of all sorts of interesting things. There was a balloon release and a school song, and people got to view the new spaces. I thought that was pretty good. But I was disappointed to see who the opening address of the Evelyn Forster Wing junior school resource centre and early learning centre was being given by—it was the member for Bradfield. What this does not tell me, and unfortunately I have not been sent a full tape recording of the event, is whether or not the member for Bradfield used the opportunity of his opening address to advise the audience of 1,100 people that he voted against every dollar in the program, he voted against every job and if the parliament had followed his lead then this project would never have come to fruition.
Honourable members interjecting—
Order!
Hypocrisy on this scale is one thing, but there is another moment later on today when we have got to end some hypocrisy from the opposition. The Leader of the Opposition seems to still be desperately typing his address for later today. Well, he will be viewed as the same kind of hypocrite as the member for Bradfield unless in that address he names, school by school, every school they are going to cut when they cut the Building the Education Revolution program. We look forward to it.
My question is to the Treasurer. I refer the Treasurer to the fact that small capital mining companies are considered to be one of the riskiest investments. Treasurer, how much has the government allocated in the budget for expected mining losses associated with its great big new mining tax? Are the losses capped or will Australian taxpayers be liable for whatever losses are incurred?
I thank the member for her question. She asked me a question about the proposed design of the Resource Super Profits Tax and the funding thereof. We have had a series of questions about this from the shadow Treasurer, and I have said that we have put the net revenue figures in the budget. What was taken into account in those net revenue figures is the proposed design that has been put forward by the Treasury. They have done all the work on that.
Mr Speaker, a point of order on relevance: the member for McPherson asked a very specific question. If the Treasurer does not know the answer he should just sit down.
Again, the member for Sturt approached with a point of order and then had an addendum. I will ignore the addendum, but again I warn him about using the opportunity to come to the dispatch box to enter into debate. On his point of order, the Treasurer is responding to the question.
This is a resource rent tax and it has two features which are not understood by those opposite, so I will just go through them. They are different from the PRRT. Those two features are transferability and refundability. The member has asked me a question about the modelling of the revenue that the Treasury has done and how much of that may take into account the tax credits that are given to companies for their investments. She has asked me about that and she knows very well that there is no way anybody could give an answer to that question—nobody could.
My question is to the Minister for Housing and the Minister for the Status of Women. How does the budget help to boost the lifelong economic security of Australian women?
I thank the member for Hasluck. She has a very good history of standing up for the men and women in her electorate and also a very good history of standing up in this parliament for important issues like pay equity, so it is very appropriate that she should ask this question. The Rudd government has committed to practical action to improve equality between men and women. One ongoing issue is the inequality in earnings between men and women and the lifelong effect that has, as women are less able to save for their retirement than men. Women’s work patterns differ from men’s in most cases, especially for the 80 per cent of Australian women who have kids. We know that it is usually mothers who have broken working patterns while caring for children and often other relatives as well. Australian men are in paid work for an average of 39 years, while women generally average 20 years in the paid workforce.
New initiatives in the budget are part of our ongoing efforts to improve economic security across the lives of Australian women. The government’s superannuation reforms in Stronger, Fairer, Simpler: a tax plan for our future will deliver substantial improvements in women’s superannuation retirement savings. Increasing the superannuation guarantee to 12 per cent by 2020 is a big win for Australian women. It will mean more superannuation savings for women and will boost their lifelong economic security.
We are also improving equity for low-income earners by in effect refunding contributions for those on marginal tax rates of 15 per cent or below. In 2012-13, around 2.1 million women will be eligible for the up to $500 low-income earner superannuation rebate. That is 60 per cent of all the recipients of the rebate. We are also helping over-50s top up their super. We know that a lot of women have that broken working pattern but that when their kids are older they are able to return to the workforce, are able to concentrate on paying off family debts and are able to focus on putting extra money into their super. We have allowed over-50s to top up their super balances when they are most able to do so by keeping their $50,000 concessional contributions tax.
Because of these reforms, a woman who is now aged 30, who is likely to have two kids and maybe some part-time work with some time out of the workforce—a pretty typical pattern for many Australian women—will be $78,000 better off on retirement. That is a very significant boost, and it comes on top of last year’s budget commitment to paid parental leave—a fully costed, fully funded scheme, not a $3 billion a year new tax on business despite a promise to not introduce new taxes on business. It comes on top of the IR changes that protect the most vulnerable workers, many of whom are women, and it comes on top of the pension reforms from last year. We know that the majority of single pensioners are women—72 per cent of single pensioners. Because of Labor’s changes, those people are $100 a fortnight better off. This is an ongoing program of building better economic security for Australian women across their lives—their working lives and their retirement. These super changes in particular will be super for those women.
My question is to the Treasurer. Can the Treasurer advise the House how much the price of fertiliser will increase as a result of his great big new tax on the mining of phosphate? It is not a laughing matter either.
This is the fear campaign in full swing. We have seen it on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, we have seen it on industrial relations and now we are seeing it on a tax which has been designed in consultation with industry. We have not seen the final output of all of that. We have put forward a framework for a 40 per cent resource rent tax—and what are they doing? They are running a fear campaign.
What we are doing is the responsible thing. We are sitting down and having a discussion with the mining industry. We have done modelling. The independent modelling has been published. The growth figures for that have been published. Yet somehow this man here expects that he can be credible by asking in here what the impact will be in two years time on fertiliser. I will be happy to answer all those questions when we have been through our consultation process, when we have finalised all of the detail with industry.
We are happy to debate this tax. I will tell you why: because everybody over there is happy to see the Australian people not get the full value for their mining resources. As the Prime Minister was saying before, at the beginning of this decade there was $1 in royalties for every $3 of mining profits. Now it is one in seven. That is an enormous loss to the Australian people. We are sitting down in good faith, putting forward a responsible proposal that will give the Australian people fair value that we can invest in superannuation, that we can use to cut the company tax.
Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order.
The Treasurer will resume his seat.
But what we are getting here is yet—
The Treasurer will resume his seat! Has the Treasurer concluded?
Yes.
I’d have a glass of water if I were you.
The member for Sturt will be able to have a cup of tea if he continues.
Honourable member interjecting—
If that is the case, he should be very careful.
My question is to the Attorney-General. What steps is the government taking as part of the budget to improve access to justice in the community?
I thank the honourable member for Fremantle for her question and acknowledge her vigorous advocacy in this area. I am pleased to advise the House that the government will invest an additional $154 million over four years in legal assistance programs to improve access to justice. This is the largest and most significant injection of new funds into the legal assistance sector for well over a decade. The investment will play a key role in ensuring disadvantaged Australians have the means to resolve their disputes early, before they escalate and before they become entrenched.
The additional funding will be provided from 1 July this year and it will include an additional $92.3 million over four years for legal aid, $34.9 million for Indigenous legal services and $26.8 million for community legal services programs. That is additional funding. It builds on the additional one-off funding totalling $70 million that has been provided to the sector over the past three years. It takes the Commonwealth’s total funding for legal assistance services to over $1.2 billion and will give the sector greater certainty for their own planning over the next four years.
The package will make a real difference. It will support legal aid commissions in their vital work of providing legal and mediation services for disadvantaged Australians. The new funding will also underpin the national partnership agreement that is currently being negotiated with the states and territories for the ongoing legal aid arrangements. It is anticipated that the new arrangements will include a number of innovations, including focusing on early intervention and education and providing for greater flexibility, including using Commonwealth funds for state related family violence and child protection related matters.
The investment in legal aid will also increase the availability of assistance in a number of important areas, including in respect of veterans’ entitlements, consumer credit and debt, and certain civil law matters. Importantly, additional resources will also be available for outreach work to rural and regional Australia, including the rapidly growing regions of Australia.
The program will also include an investment of $34.9 million in Indigenous legal services. That will also make a real practical difference, through enhanced legal advice, duty lawyer programs and casework services in the civil, criminal and family law areas. Importantly, Indigenous women and children who are victims of domestic violence will also have greater access to assistance through the Family Violence Prevention Legal Services program. The investment is entirely consistent with the government’s policy to close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage.
Finally, the government’s additional $26 million investment in community legal centres will focus on supporting those experiencing family violence and homelessness. Communities in rural, regional and remote areas will benefit significantly from the package. Those members who are lucky enough to have a community legal service in their electorate will know the tremendous job they do and the value-add that they contribute with the volunteers that they enlist to assist those who are disadvantaged. These resources will provide a tremendous and well-deserved boost to their resources, I am sure all members will agree.
In conclusion, all the evidence indicates that education and assistance provided early in someone’s confronting the legal system avoids problems and additional expenses downstream. The $154 million investment, along with the $70 million the government has already injected into the sector over the last three years, demonstrates the government’s real commitment to achieving an accessible justice system, which is necessary to underpin a fair and inclusive society.
My question is to the Treasurer. I refer to the Treasurer’s comments reported today that his new tax on LPG had already been incorporated in the forward estimates. Can the Treasurer advise the House where in the forward estimates in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 budget papers this new tax appears?
I welcome this question. I had a question yesterday from the shadow minister and Leader of the National Party about this. These were measures that were originally announced in the 2003 budget. They were announced by those opposite when the member over there was a minister in the Howard government. They were supposed to commence on 1 July 2008. This was an initiative of the coalition government.
Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. You have often admonished the opposition for not asking specific enough questions. This question could not have been more specific. It actually asked where in the budget papers these forecasts can be found. Given his statement today—
The member for Sturt has made his point his point of order. He will resume his seat. I am listening carefully to the Treasurer. The Treasurer is responding to the question. I invite members to listen to the Treasurer’s response.
They were originally supposed to apply from 1 July 2008. They were announced in the coalition budget of 2003. That is the first thing that happened—and it happened when the member opposite was a minister in that government. And he had the hide to get up and ask a question yesterday as if this was an initiative that had been put forward by this Labor government. It was not. The former Howard government subsequently deferred this until 1 July 2011 in the 2004 budget. Those changes have been an ongoing feature of government budget estimates ever since that time. I cannot believe that we are getting this question today from that frontbencher over there after the bungle yesterday.
The industry has been aware of all of this since that time. This was an initiative that was agreed with industry at that time. The agreement was that the taxation arrangements would be gradually phased in over four years—a feature of budgets since the time that they were in government. And they have the hide to come in here and claim that somehow it is a government initiative. This has been a feature of budgets and has been incorporated in estimates since that time. You should be ashamed of yourself.
My question is to the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel. How is the government supporting veterans through the budget?
I thank the member for Dobell for his question. This budget builds on the record of the Rudd Labor government in providing assistance to veterans and the ex-service community in the areas in which they really need them. In total terms, we are talking about a record budget on this occasion of some $12.1 billion. Let us not forgot that this is in a situation where, as many of our World War II veterans enter their twilight years, the overall size of our veteran community is shrinking.
There is some $246 million plus in new initiatives. I would like to particularly address three of them today. Firstly, there is $152.7 million over four years to expand community based health services aimed at Australian veterans and war widows with chronic conditions, our frailest veterans and war widows. This is designed to keep them out of hospital and in their own homes in the environment where they are most comfortable for a longer period. This is a very positive step forward and builds on the record of improved services across this area in recent years.
There are also two other particular initiatives that I would like to go to which address longstanding concerns and build on commitments made when in opposition and now in a government that we are proud to be part of. Members would know of the question around the issue of F111 deseal/reseal maintenance workers and the concerns that have been raised over a number of years with respect to them.
There was a scheme under the previous government which dealt with the concerns of those who were seen to be formally part of the maintenance area. However, there have been a range of concerns raised about the fact that many workers who had an involvement in the area were denied access to that scheme. There were ex gratia payments available on an arbitrary basis to people according to the number of days that it was identified that they had spent in the tanks. But frankly there was not a proper recognition of the circumstances that these people faced with respect to the health conditions that they had subsequently developed.
The government has fulfilled our commitment made in opposition—which, I remind people, was to have a parliamentary inquiry into that scheme. I would like to particularly note the chair of that committee, the member for Brisbane, and congratulate him on the work that he and others have done with respect to that process. I might also add that in the circumstances it should not be forgotten that when we made that commitment the opportunity was there for the opposition, then in government, to match that commitment. No commitment was made.
The fact is, that inquiry identified a number of concerns. Those concerns were dealt with fairly and justly through the recommendations of that committee. Although we have not accepted all of the recommendations, we have accepted the key points from that inquiry. One of the key points is that some 2,400 workers were denied access to the scheme as a result of the way it had been designed. What is also clear is that a number of those people have developed conditions which have been identified through the SHOAMP health scheme as quite possibly—and almost certainly in many cases—related to their exposure to chemicals in these circumstances. By giving them access under the SRCA legislation and section 7.2, which identifies conditions recognised as being part of what could develop as a result of these exposures, the government estimates that some $55 million in additional compensation and healthcare support, including counselling for families, will be provided.
This is an area that has caused enormous problems to the families involved and to the workers involved. And it is certainly true that some people feel there are concerns that certain circumstances have not been addressed. However, there is absolutely no doubt that this will mean that many workers who are dealing with the aftermath of their exposures will now be provided with real support.
The second matter I would like to raise is the question of the government’s response to the Clarke review recommendations which were not implemented by the previous government. Members would remember that in the early part of this century the previous government instigated a review under Justice Clarke around a broad-ranging set of recommendations which went to a whole range of issues within the ex-service community. A number of those were addressed. A number were not. The review that has come down has addressed several of those recommendations that are substantive, several more that, it is fair to say, are minor, and others that are still under consideration.
The key point I go to here is the issue around participants in British nuclear tests. I want to make it very clear here that the government was asked, when in opposition, to accept that recommendation. The commitment that was made was that we would review the Clarke report with specific reference to that. The result of that consideration—I am very pleased to be able to say this, today—is that what we were asked to do by the nuclear veteran representatives, the government has now done. Again, other matters remain open for consideration, and there is no doubt that some nuclear test representatives have said that they intend to pursue other matters in other forums. That is their right.
I am proud that this government took the step that the previous government would not take, and has recognised that it was identified though that independent inquiry that this was an issue that ought to be addressed, and has given these people the benefit of the doubt. We estimate, again, that somewhere in the region of in excess of $24 million in compensation and support will be provided by giving these people access to the Veterans’ Entitlements Act under the headline of non-warlike hazardous service. I think it is a positive step forward. It will allow those who have developed conditions which can be related to their service to receive compensation, and I think that is something that is long overdue.
Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.
Mr Speaker, I seek your indulgence to add to an answer I gave earlier this week to the member for Paterson.
The Prime Minister may proceed.
On Tuesday, the honourable member for Paterson asked about compensation for victims of international terrorism. I am aware of the private member’s bill that has been put forward by the Leader of the Opposition on this matter—and about which the member for Paterson has spoken. It proposes the establishment of a compensation scheme for victims of terrorism overseas. We appreciate the spirit in which this private member’s bill has been put forward. I am sure I speak on behalf of all members of the House when I say that we support victims of terrorism and appreciate the interest that any member of this House takes in their particular and individual circumstances. We are happy to examine the bill which has been put forward and see what practical things could be done to assist Australians in these circumstances. To that end I have asked the Attorney-General to speak further in the course of the next month with the member for Paterson on its details. We condemn, as I am sure all members of this place do, all acts of terrorism. We stand by all Australian victims of terrorism.
Mr Speaker, I seek your indulgence.
The Leader of the Opposition, on indulgence.
I congratulate and thank the Prime Minister for his gracious response to the question from the member for Paterson. I know that both the member for Paterson and I look forward to hearing what specific proposals the government has in mind, because these people do need additional help. They really do need additional help and a truly decent and compassionate country will not deny it to them.
Mr Speaker, I wish to make a personal explanation.
Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented?
Most grievously.
Please proceed.
Earlier in his answer the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government implied that I had lobbied ministers for $1 million per day, since being a member. I would like to reassure the people of Gippsland that I have lobbied ministers for much more than that! It would be $10 million a day at least, and I will continue to do so in the future!
The member for Gippsland will resume his seat.
Mr Speaker, I wish to make a personal explanation.
Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented?
I do.
Please proceed.
The Prime Minister in question time said that I had claimed, falsely, that Santos was not proceeding with an LNG investment. That was not, in fact, the claim I made. The claim I made, as the Prime Minister should have known if he had checked the Hansard, was merely that this decision had been deferred, not necessarily cancelled.
I present the Presiding Officers’ response to the report of the Standing Committee on Health and Ageing entitled Regional health issues jointly affecting Australia and the South Pacific: Report of the Australian Parliamentary Committee Delegation to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
I certainly accept the member for Gippsland’s claim that it probably has been much more than a million dollars every day! There is no doubt about that! Documents are presented as listed in the schedule circulated to honourable members. Details of the documents will be recorded in the
That the House take note of documents numbered 2, 3 and 4:Australian Crime Commission—Parliamentary Joint Committee—Examination of the annual report of the Australian Crime Commission for—2004-2005—Government response.2006-2007—Government response.Inquiry into the Australian Crime Commission Amendment Act 2007—Government response.Inquiry into the future impact of serious and organised crime on Australian society—Government response.Inquiry into the legislative arrangements to outlaw serious and organised crime groups—Government response.Inquiry into the manufacture, importation and use of amphetamines and other synthetic drugs (AOSD) in Australia—Government response.Review of the Australian Crime Commission Act 2002—Government response.Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade—Joint Standing Committee—Sealing a just outcome: Report from the inquiry into RAAF F-111 Deseal/Reseal workers and their families—Government response.Intelligence and Security—Parliamentary Joint Committee—Review of the listing, as a terrorist organisation under the Criminal Code Act 1995, of—Al-Shabaab—Government response.Review of the re-listing, as terrorist organisations under the Criminal Code Act 1995, of—Ansar al-Islam, Asbat al-Ansar (AAA), Islamic Army of Aden (IAA), Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ)—Government response.Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the Brigades), Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—Government response.Hizballah’s External Security Organisation (ESO)—Government response.
Debate (on motion by Mr Hartsuyker) adjourned.
I have received a letter from the honourable member for Goldstein proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:
The cost to the nation of waste and mismanagement within government programs.
I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.
More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—
This speech condemning the shameful waste and mismanagement of this government is given by me more in sadness than in anger. We all come to this place to see Australia go ahead, to become a better place, no matter who is in government. But after three years of the Rudd government I despair at the lost opportunities, the cynicism, the incompetence and the extraordinary growth of government in our lives. I despair at the loss of international respect and standing, the emergence of major sovereign risk for those who look to invest in Australia, and the mounting cost pressures on families and the impact these have on their enjoyment of life.
We could fill days of debate documenting the monumental waste and mismanagement that has become the hallmark of this government, the waste and mismanagement that has cost this country billions of dollars and that has driven the serious cost-of-living pressures facing millions of Australians—the waste and mismanagement that now defines this government. We could go on and on about this shameful three-year record, but the critical question to ask is: why? Why is it that this government is now best known for its failure to manage the shop with any level of competence and judgement? Why is it that in three short years so little has been achieved and yet so much has been claimed? Why is it that the Australian people feel so short-changed? Why is it that so much the Rudd government touches turns to custard?
Why is it that Labor’s promised program of computers in schools for every student in years 9 to 12 has so far only delivered 220,000 of the one million computers and a blow-out of $1 billion? Why is it that Labor promised to cut spending on consultancies but have instead awarded $1.2 billion in consultancy contracts since coming to office? Why is it that Labor promised broadband for $4.7 billion but broke that promise, replacing it with a plan for $43 billion? Of course, in the process, they wasted $20 million on a cancelled tender process and spent another $25 million on yet another report by consultants—all for a white elephant that will put up to $43 billion of taxpayers’ money at risk.
Why is it that Labor claim to have all the answers on climate change and the environment but have dumped the ETS for the cynical purpose of trying to make some of the parameters within a budget work? Prime Minister, you know that that $10 billion was fundamental to reaching one of the key parameters in the budget. It was a very cynical move by this government, despite the Prime Minister on so many occasions saying this is the great moral challenge of this century. They have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Just think of the money spent on thousands and thousands of hours of work by companies and individuals who took seriously the endless process of Senate committee inquiries, Garnaut reports 1, 2 and 3, the green paper and the white paper—all of that for nothing. There was $50 million worth of climate change advertising; 150 public servants administered the scheme, at a cost of $81 million; and 68 delegates were sent to Copenhagen, at a cost of $1½ million.
On top of this, in the environment area, there was the solar panel blow-out of $850 million and the dumping of $175 million on the Green Loans Program. The pink batts program, costing $2.45 billion, represents one of the monumental policy failures in this country’s history. It has resulted in 240,000 substandard installations, 1,500 electrified roofs, 120 house fires, four deaths and about $1 billion in waste—$1 billion of waste, four deaths and endless fires, and yet we discover that the Prime Minister knew about this, he was advised about this on several occasions over the last 12 months, and did nothing about it, and nor did his minister. He has misled this House by refusing to answer. He gave the impression he saw none of this, but by implication he has misled this House. All the minister for finance could say, in pathetic defence of this mismanagement and waste, was that it ‘wasn’t right to expect the government to be dotting i’s and crossing t’s because we are in a crisis situation’.
So far the most notorious example of government waste has been the pink batts, but this is likely to be superseded by the school halls program, which looks to have wasted many billions of its $16.7 billion. Dozens of examples of unconscionable waste are already in the public arena and each day seems to bring fresh evidence of more. Independent assessment has found that these school halls cost four times the amount of commercial buildings of a similar structure and nature. We are seeing billions and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money being wasted, and this is the responsibility—though you would not think it—of the Deputy Prime Minister.
Why is it that border protection is seeing a $1 billion blow-out? The Prime Minister promised to take a very tough line on people-smuggling, promising before the election to turn around the boats, yet we have had 120 boats arrive during this government’s time in office, and that number is growing. Prior to that, under the Howard government, we had 18 boats in six years. This is again a monumental failure of policy, a fundamental failure of courage.
Why is it that the Prime Minister pledged to tackle the cost of living for working families and yet in my city of Melbourne, over the last 12 months, electricity has gone up by 23 per cent, petrol by 7.4 per cent, rent by 4.4 per cent, child care by 7.9 per cent, water by 17.6 per cent, medical costs by 6.8 per cent and fruit and veg by eight per cent? This is all after setting up and shutting down GroceryWatch at a cost of $10 million and setting up and shutting down Fuelwatch while petrol prices continued to rise.
Furthermore, why is it that Australia has the highest interest rates in the developed world, with the endless, reckless spending, overspending and bad spending of $52 billion of stimulus money, resulting in six interest rate rises, and pressure on interest rates and our exchange rate, costing families thousands of dollars extra on their mortgages and hurting our exporters with higher exchange rates? Young couples who bought houses last year on the promise of cheaper housing, with a scheme designed to encourage them to buy houses, are now paying up to $5,000 more in mortgage payments just one year later because of the panicked spending and misspending by this government over a 12-month period.
Why is it that many millions of dollars have been wasted on seeking a UN Security Council seat? Why is it that the government has managed to weaken our relationships with Japan, China and India, at great cost to us in the years ahead? Why is it that the government has proposed a 40 per cent tax on our great mining industry, threatening $310 billion worth of mining projects, hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of revenue over the next 30, 40 or 50 years? We have a window of opportunity in the next four or five years to put our foot on a whole host of 30-, 40- and 50-year projects. If we do not secure those, they will go to the rest of the world. We will export projects. We will export jobs. And we will see up to two or three generations of Australians materially worse off because of the short-sightedness and the political crassness of this government, which has imposed a tax to meet a budget requirement due to its incompetence, its mismanagement, its overspending, its bad spending and its waste and mismanagement.
The politics of envy has put at great risk the opportunity to rebuild the resilience of the economy that this government inherited. This government is incompetent in not urgently dealing with the issue of uncertainty that still prevails in the world economy. Why did this government break promises on superannuation, private health insurance, 260 childcare centres, capping IVF treatment, delivering GP clinics, being an economic conservative, means-testing the baby bonus, changes to employee share ownership and stopping whaling? And why did this government present a budget that is simply not believable, a house of cards, a budget that will collapse under the weight of a huge tax on the engine of growth and employment in Australia? Its budget surplus is a mirage. It will never occur because of the waste and mismanagement and the duplicity of this government in structuring a budget that is simply not believable, which is under threat from its own measures from within the budget.
This is what it has come to: a litany of failures and disappointments, a litany of incompetence and lack of performance. Government by spin. I put it to you that competence and performance is primarily a function of character, strength of character. Character is what you do when no-one is watching. Character is when you reach inside your soul and follow your convictions. Character is finishing what you start. Character is about courage and judgement, not belligerence and panic under pressure. Character is taking responsibility for inevitable mistakes. Character is staying true to commitments solemnly made. Character is leading by listening. And character is about trust—trusting others around you, your colleagues and trusting yourself; staying true to yourself.
Sadly, under all the pressures of government, the Prime Minister and his government have failed so often on these tests of character and all Australians are paying the price. The Prime Minister and his government have not stayed true to commitments solemnly made. Promise after promise has been broken with gay abandon or the cynicism of crass politics. The Prime Minister and his government have not shown courage and judgement under pressure. In response to the financial woes that struck the Northern Hemisphere so powerfully two years ago and then challenged the resilience of Australia’s economy and others, the Prime Minister panicked. The government overspent and poorly spent and, in the process, spent tens of billions of dollars of reserves—built-up with so much work and effort over the previous decade—and built a $100 billion debt in no time at all. Rather than quickly rebuilding the resilience of the economy they inherited, they have the highest interest rates in the developed world, huge cost of living pressures and great big new job-destroying taxes as a consequence.
The Prime Minister has not shown trust in those around him and has not shown the trust and courage to stick by his own convictions. Dumping the emissions trading scheme to manipulate a budget outcome and avoid a political battle showed enormous weakness, given his professed view that this was the greatest moral and economic challenge of this century. It is pathetic. Seeking ownership of every government decision shows a lack of trust in colleagues and a lack of personal confidence and self-belief. The Prime Minister reminds me of the home handyman we all know—he enthusiastically starts a hundred jobs and he finishes none of them. He lacks the character to finish what he starts.
The Prime Minister and his government have failed to lead by listening. If they were listening, they would be focused, overwhelmingly, on reducing the cost of living pressures that face millions of Australians and their families. Instead of endless reckless spending and mountains of debt, the government would have pushed interest rates down rather than up. The government should be living within its means. Instead of new taxes to pay for the reckless spending, the government should have the courage to make tough decisions. Instead of billions of dollars of waste and mismanagement, the government should focus less on managing the media spin each day and more on doing the hard yards of managing programs effectively.
The PM and his government have failed to take responsibility for inevitable mistakes. This character weakness worries people. They feel uncertainty about the PM’s strength in dealing with whatever lies ahead. Character is what you do when no-one is watching. Do we know this Prime Minister? Does he have the courage of his convictions, or is he a chameleon? A government that believes in nothing will deliver nothing. To date, the government is known as a government of all talk and no action. If you do not know where you are going, you will never get there. All of this is a direct result of the failure of the Prime Minister and his government to pass the character test. It is why we have witnessed a government lurching from one failure to another, building a monumental level of waste and mismanagement. (Time expired)
I am pleased to be able to engage in debate with my fifth shadow finance minister in 2½ years. I am claiming an Australian record. I do not think there has been any previous instance of a senior portfolio having so many shadow ministers in one parliamentary term. In fact, a relatively representative group—three states, both genders, both houses and both parties in the coalition—has been represented. There was Senator Joyce and before him the member for North Sydney, the member for Dickson and Senator Coonan. Now there is the member for Goldstein, and he, like all his predecessors, is trotting out yet another dog-ate-my-homework smokescreen which is designed to pour out the rhetoric and to put forward some nice little slogans and a few grabs while avoiding one fundamental question: ‘What do the opposition propose to do with respect to government spending, taxation, the budget, fiscal policy and the future of the nation should it be elected in the election that is due within a matter of months?’ Eventually, they will be forced to reveal their plans and to give the Australian people some indication of what they are proposing to do. Maybe it will be this evening. We will find out in due course. But thus far all we have had has been rhetoric and empty slogans.
On the matter of shadow finance ministers, the member for Goldstein’s immediate predecessor must be feeling rather miffed today. He lost the portfolio because he tended to get a bit confused with figures, but one of his predecessors—the member for Sydney—got promoted to shadow Treasurer, and yesterday the member for North Sydney managed to say that 12 minus 9.8 equals 3.2. So while Senator Joyce got very big figures—billions and trillions—confused, the new shadow Treasurer cannot even work out what 9.8 taken from 12 equals. It was not a slip of the tongue; he was reading his own question. We all make slips of the tongue occasionally, but a shadow Treasurer’s reading out his own question and being unable to make a simple subtraction does give you cause to ponder the prospects for the nation and for fiscal management should he actually become Treasurer.
Given the record of the coalition in government on the issues that are the ostensible subject matter of this MPI debate, perhaps we should not be surprised that they cannot find a shadow finance minister who can stay in the portfolio longer than a matter of months. We remember—as the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government pointed out today—the infamous Regional Partnerships program, the Beaudesert rail project where no trains ever ran, the cheese factory that got money after it closed down, the ethanol factory that never existed and so the list goes on. We remember the government advertising spending in the 2007 calendar year of $254 million. For the purposes of comparison, what has the Rudd government’s record been? We spent $86 million in 2008 and $115 million in 2009.
I note that as a central part of his attack the member for Goldstein made a claim about spending on consultants, so let us have a look at the record of spending on consultants. In the last full financial year of the Howard government, total spending on consultants was $535 million, in 2007-08 it was $454 million and in 2008-09 it was $475 million. It was $60 million lower in the first full year of the Rudd government than in the last full year of the Howard government not accounting for inflation, because by definition the fees of consultants, like the rest of the economy, would have been a little bit more expensive given the two years that had passed in that time.
We all recall the famous water plan drawn up on the back of a serviette after a long lunch by the former Prime Minister, Mr Howard, and how, when my predecessor as finance minister, Senator Minchin, was asked on the Meet the Press program a couple of days after it was announced, ‘Was this costed by the department of finance?’ he said that it would be ‘costed in due course’. The normal pattern with these things is that the department of finance costs significant government spending proposals before they are decided and before they are announced, not after they are announced unilaterally by the Prime Minister without consulting his Department of the Treasury or department of finance.
We all remember the record of the coalition on discretionary grants, which blew out from $450 million in 2002 to $4.5 billion in 2007. So within about five or six years, the Howard government went from spending $450 million to spending $4.5 billion on discretionary grants. You would be interested to know that the record of the Rudd government on this point, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that in the following year the amount spent on discretionary grants by this government fell 27 per cent from the figure that we inherited from the Howard government.
We all remember the blow-out in the number of public servants under the Howard government. From around 2002 until 2007, the total numbers went from 212,000 to 247,000. In the three years covered by the relevant budgets of the Rudd government since it has been in office, the total increase in the Public Service will be about three per cent—that is, roughly one per cent a year—which is lower than the population increase in Australia over that period, while in the last three years of the Howard government, Public Service numbers increased by 9.3 per cent. So the members of the opposition do not come to this debate with a great deal of recent credibility.
I now turn to the government’s record on issues of efficiency, accountability and spending generally. First, on coming to office we imposed a one-off, two per cent efficiency dividend across virtually all of government. There were one or two exceptions; much of defence operational activity was one of them. That one-off, two per cent efficiency dividend meant that the ordinary operating costs of government shrank significantly as a result and that squeezed better performance and better productivity out of the public sector.
We have put forward a dramatic change in the structure of procurement in the processes of government, working through product category by product category and delivering very substantial savings. There are half a billion dollars worth of savings already projected from IT courtesy of the Gershon inquiry and significant savings from coordinated approaches to property procurement, telecommunications, Microsoft product, office machines and most recently—this was announced just prior to the budget and included in the budget—$160 million over four years through coordinating approaches to the purchase of aviation and travel services. These are all things that the Howard government could have and should have done but refused to do because of its obsession with mimicking the private sector.
We have been in the process, which will peak in the parliament in the next sitting week, of reforming the structure of administration of government superannuation. This will not only deliver significant benefits as to the costs of government—enabling us to modernise the IT systems used in administering government superannuation that desperately need reinvestment on a cost-neutral basis—but also deliver very substantial improvements in the outcomes for the investment component of the superannuation that applies to both public servants and military personnel in the relevant schemes.
We have put in place very substantial reforms to the management of discretionary grants and accountability for dealing with discretionary grants so that never again will we see some of the absolute administrative outrages that characterised the infamous Regional Partnerships program. We have put in place strict guidelines with respect to political advertising to ensure that all substantial advertising proposals—any things that cost above $250,000—have to go through an arms-length process of scrutiny that determines whether or not they are genuine government advertising or political advertising.
No more Work Choices ads!
No more Work Choices ads and no more ‘Unchain my heart’ ads or any of those complete outrages that we all remember so well.
I will turn now to the budget processes and the wider picture of government efficiencies that I have been directly responsible for. In our first budget we had $33 billion of savings over four years; in the second budget, $22 billion of savings over four years; in the third budget, $28 billion of savings over four years. These have included major tough decisions such as extending the age of pension eligibility from 65 to 67. This year we have made very substantial savings as a result of very tough negotiations with the pharmaceuticals manufacturing sector and the pharmacy sector in order to get better value for money from that very large spend that the government undertakes through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the delivery of pharmaceuticals. In contrast to this very substantial track record of the Rudd government, in the last four coalition budgets there were virtually no substantial savings. In earlier budgets the Howard government did have very substantial savings, some of which we disagreed with and some of which involved broken election promises—we all remember the distinction between core and non-core election promises—but in the last four budgets, with the money rolling in, there were virtually no savings.
This government, whether it has been during a mining boom, in a global financial crisis or in a resurgent economy post the direct impact of the global financial crisis, has found substantial savings, including very substantial spending cuts in all three of its budgets. The overall position is that the budget, in spite of the impact of the global financial crisis, will return to surplus by 2012-13, debt as a proportion of GDP will peak at just over six per cent and, as a result of the budget two days ago, we have finally seen the inevitable demise of the laughable ‘debt and deficit’ campaign—the hysterical rhetoric and grossly inflated exaggerations of the opposition. We have put in place strict budget rules to impose real discipline on the government, on its ministers and on its public servants, in particular a cap on spending increases of two per cent per annum in real terms, which is lower than the projected increase in the economy over that time. In this budget we extended that cap to go to the point where the budget will be in surplus of one per cent of GDP. We remain committed to keeping the tax ratio as a proportion of our economy on average at or below the level we inherited from our predecessors and we are adhering to that commitment. In fact, it continues to be substantially lower and will be significantly lower right across the forward estimates. In the second year of the four years of the forward estimates in this budget, spending will return to roughly the level it was for much of the Howard years as a proportion of the economy, and for the third and fourth years of the budget estimates it will be lower than the typical level of spending as a proportion of the economy under John Howard.
It is crunch night tonight for the opposition. They have kept putting off the difficult stuff. They are very good at rhetoric; they are very good at slogans; they are very good at colourful one-line grabs—but they keep putting off the hard choices. They keep putting off the difficult point where they actually have to stand up and say, ‘Here is where the money is coming from.’ We first had, ‘Not until the new year.’ Then it was, ‘Wait until parliament resumes.’ Now it is, ‘Wait until the budget reply.’ I am banking on the fact that you will not get much of that in the budget reply tonight, Madam Deputy Speaker. The moment of truth is here, but I can guarantee you that you will not see the Leader of the Opposition indicate where the $15.7 billion of unfunded spending he has already committed to is going to come from. You will not hear him indicate how he is going to maintain the projected surpluses that the government has put in place in the forward estimates. All you will hear is further hairy-chested rhetoric with nothing behind it.
In the chart and table that I released today is a very conservative estimate of the commitments that have been made by the opposition. It only includes commitments that have been explicit and that are clear—an indication that a coalition government, if it were elected to office, will do the following things. For example, the coalition has committed to removing the means testing of family tax benefits and the baby bonus that the government put in place and removing some of the tightening of middle-class welfare that the government put in place. It has committed to those things at very substantial cost, well over $1 billion, and there has been no indication yet of how they are going to be paid for. That is just one component of that $15.7 billion black hole in the coalition’s costings.
We will see tonight whether the Leader of the Opposition can meet the four tests I set for him earlier today: first, whether he can explain how he is going to pay for this $15.7 billion that he has already promised; second, if he is going to continue to oppose the Resource Super Profits Tax, whether he is also going to oppose the cut in company tax, the small business tax benefits, the improvements in superannuation and the improvements in infrastructure that are all being financed by the proceeds from this tax and, if he is not going to oppose those things, how he is proposing to finance them; third, whether he is prepared to match the government’s fiscal rules and to commit to extending the two per cent real cap on spending to the point where the budget gets into surplus of one per cent of GDP; and, finally, whether or not he is committed to ensuring that those surpluses that are now projected for 2012-13 and 2013-14 are protected—whether he can set out exactly what he is going to spend, what he is going to save, how it all adds up and how those surpluses will be maintained. We might also like to hear from him whether he understands the capital side of the budget, investments in financial assets, which do not count as spending, and whether it is the proceeds of the sale of an asset or cancelling an investment that delivers a return. That does not become transferable into spending capacity. If he spends on that basis, all he will do is further push the budget into deficit.
There is a very big challenge for the Leader of the Opposition tonight. He has to switch from the rhetorical windbag, the bloviating buffoon, to somebody who can tell us where the money is coming from. (Time expired)
While we listened to the minister for finance on this matter of public importance, the member for Casey and I were reflecting on how sorry we felt for the Labor Party backbenchers who are called down for these matters of public importance, looking like the economy section in the movie Flying High, sitting back there, not looking too good, having to defend a government that has presided over such extraordinary and embarrassing waste and mismanagement as this one.
Government members interjecting—
There they are, coming down here looking like the economy section in the movie Flying High, having to defend the government. Like lambs to the slaughter at the next election, they will have to show up on election day and defend each of the extraordinary examples of waste and mismanagement that this government has presided over—and no worse than in the area of education. This Minister for Education has presided over catastrophic waste and mismanagement of taxpayers’ money on a scale not seen since Ronnie Biggs robbed the Royal Mail of £2.6 million in 1963. It is surprising in fact that the Minister for Education would parade herself around the press gallery, parade herself around the parliament, demanding the accolades of best at show, but really wanting the job of top dog of this government. Whether she will get it or not is a matter that we will find out by the end of the year. Whether the Prime Minister can limp through to the election and whether they will put up with him is a matter for the Labor Party. And after the election, when they lose, we will see an unholy battle, a right royal battle between those who think the Minister for Education should be top dog and those who believe that the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, or even the minister for finance should be top dog.
In education, training, child care, this government has a record of waste and mismanagement that would make anybody normal blush, but this particular minister has a thicker hide than most. Most ministers with a thinner hide would have given up by now when you think of the litany of waste and mismanagement that this minister has presided over in education. Let us list them for those poor members of the backbench who have to front up on election day in about four months time and try to defend this waste and mismanagement. Let us let them know just what they have been defending for the past 2½ years. There is a $1.7 billion blow-out in the school hall rip-off program that has been delayed again and will take longer to implement than the entire duration of World War I. This was a program that was supposed to stimulate the economy quickly. It has been delayed in the budget yet again. It will run over four years. They will be stimulating the economy three years after the so-called global financial crisis. That is how poor and poorly mismanaged the school hall rip-off program has been, a school hall rip-off program that has delivered probably less than 50 per cent value for the $16.2 billion of taxpayers’ money that has been spent.
She has also been responsible for a $1 billion blow-out in the computers in schools program, which has also been delayed. The computers in schools program will now run over six years. They managed to defeat Germany in the Second World War in less than six years, but this minister could not—
Go back to school, Chris, it was seven years!
This minister could not deliver the computers in schools program to the schools of this community without having a blow-out of $1 billion. And let me tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, as you might find this startling: they promised 970,000 computers in schools, instead they have delivered 220,000 in three years. And they think they will deliver the rest in the next three years. There is a trade training centre policy that was supposed to deliver a trade training centre for every secondary college in the country but has delivered one in 10—one-tenth of that program has been delivered by this Minister for Education. The school hall rip-off program has been so incompetently managed that it has been the subject of an inquiry by the Australian National Audit Office. It delivered a scathing report last week with findings that should make the government embarrassed. There is also a New South Wales upper house inquiry, an ongoing Senate inquiry and an investigation task force headed by a man who has a media adviser before he has any investigative people working on the investigation. He has had more press conferences in the past week than I have had, at schools that did not have a problem—
Mr Butler interjecting
which is saying something, as the member for Port Adelaide quite correctly points out. But the head of the investigation task force, Brad Orgill, has been in press conferences almost every day of the week since he was appointed and got started. He has a media adviser but not yet an investigative adviser. And of course the investigative task force was only established to ensure that there was no judicial inquiry, which the opposition has been calling for for weeks.
Mr Anthony Smith interjecting
And as my honourable friend the member for Casey points out, this is a government that has people in it who think the Second World War took seven years! 1939 to 1945: you do the math!
This minister has presided over a shrinking school chaplaincy program that has no funding after December 2011, yet it is one of the most popular programs in schools that the previous government initiated. She has presided over the draining of the capital from the Higher Education Endowment Fund. The capital which was to be kept for universities into the future has now shrunk from over $6 billion to just over $2 billion in three years. She has presided over the draining of that higher education funding. She has presided over the collapse of the international students market by 40 per cent since the beginning of March, and the closure of international colleges across the country. All of this is on this minister’s watch, but I think the most recent, and the daddy of them all, has of course been the junking of the so-called ‘ending the dreaded double drop-off’ policy.
It got dropped off.
It got dropped off, as the member for Casey says. It was dropped right off the edge of the cliff. Two hundred and twenty-two childcare centres were to be built—apparently in 2007 there was a desperate need, but in 2010 apparently there is no demand at all for new childcare centres. And she has presided over changes to the budget which make child care less affordable for average families by capping the childcare rebate at $7,500.
But perhaps the worst example in this litany of failure is the school hall rip-off program. It was not long ago that the Minister for Education was scoffing at the concerns of parents, of parents and friends organisations, of principals, of state governments, of the opposition, of Ray Hadley on 2GB, of the Today Show, of the Australian. The Minister for Education mocked the Australian and said they were fabricating examples of waste and mismanagement in the school hall rip-off program. Who is red-faced now? The member for Port Adelaide could not possibly be planning to defend the school hall rip-off program. The minister dismissed these as isolated concerns. She mocked the parents of the Hastings Public School, who in 2003 built a covered outdoor learning area for $78,000; in June last year the covered outdoor learning area was to cost $400,000, and by the end of the year, six months later, it was costing $954,000. The Minister for Education scoffed at that concern and mocked the parents of Hastings Public School. In this place she misled the parliament by saying that we had got the Berridale Public School example wrong, when we compared their toilet block with the BER project. She said the toilet block was 36 square metres. In fact, of course, the toilet block at Berridale is 118 square metres. But do you think the Minister for Education has come back into the House and apologised? No. She is not returning; she is never wrong. The Minister for Education is never wrong. We were given that information by the parents at Berridale, when Tony Abbott and I visited them one morning at their school.
So they are wrong too?
They are wrong too—they are just ordinary Australians; they could not possibly be right. Only the Minister for Education can be correct. My point is that those opposite are being demeaning of and being derogatory about the parents at Berridale, mocking them by saying ‘did you get your tape measure out’. Why doesn’t the member for Port Adelaide go down there and visit them, seeing as he is so smart, in his safe seat. Why doesn’t he get off his butt and do something for a change, rather than sitting in his ivory tower doing all his factional gains in South Australia. Finally, the Rawlinsons construction data has left out the BER because it is so embarrassing. (Time expired)
After that contribution by the member for Sturt, the convenor of the left faction of the Liberal Party in South Australia, who is spending a lot of time in his area doing factional gains, it is good to see in the lead-up to the Leader of the Opposition’s speech a listing school by school of the schools around Australia to lose their BER funding under his budget reply. We look forward to that. We look forward to the member for Bradfield and others going out to their schools and telling them that the Leader of the Opposition has stated in his budget reply that schools in their electorate will lose the BER funding which has often been, certainly in my electorate, the first time there has been significant capital funding to these schools for many, many years and in some cases decades.
We on this side welcome the opportunity to have a little talk about the cost to the nation of waste and mismanagement in government programs. You could not think of a better phrase to describe the economic legacy of the Howard-Costello government—a government for which the member for Casey was a prime adviser.
And member.
And a member, let the record state, as well as an adviser—so double responsibility. History will record the economic legacy of that government as one of wasted opportunity—wasted opportunity to build the capacity of the nation for the long-term future; a wasted opportunity through mismanagement of the benefits and returns from the mining boom over the many, many years that we had to endure Peter Costello as Treasurer.
Time is short, but let me touch on a few areas where the cost to the nation of this waste and mismanagement was at its highest. There are plenty of areas that I could go into, but I want to talk a bit about infrastructure, a bit about health care and a bit about national savings. First, let us recap the sort of opportunity that the last government, under the treasurership of Peter Costello, enjoyed. They were blessed by economic circumstances. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! As much as the then member for Higgins, Peter Costello, and his acolytes like the member for Casey will try to tell us, it was all a party trick by Peter Costello, they were blessed by being in the right place at the right time. They had terms of trade the likes of which we had not seen for 40 or 50 years. There was uninterrupted world growth, with booms in China and booms in India.
The Business Council of Australia told us how good it was in the lead-up to the election in 2007. They said that the last five years in the lead-up to the 2007 election had seen $87 billion of upward revisions in the Howard and Costello budgets. We saw in the last four budgets of the previous government delivered by Peter Costello average spending increases of 5.7 per cent. You would think that that would have been reflective of a focus on building the prosperity of the nation into the future, but it was not. It was reflective of wasted opportunity, of mismanagement of the benefits of the mining boom. What did we get? We got lots of one-off payments—great press conference opportunities for the then Treasurer and the then Prime Minister but not much capacity for ordinary Australians, fixed-term pensioners, to plan their financial future in the long term. We saw lots of wasteful spending, like the decision to fund private health insurance for millionaires through the PHI rebate. That would be excusable if there was nothing else to do but at the same time the Business Council was telling us that infrastructure bottlenecks in Australia were costing us $8 billion to $10 billion per annum in lost economic growth. The Reserve Bank was telling us 20 to 25 times that there were capacity constraints in the economy that were just ignored in skills and ignored in infrastructure by the last government. By the time they lost government we were still only 20th of 25 OECD nations in terms of our infrastructure spend, in spite of having the best economic growth in the OECD for years and years.
Their approach to infrastructure instead was exemplified by examples like those mentioned by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government in question time today—the regional rorts program, and the grant of $22,000 to a cheese factory that had closed before the expenditure was allocated. Fortunately we have a different approach. This budget confirms that we doubled in real terms the transport infrastructure spend for the six years after we were elected compared to the six years before we were elected. Notwithstanding the manifestly different financial circumstances that we confront, with a revenue hit of about $110 billion through the GFC, we are acting where the last government did not act on broadband infrastructure, with the NBN Co.
Other wasted opportunities of the mining boom include things like the complete failure to build national savings in this country. They inherited the blessing of a nine per cent superannuation guarantee charge, which has built more than $1 trillion of national savings from the decisions taken by the Hawke and Keating governments. The great cost to the nation from the mismanagement and wasted opportunity by the last government’s failure to further build national savings is only now being addressed by this government. What did the former government do in the area of super? One of their first decisions was to kill off the idea that ordinary working Australians might have their superannuation increased from nine per cent to 15 per cent. What else did they do? They did not do anything in relation to the adequacy of pensions for older Australians—absolutely nothing in 12 years of uninterrupted economic growth and the sorts of budget upward revisions that I talked about.
What have we done in vastly different fiscal circumstances? We announced, only in the last couple of weeks, that we will move the superannuation guarantee charge from nine per cent to 12 per cent. That means amazing things for an average 30-year-old, for example—about $108,000 extra in their retirement income compared to what the Howard and Costello government considered adequate. We have also seen the biggest increase in the age pension in over 100 years of its existence. A single pensioner now receives more than $100 per fortnight more than they received under the last government—not in one-off payments but structural increases to the age pension. Now single age pensioners receive two-thirds of a couple’s pension, whereas the last government did nothing.
Another example, which is dear to my heart because of the job that I am blessed to have as Parliamentary Secretary for Health, is the cost to the nation of the last government’s complete failure of and complete mismanagement of health policy. Of course, none other than the Leader of the Opposition was minister for health for four or five very long years. That failure, that wasted opportunity, that mismanagement of policy was so much more shameful because they knew the scale of the challenge. Peter Costello had commissioned the intergenerational review, which set out the scale of the challenge presented by our ageing population. They knew about the increase in the burden of chronic disease, but what did they do? They did nothing. They indulged in the blame game against state governments, admittedly with some reciprocation from time to time.
Tony Abbott withdrew more than $1 billion from the hospital system in the 2003-04 budget. He capped GP training places at 600, thinking, ‘If you just restrict the number of GPs, maybe people will stop getting sick, or, if the poor dears continue to get sick, they will just stay at home and not try and impose themselves on the Medicare system.’ Just imagine, with the $87 billion of upward revisions in the budget, what the last government could have done with the extra dollars. Instead, we have had to start to fix the wasted opportunities, the mismanagement of the last government, with vastly more challenging fiscal circumstances. The budget delivered this week has shown that we have been able to deliver more than $7 billion in additional investments to the health system after a landmark agreement with all the states and territories, except Western Australia, for a vastly different set of governance arrangements and different financial architecture in the health system. This will deliver more doctors and nurses; it will deliver more beds, particularly more subacute beds; and it will deliver shorter waiting times for elective surgery and EDs.
The economic record of the Liberal Party over the last 15 years has shown a complete lack of focus and discipline. Australians count their blessings that that party was not on this side of the House during the global financial crisis. Imagine the cost to the nation. At least Peter Costello understood and liked economics, and his legacy is bad enough. Who knows what would have happened if the Leader of the Opposition had been in charge at the time of the GFC. We know he does not like economics. We know he lacks focus. We have heard reports that he spends more of his time in acting classes. We know he likes spending time on his ‘Sporty Spice’ routine, in the ocean and on the bicycle. We know that, if it were a choice between doing the hard work to get the country through a challenging economic time or getting on the bike or having a bit of a swim, we know what the Leader of the Opposition—(Time expired)
Let me begin with the very simple facts in relation to the Home Insulation Program. It is a program about which this government will not speak, which they will not acknowledge and of which they are utterly ashamed. The reasons are very simple: 120 house fires at a minimum; 1,500 potentially deadly electrified roofs; 240,000 dangerous or substandard roofs—all using the government’s figures. Of course, at the heart of the issue associated with this program is the tragic loss of four young lives. This program has been catastrophic. The Home Insulation Program—the pink batts program, as it is more widely known—was ill-conceived, ill-constructed and utterly deficient in its management. Beyond the human tragedies, beyond the impact which is unparalleled in terms of 240,000 houses, is the sheer waste of the program.
The waste of the program can be summed up in a very simple figure. The budget papers, put down two nights ago, show—buried on page 24 of the special estimates for the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency—a provision of almost $1 billion to fix the program. Let me run through the figures for that: $340 million for the Home Insulation Program inspection category; $84 million for the foil insulation program; $15 million for helping installers; and $41 million for the retraining package for workers. There is an additional $508 million, under the Home Insulation Program itself, which is unallocated and provisioned to allow for the further fix-up costs. We have almost $1 billion.
In addition to that there is an extra $136.8 million of unaccounted money in the low emissions for renters program which was discontinued on 1 September last year but for which provisioning has been made for the next two years. That is another hollow log. So potentially there is over $1.1 billion which has been set aside. There is no explanation for why a discontinued program has funding allocated in the out years.
So let us be very clear. The problem is real and human and catastrophic and should never be repeated by any government in this country ever again. The cause is significant. The cause is that the government was warned at the level of Prime Minister and environment minister that this program could be enormously dangerous. We know that there have now been 26 warnings given to the government at the highest levels—26 warnings from industry, from the unions, from the state and territory governments on 29 April last year which warned of fires and fatalities. Then last weekend we heard and saw that the inner cabal, the most senior advisers, those who worked directly with the Prime Minister’s office, warned on at least three occasions of injury, fires and fatalities, on 17 July, in September and again in October of last year. These warnings by the project control group were real and profound and unheeded by a government which at the level of Prime Minister chose to ignore the warnings, chose to ignore the warnings for political reasons, with catastrophic human consequences, with unacceptable tragic losses in terms of 120 house fires, with the risk to 240,000 homes from dangerous or potentially substandard insulation. Then there is the inexplicable loss of a billion dollars to fix this program. How can that be? The action is very simple. The Prime Minister must apologise as he has not done to the nation and to householders for these losses. He has finally, under pressure, apologised to the families, but he has not made an apology to the nation for the loss and the waste and, above all else, ignoring the warnings. He must also have a royal commission and he must commit to ensuring that all homes are inspected. This waste is unacceptable. (Time expired)
I am pleased to be able to participate in this matter of public importance debate. My grandmother had a wonderful saying, that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I think that is an interesting adage to start my contribution today in the debate. Both previous speakers from this side of the parliament have talked about the surplus budgets that were enjoyed during the last resources boom by the previous Howard government and how they failed to spend wisely in the interests of the nation during those years. It is quite a long list of things that were not done, including investment in infrastructure to support our industries. We had 20 warnings from the Reserve Bank of Australia about capacity constraints, warnings about it leading to inflation, but still no action on the government’s part. There was no attempt to invest in our schools despite many public statements about the need for a national curriculum, the need for transparency, the need to improve literacy and numeracy.
There was no investment in health and hospitals. In direct contrast, we had over a billion dollars ripped out of the health budget by the Leader of the Opposition when he was minister for health. We saw a cap on the number of GP training places. These were significant investments in health that were completely ignored by the Howard government. There was a failure to invest in broadband for the future. What did they do instead? They sold off the public telecommunications company that would have made the rollout of national broadband so much more cost-effective and efficient for the Australian people. What about the lack of investment in social and community housing? There was very little indeed, housing not even given a place of importance in the previous government’s cabinet. And of course who can forget the lack of investment in skills development and training? I acknowledge that they did give apprentices tool boxes at one stage. We are not doing that, we are actually giving them training and the opportunity for real jobs. Did the previous government reach out during that time to help the homeless? No. Did they reach out during that time to lift pensions and assist pensioners? No. Did they reach out at that time to assist and support parents with the introduction of a paid parental leave scheme? No.
I can list a number of failed programs or mismanaged programs. I will never forget the introduction of the family tax benefit where they spent the first three years of its operation suing families for overpayments of family tax benefit instead of changing the system to make it more responsive to the way ordinary families live. Or Work Choices, the introduction of an industrial relations system that saw ordinary working families’ take-home pay reduced. They did not heed warnings from unions and many people at the time about the possible implications of that scheme. We have not even begun to touch on the government advertising. While I am on Work Choices, there was $55 million for Work Choices advertising in the first round, and in the second round a further $66 million to try and explain their scheme. Australian taxpayers were forced to pay $4,581 a month to store 3½ million booklets promoting Work Choices laws. Many of these booklets were eventually pulped, a further cost to taxpayers. I have not even talked about the pens, the mouse pads et cetera.
Who can forget, given the interchange between the Minister for Health and Ageing and the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott’s infamous doctor recruiting campaign of golf balls? I also remember the Australian Wheat Board scandal, the $300 million given to Saddam Hussein. I remember the ‘outstanding’ Seasprite helicopter maintenance contract: $34 million a year at the very least to maintain a fleet of helicopters we did not have. That was waste and mismanagement. They sold nearly every Commonwealth building owned in Australia except for the Russell Hill complex and the Australian War Memorial, and I bet there were some who thought about doing that as well.
The test for the opposition tonight is not just whether the shadow Treasurer is numerate but also whether the Leader of the Opposition can be a statesman, because he proved after question time yesterday, in his attitude towards Gordon Brown and the change of government in the United Kingdom, that he does not have it in him. The test is on him tonight. We know that if they had been in charge of the government benches the Australian economy would be in recession. (Time expired)
Order! The discussion is concluded.
Message received from the Senate returning the bills without amendment or request.
Message received from the Senate informing the House of a resolution agreed to by the Senate that the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety include the merit of establishing an online ombudsman to investigate, advocate and act on cybersafety issues in its terms of reference.
Bill returned from Main Committee without amendment; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Bill agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from Main Committee with amendments; certified copy of the bill and schedule of amendments presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Main Committee’s amendments—
(1) Schedule 1, item 5, page 5 (line 27), omit “with the leave of that court”.
(2) Schedule 1, item 6, page 5 (line 32), omit “with the leave of that court”.
(3) Schedule 1, item 7, page 6 (line 3), omit “leave”.
(4) Schedule 1, item 14, page 9 (after line 12), after section 18B, insert:
18C Article 18—reasonable opportunity to present case
For the purposes of Article 18 of the Model Law, a party to arbitral proceedings is taken to have been given a full opportunity to present the party’s case if the party is given a reasonable opportunity to present the party’s case.
(5) Schedule 1, item 16, page 9 (lines 27 to 30), omit section 21, substitute:
21 Model Law covers the field
If the Model Law applies to an arbitration, the law of a State or Territory relating to arbitration does not apply to that arbitration.
(6) Schedule 1, page 9 (after line 30), after item 16, insert:
16A Division 3 of Part III (heading)
Repeal the heading, substitute:
Division 3—Additional provisions
(7) Schedule 1, page 9, after proposed item 16A, insert:
16B Section 22
Repeal the section, substitute:
22 Application of additional provisions
Application to arbitration under Model Law
(1) This Division applies to any arbitration to which the Model Law applies.
Application of sections 23, 23A, 23B, 23J, 23K, 25, 26 and 27
(2) Each of the following sections applies to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement unless the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will not apply:
(a) section 23;
(b) section 23A;
(c) section 23B;
(d) section 23J;
(e) section 23K;
(f) section 25;
(g) section 26;
(h) section 27.
Application of sections 23C, 23D, 23E, 23F and 23G
(3) The following sections apply to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement if the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that they will apply:
(a) section 23C;
(b) section 23D;
(c) section 23E;
(d) section 23F;
(e) section 23G.
Application of section 23H
(4) Section 23H applies on the death of a party to an arbitration agreement unless the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will not apply.
Application of section 24
(5) Section 24 applies to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement if the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will apply.
(8) Schedule 1, item 18, page 10 (line 31) to page 11 (line 4), omit subsection 23(5), substitute:
(5) The court must not issue a subpoena under subsection (3) to a person who is not a party to the arbitral proceedings unless the court is satisfied that it is reasonable in all the circumstances to issue it to the person.
(9) Schedule 1, item 18, page 11 (after line 4), at the end of section 23, add:
(6) Nothing in this section limits Article 27 of the Model Law.
(10) Schedule 1, item 18, page 12 (after line 16), at the end of section 23A, add:
(6) Nothing in this section limits Article 27 of the Model Law.
(11) Schedule 1, item 18, page 16 (after line 30), after section 23H, insert:
23J Evidence
(1) An arbitral tribunal may, at any time before the award is issued by which a dispute that is arbitrated by the tribunal is finally decided, make an order:
(a) allowing the tribunal or a person specified in the order to inspect, photograph, observe or conduct experiments on evidence that is in the possession of a party to the arbitral proceedings and that may be relevant to those proceedings (the relevant evidence); and
(b) allowing a sample of the relevant evidence to be taken by the tribunal or a person specified in the order.
(2) The tribunal may only specify a person in the order if the person is:
(a) a party to the proceedings; or
(b) an expert appointed by the tribunal under Article 26 of the Model Law; or
(c) an expert appointed by a party to the proceedings with the permission of the tribunal.
(3) The provisions of the Model Law apply in relation to an order under this section in the same way as they would apply to an interim measure under the Model Law.
23K Security for costs
(1) An arbitral tribunal may, at any time before the award is issued by which a dispute that is arbitrated by the tribunal is finally decided, order a party to the arbitral proceedings to pay security for costs.
(2) However, the tribunal must not make such an order solely on the basis that:
(a) the party is not ordinarily resident in Australia; or
(b) the party is a corporation incorporated or an association formed under the law of a foreign country; or
(c) the party is a corporation or association the central management or control of which is exercised in a foreign country.
(3) The provisions of the Model Law apply in relation to an order under this section in the same way as they would apply to an interim measure under the Model Law.
(12) Schedule 1, page 18 (after line 2), after item 23, insert:
23A Section 28
Repeal the section, substitute:
28 Immunity
(1) An arbitrator is not liable for anything done or omitted to be done by the arbitrator in good faith in his or her capacity as arbitrator.
(2) An entity that appoints, or fails or refuses to appoint, a person as arbitrator is not liable in relation to the appointment, failure or refusal if it was done in good faith.
(13) Schedule 1, page 18, after proposed item 23A, insert:
23B At the end of Division 4 of Part III
Add:
30A Severability
Without limiting its effect apart from this section, this Part also has the effect it would have if it were confined, by express provision, to arbitrations involving:
(a) places, persons, matters or things external to Australia; or
(b) disputes arising in the course of trade or commerce with another country, or between the States; or
(c) disputes between parties at least one of which is a corporation to which paragraph 51(xx) of the Constitution applies; or
(d) disputes arising in the course of trade or commerce in a Territory.
(14) Schedule 1, item 26, page 18 (lines 15 and 16), omit the heading to Part V, substitute:
Part V—General matters
(15) Schedule 1, item 26, page 19 (after line 32), at the end of Part V, add:
40 Regulations
The Governor-General may make regulations prescribing matters:
(a) required or permitted by this Act to be prescribed; or
(b) necessary or convenient to be prescribed for carrying out or giving effect to this Act.
The question is that the amendments be agreed to.
Question agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from Main Committee without amendment; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Bill agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from Main Committee without amendment, appropriation message having been reported; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Bill agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from Main Committee without amendment, appropriation message having been reported; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Bill agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from Main Committee without amendment, appropriation message having been reported; certified copy of the bill presented.
Ordered that this bill be considered immediately.
Bill agreed to.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Debate resumed.
The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Casey has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.
I rise to support the amendment moved by the member for Casey to the second reading of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. This bill will enable the delivery of digital television services by satellite to viewers who cannot receive an adequate terrestrial signal for the digital television services licensed for the areas in which they live. While the coalition does not oppose the bill, we have concerns that only 87 of the 698 self-help retransmission sites across Australia have been identified for upgrading. Television viewers in regional, rural and remote areas deserve the same access to television as their city counterparts, ideally through an upgrade of terrestrial service and not through satellite.
This legislation was referred to the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee for inquiry and report. One of the concerns which was raised in many of the Senate inquiry submissions is the cost of installing satellite receiving equipment for households in regional and remote Australia, such as households in my electorate of Forrest and in your electorate of Grey, Mr Deputy Speaker Ramsey. The cost to such households includes the cost of installation, the equipment required and how and when people will know if they require satellite equipment.
On this note, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has stated that households requiring satellites are expected to pay, on average, $650 for equipment and installation, of which $400 will be subsidised by the government, meaning that householders will still be approximately $250 out of pocket. Mr Andy Townend from the Digital Switchover Taskforce has stated that the new satellite service would create a situation where householders who wish to receive both the full range of services available on the new satellite network and subscription TV would need two satellite dishes and two set-top boxes. If this is the case, it will cost such householders in our areas even more.
My regional and rural electorate of Forest will be the last area in Australia to switch over, with the switch-over date set for between 1 July and 31 December 2013. I have been contacted all the same by licensed installers from my electorate. One of them shared with me his concerns about the digital switch-over from his perspective. One of the issues he raised was that, if no towers are being upgraded in my electorate and his part of the world—which I believe is correct—installers must be notified whether, when a new house is built in the region, they are required to fit the house with an antenna or a satellite.
The installer informed me that presently most new homeowners are choosing to have antennas installed, as a cheaper option. However, if in two years they can get extra channels via satellite, it would be more cost-effective to have the satellite option installed now. Even though digital television may not be available in my area until 2013, installers and homeowners need to know now what equipment they should be installing in houses now in preparation for that future. This would be a far more efficient and cost-effective process.
Another area of uncertainty for my electorate in this bill is that currently the Forrest electorate has digital transmission for ABC; however, there is no confirmation from broadcasters of whether or not GWN and WIN will also have their own digital transmission towers. In an article in the Adelaide Advertiser on 9 March 2010, regional network WIN raised concerns at the cost of paying for the digitalisation of its Western Australian and South Australian networks. In the article, WIN owner Bruce Gordon is quoted as saying:
We are looking to the Government to say, ‘You’re going to have to help because we’ll go broke quick enough without having to buy 68 new transmitters for WA to go digital.’
That means that residents in my electorate may need an antenna to be able to access the ABC and a satellite to access GWN or WIN if these networks do not have transmitters in the region. People who currently have satellite dishes are being bombarded with free-to-air adverts about channels that they currently cannot receive. Eastern states and even Perth residents may be able to view the new channels being promoted, but south-west residents cannot.
I recently received an email from a constituent in my electorate who is quite angered by ‘the state of the commercial TV networks who seem to be making a joke out of the conversion to digital TV’. My constituent highlighted that, when the commercial TV services went digital in Perth, the introduction of the subchannels such as GO!, 7Two and One HD saw a number of programs move from the main channels to the subchannels. This resulted in some programs previously available on the commercial TV channels in regional WA simply disappearing and being inaccessible for those people. Some can also no longer enjoy the picture quality that a digital TV set-up provides.
My office has received a number of calls from residents in response to an article in a local newspaper, the Bunbury Mail, on 3 December, where GWN and WIN stated that they have no intention of converting to digital until close to the changeover date of 2013. They are concerned that there may be a reason or an excuse to delay further when that date actually approaches.
The Mount Lennard transmitter in my electorate serves most of the south-west, with a coverage of over 150,000 people. This is a seriously large audience. It really does not make sense that there are no plans to upgrade this transmitter to digital in the near future.
I am also concerned as to how the government will regulate installers. We certainly do not want to see a repeat of the process we saw in the Home Insulation Program. We cannot afford to have a repeat of that bungled program.
As these issues highlight, people right across Australia deserve certainty regarding the digital switch-over—when it is going to be rolled out, exactly how much it is going to cost and how much it is going to cost them. The Labor government must do the simple hard work and provide the necessary levels of funding and on-ground support to ensure viewers are not left without a television picture when the analog signal is switched off.
The coalition has always said that local content currently available, including news, sport and community information relevant to each region should continue to be available in digital. The government’s plan will be judged by the actual delivery of digital services on television screens right around Australia and certainly in my electorate of Forrest.
In concluding, we certainly have some concerns that only 87 of the 698 self-help retransmission sites across Australia have been identified for upgrading and that there is still an amount of uncertainty surrounding this bill. Television viewers in regional, rural and remote areas—such as the residents in my electorate of Forrest—deserve the same access to television as their city counterparts. As we all know, with so many farmers and people engaged in small business in those areas, access to services like this play a critical part in their lives and often in their businesses. I support the amendments proposed by the shadow minister.
Television is very important to all Australians, particularly for those who live in regional communities. They want to have satisfactory signal and a choice of programs. They want to be able to see the programs that they want to see. They want to be connected with their local community. They expect that to happen efficiently, seamlessly and reliably. The close down of the analog television network is causing a great deal of apprehension in regional Australia. There are many communities that are not sure whether they will have television reception at all after this closure has been effected. And they have reason to be concerned about the way in which this government is handling the changeover.
Labor has a dismal record when it comes to communication services in regional Australia. They have a record of closing networks down without any regard for the people outside the capital cities who are adversely affected. Remember when the Hawke-Keating government closed the analog phone network and replaced it with GSM? There were tens of thousands of country people left with poor mobile phone coverage. Indeed, the GSM network failed to meet the expectations of and promises made by the Labor government. When the coalition was elected, the CDMA network was opened up, largely at the prompting of one of my predecessors, Tim Fischer. The CDMA network filled some of the gaps and it did in fact provide a much better coverage in regional Australia. But Labor had left regional Australians with a seriously defective mobile phone coverage.
Six months after the election of the Rudd government, they closed the CDMA network, so it has gone now as well. Again, we have an inferior signal in many parts of regional Australia. I do not live in a remote part of Australia. My electorate is all east of the Great Dividing Range. Yet there are many parts of my electorate where it is impossible to get mobile phone coverage. Even in my home, I struggle to get good coverage on many occasions. And it is because the new signal is inferior in many regards, particularly in the distances that it is able to cover, and so regional Australians are left without the kind of mobile phone network that they should have.
Then we get to broadband and the extension of broadband facilities at high speeds to all Australians. Prior to the last election, Labor said that it would deliver fibre to the node to 98 per cent of Australians at a cost of $4.7 billion and that it would start by Christmas of 2008. Then in April 2009, it changed the promise. Only 90 per cent of Australians would be covered by the high-speed broadband network and the cost had blown out to $43 billion. Two million Australians were to be excised from the promise and every town with fewer than a thousand people was excised from the promise that Labor had made before the last election.
Putting aside the dishonesty of the broken promise, the reality was that once again Labor had demonstrated that it did not consider high-speed broadband for regional Australians to be important. If you lived in a little town, you were going to miss out. You would get a second-class service. So people are seriously concerned about Labor’s track record when it comes to communications.
They also axed the Communications Fund. This fund had been set aside especially to deliver new technology to regional Australia and to fill in some of the black spots that occur when new technology is rolled out. That money was put aside. At the time it was put aside, it was put aside in sacred trust so that regional Australians could have some confidence that they would share in new technology developments in communications. But in fact that fund has been raided by the government to try and prop up its broadband scheme. Regional Australians have got nothing.
Indeed, since Labor was elected, there has not been a single cent of government money provided to fill in black spots in the mobile phone network. That is shameful. Obviously Labor members living in their city electorates and cabinet ministers—all of whom come from city electorates—have probably got pretty good mobile phone reception. But there are many small communities that do not. The black spots program was filling in those gaps—gaps that were not economical for the major telecommunications companies to service but which are important if you believe in equality of service and a capacity to cover the whole of the nation.
It used to annoy me to see Telstra ads boasting about how you could go from one end of the country to the other and stay totally connected to Telstra mobile phones. I could not go more than two or three kilometres from my own home before running out of reception. This government thinks that that is acceptable and it is not prepared to spend any money at all on filling in those gaps. This was a program that the previous government had funded faithfully over a period of time and it had made a big difference. It certainly filled in the worst of the black spots, but there are many more that still need to be filled in.
Labor is now coming to us with the news that they are going to close down analogue television and covert to digital. Is it any wonder that people in regional Australia are suspicious and concerned about whether, once again, they are going to be allowed to fall through the cracks? This bill proposes to authorise the establishment of a satellite service to cover some of those gaps. But unfortunately the government has been unable to explain to any of us how it is going to work, when it will be available and under what terms and conditions it will be made available to consumers of television in Australia.
I want to use the time I have in this speech to ask some questions that I hope the minister will respond to when he sums up the legislation. Sadly, the minister is not here but I notice that there are some of his advisers here. I am asking these questions in good faith because I have been unable to get to a stage where I can get answers to the questions. I will get to them a little later in my remarks.
I guess the core of the problem is that even under the old analogue network there were some parts of the country that could not be covered by television signals. There were 698 self-help and black-spot transmitters put in place to fill in some of those locations which were not covered by the primary transmitters. That delivered television to lots of small communities—they were not all in the country; some of them were in the cities, because there were black spots also in the cities. But the government has said that it is only going to upgrade, or arrange for upgrading for, 87 of those 698. The upgrades are going to be funded by the television stations themselves. That leaves 600 communities left in the lurch. There is some suggestion that other transmitters may cover some of those areas but we cannot have a great deal of confidence that that coverage will be complete.
Why isn’t the government converting all 698 transmitters? Why isn’t it? The 87 are costing $18 million, we are told. The government is allocating $40 million a year to this new satellite service. For that money you could have converted the whole 698 and, over a few years, put in another 698 if there were areas where reception was inferior. Why will we have a satellite service that will have significant implications for regional areas, particularly with the loss of localism in their programming?
The digital signal has different characteristics to analogue. It has a shorter range, generally. It performs quite poorly in wet weather and in some other weather conditions. That will be a particular issue in northern Queensland and at times of cyclones and weather disturbance when television reception can be particularly important. The digital signal cuts out dramatically. Most of us have already had to experience the situation of watching a digital television program which pixelates all over the place or simply shows a ‘no signal’ sign. Indeed, I have noticed it happen in Canberra over the last couple of days, so it happens in lots of places. This is a fundamental issue with the digital signal.
What about those people who are on the edges of the signal and are going to miss out altogether? Unfortunately, in August 2008 the government suspended its digital TV black spots checking program in non-metropolitan areas. So there is now no-one going around finding the spots where the digital television reception will not be available. How do we know which areas are going to be blacked out and which ones are not? Senator Conroy was asked this question in senate estimates, and his answer, to his great shame, was, ‘They’ll wake up in the morning and find they have a blank screen.’ So Senator Conroy’s test as to whether people are going to get digital television reception is that they will wake up in the morning and have a blank screen. Frankly, that is not good enough. It is not good enough for the cities and it is not good enough for the country. I do not think the government can rest on such a very flimsy approach to checking what areas will get television reception and what areas will not.
For country people, television is particularly important. They do not have a daily newspaper delivered to their doors. They are lucky if they get a weekly newspaper. They do not have a club to visit down the road if they want to enjoy some entertainment. They cannot go to a football game in a giant taxpayer funded stadium. They do not have a video shop down the road that they can simply walk along to if their television blacks out. They depend on this for a great deal of their family entertainment and information.
So any situation that results in significant numbers of families—or for that matter, one family—having the television reception which they have enjoyed for 10, 20 or 30 years suddenly not available, is unacceptable. It is quite clear that the government has not taken this concern seriously. It is quite obvious that there has not been adequate planning for this conversion, and there does not seem to be a willingness even to understand the difficulties that are going to arise. For instance, the government does not know how many households are going to require the new satellite service.
On 5 January, in a press release, the minister said that there were 247,000 households that would require this satellite service, but on budget night it was reduced to 130,000 households. Does that mean they got it wrong in the first place or is this new satellite service now going to be different from the one that was announced on 5 January? I suspect it is, because the language that is in the press release on budget night is very different from the language that was in the earlier press announcements. For instance, the original advice was that there were to be three satellite services: one covering south-east Australia—New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania; one covering Queensland and the Northern Territory; and one covering Western Australia. There were also to be three regional news services provided through a dedicated news channel. Is that still the situation, or has the Western Australian satellite been dropped out altogether? There is no reference to Western Australia any more, and in fact there is a suggestion that Western Australians are only going to receive a signal in the usual way from their regional channels.
When is the satellite going to be available? When is the transmission going to start to occur? What will be the source of the eastern states’ programs? This is a question that I hope the minister might be able to respond to. Will we still have three separate satellite footprints or are we now only going to have two? In some instances is it only going to be one footprint? There was a statement in the press release on budget night that high definition services will now be provided by a combined transmission covering the northern and southern zones. Is there now only going to be one service for high definition and only two services for standard definition? Has the situation changed, and is that the reason that the number of households that are going to benefit from this service has dropped, almost by half?
I am particularly concerned about the source of the programming for the satellite service for south-eastern Australia. Is it going to come from Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart or Adelaide? Are people who live in South Australia going to have listen to New South Wales state news, watch Stateline from New South Wales and watch the Rugby League during peak viewing times? Are they going to have to listen to New South Wales weather reports, or Melbourne weather reports? I gather they are all going to get the same one. We have been told that the service for South Australians—and you will be interested in this, Mr Deputy Speaker Ramsey—will be based on Sydney time. That of itself seems to me to be an inconvenience that ought to be avoided. I ask in particular: where is the signal going to come from and how many viewers are not going to be able to watch programs of interest to their state?
It seems that the high-definition service is all going to come from a single satellite—in other words, even people in the Northern Territory and Queensland will get the Sydney programs. Bear in mind that, at the present time, Queenslanders who want to watch ABC high-definition news get the Sydney news—not Brisbane news but Sydney news. The ABC has not bothered to provide any high-definition programming sourced from Queensland, so Queenslanders only get Sydney programming. Is that what country people have to look forward to in the future? The government has acknowledged that there is an issue with regional news services, and everyone wants to get their own local news service.
I have some more questions about this dedicated news channel. Will all local news services be available on the channel? Some areas have more than one regional news—will they all be available? Will people be able to get the news services from other towns? Will they get the local advertising and the local special programs as well, or just the news? And what about Western Australians—have they been left out of this local news service altogether? I think those are perfectly reasonable questions for us to ask.
I have also mentioned the issue of when the satellite service will be operational. It is only 48 days away from the closure of analog television in Mildura. Mildura viewers will have to have satellites and set-top boxes installed and operating by 30 June, but I have been informed recently that the set-top boxes are only going to be arriving from China on 14 June. So the people of Mildura are only going to have from 14 June to 30 June to find out whether they need a set-top box and, if they do, to get it installed. Do we know whether the set-top boxes are even going to work? Apparently it was only quite recently that decisions were made about the technology. I have heard that regional channels still do not quite know how they are going to get their news signal to the satellite and how that is going to be funded and organised.
It is quite clear that the government does not understand what is actually going on. I call on the minister tonight to give a commitment that the government will not turn off the analog television signals in Mildura or, for that matter, anywhere else in Australia until there is adequate coverage for all existing viewers. You cannot treat country people with such disdain as to simply close down their television signal without any option. To close down the analog signal in Mildura on 30 June is no longer realistic. People have had no opportunity to install set-top boxes, and they are not going to get that opportunity until just a few days before their signal is turned off. That is simply not good enough.
The reality is that television services are important to communities and we want to know how they will work. I do not think it is satisfactory for there to be just a single high-definition service for the whole of Australia. I do not think it is satisfactory that regional communities will have Sydney advertisements and Sydney programs transmitted to them. If someone is interested in buying a Holden, they do not want to know about the Holden dealer in Sydney; they want to know about the one in their own town. People want to know about the services that are available in their state and, in particular, their regional community. It seems that localism will be one of the casualties of this new satellite service.
I accept that there may be some people—although the government has, again, not made it clear—that will get services for the first time as a result of this service. I am not sure whether people in city areas, in high-rise buildings et cetera, that have trouble with the digital signal are going to be able to access the satellite or whether only those communities that are on black spot transmitters that are not going to be upgraded. It would be far better if they upgraded the black spot transmitters.
This must be the first time a Labor government has done something first in the country and left the cities till later. Labor usually gives the good things to the cities first. This is one thing that they are delivering in the country, and for that reason I doubt it is a good thing. I think there are going to be serious problems, and the government has not owned up to them. I look forward to the minister’s response to the questions I have asked. I hope that there will be a seamless transition, but I am not at this stage confident, and that is why I support the amendment moved by the opposition. We call on the government to ensure that no one loses their signal over this changeover. (Time expired)
Conversion to digital television is the most fundamental change in broadcasting since the introduction of television more than 50 years ago. It will give viewers access to multiple high-definition channels and an expanded range of programs. I know that the coalition broadly supports this because we did a lot of work on this in previous years when in government. However, I would echo many of the comments of the member for Wide Bay, particularly in relation to regional and rural areas, because I represent many of those areas and outer suburban areas that we continue to have concerns about. We continue to have concerns about them because it appears this is another ham-fisted rollout by the federal government. I have a number of concerns to raise.
I was interested to read the press release of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy. He said:
All television viewers in Australia will now have access to the full range of free-to-air digital television services as a result of the new satellite television service.
I think there is some doubt about whether all Australians will have access to this service. That definitely remains to be seen. Certainly, a lot of people who are knowledgeable in this area doubt that it is a possibility.
In my electorate, I constantly echo the concerns of some of the of the member for Wide Bay’s constituents—the people of Lancelin and Northam, for example. Northam is only an hour and a half from the city and Lancelin is a couple of hours from the city. These are people who do not have postal services. They do not have newspaper deliveries. They do not get mobile reception and they do not get television reception. So they are cut-off. In a modern world and in a country like Australia, I think that is totally unacceptable. I have spoken in this place before about it and I have written to the minister about it.
In 1998, the foundations for digital television were laid for Australia to enter this realm of digital television, under the former coalition government, when the parliament passed legislation to establish the basic framework for conversion to digital television. Further legislation followed in 2000, setting out the operating rules, and more basic implementation legislation has progressed since. The progressive rollout of digital TV has already occurred, with many metropolitan viewers able to enjoy its benefits, but the final switchover is due to occur for Western Australia on 21 December 2013, at which point standard analogue reception will no longer be available. It is a long time to wait. As I said, a lot of my constituents do not have access to reasonable television reception now and it appears they will be waiting for at least another three years, if they get it at all.
Currently, the TV signals most people receive are from terrestrial towers. To broadcast digital TV, those towers need to be upgraded by the network providers; however, not all of these towers are actually being upgraded. There are 698 terrestrial tower sites around the country and I understand only 87 of those have been identified for upgrading. That is only 12.5 per cent. Advances in television antennae reception and the strength of the digital TV signal mean that the signal coverage will be larger than that of the analogue signal. However, there will be a large number of people who will not have the benefit of a terrestrial signal. Affected individuals will be in outlying suburban, rural and remote areas, for the most part—a description that applies to most of my electorate.
Instead, the government will fund the provision of a satellite service to broadcast digital TV. With a country as expansive as Australia, some sort of satellite signal to service black spots would be inevitable. However, the scope and cost of that should not be exorbitant. A cost-effective balance should be struck, but it appears that the government has decided to allot considerable funds and rollout the system without a simple cost-benefit analysis, much like the NBN. Simple, prudent cost investigations have taken a back seat. It is interesting to read the Senate inquiry’s report on this.
This fact has not been lost on industry. In its submission to the Senate inquiry on this legislation, which has just been completed, AUSTAR argued that it was surprised by preliminary funding estimates to support this project. The government has estimated its costs for funding the satellite network to be $40 million per annum, for the potential benefit of up to 247,000 households across Australia. Broadcast Australia, which is a commercial owner and operator of approximately 600 terrestrial broadcast facilities, questioned whether the appropriate balance has been reached by the government between the conversion of existing terrestrial sites to digital and satellite platform. Broadcast Australia’s submission argued:
… it is overwhelmingly in TV viewers’ interests that digital free to air TV services potentially available to homes from the satellite are made available through local digital terrestrial transmission facilities—unless it can be demonstrated it is simply not cost effective to provide the full range of terrestrial digital transmission facilities to achieve this.
The committee questioned officers from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy about what other solutions to digital TV black spots had been considered, and about the comparative costs and benefits of alternative options. Mr Andy Townsend, Deputy Secretary of Broadcasting and Digital Switchover, responded:
The government certainly looked at a number of different ways of meeting the problem of signal deficiencies. The satellite solution that has been formulated has been designed to provide the maximum number of services to people in the most cost-efficient way.
Note that he does not say all people. However, the department declined to provide the Senate committee with details of the models considered. If multiple models were considered, where is the proof? Surely, it would simply be a matter of producing the material on the models? We have been left in the dark. Broadcast Australia said:
[we are] unaware of … any cost benefit study that has underpinned the decision by government to spend $40 million per annum in 2010 dollar terms for each of the next 4 years … to provide the full range of so called Freeview services from the new satellite platform, compared with rolling out a greater number of digital terrestrial transmission TV facilities.
The Broadcast Australia representative also stated:
The second point I would like to emphasise is that we are not aware of how the balance between terrestrial and satellite has been arrived at by the government.
Senator Conroy’s Budget 2010 Digital Switchover press release champions the fact that the government has allotted $375.4 million over 12 years to provide transmission of digital free-to-air television services from the new satellite platform, but the department will not show the modelling used to demonstrate that this is the most cost-effective figure. To remedy the signal deficiency, individuals who cannot receive terrestrial signal will now be forced to purchase a satellite kit. This raises a number of concerns. How much will the individual have to pay to get the equipment and what is the cost of installation? And when will people know that they must purchase a satellite dish?
The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy estimates that households should pay, on average, $650 for equipment and installation. The government will provide $400 in compensation to affected households and $550 to those in very remote areas. Already, that is $250 in out-of-pocket expenses. If the estimates of $280 for installation and $100 for the satellite dish are correct, I would caution that these figures may underestimate the actual cost. Some vendors are selling the necessary equipment for $600 plus installation, and regional areas are likely to experience much higher installation costs. I fear that the actual out-of-pocket expenses to householders will be much more than that estimated.
Another issue which could end up costing many regional and rural constituents unnecessarily is the lack of certainty over which method of digital reception—terrestrial or satellite—will be available. This is particularly concerning for residents near terrestrial towers which will not be upgraded but may be on the edge of the signal of other upgraded towers. In its submission to the Senate inquiry, Broadcast Australia confirmed this problem and cautioned that residents cannot be certain they will be within the new digital coverage footprint. They said:
Until the full suite of digital services are available at those sites, you cannot make an informed decision as to whether you are going to have digital terrestrial or you will need to buy, at a significantly higher cost, digital direct-to-home satellite services.
Essentially, viewers will not know until they attempt to switch to digital or the analog signal is switched off and they get a black screen—as the member for Wide Bay said and as the minister admitted at Senate estimates. This is the exact problem faced by one of my constituents. A resident in Northam, Western Australia, just a 90-minute drive east of Perth, wrote to me frustrated at the costs he has incurred to receive an intermittent digital TV signal. Spurred by advertising about making the switch, he did so. All of the digital stations he watches have broken, pixelated pictures or even a loss of signal. One television station he watches loses signal 70 per cent of the time. The constituent is frustrated that, just as he gets into a program, the signal is lost. Apart from being simply annoying, it also means that he misses out on his relaxation time. He consulted two independent antenna installation providers, who both assured him that the signal was at fault. I represented my constituent’s concern to the minister. In return correspondence, the minister’s adviser replied:
It appears that the constituent may be receiving fortuitous digital television reception form the broadcast site at Toodyay, which is located approximately 20 kilometres west of Northam. However, this is a low-powered site established to provide coverage only to viewers in Toodyay. The constituent is located outside of the coverage area for this site and this may be the reason why he has intermittent loss of signal and poor digital reception for the commercial free-to-air digital channels.
The letter goes on to suggest that, in the interim, ‘the options are to access analog reception from the Northam site, or possibly to continue to receive the poor digital signals from the site at Toodyay’. So the options available at the moment, after the constituent has spent a considerable amount of money to upgrade to receive digital television reception, are a poor digital signal that is not worth watching or no digital TV, reverting to what he had before.
This is a very unsatisfactory situation for many constituents in my electorate. This problem will be faced by many more constituents around the country unless the government can more effectively communicate who will require a satellite system. That process should start now, as people are switching, not six months before the official turn-off date at the end of 2013. By that time, many will have found out, at their own expense, that they are required to pay even more money to access free-to-air television. Even those who currently have a set-top box and satellite dish to receive pay TV will have to pay more if they require a satellite service. This issue was raised by Ms Heap, from AUSTAR, at the Senate inquiry. She commented:
We do not want to inconvenience AUSTAR’s existing customers by them having to pay for a second satellite dish and set-top box, when our set-top box should be completely capable of delivering that to them today.
Mr Andy Townend, Deputy Secretary, Broadcasting and Digital Switchover, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, agreed that the new satellite service would create a situation where householders who wished to receive the full range of services available on the new satellite network, in addition to subscription TV, would require two satellite dishes and two set-top boxes. In an advanced economy, with cutting edge technology, it truly is laughable that a person should have to purchase two separate set-top boxes and two separate satellite dishes when either system should be capable. I find it incredible that such a situation has been able to prevail.
But the department obviously does not see the extra cost, the extra burden and the illogical nature of this to be a problem. Mr Townend argued that having the two necessary sets of equipment ‘would be the consumers’ choice, and that would be a completely separate matter’. People in outlying rural and regional areas do not deserve to be the victims of their geography. The need for a satellite service is acknowledged, but it should not come at an unnecessary cost to individuals. It is obvious that the government has not put in the appropriate amount of effort to identify those who would be disadvantaged by not upgrading more terrestrial towers. There is no evidence of costings or modellings or a simple cost-benefit analysis. This is a continuing feature of the current government and especially this particular department. With $375.4 million being allotted to the digital TV switch-over, the Australian public deserve to be satisfied that they are getting value for money and the TV signal that their hard-earned tax dollars are paying for.
To further emphasise some of the concerns, I quote from the comments of the coalition senators in the report of the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee which has just been released:
Uncertainty—terrestrial or satellite?
Coalition Senators are concerned at the lack of certainty for rural and regional households who may not know which methods of digital reception will be available prior to switchover.
This will be of particular concern to residents in the vicinity of the forty four self-help towers identified as likely to be made redundant by the extended footprint of other upgraded towers nearby.
They go on to raise a number of concerns. In their concluding remarks, Senator Fisher and Senator Troeth, who signed off on this, said:
In the absence of sufficient evidence or cost-benefit analysis, Coalition Senators remain concerned that the use of a satellite broadcasting service may not be the most satisfactory or appropriate or cost-efficient means to address the issue of digital television black spots.
We worry about potentially significant out-of-pocket preparatory expenses for rural and regional digital reception, exacerbated by uncertainty about whether they will access digital TV from terrestrial or satellite means.
It finishes by saying:
Coalition Senators consider that television viewers in remote, rural and outer-metropolitan areas deserve equivalent access to equivalent television services as their city counterparts, ideally through upgraded terrestrial services where practicable.
On behalf of many of the people of Pearce who, I said, do not have postal delivery services, who do not have access to mobile phone cover, who are denied access to television services and who also do not have local newspapers delivered, I raise the concern that this situation may not improve in the short term for them.
I support the second reading amendment which has been moved by the member for Casey, particularly that which ‘warns the government that its failures to date risks leaving some Australians without television reception’.
My contribution to the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 will be short. My concern has been the way the government has been handling the digital television space and how wrong some of the decisions have been. If you have a service now and the government is wanting to change from an analog to a digital service, surely the policy should be that there be no cost to the viewer. Why should the viewer who has a service have to bear the cost of changing to a different type of delivery when people in metropolitan cities and in the range of normal terrestrial television towers do not have to pay a single cent? Surely that should be the public policy position.
It is bizarre that the government is proposing a system where people will be left out from a service that they currently have or they will have to pay to get back their service to replace the one that they currently have. That is surely wrong. It is surely a failure of public policy on behalf of the government. These services that are affected are generally in regional or remote Australia. So surely it sends the message that we do not count, that we are second-class citizens and that the government is happy to look after people in the metro areas or the regional areas where there is high-power local television transmitters but that those who are outside that area in the more remote areas or rural areas the government does not care about. That is what is being said.
I give the House a particular instance of another failure of public policy in the digital area, if I may, and that is in relation to high-definition television. High-definition television came to Australia with a huge fanfare. Sets became available and the networks lauded the quality of the pictures that could be produced. There is no doubt with the 1080i that you can produce magnificent pictures. But what has happened since? There is less and less HD content available. Yes, there is some on sport. Even the ABC has dropped its HD channel. Australia is moving against the rest of the world in the delivery of high-definition television.
Very recently I met with the BBC’s head of HDTV at the BBC Television Centre at White City in London. She confirmed to me that HD is moving very fast, even through the recession in England. She confirmed to me that, in general, people watch more television when they have got an HD service; but, more than that, she confirmed to me that standard definition production is becoming obsolete. There is no further call for it. But Australia is going in the other direction: we are producing all these standard definition channels, which is basically code for ‘more crap on television’. Yes, Anthony, you can spell that! I think we all understand that that is the situation.
I call on the minister, Senator Conroy, to have a look at this. Why is he allowing Australian television broadcasters to move away from broadcasting the best quality television that the world can deliver when the rest of the world is demanding that and is receiving it? I ask the minister to look at that as well as this public policy of making people in regional and remote Australia pay for a service that they already have. In the interests of my good friend the member for Grayndler, I will conclude. I thank the House for its time tonight.
I thank honourable members for their contributions to the debate on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. Measures in the bill address areas of digital television signal deficiency, or black spots, so that every Australian has access to all free-to-air commercial and national television services. The bill was referred to the Senate Environment Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee, which recommended that the Senate support this bill.
On 11 May 2010, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy announced that the government would provide $375.4 million over 12 years to fund a new satellite service to bring digital television to all Australians who cannot adequately receive terrestrial digital television services. This bill introduces the legislative framework to deliver the new satellite service to eligible viewers in three new commercial television licence areas. Initially, only existing remote commercial television broadcasting licensees will be eligible to apply for the licences. The new satellite service is intended to deliver the same number of digital commercial and national television channels to these areas as is currently available in metropolitan markets. The service will also provide access to local news sourced from regional commercial television broadcasters operating in their satellite licence area.
This bill also amends the Copyright Act 1968 to provide a statutory licensing scheme to ensure relevant broadcasters fulfil their obligations to provide content to the satellite broadcasting service licensees without the potential for copyright infringement. Satellite service licensees will need to comply with the same program standards and captioning requirements that apply to terrestrial commercial television broadcasting licensees. But the bill does take into account the regulatory and technical complexities of broadcasting across time zones. Ensuring the regulation of terrestrial transmission of antisiphoning events also applies to services provided by satellite service licensees.
The bill introduces measures to allow all commercial free-to-air digital television services, including digital multichannels such as GO!, 7TWO and ONE HD, to be provided to Australians no matter where they live. Broadcasting licensees in underserved areas will have the same opportunities as other regional and metropolitan broadcasting licensees to provide a full suite of digital television services in their licence area through provisions to allow commercial broadcasters in regional South Australia, Griffith and Broken Hill to apply for a third digital-only commercial television licence.
Satellite services will ensure all Australians receive the full range of commercial and national television broadcasting services. While most Australians receive their television services from the network broadcasters’ own transmission towers and will continue to do so after the switch-over, it is simply not feasible to use terrestrial coverage to serve all Australians. Some services currently using the Aurora platform raised concerns about the new satellite service for commercial and national television. This bill does not prevent services like NITV or the Rural Health Education Foundation from negotiating access to the new platform, as they did with the Aurora platform.
This bill dramatically improves the choice and quality of digital television services for viewers by establishing a regulatory framework for broadcasters to offer an equivalent range of commercial and national digital television services to their viewers through terrestrial transmission or via satellite. I commend the bill to the House.
Question put:
That the words proposed to be omitted (Mr Anthony Smith’s amendment) stand part of the question.
Original question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
by leave—I move:
That this bill be now read a third time.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a third time.
Bill returned from the Senate with amendments.
Ordered that the amendments be considered immediately.
Senate’s amendments—
(1) Schedule 1, item 8, page 4 (lines 8 to 12), omit the item.
(2) Schedule 1, items 11 and 12, page 4 (line 18) to page 5 (line 13), omit the items, substitute:
11 At the end of section 24
Add:
(3) Paragraph (2)(b) does not apply if:
(a) the foreign material is a business record; and
(b) the only reason why the evidence would not have been admissible had it been adduced from the person at the hearing is that an Australian law relating to hearsay evidence (however described) would have applied to the evidence.
(4) For the purpose of determining whether foreign material is a business record, and may be adduced as evidence, the court may:
(a) examine the foreign material; and
(b) draw any reasonable inference from the form and contents of the foreign material as well as from any other matters from which inferences may properly be drawn.
(3) Schedule 1, item 15, page 6 (line 3), omit “amendments made by items 7 and 8”, substitute “amendment made by item 7”.
(4) Schedule 1, item 15, page 6 (line 4), omit “amendments made by items 7 and 8 of this Schedule apply”, substitute “amendment made by item 7 of this Schedule applies”.
(5) Schedule 1, item 17, page 6 (lines 11 to 15), omit the item.
I move:
That the amendments be agreed to.
In order to facilitate the passage of the Foreign Evidence Amendment Bill 2008, I say that this is implementing the recommendations of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee and addresses the concerns that were raised by the stakeholders during the Senate committee processes. I commend the amendments to the House.
Question agreed to.
I move:
That business intervening before order of the day No. 8, government business, be postponed until the a later hour this day.
Question agreed to.
Consideration resumed from 11 May.
I move:
That this bill be now read a second time.
Sitting suspended from 6.01 pm to 7.30 pm
Of the three budgets delivered by the Rudd government, this is the most political, the least believable and the most damaging to Australia’s long-term future. It is a typical old-fashioned tax-and-spend Labor budget that also features all the debt and deficit that can be expected from Labor, only covered up by clever accounting and a great big new tax on mining. If the government’s revenues really had exceeded expenditure, it would be entitled to claim prudent economic management. What the government has actually delivered, though, as opposed to talk about, is a $57 billion deficit this year—the biggest ever. What the government is actually doing now, as opposed to promising in three years time, is borrowing $700 million every week till then.
Brazenly, the government wants credit for a surplus that does not yet exist and that it is unlikely ever to achieve. The surplus that it says will happen in three years time is based on increased taxes and on the growth that those increased taxes will almost certainly strangle. That $1 billion surplus is roughly the amount required to fix the pink batts program that has been linked to four deaths; the amount required to pay for the extra detention measures needed because the government has lost control of our borders or the blow-out in the computers in schools program. It is roughly half the blow-out in the school hall program. Does anybody seriously believe, based on this record, that a re-elected Rudd government could avoid another surplus-shattering disaster some time in the next three years?
It took the last Labor government 13 years to accumulate $96 billion of debt but this Labor government expects to do the same in less than half the time. It took a change of government to get Labor’s debt paid off last time and, once again, the quickest way to get rid of this debt will be to get rid of this government. Everyone wants our country to succeed and many still hope that the Prime Minister is up to the job but there is always this question: why should his latest promises turn out to be more credible than the ones that he has already broken? Amidst all the self-congratulation about how historic this budget is, you almost expected the Prime Minister to declare that fixing the deficit is the greatest moral challenge of our time.
In his 2007 budget reply, the then opposition leader, now the Prime Minister, said ‘we must remain committed to keeping taxes low’. But he has just increased the cigarette tax and added a new mining tax to the 125 separate taxes that Australia already has. He said then that a Labor government would withdraw an existing regulation for every new one imposed on business. In office, he has introduced 9,997 new or amended regulations and withdrawn just 52. He said then that he would pursue ‘a conservative fiscal policy’ but proceeded to unleash the greatest spending spree in Australian history, turning a $20 billion surplus into a $27 billion deficit in just one year. The Prime Minister said then that he was committed to:
…working families hit hard by the cost of mortgage repayments, food prices, petrol … and childcare …
His spendathon has contributed to six interest rate rises in the last eight months, with housing affordability at record lows and a $4½ thousand a year hit on families with a $300,000 mortgage. He has abandoned his fuel watch and grocery watch schemes, though prices keep going up, and he has dumped his childcare commitment after building less than 40 of the promised 260 centres. The Prime Minister said then that the:
… economic cost of not acting—
on climate change—
will be far greater than the cost of taking early and responsible action.
As recently as November he said that to delay action would be ‘absolute political cowardice’ and an ‘absolute failure of leadership’. But he now will not do anything about it until sometime next term for fear of fighting an election on tax. Instead, there is a different great big new tax that will now be the issue on which this election turns.
Mr Rudd observed in 2007 that ‘mining booms don’t last forever’. They certainly do not when governments threaten to kill them with a new tax that will eventually choke the goose that has laid the golden egg for Australia. Despite its name, this is not a normal tax on superprofits; it is a supertax on normal profits. Every company extracting non-renewable resources will have to pay an additional 40 per cent tax, as well as normal tax, once its rate of return on capital exceeds the long-term bond rate or about six per cent.
The new tax applies to the extraction of phosphate, sand and stone as well as to the extraction of minerals, oil and gas. It is a tax on small quarries as well as big miners. It will impact on the price of fertilisers and building materials as well as on the price of energy. It is a triple whammy tax on the jobs of half a million mining and related workers, on the superannuation of millions of retirees with mining shares and on the cost of living of everyone who uses power. It will increase the effective rate of tax on all mining from 44 to 57 per cent. Already, Australia heavily taxes the extraction of resources. The proposed new 57 per cent rate would make Australian taxes the highest in the world.
Isn’t it amazing how quickly BHP and Rio Tinto have gone from being lionised to being demonised? The government says that this new tax is needed to stop foreign companies ripping us off. In fact, there would be no wealth to redistribute if those same companies and their shareholders had not invested serious money to turn untapped resources into national wealth. Imposing a prohibitive rate of tax on returns above six per cent sends an implicit message to businesspeople that they would be better off putting their money in the bank. After all, who would bother to take the risks of investing in actual production if there is an extra penalty on success?
This great big new tax has already put all investment decisions on hold. Rio has said that its investment in Australia will be reviewed. Xstrata has indefinitely suspended new exploration in North Queensland. BHP has raised doubts about new coalmines in Queensland, iron ore and uranium mines in Western Australia and, particularly, the $22 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia.
It is hard to overstate the seriousness of this. A 40 per cent tax on so-called superprofits coupled with a 40 per cent government rebate for losses penalises good projects and rewards the duds. Perversely, it gives an unfair advantage to projects backed by foreign sovereign wealth funds, which will not need to satisfy normal commercial risk assessment. These projects could then transfer price profits out of Australia and sell ventures at a loss, subsidised by Australian taxpayers. By this budget’s bizarre logic, putting a new tax on cigarettes means less smoking, but putting a new tax on resources somehow means more mining. If this tax is going to be so good for the resources sector, why aren’t other industries lining up to beg for a superprofits tax to be imposed on them?
The budget formula assumes the best terms of trade in 60 years, it assumes that higher taxes have no impact on investment, it assumes a four per cent growth rate and—presto!—the deficit disappears three years early without the need for any hard decisions. If only company promoters could get away with such a prospectus. Yet, if growth really is such a sure thing, why does the government also keep warning that ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’? A responsible government would understand that it is better to reform your way through hard times than to try to spend your way out of them.
Even the worthy-sounding measures in this budget are unlikely to make much difference to the real problems that people face. The government’s savings cameo, for instance, has a person earning just $40,000 a year putting aside $50 a week for several years to generate $20,000 in savings bank deposits for just a $177 a year tax break. No-one with any idea of the cost pressures on low-income earners would find this very plausible. More GP superclinics sounds like a good idea too, except that 36 were promised at the last election and only two are actually operational. In fact, fee for service under Medicare has already produced hundreds of private sector equivalents of these superclinics and they do not deserve unfair competition from government funded rivals. Of course there should be an electronic health record, but hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent to make this a reality and no more should be spent until it is certain that we are not throwing good money after bad. Of course there should be more defence spending, but not to produce 1,500 more ‘suits’ and 500 fewer ‘uniforms’. In these respects, this budget is more about looking good than doing good.
Before the last election, Labor promised to eliminate wasteful government advertising. Instead, it has eliminated Auditor-General scrutiny of government ad campaigns and has just put aside $74 million for taxpayer funded pre-election blitzes about climate change, the National Broadband Network and hospital reform—all the things it has not done much about. Then there is the dishonesty of the government’s sales pitch. The mining tax was not a recommendation of the Henry review. The Henry review recommended a replacement tax, not an additional one, and an offsetting five per cent, not a two per cent, cut in corporate tax. The mining tax does not fund the increased superannuation. That is funded by a separate three per cent levy on payroll that will be an additional cost to business or forgone wages to workers. As well, the mining tax is not an onshore version of the existing resource rent tax on offshore projects. That tax substituted for state royalties which do not apply offshore, it was prospective, not retrospective, and it only cuts in after a much higher rate of return. If a six per cent rate of return is a ‘superprofit’ for mining, how can it also be just ‘modest’ for the government owned National Broadband Network, as one minister claimed—and what other unpopular industries might be the next target of these supertaxes?
It is true that Australia has so far survived the global financial crisis in better shape than almost any other nation. The issue is whether this success is due to the spending spree of the current government or to the reforms of previous ones; whether it is due to the government’s extraordinary management skills or to our resource exports to China. The question only has to be asked for the answer to be obvious.
There is a low road and a high road to achieving a surplus. The high road is expenditure restraint and economic reform. The low road is increasing taxes and making assumptions about economic growth. These budget projections depend more on the success of the Chinese economy than they do on any decisions that the Rudd government has taken. In opposition, Labor often accused the then government of riding the China boom. But say what you like about John Howard and Peter Costello, they did not shirk the hard reform and they did not need to hit miners with an extra tax to generate a surplus. Their surpluses were the result of tough decisions, not new taxes. Let me make this absolutely crystal clear: the coalition will oppose the mining tax in opposition and we will rescind it in government.
I have a particular message for the Prime Minister, and it is one he should be very familiar with: this reckless spending must stop. Until Labor’s debt and deficit has been dealt with, it is not hardness of heart but economic prudence to say ‘no’ even to good causes. In other circumstances you could fund a company tax cut and depreciation allowances for small business but not at the cost of an economy-stopping tax on our most successful export industry. It would be robbing Peter to pay Paul and playing to the kind of class war envy that Mr Rudd’s Labor predecessors have mostly been too honourable to exploit.
It is my goal to return the budget to surplus at least as quickly as the government proposes, but not in the lazy way through a great big new tax that threatens miners’ jobs, retirees’ incomes and everybody’s standard of living. Fostering a savings culture is important but the government must come clean about whether higher superannuation contributions are to be paid for out of workers’ pockets or by their employers. If it means an extra three per cent payroll tax on every business, that is a $20 billion a year handbrake on economic growth. The coalition will spend more on health but only where we are certain that extra spending will produce extra services. Improved Medicare rebates, for instance, would be a better way to deliver improved primary care than phantom clinics.
I am very happy to let the Labor Party win any race to raise taxes because taxes and spending will always be lower and government will always be smaller under the coalition. That should also mean that economic growth will be higher and that the size of government will always be about one per cent of GDP less under the coalition. For nine years, I was a minister in a government that delivered lower taxes and higher surpluses because it did not shirk the hard decisions needed to reform our economy. I was part of a government that understood that you cannot spend what you have not got and you can only create real wealth by hard work.
I know, as anyone who has spent time in remote Indigenous townships should, that you cannot have much of a community without an economy to sustain it. So the first principle of government should be, ‘Do no harm’. The coalition wants lower taxes, smaller government and greater freedom. It wants a fair go for families and respect for institutions that have stood the test of time. These instincts are deep in our DNA. The coalition wants an Australia that is prosperous, united and respected, where families’ choices are taken seriously by government; where pensioners and carers are regarded as people who have served and are serving our country; where officials understand that the public are their masters, not their servants; where migrants are welcome but borders are secure; where people’s taxes give them decent hospitals and proper highways; and where the armed forces represent our country’s best values. But we also know that government cannot solve all problems immediately and that overpromising and underdelivering politicians are the cause of so much cynicism about public life.
A good cause never justifies wasting money. On coming to government the coalition would immediately restructure the school hall program and provide further funding to school communities, not to state bureaucracies. Parents are normally better than bureaucrats at getting value for their school. The latest data suggests that, had parents been distributing the money, they could have obtained almost twice the build for half the spend.
Likewise, the coalition will not go ahead with the National Broadband Network, avoiding the creation of a $43 billion white elephant. Better access to faster broadband should not mean a new nationalised telecommunications monopoly and Telstra shareholders should not have their assets subject to coerced acquisition.
We all know that the former government’s workplace reforms went too far but they also helped to create more than two million new jobs, lift real wages by 20 per cent and more than double net household wealth between 1996 and 2007. The coalition will seek to take the unfair dismissal monkey off the back of small businesses, which are more like families than institutions. We will make Labor’s transitional employment agreements less transitional and Labor’s individual flexibility agreements more flexible because we have faith in Australian workers who are not as easily pushed around and exploited as the ACTU’s dishonest ad campaign is already making out.
If elected, we will be faithful to the liberal conservative tradition. But we will strive to be better than the former government, not just a copy of it. We will be a contemporary government, not just a conservative one. For starters, there will finally be a fair dinkum paid parental leave scheme which gives women six months leave at their full pay. That is real time and real money to care for their newborns because parental leave is a workplace entitlement, not a welfare one. It should be paid for by business, but not in ways which could lead to discrimination against female staff or hurt small business. Only the Labor Party habitually increases businesses’ cost burden and if the current government had not completely blown the surplus it would not be necessary, but all benefits have to be paid for and the fairest way to have a paid parental leave scheme anytime soon is through a modest levy on companies’ taxable income over $5 million a year. It will be a universal scheme but, importantly, will not mean any extra costs for small business.
The coalition’s paid parental leave policy is good for women who will finally have more realistic choices to combine work and family. It is good for all those families that need two incomes to pay the mortgage, helping them when they are most financially vulnerable. And it is good for the economy, which will not lose some of the best workers because they cannot do justice both to their jobs and to their families. More freedom for mothers to work, if that is their choice, is a productivity measure not just a social reform.
I want to make it very clear: the coalition will fight Mr Rudd’s means test on the private health insurance rebate because it is yet another one of his broken promises and because strong private hospitals take the pressure off public waiting lists. It has previously been calculated that every dollar the government spends on the rebate brings more private money into health care, saving $2 that government would otherwise have to spend. As well, we will ensure that Medibank Private really is private by selling it and using the proceeds to reduce government debt.
Before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Rudd attacked what he called the ‘bloating’ of the federal bureaucracy, but has since added nearly 20,000 to the 258,000-strong Australian Public Service. To rein in spending, the coalition will introduce a two-year recruitment freeze to reduce public servant numbers through natural attrition. The freeze will apply on an agency-by-agency basis, but uniformed and frontline service positions including, for example, the Federal Police, Customs and quarantine, the Australian Defence Force and Centrelink customer service staff will be excluded. There will be no redundancies, but for two years 6,000 bureaucrats who retire or resign each year will not be replaced. This should deliver a modest reduction in public sector numbers without compromising essential services and save about $4 billion over the forward estimates. As well, the coalition would not proceed with the budget increase to the renewable energy future fund and will cut government advertising by 25 per cent. These savings will pay for the coalition’s direct action on climate change policy, the Green Army and the retention of the current private health insurance rebate.
But there is more. Next Wednesday at the National Press Club the shadow Treasurer will announce further measures to reduce spending and to increase productivity, including a detailed response to the new spending and new savings proposals in the budget. The final costing and funding details of coalition policy will be released nearer the election, but I give people this assurance: all our policies will be fully costed and fully funded because the Australian people are entitled to reassurance that the alternative government’s promises are responsible and achievable.
The coalition has changed over the past 2½ years. We have heeded the lessons of defeat. We have learnt from our mistakes. We know, unlike our opponents, that governments should not ignore expert advice about the lethal dangers of their programs, they should not decide to change the health system without taking the premiers into their confidence, and they should not decide, with minimal Treasury input, to put a new tax on mining without first talking to the people whose livelihoods are on the line.
The government has changed too. It no longer seems to stand for many of the things it used to, like combating climate change and ending the blame game. Conversely, it does seem to stand for things that no-one would once have expected, like a chronic inability to take advice and a dangerous tendency to make policy on the run. In the end, it is a judgment about who can be trusted with the fate of the country that decides elections. This budget rests on the government’s new mining tax and the election should turn on this too. Australia’s future depends on the bulk carriers travelling to Asia just as surely as it once rode on the sheep’s back. This election, like the budget, will pit a party that thinks it is reasonable to make Australian miners the world’s highest taxed against one that does not. The die is cast. Neither side will retreat. The only way to stop this great big new tax on the people who saved us from the recession is to change the government.
Debate adjourned.
The following notices were given:
to move:
That this House:
to move:
That this House:
to move:
That this House reaffirms our pledge, first made in the year 2000, that we will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion are currently subjected.
I rise to table a petition by constituents from my electorate of Forrest who strongly oppose the Labor government’s decision to remove item numbers 50124 and 50125 from the Medicare Benefits Schedule.
The petition read as follows—
To the Honourable the Speaker and members of the House of Representatives
This petition of certain citizens of Australia draws to the attention of the House:
The thousands of Australians who, each year, have aspiration of, or injection into a joint.
We therefore ask the House to:
Review the Labor Government’s removal of item numbers 50124 and 50125 from the Medicare Benefits Schedule which provide for the aspiration of, or injection into a joint. Consideration should be taken into the impact the cutting of the Medicare rebate will have on the thousands of affected Australians.
from 365 citizens
Petition received.
This petition consists of 365 signatures from constituents who believe that removing these items from the MBS and forcing them to pay the full cost of the treatment is unfair to them. The Labor government is making patients needing such joint injections pay the full costs. During 2008-09 approximately 550,000 services were provided under the item numbers that have been removed. I understand that this was protested by the Australian Rheumatism Association, Arthritis Australia and many others. Principal petitioner and affected local Forrest resident, Kerry Prestage, said that joint injections play a crucial part in the treatment of her arthritis. Kerry has had to live with the effects of osteoarthritis every day since she was 28 years of age and these injections have been an important part of managing her condition. Kerry said:
With joint injections, patients have fewer complications and their joints are better preserved.
Patients using joint injection therapy do not have the permanent damaging effects on organs such as the liver, spleen, pancreas and stomach—something Ms Prestage has unfortunately fallen victim to. She does not want to see other osteoarthritis sufferers have the same problem. On that note, I would like to take this opportunity to make very special mention of Ms Prestage and to thank her for her very hard work and effort in collecting the signatures for this petition.
I note with great concern that there was frustration that this measure was taken by the government without consultation and without regard, in the view of my constituents, to the impact on them as patients—particularly senior Australians. The AMA, individual doctors, the Australasian College of Sports Physicians and the Australian Orthopaedic Association, as well as Arthritis Australia, all oppose this measure. In conclusion, like the many constituents in my electorate, I am urging the government to review the removal of these items from the Medicare Benefits Schedule.
This week being National Volunteer Week, I think it is important to acknowledge the efforts of more than five million Australians who volunteer and who are an essential part of our society—five million selfless Australians who help others in need across every sector of the community and every corner of the nation. I would also like to mention a particular group in my electorate that makes a significant contribution to the social fabric of the community through their volunteering. Last week I had the honour of the visiting the Narre Warren SES, led by Tim Howell, to meet four of the dedicated volunteers there. The unit has only been in existence for five years but has already made a massive contribution to the local community. The volunteers are not that different from many Australians—they come from all walks of life; they are retirees, nurses, graphic designers, tradesmen, mothers and fathers—but their contributions and personal sacrifices are extraordinary and for that they are extraordinary people and understated heroes, a very quintessential Australian trait.
As an example, in late August last year Melbourne was hit with one of its most savage storms in recent memory. Some areas of the city reported winds of up to 128 kilometres per hour. Blackouts and hail were widespread and falling trees caused significant damage. When events like this occur across the country, when trees fall across roads and on people’s homes, when storms damage roofs, when floodwaters overwhelm suburbs and streets, in the heartbreak of attempting to locate a missing loved one—someone’s mother or father, daughter or son—there is a special group of people to whom the community turns for help. This is the work that the dedicated volunteers that I just mentioned do. Volunteer services like the SES comprise thousands of Australian’s across every state who volunteer their time to help. They do not do this to be recognised in this place and they do not do it for money. Giving the State Emergency Service and its many volunteers some public recognition for their selfless efforts is in my view a small but important gesture we can make as members of parliament. It is particularly pertinent given that this week is National Volunteer Week.
During the storm I mentioned, the Narre Warren SES received over 260 calls in a 12-hour period, making them one of the busiest units in Victoria. That was only one incident. The unit’s commander, Tim Howell, and his 27 members work tirelessly to ensure this support can be provided 24 hours a day every single day of the year. It is worth remembering that, in order to perform this support, dedicated members are required to take time away from families, friends and jobs. It is also important to remember and pay tribute to the partners, children and other family members who tolerate and respect their lives being interrupted by the sound of SES issued pagers breaking the silence to notify members of someone in need. At this point in time I would also like to pay tribute to the many small businesses that give their staff the time to volunteer to undertake this great work. In this week acknowledging volunteers, I would like to make special mention of the Narre Warren SES and pay tribute on behalf of this place to the work that they do to keep our community safe. (Time expired)
On Friday, 7 May, I attended the opening of the performing arts centre at Wanneroo Senior High School. I would like to congratulate the principal, the staff and the school community for pushing that project through to success. Whilst there, we heard from the band and the choir of Wanneroo Senior High School. The skill and the standard of the band and choir is a testament to the performing arts program that has been revived in recent years by the principal. That was done in anticipation of this new performing arts centre. The performing arts program involves drama, dance and music programs. The performing arts centre itself, which has just recently been constructed, includes a dance studio, music rooms and recording studios. The heads of the choir department, Sheila Randall and John McPherson, did very well on the day. The head of the arts department is John Foreman and the head of the dance department is Kellie Thompson. They are all doing a fabulous job at Wanneroo Senior High School.
I have been informed that Lauren Tarver, who is in year 11, is currently short listed in the national competition for songwriting and is working on a songwriting project. Again, that just goes to show the strength of the performing arts program at Wanneroo Senior High. John McPherson was telling me on the day that the choir has been performing at the local shopping centre and will perform at a big competition at Burswood in the month ahead. I wish them all the best for that event. Apart from the performing arts, the Wanneroo Senior High School also has a very strong Australian Rules football program, which has been running for four years very successfully. They are a dominant force in Australian Rules football in the northern suburbs. Justin Burt is the head of that program and they are doing very well there.
I would like to take this opportunity to commend Pauline White, the principal of Wanneroo Senior High School, for her leadership, and Ros Ford and Grant Brown and all of the staff at Wanneroo Senior High for the direction that they are taking the school in. I believe it is a very positive direction and the positive influence of Wanneroo Senior High and the students from Wanneroo Senior High will be a great asset in the years ahead for the Wanneroo district.
When people come into our office looking for help they really do not care about the three different tiers of government; they just want help. They get pretty frustrated when you tell them that their problem is a local government or a state government issue and refer them off to the local state member or the local council. That is why I am organising an event that brings all government services—local, state and federal—together under one roof.
On 10 June between 6.30 pm and 8.30 pm 20 different government agencies will come together at the Bankstown Town Hall. They include Centrelink, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Medicare, the Australian Electoral Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, Housing New South Wales, New South Wales Police, New South Wales Fair Trading, New South Wales Health, New South Wales Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, Legal Aid, Bankstown Council, Bankstown TAFE as well as local organisations like the Bankstown Family Relationship Centre and a local financial counselling organisation, Creating Links. It is a government services one-stop shop. Doing this will help people who need help from a number of different government agencies—local, state and federal.
In Bankstown unemployment is double the national average. Teenage unemployment is 44 per cent. Over 11,000 people are on Newstart and youth allowance, 18,000 are on the age pension and 33,000 receive family assistance. Bankstown Centrelink makes 88,000 regular payments. Whether you are unemployed or doing it tough or living off a limited income, you are likely to require help from a number of different government agencies including Centrelink, Housing, TAFE or financial counselling support. That is why putting all of these services in the one place makes sense.
Bankstown is also one of the most culturally diverse places in Australia. It is home to people from 130 different countries who speak more than 60 different languages. As we know, navigating through government departments and through three different levels of government can be hard when English is your second language. That is why we will also have resources there on the day to help people from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
I particularly want to thank the Mayor of Bankstown and the state member for Bankstown for their help in putting this event together as well as all the different government departments and non-government organisations that are making themselves available to help the community after hours. It is a simple idea and, hopefully, it will do a lot of good.
For something completely different I am going to speak to the House about my concerns over the BER program. First of all, I congratulate Berwick Primary School council president Jason Barlow, Belgrave South Primary School council president Steve Bills, Berwick Lodge Primary School council president Richard Power, and I cannot forget the Principal of Berwick Lodge Primary School, Henry Grossek. They have been staunch in their outright rejection of the BER process and the rip-offs and rorts associated with it. An article by Kimberley Seedy titled ‘Belgrave South students left in the lurch by building delays’ said:
The school received $2.5 million for the project
… … …
Steve Bills—
the school council president—
said the entire school community was frustrated by the process. Construction was scheduled to start last December and five classes were moved from the site that will house the new centre.
It was only when we got the local media involved that all of a sudden we had a construction date. The article continued:
Mr Bills said he was angry new buildings had already been built at independent and private schools while they were still waiting. He said there was no flexibility in the building project, and there were many local builders who could have done the work quicker and cheaper.
An article by Jade Lawton of 6 May 2010 quoted Henry Grossek, who said:
… schools were getting poor quality “Bi-lo barns” at exorbitant prices.
At his school they were initially told to rip down a brick gymnasium that had wooden floors and replace it with concrete floors and something not as good.
I have the BER Update from the Berwick Primary School. They are absolutely outraged that their supposedly $2 million project is an absolute rip-off. I have seen what is being built for that money—remembering the school already has the land—and the building being constructed, I think, would cost no more than half a million dollars at best. We took the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, and the national media with us and I can say that everyone was shocked over what was happening there.
I do not know how many times we have to ask the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to intervene. Henry Grossek was assured in a meeting in May last year that the issues would be resolved. They are not being resolved in La Trobe electorate. Remember, this is parents’ taxes at work. It is a disgrace. The government must intervene and must get these situations urgently resolved.
I rise this morning to talk about a great news Building the Education Revolution project. Last Friday on 7 May at St Luke the Evangelist Primary School in my electorate of Deakin I was honoured, as was the school, to have the Prime Minister officially open the new discovery centre which consists of an IT centre and a library. There is a National School Pride project as well, which was also part of the opening.
The Principal of the school, Deb Egan, has been a wonderful person to deal with right through the project. She has been open about what the school wanted and about how we could achieve it.
A division having been called in the House of Representatives—
Sitting suspended from 9.46 am to 9.53 am
As I was saying before we were interrupted, Saint Luke the Evangelist Primary School held an official opening of the Primary Schools for the 21st Century and National School Pride projects undertaken at the school. Attending the opening last Friday was the parish priest, Father James Staunton, and nearly 200 students of the school—the whole school was there—along with just about all the parents and a large number of past students, which was especially pleasing to see.
The school was originally built in 1962 and, like so many schools in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, it had not had much work done on it since then. In fact, it is the typical old red brick building, with tar covering the ground—not much else. It is all square, very boring and very out of date. The school now has a new library and IT centre with networked computers, where we saw the students learning cybersafety. The school also has a new open-plan library and many other rooms, such as break-out rooms, which students can go to to do other activities during the day.
Looking out onto the school’s oval, we saw that most of it is now covered with astroturf. It has a running track, a volleyball court, a playing field and even a giant chessboard, where I think I lost, playing a game against the students—but it was an interesting experience. The school toilets and the staff amenities have been upgraded. The old square quadrangle that was previously covered in asphalt is now landscaped and has nice green mounds of astroturf for the kids to play on. This is a great improvement to the school and certainly makes a huge difference. I know that the school community is over the moon about it. I think it looks wonderful and is a great example of what can be done with funding from both the P21 and the National School Pride program.
There was also employment for local subbies and builders on the job, with up to 30 working at the school on any one day. Even more importantly, these are only two of the 24,000 BER projects that are currently running Australia wide, and many of those are in my electorate of Deakin. The developments at Blackburn Primary School and Burwood East Primary School will open very soon, and I look forward to being there on the day.
I rise this morning to acknowledge the many years service of Terry James Crowe to the Cronulla RSL Memorial Club. Terry just recently retired as president of the club, after more than 14 years in that position, and gave his final president’s report to the club AGM earlier this year. During his many years of service to the club Terry Crowe has held the positions of director, junior vice-president and senior vice-president. Terry steered the club through many challenges over his years of leadership, and his clear vision, strong leadership, reliable skills and passion for community service ensured that he passed on the club to the new president, Ian Bourke, in very, very good shape.
Last month I attended the Anzac Day dawn service in Cronulla, which was well attended once again, with thousands of people from right across the community, young and old, including many of the members, obviously, of the Cronulla RSL sub-branch, of which Terry was also a member and continues to remain active. Terry served with the Royal Australian Air Force during the Second World War, between 1943 and 1945, and he obtained the rank of flight sergeant flying instructor. A special presentation was recently held for Terry at the memorial club AGM in March and then again at the sub-branch general meeting in April. He was presented with a framed memorial plaque depicting his military service and an insert of him as memorial club president.
During his younger years Terry had a very successful career in business. He was employed as an accountant, then as a sales representative and finally as a manager. He went on to serve as the director of a number of local clubs, including the Miranda Builders and Businessmen’s Club and the Woolooware Golf Club, before becoming president of the Cronulla RSL Men’s Bowling Club.
I also understand Terry was also a sportsman who in his later years gave up his time to serve in an administrative role with a number of sports clubs. He has had an association with rugby union, rugby league and surf-lifesaving over the years.
Last September I rose in this place to mark the 65th anniversary of the Cronulla RSL Memorial Club and I paid tribute to Terry and his staff for the fine job they were doing for Cronulla and the wider Shire community. That challenge now passes on to Ian Bourke and his new board. Ian is also well respected in the community and I am sure will do an outstanding job with his new team of directors—both those who have come from the previous period and those who will now serve into the new period. An example, once again, on Anzac Day was the coffee and refreshments they provided at the memorial club—as well as shelter from that very adverse weather that morning—where veterans and families from around the Shire gathered together to pay tribute to those who fell in service of our country. The memorial club in Cronulla is a real icon of the Shire community. It has had great leaders. Terry has lived up to the fine tradition of those leaders and we thank him for his great service to our community.
I would like today to pay a special tribute to hardworking community champions in the Korean community in Sydney, many of whom live and work in my electorate in Bennelong. Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Austral-Korean Cultural Foundation’s Visual Art and Essay Writing Competition that was held on the banks of the Lane Cove River. It was an event that was exceptionally well organised by the foundation’s chair, Mr Phillip Min, and fellow foundation members. It was a lovely day and a beautiful setting and was clearly designed to bring out the muse among the contestants—the children and young teenagers who are keeping their Korean language skills alive and brushed up in Saturday morning classes.
Mr Byung-il Kim, President of the Korean Society of Sydney, was also there. Mr Kim is a passionate advocate for Korean Australians, and I see him regularly at community events.
This coming Saturday another champion of the Sydney Korean community, Agnes Shim, will host the annual Korean Women’s Day at St Anthony’s Church Hall in Marsfield. Agnes is president of the Sydney Korean Women’s Association, which was founded in 2002. Its aim is to promote a better understanding of Australian society and to provide much-needed settlement services to the Korean community. Agnes and her right-hand woman, Sue Yeon, also provide information and referrals, family support, employment counselling and much-needed disability services to many members of the community. They also provide a variety of recreational programs.
Importantly, the Sydney Korean Women’s Association is based on a commitment to social justice and to multiculturalism. As I told my Korean friends last Saturday, the concept of multiculturalism is fundamental to what I stand for and to my colleagues in the Australian Labor Party. We do not seek to debate it; we are proud supporters of the concept of multiculturalism. I have believed always that we must maintain a strong and vocal commitment to a harmonious society in which people care for their neighbours and a society that promotes understanding across the cultures. I thank these Korean community champions and others, like the wonderful Young Byun of the Christian Community Aid service in Eastwood, who not so long ago brought to parliament a group of vibrant Korean seniors. All of their work is greatly appreciated and I thank them for it.
I rise on behalf of 100,000 Landcare volunteers throughout Australia to ask a few simple questions of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. On Tuesday night the Treasurer announced an $11 million cut in spending on Landcare, as part of an $80 million cut to the Caring for our Country program. The first question is: why? Why does this government, which pretends to care about the environment, target the people who actually get out on the ground and undertake practical environmental work? Unlike the bureaucrats in Canberra and the ministers who back this decision, these volunteers are the people who are actually on the ground, getting their hands dirty and getting the job done. These are the practical environmentalists of our nation. They are out there doing revegetation work, erosion control and removal of weeds and assisting in pest animal control. The list of works they undertake is endless.
Cutting Landcare funding by $11 million is a kick in the guts to every volunteer who has given up a Sunday morning to plant trees, to remove weeds or to otherwise make a difference to the environment in their local community. Why was Landcare targeted when the same budget announced a $15 million climate change advertising campaign as part of more than $120 million for government advertising this year? It is so typical of the Prime Minister and this government: all talk and no action. They would rather run a propaganda campaign talking about the environment than support the practical and direct environmental action undertaken by our Landcare volunteers.
It is with a sense of enormous frustration that I make my comments here today. Landcare is an organisation that has enjoyed bipartisan support across its 20 years of history. It is an Australian icon, the envy of many nations throughout the world. It is an organisation that has stood the test of time. Landcare volunteers want to know if the current minister even tried to protect them from these budget cuts. Did he even put up a fight? Did he kick down the doors to the Treasurer’s office and demand a fair go for Landcare? Somehow I doubt it. Just as the Prime Minister is too gutless to govern, just as the Prime Minister runs away from a political fight and sends out junior ministers to announce any bad news, the minister for agriculture has form when it comes to Landcare. He has allowed the number of professional facilitator positions across the country to be slashed and now he has allowed an $11 million budget cut this financial year. The volunteers, like me, are frustrated. But they are also angry and disappointed.
The National Chair of Landcare, David Walker, has publicly criticised the decision and there will be many more critics to come—including people like Robert Belcher. Robert Belcher has chaired the Snowy River Interstate Landcare group in Victoria for 20 years. He told ABC Rural this week:
This is a continuation of the slide downwards and the money flow going through the natural resource sector is being cut and I agree with the NFF … we are poised and involved with stewardship type programs to try and encourage more sustainable farming exercises given the necessity to produce food now and into the future …
But the Rudd government doesn’t really understand rural communities and don’t think it understands the Landcare network and how powerful that can be.
That is the crux of this issue. This government does not understand regional communities. It does not understand Landcare. It would rather run advertising propaganda campaigns than support practical environmental action. I urge the 100,000 Landcare volunteers and the 4½ thousand Landcare groups to swamp their local newspapers with letters to the editor, to call talkback radio, to write to their local Labor MP and to send this government a message that they are sick of being taken for granted. (Time expired)
Since the bushfires of 7 February 2009, I have witnessed amazing stories of courage and generosity. Australians have donated $400 million to the bushfire appeal fund and, as well, volunteers have donated countless hours and have fed, clothed, housed and fenced people in the aftermath. The federal government has also expended in excess of $400 million on support and assistance and is working alongside the Brumby government and the Bushfire Recovery and Reconstruction Authority. I have met with many people who have shown a quiet but immense resilience as they have tried to rebuild their homes and their lives. These are people who have lived through more tragedy and heartbreak in the last 15 months than most of us, if we are lucky, will ever be touched by in a lifetime. These are people who have inspired and led others simply by the determination they have shown by starting again.
However, sadly, I wish to put on record today my concerns about the conduct of a small minority of private builders operating in bushfire-hit areas of Victoria. I believe there are some who are taking advantage of people in desperate circumstances, some who are forcing people to live in sheds for longer periods than they should whilst they wait for their houses to be rebuilt. I believe there are some builders—a minority, I hasten to add; there are many good stories—who are forcing people to go through another winter not in their new home. I believe there are some who are cynically ripping off their fellow Australians in a time of need. I believe that the taxes and the charity gifted to families is in danger of being fleeced by unscrupulous, exploitative operators.
I have now, in the last two weeks, uncovered too many stories of builders failing to complete work, of overcharging and of leaving valuable housing equipment on sites to deteriorate in the environment as they are unable to complete the promises that they made to their customers upon signing contracts. These emerging stories are too numerous to be ignored. Deliberately or perhaps just recklessly through an excess of optimism by the builder, people are facing difficult circumstances with a lack of money and unfortunately we are witnessing tactics which are bringing the building sector into disrepute.
I understand the decision about whether to return to a bushfire damaged community is a deeply personal one and one that many people are still making. But there is a strong movement of people going back to these towns to rebuild their homes and lives and indeed of new people moving into these areas. There have been 1,386 new building permits issued for new dwellings in bushfire areas. But I believe we need better compliance, and I will be raising it with the state government, to offer consumers substantial protection, which they deserve, in Victoria. We need to have advocates working on behalf of victims. We need the relevant authorities to be visiting the sites and forcing compliance to contracts. There will be talks starting with the Building Commission, the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, the Master Builders Association and the Housing Industry Association to work out how we can encourage compliance. I am disappointed by some of the stories emerging from Kinglake but we will remedy the problems.
Order! In accordance with standing order 193 the time for constituency statements has concluded.
Debate resumed.
by leave—The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s oversight of the Australian intelligence community is one of the key elements of our national security architecture. It provides confidence not only to the members and senators in this parliament but to the wider community as providing a parliamentary oversight of what would otherwise be activities that, of necessity, are dealt with largely behind closed doors.
I am happy to be able to advise that the committee, in conducting this review, has concluded that the administration and expenditure of the six intelligence and security agencies is sound and I would like to place on record my thanks to the agency heads and all those who have contributed to this review. I particularly want to add my thanks for the contribution we received from the Australian National Audit Office. Understandably, the ANAO have a particularly important role in reviewing the financial activities of these agencies. Their report and submissions to our committee are a significant aid in enabling us to better understand and investigate the matters that come before us.
I would also like to place on record my particular thanks to the office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and, in doing so, the recently retired holder of that office, Mr Ian Carnell, who has undertaken that work in an exemplary manner. The inspector-general’s office has been a very willing participant in the work of this committee. Its insights, advice and recommendations to the committee have been particularly helpful.
There are often misunderstandings of the workload and activities of some of the intelligence agencies that are reviewed by the committee. I thought I would take a brief moment in speaking to this report to refer to one aspect of those activities, and that is the security clearances that are increasingly required to be undertaken. It is perhaps a sad reflection, but nonetheless a necessary fact of life, that increasingly there are various occupations and activities for which our intelligence agencies are required to undertake security background checks on individuals because of the nature of the work they undertake or because of the high-profile nature of events involved. I am not sure that many people actually understand the extent of that requirement.
As the report acknowledges, some of the agencies were able to provide the committee with unclassified submissions, which we were able to draw on in our report, and others provided submissions that were classified and obviously were not able to be reported on. So we have tended in this report to talk more regularly about some agencies than others. ASIO have provided a good deal of information in an unclassified format that we were able to report on here.
I think most Australians would be surprised to know that ASIO in the year in review conducted in excess of 70,000 security assessments for the aviation security identity cards. That is just in the aviation and maritime industries. That is a substantial workload. In addition, ASIO conducted some 4,500 assessments for those people seeking licences to access ammonium nitrate. Members of parliament will recall that some years ago we legislated to restrict the availability of ammonium nitrate. It is something that is widely used in the rural sector but of course, sadly, is an ingredient of choice for some terrorist activities.
ASIO conducted in excess of 1,200 assessments of staff and visitors to the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, ANSTO, which operates the nuclear facility at Lucas Heights. They did in excess of 13,000 assessments for people requiring accreditation for special events such as APEC and World Youth Day a year or two ago. This is a substantial workload that takes a good deal of time for the agencies but nonetheless it is important. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the extensive work that they do.
I am also happy to report that during 2007-08 the agencies were able to advise us that there were no security breaches reported by any of the agencies which resulted in national security classified material being compromised. There were, perhaps understandably, minor difficulties where there were some breaches of protocol but there was no event that compromised national security classified information.
I also want to commend the agencies for the work they are doing in staff surveys. The agencies have gone through a period of quite dramatic sustained growth. That has had bipartisan support. It began under the Howard government and was supported by Labor in opposition. It is a much-needed boost to those resources. There have been particular difficulties for the agencies in managing the growth and career structures that go with it.
They all conduct quite comprehensive staff surveys and have had good responses. It is interesting to see the enthusiasm and the overwhelming support that those who work in the agencies have for what they are doing. That is how we would want it. This is not the sort of employment where you turn up between nine and five to pick up your pay; you do it because you are highly motivated, and I think that is very much reflected in the surveys of staff.
The final thing I want to refer to is e-security. This is a matter that the committee has had an ongoing interest in, along with things like electronic passports and their security. E-security is one of the serious challenges that we confront as a nation. It is a challenge for intellectual property for the business community, it is a challenge for governments and, indeed, it is a challenge for this parliament in ensuring the e-security of the systems we all use. It is a challenge that our security agencies are addressing. I know it is a matter that the committee has an ongoing interest in. I commend the report to the House.
Debate (on motion by Ms Hall) adjourned.
Debate resumed from 12 May, on motion by Mr Clare:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I rise to support this very important Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. It deals with quite poignant issues in a way for me. One always goes to one’s own personal experience with these things. This bill deals mainly with single parents and with the conditions in which they get support from the community.
I can vividly remember my own mother raising me in a single-parent family and there are two things I particularly remember about that experience. The first one is that she went to work. She was a teacher and, right from word go my earliest memories were of her going to work, supporting the family—my sister and me—and it was a good example to set. It is an example that all parents should try to set for their children—to work and to be involved and participate in the community.
The second memory I have is of me being very sick. I had childhood asthma and I had to be rushed to the hospital often. This was terribly worrying for my mother at the time. In a way I think she still sees me as that sick little boy. I can remember in particular the strain it put on her as a single parent, trying to juggle work and care for my sister, who was also sick off and on as a young child, so my heart certainly goes out to all single parents who really do struggle. It is very tough to raise children. It is a particularly tough thing to raise them on your own.
I meet a lot of single parents in my electorate. They are very good people. They try to work and to participate in the community. I have found them on nearly every occasion to be really dedicated not just to the care of their children but also to participating in our community through paid work, voluntary work and study, and you often find these people picking themselves up from relationships that have broken down. They have got kids and they really do want to prosper and make a better life for themselves and their children.
The previous rules were not so much tough as inflexible. I saw a number of my constituents having to deal with being told that they should apply for a job in, say, Noarlunga when they lived in Elizabeth, and that being just completely impractical in terms of picking up the kids from school or finding transport, or for a whole range of other reasons. There was a lot of inflexibility in terms of where you could apply for work. There was also the problem that single parents do tend to work in areas like retail or hospitality and the hours go up and down. You might have 25 hours one week and 10 the next. The previous rules also made it very difficult, I think, for people in casual or part-time employment, because when the hours went down, technically they were required to look for work. So you had a bizarre situation often where people were trying to work, wanted to work, but, because of the nature of their work, they were held up by the rules.
This bill really does seek to put a bit more flexibility in the rules for principal carers. It extends the existing 12-month automatic exemption for families with four or more children, for those who are home schooling or have distance education and for eligible families with older children, up to the age of 19, completing their secondary school education. It liberalises the eligibility for the 16-week domestic violence exemption to include parents who remain in a violent relationship as well as those who have left the relationship in the last six months, and that is important and I will come back to that. It recognises the right of respite and emergency foster carers through a new exemption that remains in place for the period of time a child is in the person’s care and for an extended period of up to 12 weeks between foster care placements. That is very important because our child protection system largely revolves around foster carers and, in particular, those who take children in an emergency. This bill also recognises the kinship carers through a new exemption for those who have care of a child under a state or territory case plan. Again, that helps to underpin the child protection system because we know that kinship carers often take a great deal of pressure off the system.
So this bill does provide some important exemptions to these fairly tough rules or obligations on these people. It also makes changes to the part-time participation requirements. They allow principal carer parents to meet their requirements through part-time study of at least 15 hours a week or 30 hours a fortnight of contact or non-contact hours. It allows combinations of approved activities, part-time study and part-time paid work as long as the parent is undertaking 15 hours per week of activity. It changes the rules on voluntary work to allow voluntary work alone or in combination with other activities to meet the requirement where parents live in poor labour markets where they have limited training opportunities or where there is a significant vocational aspect of voluntary work. That is an important point because in areas in my electorate which suffer from very high unemployment—and suffered from very high unemployment right through the boom, I might say—people often do not have clear avenues into work, so voluntary work often is the bridge by which people get from no work to paid work.
This bill also allows principal carers to participate on a part-time basis in the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme that is based around small business and it introduces more flexible arrangements over long school holidays, which particularly gives some relief from the participation requirements during the Christmas-New Year fortnight. That is important because Christmas is a time to spend with friends, family and children. It is a particularly important social occasion but it is also an occasion when there are some stresses on families. We should recognise that people, in trying to celebrate, often put a lot of pressure on themselves. The last thing we want to do is add to that pressure or the obligations over that period. People deserve some latitude during special occasions.
I talked a little bit before the domestic violence exemptions, which I think are tremendously important. I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the work of the Northern Domestic Violence Service, which does a great deal of work in my electorate. They are based in Elizabeth South but they work as far afield as Gawler and the rural communities. It is a great service and they have been going for 25 years. I think they would have preferred to have shut down by now but, sadly, there is still demand after all those years. I pay tribute to their dedication over that time. Recently we held a fundraiser with the Deputy Prime Minister for this service, some schools in the electorate and Northern Carers. That was held at Hope Central, a church in Elizabeth South which is a very active and decent group of people. Joe and Jodie Habermehl, who are pastors at the church, and Kathy Tripodi organised a breakfast at very short notice. They have a long history of fundraising in this area, having raised about $40,000 or $50,000 for various charities, including the Northern Domestic Violence Service, and I would like to pay tribute to them.
In conclusion, this bill does provide some flexibility but it keeps the obligation for people to be active and to work and to participate in our community. I think that is a reasonable and decent obligation. I commend the bill to the House.
It is a pleasure for me to have the opportunity this morning to speak to the Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010. With the indulgence of the House, I will say very briefly at the outset that you cannot talk about a bill like this without thinking about the people it is going to affect—a lot of people in the community who live and work under enormous and varying stresses. With that in mind, I wanted to take the liberty of mentioning that I had the privilege this morning of attending the ACT launch of the Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal. I mention it simply because you cannot go to a function like that without hearing the stories of a lot of people in our community, many of whom are affected by this very bill. I want to take the latitude of encouraging all members of this place to get behind their local Red Shield Appeal, because they are fantastic sources of support for these very people.
The amendments in this legislation are extremely important. They are in response to the Participation Review Taskforce, which was established by the Hon. Brendan O’Connor MP, then Minister for Employment Participation, and chaired by Patricia Faulkner AO from KPMG, in May 2008. The report was delivered in August of the same year and it made 20 recommendations. The idea of the legislation is to introduce flexibility into employment participation requirements, to help parents balance their parenting responsibilities with those requirements. They will still be required to meet their participation agreements in order to receive income support, unless they are one of the small number that are exempt under this bill. Parents will still have to undertake 30 hours per fortnight of suitable activity and will still need to report to Centrelink, as they do now. However, the activities that are now approved have broadened to include such things as part-time study and voluntary work—and I will go into some of the details in a moment.
The liberalisation of the 16-week domestic violence exemption, which was just mentioned by the previous speaker, the member for Wakefield, is a very important part of these amendments as well and will provide better assistance to children who have been exposed to domestic violence, regardless of whether or not the principal carer has left the relationship. This is to ensure that the principal carer is able to devote adequate time to children who have been exposed to domestic violence. These principal carers will also have regular contact with Centrelink social workers, and the exemption can be extended at the discretion of a Centrelink social worker. However, the principal carer will still be able to access employment services and participate in activities if they so wish.
The government very much recognises that it is very important for parents on income support to remain socially and economically engaged in the community at the same time. They should engage in productive activities outside the home. However, the scope of participation activities really needed to be broader than the ones that were already in place, particularly for parents who are disadvantaged through low education or low skill levels and those who had been disengaged from the workforce, who were more likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market. The changes to participation activities will definitely make the system fairer.
I will go into some detail about the changes that this bill will effect but I would like to make some general comments first. It does not matter what part of the economy or the community you happen to live in or participate in to know that today, more than ever, there are enormous pressures on families to try and strike a balance between their employment obligations—or, in this case, obligations to Centrelink—and time with their families and children. Some people think that, if you are in full employment and living a good life economically, you have those choices; you can in fact decide how much time you will or will not spend with your family, community and children. It is a bit unfortunate that they do not understand, recognise or accept that those who are a bit further down that socioeconomic scale are just as entitled to that level of choice and should also be encouraged and helped to spend time with their families and children. It is a very important point that is really brought home to me when I consider the changes that we are making through this piece of legislation.
Amongst other things, the bill is going to extend the existing 12-month automatic exemptions for families with four or more children, families who have children in home schooling or families who have children doing distance education, and to eligible families with older children completing their secondary school education. The exemption does not stop principal carers from accessing employment services. The government would still encourage them to do so if they are able. I would call this a very common-sense approach to the amendments.
It will also broaden the eligibility for the 16-week domestic violence exemption to include parents who remain in a violent relationship or who have left such a relationship in the last six months. It will also recognise the role of respite and emergency foster carers through a new exemption that remains in place for the time the child is in the person’s care and for up to 12 weeks between foster care and placement. It will recognise the role of kinship carers through a new exemption for those who have the care of a child under a state or territory case plan. These are very important steps that will protect children who may have been vulnerable to traumatic domestic situations and who require extra care.
The bill will allow principal carers to meet their participation requirements through part-time study of at least 15 hours per week of contact or non-contact hours. It will also allow combinations of approved activities, such as part-time study or volunteer work, as long as the parent undertakes 15 hours per week of those activities—again, thank goodness, very much a common-sense, equal playing field approach. It will allow voluntary work as one of the components to satisfy participation requirements in a poor labour market. Over the years I have had many a comment from people in my community about the inequity of this legislation before the passage of this amendment bill.
The bill will allow principal carers to participate in the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, NEIS, on a part-time basis. It will allow principal carers to take a break from participation requirements over the Christmas and New Year fortnight. I am really pleased to be able to say that. Forgive me, but I think this is one of the most important aspects of the bill, because it actually reflects what the government is trying to do in accepting the recommendations of that review and, as I said a moment ago in my introductory remarks, in actually allowing the people affected by this legislation to lead a life like most of us, or at least giving them the choice to do so. I am particularly pleased to see this common-sense, fair approach.
The bill will also allow parents with regular term employment that ceases over the long school holiday break to be exempt, provided their employment recommences after the break—in other words, there is no penalty to them if that is the type of employment they have. This shows a full understanding of their circumstances and is an acknowledgement that the sort of support this legislation can offer is still available to them. These are really important amendments—as I have said, very common-sense and very fair. It allows people who benefit from this type of legislation to actually benefit from it in a fair way along with the rest of our community. It enables them to start making choices the way the rest of us can in that important matter of balancing commitments—between Centrelink, employment, their family, their extended family, their children and their community involvement. It is indeed a pleasure to commend this bill to the House. I am very pleased to see it come through and I welcome it very much on behalf of the people affected within my electorate.
The Social Security Amendment (Flexible Participation Requirements for Principal Carers) Bill 2010 represents a vital part of the government’s ‘more flexible participation requirements for parents’ 2009-10 budget measure. This measure delivers on the government’s commitment to support the economic and social inclusion of parents by ensuring that all parents on income support have the opportunity to develop their skills, to participate in the workforce and to be treated with the respect inherent in their roles as parents.
Before detailing the purpose of the bill, I will take the opportunity to dispute some of the claims that have been made in this debate by the opposition. We should not forget that it was the Hawke Labor government that introduced mutual obligation and penalties as a condition of getting the dole in Australia. From July 2009 to March 2010, this government has imposed 21,189 penalties resulting in a stop to income support. The overriding objective of our policy is to get people into work. The new Job Services Australia is performing very well compared to the former Job Network. On a like-for-like basis about 13 per cent more unemployed people are getting into jobs, and that is not taking into account the more hostile environment created by the global recession. More than 304,000 job placements have been recorded by Job Services Australia since 1 July last year.
Work for the Dole is very important but it is only one of the ways to build skills and get people back to work. Building skills is the key to tackling skill shortages. It is also the key to reducing unemployment in areas where it is highest and where it is most difficult to budge. That is why the government is investing in skills and training: $300 million to build the skills we need for the future through the Critical Skills Investment Fund and the extension of the highly successful Apprentice Kickstart initiative, which were both mentioned in the budget on Tuesday night; $242 million to deliver a better training system, matching the needs of industry and guaranteeing young people a training place; as well as almost $120 million to build literacy and numeracy skills for people in the workforce and looking to get back into the workforce. This investment is about preparing people for work and making sure that they are job ready.
Training is now a much more meaningful part of the compulsory participation system for unemployed people. We have already increased the number of unemployed people required to undertake training. From April 2005 to April 2010, the number of unemployed people in training has gone up from 46,000 to 76,000. We have made the employment service system more flexible. A key change has been to allow the professional employment services to decide how best to get people into jobs. They know the labour market, deal directly with unemployed people and are able to tailor support to suit individuals’ needs. They decide if it is Work for the Dole training or another program that will be best to meet the compulsory participation requirements. This principle of flexibility and tailoring employment services to the needs of individual job seekers with the aim of getting them into a job is reflected in this bill.
The government recognises that many parents with participation requirements already meet their obligations through paid work and that these families benefit from the parents’ participation in the workforce. However, many Australian families face additional challenges and the government understands that these activities need to support parents’ individual circumstances, replacing a one-size-fits-all approach. For this reason, in May 2008 the government established the Participation Review Taskforce to consider the barriers to participation encountered by parents in the workforce. The task force undertook extensive consultation with the Australian community and reported its findings and recommendations to government in August 2008. The government has responded to the recommendations of the task force through a range of initiatives designed to support the economic inclusion of parents in the labour force while considering their individual circumstances. The government’s response is contained in this bill as well as in changes to the Guide to Social Security Law and amended subordinate legislation.
The government’s changes to participation requirements will help parents to better balance their family and caring responsibilities with their participation obligations by improving their ability to undertake education, training and relevant volunteering opportunities. This will provide greater opportunities for parents to obtain relevant skills, qualifications and work experience and to participate socially and economically in their community. Parents will also be able to report their participation efforts more flexibly by utilising Centrelink’s online and telephone reporting services.
This bill and the wider measure respond to the concerns of parents that the current system is too rigid and the current participation rules are often counterproductive to their efforts to develop skills, gain relevant experience and find work. The greater flexibility introduced by this measure, together with individually tailored assistance provided through Job Services Australia and the Disability Employment Services network, will ensure that parents are fully supported in their efforts to gain skills and qualifications and participate in the workforce. Parents will still be required to undertake 30 hours of suitable activities each fortnight. However, we recognise that parents can gain skills and employment through many different pathways. Parents with participation requirements will be able to undertake part-time study and combine suitable activities, such as part-time study, part-time paid work and vocationally appropriate voluntary work, to fully meet their participation requirements.
The bill will directly improve access to exemptions from participation requirements. This recognises that at times some parents face unique challenges that make it difficult for them to be available for part-time work or study. The existing domestic violence exemption will be extended to provide greater support for victims of domestic violence, regardless of their relationship status, to ensure that the exemption is available when needed. The bill also extends existing exemptions for parents with large families, those who provide home schooling and those parents whose children undertake distance education. These exemptions will now extend to parents who have older children who are still in school, therefore recognising the important role that these parents play in the education of their children. New participation exemptions will be introduced in recognition of the important caring role that kinship and foster carers play in our community, including emergency and respite foster carers. These exemptions will be available where a care plan is in place and which has been prepared or accepted by the relevant state or territory government.
This bill provides a sound balance between the role of parents on income support as carers, their participation in paid work, their skill development and their involvement in their local communities. The bill responds to the concerns of Australian parents and provides for greater flexibility for parents on income support in recognition of their most important role, that of being a parent. I commend the bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.
Debate resumed from 25 November, on motion by Mr McClelland:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I rise to speak on the International Arbitration Amendment Bill 2009. Arbitration is the primary means by which parties to transnational commercial agreements resolve disputes without having to resort to national courts. They have the advantage of avoiding the complex choice of law and enforcement issues that can arise in national courts. They also typically provide for a process that is specifically formulated to the parties’ requirements and is therefore more likely to preserve the relationship between them. The principal act, the International Arbitration Act 1974, implements Australia’s commitments under the New York Convention of 1958 and the Washington Convention of 1965 and gives the force of law to the UN model law on international commercial arbitration. However, problems have gradually arisen in the interpretation and application of the act over the years, particularly as to the application of competing state legislation and the means by which arbitral awards can be challenged.
The amendments effect an agreement with the states for a uniform arbitration legislation scheme based on the UN model law on international commercial arbitration, provide for limitations on court intervention and give clearer guidance on the interpretation of the model law. Miscellaneous amendments will supplement the operation of the model law as it relates to interim measures, disclosure of information, interests and costs.
The International Arbitration Act 1974 implements Australia’s obligations to enforce and recognise foreign arbitration agreements and arbitral awards under the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, which was completed in New York in 1958. The act also gives the force of law to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration as the primary arbitral law that governs the conduct of international arbitrations taking place in Australia. Finally, the act also implements Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States, which was completed in Washington in 1965.
The amendments to the act contained in the bill can be divided into four separate categories: amendments to the application of the act and the model law; amendments concerning the interpretation of the act; amendments to provide additional option provisions to assist the parties to a dispute; and miscellaneous amendments to improve the operation of the act. In 2006 the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Model Law adopted the first set of amendments to the model law since it was originally adopted in 1985. With one exception relating to ex parte orders, the bill will apply these amendments to international commercial arbitration in Australia.
Section 21 of the act allows the parties to an arbitration agreement to resolve their dispute under an arbitral law other than the model law, as given the force of law by the act. For example, the parties could choose to resolve their dispute under state or territory legislation. This creates significant legal difficulties and confusion concerning the interaction of the different laws. The bill repeals section 21, removing the ability of the parties to an arbitration agreement to nominate an alternative arbitral law. The bill also amends the act to expressly provide that the model law covers the field with respect to international commercial arbitration. In doing so, the bill retains jurisdiction for state and territory supreme courts and confers jurisdiction on the Federal Court of Australia.
The bill includes new provisions which are intended to confine the circumstances in which the courts can set aside an award made under the model law or refuse to enforce foreign awards under the New York convention and the model law. The bill amends the act to provide guidance to the courts when exercising powers and functions under the act or the model law, exercising powers or functions under an arbitration agreement or award, interpreting the act or the model law, or interpreting an arbitration agreement or award. For example, the bill requires a court to have regard to the objects of the act and to the fact that arbitration is an efficient, impartial, enforceable and timely method of dispute resolution. The bill inserts an objects clause into the act which emphasises the importance of international arbitration in facilitating international trade and commerce and is intended to guide the interpretation of the act.
In addition to giving force to the model law as the primary arbitral law governing the conduct of international commercial arbitration in Australia, the act also provides a range of provisions that the parties to an arbitration agreement may adopt on an opt-in basis and which are intended to help them resolve any disputes between them fairly and efficiently. These provisions address issues such as the consolidation of arbitral proceedings and the awarding of interests and costs.
The bill includes a number of additional optional provisions that will be made available to the parties to an arbitration agreement. These provisions cover issues such as the availability of subpoenas and court orders to support an arbitration, the disclosure of confidential information and the death of a party.
This is the second amendment that has been made to the international arbitration regime—the first being the Federal Justice System Amendment (Efficiency Measures) Act (No. 1) 2008. Both pieces of legislation seek to increase the attractiveness of Australia as a venue for international commercial arbitration. This is a high-value service in which Australia should enjoy a competitive advantage. Any initiative that seeks to enhance that advantage is welcomed by the opposition. Therefore, we support the passage of this legislation.
I speak in support of the International Arbitration Amendment Bill 2009, which was introduced into this place in November last year. I want to thank the Attorney-General for causing a review of the act to be undertaken, after announcing it in November 2008. It was a timely review. I note that the review took into account some 30 submissions, a literature review, court cases and judgments—all manner of things—plus the model law and some amendments that were needed. No doubt the thinking of the Attorney-General and, I would say, the people in the Attorney-General’s Department was also brought to bear on this issue.
The predominant thinking around the act is to maintain its simplicity and its ease of take-up, application and enforcement. Yes, it is done within the rule of law but it is not so rule bound that it cannot take account of realities and agreements in the world of commerce. Any changes to the legislation need to be considered within this framework because amending laws can sometimes complicate, not simplify, an issue.
I have read the review and am familiar with the act and the conventions. One is the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards 1958. It is also called the New York convention because it was agreed to there. This is often how such things are named—for instance, the Doha Round, the Uruguay Round, the Bretton Woods agreement et cetera. There is also the International Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States from 1965, and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration is what we call the model law.
UNCITRAL was established by a resolution of the General Assembly back in 1966 to help states face the problem of the diversity of national laws. We should be aware that many states are also federal in some form, which brings with it another set of complexities when dealing with any international-national system. This is a common way for states to organise—in fact, it is one of the most common ways. The particular challenges and obstacles that this presents to the free flow of trade was one of the key problems that the commission was given to address. The commission’s mandate is to further the progressive harmonisation and unification of the law of international trade. ‘Harmonisation’ and ‘unification’ are terms that we are well familiar with and they sound good, but in practice they can be very difficult, particularly when we are dealing with 192 states.
Australia is one of the 60 states on the commission. People are elected for six years. I think that the terms of the current members expire this year. All of this can seem a bit complex but in practice it works well enough. However, it is recognised that it can always work better—hence the bill before this place. One of the problems we face in multilateral jurisdictions such as Australia is that state, territory and federal courts each apply their own enforcement or absence of procedures. Some parties agree to submit themselves, but they agree in the context of electing certain jurisdictions to be covered by certain arbitration settlement and enforcement rules.
I have had experience in negotiating some of those contract agreements by way of leases and licences with major international companies and states—namely, Timor Leste. I have also had experience in working on how to introduce a simple law that sets up a no-frills arbitration system for a state and then getting it off the ground so that business and commerce have some certainty and can work to build capacity vis-a-vis this whole area of trade law and trade capacity. It is challenging indeed.
In Australia, the states have their own commercial arbitration acts and tribunals. In fact, I was a member of the New South Wales Commercial Tribunal for a number of years—not that it sat in country New South Wales very much. I was also a member of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal. So I am familiar with the way in which some of this works at a very local level and how it manifests itself in a variety of configurations.
The amendments to the act seek to coalesce some of the matters that I have just discussed and some others that I have not discussed. There are three objectives to be achieved by the amendments. Firstly, they are to provide guidance to the courts in the interpretation of the act. If I remember correctly—because it was some time ago that I prepared these notes—it currently has none and, I believe, no particular or focused objects either. I think they are now being included. Secondly, they are to clarify the application of the act between the various Commonwealth, state and territory pieces of legislation. Thirdly, they will implement amendments to the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration.
The bill also gives effect to enhanced flexibility, including a range of optimal mechanisms that parties can use to resolve a dispute, recognising that it does not all have to be strictly legislated. If I remember correctly, it gives more certainty to what constitutes an agreement. There is a broader definition, including e-communications and e-commerce. Then it addresses some technical matters around confidentiality, court orders, capping costs and subpoenas or the availability thereof.
Regarding the model law provisions, there is a good inclusion in that parties will be able to preserve the status quo of disputed assets while arbitration is being resolved. That is always quite a problem in practice. Often those assets will disappear, flee or go missing in action while the matter is in dispute, so it will give some effect to that.
The bill will set out the types of matters that a court should have regard to when exercising functions under or interpreting the act. The model law and arbitration agreement, or arbitral award, and these provisions emphasise the importance of arbitration in supporting international trade and commerce—because that is what it is about—and recognise that arbitration is an efficient, impartial, enforceable and timely method by which to resolve disputes. That is the ideal, of course, because we want it to be efficient, impartial, enforceable and timely. These amendments will seek to further enhance those attributes.
The bill will also clarify the only grounds—and that is important—on which the court may refuse to recognise a foreign award, and these are the ones set out in section 8 of the act. They are consistent with Australia’s obligations under the New York convention.
In closing, I would just like to say that the bill will provide clear guidance to the courts on interpretation. That is a good thing. By adopting amendments made to the model law, the bill ensures that we stay at the forefront of international commercial arbitration practice. I will be interested to see how this works in practice, having had a little bit of experience in the area. I know that the object is to simplify and stay ahead of the game. I am sure that will happen, but often things need a bit of tweaking after they are implemented and this is one of those areas that I see as a work in progress. With those words, I commend the bill to the House.
I rise to support the International Arbitration Amendment Bill 2009. The bill amends the International Arbitration Act 1974 to clarify the application of the act and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration to provide greater certainty concerning the interpretation of the act and the model law to provide additional optional provisions to assist the parties to a dispute and make other miscellaneous amendments to improve the operation of the act.
The proposed government amendments make a number of minor amendments to improve the operational provisions in the bill. In addition, they set out a new scheme for the application of optional provisions contained in the act and the bill, insert a new provision modifying the requirements in the model law such that parties be given a full opportunity to present their case to facilitate faster proceedings and add additional measures concerning matters such as evidence and security for costs. The government amendments were developed in response to issues raised by practitioners after the bill was developed.
This bill is about the facilitating international trade and commerce by providing a more effective regime for the conduct of international commercial arbitrations in Australia. Our trade is a vital part of our economy. The Australian government continues to support trade liberalisation unequivocally and resist protectionism. We are committed to helping developing countries gain access to international economic opportunities. One of the more recent major developments in trade in Australia was in January this year, when Australia welcomed the commencement of our largest free-trade agreement, the ASEAN free-trade agreement. The historic agreement spans 12 economies with over 600 million people and a combined GDP of $3.1 trillion. The agreement opens up significant opportunities for Australian business in one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. There is great potential for Australian exporters to enter new markets with Asia leading the global recovery and six out of 10 Asian markets expected to grow at rates at least double the OECD forecasted average in 2010.
Australia sees this agreement as an important building block towards deepening this country’s economic integration with the dynamic Asian region. The agreement covers over 70 per cent of Australia’s trade with Asian countries with which we do not have bilateral free-trade agreements. The agreement includes the elimination of tariffs on exports such as cheese, fresh grapes, wheat and sheep meat. It also dramatically expands the subject areas that Australian education providers can deliver in Vietnam. By 2020 the deal, which is Australia’s first multi-country free-trade agreement and the most comprehensive free-trade agreement ever concluded by ASEAN, will eliminate tariffs on 96 per cent of our current exports to ASEAN countries. ASEAN accounted for 15 per cent of Australia’s trade, valued at $83 billion, in 2008-09. This is as large as Australia’s trade with China, Australia’s largest trading partner. Forty-two per cent of our total exporter base, or around 18,500 Australian exporters, trade with ASEAN. That is just one picture of how important Australia’s trade is, especially our growing trade prospects with our own region. No doubt our business community will be doing its best to take full advantage of the many benefits that this far-reaching agreement with ASEAN has to offer.
Of course, the global financial crisis hit global trade right around the world. With the global financial crisis we saw the biggest downturn in the global economy since the Great Depression. The Rudd government’s intervention with the stimulus package helped to save jobs during this period. If we have a look at the effects of the recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Australian jobs were lost and it took years and years for those jobs to return. On the Central Coast the economy would have been devastated by the global financial crisis but for the fact of the stimulus package, which helped to support jobs in retail, manufacturing and construction in particular. In previous recessions the Central Coast was hit the hardest of the many regions in Australia. The member for Shortland, who was just here, shares part of the beautiful Central Coast with me. Unemployment in the 1990s peaked at around 15 per cent on the Central Coast. Without the stimulus package, unemployment was going to grow significantly on the Central Coast. As it is, our unemployment has peaked at 6.3 per cent. If in this current downturn due to the global financial crisis there had not been the government’s stimulus package, if there had not been the intervention, and unemployment rates reached 15 per cent as they did in the 1990s, that would have seen an additional 11,100 people on the Central Coast without a job. So that is the effect that the stimulus package had. It is in the context of trade that I raise that particular issue.
The bill facilitates international trade and commerce by providing a more effective regime for the conduct of international commercial arbitrations in Australia and the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitration agreements and awards. The proposed government amendments to the bill have been developed following comments received from stakeholders—namely, arbitration practitioners—after the development of the bill. The government amendments can be divided into two categories: those directed at improving the operation of existing provisions in the bill and provisions that supplement the provisions of the bill. The key amendments to the existing measures in the bill will: simplify the arrangements for enforcement of foreign awards in Australia and make it clear that a court can only refuse to enforce an award on one of the grounds set out in the act; and amend the application of the optional provisions in a part of the act to specify that certain critical provisions apply by default, including those relating to costs and interest. The remaining provisions apply only if expressly adopted by the parties. This part of the act, as amended by the bill, supplements the model law with provisions addressing matters such as interest, costs, confidentiality and assistance from courts. It also removes an unnecessary duplication between the two proposed sections concerning court assistance.
In addition, the bill will provide that the parties to arbitration are entitled to a reasonable opportunity to present their case to a tribunal rather than a full opportunity as required by the model law. This measure is intended to give arbitral tribunals greater flexibility in managing particular matters before them. It inserts provisions into the act to provide arbitral tribunals with greater powers concerning evidence and security for costs. These provisions would apply unless the parties to the dispute agree otherwise. It modernises the drafting of the immunity provision in section 28 of the act and extends it to entities that appoint arbitrators to tribunals. It inserts a severability clause to provide guidance to the courts on the constitutional basis for the act and inserts a regulation-making power into the act. These amendments will help to ensure that the overall package of reforms contained in the bill achieves its desired outcome: a faster and fairer system for international arbitration that makes Australia an attractive venue for the resolution of disputes.
Over time, international arbitration has developed as a practical, efficient and well-established method of settling commercial disputes without resorting to national courts. Arbitration is typically faster, less formal and more tailored to the particular dispute than court proceedings whilst retaining the benefits of impartial adjudication. Arbitral awards are also more readily enforceable around the world than are judgments of national courts. Finally, arbitration is a method of dispute resolution that is chosen and controlled by the parties. This helps the parties to preserve their commercial relationship and resolve their dispute in a manner that suits their needs.
There are two pillars that underpin the modern system of international commercial arbitration. The first is the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, done at New York on 10 June 1958 and commonly referred to as the New York convention. The convention provides crucial support to international trade by ensuring that arbitral agreements and awards are enforceable between the 144 contracting states. This means that commercial parties can turn to arbitration in full confidence that the award made by the arbitral tribunal will be enforceable throughout the world.
The second pillar is the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. The model law was developed by the commission as a basis on which countries may choose to draft their own legislation governing international arbitration. The model law was developed to address the wide divergence of approaches taken to international arbitration throughout the world and to provide a modern and easily adapted alternative to outdated national regimes. As the explanatory note to the model law prepared by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law states:
Since its adoption by UNCITRAL, the Model Law has come to represent the accepted international legislative standard for a modern arbitration law …
On 21 November 2008 the Attorney-General announced a review of the International Arbitration Act and released a discussion paper to stimulate debate about the future of the act. The product of the review’s work were reform measures developed following careful consideration of the more than 30 submissions made to the review as well as academic literature, court decisions and approaches taken overseas. The reforms contained in the International Arbitration Amendment Bill 2009 will ensure the act remains at the forefront of international arbitration practice. The reform provides parties with a wider set of tools to help them resolve their disputes.
Once amended, the act will provide a clear distinction between the application of Commonwealth legislation and state and territory legislation. The bill will also clarify the circumstances in which the courts can refuse to recognise and enforce foreign awards. One concern expressed in submissions to the review was parties were finding increasingly novel ways to challenge awards and delay the arbitral process. These provisions are intended to emphasise the importance of speed, fairness and cost effectiveness in international arbitration while clearly defining and limiting the roles of courts in international arbitration without compromising the important protective function they exercise.
Thirdly, the bill will implement a number of amendments to the model law adopted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in 2006. These amendments concern interpretation of the model law, the introduction of a more sophisticated regime for making and enforcing interim measures, and minor changes to authentication and translation requirements.
Further, the bill will introduce additional provisions to supplement the operation of the model law. At present, the act includes a range of optional provisions that parties can use to help resolve their disputes. These provisions address issues such as the consolidation of arbitral procedures, interests and costs. The bill will add a number of new tools to this set of optional provisions. The parties will be able to select new provisions that allow them to obtain subpoenas and other court orders to assist with the arbitration. The bill will enable the parties to select new provisions dealing with the disclosure of confidential information. Other opt-in provisions address the death of a party in an arbitration agreement and revise the provisions concerning interest on debt under an award.
Finally, the bill includes a range of other measures directed at improving the general operation of the act, including providing a more expansive definition of what constitutes an agreement in writing for the purposes of the New York convention. The former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, once said:
… international trade thrives on the rule of law: without it parties are often reluctant to enter into cross-border commercial transactions or make international investments.
Arbitration is an essential tool for doing business across borders. The bill will not only assist Australian businesses in resolving their disputes but also ensure Australia is an attractive venue for parties from around the world to resolve their disputes. I commend the bill to the House.
in reply—I would like to thank members for their contributions to the debate on the International Arbitration Amendment Bill 2009 and I would certainly like to thank the opposition for their support of the bill and indeed for facilitating its passage through this simplified process of the Main Committee.
The bill is the most significant reform to the International Arbitration Act 1974 since Australia implemented the UNCITRAL model law in 1989. Arbitration facilitates international trade and commerce by providing a quick, cost-effective and enforceable means for commercial players to resolve their disputes. As I said in introducing the bill into the House, the measures contained in the International Arbitration Amendment Bill will ensure the act remains at the forefront of international arbitration practice.
In summary, the bill will provide guidance to the courts on the operation and interpretation of the act, it will adopt key amendments to the UNCITRAL model law made in 2006, it will provide a wide range of additional tools to assist an arbitral tribunal to resolve disputes to the mutual benefit of the parties, it will clarify the relationships between the act and the state and territory laws regulating domestic arbitration, and it will make a range of other amendments to improve the operation of the act. The bill, along with other initiatives such as the establishment of the Australian International Disputes Centre in Sydney, will spark a fundamental change in the way international arbitration is conducted. I thank the state and territory attorneys-general and in particular the New South Wales Attorney General for the drive he has shown in this area.
The bill provides a strong legal framework for arbitration practitioners to find creative solutions to commercial disputes—solutions that are tailored to the dispute at hand and the real needs of the parties. The bill is not just about helping Australian businesses to resolve their disputes quickly and efficiently, although this is of course very important; it is also about making Australia a regional centre for international commercial arbitration. With the reforms contained in the bill and the strong support of our expert and highly regarded practitioners, Australia can certainly become a significant centre for international commercial arbitration in the Asia-Pacific region.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Bill—by leave—taken as a whole.
I present a supplementary explanatory memorandum to the bill and I seek leave to move government amendments (1) to (15) together.
Leave granted.
I move:
(1) Schedule 1, item 5, page 5 (line 27), omit “with the leave of that court”.
(2) Schedule 1, item 6, page 5 (line 32), omit “with the leave of that court”.
(3) Schedule 1, item 7, page 6 (line 3), omit “leave”.
(4) Schedule 1, item 14, page 9 (after line 12), after section 18B, insert:
18C Article 18—reasonable opportunity to present case
For the purposes of Article 18 of the Model Law, a party to arbitral proceedings is taken to have been given a full opportunity to present the party’s case if the party is given a reasonable opportunity to present the party’s case.
(5) Schedule 1, item 16, page 9 (lines 27 to 30), omit section 21, substitute:
21 Model Law covers the field
If the Model Law applies to an arbitration, the law of a State or Territory relating to arbitration does not apply to that arbitration.
(6) Schedule 1, page 9 (after line 30), after item 16, insert:
16A Division 3 of Part III (heading)
Repeal the heading, substitute:
Division 3—Additional provisions
(7) Schedule 1, page 9, after proposed item 16A, insert:
16B Section 22
Repeal the section, substitute:
22 Application of additional provisions
Application to arbitration under Model Law
(1) This Division applies to any arbitration to which the Model Law applies.
Application of sections 23, 23A, 23B, 23J, 23K, 25, 26 and 27
(2) Each of the following sections applies to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement unless the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will not apply:
(a) section 23;
(b) section 23A;
(c) section 23B;
(d) section 23J;
(e) section 23K;
(f) section 25;
(g) section 26;
(h) section 27.
Application of sections 23C, 23D, 23E, 23F and 23G
(3) The following sections apply to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement if the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that they will apply:
(a) section 23C;
(b) section 23D;
(c) section 23E;
(d) section 23F;
(e) section 23G.
Application of section 23H
(4) Section 23H applies on the death of a party to an arbitration agreement unless the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will not apply.
Application of section 24
(5) Section 24 applies to arbitral proceedings commenced in reliance on an arbitration agreement if the parties to the agreement agree (whether in the agreement or otherwise in writing) that it will apply.
(8) Schedule 1, item 18, page 10 (line 31) to page 11 (line 4), omit subsection 23(5), substitute:
(5) The court must not issue a subpoena under subsection (3) to a person who is not a party to the arbitral proceedings unless the court is satisfied that it is reasonable in all the circumstances to issue it to the person.
(9) Schedule 1, item 18, page 11 (after line 4), at the end of section 23, add:
(6) Nothing in this section limits Article 27 of the Model Law.
(10) Schedule 1, item 18, page 12 (after line 16), at the end of section 23A, add:
(6) Nothing in this section limits Article 27 of the Model Law.
(11) Schedule 1, item 18, page 16 (after line 30), after section 23H, insert:
23J Evidence
(1) An arbitral tribunal may, at any time before the award is issued by which a dispute that is arbitrated by the tribunal is finally decided, make an order:
(a) allowing the tribunal or a person specified in the order to inspect, photograph, observe or conduct experiments on evidence that is in the possession of a party to the arbitral proceedings and that may be relevant to those proceedings (the relevant evidence); and
(b) allowing a sample of the relevant evidence to be taken by the tribunal or a person specified in the order.
(2) The tribunal may only specify a person in the order if the person is:
(a) a party to the proceedings; or
(b) an expert appointed by the tribunal under Article 26 of the Model Law; or
(c) an expert appointed by a party to the proceedings with the permission of the tribunal.
(3) The provisions of the Model Law apply in relation to an order under this section in the same way as they would apply to an interim measure under the Model Law.
23K Security for costs
(1) An arbitral tribunal may, at any time before the award is issued by which a dispute that is arbitrated by the tribunal is finally decided, order a party to the arbitral proceedings to pay security for costs.
(2) However, the tribunal must not make such an order solely on the basis that:
(a) the party is not ordinarily resident in Australia; or
(b) the party is a corporation incorporated or an association formed under the law of a foreign country; or
(c) the party is a corporation or association the central management or control of which is exercised in a foreign country.
(3) The provisions of the Model Law apply in relation to an order under this section in the same way as they would apply to an interim measure under the Model Law.
(12) Schedule 1, page 18 (after line 2), after item 23, insert:
23A Section 28
Repeal the section, substitute:
28 Immunity
(1) An arbitrator is not liable for anything done or omitted to be done by the arbitrator in good faith in his or her capacity as arbitrator.
(2) An entity that appoints, or fails or refuses to appoint, a person as arbitrator is not liable in relation to the appointment, failure or refusal if it was done in good faith.
(13) Schedule 1, page 18, after proposed item 23A, insert:
23B At the end of Division 4 of Part III
Add:
30A Severability
Without limiting its effect apart from this section, this Part also has the effect it would have if it were confined, by express provision, to arbitrations involving:
(a) places, persons, matters or things external to Australia; or
(b) disputes arising in the course of trade or commerce with another country, or between the States; or
(c) disputes between parties at least one of which is a corporation to which paragraph 51(xx) of the Constitution applies; or
(d) disputes arising in the course of trade or commerce in a Territory.
(14) Schedule 1, item 26, page 18 (lines 15 and 16), omit the heading to Part V, substitute:
Part V—General matters
(15) Schedule 1, item 26, page 19 (after line 32), at the end of Part V, add:
40 Regulations
The Governor-General may make regulations prescribing matters:
(a) required or permitted by this Act to be prescribed; or
(b) necessary or convenient to be prescribed for carrying out or giving effect to this Act.
The government is proposing a number of amendments to the bill to clarify and supplement the provisions of the bill in order to ensure its overall objectives are achieved. In making these amendments the government has taken into account the issues raised by legal practitioners and experts in the field. In particular, the amendments provide clarification on the scope and operation of the act and clearly specify which of the optional provisions apply by default and which only apply with the express agreement of the parties.
Question agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Ordered that the bill be reported to the House with amendments.
Debate resumed from 10 March, on motion by Dr Emerson:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I rise to speak on the Personal Property Securities (Corporations and Other Amendments) Bill 2010. The initial suite of personal property securities legislation was passed with coalition support in 2009. The various states and territories have long had their own mechanisms for the registration and management of securities given over personal property to secure financial obligations. Familiar examples include fixed and floating charges, bills of sale, chattel mortgages and registers of hire-purchase agreements. It has also long been recognised that there is a need for national harmonisation of these arrangements to provide greater certainty for borrowers and lenders and to increase efficiency within the sector. The former Attorney-General, the honourable member for Berowra, Philip Ruddock, gave this issue particular priority during the term of the previous, Howard government.
In October 2008 COAG signed an intergovernmental agreement to effect the proposed legislation as part of the National Partnership Agreement to Deliver a Seamless National Economy between the Commonwealth and the states and territories. The principal act applies, with very limited exceptions, to all types of personal property, including motor vehicles, contractual rights, intellectual property rights and uncertified shares. It provides for rules for the creation, priority and enforcement of security interests and establishes a national register of them. There are detailed specific provisions in relation to certain classes of property.
The principal purpose of this bill is to make amendments to the Corporations Act 2001 to harmonise the language and to ensure conceptual consistency between the two acts. These amendments comprise terminological changes to the provisions referring to charges and other security interests. References to charges, mortgages, liens and pledges in the Corporations Act will be replaced with ‘security interests’. ‘Floating charges’ will become ‘circulating security interests’. ‘Fixed charges’ will become ‘non-circulating security interests’. Similar changes will be made in the references to holders of security interests. The old terms will be retained to refer to security interests to which the Personal Property Securities Act does not apply.
Furthermore, this act provides for the extension of the Corporations Act concept of property to include property subject to the retention of title agreement. Currently, the holder of a security interest over the whole, or part of the whole, of the property of an insolvent company is entitled to appoint an administrator. Under the amendments where the whole, or substantially the whole, of the property of a company comprises property subject to the retention of title agreement, the holder of that interest will be entitled to appoint an administrator in the event of insolvency.
Concerning the repeal of chapter 2K of the Corporations Act, chapter 2K provides for the registration of company charges. That function will be subsumed by the personal properties security act regime. The provisions as to charges void against an administrator or liquidator will be retained. The bill further goes to the retention of existing rights in the Corporations Act. Examples include provisions regulating priority in the distribution of proceeds, administrators’ rights of indemnity and the priority payment of certain unsecure creditors. The bill also provides for streamlined transitional provisions.
This bill wisely reflects the recommendations made by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, which has reported several times on the proposed legislative regime. We in the opposition understand the benefits and importance of establishing a simplified, national personal property securities regime and, as I said, that was something pursued by the previous Attorney-General and by the previous government. Therefore the opposition supports the passage of the bill through the parliament.
I speak in support of the Personal Property Securities (Corporations and Other Amendments) Bill 2010. When I was training to be a lawyer at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s and early to mid-eighties I did not quite understand, when doing constitutional law, the travails and troubles that the Federation actually caused us. You read section 51 of the Australian Constitution and recognise that the Commonwealth has jurisdiction in respect of certain aspects. But there are areas in which business goes across jurisdictions.
I remember the first day I started practising as an articled law clerk and someone walked into the office with all their tax returns and a big box of receipts et cetera. I asked where they had business interests and they said, ‘In the Lockyer Valley just outside of Ipswich, and interstate I have got farming interests.’ I asked, ‘What about your securities? Are you secured on any properties, debentures, companies et cetera?’ They wanted me to check all this out. I remember distinctly contacting my then master, as they called it, and finding out that you had to go interstate to check so much with respect to mortgages, liens and debentures. You really realised then—and I realised as a very young lawyer—what stupidity it was in this country to have all these different systems with different charges and different registries, and I recognised there and then what a shocking impediment and obstacle to a seamless national economy it was—though I did not quite use that expression in those days.
When I got into business for myself and built up a law practice which dealt with a lot of commercial clients interstate and overseas, it was an endless frustration to me, particularly in the commercial section. So the creation of this new registry, the idea of personally being able to be searched online and across the country, whether you are living in Queensland or Tasmania, is a great national reform of the reformist Rudd Labor government. I think this is a great initiative.
The amendments here are consequential; they are about making sure there is consistency with the Corporations Law and that definitions of property are the same. This is about making improvements to the system, and of course there are going to be changes—that is what happens when you establish a new registry. I noted what the Attorney-General, who is here in the chamber, said on 26 November 2009 when the personal property securities law was passed. I read what he said at the time because I thought it was very important in that the passage of that bill was a major achievement in reforming Australia’s personal property securities system. I say amen to that; I think it was a major achievement. It is a demonstration once again of the Rudd Labor government’s commitment to small to medium sized businesses. We saw that in the budget with the reduction in corporate tax rates and the write-off of $5,000 upfront for small businesses. There is a myth in this chamber, perpetrated and perpetuated by those opposite, that they alone are the friends of small business. It is simply a nonsense. The legislation here is consequential, but it makes the system work better. It is necessary. The COAG implementation timetable requires the personal property securities reform to be implemented in May 2011.
This legislation before the chamber makes amendments in accordance with schedules, as we often do, to amend the Corporations Law and the primary legislation, the Personal Property Securities Act or PPS Act, and also other Commonwealth legislation. It is minor but it improves the system, amending terminology in the Corporations Law to make it consistent with the PPS Act and amending the Corporations Law in relation to the concept of property. Property has a particular concept in law: it is personalty or realty; it is tangible assets or intangible ones. Things like contractual rights and intellectual property rights are intangible. Tangible assets, as we know, are things like livestock, property, crops, cars et cetera. This legislation makes the definition of property consistent. It repeals chapter 2A, which establishes the ASIC register of company charges. That is being replaced by the PPS register. It maintains the existing rights of secured and unsecured creditors such as employees, debtor companies, owners, lessors, lienees, pledgees, controllers, administrators or liquidators. It is minor, as I said, but it is important.
The Ministerial Council for Corporations have approved the changes and the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General have approved the amendments in accordance with the intergovernmental agreement. It makes a difference, clearly, to make sure this system works better. Small businesses will clearly benefit because they will use the registry on a daily basis. It will improve their capacity to get finance and their security. Nothing causes more disputes between parties than a dispute between a third party and two other people involved in a contract. We see that all the time; that is what causes difficulties. That is why there are complicated provisions in the Corporations Law and the Bankruptcy Act in relation to third parties. If people can get access online to a registry and can check it out to see what the situation is with respect to the security, that will enhance their certainty of transaction. When they go to bargain in relation to a good or service it will improve the situation.
I think this legislation is important. It improves the PPS Act. I am very excited about this legislation because it will make a big difference to business and to the many small businesses and farming communities in my regional and rural seat of Blair. It will help business operators in Ipswich but it will also help in the little communities where there are small businesses who need access to that information. It will help people who live in little country places like Kilcoy, Lowood, Minden, Fernvale, Toogoolawah and Esk, as well as the farmers who support the economies in those areas. I support the legislation and I commend the Attorney-General for the work he has done.
I thank both of the previous speakers for their contribution to this debate on the Personal Property Securities (Corporations and Other Amendments) Bill 2010, in particular the member for Blair, who has just completed his speech. I would like to thank members for their contribution to the debate more generally. Before I turn to some of the specific aspects of the bill, I reiterate the comments that have previously been made that this is a significant reform of Australia’s personal property security regime and will create significant efficiencies, leading to businesses being more likely to lend funds on the basis of identified securities and ultimately making it cheaper for those financial institutions that lend funds to do so more cheaply as a result of a reduction in costs of compliance.
The core elements of the bill are amendments to the Corporations Act 2001 to ensure its consistency with the functional approach of the Personal Property Securities Act, or the PPS Act—an easy acronym. Under this approach to security interests, transactions which have the same effect are treated alike. The bill has received significant support and input from stakeholders, including businesses, consumer advocates, representatives from state and territory governments, lawyers and financiers. I am grateful to all of these people for their comments and feedback and, of course, to officers of the Attorney-General’s Department who, for a long period of time, have been doing some tremendously dedicated work on this bill and the overall structure of the personal property securities scheme.
The amendments to the Corporations Act in schedule 1 will make amendments to the Corporations Act concept of property to apply the functional approach to security interests, particularly in relation to property in which the grantor does not have title. It will repeal chapter 2K, which establishes the ASIC Register of Company Charges, as this will be replaced by the Personal Property Securities Register. It will maintain existing rights, including employee entitlements in insolvency, and apply appropriate transitional and application provisions. The Ministerial Council for Corporations approved the amendments following a six-week consultation period which ended in January of this year. The amendments to the PPS Act in schedule 2 will simplify the transitional provisions, ensure consistency with existing state and territory provisions on the enforcement of security interests in crops and livestock and reflect the terminology used in the international financial industry in relation to intermediated securities. The Standing Committee of Attorneys-General has approved these amendments in accordance with the intergovernmental agreement that supports the PPS reform. Schedule 3 makes minor consequential amendments to other Commonwealth legislation.
The bill was referred to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry. Submissions to the committee raised some possible amendments which would clarify the operation of the bill. To avoid any delays, we are proposing to give appropriate consideration to the issues raised in the Senate committee inquiry and, if necessary, to enact a further amendment bill which will be introduced later in the year.
In conclusion, as I have said before, the PPS Act will replace the existing complex regulatory arrangements, based on artificial distinctions between personal property security transactions, with one national functional approach to personal property securities. PPS reform is a key aspect of the government’s continued commitment to cooperation with the states and territories on the government’s deregulation agenda and the national agreement to deliver a seamless economy. I acknowledge the contribution of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General in progressing the PPS reform and this particular bill.
As this reform is based on a referral of power from the states to the Commonwealth, I also acknowledge the prompt and cooperative manner in which the states have assisted in this reform. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia have passed referral legislation and Tasmania and Western Australia will be passing their referral legislation in due course. The states and territories will also be making consequential amendments to their legislation dealing with personal property security interests. In closing, PPS reform is essential to making secured financing more accessible and efficient by lowering risk for lenders, by increasing competition between finance providers, by providing greater certainty for both lenders and borrowers and by lowering costs for borrowers. I commend the bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Ordered that the bill be reported to the House without amendment.
Debate resumed from 18 March, on motion by Mr Shorten:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I rise to speak on the Social Security and Indigenous Legislation Amendment (Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2010. This bill encompasses three schedules. Schedule 1 completes the government’s response to the report of the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce, Carer payment (child): a new approach. The proposed amendments will bring consistency to the assessment of carers of children for carer payment and carer allowance. Indeed, it was the coalition in 2006 that recognised the gap in government assistance for families caring for children with disabilities. It was the coalition that initiated a review in March 2007 into carer payment (child) to examine the ability to provide a safety net for carers of children with profound disability or severe medical conditions. The review, which recommended a fairer assessment process and less red tape, was handed to the incoming Rudd government in November 2007.
In the 2008-09 budget the Rudd government announced it would provide $293.6 million over five years to improve assistance to carers. A key measure was to expand qualification for carer payment paid in respect of a child. As part of the measure, the government announced it would implement a new assessment process to determine qualification for carer payment paid in respect of a child based on the amount of care required by a child with disability or two or more children with disability, rather than the rigid medical criteria used to assess qualification for the payment. The Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill was introduced in the House on 19 March 2009 and received assent on 23 June 2009. The coalition supported that bill. The amendments made by the schedule commence on 1 July 2010.
The proposed amendments under schedule 2, which relate to the income management regime, include: removing the concept of special account and replacing it with the income management record, allowing the collection of income management debts through the social security debt collection system, allowing recovery where funds have been paid to an income management account in error, allowing the secretary to credit the income management of certain customers earlier in some circumstances, giving the minister power to specify the amount of the deductible proportion of two new student scholarships, and some other amendments relating to financial management of income management accounts.
The objective of schedule 3 is to provide a guaranteed minimum income of $45 million per year to the Indigenous Land Corporation. The Indigenous Land Corporation currently receives annual income through investment earnings from the realised real return on the investment of the land account in the previous financial year. The land account is administered by the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs portfolio. Since 2004-05, the value of payments to the ILC from the land account has fluctuated as a result of changes in the value of the realised real return on investments. These fluctuations have caused difficulties for the ILC in its long-term strategic planning. This legislation will establish a guaranteed minimum earning for the ILC. The payment will be set in the first year at $45 million and indexed at the CPI.
When earnings from the land account exceed the minimum amount, a supplementary payment will be made in addition to the annual amount. The supplementary payment will be the difference between the land account actual balance and its real capital value. In a situation where the guaranteed payment for any year exceeds the earnings from the land account, no supplementary payments will be made in future years until the real capital value of the land account has been restored.
Current capital value of the land account is $1.7 billion, with investment earnings averaging $50 million over the medium term. Regulations will be drafted to establish a review mechanism to assess the revised ILC earning system established through this legislation to ensure the $45 million is sustainable. The coalition will be supporting this bill when it is returned to the House.
in reply—In this bill, the Social Security and Indigenous Legislation Amendment (Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2010, the government is pleased to introduce a significant 2008 budget measure that supports Australia’s carers. This initiative for carers is the final instalment of the government’s legislative commitment responding to the report of the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce entitled Carer payment (child): a new approach. The new changes are part of a $294 million package from the 2008 budget to better support carers of children with disability and serious medical conditions.
The legislation for improved support for carers enacted in 2009 had as its centrepiece a new assessment process to determine qualification for carer payment paid in respect of a child. Central to this new assessment process was the introduction of the Disability Care Load Assessment (Child) Determination 2009. In this new bill the government now brings forward amendments that will deliver consistency in the assessment of carers of children for carer payments and carer allowance. This Disability Care Load Assessment (Child) Determination will now be used for qualification purposes for carer allowance as well as for carer payment. This alignment will bring consistency to assessments of carer allowance and carer payment paid in respect of children under 16 and will improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of those assessments. The list of recognised disabilities will also continue to apply in determining eligibility for carer allowance.
The demands on carers are well known to the government, the senior minister—Minister Macklin—and indeed all Australians. We recognised these demands by introducing in this bill a further amendment to allow carers a further three months after the child they are caring for turns 16 in which to complete the Adult Disability Assessment Tool to test their eligibility for carer allowance (adult). Under the current rules, a carer loses their carer allowance when the child to whom they have qualified for the allowance turns 16, unless they have been assessed and given a successful rating under the Adult Disability Assessment Tool. Through this bill, the carer will have up to three more months in which to have the care receiver assessed and rated under the Adult Disability Assessment Tool. This amendment will align the provisions for carer allowance with the relevant provisions for carer payment which were amended in a similar way in 2009.
Among two non-budget measures also included in this bill are minor improvements to the income management provisions in the social security law. These related to administrative matters such as appropriation, debt recovery and financial transactions. One of the amendments will apply, for example, when a third-party organisation that holds income managed funds for a person such as a community store owner ceases to operate. Under current rules, these amounts become debts to the Commonwealth and the person cannot be reimbursed until the debt recovery process is finished. This amendment will make sure the person can be reimbursed from the Consolidated Revenue Fund before the debt recovery action is finished. Any recovered funds from third parties will be recredited to the Consolidated Revenue Fund once the debt recovery action is finished.
The income management amendments in the bill will also fix some current debt recovery inconsistencies between people’s income managed funds and their substantive payment under the social security law.
Mr Briggs interjecting
I thank the member for Mayo for his support. Further amendments will remove any ambiguity about the appropriation for income management payments and align the reimbursement processes for unauthorised transactions under the BasicsCard with the Electronic Funds Transfer Code of Conduct.
The last measure in the bill is to amend the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005 to ensure a reliable income stream for the Indigenous Land Corporation, which is established under that act. The corporation’s purpose is to help Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders to acquire and manage Indigenous held land so as to provide economic, environmental, social and cultural benefits. The main source of funding for the Indigenous Land Corporation in a financial year is a payment made from the land account established under the act that is equal to the realised real return on the investments of the land account in the previous financial year. The value of these payments to the corporation from the land account has fluctuated in recent times because of the changes in the value of the realised real return. Long-term strategic planning has been made more difficult for the corporation by these fluctuations.
The government is committed to securing a more reliable level of funding for the Indigenous Land Corporation. Accordingly, this bill has a guaranteed annual payment of $45 million from 1 July 2010, and the payment will be indexed for later years according to the consumer price index. Where the actual capital value of the land account exceeds the real capital value of the account, the bill will also allow additional payments to be made to the corporation of an amount equal to the excess above the real capital value. The real capital value of the land account will be maintained. This bill also provides for an independent review of the effectiveness of the funding arrangements after three years. I commend the bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.
Debate resumed from 17 March, on motion by Mr Griffin:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I speak in support of this legislation. I think the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 GST Administration Measures No. 2) Bill 2010 makes an important difference to assist small and large businesses. Schedule 1, in particular, makes a big difference in ensuring more principled and flexible rules are available to GST groups. Companies can combine in joint venture arrangements to ensure that they improve their cash flow and their compliance costs. To do this, they need the approval of the Commissioner of Taxation, which can take a considerable period of time, as anyone in business knows—anyone who has worked in commercial law or corporate law will understand that that is the case. Currently there are restrictions on the dissolution of a group and amendments of a group, and there is uncertainty about liability issues where they are joint and several, so these amendments are an important improvement in business arrangements for corporate Australia. They will reduce compliance costs and increase certainty by improving the methods by which the Commissioner of Taxation can approve these arrangements.
The amendments also make a difference in relation to business arrangements. It is enormously frustrating for businesses, which have to deal constantly with the obstacles, irregularities and inefficiencies in our tax system. The improvements here, which allow self-assessment on eligibility rather than requiring the Commissioner of Taxation’s approval, will make a big difference. I think they are a good and more flexible arrangement for business in this economy. So schedule 1 makes a significant difference to business arrangements for corporate Australia, and I support this schedule in particular.
Schedule 2 deals with the adoption of rules in relation to indirect taxes and excise. Tax rulings are extremely important for business. I can tell you that, when a client comes to speak to an accountant or a lawyer about a tax problem, it is fantastic when that lawyer or accountant can say: ‘There’s a tax ruling on that. I can just point it out.’ It is a formal mechanism that the Australian Taxation Office can use to interpret the law. We know that happens every day for corporate Australia. We also know that the interpretation of those laws by the Commissioner of Taxation is important to clarify certain inconsistencies in business arrangements. The commissioner does not always get it right, and we have seen that in terms of litigation. However, we want to make sure that taxpayers can be certain, confident and reassured that their tax liabilities are consistent with the commissioner’s interpretation of the law.
Currently, there is no framework for GST rulings, and there have been submissions made to the Board of Taxation about that. The amendments before us include indirect tax rulings, excise advice and the general rulings regime. This is a sensible, moderate and reasonable approach and an important reform for corporate Australia, and it will go a significant way towards ensuring that GST, excise and indirect tax rulings make a big difference to the lives of companies and individuals involved in business arrangements.
The third schedule is probably the one that makes the most difference to the average individual taxpayer and small business across the country. We know that you can only claim an input tax credit if there is a tax invoice. We also know that there are particular requirements to ensure that tax invoices comply with a defined set of requirements. Not everyone who sets up a business will have had prior business experience. Not everyone who opens a newsagency, a fish and chip shop or a flower shop or who leaves a building company to work for themselves as a tradesman will have had prior business experience. Hence, they will not get it right every time they deal with tax laws. The invoices they present will not always comply with the particular prescriptive requirements of the tax legislation; therefore, any flexibility in the legislation makes sense with respect to small business particularly.
When suppliers claim an input credit, the schedule allows for a more reasonable approach to be taken where the tax document contains some minor errors. This seems to be prudent and sensible. If there are fundamental mistakes in a person’s documentation—let us say, it does not even look, smell, feel or taste like a tax invoice—then of course it is not a tax invoice. But we want to make sure that, if there are minor errors, people can claim their input tax credit and not worry that there might be problems. Sometimes this can mean thousands of dollars for small and medium sized businesses. This amendment will make a difference. Minor errors can of course frustrate compliance costs for small business, so the changes here will make a difference. They operate from the middle of this year.
We think these are important changes. We think they will improve the flexibility of our economy, assist more businesses, allow recipients to treat documents as tax invoices where there are minor changes. That will make a big difference, particularly for small business in my area. We do not have many large businesses in the Ipswich and West Moreton area; however, our many small business operators are the backbone of the economy. This is also the situation for many small country towns and rural communities as well as metropolitan Ipswich. So we think this legislation will make a difference.
I am happy to support the legislation because it helps corporate Australia—large businesses in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane—as well as small businesses in places like Boonah, Laidley, Kalbar, Beaudesert and other places up in the Somerset region which I know need certainty with respect to these matters.
I will rise for a short time to facilitate my colleague, the shadow spokesperson on this issue, who is moving from a speech she is just completing in the House of Representatives to the Main Committee. I will help her in that transit by offering a few thoughts on the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 GST Administration Measures No. 2) Bill 2010.
The member for Blair was very well versed on the subject. I will give him credit for his knowledge of tax rulings and the interpretation of the tax act. It is probably something he has far too much knowledge of. I congratulate him on his contribution on the bill. Like the member for Blair, small business is also hugely important in my electorate. I do not have substantial businesses either, so ensuring that small business is able to operate effectively is very important. My business base is made up of about 7,500 small businesses. We recently surveyed them, in fact, and one of the consistent issues that came through was their difficulty with the complicated tax system and the GST. While the GST was a very worthwhile initiative of the former Howard government—and I now welcome the support of it from those on the other side—it can always be improved to make it easier for small business to make sure that they can get on with the job of their business, whether it be a hairdressing salon, a butcher shop or a winery. They need to keep their businesses open and operating without too much complication in relation to meeting their tax obligations.
It is very important that we look at these pieces of tax legislation to ensure that they are as simple as they can possibly be, but obviously ensuring that the tax act and the tax obligations of people are being fulfilled. No-one likes paying tax. It is the view on our side of the chamber that we should be paying the lowest tax we possibly can. We do not support great, big new taxes—not on small business in this case but also on other industries. We think that will damage the economy and will damage the very industry which is driving so much of our economic activity in our country. We on our side of the House are always conscious of trying to reduce the tax burden on Australian business. It is a real balance to ensure that the tax act is being properly implemented and at the same time allowing people to get on and run their business.
The member for Blair talked in great detail about the changes contained in this bill—in far better detail than I could—and I agree with much of what he had to say. Occasionally the member for Blair and I do not agree on issues relating to tax, and certainly in recent days I think we probably have a vastly different view on some of the changes to our tax system that are being planned. Clearly the opposition is supportive of this bill, but I will not take too much of the shadow minister’s gunpowder in giving our view. With those few remarks I will conclude.
I am pleased to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 GST Administration Measures No. 2) Bill 2010. This bill amends the tax law to further progress a package of reforms announced in the 2009-10 budget aimed at simplifying and streamlining the administration of GST in the areas of grouping, invoicing and rulings. These amendments are from recommendations of the Board of Taxation in its Review of the Legal Framework for the Administration of the Goods and Services Tax. The changes will apply from 1 July 2010.
The bill deals with three schedules. Schedule 1, GST groups and GST joint ventures, amends the A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999 and the Taxation Administration Act 1953 to adopt more principled and flexible rules for GST groups and GST joint ventures. This schedule will enable entities to self-assess their eligibility to form or change a GST group or joint venture and they will only need to notify the commissioner of their action before the due date of lodgment of the GST return for the tax period. Presently, the commissioner must formally approve such changes. Schedule 1 also greatly increases the flexibility of the grouping rules by allowing entities to form, change and dissolve the GST group or joint venture at any time during a tax period rather than only at the beginning of a tax period or having to unwind transactions back to the start of a tax period. Further, schedule 1 will enable entities to enter into indirect tax-sharing agreements to limit their joint and several liabilities in respect of indirect tax law liabilities to a contribution amount agreed with the representative members for GST groups or joint ventures. This will increase certainty for members in GST groups and joint ventures in relation to their exposure to group debts.
Schedule 2 of the bill concerns rulings. Schedule 2 amends the Taxation Administration Act, the GST act—both mentioned previously—the Excise Act and the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to include indirect tax rulings and excise advice in the general rulings regime. This will address problems arising from not having an express legislative framework for GST rulings and from having no formal review rights and no framework setting out the taxpayer’s rights and obligations. Income tax rulings will be expanded to include GST, luxury car tax, wine equalisation tax and excise matters.
Schedule 3, tax invoices, amends the A New Tax System (GST) Act to introduce a more flexible set of requirements for tax invoices. It will allow recipients of supplies to disregard certain errors in a document intended to be a tax invoice, where missing information can be obtained from other documents provided to the recipient by the supplier.
The coalition support this bill, as we support all measures to simplify and streamline the administration of both GST and other taxation provisions. We appreciate the fact that the changes will apply from July 2010. Without further ado, I commend the bill to the House.
in reply—I would like to thank all those members who participated in this debate. The measures contained in the Tax Laws Amendment (2010 GST Administration Measures No. 2) Bill 2010 further progress a package of reforms announced in the 2009-10 budget aimed at simplifying and streamlining the administration of the goods and services tax, this time in the area of grouping, invoices and rulings. These measures arose from recommendations made by the Board of Taxation in its report on GST administration. Adopting the more flexible rules for GST groups and GST joint ventures contained in schedule 1 will reduce compliance costs and increase certainty. In particular, the system of requiring the commissioner’s approval to form, change or dissolve a group will be replaced with self-assessment and notifications. The requirement that the information and changes to a group only take place from the beginning of a tax period will be replaced with rules allowing such actions to take place at any time during a tax period. Finally, entities entering into indirect tax-sharing arrangements will be able to address the uncertainty associated with the existing joint and several liability provisions to limit their liability for unpaid indirect tax amounts.
The amendments in schedule 2 of the bill will expand the income tax rulings regime to include GST, luxury car tax and wine equalisation tax rulings and excise advice. This introduces a range of features, including the right to object to a private, indirect tax or excise ruling. Providing consistent rules across different taxes will simplify the tax law and increase certainty for taxpayers.
The amendments contained in schedule 3 of the bill will introduce more flexible requirements for tax invoices and allow errors in tax invoices to be disregarded by recipients where the relevant information can be obtained from other documents issued by the supplier. As a result of this measure, minor errors in tax invoices will no longer result in taxpayers incurring the compliance costs associated with revising their input tax credits and obtaining a corrected tax invoice. The measures contained in this bill apply on and from 1 July 2010. I commend this bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.
Debate resumed from 17 March, on motion by Mr Griffin:
That this bill be now read a second time.
I am pleased to speak on the Tax Laws Amendment (Transfer of Provisions) Bill 2010. The bill deals with five schedules. Schedule 1 concerns the collection and recovery of tax. Schedule 1 rewrites the remaining sections of part 6 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and the Taxation Administration Act 1953. Part 4 contains rules about the collection and recovery of income tax, including rules about when income tax becomes due and payable, rules allowing the commissioner to make estimates of certain tax debts and to take recovery action based on those estimates, and rules imposing penalties on directors of companies that fail to pay certain tax debts. The rewritten rules of collection and recovery include those giving the commissioner power to seek security from a taxpayer for an existing or future tax liability in certain situations such as a serious risk of tax liability not being paid, expanded security deposit rules to cover all taxes administered by the commissioner and new machinery rules and higher penalties for noncompliance.
Schedule 2 relates to commercial debt forgiveness. Schedule 2 rewrites the remaining schedule 2C to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and contains the rules for the income tax treatment of the gains made when a taxpayer’s debt is forgiven. Schedule 3 rewrites the remaining schedule 2E to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. Schedule 2E ensures that a lessor and a lessee of a luxury car get the same income tax treatment they would have got had the lessor sold the car to the lessee and lent the lessee the money for the purchase.
Schedule 4 is on farm management deposits. Schedule 4 rewrites the remaining schedule 2G to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. Schedule 2G establishes the farm management deposits scheme, which allows eligible primary producers to set aside pre-tax income in profitable years for subsequent withdrawal in low-income years. Schedule 5, on general insurance, rewrites the remaining schedule 2J to the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997. Schedule 2J ensures that general insurance companies are taxed on premium income received and can deduct liabilities for outstanding claims over the period of risk under the policies to which the income and deductions relate.
The subject matter of all those schedules is quite interesting and complicated, but that is not what this bill is about. This is about a rewrite. This is about an ongoing tax law simplification project which rewrites the archaic and sometimes very difficult to interpret rules in the 1936 act into the 1997 plain English act. It is taking an awfully long time. We would like to see it speeded up and we would like to see provisions that are not as simple and straightforward in their rewriting as these ones accelerated in the queue. However, in the rewrite, quite appropriately, there are no changes to the law. The coalition approves this bill. It is uncontroversial and I commend it to the House.
I speak in support of the Tax Laws Amendment (Transfer of Provisions) Bill 2010. There are some in the House and the Senate who go to the gym when they are here in Parliament House. I have actually never weighed the income tax assessment legislation, but I think if you weighed it it would probably weigh the same as a couple of dumbbells that you could throw around and push up. It is pretty heavy stuff. I remember when I studied it at law school and when I had it on the shelf in private practice. You have to watch the way you pull it out because it is quite heavy. It is also quite complex, and anyone who studies it and deals with it day by day knows how difficult it is.
The member for Farrer was correct: it was 1936 when the original legislation went through. That was a long time ago. We have talked about this being known as the Tax Law Improvement Project. It has been going on for a long time. It got a kick along under Paul Keating, when he was the Prime Minister, back in the early nineties. There was a recommendation given to the Keating Labor government by the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit to make some changes. But, seriously, we have to do something about this to speed the process up. I commend the legislation that is before this House. We are making changes. We are rewriting 149 pages of the old 1936 act and putting it into the 1997 Income Tax Assessment Act and the Taxation Administration Act. That is significant change. As the Hon. Nick Sherry said in a press release on 17 March this year, that is a reduction of 30 per cent because it will be reduced to 101 pages. But we have to do better long term, whether we occupy the treasury bench or those opposite do.
I will not go through the schedules that the member for Farrer outlined, but I will say that we are not changing in any substantive way the legislation that is before the House. We are modernising the law, providing certainty and consistency through the changes, and using language which we use today. The use of modern English in legislation cannot come quickly enough. Some of the provisions of the Income Tax Assessment Act are almost incomprehensible. They really are. They are very difficult to understand. For those people in small and medium sized businesses who are more interested in selling their goods and services and dealing with their clients and customers, to have to wade through complicated, archaic provisions that use language which they would not use in modern-day life—and which their children certainly would not use—is simply ridiculous. We must accelerate the process of modernisation of our laws when it comes to using plain English. Sometimes you wonder how we draft legislation. We have paragraphs and subparagraphs that go on forever. We have to make changes.
I commend the government for what they are doing. This is a significant reform and it makes a big difference to how the legislation looks. These are complicated areas, and I know it takes time, but we have to accelerate the process. The project needs to be given some impetus. I agree with the Hon. Nick Sherry that this is an improvement. I think it does reduce complexity. We are about committing ourselves to slashing red tape and modernising not just the tax law system but other complicated pieces of legislation. Governments of both persuasions do this from time to time. We do this through the Statute Law Revision Act, and we do it on numerous occasions. Since I was elected to this place in 2007, I have spoken on that piece of legislation and various other pieces of legislation like it on numerous occasions, because there are some quite strange provisions in legislation. I commend the government for tackling the project, for giving it some life, for accelerating it, but we must do better. This legislation does make some changes. It rewrites the 1936 act. I will now make mention of some of the schedules.
I would like to mention schedule 2G, which establishes the farm management deposits scheme. This allows eligible primary producers to set aside pre-tax income in profitable years for subsequent withdrawal in low-income years. We are not making any change; we are just modernising the legislation. But that is a good scheme, particularly for the farming communities in the Somerset region, the Lockyer Valley and the Fassifern Valley in South-East Queensland, which I represent. In difficult drought conditions it is tough not just on the farmers but also on the small business operators in those communities, so I am pleased that we have seen the drought break in South-East Queensland and that we have seen improvements. I really support this scheme. I think it will make a big difference in farming communities. In particular, I am pleased that we are modernising the legislation with respect to that scheme, and I commend the legislation to the House.
in reply—Firstly, let me thank those members who have contributed to this debate. The Tax Laws Amendment (Transfer of Provisions) Bill 2010 repeals five areas of income tax law, adding up to 149 pages of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936, and rewrites them into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and, in one case, into the Taxation Administration Act 1953. The bill does not make any major policy changes to the provisions it rewrites. Indeed, the changes it makes are mostly to the location of the provisions, to their structure and to their text. But, still, those changes are important.
The government is committed to having a single income tax assessment act for Australia within a reasonable time. The benefits of achieving that might not be noticed by many, but they will be appreciated by those taxpayers and tax practitioners who have to work with the income tax law, a most difficult piece of legislation. Achieving a single assessment act will reduce the complexity of that legislation, and this bill takes an important step towards achieving that goal, so it is pleasing to see that other members have taken an interest in this matter, which has not always had the profile that it deserves. I commend this bill to the House.
Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.
Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.
I move:
That the Main Committee do now adjourn.
I rise this afternoon to speak on an issue that is important not just to my electorate, not just to rural and regional Australia but to all Australians—that is, the issue of our food security. Too often we hear platitudes and too often we see politicians decked out in their brand-new, dustless Akubras and open-necked shirts going out into rural and regional areas trying to get nice Australian type photos; but, when it comes to making real decisions about securing not only Australia’s food supply but the survival and, in fact, growth of rural and regional Australia, too often we have seen a lack of action. I have a particular passion for this issue. As a young mother soon to have her family grow I am concerned about the future of this nation. What sort of country do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a country where we import all our food? Do we want to live in a country where we import all our manufactured goods? I would say no. But we need to start now. We are at the crossroads.
In this instance, looking at one particular industry, the apple industry, I have met with local growers in my electorate who are extremely concerned about the very serious potential of importing diseases. I certainly share this concern, as do many people on this side of the House. We are pest free in this industry and we have a distinct product to sell. We have seen the area lose many farmers and many workers. There is also this concern: if our green, clean agricultural industries are battered with unfair imports, which could quite possibly contain a variety of exotic diseases, what incentive are we giving to our hardworking farmers? What are we saying to them and their families? We are not saying, ‘Thank you;’ we are not saying, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ What we as a nation are saying is: ‘Too bad; we’re still going to allow the importation of these, possibly, diseased fruit.’
I want the government to actually listen to the concerns of industry, rather than fob them off and not do the hard work of considering potential consequences. Once we import any one of these exotic diseases we have Buckley’s of trying to get rid of it. The industry is worth a significant amount of money to regions, it is worth a significant amount of money to our agricultural sector and the Labor Party is, unfortunately, playing Russian roulette with our nation’s quarantine and border security. I join the shadow minister for agriculture in questioning the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry as to how hard he has fought to appeal against any adverse findings regarding the importation of apples from China. I am not sure whether he has fought too hard. I suppose he now has a lot of responsibilities, with the issue of population as well, but he should not forget that he is dealing not just with the sustainability of a population but with the sustainability of the agricultural sector.
What contingency plans does the minister have to deal with any outbreak of, say, fire blight? What plans are in place? I do not think there are many, because I do not think the minister has given this matter due consideration. I do not think he has looked into the eyes of these apple growers and said, ‘I’ve done my very best to protect you.’ I have written to the minister requesting that he meet with my apple growers to hear firsthand from them not only their expertise but also their critique of the current quarantine system and the current assessments that have been made about the importation of foreign apples into Australia.
I thank the honourable member for Indi and I am sure that all honourable members will join with me in giving the member for Indi and her husband, Greg, every best wish with respect to the forthcoming birth of their second child.
I rise today to recognise the extraordinary contribution that Australian nurses have made to our nation’s history—in particular their contribution to the history of Australia’s involvement in world conflict. Australian troops have marched into war zones over many different conflicts, but they have been supported by personnel such as nurses, who have stood alongside our troops providing support. In the Boer War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War the same Australian spirit, determination and courage that distinguished Aussie service personnel was also evident in the nurses and other service personnel who served alongside them.
Take, for example, the achievements in World War II of a constituent in my electorate, Nurse Lieutenant Olive Weston, of Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL. She is one example in my electorate of a woman who has served this country with great distinction and quiet dedication. She is part of a succession of Australian women whose history of selflessness took them off to places where their charity, efficiency and good cheer made all the difference in circumstances of unimaginable pain and suffering.
In her 84 years, Lieutenant Olive Weston has served the country in a variety of contexts that would have tested the moral fibre of the best of us. She joined the army at the age of 15 during World War II and her experience in tropical medicine was put to use in caring for soldiers in the 12th Station Hospital in Townsville. Her four years of service included a stint in New Guinea before she was repatriated to Australia after suffering from malaria and dengue fever. Personal hardship has made little difference to the commitment that Olive has shown in her ongoing years. She explained her attitude to hardship in her biography: ‘We didn’t really have fear; that’s why we were doing what we were.’ This is a very good book and I would suggest everyone read it to learn about the experiences that people such as Olive Weston had and about the sacrifices they made on behalf of the country.
In World War II alone, 3,477 Australian women signed up to the Australian Army Nursing Service and, of those, 71 made the ultimate sacrifice while caring for troops overseas. In early 1942, when fighting on the Malay Peninsula reached its climax and retreat became unavoidable, evacuation by hospital ship was not a possibility so the wounded soldiers and Australian Army service sisters returned to Australia via a number of vessels. En route to Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was sunk by Japanese bombers in the Bangka Strait. A group of 22 survivors made it to Bangka Island but, tragically, when the Japanese found them they were ordered to walk into the sea and were machine-gunned from behind by the Japanese patrol. All of these women were killed except one, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel—she has a very remarkable story to tell.
I want to take this opportunity to commemorate these nurses because they are not necessarily often remembered. I also want to congratulate everyone in South Australia involved in remembering these women through the annual Bangka Day service held at the memorial in the Women’s Memorial Playing Fields. It is a significant memorial service. Further, I want to talk today about something very special that the Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL has done. I was very pleased to attend the launch at the Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL of Australia’s first ever honour roll dedicated to nurses. As far as they are aware, this is the first such honour roll in Australia. They have put together a wonderful honour roll and memorial for the nurses who served.
I would particularly like to congratulate the Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL for pursuing Olive’s idea and actually putting money behind it to ensure recognition for some of the nurses that were killed. I would like to particularly pay gratitude to the committee that was involved in organising the project: Olive Weston OAM, Steve McInnis, Harry Rollinson, John Fakes OAM, Gary Maynard, Kath Ramsden and David Goodman. The Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL has made a commitment to these nurses by providing funding and in assisting the collection of photographs and names on the honour roll. The president of the Port Noarlunga/Christies Beach RSL said that the RSL chose to fund and support the honour roll ‘because we believe it is important to recognise the contribution that women have made in our national history’. (Time expired)
I would like to read the poem inspired by the event of the anniversary church service for the Bunyip Ridge bushfire held at Labertouche on 7 February 2010. It is by Gerry Cunningham, who, for members’ information, is a brother of former member for McMillan, Barry Cunningham—and very talented he is. It is entitled Hope:
The marquee stood in the paddock there
Mid the skeletal trees both green and bare.
The locals gathered in the sunlit air,
And they dared to hope.
The Christian band with its fiddlers two
played a jaunty tune in the morning dew.
They sang their songs and one was new,
And it sang of hope.
A bible reading from John fourteen,
A home for all in a place unseen,
It was hard for some, where they had been,
Yet they cling to hope.
A duet of song spoke for everyman.
A solid place where we all can stand.
Perhaps it will help us to understand,
As we search for hope.
A funny man for the kids came out.
With his many tricks he did sing and shout,
The prodigal son he went on about,
And he spoke of hope.
The member’s words were brief but true.
They reminded us of the things we knew.
That the wrath of nature is a bitter brew,
But we should still hope.
The symbolic sunflowers in their shining gold,
A story of regrowth there to be told,
They had grown a flowering sight to behold,
And they told of hope.
A hymn was sung of God’s great fidelity,
A denial, it seemed, of our recent reality.
But our strength is restored by the day’s communality,
And we continue to hope.
A cuppa together to finish the day,
For the true Aussie spirit was here on display
In far better mind we went on our way,
We were filled with hope.
It was a very, very hard commemorative service to go to. I found myself as I stood to speak wishing I were somewhere else and someone other than the federal member on that day. I had the realisation that, as I felt, so did many of the hundreds of people that were there. They did not come because they wanted to commemorate such a tragic event; they came to support one another. Gerry Cunningham was there with his wife. I said to Gerry, ‘Gerry, I know you’re a poet of great means. Have you considered putting words to this day?’ The church had truly erected a tent in the middle of a paddock. We expected a hundred people to turn up. But suddenly out of the bush and along the roads at Labertouche, cars began to arrive. I noticed two women sitting apart—not wanting to be a part of a church but sitting apart. I realised as I watched them that they were here to support others and not because they wanted to be there, not because they wanted to participate. They did not want to remember what had happened on that fateful day in February, but they came to support all the other people that came to support all the other people. They were feeling exactly as I was: ‘What are we doing here? We’ve got nothing to celebrate. It was a terrible, terrible, terrible day.’
I missed the word ‘sunflowers’ in this poem—I actually read out ‘flowers’. I should have used ‘sunflowers’ because they used sunflower seeds that had been planted and then taken from the fire and grown. Then they handed out sunflowers to people. I took one home and I planted my sunflower seed and it grew. It was GM-free sunflower, too, I might say.
The day was important, and I said to Gerry, ‘Would you put it on paper? Gerry, if you put it on paper, because I know you are capable of doing that—of capturing the moment in a poem—I will read it out in the parliament.’ I am fulfilling that promise to Gerry today to read this poem out, but not for Gerry and not for the great contribution the Cunningham family have made to our district; I am reading it out for every person that was there on that day at that church service supporting one another, arm in arm and hand in hand.
The food-labelling regime in Australia, as in other countries, is important for a number of reasons. Labels on food and food products provide information that is critically important in relation to health and safety; in relation to preventative health in terms of diet, particularly for children; in relation to allowing consumers to make informed choices about their food and its origins; and in relation to competitive fairness when it comes to the way that food companies produce and represent their food to the market. As it stands, food labelling in Australia, which is governed by the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code in addition to state and territory fair trading laws and the Commonwealth Trade Practices Act, is a largely self-regulating system, whose requirements cover things like the provision of ingredients and nutritional information; the produce’s country of origin; the date by which a food should be eaten; and a general truth-in-labelling requirement with regard to the description of the product itself—its weight and so on.
Labels that go beyond this more-or-less raw data and that present what might be called second-order information, in that they draw a conclusion from, say, nutritional information, are perhaps best represented by the Heart Foundation’s Tick. While it is not uncommon for people to regard the heart Tick as forming part of Australia’s food labelling system, the reality is that the Heart Foundation is not a part of the government and the heart Tick is a voluntary form of health accreditation that producers choose to seek or not as it suits them, rather than being something that results from an enforced survey of all foods. That is not to take anything away from the heart Tick itself. Indeed, as a private organisation the Heart Foundation has done a fantastic job in establishing a system of great integrity when it comes to the testing and the random audit compliance for products that first seek and then receive the heart Tick.
I am not the first person to observe that the Heart Foundation’s Tick label and the process that underpins it represent an approach to food labelling that many consumers, health professionals and animal welfare advocates would like to see implemented more widely. We must acknowledge that food production, like other kinds of production, is occurring within the context of significant and rapid change and innovation. That in itself is a strong argument for ensuring that our approach to food labelling is proactive rather than reactive.
On that point, I have noted before in this place the particular importance of staying ahead of the curve in relation to food products that involve genetically modified ingredients. I am pleased to note that work is currently occurring under the auspices of Labelling and Information Standards in relation to the treatment of nutrition and health related claims. While this will, hopefully, produce better guidelines and compliance when it comes to what are called nutrient content claims and health claims, these guidelines will of course apply only where a food producer seeks to make what is inevitably a positive claim, like ‘High in calcium’ or ‘Calcium is good for healthy bones’. They will not operate to require the disclosure of what might be considered negative nutritional content or the negative health consequences of that content. Again, on this point, I would say with confidence that there is appetite in the Australian community for some guidance in relation to key nutrition and health data, and that a simple, mandated labelling scheme would likely be welcomed by the majority of people, and especially by parents.
Last year I wrote to the Food Labelling Law and Policy Review Panel in support of a submission from the Barristers Animal Welfare Panel that called for nationally mandated and legislatively defined labelling protocols to cover methods of production of animal derived products that involve very different outcomes for animals like chickens and pigs. In the case of different methods of egg production, Australian consumers have, in large numbers, demonstrated their preference for eggs from free-range chickens, and yet it was only three years ago that both the Australian Egg Corporation and the Australian free-range poultry association estimated that some 200,000 factory-farm eggs per day were being passed off as free-range eggs.
Strengthening the labelling regime in this area is not just a case of providing consumers with accurate information about production methods. It is also about protecting the financial interests of those producers who choose to farm chickens in a way that is both more humane and more costly. Such producers should not have the marketing advantage that comes with genuine free-range farming diluted by unscrupulous producers whose farming methods would horrify some consumers. The current absence of effective labelling compliance when it comes to methods of production for eggs and other animal derived products means that some producers are misleading consumers, misrepresenting their conduct when it comes to animal welfare, and having a free ride at the expense of their genuinely free-range competitors.
The rapidly occurring changes in food production methods and technology, in patterns of food consumption and in our understanding of the health and welfare consequences that flow from these, require that we continue to review the approach taken to labelling in the interests of public health, consumer choice and fair market competition.
Today I speak on behalf of the many residents of my electorate of Tangney who have approached me to voice their concern about the lack of new investment in aged care. From recent meetings with aged-care providers and their staff, it is becoming increasingly clear that the current aged-care process is simply not up to the task of meeting the challenges of an ageing population. I am concerned that the lack of investment in aged care is manifesting itself in the lack of allocation of aged-care positions. Staff retention is also a problem, with the wellbeing of aged-care staff and their facilities also needing to be addressed. With an ageing population we have a growing demand for positions, and the growing labour shortage is not helping to find and train new carers and nurses.
In 2007 only 69 per cent of aged-care beds were allocated in Western Australia from that year’s aged-care allocation fund. The actual figure for allocations in 2007 was 644 beds out of 1,006. This was notable, as it was the first time we had had a shortfall in allocations nationally. In 2008, we had a new zero real interest loan round of 334 beds allocated, which was claimed in the Senate to have made up the shortfall of beds from the 2007 aged-care allocation round. Clearly, this was not the case.
Then in 2008-09 the aged-care allocation round was reduced from 1,640 to 1,208 beds—and we are yet to receive a reasonable explanation as to why it was reduced. In the 2008-09 allocation round, with 1,208 beds made available, there were only 519 beds allocated. In 2009-10 we had 4,299 beds on offer in WA, and there is no business case for any provider to apply for these beds to meet future needs in WA. The forecast allocation numbers for the next two rounds are 1,176 available beds in 2009-10 and 2,523 beds in 2010-11.
My electorate is crying out for aged-care places, yet we have well over 1,000 beds still to be built from allocation rounds going back to 2004 and we have a record number of beds being handed back or unallocated. With a shortage of residential places on offer, this situation seems unfathomable. Further to this, between December 2007 and March 2009, 786 bed licences were handed back nationally and 283 of these were from my state of WA. I have to ask: why is WA leading the way in the aged-care development demise?
There are a number of key issues. Firstly, there is the availability and access to affordable large land lots in appropriate areas. This is linked to the land shortage in WA, which drives excessive price growth. Secondly, the cost of construction far exceeds the national standards. This is multifold in regional and remote areas. The industry is currently funded at $109,000 per bed, and the average cost of construction exceeds $200,000. Aged care quite simply cannot be run profitably. Thirdly, many aged-care providers face funding issues, as they do not have the financial resources to service the large loan needed to build the infrastructure. There are also issues with the workforce and, due to the regulation on funding and fees, the industry has no mechanism to raise wages to a competitive rate in a competing market in WA, even in these relatively good economic times. As things stand at the moment, wages are poor and the work is challenging. Simply put, they cannot even compete with Coles.
Aged care has an ageing workforce, and younger people are not attracted to the roles and responsibilities. The industry has been warning the federal government and relevant ministers for years that there will be a shortfall in applications, and now, unfortunately, it is a reality. This is not an issue that needs political polarisation. A mature debate on the future of aged care is needed to ensure that my constituents in Tangney and the wider Australian population are provided with options, security and certainty in the aged-care system.
April was Autism Awareness Month around the world, and on Friday, 30 April, Rainbowland Autism Services Inc. organised the inaugural Autism Rainbow Day as part of a global autism awareness campaign. My electorate office team joined in the awareness campaign on the day by wearing plain-coloured T-shirts symbolising one of the colours of the rainbow. The campaign, not surprisingly, attracted widespread public interest both from within Australia and from overseas. I say ‘not surprisingly’ because of the number of children around the world with autism. Through greater community awareness it is hoped that there will be greater community understanding and, in turn, increased levels of support for children with autism and for their families.
I will take a moment to provide some background with respect to autism and the Rainbowland Autism Services community organisation. An autism awareness fact sheet describes autism as ‘a lifelong neurological disorder characterised by impairments in communication, socialisation and restricted patterns of interest and behaviours’. In Australia autism is estimated to affect one in every 160 Australian children and around 30,000 Australian families. The estimated cost of autism to the Australian community is around $7 billion per annum. The social impacts on and costs to the children and those 30,000 families in the form of learning difficulties, limited social opportunities for the children and very high rates of parental depression and separation are immeasurable. There is no cure for autism but providing the right kind of early intervention can be very beneficial for children and, in turn, ultimately saves millions of dollars in costs later on.
Understanding the behaviour of children with autism and being able to correctly interpret that behaviour is an important first step. Speech therapy, early intervention, occupational therapy and home modifications all help, but for the families they come at a cost, as does the destruction to the school life of the children, which raises an additional concern. Many schools are simply unprepared; they do not have the resources or the expertise to deal with children with autism. In that respect, autism-specific preschools such as that in Brisbane are a terrific start.
I welcome, as I know many of the parents I have spoken with do, the Rudd government’s $190 million Helping Children with Autism package, the first national initiative to help families deal with this challenging disorder. The package provides families with $12,000 in early intervention funding. Rainbowland Autism Services is a local autism group formed by local families in Makin who are affected by autism. The group is led by Alison Dix, who through her determination, her tireless efforts and with the support of other parents has established the Rainbowland playgroup for children with autism.
I have visited the playgroup, spoken with parents there and seen for myself its benefits for the parents and for the children. There is no doubt, however, that more needs to be done for both the parents and the children. Raising community awareness through initiatives such as Autism Rainbow Day will highlight the needs and in turn hopefully lead to more support being provided. It also serves to remind the parents of children with autism that they are not alone, that support networks are in place and that with others who share their problem they stand the best chance of being heard. I am also aware that through those kinds of networks they are able to support each other both in a social sense and in providing guidance to families who are finding it very difficult to cope by directing them to some help and assistance.
It is a terrific initiative, and I commend Alison Dix, Helen Howson and all of the other parents they work with for organising Autism Rainbow Day and for being a voice for the thousands of children with autism and for their family members. It is one of those initiatives that was started by a local group of people who simply believed that there were not enough support services and who were prepared to create this organisation. It is doing a terrific amount of good work, certainly within my electorate, for those families who are faced with the challenges of autism. In turn, they are becoming vocal advocates for families and children with autism around the country. I commend the work that they are doing.
Question agreed to.