Federal Leader of The Nationals Warren Truss: Address to The Nationals Federal Council 2009
22-August-2009
Speech by the Federal Leader of The Nationals
Warren Truss
The Nationals Federal Council
Saturday 22 August 2009
This Federal Council is where The Nationals take the next step to positively and ambitiously plan the future for our party, and to help create a better future for the people of regional Australia that we alone are specifically dedicated to represent.
As we do so, I am reminded of the old quote about the future and there being three kinds of people: “Those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened”.
I know what camp The Nationals have to be in. I certainly don’t want the future to be Kevin Rudd’s - it’s bad enough being in his present.
And I don’t want us to waste the opportunity that the next election represents: to get this great country back on track, where we pay our way, we strongly encourage investment and prosperity, and we are beholden to no-one.
We have to make our own future. More than seven million Australians who live outside the major cities need a party of committed men and women to stand up for them, deliver for them and not take a backwards step. We must reach out not just to our traditional voters but those we have lost in the past and those who have never thought about voting for us before.
But before we look to The Nationals’ future, it is important to spend a little time examining where Australia has ended up in the 21 months since the election of the Rudd Labor Government.
Before the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd told the nation that he could reduce petrol and grocery prices, cut bank fees, take over the public health system if the States did not lift their game, put a computer on the desk of every schoolchild, improve the lot of the homeless and indigenous people and provide fast broadband to 98% of the population for less than $5 billion.
But petrol and grocery prices have gone up, so have bank fees. The date for the States to fix their hospital systems passed two months ago and we’re now having another six months of consultation. The computer on every desk has become a computer on every second desk and only then if the P&C pays for the electricity and maintenance. Not a single new home has built for the homeless or Aboriginal Australians. The broadband promise now covers only 90% of the population and the cost has gone up to $46 billion – if it is ever built at all.
Kevin Rudd also told Australians that he was an “economic conservative” and that “reckless spending” would stop. Kevin Rudd said he would govern for all Australians.
On all of those promises and claims, Mr Rudd’s report card has been stamped with a great big F for fail.
As economics commentator Ross Gittins – no friend of the Coalition – said the other day: “In the short time he’s been in office, Rudd has established a record of over-promising and under-delivering. He invariably claims the fix he cobbled together is the biggest and best in ages. But then he moves on and something else becomes top priority.”
But it would be unfair of me not to mention the Prime Minister’s real achievements. In the area of spending other people’s money, Kevin Rudd has scored an A. In fact, he deserves a gold star too.
The “economic conservative” who would stop the previous Government’s “reckless spending”, but no-one has ever spent more in such a short time – Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan make Gough Whitlam look like Scrooge McDuck.
It is astonishing to think that within a few short years, Federal debt is forecast to reach $315 billion. I was there in the ministry for most of the Coalition’s time in government, and saw first-hand how hard it was to pay back the $96 billion of debt left behind by the Hawke and Keating governments.
$315 billion is a whole new ball game. The children getting a new Julia Gillard Memorial Assembly Hall at their school should be told that they will be paying if off through higher taxes and poorer services for the rest of their lives. With the 40th anniversary of the moon landing just passed, it is worth noting that if you were to convert $315 billion to ten dollar bills and lay them end to end they would stretch from the Earth to the moon, and back six and half times.
The Rudd Government has already built a legacy of debt and joblessness that we will remember for generations.
So, who is the team of champions that has created that legacy? Radio commentator Alan Jones recently noted that the six leading members of the Government from Mr Rudd down have a collective work experience of 181 years. But only 13 of those years were spent in the private sector, and 11 years of that 13 are credited to Julia Gillard who was working with a private law firm as a trade union lawyer!
So we have a collective TWO YEARS of genuine private sector business experience – although none were running a business - among the people calling the economic shots in Canberra. Yet these are the people now trusted with running the nation’s biggest business – the national government.
Back in the mid to late 90s, we in the Liberal-Nationals Coalition had to make a number of very hard decisions about what programs should be cut or trimmed to get the books in order after the damage wrought by the Keating Government. We worked hard to avoid tax increases, reckoning that a low tax environment would help set up Australia for prosperity and job and investment creation once the economy was back on track. We were right.
We certainly would not and did not target regional Australia – where so much of our national wealth is created – with big and unconscionable spending cuts.
Compare that approach with the first Rudd Budget, which stripped more than $1 billion from country Australia. Regional development programs worth $436 million were scrapped and replaced with one worth only $176 million, and all that money was already allocated to Labor’s election promises. Existing agricultural programs worth $334 million were replaced with ones worth only $220 million and most of those were about climate change, and of course the $959 million Opel broadband contract to provide broadband to regional Australians was bumped off – with no credible alternative available.
The second Budget was even worse. Breaking an election promise, no specific program was put in place to support development in regional Australia and the Area Consultative Committees across the nation were axed. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry was the ONLY department hit with an extra efficiency dividend, seeing 312 staff dismissed, quarantine inspections of imports have been cut but export inspection charges are set to rise dramatically, making Australian exports less competitive. Land and Water Australia has been abolished and another $12 million taken from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. More than $900 million in budgeted drought funding has simply disappeared, yet the drought continues to wreak havoc.
When it comes to regional Australia, Labor is dismissive, destructive and sneering. Labor has chosen a Minister for Regional Development, Anthony Albanese, who lives in inner Sydney. This Syndey Labor power monger is the one Labor sent out this morning to criticise The Nationals and our championing of the regions. He actually boasts about moving road funding away from the regions to the cities. The Agriculture Minister Tony Burke represents a neighbouring Sydney electorate which has the least number of people dependent on agriculture, fisheries and forestry of any electorate in Australia. The new Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development lives in Bennelong – not far away in central Sydney.
They don’t understand and they don’t care.
Sadly, the Australian system of politics has so often boiled down to one step forward, one step back. One side – always Labor – wrecks the economy, puts people out of work, sends investment and tax dollars offshore and panders to special interests.
Then the other side – always the Coalition – is voted back in to clean up the mess. To pay off the debt, provide a sensible and clear framework to create jobs and investment and - thanks largely to The Nationals – restore security, opportunity and prosperity for regional Australians.
It is no wonder so many of our fellow Australians are so cynical about politics.
The cynicism has already begun to emerge when people hear about Labor’s hazy ambitions for paying back that debt. We still don’t know for sure what the Rudd Government is proposing, but I think we’ll know more once the Ken Henry’s tax review is released later this year. So far, only an increase in the GST and new superannuation taxes has been ruled out; everything else is up for consideration. Over the past couple of weeks Labor has refused to rule out higher income taxes, new Medicare levies, capital gains tax on the family home, state income taxes and even death duties. So much money has been wildly spent that major new or increased taxes are certain under Labor.
Early this week one of the papers commissioned by the Henry review made it to the front page of the newspapers. Some Melbourne academics – hand-picked by Dr Henry – came up with the idea of whacking an extra 10 cents a litre on fuel excise for every motorist. I have asked the Rudd Government four times to rule out such a new tax slug, but they will not do so. And they proposed to put a new monitoring device in your car so that big brother Canberra can know where you are driving and when and charge you extra if you are somewhere they don’t want you to be.
Labor is preparing the ground for a new round of tax increases. We know Labor lives and dreams new and increased taxes. The Keating Government promised at election time that it would not increase fuel taxes but at its very next budget massively increased fuel excise and indexed the tax.
Last November, senior minister Stephen Conroy said the introduction of congestion charging was ‘a welcome step’. A few months earlier, Dr Henry himself alluded publicly to increased diesel fuel excise for heavy vehicle operators being a ‘pre-condition for other, more important, land transport reforms’. Does he not know that the road transport industry is already fully cost recovered for its use of the road system?
Higher fuel taxes are a tax on living and doing business in regional Australia. What these city-based pointy heads have forgotten is people living in regional Australia have to drive further each day to go to work, take their children to school or go to the doctor, compared to their city cousins. Often they drive on dirt roads and in most cases there is no public transport network to fall back on either.
Higher fuel taxes are a zonal tax on the regions.
Of course, we’ve begun to see the colour of one of Labor’s new taxes, and it’s green. And it will send us further into the red.
The proposed Rudd emissions trading scheme, or carbon pollution reduction scheme as the Labor spin doctors have styled it, is a radical new tax.
His go it alone CPRS is the harshest proposed anywhere in the world and it would touch everything we do. Everything we eat and drink would cost more. Cost of doing business in the country will skyrocket and jobs would be exported overseas. But the CPRS will do nothing for the environment, global emissions would continue to rise, the Murray will stay empty, it will not save the Great Barrier Reef and not a single polar bear would be spared.
One study has shown that in its first year, the Rudd CPRS would cost each Australian $404. The scheme proposed in the United States, will cost only $57 per person and the one operating in Europe only 80 cents per person.
This week’s closure of a Cement Australia’s Rockhampton plant is an illustration of what to expect when Australia has a CPRS and others do not. While Cement Australia gave a couple of reasons for its decision to close the plant, they devoted a whole paragraph of their press release to their concerns about the CPRS. Cement manufacture is a major emitter and Cement Australia said there could be no long term future for the plant under Labor’s CPRS. Other cement plants in Australia are also likely to close with more jobs lost, almost all in regional Australia.
But there will be no environmental benefits. When cement is manufactured in Australia, there are approximately 0.8 tonnes of CO2 emitted for every tonne of cement produced. When our mills close, we will import cement from China, where the emissions are 1.1 tonnes for every tonne of cement produced. So under Labor’s CPRS Australia will lose jobs but global emissions will actually go up.
The Labor Government demanded that their CPRS be passed by the Parliament without any amendments. They were not even prepared to correct obvious drafting errors. For instance, as the legislation stands, Australia coal miners will have to pay not just for the emissions from their mining operations but also on the use of the coal wherever it is exported around the world (unless they sell it through an agent). There will be no new Australian coal mines under Labor’s CPRS even though China is planning to build another 100 coal fired power stations over the next ten years.
The Nationals are not anti environment and we have agreed to support bi-partisan targets for Australia to take to the climate change discussions in Copenhagen later this year. Australia must be part of a global response to address climate change but with our 1.3 per cent chare of global emissions – and that share is going down – we cannot fix the problems ourselves. Even if we were to pass Labor’s draconian CPRS before Copenhagen no one will be listening and no one will follow. Kevin Rudd loves to strut the world stage but he is being delusionary if he thinks the United States, Europe or others will abandon their own emission reduction schemes in favour of Australia’s.
The Rudd ETS would have a disproportionately harsh affect upon regional jobs, investment and lifestyle. For that reason alone The Nationals will never support the Rudd model of a carbon pollution reduction scheme. We voted against it last week – so did the Liberal Party - and The Nationals will do so again, no matter how many times Labor puts its scheme before Parliament.
Within months, we could be going into another election campaign. Whether it is the normal one we see every three years, an early election or a contrived double dissolution The Nationals will be ready to provide a positive policy alternative.
Today we will be debating a 54 page policy document for The Nationals. This is a work in progress and is the first major review of our policy platform since 2004. It does not cover every element of our policy interests. It does focus comprehensively on 12 key areas of importance to the people of regional Australia. These are: health, education, food security and agriculture, land and water management, the economy and taxation, regional development, small business and tourism, transport, communications, social justice, climate change and trade.
Of course, the economic management of this country is of paramount importance. There are many things we will want and need to do that will not be possible under the weight of Labor’s debt. There are matters such as national security, workplace relations and support for the less well off where The Nationals will also want to make major contributions. We know it is important that as we gear up for the next election, regional people can see our bona fides and how we intend delivering security, opportunity and prosperity to them.
I don’t propose to explore all 54 pages in detail in this speech. But some of policies we will ask you to consider today include:
· A targeted fund for regional health infrastructure and incentives to attract medical professionals to a practice in a regional community;
· A Minister for Regional Health, dedicated to devoting his or her full attention to regional health concerns and integrating the many and sometimes confusing array of programs into a comprehensive health service;
· Local hospital boards to run local hospitals and to set local priorities and with direct federal funding;
· Reforming Labor’s disastrous changes to Youth Allowance, and empowering local school communities to develop infrastructure projects rather than being told what to do from on high;
· Rebalancing land use by farming, mining and forestry to ensure all three prosper and the nation’s food security is protected, and create a Ministry of Food Security;
· Unfreeze the $5.8 billion set aside by the Coalition to invest in water efficiency on our farms and regional water supplies; to deliver more water for the environment and for productive use; and there will be socio-economic studies before any more water is bought in the Murray Darling Basin.
· Guarantee a fair share of Government funding for regional infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, and broaden the Better Regions program so that seats held by other than the Labor Party also get a look-in;
· And we will build the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane.
There are many other policy ideas in this platform. I recommend everyone read the document thoroughly and we would appreciate your feedback.
The Nationals are committed to building a strong future for regional Australia.
There is a big task ahead of The Nationals at the next election. But I believe we have the policies, commitment, drive and personnel to break through. Help us to help you to make Australia great again.
