Tuesday, 27 September 1988 Madam SPEAKER (Hon. Joan Child) took the chair at 2 p.m., and read prayers. Mr HAWKE(Wills-Prime Minister) —Madam Speaker, I seek leave to make a statement concerning changes to the Ministry. Leave granted. Mr HAWKE —Madam Speaker-- Opposition members interjecting- Mr HAWKE —I will give the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) a chance to make a statement about his changes; they will be much more interesting than mine. I wish to inform the House of the changes to the Ministry following the resignation from Parliament of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Hon. Bill Hayden, who is to be appointed Governor-General when Sir Ninian Stephen concludes his term in February next year. His Excellency made the following ministerial appointments on 2 September at Government House: Senator Gareth Evans as portfolio Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade; Mr Ralph Willis as portfolio Minister for Transport and Communications; Mr Peter Morris as portfolio Minister for Industrial Relations. He will also be Minister assisting me on Public Service Matters and will continue as Minister Assisting the Treasurer; Senator Robert Ray as portfolio Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs. He will also be Minister assisting me on Multicultural Affairs and has taken over from Senator Evans the role of Manager of Government Business in the Senate; Mr Clyde Holding as Minister for the Arts and Territories in the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories portfolio. Mr Holding will also be Minister Assisting the Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs and Minister assisting me generally across my portfolio, including in relation to the Bicentenary; Mr Gary Punch as Minister for Telecommunications and Aviation Support in the Transport and Communications portfolio; and Mr Bob Brown as Minister for Land Transport and Shipping Support, also in Mr Willis's portfolio. As I announced earlier, the Minister for Social Security, Mr Howe, is now Minister assisting me for Social Justice. Mr Morris and Senator Ray have become members of Cabinet. There is now no office of Minister for Home Affairs within the Administrative Services portfolio; and, because of the breadth of responsibilities and the workload, there are three Ministers in the Transport and Communications portfolio. Within the latter portfolio, Mr Punch will be responsible, under Mr Willis, for telecommunications, postal and certain other communications matters, and domestic aviation infrastructure and aviation security. Mr Brown will work on land transport, road safety and maritime operations and will assist Mr Willis with maritime policy. Responsibilities within other portfolios remain unchanged. Madam Speaker, these appointments will ensure that the Government continues to have a ministerial team of the highest quality deployed in a way which takes full account of its policy and administrative priorities and the changing relative workloads of portfolios. There are no changes in the number of departments or Ministers and the roles and tasks of portfolios also remain unchanged. I seek leave to incorporate in Hansard a Ministry list setting out the new ministerial arrangements in detail. Leave granted. The list read as follows- COMMONWEALTH GOVERNMENT Third Hawke Ministry Title Minister Representative in other Chamber Department(s) administered Prime Minister The Hon.R.J.L. Hawke, AC, MP Senator Button Prime Minister and Cabinet Attorney-General and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Commonwealth-State Relations The Hon. Lionel Bowen, MP (Deputy Prime Minister) Senator Tate Attorney-General's Minister for Justice Senator the Hon. Michael Tate Mr Bowen Attorney-General's Minister for Consumer Affairs and Minister Assisting the Treasurer for Prices Senator the Hon. Nick Bolkus Mr Bowen Attorney-General's Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce Senator the Hon. John Button (Leader of the Government in the Senate) Mr Jones Industry, Technology and Commerce Minister for Science, Customs and Small Business The Hon. Barry O. Jones, MP Senator Button Industry, Technology and Commerce Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Senator the Hon. Gareth Evans, QC (Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Mr Duffy Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister for Trade Negotiations, Minister Assisting the Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce and Minister Assisting the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy) The Hon. Michael Duffy, MP Senator Evans Foreign Affairs and Trade Treasurer The Hon. P.J. Keating, MP Senator Walsh Treasury Minister for Finance Senator the Hon. Peter Walsh Mr Dawkins Finance Minister for Transport and Communications The Hon. Ralph Willis, MP Senator Evans Transport and Communications Minister for Telecommunications and Aviation Support The Hon. Gary Punch, MP Senator Evans Transport and Communications Minister for Land Transport and Shipping Support The Hon. Bob Brown, MP Senator Evans Transport and Communications Minister for Employment, Education and Training The Hon. J.S. Dawkins, MP Senator Walsh Employment, Education and Training; Aboriginal Affairs Minister for Employment and Education Services The Hon. Peter Duncan, MP Senator Walsh Employment, Education and Training Minister for Aboriginal Affairs The Hon. Gerard L. Hand, MP Senator Tate Aboriginal Affairs Minister for Defence The Hon. Kim C. Beazley, MP (Vice-Present of the Executive Council and Leader of the House) Senator Richardson Defence Minister for Defence Science and Personnel The Hon. Ros Kelly, MP Senator Richardson Defence Minister for Primary Industries and Energy The Hon. John Kerin, MP Senator Cook Primary Industries and Energy Minister for Resources Senator the Hon. Peter Cook Mr Kerin Primary Industries and Energy Minister for Social Security and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Social Justice The Hon. Brian Howe, MP Senator Bolkus Social Security Minister for Administrative Services The Hon. Stewart West, MP Senator Ray Administrative Services Minister for Community Services and Health The Hon. Neal Blewett, MP Senator Cook Community Services and Health; Veterans' Affairs Minister for Housing and Aged Care The Hon. Peter Staples, MP Senator Cook Community Services and Health Minister for Veterans' Affairs The Hon. Ben Humphreys, MP Senator Reynolds Veterans' Affairs Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories Senator the Hon. Graham Richardson Mr Holding Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories Minister for the Arts and Territories, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister and Minister Assisting the Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs The Hon. A.C. Holding, MP Senator Richardson Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Public Service Matters and Minister Assisting the Treasurer The Hon. Peter Morris, MP Senator Button Industrial Relations Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Multicultural Affairs Senator the Hon. Robert Ray (Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Mr Holding Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs Minister for Local Government and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women Senator the Hon. Margaret Reynolds Mr Holding Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs Portfolio Ministers, all of whom are in the Cabinet, are shown in bold type. Mr Duffy is also a Cabinet Minister Mr HAWKE —Madam Speaker, I inform the House that the Treasurer (Mr Keating) left on 21 September on Government business overseas. He will return to Australia on 13 October. In his absence the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Mr Dawkins, is the Acting Treasurer. I also advise the House that the Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories, Senator Richardson, left Australia on 13 September on official duty overseas. He will return on 29 September. The Minister for the Arts and Territories, Mr Holding, is the Acting Minister during Senator Richardson's absence. Mr HOWARD(Bennelong-Leader of the Opposition) —Madam Speaker, I seek leave to make a short statement. Leave granted. Mr HOWARD —I welcome the confirmation by the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) of details that were already widely known in the community. I say to the Prime Minister and to the House that, rather than provide the House with details that are well known, he might have better used the time and allowed the Attorney-General (Mr Lionel Bowen) to explain to the Australian community how the Government justified wasting $46m on an ill-fated referendum campaign. Madam SPEAKER —Order! The Chair was under the impression that the Leader of the Opposition wished to make a similar statement to that of the Prime Minister. Mr HOWARD —No. I sought leave to make a short statement in response to the statement made by the Prime Minister. I did not seek leave to make any other statement. With respect, the Chair was in error if that is what you thought that you gave me leave for. Madam SPEAKER —The Chair gave leave to the Leader of the Opposition to make a short statement on the same lines-- Mr HOWARD —No, you gave me leave to make a short statement. Let me simply repeat that the time that the Prime Minister took up would have been better employed with the Attorney-General justifying to the Australian public the waste of $46m on the referendum campaign and the Opposition looks forward with great interest to the performance of the Government's new front bench. Madam SPEAKER —The Leader of the Opposition will now resume his seat. Mr HOWARD —On what basis? Mr Sinclair —I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. It is worth while your reflecting on the proceedings of the last little while. The Leader of the Opposition sought leave. You did not give leave; leave was given by the Parliament. You are the Speaker and you adjudicate in this place; you do not give leave. Secondly, the Leader of the Opposition was given leave to make a statement. It was not a statement on a specific issue. The House having given leave, you are not in a position where in any way you can require him to make any remarks other than those he chooses. Thirdly, I trust that in the course of Question Time today and on other occasions you will also intervene in answers by Ministers when they go beyond what we regard as reasonable. If you can intervene when leave is given to make a statement, you can intervene to require Ministers to terminate their answers when they go beyond a reasonable length. Madam SPEAKER —The Chair was under the impression, as I imagine the House was under the impression, that the Leader of the Opposition was intending to make the same type of statement as the Prime Minister. Mr Peacock —He did not say that. Madam SPEAKER —In that case the Chair was in error, but so also was the House in giving leave. Opposition members interjecting- Madam SPEAKER —I am quite sure that the House was under the impression that the Leader of the Opposition was going to make a similar statement to that of the Prime Minister. Mr Howard —I wish to speak to the point of order raised by the Leader of the National Party. I remind you, Madam Speaker, of an earlier occasion when the Prime Minister made a similar statement and I sought and obtained leave to make comments on a variety of matters that did not include providing a list of the shadow Ministry. Your recollection of those events is in error. Mr SPENDER —My question is directed to the Prime Minister. We acknowledge that it is proper that Mr Hayden as Governor-General designate should call on the Queen before he takes up office, but the Prime Minister will be only too well aware that over the past 5 1/2 years Mr Hayden, unlike previous Governors-General designate, as Australia's most travelled Foreign Minister has more than familiarised himself with the world in the course of his 40-plus arduous overseas trips. Will the Prime Minister now explain why the Australian taxpayer should pay for a 39-day world tour by Mr Hayden and others? Will he explain the reasons for Mr Hayden's itinerary and the special relevance of his visiting such places as Paris, Zurich and Spain or visiting New York yet again-a city he visited on a number of occasions at government expense? What, pray, is the cost of this grand tour to the Australian taxpayer? Mr HAWKE —All the arrangements that are being made in respect of the proposed visit by Mr Hayden are fully in accordance with precedents applying to former Governors-General designate. I will be more than happy to give a full answer to the question asked by the honourable member for North Sydney. Governors-General designate have traditionally travelled overseas prior to being sworn in. The Governor-General designate, as I think honourable members know, visits the Queen to discuss matters associated with the future performance of the functions of the Governor-General as Her Majesty's representative in Australia. A period overseas for Governors-General designate also provides a complete break from previous professional life before taking up the important-- Opposition members-Ha, ha! Mr HAWKE —I can see that we are going to have another session of the giggles-the giggle, giggle, giggle-which has been no substitute for policy. If the giggle is the best the honourable member can do he is guaranteed to be with us in that position not much longer, which is unfortunate. What has been done in the past is that an opportunity has been provided for the Governor-General designate to visit the Queen and to have a complete break from his previous professional life before taking up the important and demanding duties of Governor-General. In the visit that the Governor-General designate will undertake he will not necessarily-it is most unlikely-be meeting precisely the same sorts of political figures he met in his role as Foreign Minister. Let me make clear how much in line with previous practice is what is being done by Mr Hayden. Sir Zelman Cowen, prior to his taking up the office and on his visit to meet the Queen, visited the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States of America, China and Japan over a period of 46 days. Sir Ninian Stephen travelled to Yugoslavia, Italy-including Sicily-the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada over 40 days. The Commonwealth met all costs associated with the visits, other than the cost of Sir Zelman Cowen's visits to China and Japan where he was a guest of the Chinese and Japanese governments. All costs associated with Mr Hayden's visit will be met by my Department in accordance with those established precedents. The proposed overseas visit by Mr Hayden is consistent with these precedents and, on that basis, was approved by the Secretary of my Department. Mr Hayden will be away for 39 days, leaving on 29 September and returning on 6 November. That 39 days compares with the 46 days in the case of Sir Zelman Cowen and 40 days in the case of Sir Ninian Stephen. An officer of my Department will accompany Mr Hayden. Sir Zelman Cowen travelled with a police escort and Sir Ninian Stephen was accompanied by his associate. I conclude on the point I made during this answer earlier, that is, that the assumption that Bill Hayden will on this visit be seeing exactly the same people he saw and performing the same functions he performed as Foreign Minister is obviously erroneous. It is a stupid assumption made by a stupid collection of people who sit opposite. Mr Tuckey —Madam Speaker, I take a point of order. The Prime Minister failed to answer the question in not telling us how much the trip would cost. Madam SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member does not have a point of order. Mr Tuckey —Madam Speaker, I do have a point of order. Madam SPEAKER —The Prime Minister has answered the question. Mr Tuckey —The Prime Minister failed to tell the people of Australia how much the trip is going to cost. Mr Beazley —Madam Speaker, I take a point of order. Clearly, the remarks of the honourable member for O'Connor did not constitute a point of order. They were debating the matters contained in the Prime Minister's answer. They were, therefore, frivolous. The Standing Orders maintain procedures to deal with frivolous points of order. Mr Tuckey —Madam Speaker, I take a point of order. I ask the Prime Minister to withdraw the remarks he made. He knows what he said. Madam SPEAKER —I did not hear what he said. If the Prime Minister said something out of order, will he please withdraw it? Mr Hawke —If the tender member is offended, I withdraw. Mr BEDDALL —Can the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy advise the House of the reaction to the Government's decisions on the new wheat marketing arrangements? Mr KERIN —I thank the honourable member for Rankin for his question and acknowledge his very close interest on behalf of the wheat growers in his area. Honourable members will recall the somewhat fuzzy and fabricated fury of the Grains Council of Australia when I announced that the Government was proposing to commercialise fully the Australian Wheat Board and the domestic wheat market. There are all sorts of wild claims about potential losses to growers, when in fact growers will actually benefit in net terms. But as usual the unthinking National Party of Australia jumped straight in and supported all these ridiculous claims. There are two certainties in this place. The first is that the National Party will always support the lowest common denominator, particularly if that denominator is concocted in Queensland where the National Party hates the Liberal Party. But members of the National Party have made a mistake. Contrary to the fabricated fury of the Grains Council, the only proper survey of genuine wheat farmers shows that 41 per cent of growers support deregulation and some 47 per cent support competition in feed wheat exports. The question facing the Government is why individual growers should be restricted in their marketing choice. The present restrictions in the domestic market just cannot be justified, so the Government will proceed with commercialising the Australian Wheat Board and the market. Growers will be free to choose, and they will choose the most efficient marketing, transport, storage and handling system. This will improve the efficiency of the system and so increase growers' net terms. The other certainty in this place is that the Liberals will be confused. There is an old army joke about the confusion of officers; here it is the confusion of the Liberals. I refer first to the honourable member for Wannon-a sensible chap whose electorate will be a Liberal-National Party election battleground this coming Saturday. He persuaded his shadow Cabinet to take a sensible point of view, and in so doing rolled his fellow Victorian, the Deputy Leader of the National Party. The Leader of the Opposition was nowhere to be seen. He was leading from behind again. But the Western Australian Liberals disagreed. The honourable member for O'Connor has said in his electorate that as a parliamentarian he opposes deregulation but as a farmer he supports it. He is a real man of principle. The local Nationals over there then claimed, to quote them, that the acquired immune deficiency syndrome issue rated higher on his hit list of priorities than did representing his wheat grower constituents. This was too much for the honourable member for O'Connor. He can dish it out but he cannot take it. He capitulated completely to support the status quo, saying in the prestigious Wheatbelt Mercury: It is time Mr Howard stopped worrying about his image and supported the Grains Council of Australia. So there we have it. The Leader of the Opposition has been sitting there in silence worrying about his image; the Liberals are confused and the coalition is divided. This is the state of coalition harmony in this country, and that would be the result of an Opposition win in Victoria. While they have their battles we will get on with the business of running the country, and I am sure John Cain will get on with the business of running Victoria properly. Mr PEACOCK —My question is directed to the Prime Minister, and follows the previous question asked of him. I refer to the Prime Minister's answer in which he said, amongst other things, that Mr Hayden would be having a break-a break at taxpayers' expense. I assume, as Governor-General designate, he will be exchanging views with other heads of state. If that is the case, is it so, as the press reports, that he will be visiting Austria and having a break with Dr Waldheim? Mr HAWKE —I do not know. Mr BRUMBY —Has the Minister for Employment, Education and Training seen the report in today's Australian Financial Review which sets out the latest figures on manufacturing employment? Can the Minister advise the House whether these figures accord with developments elsewhere in the labour market? Mr DAWKINS —I think it is fair to say that the proudest boast of this Government, particularly as a Labor government, is the way it has transformed the labour market during the period it has been in office. The creation of a million jobs is just not a statistic. It means that a million people have been lifted out of poverty, and therefore hundreds and thousands of families throughout Australia have been lifted out of poverty, out of the social security system, and put back into the work force. Those people can earn a decent living and look after their families appropriately. We will go on and on acclaiming that this is the single greatest achievement of this Government, an achievement which is not over yet and which is continuing to build on our already impressive record. Employment has grown by 17.4 per cent since April 1983; unemployment has fallen from 10 per cent-that terrible legacy left to us by our opponents-to 7 per cent; more than half the jobs have been taken up by women; and, as impressive as anything, the unemployment rate for the teenage population has fallen from over 12 per cent to under 7 per cent. Whereas young people had the worst job outlook, their position is now better than that in the community as a whole. The honourable member referred me to an article relating to manufacturing employment. This gives a stark comparison of the record of this Government and that of its predecessor. During the period 1976-83 manufacturing employment actually fell by an average rate of 1.6 per cent per year, whereas between 1983 and the present, over the last five years, it rose by 0.8 per cent every year. Indeed, in the last 12 months, as if that five-year period were not significant enough, manufacturing employment has risen by a staggering 4.2 per cent. This is all because this Government, through its macro-economic policy and the micro-economic adjustments which it is proceeding with, has achieved circumstances in which manufacturing has not been driven into the ground by a generally uncompetitive Australian economy, but rather is now able to hold its head up high and compete with the rest of the world. I am sure the honourable member for Bendigo would like me to refer to his home State of Victoria where, compared with all the other States, there has been a greater rate of growth and there have been more jobs and more exports. Some 14,600 jobs have been created in the manufacturing sector of Victoria alone. These jobs do not just materialise, but are the result of investment decisions made by Australian business. In regard to private business in Victoria in the period 1983-88, the investment rate was double that for Australia as a whole. Although the annual rate of growth in manufacturing investment in Victoria was 2.3 per cent during the years before we came into office and before the Cain Government came into office, in the last five years there has been a massive 7.2 per cent per annum increase in the investment in manufacturing industry. Although we saw our opponents, the Liberal Party both in Victoria and nationally, devastate the manufacturing industry, we have been able to rescue it and give it a future, and its future is nowhere rosier than it is in Victoria. Mr PEACOCK —I address my question to the Acting Treasurer. Is it a fact that since this year's May statement, housing interest rates have increased by one per cent to 14.5 per cent? Is it a further fact that a one per cent rise in housing rates increases home loan repayments on, for example, a $50,000 mortgage by $40 a month? Is that equivalent to a tax increase of 6 per cent for the average income earner? Mr DAWKINS —Why anyone would take any notice of the projections of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition I simply do not know, and certainly one would not bestow any credibility whatever on any kind of financial equations that he might like to manufacture. I shall not speculate on the general direction of interest rates. Indeed, everybody knows that it is highly irresponsible to speculate about short term forecasts for interest rates. What I can say is that this Government has set the circumstances whereby there will be a general downward trend in interest rates. Let me tell honourable members about some of the underlying circumstances which have created that environment. Opposition members interjecting- Mr DAWKINS —I would not have thought that the Leader of the Opposition would want to have his record on interest rates, or on anything else for that matter, ventilated in this House or in the nation. He has the shabbiest record of any person who has been in the position of Treasurer at any time. As far as this Government is concerned, as a result of bringing in a Budget which has within it a $5 1/2 billion surplus-- Mr Blunt —Madam Speaker, I raise a point of order. The Minister is obviously out of his depth. In the question he was asked to advise whether interest rates historically had gone up. Could you ask him to address the relevant part of that question? Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member will resume his seat. The Minister is answering the question. Mr DAWKINS —It might come as a surprise to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition that interest rates are actually influenced by a very complex set of circumstances. Of course, there was a time when the Opposition liked to believe that the Australian economy could live insulated from the rest of the world. This Government made the very deliberate decision to ensure that the Australian economy was as exposed as possible to the rest of the world so that we could show how well we competed and we are showing just that. Interest rates are a very important indicator of how well we are achieving in comparison with the rest of the world. Three major factors represent the Government's responsibility with regard to the interest rate environment. One is fiscal policy and the fact that, as a result of our overall Budget surplus, there will be no net borrowing by the public sector in this country. That must have an easing effect on interest rates. As well, we have declining inflation. Again, that should have a moderating effect on interest rates. The new deregulatory measures in the banking system will continue to exert downward pressure on bank loans. Of course, we do not pretend that those are the only factors which influence interest rates. There are, of course, the demands for funds by the private sector in Australia and interest rate levels in the world financial markets. Mr Tuckey —Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a point of order with regard to relevance. Of course, the question related to the $40 increase in monthly household payments confronting all home owners. All we asked the Minister to do was to confirm whether people have to suffer that-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! The honourable member has raised the question of relevance. Mr Tuckey —Yes, and I ask you to ask him to tell the people of Australia whether they are suffering that or not. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member will resume his seat. Mr Tuckey —It sounds more like his tax return. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The Minister shall continue his answer. Mr DAWKINS —I would be happy to send the honourable member for O'Connor an elementary textbook on first year economics. That might suit his purposes for the occasion. Mr Tuckey —You failed everything at university. They had to send you to Roseworthy to get your diploma. Mr DAWKINS —At least I did not have to switch parties to get here. Mr Tuckey —Your mother wouldn't let you. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! If the honourable member for O'Connor continues to interject I shall name him. Mr DAWKINS —I do not intend to give any comfort to the Opposition in terms of its calculations. Members of the Opposition are the ones who are trying to play politics with regard to interest rates and the fortunes of Australian home owners. We will pursue the current policy stance, in relation to both fiscal policy and monetary policy, recognising that monetary policy, as the Treasurer says, must continue to play its vital balancing role in the overall economic strategy. Mr JENKINS —Has the Minister for Trade Negotiations seen reports suggesting that Australia should join the European Economic Community? Can he inform the House how this would affect Australia's present trading relationships? Mr DUFFY —I have seen the reports of statements by Mr John Elliott of Elders IXL Ltd who, amongst other things, is President of the Liberal Party of Australia. It is reported that he has expressed the view that Australia should apply for entry into the European Community. I think, leaving aside considerations of the merits or demerits of any future Australian membership of a trade or economic bloc, region or otherwise, the rules of the Treaty of Rome do not allow for any Australian application for membership. So that is one problem. Mr Hawke —Is it Liberal Party policy? Mr DUFFY —No, it is not. The Prime Minister just asked me whether it was Liberal Party policy. It is a bit difficult to ascertain Liberal Party policy on trade. If the Prime Minister will bear with me I will deal with that. The point of real concern from Mr Elliott's point of view is that Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Community, states that any European state may apply to become a member of the Community. Of course, it may well be, having regard to Opposition statements on immigration recently, that those opposite are not too sure of which part of the world we live in. But I can assure those opposite that it is not intended that Australia should propose to any member state of the European Community that it should submit a proposal under the terms of the Treaty of Rome, which lays down the legal processes for treaty amendments, for the removal of the word `European'. The proposal is somewhat extraordinary. Of course, Mr Elliott is at odds-the Prime Minister was interested in this-with other statements made on trade by members on the opposite side of the House. The former Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser, has recently suggested that Australia should concentrate its efforts on trading blocs in the Asian and Pacific regions and should not join the European Community. Mr Malcolm Fraser's view has been echoed by the honourable member for North Sydney and also the honourable member for Mayo. So we do have some agreement. We then had the Leader of the National Party of Australia commenting on my suggestion that we should examine a Pacific rim trade group. He agreed that there was potential in that but, in fairness, he also suggested that we should not blow out the candle on the Uruguay Round. It is good to have the opportunity to assure the right honourable member for New England that this Government has no intention of doing that. In fact, tomorrow-- Mr Sinclair —It only needs a puff. Mr DUFFY —The right honourable member had better make up his mind. He now says that it only needs a puff to blow it out. I thought he was a strong supporter and I am disappointed that he now thinks it just needs a puff to blow it out. It is very difficult to know where any Opposition member stands on this matter. Tomorrow I will be leaving for Pakistan to attend the informal Trade Ministers Conference to discuss the Uruguay Round. Mr Peacock —It will be a fantastic visit. Mr DUFFY —The Deputy Leader of the Opposition interjects. I can assure him that it is an extremely important meeting and it involves a considerable sacrifice because on the two weekends I will be away the Turnbull Stakes and the Caulfield Guineas will be run in Australia and I will miss the company of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition at both those meetings. The Pakistan meeting will be the first of a series of meetings leading to the mid-term review in Montreal and the importance of that we all know. I think it is worth stating that Australia has been at the forefront in the Uruguay Round. The efforts of my predecessor in the portfolio, Minister Dawkins, both through the formation and continuation of the Cairns Group and in our own right, will be maintained right through the four years of this round. The Government's trade policy stands in stark contrast to that of those opposite. Mr Reith —Wind it up. He has had plenty of time. Mr DUFFY —I think if I need any advice as to when I should wind it up, it will come from elsewhere, rather than from the honourable member. When a trade policy is produced by the Liberal and National parties-and that we eagerly await-we think it will be the same mishmash as other policies. In closing, I think it is worth noting their rural policy, which somehow leaked. The Australian editorial section of 20 September says: It is high time the Federal Coalition got its act together and came up with a rural policy with some genuine vision, purpose and specific direction instead of its traditional pile of sententious waffle. Mr PETER FISHER —My question is addressed to the Acting Treasurer following his failure to answer the previous question he was asked. Is it a fact that in March 1983 the average housing loan repayment was $350 per month and absorbed 19.2 per cent of median family income? Is it a fact that in March 1988, before the latest rise in mortgage rates, the average loan repayment was $666 per month, nearly double the level of March 1983, and absorbed 27 per cent of median family income? Mr DAWKINS —I do not have anything to add to the answer I gave before. Mr CHYNOWETH —Can the Minister for Social Security tell the House the meaning of the latest unemployment beneficiary figures in Victoria? Mr HOWE —One of the achievements that the Government has referred to has been the level of the job creation that has occurred during the period that we have been in government. We do not normally draw attention to the statistics with respect to unemployment benefit, so we have not drawn as much attention as we might to the falls that have occurred in the number of unemployment beneficiaries. Mr Sinclair —There is a 90 per cent increase in regional Victoria. Mr HOWE —Incidentally, Victoria, as the right honourable member for New England I am sure would be interested to know, has had the fastest fall in unemployment and has contributed significantly to the nationwide drop of 26.3 per cent in the number of people receiving unemployment benefit during the past five years. The figures show that the number of unemployment beneficiaries fell nationally by 163,336, that is from a peak of 622,000 in August 1983 to 458,767 last month. Those figures are still falling, the latest figure showing that 444,000 people are now receiving unemployment benefit. Victoria had 21.4 per cent of the nation's total of unemployment beneficiaries in August 1983. It had reduced that to 17 per cent by August this year. Unemployment benefit numbers in Victoria have fallen by 40 per cent, faster than anywhere else in Australia. Victoria has contributed one-third of the nationwide reduction in unemployment benefit numbers. At the same time, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures over the past five years show that Victoria has consistently recorded the lowest unemployment rate. This is of course a magnificent achievement for a State with 26 per cent of the nation's labour force. Those figures, dramatic as they are, of course underline some of the points that the Acting Treasurer spoke about when he talked about the Government's fiscal policy. The reality is that those figures represent a reduction in terms of expenditure on unemployment benefits of $1 billion a year. It is because this Government has been so successful with respect to its economic policy and because it has been joined in terms of economic policy with the kind of commitment that we have seen in Victoria that we are able to achieve the results in fiscal policy that are so crucial in terms of the management of the Australian economy. It is also why, just as we here have developed a range of social policies to assist those on very low incomes to target improvements, particularly towards low income families, Victoria has been able to match that very successful economic record with very progressive social policies, which has reinforced its economic policies and helped it achieve a reduction of 40 per cent in the number of unemployment beneficiaries in that State. Dr HEWSON —My question is to the Acting Treasurer and it relates to his first year economics tutorial on the complex factors determining interest rates. Will the Acting Treasurer confirm to the House that the Treasurer recently had discussions with the Reserve Bank of Australia with a view to stabilising official interest rates and thereby holding down market and housing interest rates prior to the Victorian election next Saturday? Mr DAWKINS —I do not know what discussions the Treasurer had with the Reserve Bank. I do know that from time to time he has discussions with the Reserve Bank, as the honourable member would well know, as part of his responsibilities. Even if I knew what transpired between the Treasurer and the Governor of the Reserve Bank, I certainly would not tell the honourable member. Mr SCHOLES —I direct a question to the Minister for Employment and Education Services. In view of the serious difficulties that exist with regard to Austudy assistance to students in provincial areas, particularly in Victoria, can the Minister advise what action has been taken in respect of the Budget undertakings to expand services to students seeking advice and assistance with respect to Austudy? When can we expect to have direct access in cities such as Geelong where there is a very substantial student com- ponent? Mr DUNCAN —I thank the honourable member for his question. As a result of the Budget undertakings, the Government intends to introduce to Commonwealth Employment Service offices throughout Australia a much upgraded provision of services to Austudy applicants and, in particular in relation to Victoria, the Government proposes from the beginning of the 1989 assessment time for Austudy the introduction of a greatly upgraded service in Geelong, which is in the honourable member's electorate. In addition, we intend to introduce services in various other country centres throughout Victoria, for example, Morwell, Shepparton, Bendigo and Ballarat; and in the Melbourne metropolitan area we will introduce upgraded services at Coburg, Footscray, Frankston and Glenroy. Those services will ensure that Austudy applicants will be able to lodge their applications there and have the details with respect to the applications checked and, in particular, will be able to seek advice from officers as to the progress of their particular applications. This service undoubtedly will ensure, particularly in regional areas such as the honourable member's electorate, that people who have applied for Austudy will receive a much upgraded service compared with what has existed to date. Of course, this is part of the Government's policy of upgrading the level of income support services for students. We have to date been very successful in doing that. From 1983 onwards we worked towards the introduction of Austudy, and we have been very successful in introducing a scheme which now sees a Budget allocation of $862m, which is a four-fold increase on the amount that was being provided when the Fraser-Howard regime was cast from the treasury bench. In addition to that, we expect the numbers of people on Austudy this year to be in the vicinity of 380,000, which is again a very great increase on the level of people who were receiving income support when the Liberals were in office. We have pursued these policies in an endeavour to support the Government's desire for there to be a much greater retention rate at secondary schools throughout the nation. We have been quite successful in that, particularly in relation to Victoria, where the retention rate for secondary schools when the Cain Government came to office was an abysmally low 33 per cent. As a result of the good work that has been put in by this Government and by the Cain Government, the retention rate has gone up substantially. The retention rate in Victoria is now 57 per cent. Opposition members interjecting- Mr DUNCAN —Opposition members do not like to hear these sorts of statistics, because quite clearly they indicate the excellent results of the policies of this Government and, in relation to Victoria, of the Cain Government. There is no doubt that the Opposition does not like these statistics, because they provide the reason why the people of Victoria undoubtedly will re-elect the Cain Government next Saturday. Mr BEALE —I direct my question to the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. He will be aware of serious irregularities in the conduct and financial administration in the Department of Accounting and Finance at the University of Tasmania. Why, over a period of nearly six months, have the Minister and his senior departmental officials refused to take action on these serious irregularities? Why did the Minister instruct the honourable member for Denison to go quiet on this issue after the honourable member wrote a letter of complaint to the Vice-Chancellor of the university? Why did the Minister seek to ensure that senior administrators of the university with close links to the Labor Party, including the campaign manager for Labor leader Neil Batt, kept this affair covered up? Mr DAWKINS —Madam Speaker-- Mr Kerr —I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Far from covering any matter up-- Madam SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member does not have a point of order. If he has a personal explanation to make, he can approach the Chair later. Mr Kerr —Far from covering any-- Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member will resume his seat. Mr DAWKINS —I will have a close look at the question asked by the honourable member for Deakin. I must say that his question comes as an astounding bit of news to me. Mr Beale —Did you say your Department-- Madam SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for Deakin has asked his question. He will now be silent. Mr DAWKINS —The honourable member for Deakin talked about my personal intervention in some matter. I have no recollection whatsoever of so being personally involved. In any event, I am not the kind of Federal Education Minister who would go around interfering in the autonomous administration of a university campus anywhere in Australia. Maybe this is part of the poisoned legacy that the honourable member for Mackellar has handed on to the honourable member for Deakin. I see that another part of his legacy relates to schools policy. The Opposition talks about introducing some national unit to monitor standards. Mr Sharp —What has this got to do with the question? Mr DAWKINS —I will tell the honourable member what it has to do with it: it is reported that the new shadow Minister is to talk to the old shadow Minister-- Mr Spender —I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, you will recall that the Minister was asked a particular question about particular matters of fact. He was not asked about policy, neither his Government's nor ours. Mr Beale —What is going on here? Madam SPEAKER —Will the honourable member for Deakin cease trying to run this House. I am quite capable of doing so. The honourable member should keep quiet while I hear what is happening. If the honourable member for Deakin interjects again, I will deal with him. Mr Spender —The Minister was asked a particular question about particular factual matters and he said that he knew nothing about them. In my submission he is not entitled, under any view of the meaning of the word `relevance', to have a little foray into this policy or that policy. He either answers the question or he sits down. Since he clearly cannot answer, he should sit down. Madam SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for North Sydney will not tell people to sit down either. The Minister will finish answering the question. Mr DAWKINS —I was just about to make the simple point that the Opposition now intends to rely on Dr Metherell to spearhead its education policy. If the Opposition is to rely on Dr Metherell, I suggest that the rest of the country should rely on me. Mr Beale —Madam Speaker, in his response to my question the Minister said that he would give close attention to this matter. Do I presume from that that he will write me a letter giving me an explanation? Madam SPEAKER —Could I suggest that the honourable member for Deakin sort that out with the Minister. Mr Dawkins —I will give the matter a bit of thought and see what attention the honourable member deserves. Mr FREE —I too have a question for the Minister for Employment, Education and Training-- Opposition members interjecting- Madam SPEAKER —Order! Honourable members on my left will cease interjecting; I cannot hear the question. Mr FREE —My question arises out of a report in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald which the Minister clearly has read. The article refers to the Federal Opposition's plan to prepare a new policy to tell parents which are the best schools for their children and reports that the new Opposition spokesman on education will rely on New South Wales Education Minister-- Mr Tim Fischer —I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. At the outset of his question the honourable member for Lindsay referred to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald which did not even relate to a government policy statement but to an alleged Opposition policy. I draw your attention, Madam Speaker, to the relevant section of Pettifer's House of Representatives Practice which deals with the matter of reference to newspaper reports-- Madam SPEAKER —I take the honourable member's point. I was waiting to hear the finish of the question. Could I please ask members who are approaching the Chair to make a personal explanation or to ask me a question to wait until the person asking the question has finished because I cannot hear what is said. The honourable member for Lindsay will be aware that he cannot ask questions about Opposition policy. Mr FREE —I was about to bring my question to a close and clearly indicate its relevance. I ask the Minister for Employment, Education and Training what implications consultations with Dr Metherell would have in developing this policy on the education of Australian schoolchildren. Mr Tim Fischer —Madam Speaker, I raise a point of order under standing order 144, which deals with the fact that questioners should not ask Ministers for any expressions of opinion. The introduction to this question related to Opposition policy and a press statement this morning in the Sydney Morning Herald. The honourable member is now asking the Minister for an opinion relating to that Opposition policy and, as such, the question should be ruled out of order. Mr Free —On that point of order, Madam Speaker: clearly the Minister's portfolio covers matters concerning the education of Australian schoolchildren. A question which relates to policy input in this important area is of course relevant to the portfolio. Madam SPEAKER —The Minister may answer the question; it is relevant to his portfolio. Mr Spender —Madam Speaker, I take a point of order. Under standing order 142 questions may be put to a Minister relating to public affairs with which he is officially connected, to proceedings pending in the House or to any matter of administration for which he is responsible. Discussions by some members of the Opposition with a Minister of a State government cannot conceivably fall under that head and the question is, therefore, out of order. Mr Beazley —Madam Speaker, speaking to the point of order: The latter part of the question dealt with the impact of a certain type of policy, if it were adopted by the Government, on the administration of education and the future of students, which is entirely within the responsibility of the Minister. Madam SPEAKER —Under the circumstances I think the question asked by the honourable member for Lindsay is hypothetical. It is ruled out of order. Mr HAWKE —Madam Speaker, I seek your indulgence to add to an answer. Madam SPEAKER —The Prime Minister may proceed. Mr HAWKE —I have been informed-and I am sure this will be of great comfort and joy to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition-that the Governor-General designate will not be visiting Austria. If he is there at all it will be for a change of plane. Therefore, that question was hypothetical. The only countries that the Governor-General designate will be visiting are Hong Kong, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Spain, France and Thailand-those six countries. Mr TUCKEY —Madam Speaker, I seek your indulgence to address a question to you. Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member may proceed. Mr TUCKEY —Madam Speaker, you may be aware that since 1976, during the period of Speaker Snedden until the conclusion of the last parliamentary session, the number of questions answered during Question Time has fallen from 19.3 to 12.5. As this declining number of answers must reduce the effectiveness of this Parliament for both Government and Opposition members, I ask: Will you consult with the Prime Minister with the purpose of improving this sorry record? Mr HOWARD —Madam Speaker, may I raise a matter relevant to the comfort of members on both sides of the House? Could you have yet a further investigation of whether the sound system in this place can be made better? It is inadequate. It is very unfortunate that such an expensive Parliament House should have such an inadequate sound system in its chambers. Madam SPEAKER —The Chair is aware of the inadequacy of the sound system. We ar e carrying out a number of tests on the existing equipment with a view to installing some replacement equipment. I recognise that it is difficult. The honourable member cannot hear me. I cannot hear him. When there are a few interjections I cannot hear anybody. Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member for Parkes (Mr Cobb), the honourable member for Kalgoorlie (Mr Campbell) and the honourable member for Farrer (Mr Tim Fischer) have raised with me questions relating to the display of the Australian flag in the House of Representatives chamber. I sought the views of the three Party Leaders in the House and each has indicated support for the suggestion that the Australian flag be hung in this chamber. Following receipt of that advice, the Parliament House Construction Authority and the architect were asked, as a matter of urgency, to provide advice on the location and mounting of a flag or flags in this chamber. As honourable members will observe, two flags have been placed in the chamber as an interim measure. When the advice of the Authority is received, I will consider the most appropriate location and method of display for the Australian flag or flags to be placed in this chamber. Mr SHACK —Madam Speaker, I also ask a question of you. I ask you to advise the House, in the discharge of your duties, as to the ongoing status of standing order 145. As you consider your answer, I also ask: Is it not a fact that standing order 145 is one of the shortest and clearest standing orders in the book? Is it not a fact that there is no dictionary or definitional ambiguity about the meaning or the understanding of `relevance'? Is it not a fact that day after day in Question Time we approach the despatch box to draw your attention to standing order 145 when clearly Government members front up and hurl abuse at the Opposition, giving answers which are totally irrelevant to the questions asked? Mr Beazley —I rise on a point of order, Madam Speaker. Madam SPEAKER —Order! I will hear the rest of the honourable member for Tangney's question first. Mr SHACK —Finally, Madam Speaker, is it not also a fact-- Mr Scholes —I take a point of order, Madam Speaker. Madam SPEAKER —Order! I intend to hear the rest of the question, and then I will take points of order from the Leader of the House and the honourable member for Corio. Mr SHACK —Finally, Madam Speaker, is it not also a fact that in the discharge of your duties you never draw attention to the question of relevance-you never sit Ministers down on the basis of relevance? All you say to them is simply that they should draw their answer to a close. Madam SPEAKER —Order! I suggest that, if you wish to criticise the Chair, you do so by way of a substantive motion. Mr SHACK —Madam Speaker, I was not criticising you directly; I was simply asking a question. Madam SPEAKER —The Chair took it as a direct criticism, and I suggest that in future you make such criticism under a substantive motion. I call the Leader of the House on a point of order. Mr Beazley —Madam Speaker, I accept that you interpret the honourable member's comments as a question, and so I am prepared to accept them as such. I have nothing further to say. Madam SPEAKER —I call the honourable member for Corio. Mr Scholes —My point of order is that the matter which has just been raised has been considered by the Standing Orders Committee of this Parliament, and the present Leader of the National Party of Australia refused to accept any changes to standing order 145. Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member for Corio may have a point, but he does not have a point of order. Mr Howard —Madam Speaker, I take the following point of order: the honourable member for Tangney asked you a question, and you confirmed by way of response to the Leader of the House that you acknowledged it to be a question. Could I respectfully point out that you have not answered it? Madam SPEAKER —I will answer the honourable member for Tangney, but I will deliberate on what he has had to say and read it in Hansard first. Mr Tuckey —Madam Speaker, may I ask a question on the same matter? Madam SPEAKER —The honourable member for O'Connor will get the same answer. He may not get the same answer, but he will be dealt with by way of the same procedure. Mr BEAZLEY(Swan-Leader of the House) —Papers are tabled as listed in the schedule circulated to honourable members earlier today. Details of the papers will be recorded in Hansard and the Votes and Proceedings. The schedule read as follows- The Royal Australian Air Force Welfare Trust Fund-Annual Report 1987-including the Auditor-General's Report-section 34 of the Services Trust Funds Act 1947. Report of the 103rd Session of the National Health and Medical Research Council-Hobart, June 1987-clause 21 of the National Health and Medical Research Council Order. Medical Research 1987-National Health and Medical Research Council Report-section 9 of the Medical Research Endowment Act 1937. Supplemental Agreement-to the Housing Agreement dated 12 March 1985 between the Commonwealth of Australia and the States and the Northern Territory of Australia-section 5 of the Housing Assistance Act 1984. Australian Maritime College-Annual Report of Council 1987-including the Auditor-General's Report-section 39 of the Maritime College Act 1978. Advance to the Minister for Finance-statements of expenditure-May and June 1988. Meteorology Policy Committee-Annual Report 1987. Coastal Shipping-Industries Assistance Commission Report No. 415-dated 20 July 1988. Christmas Island Services Corporation-Annual Report 1986-87-including the Auditor-General's Report-section 27 of the Services Corporation Ordinance 1984. Insurance and Superannuation Commission Life Insurance Group-Annual Report 1987-section 11 of the Life Insurance Act 1945-together with a Half Yearly Financial Bulletin on Life Insurance-June 1987. Canberra College of Advanced Education-Report of Council 1987-including the Auditor-General's Report-section 30 of the Canberra College of Advanced Education Act 1967. Council on Overseas Professional Qualifications-Annual Report 1986-87. Conference on Disarmament-Report of the Australian Delegation-1987 Session. United Nations General Assembly-Report of the Australian Delegation-Forty-second Session 1987. United Nations Commission on Human Rights-Report of the Australian Delegation-Forty-third Session 1987. Advance to the Minister for Finance-Statement of Heads of Expenditure and the amounts charged thereto pursuant to section 36a of the Audit Act 1901. Mr GOODLUCK(Franklin) —Madam Speaker, I seek leave to make a personal explanation. Madam SPEAKER —Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented? Mr GOODLUCK —I do. Madam SPEAKER —Please proceed. Mr GOODLUCK —I claim to have been misrepresented over comments I have made about brochures published by the Tasmanian AIDS Council and the Victorian AIDS Council. I do not really want to quote from the brochures I have because there are young people in the gallery today, but I have to. I quote by way of explanation a passage from a Victorian AIDS Council brochure, Safe. The paragraph I shall quote is one of the least offensive I could find, most of the others being far too offensive to read out in public. It states: Safe sex- I am sorry, but I have to go on with this- with three or more can be loads of fun. And last for hours. Dr Klugman —Madam Speaker, I take a point of order. I do not see that the sexual preferences of the honourable member for Franklin are relevant to this. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! There is no point of order. The honourable member for Franklin might get to where he was misrepresented. Mr GOODLUCK —I will get to it, Mr Deputy Speaker. The brochure continues: If it gets anal use a new condom for each time and for each person. You can teach each other how to enjoy them. And go through packets in no time. I claim first to have been misrepresented in the Sunday Tasmanian. I was accused by the Tasmanian shadow Minister for Health, Judy Jackson, of appealing to the lowest common denominator. In the Melbourne Herald of 20 September 1988 Mr Alan Hough of the Victorian AIDS Council said in reference to myself: There was no room for prudery in AIDS debates. I quote also from the Hobart Mercury, in which Mr Martyn Brown, Peer Education Officer of the Tasmanian AIDS Council, said: Bruce Goodluck was a public health nuisance and should be gagged. Government members-Hear, hear! Mr GOODLUCK —I stuck my neck out for that one. I am not a prude and I will not be gagged. If people say that I am insensitive by drawing the attention of the public of Australia, taxpayers, who are funding money to stop this scourge by using that sort of language-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! The honourable member is now debating the question. Mr TUCKEY(O'Connor) —I seek leave to make a personal explanation. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented? Mr TUCKEY —I do. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The honourable member may proceed. Mr TUCKEY —During Question Time the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy (Mr Kerin) quoted from a newspaper article purporting to have been published in my name. In fact, the article published, which is under my photograph and under a heading that I use, `Straight Talk', was the publication of another member of parliament entirely. I contacted the newspaper immediately on reading the item. It has admitted that that is the fact, and has promised to publish a retraction, which I will post to the Minister next week. So he got it wrong. Mr RONALD EDWARDS(Stirling) —I seek leave to make a personal explanation. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Does the honourable member claim to have been misrepresented? Mr RONALD EDWARDS —I do. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The honourable member may proceed. Mr RONALD EDWARDS —In a newspaper circulated in Australia called the Macedonian was a letter that purported to have come from me. I quote the segment appearing on the front page: I too share your concern about the treatment of Macedonians in Greece and the constant harassment of Macedonians in Australia by the Greek authorities. This issue, as you are aware, has been discussed in great detail by Cabinet. Let me assure you on behalf of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bill Hayden, that the Australian Labor Government has and will continue to support the Macedonians in promoting their unique language and culture within multicultural Australia. I was contacted by that newspaper and also by another newspaper called the Greek Herald with respect to this letter. I was able to advise the Greek Herald and the Macedonian of the following facts. The letter which purportedly came from me contains a letterhead and the date of the letter was June 1986. The letterhead on the purported letter was not used by me until November 1986. Further, the custom in my office and in many offices is to include on the letter the initials of the person who typed it. The initials used were not accurate in that they did not refer to the person who would have typed the letter if such a letter had been sent. Thirdly, there is reference in the letter to Cabinet. On no occasion would I refer to Cabinet because I, in common with all backbenchers, am not privy to Cabinet discussions. Fourthly, it is clear to me that in the context of other correspondence on this matter there has been a deliberate attempt to create differences between the communities. Accordingly, it was clear to me that the letter was a forgery. I have referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police, and am now able to advise the House that the Director of Public Prosecutions is seeking further information and evidence on the matter with a view to a possible prosecution. Mr KERR(Denison) —Mr Deputy Speaker, I claim to have been misrepresented and seek leave to make a person explanation. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —The honourable member may proceed. Mr KERR —Earlier this afternoon the honourable member for Deakin (Mr Beale) suggested that there had been some arrangement, conspiracy or cover-up in relation to certain matters at the University of Tasmania. That disgracefully misrepresents the facts. The situation is that, between four and five weeks ago, a constituent arrived at my office and made certain allegations in relation to certain practices in the Department of Accountancy. Immediately following that, I wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Tasmania, pointing out those allegations to him and indicating that I understood that those allegations were known to the university authorities because my constituent had so informed me. I pointed out that although the university was an auton- omous institution, it had a responsibility in relation to such matters to make sure that there was a complete investigation, and I looked forward to the Vice-Chancellor's assurance that that would occur. Subsequently, I received an interim acknowledgment of that correspondence and I have followed up that matter directly by telephone call to the Vice-Chancellor and, subsequently, over the last day, by the release of my letter to the Vice-Chancellor, calling for such an investigation. The shadow Minister has put before the House a disgraceful and appalling distortion of the facts. Mr Sinclair —Did you discuss it with Dawkins? Mr KERR —I have had no contact whatsoever from the Minister. The only political contact I have had in this matter is from the honourable member for Franklin (Mr Goodluck), who said to me that he did not believe there was enough substance to the matter at this stage to take any further action. We discussed it. I indicated that I have written to the university. The honourable member for Franklin agreed with the steps that I had taken and we took the view that it was in the public interest that we act in that manner. It is a disgrace-it is something that I will remember for a very long time-to the practices of this House that such accusations can be made by a shadow Minister without their being raised in my presence or, I understand, with the Minister prior to the matter being raised in this House. Mr Spender —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. He has had enough time. If he is continuing, and he is obviously under considerable nervous strain, he should be advised that he is debating the matter and that therefore his personal explanation has come to an end. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! If the honourable member for North Sydney has a point of order and wishes to take a point of order-- Mr Spender —I will make it again for you. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —No, you do not need to make it again. Mr Spender —You have actually got it, have you? Congratulations. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —However, I would have thought that the honourable member would have been aware that the best way in which to make a point of order is not by making a disparaging remark about another member who is on his feet. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Madam Speaker has received a letter from the Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Mr Peacock) proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely: The danger that Victoria's huge debt burden poses for the standard of living of many Australians. 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- Mr PEACOCK(Kooyong)(3.13) —I have brought before the House this matter of public importance. I am not the only one in the nation concerned with the future of the State of Victoria, my own State. Saturday's Australian clearly showed to the nation the plight that Victorians face. The headline on the front page was `Victorian debt burden nation's worst'. In today's Age the headline reads, `WorkCare blowout under fire', with billions of dollars being involved. The reality is-for factors which I will deal with in regard to the Victorian economy-that the impact on taxpayers is grievous. I state by way of introduction that there is, of course, a background to it. The background is the national scene. After well over five years in office, the Labor Government has left Australia with a standard of living that is well below our potential and saddled the nation with a huge and growing foreign debt. I see that the Treasurer (Mr Keating), who has presided over a quadrupling of foreign debt, is lecturing other nations around the world as to how they ought to handle their financial matters. At home, our low living standards can be attributed to his record high taxation levels and our poor productivity performance. Our massive foreign debt is similarly the direct result of his and Labor's economic mismanagement. It will be recalled, as backdrop to Victoria, that the Treasurer's first two Budgets forced us, as a nation, to borrow overseas to finance huge increases in government spending. In June this year our net foreign debt stood at over $88 billion. As I have said, we now have the Treasurer lecturing the United States at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Berlin about cutting government expenditure. This coming from the man who increased outlays in real terms by 8.3 per cent in 1983-84 and 6.5 per cent in 1984-85! I bring the Grim Reaper into this because he has been getting a bagging while he has been overseas. While he has been overseas the minders of the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) have been at work to establish in the minds of Australians over the last few days that he, the current Prime Minister, will be leading the Australian Labor Party at the next election. Frankly, I do not think it matters a damn. Labor will lose the next election with or without Hawke but if he wants to run merely as the stalking horse for the Grim Reaper, so be it. But while the Treasurer is away the Prime Minister's minders are at work. I introduce the matter of public importance in this manner because before he went away, the old Grim Reaper made one of those forays into-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! If the Deputy Leader of the Opposition is referring to a member or a Minister he should use the title of the member or the Minister. Mr PEACOCK —The Grim Reaper-the Treasurer? Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! If the honourable member is referring to a member or a Minister he should use the title of the member or the Minister. Mr PEACOCK —I will refer to the Grim Reaper as the Treasurer then. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —If the honourable member is referring to the Treasurer he should refer to him as the Treasurer. Mr PEACOCK —The Treasurer made one of his normal forays into the Victorian campaign. I said in this House many weeks ago that this Treasurer has no concept of people or their problems. Mr Tim Fischer —Arrogance personified. Mr PEACOCK —The arrogance that exudes from him is well known to all Australians. Look at the way in which he refers to Australians not requiring tax cuts, et cetera. I also said at the time that at any election campaign one will never see the Treasurer out on the streets with people, in pubs, in supermarkets, at kindergartens or at old people's homes. He will not go near them. His single entry in any election campaign is to drop into the antiseptic atmosphere of a press conference, dump a few statistics down and flee. Sure enough, leopards do not change their spots. Down he came to Victoria last week. He turned up for a press conference and handed out some shonky figures to support the existing Treasurer Jolly, and departed for New South Wales. I say `shonky figures' because in the context of the Victorian campaign it is one thing for the Treasurer simply to appear at a press conference and nothing else, but he issued a statement. Attached to the statement were table 10 and table 11 from Budget Paper No. 4. He was trying to point out how well the Victorian economy was going. I looked at these two tables. I have been doing a bit of work in this area for the last 12 months and these tables are a bit familiar to me. I thought: hang on a flash, there is something missing here. Do honourable members know that the Treasurer doctored the documents? I seek leave to table not only his statement but also the sanitised version of tables 10 and 11 of Budget Paper No. 4 and, if I may, the full extract which reveals the real situation for Victoria without the lines being deleted. Leave granted. Mr PEACOCK —The fact is-- Mr Howard —Are you saying he told a lie? Mr PEACOCK —Indeed. The omitted data-which he left out because it showed Victoria in a bad light-showed that current outlays in Victoria have been growing at 5.1 per cent a year, in real terms, from 1982-83 to 1986-87 compared to 4.7 per cent for all other States. It showed that capital outlays in Victoria have shown significant negative real growth over the period. So, clearly, the Cain Government has postponed capital outlays while allowing current outlays to continue to grow strongly. It is hardly responsible fiscal management and it is hardly frankness. So not only was there a ducking from the people but there was also a ducking from the truth. Frankly, any Treasurer who seeks to come into a State other than his-though we are never too sure where this Treasurer's home State is-with doctored documents will reap grimly the consequences of so doing. No doctoring of the facts can hide the reality of the Victorian economy. The Australian pointed it out in its dramatic headline `Victorian debt burden nation's worst'. The reality is that the State debt in Victoria is the worst in Australia. According to the latest comprehensive data from Salomon Brothers, which did an investigation of the State economies, Victoria's total State debt was the highest of all States in 1986 at $20.3 billion. Let me tell honourable members that Salomon Brothers also did a very interesting comparison. It will be recalled that Premier Greiner, possessed of the need to find out precisely what had happened in the State of New South Wales economically, established an audit commission, and when it reported all drew the conclusion that New South Wales was on the verge of bankruptcy. Let me tell honourable members that Salomon Brothers indicated to the nation that Victoria's debt as a percentage of gross State product (GSP) is 32.1 per cent. The New South Wales debt to GSP figure is 24.5 per cent. Mr Howard —Worse than Unsworth's. Mr PEACOCK —Worse. If New South Wales was allegedly on the verge of bankruptcy, one can imagine what Victorians are going to find out when the new government, as it has undertaken to do, appoints an independent audit commission to go through everything. Honourable members have listened to some of the figures given here today by the Government. Let me pick three crucial ones for the State of Victoria. Have a look at annual employment growth in Victoria and see how it relates to other States, have a look at business investment=mthat is, capital expenditure, the engine for growth in a State-and have a look at the confidence or otherwise the Victorians are showing in their economy, and honourable members will see a contrast. Annual employment growth in Victoria, on seasonally adjusted July figures, was 0.2 per cent compared with 2.8 per cent nationally. Mr Brumby —July to when? Mr PEACOCK —If the honourable member is worried about the figures, let me point out that they are only the latest figures. These fellows are doing me a favour. The other day when I produced some of these figures a spokesman for the Cain Government said, `This is deplorable. Peacock is being selective; he is picking the worst figures'. They just happen to be the latest figures. I cannot help it if they are also the worst. The capital expenditure figures for the nine months to March show that capital expenditure, business investment, in Victoria is up 3 per cent. We all know what the national average is: it is up 10 per cent. So the national average is 10 per cent and this rapidly developing industrial museum over which Cain is presiding has registered an increase of only 3 per cent. If honourable members want to see what the people in Victoria are doing, after the taxes and charges are lumped on them, they should look at the increases in retail sales. They will see that the increase in retail sales for the 12 months to June of this year was 4.7 per cent compared with 7.4 per cent nationally. The reality is that Victorians well know just what has been hung around their necks in the reduction of living standards under this Government. In the midst of this we have, of course, the Premier entering after the honourable member for Bradfield (Mr Connolly) rightly drew attention to the issue. The Premier made this a State issue by picking up the complaints of the honourable member for Bradfield, shadow Minister for social security, in referring to what this Government had done not to the tens of thousands but to the hundreds of thousands of pensioners by its sixth change in testing for the pension. So Cain goes to this Government, and it pulls out the retrospectivity clause. One might have given it some marks if it had pulled it out on the basis that it was wrong, if it had looked at the matter and said, `No, this is unfair; this is wrong. We will make a change'. It changed because the matter had been raised in the middle of an election campaign. However, the legislation is still foreshadowed; it will still breach principle; and it will still have the effect of being a tax on income not yet received. If the people who were encouraged by this Government to purchase such market-linked investments had invested their money in an asset and it had appreciated, they would not be taxed unless and until they sold that asset. By investing here, they will have the effect of a tax before they receive the income. There are other anomalies. If I were a pensioner I could walk into Rothschild Australia Asset Management Ltd or BT Australia Ltd and say, `I want to put a few thousand dollars in a market-linked investment. Give me an approved deposit fund in New York or London'. That will not affect the income test, but if pensioners invest in an Australian fund it will. It is shonky. Once again the Government has not thought through the consequences of its legislation. Underlying it all is the arrogant attitude which pervades Labor governments today and which reveals them to be out of touch with the needs of average Australians. Quite frankly, debt or otherwise, expenditure or otherwise, and programs or otherwise, nothing today underlines that arrogance more than the answers the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) gave to questions asked of him with respect to former Foreign Minister Hayden. Have we in this nation reached a stage where we simply give retiring politicians a break at taxpayers' expense? It is not the Government's money. It is not my money, either. I am only a contributor as a taxpayer, which some members opposite, including certain on the front bench, cannot be described as. As a legitimate taxpayer, I am a contributor. One has only to watch the Victorian television advertisement with respect to the State Bank-`It is your money, Ralph'. That is what Victorians will be thinking-it is taxpayers' money paying for Hayden to go on a nice little swan around the world. It is a rort and those opposite know it. This underlines the arrogance of the Government and how out of touch it is. If in fact the Government were addressing the real needs of this nation, it would be tackling government expenditure, as we have told it before; it would be giving real tax relief, instead of handing back the proceeds of bracket creep that the Government has so cruelly taken from people to achieve its surplus; and it would be redirecting the economy by restoring the incentive to both invest and work. But no, in terms of the debt dumped on Victorians and in terms of the continuing struggle for taxpayers to cope under the high tax rates of this Government-whether it is debt or taxes and charges-and I can assure those opposite that in Victoria there will be a decision on Saturday that another four years of a Labor government is just not on. If those opposite have so much confidence in Cain, they have only to look at what is happening in Victorian State Government offices now. The shredders are already at work. In fact, it led me to draw the conclusion that, frankly, the only machinery of government over which Cain has control at the moment is the shredder-and is it working! Those opposite will find that the sorts of concerns that are wrapped up in these sorts of stories with respect to Victoria's debt burden and taxpayers generally will be taken out on them on Saturday. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! The honourable member's time has expired. Mr DAWKINS(Fremantle-Minister for Employment, Education and Training and Acting Treasurer)(3.28) —It is apparent that really there are only two things that can bring the Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Mr Peacock) to his feet: first, a failed attempt to throw a life raft to his mate Jeff Kennett-and I will return to that in a moment-and, secondly, the absence of the Treasurer (Mr Keating). What has brought about this new bravado in the Deputy Leader of the Opposition? Is it entirely unrelated to the fact that the person whom he shadows, the Treasurer, is absent from the country? Has anyone heard such a cowardly attack engaged in by an honourable member during the absence of the person that he is supposed to be shadowing? There is a very well established practice and principle in this place that one does not embark on abuse and criticism of individuals who are not here to answer, but of course the cowardly Deputy Leader of the Opposition would not be worried about such niceties. Oh no, he sees this as a great opportunity to attack the Treasurer just because he is not here-a very cowardly act indeed. Of course, cowardice and treachery are not new to this man. Honourable members will remember that very famous conversation via the agency of Mr Kennett's telephone. Mr Tuckey —I raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think the Minister is forgetting that it was he who attacked John Reid on tax matters when that man could not defend himself. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! There is no point of order. The honourable member for O'Connor will resume his seat. Mr Peacock —I raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I hardly ever raise a point of order or call for the withdrawal of a remark but I will not wear a reference to `cowardice'. It is unparliamentary, it is untrue and I object to it. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —I have not heard-- Mr DAWKINS —I withdraw the word `cowardly'. I say that the Deputy Leader displays a total lack of courage. Let us return to the relationship between the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Jeff Kennett, who is now making a belated and failed attempt to save the Liberal Party in Victoria. It was Jeff Kennett and it was the Deputy Leader of the Opposition who engaged in that bit of telephonic treachery against the current Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard). Whether they were entitled to engage in that treachery is another matter. We now have the evidence we need to show that the Liberals in Victoria must be totally and unambiguously desperate if they are prepared to get the Deputy Leader of the Opposition to attack the Labor Party Government in Victoria and support the record of the Opposition Liberal Party in Victoria in here. I will tell honourable members what the Treasurer is doing overseas. Not only is he representing Australia in the highest forums of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a forum in which he happens to enjoy almost complete seniority in terms of other Ministers for finance, treasurers and chancellors from around the world, but also he is recognised as presiding over one of the great success stories of any economy in the world over the last five years. Frankly, Australia puts the rest of the world in the shade. What else is the Treasurer doing whilst he is overseas? He happens to have paid back $800m of our foreign debt in Berlin over the last few days. Mr Peacock —That is like the arsonist putting out the fire. Mr DAWKINS —I do not know what has come over members of the Opposition in the past day. They seem to be possessed by some fake and totally misconceived euphoria about something or other. We will wait to see the euphoria of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition at about 9 p.m. on Saturday, when the position will be transparently clear, when once again the Liberal Party in Victoria, the jewel in the crown, is condemned to opposition for another four years. That will prove the ascendancy of the Labor Party across the nation. I want to talk a little about the national debt because it is an important issue and nothing has obsessed this Government more than dealing with it. The national debt was massively contributed to by our opponents when they handed this Government, on the assumption of office, a fiscal deficit of some $10 billion. What does the Deputy Leader of the Opposition think that represents? Does he not think that represents a debt that had to be paid back? Did he think that, just because the Liberal Party in office had so constructed its Budget that it was spending $10 billion more than it was receiving in revenue, that did not have to be covered by debt? Of course Australia went into debt in 1983-84. It went into debt the next year as well because the terrible policies of the current Leader of the Opposition when he was Treasurer could not be reversed. He was the one who got this economy out of control. It took us just five years to turn a massive fiscal debt into a massive fiscal surplus, something which has not been paralleled anywhere in the world in recent times. It is because we were able to do that that we have been able not only to reduce dramatically the acceleration of the accumulation of Commonwealth debt, made necessary only because of the fiscal larrikinism of our opponents, but also to commence the task of repaying the debt. We are the ones who repay debt: the Liberals are the ones who amass it year after year with no regard to what it might mean to future generations or future governments. As a result of our budgetary savings and of repaying debt in the past year our public debt interest this year will be $210m less than it was last year. This is purely a result of our preparedness to bite the bullet and begin the process of bringing this economy back into line, bringing the Budget back into balance, putting it into surplus and beginning the task of repaying the debt. The main object of the Deputy Leader's address related to Victoria. The first piece of evidence he used to demonstrate his case was an article which appeared in the Weekend Australian. It is a great pity that he did not read today's Australian as well because in it is a retraction, a correction, of the big claim that the Deputy Leader made that was emblazoned in the Weekend Australian. It was retracted somewhat more coyly in today's Australian. The article says: An article in The Weekend Australian which used several different measures of the debt burdens of the States made a mistake in reporting one of Victoria's ratios-that of gross debt as a percentage of gross State product. The correct position, that Victoria had the second lowest debt burden of the four States measured using this ratio, was shown in a table on Page 8 of the same issue. So we have the claim of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition based on evidence in the Weekend Australian which said that Victoria had the highest debt burden. However, today's Australian-the same journal-says that it has the second lowest debt burden. Of course, these interstate comparisons are somewhat complex, and the complexities have totally befuddled the mind of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. They have not, however, befuddled Moody's Investor Services Inc., a major international credit rating agency. It has awarded Victoria the highest credit rating that any State can achieve. Do honourable members really think that Moody's, relied on around the world by lending agencies to establish the credit rating of a State government or other government, would be giving Victoria the highest credit rating if it were in such a parlous position as the Deputy Leader of the Opposition would have us believe? Of course it would not. That is why one needs to be a little more bright and a little more competent in matters economic than is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition if one is to rely on simplistic interstate comparisons. In the first instance-and this is only one example that I intend to use-the Deputy Leader of the Opposition decided to compare New South Wales with Victoria. If we look at the State government sector in New South Wales we will see that it does not include the gas industry, which is in the private sector, and does not include the electricity generation or distribution system, which is in the State local government public sector. So when we make a comparison between the diminished State government public sector of New South Wales and that of Victoria, where we find that both of those very large public undertakings are within the State Government's purview, we have to make an adjustment before we make the kind of simplistic comparisons which just dripped off the tongue of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition today. The fact is that the claims of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition are, as he well knows, totally without foundation. Not only does Victoria enjoy the highest credit rating that Moody's can give any State, but also there is a reason for that. In the first place, Victoria's debt is coming down and is just over half, in terms of debt to gross domestic product, what it was in the halcyon days of Sir Henry Bolte. Remember those days when Henry Bolte used to run the Liberal Party in Victoria and, indeed, the Liberal Party throughout Australia? In those days, of course, the Government had twice the debt that John Cain now has. As well as that, the growth in Victoria's debt servicing ratio has been the lowest of all States since 1982. Let us look a bit further. Borrowings by the Victorian Government have fallen in each of the past six years. Statistic after statistic, piece of evidence after piece of evidence that one turns to simply destroys and demolishes the arguments of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. Quite frankly, he was not interested in facts or evidence. It was all about the fact that poor old Jeff Kennett got on the phone-presumably a more secure phone than they used on their last notorious conversation-and said, `For heaven's sake, Andrew, you are, after all, the Opposition spokesman on the economy'. Very few people around Australia know that but Jeff Kennett knows it. He said to the Deputy Leader, `For Heaven's sake, get on your hind legs in the House and try to drum up a bit of drama about the Victorian debt burden'. So the Deputy Leader of the Opposition said, `Yes, Jeff, I will do that. There is not a scintilla of evidence on which to base that claim, but nevertheless for you, Jeff, my mate, I will do that'. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition knows that on Sunday morning his mate Jeff will be looking for a new job. The Cain Government has committed itself to ensuring that debt continues to fall as a share of the non-farm State economy through the term for which it will be elected on Saturday. Not only does the Victorian Government have an impeccable record; it is prepared to stake its future on the fact that it will maintain that impeccable record. This is a phoney argument, just as phoney as the Opposition's reshuffle-induced euphoria-one that Opposition members alone can understand-nevertheless there are some very substantial reasons why the people of Victoria will disregard the advice of the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and once again turn to the Australian Labor Party and John Cain to see them through the next four years at least. The reason for that was referred to a couple of times earlier today-that is, in Victoria there are more jobs, more growth, more opportunities for people, more prosperity and more exports than in any other State. That is because the Victorian Government has committed itself not to a superficial governance of its State but to fundamental restructuring where the great Victorian manufacturing industry, which was devastated by our Liberal colleagues, has been resurrected and strengthened and has once again become the motor of the Australian economy-the new Australian export-driven economy which needs to be based on manufactures if we are to broaden the basis of our export performance. What has occurred in Victoria over the past five years is a model for other States. Victoria has made more than its fair share of contribution to the turnaround in this economy and that is why we are happy to endorse the Cain Government enthusiastically and that is why the people of Victoria will do so again on Saturday. Mr LLOYD(Murray)(3.43) —The personal abuse which marked the first half of the speech of the Minister for Employment, Education and Training (Mr Dawkins) indicates the arrogance of the Australian Labor Party when it comes to answering the real charges about Victoria's or Australia's debt position. Perhaps it is like the Minister's answers in Question Time today on simple matters of housing interest rates: he does not know. I remind everybody who may have been somewhat confused by the speech of the honourable member for Tangney about the subject we are debating today. That subject is the scandal of Victoria's huge debt burden and in particular its depressing of the standards of living of all Victorians, as well as Australians. What does that mean for Victorians under this Cain Government? The highest debts, the highest taxes-particularly of country people-the questionable, if not corrupt, situation of the Victorian Economic Development Corporation, the scandal of WorkCare, and so it goes on. I want to remove once and for all the myth that has been carefully cultivated by that Labor Government of good economic management in Victoria. One could say that the Treasurer of Victoria has `jollyed' the economic situation in Victoria when really the Victorians have been taking a `caining'-a hell of a caning. The conservatives in Victoria, whether it is Mr Stockdale of the Liberal Party or Mr Hallam of the National Party, have been hammering home the reality. Two factors have come up in the last few days and I hope these are now apparent to all Victorians who will vote on Saturday. These factors have come at a most appropriate time in relation to that election. The first is the revelation by the Greiner-Murray Government in New South Wales of the real debt levels of State governments in Australia. Also for the first time at State level there was some honest budgetary accounting in the recent New South Wales Budget. The second factor is the report of Moody's Investor Services, the internationally renowned-and this is even acknowledged by the honourable member for Tangney-credit agency on the state of Victoria's debt. I remind honourable members of the quotation in last Saturday's Weekend Australian and point out that the retraction in today's Australian refers to only one of the eight charges. Therefore every other one of those charges about Victoria being the worst or one of the worst States stands. I refer to last Saturday's Weekend Australian, which ran the headline `Vic debt burden nation's worst'. The article says: According to the latest figures from the International credit rating agency, Moody's Investor Services, Victoria's debt servicing ratio is hovering around the 21 per cent mark. The same figure appears in a trail-blazing publication put out earlier this year by the South Australian Treasury but largely ignored until now. Surely Labor cannot criticise its own State Government in South Australia which confirms this point and which the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock) confirmed with a reference to Salomon Brothers. Let us listen to those eight points. The article says: . . . Victoria has the highest gross State debt, the second highest ratio of gross debt to gross State product and the lowest ratio of liquid assets to debt. It also has the highest net debt per capita of all the mainland States, the highest interest bill and the highest debt service ratio measured as the ratio of total net interest paid to total revenue. In other words, there are about eight charges there of gross economic mismanagement by Victoria, and even the honourable member for Tangney had to remind us that only one of those charges was retracted in today's Australian. Therefore every other charge against Victoria stands. That is not all. The same statement by Moody's refers to the fact that these charges make no mention of the debt overhang, the huge liabilities arising from, for example, unfunded superannuation schemes that will have to be financed in the not too distant future. That brings me to WorkCare. I refer to an article about a State Government report in today's Age entitled `WorkCare blowout under fire'. The report says that the State Government report indicates that unfunded liabilities for WorkCare in Victoria are over $2 billion. WorkCare in Victoria lost $2.9 billion in the 12 months to June this year. It has only $50m left to pay claims. How is that for economic mismanagement on a grand scale? What a scandal! What economic mismanagement! What negligence! What absolute hard labour! What is more, that debt burden is increasing. I refer now to the Greiner revelations and I wish to quote from the Budget speech of Mr Greiner, Premier of New South Wales. An article in the Australian last Wednesday said: In his first Budget, Mr Greiner has achieved a surplus of $8 million . . . Mr Greiner said that by using the Commonwealth's accounting procedures his surplus was really $339 million. He said that on his basis, which separates borrowings from tax revenue, Victoria would have a deficit of just over $1 billion. Let us get that straight. On a true accounting basis Victoria in its Budget for this year would have a deficit of $1 billion because Victoria has used a very quaint accounting device of including its Budget borrowings as receipts along with tax revenues, and to enable it to establish its figures for this year those borrowings are $1 billion. That means that Victoria, as a State, is going further and further into debt. It is rolling over existing loans and not repaying them. It is adding new and additional debt and using borrowings for everyday budgetary expenditure. That is not all. Interest charges have blown out by $1.2 billion. That is an increase of 33.8 per cent in interest payments by the State in two years and that includes further additional interest payments over and above last year of 13.6 per cent this year. That is without taxes. That is the economic hole which the Cain Labor Government is putting Victoria into. Victorians already pay a frightening debt servicing cost. They pay the highest taxes of any State in Australia. State taxes have increased by 26.7 per cent in the last two years, which includes an increase of 10.5 per cent this year. These increased taxes have come on top-and more increased taxes will come on top-of servicing Victoria's increasingly expensive debt. Victoria, at the expense of Victorian taxpayers, particularly home buyers, had a windfall of an additional $300m in stamp duty receipts in the last year. That is adding further to the misery of Victorians. It is a warning of what is to come under another Labor Government. The economic mismanagement does not end with the general state of the economy. There are plenty of examples of specific mismanagement. There is WorkCare. There is V/Line and its $1 billion debt. There is the Victorian Economic Development Corporation (VEDC), a very expensive and embarrassing organisation set up by the Government which has a long list of failures. I have time to give honourable members just one example: Corpivic, a Mildura-based fresh table grape exporting company, was granted $1m by the VEDC, out of $1.5m total capital, to establish a company to export fresh table grapes. It lasted for three weeks this year. The leading figure in it was a Mr Lindsay Leake, who happens to be the Labor Party candidate for the seat of Mildura. He has been the Labor Party candidate on two previous occasions. How is that for a coincidence? How is that, not for tickling the till but for handling money perhaps in an interesting way? That came after advice from all the table grape people in the area that there were already enough, if not too many, table grape exporters in the Mildura area. One could go on and on, particularly in relation to country areas. In country Victoria a double standard has been applied by Labor. For example, unemployment in rural and regional Victoria has increased by 90 per cent under the Cain Labor Government. With V/Line there is 120 per cent cost recovery for grain freight, compared to about 35 per cent for the metropolitan area, and it still runs at a $1 billion debt. When it comes to public authority dividend taxes and the Grain Elevators Board, with grower only money in it, the Victorian Government removed $19m from the growers of Victoria. The message is clear: on Saturday, Victorians, if they want to get away from future hard `Labor', must replace the Government with more `abel' conservatives than Cain. For better government, Victoria must drop the Labor Government. Mr GRIFFITHS(Maribyrnong)(3.53) —If any one mistake indicated the degree of confusion which the Deputy Leader of the National Party of Australia, the honourable member for Murray (Mr Lloyd), brought to this debate, it was his continued reference to the alleged misleading of this House by the honourable member for Tangney (Mr Shack). The honourable member for Tangney is one of his own front bench colleagues. The honourable member for Murray continually adverted in this debate to that honourable member-unbeknown to him, one of his own front bench colleagues. If that sort of confusion reigns during this debate one can only marvel at the confusion that would have reigned when he started talking about economic indices. I wish to address a number of issues. First and foremost is the threshold issue of the matter of public importance before the House today. Honourable members are aware that, as is so often the case, the Opposition has simply put forward a matter of public importance based upon what its members read in yesterday's newspapers. Nobody advised them that there were subsequent clarifications of the mistakes made, which clarifications should have been made in this House. There is another interesting point. The Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia, the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock), took a point of order-he indicated that he does not often take points of order; I can see why-in relation to his now infamous telephone conversation with Mr Jeff Kennett of Victoria. The reason he took that point of order was that he was described as both treacherous and cowardly. His point of order sought the withdrawal of the latter part of that description. So in the records of this House he has not disputed the first description of him-treacherous. I suspect that, having regard to the contents of that telephone call, he would not have the cheek to do so. Mr Reith —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. It is quite inappropriate for a member to attempt to slur another member by reference to a point of order previously taken. I ask that he withdraw it. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! There is no point of order. Mr GRIFFITHS —I might say just for the record that I certainly do not regard the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in that way, but it was interesting that he failed to seek that withdrawal. There were issues raised in relation to WorkCare. Let me say for the record that the number of claims reported for the first six months of this year was no less than 12 per cent down on the number reported for the same period last year. That is a matter of public record. The percentage of beneficiaries who are to be on benefits for more than 12 months was no less than 40 per cent down on the proportion a year ago. Anyone who has any understanding of the way these schemes are funded will no doubt understand that, as a basic principle, the first years of the establishment of these schemes are the most expensive, because it takes some time to get the level of funding required to service the inherited outgoings that the schemes have to look after. So there is no magic in that. It is a sad reflection on this House that basic insurance principles are not adhered to when discussing these issues. But perhaps that is not be scoffed at in the period leading up to a State election. We all get a little toey. The Liberal Party in Victoria is grasping at straws. Mr Reith —Speak for yourself. Mr GRIFFITHS —If the honourable member comes into the chamber tonight for the adjournment debate he will hear about something quite interesting which some of his colleagues have been involved in. It is not a matter of assertion, or of opinion on my part, but a contribution based upon documents supplied to me directly from the Liberal Party headquarters in Victoria, documents that I believe will be of considerable embarrassment to Opposition frontbenchers, indeed to all members of the Opposition. Mr McGauran —A smear campaign. Mr GRIFFITHS —No. As I said, I do not rely on assertion or opinion. The honourable member is welcome to come into the chamber tonight to hear my contribution. He will find that it is documented material from the Victorian Branch of the Liberal Party. So much for that matter for the moment. There are a number of other issues I should go to. Mr Reith —We cannot wait for the next bucket. Mr GRIFFITHS —If the honourable member likes, he could go and ring journalists from the Weekly Times. Two weeks ago, his friend and colleague Ian McLachlan, often written up as a future leader of the Liberal Party-it was not picked up by the mainstream press, although I hope that it will now do a little digging-in a public forum in Melbourne-- Mr Chynoweth —A member of the Liberal Party. Mr GRIFFITHS —He is certainly a member of the Liberal Party. He described in a public forum this Opposition as `brain dead'. That description came from one of the honourable member's own senior colleagues, and he is dead right-excuse the pun. Victoria's economic record stands unsurpassed in an Australian context. The Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party was talking about figures that he derived from the last month or so. Of course he did not talk about the previous 60 months. That, in any analytical sense, is a little like going to a used car salesman and accepting the story that a car that has done 200,000 kilometres has only been driven to church on Sundays. It was only driven to church for the last month, but we are asked to discount the 200,000 kilometres on the car's odometer. For more than 60 consecutive months Victoria has recorded the lowest unemployment rate of any State. Of course we can use statistics to describe that most welcome record, but more importantly we ought to talk about the impact that that has on the State economy and the impact on those who are fortunate enough to have gained employment, a decent standard of living and a degree of respect for themselves and their families. In the last six years Victoria's economic growth rate has been 1 1/3 times that of the rest of Australia. It has been even more spectacular in attracting business investment. This matter was injected into the debate earlier. Just let me say that the statistics on this are quite clear. Since 1982-83 business investment in real terms in Victoria has increased by twice the rate for the rest of Australia. With that sort of impetus underpinning the State's performance it is not surprising that Victoria has been at the heart of Australia's export surge. If there is a single economic index that is of overwhelming importance to this country it is that relating to export enhancement and import replacement. On that measure the Victorian economy has been the pre-eminent economy in this country. In the last two years manufacturing exports from Victoria have increased by 120 per cent, again twice the rate for the rest of Australia. My own region, the western region of Melbourne, has figured prominently in that outcome, with considerable advantages to those who live there. It was, I might say, a most neglected region until the advent of the Cain and Hawke Labor governments. As a result of that record of achievement the State Opposition has not been able to mount any credible attack on the Cain Government's economic performance. So what do we have now? In the fortnight preceding the poll we have seen the Opposition dipping into the bucket and throwing the mud around. I believe the electorate these days is much more sophisticated than was the case 10 or 15 years ago, and I do not believe that Victorians will be prepared any more than any other Australians to substitute mud slinging and personal attacks for economic rectitude and sensible government. I believe that prediction will be more than fulfilled on Saturday. There is a whole range of other issues that I could go to, but I shall not. I shall conclude on this note: in the lead-up to the last Federal election the Liberal Party and the National Party promised, in effect, tax cuts of some $14 billion. It was recklessness and bribery unsurpassed. Now they have the cheek-more cheek than the rear end of an elephant-to come into this House and argue a case on the basis of economic responsibility. It will not wash with the people of Australia, and it most certainly will not wash this Saturday with their country cousins in Victoria. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Blanchard) —Order! The time allotted for the debate has expired. Mr HOLLIS(Throsby) —On behalf of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works I present the tenth report of the Committee for 1988 relating to the stage 2 development of the Royal Australian Air Force Base, Tindal, Northern Territory. Ordered that the report be printed. (Budget Debate) Debate resumed from 31 August, on motion by Mr Keating: That the Bill be now read a second time. Dr HARRY EDWARDS(Berowra)(4.04) —The Treasurer (Mr Keating) says that this Budget is `the one that brings home the bacon'. I wonder what he really means by that. I suspect he wants us to believe that this Budget pulls it all together, with restored balance in the economy, continuing strong growth and the debt being rolled back. Bluntly, that is not the reality. Let us be clear about some of the things the Treasurer does not and cannot mean. Certainly the Budget does not give any relief from the terrible weight of income taxation on the average Australian. That point has been hammered by previous Opposition speakers, but it is some three weeks since we debated this matter so it bears repeating: there is no relief from the terrible weight of income taxation on the average Australian. There is a small measure of relief via the lower tax on beer and a few other lower indirect taxes. But income taxes in total increased by 10 per cent last year and they are now projected to increase by 14 per cent this year-that is, by $5.7 billion-as, with the passing of time, the so-called bracket creep bites deeper and deeper. Note that that total, $5.7 billion, happens to be only slightly greater than the Budget surplus of $5.5 billion trumpeted forth with great boasting and thumping of the chest by the Treasurer, most recently before the International Monetary Fund in West Berlin in the past few days. Thus, as one commentator put it, that is a surplus in the Budget `ripped out of the hides of ordinary Australians'. We can bet that statement is bang on. So I say this: At a time when the real incomes of ordinary Australians have fallen so under this Labor Government-I am referring to the goods and services one's wages will buy at the supermarket or the fruit market-and when Australians on low to average incomes are suffering the biggest falls, there is to be a further whacking increase in people's income taxes. It is immoral that ordinary Australians-we are not talking about rich people here-are forced to pay and go on paying 40c tax in the dollar for every extra dollar of income they earn, and so their overall tax rate increases. There is no bacon there; no way. What it all amounts to is this: by 1 July next year, when there is some prospect that some bacon in the form of tax cuts will be delivered, the average wage and salary earner would need $56 a week to restore his real disposable income to the level of March 1983, when Labor came to power. I say again, $56 a week; that is the measure of how people are being thrashed by this highest taxing government in Australia's post-war history. The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) put it correctly when he said that under Labor `hard work in Australia is rewarded by higher taxes'. That is a great way to run a country. In addition, the way this Budget and overall policy are shaped, to higher taxes will be added higher interest rates. That brings me to the other important way in which this Budget fails to bring home the real, the essential, `bacon' that is, it does not promise any significant contribution to getting this country out of the fundamental economic predicament of its vast balance of payments deficit and frightening overseas debt. Make no mistake, we are in this situation largely as a result of the economic policies of the Hawke-Keating Government. My colleague the honourable member for Wentworth (Dr Hewson) set that out in his speech earlier in this debate. The situation was exacerbated, it is true, by the decline in the terms of trade after 1985 but, and I underline this, all of that fall in the terms of trade has now been recovered. Australia's situation of a massive balance of payments deficit and an ever-increasing overseas debt is a very serious one. It makes us very dependent on large scale borrowings from foreigners. That has been facilitated in recent years by all the money sloshing around the world economy. But we are still very vulnerable. It is a situation which the Treasurer has on a number of occasions in the past-though not this time, with his economic zeal having been so blunted by his aspirations to the Lodge-described as being `unsustainable'. That is correct. Last year the balance of payments deficit-that is, what we are spending overseas in excess of what we are earning, and we may use the analogy of a person spending $450 a week when he is earning only $400-came in at $11.9 billion, or a billion dollars per calendar month. The July figure was $1.7 billion, but it is around $1 billion on average. That means that the country is going an extra $30m into hock every day. Some have said-my friend the honourable member for Herbert (Mr Lindsay), amongst others, earlier in this debate-`But we are reducing our overseas debt', and much was made in the news this very morning of the Treasurer repaying or retiring $800m of Commonwealth debt. That is less than one month's worth-a billion dollars of our profligate new borrowing. Who says that our overseas indebtedness is falling? That is an illusion which the Treasurer would carefully foster-falsely-like other illusions and distortions conveyed by this Treasurer and the thrust of this Budget. It is absolutely obvious that somewhere, somehow, someone has to borrow when one is running the economy so as to go $30m extra into hock, as I said, every day. In those circumstances, if the Government retires a bit of its debt, that does not change the overall situation-but it sure fosters the illusion of reducing the nation's indebtedness. The truth is that unless the Government accepts its overall responsibility-and it is the Government's responsibility-to run the economic affairs of the country so that the country lives within its income and does not chalk up that $30m extra every day, the Government is not facing up to its responsibilities and is putting us very much at risk. As I have said, someone, somewhere has to do the borrowing. Thus, we do find that the gross overseas debt went up last year by $10 billion, to $115 billion as at 30 June last; and the net debt went up by $7 billion, to nearly $90 billion. They are Reserve Bank of Australia figures-if anyone has any doubt-and there is no argument about them. So the debt relentlessly increases, and the carefully crafted illusion that our vast overseas debt is being cut is just that-phoney, false, an illusion. What I am saying is that the key `bacon' that the Treasurer is not bringing home is a significant, a sufficient, a more certain contribution to the correction of the continual substantial deficit in the balance of payments which, as the Reserve Bank in its annual report rightly stresses: . . . is central to Australia's economic strategy . . . to securing our economic future. What that calls for, as the Reserve bank report says, is, first: sustained improvement in the competitiveness of our industries- which is threatened by too rapid wage increases and makes a tax cut now imperative. Secondly, it calls for a: broader productive base . . . to complement resource export industries- and involving: the progressive transfer of resources into production for export and for import replacement. A positive contribution is made to that when export volumes increase more than import volumes. But in the year just passed the reverse happened: import volumes increased faster than exports. And for crying out loud, the same result is forecast in the Treasurer's own Budget Papers for next year. Where the Government has really let the long term future of the country down is in not reducing government spending more, which is the most direct way, under the Government's control, of making the economic room for the necessary additional investment and export and import replacement production. I know that the Treasurer, in his typically excessive, derogatory, plain wrong way, has said: . . . parroted calls in future for further savage cuts in public spending should be seen for what they are; mindless shrieks by ideologues against the legitimate spending functions of government. In response to that, I would ask: What about his colleague Senator Walsh's `two hundred bloody programs'-I might say that the `French' is the Senator's and these are his words- that cannot be justified on social justice, equity, or economic efficiency grounds and therefore should be cut? Mr Webster —He is right. Dr HARRY EDWARDS —Yes, indeed; he is right. Is Senator Walsh a mindless ideologue? I conclude by saying that with his characteristic abuse, half-truths and bluster the Treasurer may win the political argument for a day, for a month or for a bit longer; but, in his continuing drive for the Lodge and his need to win friends and influence people and his colleagues, in this Budget he has let the country down very badly indeed. In summary, it is a bland, soft Budget, despite its trumpeted surplus of $5 billion. There is, first, the massive tax hike governed above everything else by the political imperative of no tax cut until just before the next election. Secondly, there is the fact of no tax cuts now, thus endangering the essential wage-salary moderation. Thirdly, the pace of the country's adjustment to its massive external deficit and overseas debt problem is slowed to a virtual standstill. It is a soft Budget that really lets this country down. Mr BRUMBY(Bendigo)(4.16) —I have pleasure in supporting the Appropriation Bills, as I have done every year since my election to this House in 1983. I have to say that, of all the May statements and the Budgets that this Government has released in each year since that time, I think that in its fundamental characteristics this is the best Budget that this Federal Labor Government has been able to produce. I say that for a range of reasons, but I refer particularly to the principal characteristics of this Budget. There are three basic, outstanding characteristics in this Budget. The first is that it returns a surplus to the Government in excess of $5 billion. To put that in context, that compares with an inherited deficit that we received in prospect on taking government in March 1983 from the irresponsible government at the time, with its Treasurer John Howard, of $9.6 billion. That was the deficit in prospect that we inherited. We have turned that around after 5 1/2 difficult years. I know that they have been difficult years also for the Australian people, and we appreciate their support in that turnaround of the Australian economy. We have thus seen $9.6 billion in the red turned around to $5.5 billion in the black-a net turnaround of more than $15 billion. It has been financed primarily by expenditure cuts. That is the first outstanding feature of this Budget. The second is that the private sector investment figures on which it is based forecast a 12 per cent real increase in investment in the Australian economy in this financial year, 1988-89. Obviously, investment is crucial to Australia's ability to improve its competitiveness, to put exports at a world price on to international markets, and to repay some of the debt that has accrued over many decades because of the imbalance in our exports and imports. Investment is crucial to make us more competitive, to get out into the export market. In this Budget the magic figure is a 12 per cent anticipated real increase in investment. The third characteristic goes to the issue of debt, of which we have heard a lot of debate-much of it inaccurate-in this House today. The net public sector borrowing requirement in this Budget is zero-nil. To many people and to many members of this House, particularly Opposition members, `the public sector borrowing requirement' is a long expression; but what does it mean when one says that it is zero? It means that this year the whole government sector of Australia will not be borrowing one new cent or dollar to finance any of its programs. To put that in context, let me emphasise that in five years-in other words, since the time we took government in 1983-government borrowing has been reduced from $20 billion to zero. It is another dramatic turnaround. The previous speaker, the honourable member for Berowra (Dr Harry Edwards), talked about debt. We agree with some of what he said. We agree that for this country debt is a problem. We agree that continuing unfunded current account deficits are a problem and that is why, in the 5 1/2 years since we have been the Federal Government, we have taken proper, responsible action and appropriate measures to deal with that current account problem. We see in this Budget that those measures have been effective. We can argue about the pace of adjustment, but it is the view of this Government that the decisions we have taken in a budgetary context, a fiscal context and in a labour market context have been rapid enough to improve Australia's current account position and, at the same time, have been sustainable domestically; in other words, the Australian people have been prepared to accept the rate of change which has occurred. When one looks at those three key statistics, such as the surplus, one will see that there is a $5 1/2 billion surplus in this Budget. We think that that is appropriate for Australia's needs. The Budget forecasts a 12 per cent real rise in private sector investment. We think that that is ideal for Australia at present. The third characteristic is that the public sector borrowing requirement is nil. It means that we are borrowing no new money and, indeed, during this financial year the Federal Government has been repaying debt. I want also to touch on the question of outlays because it has been suggested in the debate today by the Opposition-of course, a Victorian election is to be held next Saturday, on 1 October; I will come to that in a moment-that this is a high taxing Government and that the surplus of $5 1/2 billion in this Budget has been achieved by slugging people in the hip pocket. It is not true to say that, and responsible Opposition members know that it is not true to say that. Outlays in this Budget as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) are 25 1/2 per cent. Four years ago they were 30 per cent. That means that we have cut government spending, government outlays, by 4 1/2 percentage points of GDP. That is an enormous cut which has been achieved over four years. Next year, just on the basis of these Budget figures, outlays will be 24 1/2 per cent of GDP. The honourable member for Berowra, who is in the chamber at the moment, knows that those figures are true: four years ago outlays represented 30 per cent of GDP, this year they represent 25 1/2 per cent of GDP and next year they will represent 24 1/2 per cent of GDP. He knows that when previous conservative governments were in office they could not match that sort of record when Australia needed that sort of record to get itself out of economic trouble. This Labor Government has taken responsible action, at the same time preserving our social justice commitments to those most in need in the community. We have cut spending from 30 per cent of GDP to 25 1/2 per cent this year, and 24 1/2 per cent next year. One might ask: How does that stack up against the rest of the world? As the Treasurer (Mr Keating) would say, `Put that in the big picture'. To put that in the big picture, it means that Australia has an achievement which is unmatched by any of the other 22 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That puts the matter in its context. For three years in Australia we have been reducing real outlays because economic circumstances demanded it. We have done that with the support of the Australian people, who have acknowledged the need to cut spending. Sometimes that hurts people, but they have supported us in that regard because it has been essential for Australia's long term good. We have done it, and no other country in the OECD could match that achievement. It is an achievement which is unmatched anywhere in the world. It means that after 5 1/2 years of Federal Labor Government we have a smaller but better public sector. As I said earlier, the question of debt has been raised a number of times in this debate. I guess it has been raised in the context of the Victorian election to be held this Saturday. I suppose that if I were an Opposition member, I would be grasping at straws, or grasping fairly desperately at issues with which to try to run during this last week. Certainly, at this stage of the poll, the Victorian Cain Government is a long way ahead of Mr Kennett. That is not surprising when one thinks of the performance of the Cain Government over more than six years and contrasts that style and performance with that of Mr Kennett. I suppose it is a laughable comparison. The Opposition has talked about debt because it has not had much else to talk about. I just want to make a few points about debt in Victoria. This year the Victorian debt gross domestic product ratio is about 28 per cent. One might say that that sounds pretty high, but what does it mean? It is the same level as it was seven years ago in 1981-82 when the Cain Government won office-or, to put it another way, in the last full year of the Hamer-Thompson Government. It is worth comparing it to that of the alleged old sage of the Liberal Party, Sir Henry Bolte, because when he was Premier of Victoria in the 1970s, State debt reached a staggering 44 per cent of Victorian GDP. When the Deputy Leader of the Opposi- tion, the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock), comes into this place to try to support his mate in Victoria, Jeff Kennett-and that is all he is doing, trying to support a mate-and says that debt under the Cain Government in Victoria is high, people ought to put that in its proper context. It is not high. Indeed, the Victorian economy is better equipped than any other economy in Australia to repay that debt. What is more, it has been borrowing to put money into productive enterprise which will earn Victoria more jobs, more investment and more export income. I repeat that comparison. In the 1970s, under dear old Sir Henry Bolte, the perfect Premier in far right Liberal eyes, State debt was 44 per cent of GDP. Today it is less than 30 per cent. So the Cain Government and Treasurer Jolly have been reducing that level of debt every year to get it to a responsible level. I am told that by 1990-91 State debt as a share of GDP will fall to 25 per cent, which will be the lowest level, not in a decade, two decades or since Bolte, but the lowest level this century, in 90 years, and that is an outstanding performance. The last thing I want to say about debt in Victoria is that public sector borrowing requirements have been reduced in every year of the Cain Labor Government. In six very good years of government those borrowing levels have fallen in real terms. Even if members of the Opposition argue, for whatever reason, that debt in Victoria is too high, the fact is that it has been falling each year in which the Labor Government has been in office. I think that probably says something about the conservative governments which preceded us. The next point I want to make is in response to remarks about taxation. It has been said that taxation in Victoria is high. Again, that is simply not true. I suppose it makes interesting headlines and small talk in this Parliament in the lead-up to the State election on Saturday. There is an abundance of evidence to show that it is simply not true. I do not refer to State statistics, as the Minister for Land Transport and Shipping Support (Mr Robert Brown) knows. I refer to impartially collected statistics by organisations like the Australian Bureau of Statistics which show that Victoria is certainly not the highest taxing State and, indeed, since 1982-83, the year in which the Australian Labor Party won office, Victoria's growth in tax has been the lowest of all of the States. It has also been claimed that if people have not been taxed highly in Victoria they have been hit in the back with hidden charges. That is a claim which I have heard in Victoria. In last year's election campaign the Cain Government made a commitment not to increase gas, electricity and Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works water charges by more than the consumer price index. The Cain Government has done better than that. Since the last election in 1984-85, the increase in key household charges has been considerably less than the CPI. Mr McGauran —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. Members of the Opposition have tolerated with some forbearance this honourable member's long expose of the financial affairs of Victoria. We are discussing a Federal Budget and on the point of relevance I would submit that he has far exceeded the Standing Orders. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Blanchard) —Order! I have listened closely to the honourable member's remarks. The question of relevance is not pertinent in this case. There is no point of order. Mr BRUMBY —Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is not surprising that the honourable member for Gippsland (Mr McGauran) should be a little sensitive about these matters in Victoria. Mr Robert Brown —They are ashamed of their record. Mr BRUMBY —I will tell honourable members a little about that, as it is relevant to this debate. The honourable member for Gippsland has a brother in the other place in this Parliament who is a National Party senator. Throughout the whole of the Victorian election campaign Senator McGauran has been running advertisements supporting a coalition arrangement between the Liberals and the Nationals in Victoria. It has been a matter of great luck and good fortune to us in the Labor Party that anyone could be so stupid and so naive politically as to run those half-page advertisements calling for a coalition when the Liberal leader in Victoria, Mr Kennett, has been consistently saying that the choices in Victoria are a Liberal government or nothing. So the question is very relevant when comparing our economic performance-- Mr Sinclair —They would be nothing if there were a Labor government. It describes their record well. Mr BRUMBY —The right honourable member for New England is finished. If he had anyone of any calibre on the front bench, including the shadow Minister who is present, he would already be on his retirement farm. But he has no-one there of any calibre, no-one with any gumption, and no-one who can string a sentence together, otherwise he would be in retirement; he would be back on the farm. The only threat to him is the man from the other place whom the coalition dumped from the shadow Ministry because he was not up to scratch, but the seven minions in the National Party decided to keep him as Leader of the National Party in the Senate. So he is a bit like a Minister without portfolio. He graces the chamber and the National Party meetings and he is National Party Leader in the Senate, but he does not have a portfolio and he will never have one. Perhaps it highlights two things: firstly, the lack of ability on the Opposition side of the Parliament; and, secondly, these awful and horrific tensions as a result of nightmare events between the Liberal and National parties. This is represented in Victoria as well. In Victoria Mr Kennett says that it is the Liberals or nothing, but National Party members say that it is a coalition or nothing. When we stack all their shadow Ministers up-what about their environment Ministers, their economic Ministers or their decentralisation Ministers?-what one National Party shadow spokesman says, a Liberal Party shadow spokesman rejects. So what are the poor old voters meant to think about the policies that are on offer? It is a bit like the last Federal election, involving the right honourable member for New England, Senator Stone and Joh from up north. The right honourable member for New England was not sure which team he was on. But I can tell him that, as far as fiscal rectitude and debt go, he was part of a team which was promising unfunded tax cuts of $14 billion. The advisers of the right honourable member for New England have just handed him a note saying that he is making a fool of himself, that he should shut his mouth and could he please be quiet. He was part of a campaign team which promised $14 billion in unfunded tax cuts, yet he has the gall to come in here and talk about fiscal rectitude. Mr McGauran —What about interest rates? Don't you care about interest rates? You are forcing people out of their homes. Mr BRUMBY —Mr Deputy Speaker, can I have some protection from the honourable members opposite? Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Blanchard) —If the honourable member addresses the Chair, it will cause less argument in the chamber. Mr BRUMBY —I am happy to address the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker. I was just saying that the right honourable member for New England was part of a team which promised $14 billion of unfunded tax cuts. The other half of his team, the Liberal half, was promising $8 billion; and I suppose that that was a bit more responsible. I have to say that, to Senator Stone's credit, only a matter of months ago he honestly confessed and confided to the press that remarkable headline in the New South Wales papers: `Don't trust us on tax-Stone'. Even more recently Senator Stone had the decency to say that the Labor Government's policy of not giving tax cuts this year was the responsible thing to do because, if we splurged $5 billion or $10 billion on tax cuts this year, it would blow out consumer spending, blow out the import bill, put the current account back into bigger deficit, and hence increase our foreign debt. So he has the good sense and the good grace to support this Government's policies when he knows they are right, and that is more than I can say for the right honourable member for New England and the honourable member for Gippsland-one a leader of a party with nowhere to go and the other a young incumbent also with nowhere to go. That is an accurate summary of both of them. It is about time that they stood up and supported responsible economic policy when it is put before them, as it is in this Budget. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Blanchard) —Order! The honourable member's time has expired. Mr SINCLAIR(New England-Leader of the National Party of Australia)(4.36) —No-one would believe that it was only 5 1/2 weeks ago that the Treasurer (Mr Keating) delivered the Budget. Since then all the arithmetic on which it is based has largely been discredited. What I wanted to do for a little while this evening was to analyse three key points of the Budget strategy which I think have failed abysmally and around which I think most Australians need to ponder as they recognise that tax cuts are not theirs, and as they recognise that State Labor governments have increased their State debt beyond that of any reasonable assessment. I really want to look at three key points. Firstly, the 1987-88 Budget surplus was achieved by a combination of high taxation, low Commonwealth investment relative to consumption, and statistical manipulation. This higher tax continues to underpin the current Budget. Secondly, the major assumptions underlying the Budget are unrealistic and have proved to be so since the Budget was delivered, particularly the forecast of inflation, the size of the 1988-89 current account deficit and the terms of trade. Mr Brumby —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. I know that there has been a recent review of the Standing Orders, but I am wondering whether it is still in order for a member of this House to read his speech word for word, as the right honourable member for New England and Leader of the National Party is clearly doing. Mr SINCLAIR —I am not reading it. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Blanchard) —The right honourable member has just informed the House that he is not reading his speech. There is no point of order. Mr SINCLAIR —For the gentleman opposite to pretend that I read speeches indicates that he does not know very much about me. I do not know whether he is even a member of the House; I do not think I have heard him speak here before. The third thing which it is important for us to understand is that, when we look at the overall level of debt, we must look at not just the size of the Victorian debt but also the size of the gross external debt. Unfortunately, whereas net external debt had a small and temporary fall in Australian dollar terms late last financial year, due largely then to appreciations of currency, both gross and net debt are likely to rise again significantly this financial year. I want to look at this Budget in critical terms in relation to those three facets. First, let us look at the Budget surplus and taxation. The Budget surplus recorded in 1987-88 was $2 billion. We all recall those figures; they were the result of the last year's presentation. It relied heavily on asset sales, profits from the Reserve Bank of Australia, and a further $200m found by changing the statistical classifications. Public sector consumption grew by 2.7 per cent, so the much vaunted Keating public expenditure cuts resulted from a slashing of public investment-that is, public gross fixed capital expenditure-by 11.1 per cent, a short-sighted policy which does not address the tough issue of cutting recurrent expenditure. The one thing that his Government has not done is understand that, unless it cuts recurrent expenditure, there is no likelihood that it will be able to pass on meaningful tax cuts to the Australian electorate, tax cuts which are overdue and which to date have not been found within any of the Budgets of the last few years in a realistic manner. In fact, under Labor since 1982-83 total Government outlays have risen by 12 per cent and Commonwealth own purpose outlays by 19 per cent in real terms. The deceptive stewardship of the economy under Labor can be seen most graphically in the massive debt that has been run up in New South Wales and Victoria. Mr Brumby —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. I raised a point of order previously and my integrity was impugned. The Leader of the National Party said that he was not reading a speech. I ask that he table, for the benefit of the House, the first two pages of the material from which it appears to me he has been reading so that the House can make a judgment about whether he is reading or using notes. Mr SINCLAIR —There is no doubt that the two States that I have just spoken about, New South Wales and Victoria-- Mr Brumby —Mr Deputy Speaker-- Mr SINCLAIR —Mr Deputy Speaker, it is customary in this place that we do not have idiots like the fool across the chamber intervening in the course of speeches, and I would suggest that it is up to you to make sure that I am allowed to make a speech on the Budget as the leader of a party. What that fool seeks to do is to deceive the Victorian electorate at the time of a State election, and it is about time Victorians knew that Cain is a lousy Premier. Mr Robert Brown —Mr Deputy Speaker, I take a point of order. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The right honourable member will please resume his seat. There is a further point of order. However, I must point out that I have not resolved the original point of order yet. Mr Robert Brown —Mr Deputy Speaker, I think it important that the Leader of the National Party withdraw those comments. He attempted, to the extent that he could, to drown out the honourable member for Bendigo while the honourable member for Bendigo was speaking, and now when the tables have been reversed he is upset about it. He should be able to take it as well as dish it out, and he should withdraw those comments. Mr SINCLAIR —Shut up and sit down; I withdraw. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The right honourable member has withdrawn. There is no point of order. Mr SINCLAIR —There is no doubt, as far as the debt of the two major States of Australia is concerned, that under the management of Labor New South Wales and Victoria are in a lousy state. Mr Robert Brown —Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a further point of order. I was attempting to make a point of order when I was told by the Leader of the National Party to shut up and sit down. I will accept those instructions from you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I certainly will not accept them from a person like that. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —There is no point of order. Before I call the right honourable member again, I point out that on an earlier point of order a request was made that-- Mr SINCLAIR —That was not a point of order. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The right honourable member is quite right. There was no point of of order. Mr SINCLAIR —There is no doubt that the size of the public debt in New South Wales and Victoria is one of the major causes of concern in financial management in Australia today. We have had a financial audit in New South Wales. What has happened? These idiots from the other side have been running around pretending they are financially responsible in the State parliaments. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! Mr SINCLAIR —I beg your pardon. I withdraw the phrase. Their affiliates in State parliaments in New South Wales and Victoria, members of the same party, pretend that they are financially responsible. What is the Treasurer, the guy who brought in this Budget five weeks ago, doing? He is in Europe telling others how to run the world economy. I cannot imagine anything less relevant. The point is that Labor's stewardship of the economy has been deceptive. Mr Wran is the guy the Prime Minister, Mr Cain and all the other Labor Premiers around Australia seem to think is the great guide and mentor who set the pattern for them. The reality is that New South Wales, where he was Premier, has been found to have total liabilities of $46 billion. We are told now that in Victoria net State debt has more than doubled from $11.3 billion to $23.6 billion in the seven years under Premier Cain. The State Budget expenditure has increased by 3 per cent per annum in real terms. This year's Victorian Budget, about which the honourable member for Bendigo was talking, is forecast to be more than $1 billion in deficit. No wonder honourable members opposite want to try to conceal the figures. The reality is that, under Labor, debts have risen and interest rates are in an appalling state. We saw today that the Acting Treasurer (Mr Dawkins) is not even competent and does not understand what factors influence interest rates. The Government relies totally on high levels of taxation to ensure that it gets the $5.5 billion Commonwealth Budget surplus forecast for this year. There is no doubt that the present Treasurer is the highest taxing Treasurer in Australia's history and he is also the highest spending Treasurer. A Budget surplus is based on surplus tax, it is based on excess tax, and it is based on the fact that Labor is mismanaging the Australian economy. Let us look at inflation. Dr Theophanous —What rubbish! You don't know what you are talking about. Mr SINCLAIR —My dear friend over there should tell us about immigration. He is pretty hot on that but the trouble is that he runs for cover as soon as he is asked to speak the truth. The real trouble with this Budget, as we all know, is that the Treasurer has foreshadowed that inflation is to increase by only 4.5 per cent over the course of the next 12 months. We know that the annual rate as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) was 7.1 per cent at the end of June 1988-twice the average of 3.6 per cent for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We know that the implicit price deflator for gross non-farm product was 7 per cent, up from 6 per cent in the financial year 1984-85. Yet the Budget forecasts a 4.5 per cent increase in the CPI this year. We even saw Bill Kelty from the Australian Council of Trade Unions telling the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission that it was not possible for that 4.5 per cent to be reached this year. We also know that the projected fall is based on a beer fiddle on indirect taxes which is going to account for 0.5 per cent and on the assumption that the rise in the exchange rate for the first half of 1988 will be sustained-we have seen what has happened to that-with the remainder presumably contingent on something like cheaper fresh vegetable prices. Each one of those factors, I would contend, is questionable. As far as the maintenance of the exchange rate is concerned, we know that there has been a significant easing in the value of the Australian dollar over the course of the last few weeks. We know that a major part of many household budgets is the monthly mortgage repayment. Housing interest rates have gone up from 13 1/2 per cent to 14 1/2 per cent. Prime lending rates are now 15 1/2 per cent. They affect the small business and the farmers that the National Party represents. These increases will inevitably raise the CPI. Even the price of fresh food has not fallen since 30 June 1988. This month the Government's Prices Surveillance Authority-and I see that the honourable member for Canning (Mr Gear), the chairman of the Government committee on the subject, is here today-stated that vegetable, fruit, meat and tinned fish prices are set to rise even higher. Yet this is one area on which the Government is relying when it says that the CPI figure this year will be 4.5 per cent. Indeed, I would say that the minimal assessment of inflation for this year should be around 6 per cent, and I would not be at all surprised if the figure were higher. We have had no tax concessions passed on. We have a CPI figure that is significantly higher than the Government's assessment. We have an interest rate level which we all accept is going higher, even though the Acting Treasurer does not seem to know what it is about, and we have people in Victoria still pretending that their State is managed properly. The reality is that State governments further aggravate the whole problem. Inflation is further augmented by the fact that there are State charges and State taxes that significantly affect even the living standards of people such as honourable members opposite. One thing that really worries us on this side of the House is that the Labor Party has not understood that the July $1.7 billion current account deficit reflects one of the real problems we have in the Australian economy. Mr Hunt —Where are the August figures? Mr SINCLAIR —We know the August figures, as my colleague has said, are not out. At the very least we expect them to be between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. No serious analyst can really argue the proposition that the Budget current account forecast is accurate. We all know that the forecast for the current account deficit is based on exports-essentially rural products and minerals-maintaining their value. Under this Government the pace of adjustment has been slowed down. The pace of adjustment has not been helped by such dramatic changes as those that were imposed through the export market development grants scheme. That scheme was supposed to run for five years. The Government has pruned it halfway through, thereby further delaying and putting into doubt the pace of adjustment that is necessary to encourage Australian exports in other than our traditional commodities and in the minerals sector. We know that wool prices are 20 per cent lower today than they were at the top of the market last year. Recently we have seen significant falls in the gold price. Indeed, at the moment there seems to be some expectation among analysts that gold might plateau at the relative low price of about $US375. We also know that there has been generally some doubt with respect to other metal prices. With respect to aluminium, for example, we are told by international analysts that there is a narrowing gap between supply and demand and that demand is also likely to ease. With so many of our major commodities thecurrent account has in fact improved-- Mr Gear —What would you do about it? Mr SINCLAIR —We would not rely on them to the degree that the Government has, but we would encourage them as a balanced part of the Australian economy. The major failure of the Government's Budget is that the Government is trying to pretend that we are no longer dependent on those commodities. We on this side acknowledge that we are dependent on them and we would not pull away from them money to provide roads, we would not add to the taxation burden of our commodity producers, and we would not remove from those in the rural sector the range of assistance schemes such as income equalisation deposits (IEDs) which should be available this year. In fact, the Government should allow farmers, when there are good seasons and a lift in prices, to put away money so that in a time of drought they do not approach it asking for help. The point is that the Australian Labor Party does not even understand what IEDs are about. There needs to be a balance between the assistance provided with respect to traditional exports and those that we see as necessary in the service and manufacturing industries which, of course, have a role. The Government had a scheme with respect to export market development grants, but it pulled the rug out from under it. Indeed, there is no doubt that what the Government has done is to look at a current account scene which I suspect will be significantly worse than it appears because of the Government's actions. Let us look at imports. In 1986-87 the volume of imports declined by 3.2 per cent. We saw in the July figures a significant increase in imports. We suggest that that is because consumption is running at a point which will not encourage any improvement in the current account deficit at the end of the year. So statistically we find that the Government is not encouraging traditional exports-indeed, it is prejudicing their production and it is not helping with diversification. We have an increase in imports that will not help significantly. There is no increase in investment. The money coming into Australia is not for new plant and machinery; it is essentially there for consumer goods. The result of all that is to prejudice further Australia's competitiveness and to make the long term future even worse. Looking at the terms of trade, the Budget continues the Government's record of placing inordinate stress on the commodity or net barter terms of trade. We are concerned that even the Budget focus on the commodity terms of trade is open to serious question. The Government's forecast in 1987 that there would be a 2 per cent rise in commodity trade was bettered-not because of Government action but because of an upturn in world commodity prices. Honourable members opposite will recall that the price was 9.4 per cent better over the course of that year than the Budget forecast of 2 per cent. That occurred not because of what the Government did but simply because world market conditions changed. It is worth while remembering the sober advice of the Reserve Bank of Australia in its annual report released on 23 August this year where it said: While the rise in commodity prices is very welcome, from Australia's viewpoint it cannot be taken for granted that the levels of mid-1988 will continue for long. However, it is on that level that the whole of the Australian Budget surplus and the whole of the Australian economy are based. With respect to external debt, I refer to the fact that the Treasurer is overseas and, with great fanfare, has announced the repayment of a mere $800m in debt. The reality is that, as far as our surplus is concerned, of course he should be repaying debt. However, we must understand that the value of the Australian dollar affects the level of debt, and that the level of debt under Labor is likely to be somewhere about $11 billion up on the net debt at the end of this financial year on what it was at the beginning of this financial year simply because of the adverse balance of payments. We have all sorts of problems and concerns with respect to the Budget itself. There is no doubt that the cut of 9 per cent in government support for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which comes on top of a total reduction of 23 per cent over the previous four Budgets, will certainly affect the agricultural sector and will certainly affect our ability to produce commodities in the future. The Government has not addressed the problem of government regulation and excessive charges which, according to the Business Council of Australia, add at least $2 billion per annum to the nation's freight bill. The Government has cut funds for roads by 6.4 per cent in 1988-89, which makes the total real funding cut for roads under Labor since 1983-84 about 25 per cent. The Government has also cut assistance for isolated children by 16 per cent, thus reducing by nearly 24 per cent-it affects nearly 4,500 Australian children-the number of students being assisted under the assistance for isolated children scheme. There is no doubt that, when one looks at the Budget, one can see that its strategies have failed in those three areas that I have attempted to identify-the external debt, the terms of trade and the current account deficit. We face real difficulties in those areas, along with the failure to pass on personal income tax cuts. If one asked average Australian workers today whether they were better off after the succession of Keating Budgets than they were in 1983, whether Australia is restructuring its economy rapidly enough to meet the increasingly harsh challenges of success in the world economy, and whether they should be paying tax at the present crippling tax rates, the answer would be no. This Government's Budget has failed 5 1/2 weeks after its delivery, and it has failed because the Government has not addressed the fundamental concerns that confront ordinary children, ordinary taxpayers and the ordinary men and women of Australia. The Government is remote. It is out of touch with the Australians and it is certainly out of touch with rural Australians wherever they might live and work. Mr GEAR(Canning)(4.56) —That contribution from the Leader of the National Party of Australia (Mr Sinclair) epitomises what is wrong with the Opposition today. It was a tired old speech given by a tired old leader who not only does not have a future but certainly does not have a past. I will go through some of the things that he said and remind him of his record and the record of this Government when comparisons are made. The Leader of the National Party spoke about external debt. One might ask which government put this country on the road to our present external debt. I would ask the Leader of the National Party to go back to 1982-83 when, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the debt in this country was the highest it has ever been. Certainly one of the most significant factors contributing to our external debt is the fact that we do not have a manufacturing base in this country. Virtually everything that we buy-all our consumer goods-is imported from overseas. If one goes back through history, the reason for that is the protectionist policies of the Liberal and National parties during the 1950s and 1960s. Those parties propped up inefficient industries in this country to a point where ultimately they collapsed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We are starting the long haul towards getting our manufacturing industries back to prosperity. That will cut our external debt. We are going through some of the tough times that have resulted from the policies of the past given to us by men of the past like the Leader of the National Party, who just spoke. He spoke about tax cuts. What a joke from the Leader of the National Party who was a Cabinet member in the previous Government. I remind the Leader that when that Government snatched office in 1975 the top tax rate was 60c in the dollar; and, when that Government was kicked out of office in 1983, the top tax rate was still 60c in the dollar. The present Government has been in office for 5 1/2 years and the top tax rate is now 49c in the dollar. In addition, the 46c rate which he was happy to keep for seven years is now down to 40c in the dollar. More importantly, when we think about people on low incomes, the bottom rate of 30c under his Government has dropped down to 24c. When he was a member of the previous Government, the Leader of the National Party was content to retain those high tax rates, but this Government has cut those tax rates and next year it will cut them again. So when one looks at the performance of this Government compared with the rhetoric of members opposite, we have delivered whereas the previous Government never did. The Leader of the National Party also talked about the present Treasurer (Mr Keating) being the highest taxing Treasurer. It really is a cheap throwaway line to say that we have the highest taxing Treasurer. One can say that every year but, of course, in any expanding economy there will be more taxes. I take the Leader of the National Party and other members opposite back to 1982-83 when we had a shrinking economy. One had a right to complain if more taxes were being collected then, but to complain about more taxes in an expanding economy seems to me to be the cheapest throwaway line of all. In terms of taxes collected, Australia is a low taxing country. In fact, of the 23 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries we are the eighteenth lowest. There are 17 countries in the OECD which collect more taxes than does Australia. When I was in Melbourne last week I saw a sign on the side of the road for the Opposition Leader, Mr Kennett, which said something like, `taxes down, living standards up'. One has to conceptualise what Mr Kennett is trying to do in Victoria. It is exactly what the Liberals are trying to do here. The Liberals are trying to tell the Australian people that they can have lower taxes and a higher standard of living. I will get back to the point I made before: the lowest taxing country in the OECD is Turkey. If members of the Opposition want Turkey's tax rates they will get Turkey's education, they will get Turkey's health provisions, and they will get Turkey's social security provisions. But they should not come in here and say we can have lower taxes and a higher standard of living because it is just not on. The people of Australia know that. The people of Victoria know that. Next week I am sure that the grab for the hip pocket, the line that the Leader of the Opposition in Victoria is going on with, will be exposed for what it is-a fraud. The Liberal Party and the National Party have always treated the electorate as mugs. They always seem to think that they can say to them, `You will pay less tax but you will get more for it'. The fact is that that cannot be done. My little bloke, who is only 11, would not believe that, yet the Liberal Party time and time again says, `Let's lower taxes'. If the Liberals want Turkish tax rates they should be honest enough to tell the people that they will get Turkish social security provisions and all that goes with that. The Leader of the National Party also talked about inflation. When he was kicked out of office, the inflation rate stood at 11.7 per cent. When he got into office it was much the same. For those of us with a memory, back in 1975 that was the Opposition's No. 1 priority: `Let's get rid of inflation; let's cut inflation'. It had seven years in which to do it but it failed. By the standard it set itself, it failed. When the Opposition was kicked out, inflation was higher than it was when the Opposition got into office. This year it is down to 7.1 per cent-a figure the Opposition never approached in government. The projection for this year is about 4 1/2 per cent, and this Government will achieve that. The Leader of the National Party also talked about the current account deficit. When we assumed office it was minus 4 per cent. The Government of which he was a member was actually spending 4 per cent more, expressed as a percentage of GDP, than it was collecting in taxes. We have turned that around in five years to a surplus of 1.7 per cent this year. That is what this Government has done; yet the Leader of the National Party has the gall to talk about the current account deficit. It does not matter which measure-the economic or social measure-is chosen to compare this Government with the previous one, we come out a mile ahead. We go to the reasons why we can give tax cuts. One of the main reasons is that we repaired the taxation system. For example, this year the capital gains tax will bring directly into the tax coffers $100m which was never collected before. We remember, when we gave notice that we would not allow entertainment deductions, the show stacked on by the Opposition. One has to ask who was taking advantage of those entertainment deductions. It certainly was not the worker. The worker always took his lunch to work-the vegemite sandwiches in a brown paper bag. Mr Robert Brown —And paid for their lunches. Mr GEAR —And, as the Minister rightly points out, cross-subsidised those people who were having lunches in restaurants and booking them up to the taxpayer. One would think that fairness would dictate that it would be valuable to put equity back into the taxation system, but the Opposition opposed the proposition all the way down the line. I am glad to say that, as a result of that and other measures, the tax net has been closed substantially and we are collecting more taxes. We do not make any apologies for that. Substantiation is another area. We will always remember how the Opposition fought the introduction of the fringe benefits tax all the way down the line. On the fringe benefits tax it said, `Axe the tax'. The opponents of the fringe benefits tax did not have to look far in this chamber to find friends. It was the Liberal and National parties that opposed the introduction of the fringe benefits tax, whereby a section of this community, instead of taking all its income in cash, as do pay as you earn taxpayers, and paying all of the tax on that cash income, were able to manipulate their income so that they received a portion of it in cash which was taxed and a significant amount of it in fringe benefits which were not taxed. That tax this year will bring in $1,000m. That is $1,000m which was never collected before but which should have been. This Government has introduced legislation for a tax file number. It will be very interesting to find out what the Opposition's stand is on the tax file number. We cannot find out what its position is at the moment. It is sitting on the fence. We know what the Australian Democrats are saying. They will oppose it for some reason which escapes me. It seems to me that the Democrats are opposed to every measure to raise taxes but they are for every measure to spend them. It seems that the Liberal and National parties are going the same way. Let me get back to the workers in the street. They are paying less tax now as a percentage of their income than they were before, and they will be paying less next year. The reason for that is the repairs we have made to the taxation system. The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) made a pathetic response to the Budget. As I said before, the Opposition treats the electorate as mugs. There were no specifics in his reply, no comprehensive alternative tax policy. If we want to know what the Opposition might do we have to go back to the last election. We will always remember the big grab for the pocket, the promise of the top tax rate of 38c in the dollar and the bottom tax rate of 25c in the dollar-that is, increase the taxes for the people on low incomes and reduce the taxes for the people on high incomes. If we go back to the last election period we will see some of the commentary made about the taxation policy of the Liberal Party during that time. We have to do that because that is the only way we can look at what it might do in the area of taxation. There are no specifics coming from the Opposition at present. In an article in the Daily Telegraph on 11 June last year headed `The sound of rubbery figures . . .', reporter David Armstrong had this to say about the Leader of the Opposition's tax policy: Along with Mr Howard's voice you could hear the sound of rubber stretching. And the rubbery figures have given the Government a catapult to fire rocks at the Grand Plan. How right he was. There was a journalist listening to the Leader of the Opposition bringing down his tax policy. He knew that the figures were rubbery. We all know-history has so recorded-that the figures were rubbery to a great extent and, of course, were exposed by the Treasurer in that election campaign. But nothing has been said since that election campaign which would lead us to believe that the Opposition would do anything different. As I have said, if we want to look at what it might do on taxation we have to go back to that time. Cutting government spending is another line we hear from the Leader of the Opposition. So let us look at his record when he was in government. An article by Max Walsh in the Sydney Morning Herald during the election campaign was headed `The election promises of a ``taxer not an axer'' '. Central to the taxation policy in the last campaign by the Liberal Party was the claim that it would slash government spending. What did it do in its time? Max Walsh said in that article: In his five Budgets, Mr Howard- when he was Treasurer- lifted Government outlays from 28.4 per cent to 30.4 per cent of GDP, an increase in 7 per cent over the period. Over the same period he lifted taxes from 25 per cent of GDP to 27.7 per cent of GDP, an increase of 11 per cent. So we can see when we match the rhetoric with the record that the rhetoric says `lower taxes, slash government spending' but the record suggests something else. When Opposition members get into office they do not have the guts to go on with it. It is all right to have a hairy chest when one is in opposition and to say what one intends to do, but being in government and actually doing the hard things that this Government has done takes a bit more guts than the honourable member for Bennelong was prepared to show when he was in government. Of course the ultimate event happened. In the Age of 18 June the headline read `Keating destroys Lib tax pledges'. The article read: The central proposition is that Mr Howard has `double counted' the general program cuts of $2,500 million and the $1,500 million cuts to the States against the same Commonwealth expenditures. So there we have it. The rubbery figures that Mr Armstrong gave in his article after he listened to Mr Howard deliver his speech have caused the ultimate cut-down and, of course, the Leader of the Opposition never recovered. The fact is that Opposition members have never sat down and done the hard work of coming up with the policies. After the Budget another journalist, Mr Burrell from the Age, posed a question to the Opposition. He said this: A $5.5 billion surplus, a zero net borrowing requirement for the public sector, a 12 per cent investment forecast, cheaper beer and lipstick for Mr and Mrs Average and the biggest personal tax cuts in history to come. With the clothes they wore to the 1987 election well and truly stolen, where could John Howard and Andrew Peacock go? That is a relevant question, because those are the sorts of things that the Opposition promised during the election campaign-not that it could ever deliver, as the Treasurer rightly pointed out. Mr Burrell goes on: In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, the Shadow Treasurer, Mr Peacock, was pleased to suggest personal tax cuts-around $56 a week- honourable members should remember what I said about treating the electorate as mugs- for average earners to make up for the absence of tax scale indexation since 1983. He would not say how large the necessary spending cuts would be or where they would be made. So there we have it-ambiguity all the way along the line clouded all in grey; no specifics, just treat the electorate out there as mugs. That is what the shadow Treasurer was doing in this interview. Mr Burrell goes on: To pay for personal tax cuts of the order suggested would cost about $10 billion, spread over three years. Add to this the erosion of some of the $1 billion in fringe benefits tax- the Opposition will give that tax back to its mates- revenue from the changes proposed by the Opposition, the impact of its more generous capital gains tax- once again, giving money back to its mates- and the need for a bigger surplus, and we are looking at additional spending cuts as high as $15 billion on present figures. That is what the Opposition wants us to believe-that it will cut government spending by $15,000m. Honourable members should remember what I said previously about the billboards down in Melbourne-`Taxes down, living standards up'. Anybody in Victoria, or indeed in Australia, should think hard about a Federal Liberal Party and its State counterparts in Victoria talking about raising living standards when taxes go down. The simple fact is that it cannot be done. The Opposition knows that it cannot be done; it is just a big con job. Mr Burrell asked a question of the shadow Treasurer: Where would these cuts be made? The shadow Treasurer replied: The most significant contributor will be the health programme. But I am not prepared to detail the other areas we have examined. Let us look at the outlays on health in the Budget. In the Budget Papers this year we find that the outlays are $10,797.3m. If we then look at the Medicare payments on page 122 we find that these amount to $3,725m. It seems to me that the Opposition wants to get rid of Medicare. It seems to think that that will save it $3,725m. The fact is that it will not. The health insurance system still has to work. Just slashing $3,725m off the Budget would mean that people would have to take out more costly private insurance to do what Medicare has already done. The function does not disappear, even though the money goes from the Budget Papers. The shadow Treasurer is saying that the Opposition will make significant cuts in the health area. He is really saying that he will get rid of Medicare. Medicare is the most comprehensive and fair system of medical insurance that this country has ever had. It has an approval rating of 65 per cent, yet the shadow Treasurer wants to get rid of it. People in Victoria should really think about how well off they would be without Medicare, because the simple fact is that replacing it with private health insurance would be beyond the reach of certainly the two million Australians who never had private insurance before we came to power and also to a significant number of people beyond those. Another area which the Opposition might look at is education. It might give the function of higher education back to the States. But the function does not disappear even though the money disappears from the Budget. That function is still there. It seems to me that through all this debate on the Budget, through all the election campaigns, including the one that is going on now, there is one consistency by the Liberal Party. Liberals have always argued for lower taxes and lower government spending, even though their rhetoric never matched their record in government. They have always treated the electorate as mugs. They always want the electorate to believe that people can have higher living standards with lower taxes. The simple fact is they cannot. As long as the Liberals want to espouse that line, they will sit on the Opposition benches, where they deserve to be, because they are nothing more than frauds. As a member of this Government, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to support the sixth Hawke Budget, which will do a lot of good for the Australian public. Even though the honourable member for Bradfield (Mr Connolly) frowns, that is true and, because of that, I will be here for a long time yet. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —Order! The honourable member's time has expired. Mr SMITH(Bass)(5.16) —The honourable member for Canning (Mr Gear) says that he welcomes the sixth Hawke Budget. This afternoon I want to spend some time talking about one aspect of the Hawke-Keating Budget which in my view, and the view of many within the Australian community, marks yet a further decline in one vital area of government support, and that is in the area of science. Anyone who has been reading the newspapers closely over the last six months will have noticed a marked increase in the number of times there have been letters to the editors from eminent Australians-the best and brightest in this country, the researchers, those who spend years in laboratories looking for ways to solve very complex problems, the ones who are saying it is no longer worth going on because the Government does not care any more. This Budget marks a very marked and continued decline in Budget expenditure from the Government in support of science in this country. Indeed, when I spoke on this issue last year I pointed out that for the first time in 15 years in this country we had seen the dismantling of the Department of Science at the Federal level. We no longer have a science department. We have a science Minister and he is a good Minister. He is a good advocate for science. But the tragedy of Barry Jones-and those in the science community confirm it-is that no-one listens any more; certainly no-one in his own party listens. That is a tragedy for all of us. The main elements of science have now been spread to the four winds of the bureaucracy. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is now under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce, Senator Button. The Bureau of Meteorology-all about climate, that vital thing-is under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Administrative Services. The premier bicentennial scientific event in this country was the launching of the Australia Telescope. That now comes under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. There is no longer in our community, at least at the Federal level, an advocate for science. Because of that, there has been a rapid decline in support for it in this country. The Hawke Government is clearly failing to actively encourage and support the development of a lively science culture in which scientific creativity is valued, nourished and allowed freedom of expression. The Government has failed to provide the necessary financial commitment in support of major Commonwealth scientific bodies and a brain drain is already under way. The low priority given to science is evidenced, as I have said, by the axing of the Department of Science and the relegation of the major components of science to ministries other than the designated Minister for Science, which in itself is surely an absurdity. The Government is putting emphasis on short term, high tech, applied and `relevant' research at the expense of research in traditional areas such as rural research and basic research. There is an assumption by the Government that it can pick the winners in research, which is itself a huge gamble, in its intervention in directing research funds. Interestingly, last year the Minister for Science said in an address at the University of Melbourne that the relations between science and government were improving and that `Australian science could be poised on the brink of the most important and most productive period in its history'. Nothing could be further from the truth. By September this year the Minister was saying that the Government's focus was too narrow and concentrated on the immediate, the financial and the obvious. How right he is. What happened this year in the Budget is further evidence of that. Honourable members will know that the flagship of science in this country is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Many of us, on both sides of this chamber, have expressed our concerns about the direction of the CSIRO. Over a five-year period there has been a cumulative reduction in funding to the CSIRO of some 32 per cent. Only several weeks ago we saw the unprecedented step taken by the divisional heads of the CSIRO of attacking the Chairman of the CSIRO for his comments that they were bad managers and his implication that they were not interested in the development of science in this country. I can well understand their indignation. As the former shadow spokesman in this area, I spent a considerable period visiting the various CSIRO establishments. It disheartens me as an Australian, let alone a politician, that people who have committed their lives to science feel that they have to leave. If people can get excited about science-and I wish that they would-I direct them to what is outlined in the article that appeared on page 2 of today's Australian. It is indicative of what is happening. It was headed, `CSIRO's livestock chief quits over fund cuts'. It is the thin edge of the wedge. Here is a man who has given the best part of his productive academic life to science and the CSIRO saying that he has had enough, that no longer can he sit in the chair as a divisional head in the vital area of livestock and have to cut off the careers of young scientists in their prime, when they should be providing the very best of advice to Australia, saying, `Sorry; because of the government cuts no longer is there going to be a job here for you'. The article stated that Dr Trevor Scott, who had headed the animal production division based in Prospect in western Sydney for 14 years, said that his division had sustained real budget funding cuts of more than 50 per cent in the past six years. That is in the area of livestock support, of trying to find scientific ways to improve productivity within the vital area of beef exports. How many times do members of parliament from both sides stand up and talk about the value of our agricultural produce and the benefits it brings to Australia? We all know of those benefits. If we want to improve productivity and maintain our competitive edge in the increasingly competitive world of international trade, we must be out in front. We must utilise the resources we have, our brain power, to give us advantages to get our produce to the markets in the best and most efficient way. Involvement in the livestock area by the CSIRO has produced tremendous benefits over a long period. It is an absolute disgrace that the division has now lost its divisional head, but it is indicative of what is happening generally. There have been other cases of scientists leaving. As recently as the end of August a mathematician by the name of Adrian Badderley left the CSIRO and wrote a very long article in the Melbourne Age indicating why. He said: The word `basic' has become a bad word in Australia, but in the Netherlands, a nation with two-thirds of Australia's population, there are two research bodies like the CSIRO, one devoted to basic research, the other to applied research. He will be working for the former. He is leaving Australia, going elsewhere to pursue his scientific career. A man whom this community has invested thousands of dollars in has turned his back on Australia, not because he does not love Australia but because he feels that no-one in this country cares any more, no-one in this Government cares enough to make sure that the funding levels of CSIRO are realistic. CSIRO is not asking for the world. It is just asking for sufficient funds to make its research programs viable. The cutbacks are also happening within the broad staff levels of CSIRO. Last week we had the unprecedented vote of no confidence by the CSIRO staff officers in the executive of the CSIRO. The science community in this country is in revolt. There is no doubt about that. Only two weeks ago the Australian Research Council saw unprecedented arguments between the new Chairman of that body, Professor Aitkin, and the members of its advisory board. They disagreed with a direction relating to the Government's sudden desire to centralise research. The Government wants to determine where the money is going to go. Middle level bureaucracies are going to determine where the dollars are spent. No longer will there be a reliance, as there always has been in this country, on the experience and expertise of the peers operating within the science community. Suddenly we are to turn our backs on that successful method which has given us so much in the way of scientific knowledge. Australia has been at the forefront of science in many areas for a long time, but we now run the acute danger of falling behind the rest of the developed world. It is not just me, the member for Bass, saying that. As I said, one has only to go to the letters to the editor columns of the various newspapers-for example, the letter to the editor of the Australian Financial Review today from an eminent scientist at the University of New South Wales. Everyone is concerned. Science is not a short term business. If we are concerned about tomorrow, and each and every one of us ought to be, we must be prepared to make some investment today. That is what science is all about, and that is what this Budget fails to do. It fails to recognise that science is not a short term thing, that if we want to get results from laboratories and find ways to deal with pests which trouble livestock, we must be prepared to sink funds into science today, perhaps with a 15-year time lag, to get some benefits. Interestingly, the Age of 30 August reports that another scientist, Dr Isaacs, is leaving Australia. He and a Dr Colman were doing work on flu. Each of us, especially those of us who come to Canberra-certainly to the old Parliament House-have suffered the flu. All of us would love to have a cure. One of the worst things with the flu is that it makes one lose one's voice. For those of us in this profession that is a disaster. We now have a scientist leaving the biotechnology area in Australia to go and work elsewhere. We will lose the benefit of the tremendous work he was doing. That is a tragedy. What does the Minister for Science, Customs and Small Business say about this? He stood up at the National Science Forum with me this year, where we debated the issues, and said, `It is not my fault, Warwick. It is the bureaucrats' fault'. My response is that one has to be able to win. If the Minister cannot win in politics, if he cannot deliver the goods, perhaps he ought not to be a Minister. Many members of the science community are of that view. It is all right to say, `Yes, we recognise the problems' and to have the right rhetoric, but at the end of the day we will be judged by results. I go back to the flagship of science, the CSIRO, and point out the extent of the decline in CSIRO expenditure. Later, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will seek leave of the Minister at the table, the Minister for Housing and Aged Care (Mr Staples), to incorporate in Hansard a table which details this decline. It shows that current expenditure on CSIRO is some 72 per cent of what it was in 1983-84 in real terms. So we are going backwards in terms of funding. Mr Cobb —That is not progress. Mr SMITH —It is not progress at all, as the honourable member for Parkes rightly interjects. I might add that he is a member with a rural constituency who knows the importance of science in enhancing things like wheat and livestock development and in addressing environmental concerns such as soil degradation and water purity. All of those issues are vital for Australia, yet we seem now to be turning our back on them in the pursuit of something that might be there in the high technology area. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —Order! If the honourable member is seeking leave to incorporate the table, I suggest he do so now. Mr SMITH —I seek leave to incorporate the table. I understand it has been shown to the Minister at the table. Leave granted. The table read as follows- CSIRO EXPENDITURE Date Nominal (Budget) CPI Index (ABS) Real $83/84 % Change 83-84 331.6 131.6 331.6 none 84-85 324.9 137.2 311.6 - 6 85-86 344.3 148.7 304.7 - 2 86-87 367.8 162.6 297.7 - 2 87-88 347.8 174.5 262.3 -12 88-89 334.2 183.2 (a)...240.1 - 8 (a) Assumes 5% inflation Current expenditure 72% of that in 1983-84 in real terms. ie 240.1 ie 331.6 Mr SMITH —I thank the Minister. I urge honourable members to look at the table. As I was saying, the scientists are leaving and CSIRO is suffering. It is interesting to reflect on a little bit of history about the CSIRO. Back in the 1920s, when this country was suffering a problem similar to that which it faces now-a balance of payments crisis, large debt levels and an economy that was somewhat uncertain-the Bruce-Page coalition Government took a decision which has had real benefits for this nation. It decided that the CSIR, or Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, ought to be set up. That was in the 1920s. A small committee chose the inaugural person to head this body, a man called Sir David Rivett. I might add that he was born in Tasmania, though a Victorian Rhodes scholar. A scientist was chosen to lead the science community to assist in utilising government funds to support science and to address the needs of an economy that was in a parlous state. These scientists chose particular areas to develop, and they chose those areas in which Australia had a comparative advantage. They looked at mining and they looked at agriculture, and they saw that they were the ways for Australia to address its balance of payments problems and that any money spent on science to enhance the opportunities for Australia internationally in those areas was money well spent. So the CSIRO was born, and that was the direction it took. Nothing has changed. Those are still the areas of Australia's comparative advantage and yet we are now turning our backs on science. We know-and the figures have been cited ad nauseam-that the manufacturing community and the business community in this country are not great supporters of science research and development. This Parliament has taken a bipartisan approach to address that issue by offering a 150 per cent tax deduction. But that in itself will not solve our problems. We need to be supporting those areas of comparative advantage, and this Budget clearly indicates that we are not. That is to this Government's shame. Unless we support those areas in a meaningful and positive way, we will continue to get the result that we are now getting. We will get the best and brightest in this country saying they have had enough, and they will leave. Who is going to be the poorer? It will not necessarily be the people of today in this country; it will be the people of tomorrow. Each and every one of us in this chamber is charged with a trust, that is, to hand to future generations a nation in good store. Unless we support science and have some idea about what is happening with the greenhouse effect, what is happening in the atmosphere and with the ozone layer, that will not occur. They are the issues of our time that we need to be looking for answers to now. We cannot leave them for tomorrow and hope that industry will pay for the necessary work to be done. That is why there needs to be support for public science funding, and that is why it is such a tragedy to see this Government walk away from it. That great kneecapper in the other place, Senator Richardson, went to Cabinet to get a million dollars for greenhouse research, and he was rebuffed. He was told no. Who was he told no by? The Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) and the Treasurer (Mr Keating). They are all about getting elected next time, all about giving massive cuts in beer excise, but they are not prepared to fund a body like the CSIRO to a meaningful level. Mr Cobb —So much for priorities. Mr SMITH —Where are their priorities? What is the role of government in science in this nation? Where is the proponent for science on the other side who is going to stand up and challenge the Government and say, `Enough is enough'? The scientists are standing up and the editorial writers are standing up; the best and the brightest in this nation are standing up and asking why. I believe we should address the issue in a meaningful and quick way, and I propose the following three-point plan: I think that the CSIRO, acknowledged as it is as the flagship of science, needs to have an immediate additional funding allocation, and I mean immediate, of some $50m. That will ensure that the rush from the CSIRO of our scientists will stop and that the existing research programs will continue. There also needs to be a change at the top. We need to go back to the 1920's model and have an eminent scientist as head of the CSIRO. One would expect someone like me, on this side, to attack Neville Wran. Neville Wran is a publicist; he is not a scientist. CSIRO is a scientific body. Neville Wran has not achieved anything for CSIRO other than publicity. At the end of the day, as I said, we must come back to the facts, and the CSIRO and science are all about funding facts. The facts show that the funding levels have gone down. Neville Wran should go. There are many eminent scientists in this country who can do the job. Thirdly and finally, this country needs to go back to the time when Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister and we established a science department. Malcolm Fraser was science Minister; John Gorton was science Minister. Science has been downgraded in this Parliament and it is time for that to stop. One way to ensure that is to re-establish a science department which can be a focus for science and a defender of science in our community, because if we do not our community will be the long-term loser. I advise the Government to reconsider because when the best and the brightest in this country stand up and say `You are wrong', it is at the Government's peril if it chooses not to listen. Dr THEOPHANOUS(Calwell)(5.36) —The honourable member for Bass (Mr Smith) made a sensitive speech about the importance of science, and, of course, for his labours in the field of science, he has been relegated by the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) to the back bench. He can talk about spending more money on science, but he needs to look at the alternative economic strategy of the Opposition. It wants to cut everything. It wants to cut services in every area of society, including science. The honourable member tells us about the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation having some problems, but what would happen to the CSIRO under an Opposition led by its present Leader? I will tell the House what would happen: it would not exist at all. That is what would happen under the Opposition's priorities. Last year the Opposition made it perfectly clear that it would slash funding for all public bodies, all government services, by billions and billions of dollars. So it is all right for individual members of the Opposition to say that we really ought to protect this area or do something about that area, but they need to get their act together because last year the Leader of the Opposition refused to specify which areas would be cut. I will come back to this point while speaking about another area of great topical concern to this country. I refer to multicultural and ethnic services, and the whole immigration debate that has been taking place in recent times. An enormous disservice has been done to this country by the Opposition dumping the bipartisan multicultural policy that has guided this nation socially and culturally for the last 20 years. That policy has been dumped because of this Opposition of extremists and because of the people in the New Right who are opposed to multiculturalism and the development of a tolerant and multicultural society. The result of that policy being dumped is very serious indeed. Australia's international reputation has been torn apart ever since the Leader of the Opposition began his rampage against a multicultural policy. Our reputation not only in Asia but also in Europe-in fact throughout the world-has been one of a tolerant society, a society that was developing a unique social experiment, an experiment in which people from various cultural groups could come together, work and cooperate together and develop together for the future. That whole process, which has been looked at with admiration by the rest of the world, has been torn to pieces because the Opposition has decided to oppose multiculturalism and to develop an alternative monocultural policy, a monocultural strategy which would try to force everybody into the one kind of cultural stream. There has been damage not just internationally but also in our own society. Since this debate began, since the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the National Party raised these matters, there have been incidents which we have never had before in this country. There has been an upsurge in racist incidents and in conflicts between communities. There has been an upsurge in attacks against individuals who want to defend a non-discriminatory immigration program and multiculturalism. In this situation the Leader of the Opposition is culpable. If the Liberal Party were a decent, humanitarian party, its only proper course would have been to dump John Howard. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —Order! I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member for Calwell. I allowed the previous speaker a couple of transgressions in referring to people by name rather than title. I have allowed the honourable member a couple of transgressions. I would ask him in future to refer to members of this Parliament by their correct titles. Dr THEOPHANOUS —I am referring to the current Leader of the Opposition, who has a lot to answer for in relation to his comments on immigration and the dumping of multiculturalism. This is an important matter because, as everyone knows, an election is to be held in Victoria-the first major election since this matter arose. I appeal to the people of Victoria to give a resounding no to the Liberal Party and the National Party at this election and to reject the approach of the Leader of the Opposition. I know that Jeff Kennett has said that this will not be an issue in the State election. Of course he has been running away from it, and I shall be commenting on that later. The fact is that the Liberal and National parties' platform and policy adopted in August of this year dumped multiculturalism, which is the most successful social and cultural policy seen in this country in the last 20 years. It was even described by the New South Wales Liberal Premier as the most successful social policy. Yet it has been dumped by the Leader of the Opposition. Although the Leader of the Opposition in a speech he made in August claimed to identify profound weaknesses in multiculturalism, when the policy appears what do we find? We find no explanation as to what these profound weaknesses were supposed to be, no explanation as to why multiculturalism is said to be divisive. If there is anything divisive, it is the comments of the Leader of the Opposition, which have divided this country. What do we find as an explanation for the dumping of multiculturalism, this most successful social policy? We find the following paragraph in the Liberals' policy-and I am glad that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Mr Peacock) is present to hear this. He should be ashamed to remain in that post while all this is going on. Mr Staples —He was not here when the vote was on. Dr THEOPHANOUS —Indeed, he was not here to show his colours and vote on this key question. He was away. This is the statement that was made: Terms and concepts such as multicultural and multiculturalism provoke much debate. They mean different things to different people. To many they are words of reassurance. To others they have over time promoted division rather than unity. Even if that statement were true, what a pathetic reason it is to drop a policy that was adopted by both parties-by the Whitlam Government, by the Fraser Government and by Ministers in the Fraser Government, including the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. That policy was dumped, thrown out, and replaced by the nonsense of the so-called alternative monocultural policy which the Leader of the Opposition is trying to impose on the Australian people-a very narrow approach. This is not all there is to the matter. It is natural that the people of Victoria, in judging this question in the Victorian election, will want to know what the Leader of the Opposition in Victoria, Mr Kennett, has to say about the matter. Of course, we know the position of the Cain Labor Government very clearly. That Government has clearly said that it supports multiculturalism. Mr Cain has attacked the Federal Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the National Party of Australia (Mr Sinclair) and accused them of putting Australia back 40 years in what they have said about immigration and multiculturalism. He said: I think we all regret that in 1988 that those on the conservative side of politics have decided to challenge multiculturalism for the basest of political reasons. He went on to say that they had done Australia a great disservice. But what is Mr Kennett's position? In August of this year Mr Kennett was reported in the newspapers as attacking the Federal Leader of the Opposition. In the Melbourne Herald of 16 August there was the headline `Kennett slams Howard's stand on migrants'. But when the policy came out only a week later, Mr Kennett said, `I see no problem with it'. This is the policy which dumped multiculturalism as a philosophy and approach. Where does Mr Kennett stand? Does he support the Howard line or the line of the honourable member for Goldstein (Mr Macphee) and others who are champions of multiculturalism? Where does he stand? Is he trying to have five-bob each way? The answer is, of course, that he is. Mr Kennett has not been coming clean on this question. On the one hand he is saying, `I support multiculturalism' but, on the other hand, he is saying, `I support Federal Liberal policy'. He cannot do both. That points to the confusion in the Victorian Liberal and National parties. Of course, we all know where the National Party stands as its members have always been opposed to multiculturalism. But one asks what the Liberal Party's position is, as it is not at all clear. How are the voters of Victoria on Saturday to judge this great policy of multiculturalism? Where does Mr Kennett stand? I ask honourable members and others who are listening to this debate to consider this question: If Mr Kennett is a champion of multiculturalism, why has he not embraced that policy? If not, why has he not consistently done what he started to do, and that is to distance himself from the present Liberal policy and support multiculturalism? The matter goes even further. I am amazed to find today, having searched everywhere, including the offices of the Liberal Party in Victoria, that the Victorian Liberal Party has not issued any policy on ethnic affairs and multiculturalism. It has no policy on ethnic affairs. It so happens that more than 50 per cent of the people of Melbourne were born overseas or have parents who were born overseas. However, despite that fact, no policy on ethnic affairs has been issued by the so-called alternative government. That is an absurdity. Where is that policy? There is none. The only indication we have is the interview that Mr Kennett had with the Italian newspaper Il Globo in which he announced some aspects of a policy. That was all that we got. There has been no written policy or statement on multiculturalism to clear the air. Finally, Mr Kennett had that interview with Il Globo. What did he do in that interview? Did he clear the air? No, he did not. Previously the Liberals had stated in the State Parliament that they would abolish the Ethnic Affairs Commission. One of the many things that happened under the Liberals involved the cutting of services. We know that the reason for the attack on multiculturalism at Federal level is to cut multiculturalism and ethnic services. The same applies at State level. Mr Kennett said in the interview, `I did intend to close down the Ethnic Affairs Commission, but I have rethought the matter. I am not going to close it down, but I intend to depoliticise it'. In other words, he is claiming that the Ethnic Affairs Commission, a public body, is somehow politically biased, stacked. Then he says that he intends to depoliticise the Commission. One does not have to be brilliant to know that when a politician talks in those terms certain things will happen. He wants to get rid of certain people there in order to put Liberal Party stooges into the Ethnic Affairs Commission. The fact is that, in relation to the election, we do not even know what the Liberals will do in this crucial area of ethnic services and multicultural policy. It is disgraceful that they have not even bothered to issue a policy. That should be contrasted with the position of the Victorian Labor Government. It has issued a comprehensive document, comprising more than 20 pages, which explains all of the things that it wants to do in the area of ethnic affairs and multiculturalism. It explains all the things which it has already done and all the things which it will do in the future. So its policies have been made public. Anyone who is listening to the broadcast of this debate must realise that people from migrant backgrounds, people who know about the current debate that has been taking place in relation to multiculturalism, have been a bit confused about where Mr Kennett stands. They can now see where his priorities lie. When the Victorian Premier raised this issue on 5 September, Mr Kennett was indignant. He said, `I am really a supporter of multiculturalism'. If that is the case, as I said before, why has he embraced the Federal Liberal platform, which has dumped multiculturalism? More importantly, why has he not issued a policy? The reason that he has not issued a policy is that the Victorian Opposition is divided. It does not know where it is going. The Opposition in this place is divided on the subject, as was indicated a few weeks ago when we had a debate on this matter. The Opposition in Victoria is also divided. One should remember that there is no way that the Liberal Party can win an election in Victoria by itself. Therefore, it will be forced into a coalition with the National Party. The National Party's position on multiculturalism is quite clear. It is totally opposed to multiculturalism. In that situation, how will the Victorian Opposition formulate its policies? What sort of multicultural and ethnic policy will it pursue in the very unlikely event that it wins the election? It does not know what it is dong in this area because its ranks are thoroughly divided. Some Opposition members want to move Australia back 30 years to a monocultural situation in which there is no recognition of people's rights, ethnic services or the diversity of cultures. They want to impose one pattern on everyone. On 17 March this year the House passed a motion in support of multiculturalism. That motion was supported by both sides of the House. Members of the Liberal Party spoke in favour of that motion. It was passed without dissent. Yet less than five months later the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Party, with no explanation or reason other than the pathetic paragraph which I read out earlier today, have moved away from multiculturalism and from the great social experiment of bringing together the diversity of cultures and building an Australian culture of the future. I know that many people, in voting on Saturday in the Victorian election, will make up their minds on the basis of what they think about the debate on multiculture and immigration. Let me say to them that they ought to vote to reject the approach which has been put forward by the Liberal and National parties. They ought to vote to reject the approach of the Federal Leader of the Opposition. They ought to vote to reject the five-bob each way approach which has been put forward by the Leader of the Victorian Opposition, Jeff Kennett. The fact is that, unless there is a resounding no to those sorts of policies, we will be in a serious position, because the Leader of the Opposition will continue with his political expediency trying to divide the nation by attacking multiculturalism and by trying to promote a discriminatory immigration policy. I say to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that this is one of the major political issues to have arisen. The people of Victoria should grasp the nettle and vote against the Liberal and National parties because of what has happened in relation to this matter. Debate interrupted. Mr HAWKE(Wills-Prime Minister) —Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek indulgence to add to an answer that I provided to the House at the end of Question Time today. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —Indulgence is granted. Mr HAWKE —I thank the House. In answering the question by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock), as to whether Mr Hayden would visit Austria, I listed six countries which Mr Hayden will visit for official appointments and consultations. In addition to the six countries I mentioned, Mr Hayden will also visit Greece. He will have transit stops in San Francisco and Zurich and a brief stopover in Singapore. There will be no transit stops in Austria. (Budget Debate) Debate resumed. Mr COBB(Parkes)(5.56) —After listening to the outburst of frenetic diatribe from the previous speaker from the Government benches, the honourable member for Calwell (Dr Theophanous), I think it is time that the debate turned to more serious matters. People who heard the words of the previous speaker will think that the election in Victoria is truly sewn up for the Liberal and National parties, come next Saturday. Relevant to the foreign aid grants in the recent Budget, I wish to speak about a country in the southern half of Africa where the indigenous black people are ruled by a racial minority who came from the north nearly three centuries ago. This minority, less than 15 per cent of the population, reserves virtually all power, all privilege and disproportionate amounts of wealth for itself. This country is ruled by a dictatorship of institutionalised racism. An example of what I am talking about occurred in 1972 after the majority tribe, which makes up 85 per cent of the population, had unsuccessfully challenged the minority Government, which brutally oppresses it. The Government forces set out to kill every man, woman and child from the majority group who had more than a primary school education. Teachers, administrators, clerks, priests and students were rounded up and slaughtered, first with bullets and later with clubs and hammers. Government extermination squads moved into the schools, picked out all the children of the majority race and smashed their skulls with sledgehammers. The children's battered corpses were later piled in heaps. In total, somewhere between 100,000 and 350,000 people were killed. Honorable members may have heard nothing of this atrocity. That is not surprising, since not one single peep of protest came from the United Nations about it. Nor has there been protest from the Organisation of African Unity, which loves to trumpet its concern about racism and rights. The British Broadcasting Corporation said nothing and the World Council of Churches was also mute. No Commonwealth conference listed the event on its agenda, and even that world conscience of human racism, the anti-apartheid movement, uttered not a murmur. There were no demonstrations or rallies in Western capitals; no playwright or songwriter immortalised the event; no epic film was made to condemn the massacre; and, even more amazing, not even Bob Hawke or Malcolm Fraser-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —Order! The honourable member will not refer to the Prime Minister in that way. Mr COBB —I take your point, Mr Deputy Speaker. I was referring to events in 1972 when he was not the Prime Minister. Not even those well-known latter-day champions of the black cause saw fit to mention this gruesome incident. I guess they had other things on their minds in those days. Likewise, our ever vigilant Australian Broadcasting Corporation chose not to report such news, and somehow even the trade union movement neglected to call for the usual trade bans against the country. In the world outside the country in which this barbarity occurred, not one person shed a tear for the fallen victims and their grieving families. Perhaps the explanation for the selective censorship lies in the fact that the country to which I refer is Burundi and not South Africa. After all, there is little mileage to be gained from criticising the ruling black Tutsi minority in Burundi. Even though they rule the majority Hutu tribe, and do so solely by racial criteria, to condemn the Tutsi minority on the world stage is not considered fashionable. The Malcolm Frasers and others of this world have been quick to recognise that it is more fashionable to criticise a white minority of 17 per cent in South Africa than to condemn a black minority of 14 per cent in Burundi. I will return to that irony shortly. Let us just dwell for a moment on a few of Burundi's facts and figures. Burundi is a tiny country of about five million people located in the central south-east area of the African continent. It is squeezed between Tanzania to the east, Zaire to the west and Rwanda to the north. At 27,834 square kilometres in size it is little more that 20 per cent of the size of my electorate of Parkes. Nevertheless, it has a 33-inch rainfall, which is about 825 millimetres, and 51 per cent of its land is arable; so it is potentially a very rich country despite its high population density. After gaining independence from Belgium on 1 July 1962 it, like so many African countries, has worked its way towards a one party, quasi-military socialist state and, as a consequence, has been going downhill ever since. Today, the average income of a Burundian is around $US5 a week. Coffee makes up over 80 per cent of Burundi's exports. Although the indigenous Hutu constitute nearly 85 per cent of the population, they are ruled by the Tutsi minority of less than 15 per cent. Incidentally, the Tutsis are the tallest race of people on earth. Their minority rule in Burundi, which is based entirely on race, is ruthlessly applied. I would like to contrast the world silence on the Burundi racism and the massacre to which I referred with another country to the south that has also practised racism and whose history is also scarred by an incident of bloodshed. I refer to South Africa and the Sharpeville massacre. Let us recall for a moment that sad event. Back on 21 March 1960, whipped into a frenzy by the pronouncements of the South African Communist Party and their African National Congress and Pan African Congress cadres, some 10,000 shouting and screaming Africans marched on the local police station at Sharpeville. They were armed with sticks, clubs, knives, bottles, iron pipes, needle swords and other weapons. Photographs will attest to the massive piles of these implements that were collected after the shootings. The handful of police officers in charge of the station panicked and opened fire. It was both a tragic and a stupid action. I guess that it is easy for us to be critical after the event as we were not there. Nevertheless, when the shooting stopped, 69 lay dead. The world, naturally enough, was horrified by what had happened and, quite properly, condemned the circumstances of racism that had led to its occurrence. That is only as it should be. However, nowadays the Sharpeville massacre, as it has come to be known, is annually paraded before the world as an atrocity committed by the South African police. While I agree that it would be hard to pardon what happened, I wonder why we give such prominence to this single event yet ignore the countless millions slaughtered like cattle in Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Uganda or Ethiopia, not to mention the horrifying episode referred to earlier that took place in Burundi in 1972-12 years after the Sharpeville massacre. Is there some sort of selective morality operating out there which dictates that the shooting of 69 blacks by police in South Africa in 1960 is a more heinous crime than the slaughter of 100,000 or more blacks in Burundi in 1972? Even if one accepts the implied logic of the anti-apartheid movement that to be killed or oppressed because of racism is worse than being killed or oppressed for other reasons, that is still no explanation as to why Burundi is exonerated and South Africa prosecuted. Both countries are racist. Is it because the ruling South African minority is anti-communist and the ruling Burundi minority not as strongly so? Perhaps. Such reasoning could have explained why the United States of America was vilified in Vietnam while the Russians were overlooked in Afghanistan. However, I suspect that that is not the prime factor operating here. I think there is a much more basic and sinister force at work. In fact, I believe that force to be based on colour. Regrettably, it appears that the great bulk of the anti-apartheid movement judges black people to be morally inferior to whites. I find this appalling and repulsive. Surely it is a basic human right that all people have equal rights and should have equal responsibilities to accompany those rights. People who commit acts of atrocity should be equally condemned, irrespective of whether they are black, white, red or yellow. A person who dies at the hand of a black is just as dead as one who dies at the hand of a white. It is a patronising sort of racism to apply a higher standard of behaviour to a white than to a black. If we are all equal we should all be judged equally and by the same standards. This treatment by the anti-apartheid movement of the holocaust in Burundi as just some sort of messy incident between some sort of lowly, uninteresting people that are not worth worrying about, I find both racist and hypocritical. Honourable members will be aware that the dominant Tutsi tribe has recently been on yet another racist murdering rampage of the Hutu indigenous peoples of Burundi. Most reliable reports have it that about 24,000 Hutus have been slaughtered. Burundi's leader, Major Pierre Buyoya, admitted last month that his soldiers had killed Hutu civilians on sight as a reprisal, he said, for their massacring of Tutsi tribesmen in ethnic clashes. He claimed that his soldiers had done it spontaneously without any order from the Government. As well as these 24,000 revenge killings which, incidentally, must surely give the word `overkill' a macabre new meaning, some 41,000 or more Hutus have fled into neighbouring Rwanda. Many have arrived with bayonet, knife and bullet wounds and with stories of how the soldiers killed so many of their race. Some newspapers ran a few stories on these latest massacres, albeit on pages 9 or 10, well away from the front page and second page headlines which I see were reserved for Nelson Mandela's latest illness. Of course, there has been the usual deafening silence on the Burundi racial massacres by the usual array of anti-apartheid dignitaries and organisations. I guess that they still regard them as inconsequential happenings of no great import. However, while the anti-apartheid clique are, no doubt, chattering in the foyers about the latest glossy anti-South African film, or preparing for next year's Sharpeville massacre remembrance, the Burundi refugees pouring over the border into Rwanda are each describing the loss of up to eight relatives. The victims, because they have been chosen on racial lines, are nearly all Hutus. The world has also chosen to overlook that napalm has been used on the Hutu population from Government helicopters. People on the Rwanda border have lost count of the number of bodies floating down the river into that country. Reports have it that the slaughter may still be continuing. Pregnant women have miscarried through sheer terror. Some of the accounts at a university hospital in Rwanda with 80 such patients are revealing. One of these accounts was from Mrs Mihimpudu, a 22-year-old mother who was shot through the wrist and had a puffy, burnt face. She sat on the bed, naked to the waist, when she gave her account to the reporter. She said that the soldiers had made her and nine villagers lie on the ground and then shot them. Both her children died and her baby, who was strapped to her back, was shot through the head. The doctor at the hospital has performed 20 amputations in the last week. Fifty out of the 80 patients had as many as 20 bayonet wounds each, so the reports go. One woman had an infected hole in her breast left by a bullet that entered from her back. A 17-month-old baby girl had a bullet wound through her jaw. Her mother had also been shot in the face and her father killed. A 2 1/2-year-old boy sat up in bed, his right arm held by his father. His left arm had been amputated at the shoulder after being shattered by a bullet. His mother, brother and sister had been killed. In another bed were two eight-year-old girls. One had been bayoneted in the back while she was lying on the ground and the other had machete wounds to the hands and neck. `It was the soldiers', she said. However, they were not all Hutus. There was an eight-year-old Tutsi boy there with his face smashed by a machete. His mother said that his father had been killed. In one area in the Ntega district, hundreds of houses are deserted, some burnt. Almost the entire population has been killed or has fled. The area is deserted. A tragedy has occurred in Burundi and is continuing to occur. Perhaps it is not a fashionable country and perhaps it has not received much publicity in this country. Nevertheless, I believe that international aid is needed, especially in Rwanda, to assist these refugees that have fled from Burundi. More importantly, world pressure must be brought to bear on the Government of Burundi so that it will hold internationally supervised democratic elections and pressure must be brought to bear to get rid of the racially oppressive system there. I hope that Australia will get its perspectives and priorities right and lead the way with such long overdue initiatives. Mr GRIFFITHS(Maribyrnong)(6.10) —I must say by way of introduction that the constituents in the electorate of Parkes must be absolutely fascinated when their representative in this chamber spends so much of the time of this House discussing the minutia of what is going on in Burundi. Actually, that is a rather poetic phrase-the minutia of what is going on in Burundi. Mr Cobb —Twenty-four thousand have been slaughtered and you don't think it is important! Mr GRIFFITHS —The only reason I raise this, and I think I have a good enough record in this House on human rights issues to be able to say this without attracting automatic criticism, is that the honourable member for Parkes seems to have an absolute fascination with things other than his electorate. There are many aspects of the Budget that I think his constituents would be interested in, in addition to what is happening in Burundi. I would like to address my remarks to some aspects of the Government's economic policy and in that context to raise a couple of issues that I had hoped to raise during the matter of public importance debate today but unfortunately did not have time to do so. I did advert to the Victorian Government's record in manufacturing industry and I indicated there that this was of particular importance in my electorate of Maribyrnong in the western suburbs of Melbourne. In the last two years manufacturing exports from Victoria have increased by 120 per cent, which I think most honourable members would be aware is about twice the rate of the rest of Australia. That has significant implications for the western region of Melbourne, relying as it does so heavily on manufacturing industries. I think it is one of the important indices in judging the combined efforts of the Federal and State Labor governments, in particular the priority given to export enhancement and import replacement. If one looks at the introductory remarks to the Budget, it is obviously a key ingredient of the Government's strategy and a very successful one at that. In the contemporary political debate in Victoria, obviously the State Opposition has not been able to register a mark against the Government's economic performance, and one would not wonder at that if one went through the range of indices that ought to be taken into account when looking at the performances of a government. Mr Kennett's claims that Victoria is the highest taxing of the Australian States are probably another symptom of the chronic inability of the Opposition to get its sums right. I suppose by way of comparison, all things being relative, one can only reflect on the absurdity of that criticism in the light of what happened in the lead-up to the last Federal election. The Liberal component of the Opposition-the party in disarray-was advocating tax cuts of the order of $7 billion. The National Party of Australia was advocating tax cuts of the order of $14 billion. How any member of the Opposition can come into this chamber and talk about fiscal rectitude or commonsense government is beyond me when that contemporary record is fresh in the minds of the people of Australia. In this case, as in many other cases, the Opposition's back of the envelope calculations are in direct conflict with the official Australian Bureau of Statistics measurements of government financial estimates. If one goes to those hopefully impartial documents rather than relying on the rhetoric that goes around this chamber in a pre-election environment, one will find, for example, that according to the Australian Statistician Victoria's per capita taxation in 1987-88 was $971. Because the Opposition was at pains to refer to the Greiner Government today by way of comparison across a range of indices, I might just compare that amount with the 1987-88 figure in New South Wales, which was $1,009, significantly different. Even apart from the nonsense involved in the Opposition's numbers, the reality is that the whole basis of the Liberal Party's claims on State taxation is meaningless, and that is because it ignores the principle of fiscal equalisation which of course is enshrined in our federalism arrangements and which will always ensure that the less populous States appear to have the lowest per capita taxes. A more consistent and more appropriate measure of the share of a State's product being taken by the Government can be found in the statistics published in the Federal Budget Papers giving State own source revenue as a percentage of gross State product. Those figures show how much of the State economy each State government takes for its own purposes. The most up to date version was published on Budget night last month. I emphasise again that, where possible, one ought to go to the umpire in these matters. Those figures show that Victorian State Government own source revenue is the fourth lowest of the States. If State revenue per head is taken into account, Victoria goes one better again. On that measure it is the fifth lowest of the six States, bettered in that context only by South Australia. It is not surprising to find that the State administered for the longest period by the Liberal Party of Australia, that is of course Tasmania, has the highest per capita revenue collections of all States. The Cain Government also shapes up well in keeping revenue increases to a minimum over the period from 1982-83 to 1987-88. The average real growth in Victoria's State own source revenue was the lowest of the six States. If I recall correctly, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party (Mr Peacock), the shadow Treasurer, was at pains to take advantage of the last month's statistics in a particular context. I think I should emphasise again that any assessment of any government, be it Federal, State or regional, really relies upon an extended timeframe to ensure that statistical discrepancies do not give a distorted result. I emphasise again that over that extended period from 1982-83 to 1987-88 the average real growth in the Victorian State Government's own source revenue, the most appropriate index, was the lowest of the six States. Equally, average real growth in own source per capita revenue is lower in Victoria than in any of the other States. In other words, Victoria can justifiably and relying upon the umpire, if one can have an umpire in these matters, make the claim to have a low tax State. As I indicated, the rhetoric that surrounds the lead-up to a State election is in conflict with the umpire's data. I also alluded to something which was not picked up by the mainstream media, and I hope the media used a bit of investigative capability to track it down. I was advised by an impeccable source that about two weeks ago Mr Ian McLachlan, the former President of the National Farmers Federation and long time member of the Liberal Party, indeed an individual who has been mooted on more than one occasion as a potential leader of the Liberal Party, described the Opposition in a public forum in Melbourne as `brain dead'. If the mainstream media track that down-I understand a journalist from the Weekly Times was present-that should provide the basis for a reasonable story. Again, that is not coming from someone like me with a clear subjective view about the Opposition. This gentleman joins a long queue of people in the Opposition parties who have been very frank about their shortcomings. I think the Australian people and for that matter the Victorian people are entitled to question why they should be requested to vote for an Opposition party which the former Leader of the the National Party described as being `in disarray' and a prominent member of the Party in a contemporary context described as `brain dead'. This is very hard hitting rhetoric but, in my subjective view, it is very accurate. I think the Australian people are entitled to add additional weight to those comments as they come from such impeccable sources in the Opposition itself. I think that those criticisms are manifest not only by any observance of the coalition in opposition but in terms of its contribution in this chamber and elsewhere. There are a number of other points that I think are worth making. The genesis of the Opposition's matter of public importance today was a report in the Australian which had a bold headline with respect to the Victorian State Government's alleged indebtedness. In fact, if one drew a correlation between significant newspaper articles and the role of the Opposition in this chamber, that empirical data would suggest a very clear link between the main stories of the day and what subsequently transpires in this chamber. Of course, that means that we have an Opposition which relies primarily on the Press Gallery for its direction in this chamber. In my submission, that of itself shows a relative poverty of thinking within the Opposition. In my 51/2 years in this chamber I have not had the experience of the Opposition coming in here and canvassing the main policy issues that look beyond tomorrow's headlines. I think that is a very sad thing and a reflection of the mess that the Opposition is currently in. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the former Leader of the National Party describes the Opposition as being in disarray. I have already alluded to Victoria's debt but I think it is worth reflecting on a number of other points. No-one of any status in this debate has indicated that Victoria cannot well handle the existing debt that is part of any modern government. In fact, the rating agency Moody's Investor Services Inc.-which again I think I can describe as more of an umpire in these matters than I or anyone opposite, and which is regarded internationally as being if not pre-eminent in this area then certainly one of the two major agencies-has awarded Victoria the highest credit rating that any State government can possibly achieve. It is not the second or third highest but the highest. That independent arbiter of whether or not a State government's level of indebtedness is too high has given the Victorian Government the highest possible rating. The reason is that Victoria's debt is coming down and is just over half, in terms of debt to gross domestic product (GDP)-which is the appropriate index-what it was in the days of Sir Henry Bolte. It was only a short time ago, at the Liberal Party's pre-election launch, that once again Sir Henry Bolte was trotted out. The Liberal Party implicitly and explicitly holds out Sir Henry Bolte as being a reflection of all that is good and proper in the Liberal Party. Given that in Sir Henry Bolte's period of office there was a level of debt to GDP double what currently transpires in the Victorian Labor Government context, I think that of itself is a significant ingredient in relation to proper debate, and it puts into perspective the Labor Government's record in that regard-which, obviously, is quite good. The growth of Victoria's debt service ratio-again, a most significant index-has been the lowest of all States since 1982. Of course, there are, as there always will be, lies, damned lies, and statistics. I suppose the National Party's version would be `pork pies, damned pork pies, and statistics'. People always have the ability to abuse statistical data, which is why I hope that I have been astringent in this debate rather than making assertions to try to appeal to sources that would be regarded by most Australians as being as close to the umpire as one can get. By way of example, the debt figures in New South Wales are assisted by the fact that gas is produced in the private sector and electricity is distributed by local government. Of course, in Victoria they are both public sector State government functions, and they are very significant at that. In fact, they constitute a very significant proportion of the State Government's responsibilities. In 1988-89, Victoria's borrowings will be 38 per cent lower in real terms than in the last year of the former Liberal Government. I would have thought that, coming from an independent source, that is a fairly telling statistic. Victorian borrowings have fallen in each of the past six years, which is a rather unique phenomenon for a modern economy. The Cain Government has committed itself to ensuring that debt continues to fall as a share of the non-farm State economy during the term for which it will be elected next Saturday; and I have absolutely no doubt that it will be re-elected. In fact, I said to a Liberal Party colleague earlier today that certainly in the area that I represent I believe there has been a very dramatic shift in sentiment to the Labor Party over the last few months. I think that will be confirmed on Saturday not only in the western suburbs of Melbourne but elsewhere in Victoria. I return to the core of the debate, that is, the economic analysis. By 1991-92 it is expected that the Victorian debt ratio will fall to 25 per cent, which will be the lowest level, not in the last five or six years, the period of the Labor Government, not in the last decade, and not even harking back to the so-called golden era of Sir Henry Bolte-which I indicated earlier was not all that golden when one looks at the empirical evidence rather than the supposed nirvana that the Liberal Party would have-but for this century. That is a most telling statistic and one that, unfortunately, we do not hear a great deal about. It is a rather unique statistic if one excludes the Federal arena. It is interesting that the Federal Opposition seeks to take up the cudgels on the issue of debt, because it was the current Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) who, when Treasurer, removed the constraints on State borrowings. I can vividly recall, at least in economic journals, the debate that surrounded that decision. I think with the benefit of hindsight, particularly in terms of timing, it was a particularly unfortunate decision. If one looks at the level of overseas debt that we have experienced in the recent past-and still experience-one will see that the State contribution is quite significant. In other words, in making that decision the then Treasurer, the new Leader of the Opposition, absolved the States of any responsibility in economic management. Through the Loan Council and other forums, it is very important in terms of macro-economic management to ensure that State public sector borrowing requirements are absolutely consistent with overall macro-economic objectives. Of course, he was also the Treasurer who left this Government with a $9.6 billion Budget deficit to rein in. We have certainly done that very well, and I think even members of the Opposition, in their quieter moments of reflection, would accept that. Sitting suspended from 6.30 to 8 p.m. Mr McARTHUR(Corangamite)(8.00) —The previous speaker, the honourable member for Maribyrnong (Mr Griffiths), was questioning the figures that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and shadow Treasurer, the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock), put forward today concerning Victoria's total indebtedness. I want to get the figures clearly on the record for all Victorians, who will go to the polls next Saturday. In 1982 Victorians owed $11 billion. In 1988 they owe about $23 billion. Mr Beale —How much? Mr McARTHUR —Twenty-three billion dollars. That is the figure at the moment as far as we can estimate. The Victorian Government has sold the railways and tramways rolling stock for $350m and then rented it back. The WorkCare arrangements have an unfunded liability of about $2 billion. These figures have been raised in the last week of the election campaign. They are not refuted by Mr Jolly. It is anyone's guess what the final figures of the WorkCare arrangements will be when the unfunded figures emerge year after year. This is what in Victoria is called creative accounting. That is what the Cain Government has been up to in creating these quite massive debt figures that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Treasurer, referred to today in the debate on the matter of public importance. Premier Kennett, after next Saturday, will be taking a total audit to fully account the total indebtedness of the Victorian State Government as it takes over office on Sunday, 2 October. I now turn to the Budget that was brought forward in August. I wish to debate those figures. I will begin by quoting Mr Terry McCrann, the respected economic commentator and journalist with the Melbourne Herald. He said: By the middle of next year more than half of Australia's 7.4 million taxpayers will be 41c or higher tax bracket, paying more tax on each dollar of extra income than the corporate giants of Australia. This situation brings about bracket creep, which is becoming more than just jargon used by tax experts. Every wage earner is feeling the pinch of the despicable policy of the Treasurer (Mr Keating) of reaping extra dollars from hardworking Australians. Australians will have to wait until 1 July 1989 to gain any relief from this tax increase brought about by inflation and wages growth. In Budget Paper No. 1, in a very small paragraph relating to income tax on individuals, the figures support the proposition that bracket creep is the major factor in the Budget surplus of $5.5 billion. Income tax collections from individual pay as you earn taxpayers will grow by 13.8 per cent in 1988-89 compared with 8.8 per cent in 1987-88. These estimates are based on an employment growth for wage and salary earners of 2.5 per cent and, more importantly, on an estimated increase in average weekly earnings of 5.75 per cent. Put in simple language, Australian taxpayers will receive about a 6 per cent increase in their pay packets in the next 12 months but will pay nearly 14 per cent extra in tax. No wonder Labor's heartland is rejecting this high-taxing Government. The optimistic predictions of the 1988 Budget are based upon these tax increases. The States are carrying the burden of expenditure cuts. The Department of the Treasury takes the view that the five-year upturn in the world economic cycle will continue. There is a presumption that commodity prices will maintain their high levels of 1987-88. The stormy clouds surrounding the United States economy with its rising domestic deficit of $US150 billion, along with a similar trade deficit of $US150 billion, make it imperative that the United States economic leadership take some drastic action after the presidential election in November 1988. There are signs that the stock markets around the world are becoming jittery, and that a second wave of selling similar to the October 1987 crash is not beyond the realms of possibility. Whilst I commend the Treasurer for bringing about a domestic surplus, I am concerned that the predictions and background which make up the Budget figures are unduly optimistic. Australia is burdened with $110 billion of overseas debt, a high inflation rate, and a balance of payments problem that has yet to be corrected. With this background, let me destroy the myth that Treasurer Keating has dealt with the Australian economy in a prudent and fiscally responsible manner in his six Budgets. I seek leave of the House to incorporate in Hansard a table and graph from the Budget Papers which clearly indicate the deficits produced by Treasurer Keating in his first four Budgets. Leave granted. The table and graph read as follows- 0037C Mr McARTHUR-As sensible Australians will recall, the Hawke Government enjoyed an upturn in the world economy at the end of 1983, as well as the breaking of the drought. In this favourable climate, Treasurer Keating accumulated a deficit of nearly $23 billion. By his own reckoning in June 1986, Australia faced `a banana republic' status and the Government made some attempt to cut its extravagant expenditure patterns. Of course, capital sales, restrictions on State expenditures, and Reserve Bank windfall profits helped to turn the Budget around. During these years the economy continued to grow steadily. The shameful and outrageous lie that the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) produced a $9.6 billion deficit in 1983 is totally rejected by the figures. With the ever present problem of escalating national debt, the Budget calculations should be put in the light of a possible fall in world commodity prices and a slow-down in the world economy. In September 1988 the signs are that this could happen. Australians are realising that in terms of national debt they are in the big league. In Mr Des Moore's economic discussion paper No. 1, Australia's Debt Problem-How Serious?, he canvasses the problems facing Australia because of its escalating national debt position. Mr Moore is a highly regarded ex-Treasury official. When the Hawke Government came to power in 1983, the national debt was approximately $35 billion. Five years later it is now $110 billion. Mr Moore makes the following observation: A country that is increasing its internal borrowings but does not in due course produce a commensurate increase in exports is clearly headed for double trouble. He goes on to conclude that in fact we have not `increased our productive capacity to service that debt', that we have been on a consumption binge, and that, from all the subjective elements in this research, Australia's external debt ratios have clearly been too high since 1984. He says in his paper that Australia is in the category of `dangerously high debt countries rating twenty-seventh place in the list headed by Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Poland, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador and Egypt'. Further listed countries do not give comfort to Australia's position. Low debt countries on the scale are listed, with the United States of America in forty-eighth place, England in sixty-fourth place, and Singapore in seventy-sixth place, or top of the class in relation to its gross external debt commitments. As many commentators have observed-and the Opposition has been alerting all Australians to the fact-this country now spends 40 per cent of its gross domestic product in servicing its international debt. The Budget predictions presume that commodity prices will hold their high levels. A review of their relativity and significance raises serious doubts about the capacity of commodities to maintain the buoyancy of the 1988 prices into the next 12 months. Quite clearly commodities are the key to Australia's future prosperity in terms of both overseas earnings and internal living standards. The Reserve Bank in its annual report of 30 June 1988 said: While the rise in commodity prices is very welcome from Australia's viewpoint, it cannot be taken for granted that the levels of mid-1988 will continue for long. The higher prices should be regarded as a windfall which provides the opportunity to reduce markedly the balance of payments deficit. It would be tragic if they were absorbed in an overly rapid increase in domestic demand, with the pressures that would unleash, or if we were deflected from the long-term task of adjusting the structure of the economy. Australia is totally dependent on major commodities contributing to our export earnings. In the last year, wool contributed $5.7 billion which constituted 14 per cent of our export earnings. It has been a dramatic increase on the income of two years ago. Wool growers are enjoying profitable incomes and, what is more, Australia is riding on the sheep's back as far as Treasurer Keating is concerned. Whilst the industry is anticipating about the same income in the current year, wool prices have fallen recently and if there is a dramatic collapse of the wool market this will have a major impact on the Budget outcome. Coal makes a $4.8 billion contribution and constitutes 11.6 per cent of our export earnings. The archaic work practices and stubborn attitude of mining unions make the future profitability of this vital export industry questionable. Overseas competitors are offering quality coal at a price with certainty of delivery not impeded by unco-operative unions. Aluminium and alumina have received a boost in price and contribute $3.6 billion which constitutes 8.6 per cent of export earnings. In my own electorate of Corangamite, the Alcoa Point Henry plant is helping this turnaround in the industry's profitability and Australia's exports. Gold, with a $2.4 billion contribution to exports, constitutes 6 per cent of export earnings and has been a big contributor to the change in commodity prices, moving upward to help the Australian economy. The beef industry continues to enjoy prosperity as the drought in America provides a ready market and the Japanese market remains profitable and accessible. Twenty-three million head of cattle provide $2 billion worth of export earnings, constituting 5 per cent of total exports. The wheat industry provides a classic example of fluctuating fortunes both in production and in prices received. In 1983 after the drought 22 million tonnes were produced Australia wide and it is estimated that in 1988 only 14 million tonnes will be produced. In 1987-88 wheat generated $1.7 billion which constituted 4.2 per cent of exports. Prospects for wheat look better on the world scene because of the drought in the United States of America. Dairy products contribute about half a million dollars and help in providing rural prosperity for higher rainfall zones in Australia. The key element of these commodity prices is that added together they constitute 56.7 per cent of our total export earnings and that any change in their price will reflect directly on Budget predictions. Turning to the balance of payments, I note that the Government has an ongoing problem with the $1.7 billion deficit figure announced on 28 August for the month of July. This adds to the already gloomy outlook. Australia has been trading in the red over the past two years and in 1986-87 was $13.2 billion in deficit. At the conclusion of 1987-88 another $11.9 billion was added to the red figures. The projection for the current year is $9.5 billion in deficit and in Senator Walsh's own words the nation's foreign debt and current account deficit is `the pall that hangs over the Australian economy'. Whilst the media gave the impression that the Treasurer's Budget forecasts were favourable, there can be no doubt that in real terms the Budget is predicated on overly optimistic commodity prices. In the end it is hard working Australians-those highly taxed middle income earners-who have contributed a greater proportion of their livelihood to this insidious form of `tax by stealth'. It is they who have generated the $5.5 billion Budget surplus that the Treasurer has so proudly proclaimed. Mr SCHOLES(Corio)(8.15) —This Budget-indeed, the national situation as we find it today-is the end product of six years of just plain hard work and dedication. Whilst we hear Opposition members desperately trying to prove that white is black in almost every one of their speeches, the facts are that any person who is prepared to get rid of the fog of political need in front of his eyes will be fully aware that Australia today is a far better managed, far more effective and a far more capable country to meet the challenges of a very tough world out there than it was when we came into office. The fact is that the Liberal-National coalition which governed this country from 1975 to 1983 was unable to come to grips with any of the serious problems that had been brought about by changes in world trade and commodity conditions throughout the world. The previous Government spent three years with the so-called razor gang slashing government expenditure-three years, but at the end of the day it came up with cuts of $300m. To say that that was inconsequential is an understatement. In 1983 the major growth industry in this country was tax avoidance. It was the only industry that was prospering and the initiatives of almost all the commercial entrepreneurs in this country were being directed into that field. The commercial development in this country was located in the ingenuity and imagination of the bottom of the harbour schemes, the Curran schemes and other tax avoidance schemes. What did the Government of the day do about it? In 1979 the Commissioner of Taxation reported to the then Treasurer, the honourable member for Bennelong (Mr Howard), a massive leakage of funds from the revenue because of tax avoidance schemes that were patently dishonest and needed legislative remedies. The then Government procrastinated. Its back bench committee found every excuse possible to defer any decision and of course we now know why. The Liberal Party branch committees in Western Australia were right at the top of the tree in the tax avoidance industry. That was the sort of government that we had and by 1982 the country was in such a mess that no Australian could take seriously an opposition which now stands up and tells us that things are really not any better; it is just imagination. The Government of which the honourable member for Bennelong was Treasurer was incompetent, inefficient and lacked the courage to take decisions that were in the national interest. The Government that paralleled it in Victoria was incompetent and into every type of scandal because of mismanagement. How many Victorians nowadays forget the land deal scandals that rocked that State? Mr McArthur —What about workers compensation? Mr SCHOLES —Perhaps the honourable member might tell us about the management of Queensland. That State has had a conservative government since 1957. Has he never heard of the Fitzgerald Inquiry? These are sloppy, incompetent governments which have not had the courage to carry out the functions for which they were elected. On Saturday in Victoria people will be asked to judge whether they should go back to the sort of government in which Mr Kennett was a Minister-he was not a very good Minister either and everyone knows that-whether they will take the risk inherent in that decision; whether they are prepared to accept a State Premier who, as Leader of the Opposition, has conducted a campaign that even the National Party acknowledges is a farce. Senator McGauran tells us that there cannot possibly be a Liberal government in Victoria; there will have to be a coalition. Where are the policies, where are the arrangements? What are the Victorian people to expect if, on Sunday morning, there is a coalition government? Mr McArthur —There's every chance of that, too. Mr SCHOLES —Perhaps the honourable member might tell his State leader that the honest thing to do-and I do not expect the Liberals to be honest-would be to say what the arrangements are for a coalition government in Victoria. Will Ross-Edwards be the corporate manager of the State? Will half the present State shadow Ministers be dumped? The Federal shadow Minister at the table is safe for the time being. He is close enough to Howard. Obviously he has not offended him. Will they be out on their ears? Who will run the State? What will be the policies? The coalition is in total conflict. Both sides are pretty incompetent. They certainly do not agree on any key issues in Victoria at the moment. We can have one set of policies from the Liberal Party and another set of policies from the National Party if we want them but we cannot really get either set, because neither party can govern. One wonders at the farce of a National Party leader talking about governing Victoria. He is not running enough candidates to get a majority. Mr McArthur —That's not true. Mr SCHOLES —The honourable member is not serious, is he? The Liberals cannot govern in their own right. Let us consider the sorts of election promises they are making now. The Leader of the Liberal Party in Victoria has promised to abolish the means test. I ask him to pray tell us how, and who will pay for it. He said that there will be no increase in any form of government charges-gas, electricity and other items-for the next four years. Mr McArthur —What's Cain saying? What did Cain say in the advertisements? Mr SCHOLES —He said that there would be no increases in excess of the inflation rate. That is different, is it not? Let us have a look at what Mr Greiner said. He said that no charges would be above the cost of living. Two weeks after he was elected transport charges went up by 10.5 per cent. Gas and electricity charges increased above the inflation rate. He withdrew concessions from pensioners, to whom he had promised to give greater concessions. Some classes in New South Wales do not have teachers. The Greiner Government has improved the education system to such an extent that in New South Wales they no longer need teachers. Students can go to school and sit in their classrooms and, if they happen to have comics with them, they can entertain themselves, unsupervised. That is the sort of government that Victoria is being offered. Billions of dollars of extra expenditure is being promised by the Victorian Opposition, and it is going to cut taxes! Mr Connolly —Come on, Gordon, you know that Labor never cuts taxes. Mr SCHOLES —I know that Liberals never tell the truth. Their election campaigns are a desperate effort to cover up the incompetence and ineffectiveness of their political machine, its inability to carry out any form of policy development. It is six years since they promised us a tax policy in this Parliament and they still do not have one. Mr McArthur —Have you got one? Have you got a tax policy? Mr SCHOLES —Yes, it is in the Budget. The Liberals have been promising us tax policies for six years. What is their policy in Victoria on immigration? The migrant communities in Victoria got one line in Kennett's policy speech. No immigration policy was put forward in the Victorian election campaign by the Liberals. They do not care about migrants. Why would they put anything forward, given the mess they have made of their ethnic policies in this place? They do not know where they are going. All they have as a policy is a thought by their Leader that there might be some votes in black bashing. That is where the Liberal Party in this place is, unfortunately. Once when the conservative parties in Australia got into the sort of mess they are in now, someone of vision would come forward and form a new party-usually someone from the Labor Party side; they did not get many of their leaders from their own ranks. Nevertheless, someone came forward and saved the conservatives from the scrap heap. The Liberal Party's problem is that it has no one to save it from the scrap heap. It is on the train to the rubbish dump right now. On Sunday in the city square in Melbourne Mr Kennett will attempt to demonstrate how he is going to pay for his policies if a coalition government is elected in Victoria. However, I do not really believe that he is capable of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Mr IAN ROBINSON(Page)(8.25) —The Government's predicted $5.5 billion surplus in the 1988-89 financial year relies upon large revenue increases which are expected from collections of individual income tax, company tax, sales tax and fringe benefits tax. The Budget Papers show the extent to which increases in just a few areas of taxation have underwritten this year's huge surplus. Individual income tax, including capital gains tax, is predicted to rise by $5.7 billion in this financial year, an increase of no less than 13.6 per cent, which follows a healthy 10 per cent increase in the previous year. These figures clearly show the effect which the so-called incremental creep or fiscal drag has had on income tax collections. Company tax is predicted to rise by no less than $1.4 billion this year, a 15.9 per cent increase, which follows a 31.1 per cent increase in the previous year. Sales tax is predicted to rise by $1.1 billion this year, a 14.4 per cent increase, which follows an 18.9 per cent increase in the previous year. We must recognise that this form of taxation is really tax by stealth. Sales tax has been indexed. We are now in our third or fourth year of this new form of taxation by stealth. There is never a clear indication of what the increases are. They are calculated and they automatically occur. It is no longer the responsibility of the Government front bench to come forward and say, `These are the increases as a consequence of the Budget determinations that will occur in this area'. That is a real deception. The fringe benefits tax has reaped far more revenue than was estimated when it was introduced. Fringe benefits tax collections are predicted to increase by a further 13.6 per cent. Some of the areas where there are falls are interesting indeed. The biggest setback to revenue collections this financial year will come from crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas levies, which are likely to fall by 32.7 per cent, or $673m. The Government is trying to compensate for the drop in crude oil excise revenue by increasing levies on petroleum products, but this carries a heavy inflationary penalty. Every 1c increase in the petroleum levy adds 0.1 per cent to the consumer price index (CPI). That is the very thing the Government is trying to avoid. It is trying to find ways and means of keeping the CPI down whilst at the same time promising tax cuts and wage increases. The Government cannot have it both ways. The truth is that there have been no real cuts in government expenditure, which were promised time and again by the Government. In the May mini-Budget and the current Budget the Government has cut funds heavily to State and local government. Those two areas account for about 95 per cent of the reductions that have taken place. This places a heavy burden on those levels of government. Taxation is increasing steeply. Many people are now entering higher income tax brackets. As a result of these effective tax increases, the ordinary taxpayer will have less disposable income available while they are facing increasing costs. This is a real area of concern that the Government is ignoring. The ramifications of this are reduced demands for goods and services, reduced incentive to work extra hours, which has an adverse impact on productivity, and reduced incentive for some to work at all. This is no way to manage the economy. In the brief time at my disposal I draw attention to the fact that all the credit currently being taken for the reduction in our overseas commitments is being taken by the Treasurer (Mr Keating). The Treasurer is overseas saying that he is paying off a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there. Where has that money come from? It has come from heavy taxation within this country. But there is no effective policy to ensure that the consequences of the present Budget will mean an escape from higher interest rates and the risks that are inherent in the trends that can occur overseas, and there is no guarantee that at the end of the current financial year we will see a better overall position. In many respects there is no doubt that it is a risky Budget. It is said to be a soft Budget, but the truth is that it is not. What does this mean for the man in the street? He has been blinded and deafened by the Treasurer's rhetoric-the promise of a better Budget, a better slice of the taxation cake at some future time. When is that to be? There is no firm commitment; there is no firm undertaking. But we can be sure it will be a political decision when the time comes. We find under the Government's education policy that there will be a cessation of the $263 higher education fee, but that will be replaced with a $1,800 debt to be incurred by those who are caught out by a means test, repayable by way of taxation at a later date. We have not seen the fine print for that proposal but no doubt it will again be rushed through this House, like so many other pieces of important legislation, to the detriment of the wider community. Again the Government has its own concept of who can pay and who cannot, having no regard to the real effects of means testing. Many other areas of Government policy adversely affect the family. We must consider not only the traditional approach to education but also the Government's attitude to welfare services, to the whole range of important elements that have made this country what it is. We find in this day and age that those things are slipping away. We find that the disposable income of the average family is far less than it should be. We find that it is a tough battle for the middle income earner to survive against the Government's proposals. Look at the realities of some of the Government's policies. There has been a slight increase in education funding. Of course that is desirable, and the intimation was that that funding would go towards technical and further education (TAFE) facilities and urgent training requirements. Let me refer to the demand for TAFE college facilities in my own electorate. There are around 1,000 TAFE students in the town of Maclean. They are being taught in halls and hired rooms, without adequate facilities. The New South Wales Government put forward, under the terms of the current arrangements for TAFE capital funding, a proposition for a new college. It was given No. 1 priority. Now we find that the Federal Minister for Employment, Education and Training (Mr Dawkins) has said no, northern New South Wales does not need such TAFE facilities and has refused to approve the proposition. As a result of a conference between the State and Federal Ministers, the question has been referred to consultants who will be commissioned to make a special investigation and come up with a report. In this day and age the responsibility for decisions of this kind should be taken by the Government, by the Minister and the department that he presides over. But, no, here we see delaying tactics, and it is just not good enough. These tactics will mean that it will cost even more to determine what the outcome should be. Look at the rural sector, and at road funding and the traditional support for primary industry. Primary industry is currently carrying this country out of its economic dilemma to some extent. We find that this Government is cutting back on those few areas of support that primary industry has traditionally relied upon. Again that means a cost impost on the very industries that contribute so much to the overall outcome of a Budget of this kind. The Government's action is so contradictory that it is unbelievable that a responsible Prime Minister and a responsible Treasurer can seriously put a case of the kind this Government has to the people of Australia and expect to have it accepted. Look, too, at the other areas of real need-homes for the aged, preschools, and all of the responsibilities that fall upon the Commonwealth. We find the Government is creating barriers, hurdles and disincentives in these essential areas of Government spending. Yet the extravagant spending goes on. This extravagant spending in so many directions is unbelievable. So the Treasurer takes pride tonight, no doubt in yet another overseas country, in saying, `Look at my record, look at what I have achieved'. Of course he is covering up the real facts of where this Budget is taking this country. The strategy applied in this Budget is of no effective consequence at all. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Ronald Edwards) —Before calling the honourable member for Hotham, I am sure I speak on behalf of all members when I say how pleased I am to see the honourable member for Riverina-Darling well and joining us in the chamber. Honourable members-Hear, hear! Mr KENT(Hotham)(8.36) —I am delighted to take part in this year's Budget debate as this is the best Budget introduced by the Treasurer (Mr Keating) since the Labor Government took office in 1983. The honourable member for Page (Mr Ian Robinson) tried to paint a gloomy picture of the economy and of the Budget. He bemoaned the fact that the disposable income of families is far less than it should be. He did not say what it should be. At the same time he is forgetting that only five years ago, under the Howard-Fraser regime, one million people in Australia had no income whatsoever. They were on the unemployment scrapheap. They had no income, disposable or otherwise. So let us not talk about disposable income. We are looking after the income of ordinary people by placing them in work. They have income today; they have a job to go to, thanks to this Government and thanks to the Treasurer. The honourable member also said that the Government should reduce expenditure. But in the same breath he said he was very worried about the reduction in rural subsidies. Of course he does not say that we should reduce them, but that we should cut funding somewhere else. He wants to maintain subsidies for the rural community and reduce taxes. The rural people never like to pay taxes. I admit that I do not like to pay them either, but if we want subsidies we have to pay our taxes as well. We have to finance subsidies from somewhere. As well as the Opposition putting forth all these contradictory points in its argument, it has also failed miserably in its attack on the Budget. It just could not fault it. I wish to join the majority of the economic commentators in Australia and congratulate the Treasurer on a very good Budget indeed. With a masterstroke the Treasurer brought down a Budget which lays the foundation for a return to an era of prosperity in Australia. The Labor Government has accomplished all this good work in only five years. We turned the economy from being one in a deep depression engineered by the Howard-Fraser regime in the early 1980s into an economy of growth. There was a Budget deficit of $11 billion when the Labor Government took office, and now there is a $5.5 billion surplus. This means in simple terms that the Hawke Labor Government, by turning an $11 billion deficit inherited from the conservatives into a $5.5 billion surplus in five years, has saved this nation an average of $3 billion each year it has been in office. It is not only the billions of dollars that we have saved for this nation; we have also saved over a million people from the untold misery of unemployment. We have created jobs for them, and the effect of that has been felt especially in Victoria. In my electorate one can see operating factories that only a few years ago were idle because of the policies of the conservatives. Of course people are working in them. There are busy shopping centres, with people spending. People are earning money to spend on their needs and their families' needs. So it no wonder that the majority of Australian people support the Hawke Labor Government. I am also certain that the majority of Victorians will acknowledge Labor's achievements and vote for the Cain Labor Government in Victoria on 1 October. Most economic commentators agree, and there is no doubt about it, that our economy is in good shape and in good hands. Thank heaven and the Australian people, the conservatives are cast onto the Opposition benches and cannot harm the economy of this country any more. However, they still intend to cause us damage in another area, namely, in the field of immigration and ethnic affairs, and of course, that is a very important area. It is a vital area, as the future of our nation depends on our immigration program. It is part of our nation building, as today's immigrants will be tomorrow's Australians. Until now our immigration program has been uniquely successful. Nowhere else on this planet have so many people from various backgrounds settled so successfully in such a short time. I am a product of this migration program. I am only a first generation Australian and, if the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) or anyone else wants to suggest to me that I am not serving this nation well as a member of this Parliament because I am not of Anglo-Celtic background, I will be deeply offended. My wife and I were born in Yugoslavia, we came here 35 years ago; my son married an Australian of Irish descent. Does the Leader of the Opposition want to say that my grand-children are not `dinky-di Aussies'? If he tries that on them, he will get a kick in his backside. Does he want to judge me on my ancestry, does he want to judge my grandchildren on their ancestry, or is he objecting to migration from Asia only? What vision does the Leader of the Opposition have concerning the current and future generation of Australians? Does he consider that only Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent have the right to nominate migrants to this country? Does he want to deny the same rights to Australians of Vietnamese, Cambodian or Chinese origin? If not, I call on him, as our Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) called on him, to retract and to apologise to those in the community whom he offended by advocating racist attitudes concerning immigration. He was talking on `One Australia', but he was advocating the exclusion from the `One Australia' those whom he considered racially inferior, namely, people of Asian background. One would have to pause for a moment and ask: Why would the Leader of the Opposition single out people of Asian background? Does he have any reliable statistics to show that there is something wrong with our migrants from Asia, be it Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Singapore or Hong Kong? Can he give any reason why Asian migrants would not fit into our way of life? Of course, he has no such statistics, and the only reason he advocates the slowing down of the Asian immigration is to play to the racist gallery in the hope of winning a few votes. It was for the basest opportunistic reasons that he decided to fan the racist flames. Let us be rational and ask ourselves what kind of society we are. Of course, we pride ourselves on being a society where good family life is highly rated, where human rights and the freedom of the individual are highly respected, where individual ambition to better ourselves is encouraged. Would anyone want to say that these values are not shared by our migrants from Asia? Are they or are they not good family people, or does Howard want to say that they do not value the freedom of individuals when thousands of them fled from their homeland, exposing themselves to personal danger and suffering just because they value personal freedom so highly? Is anyone accusing our Asian migrants of opposing individual initiative and not being ambitious to better themselves? Of course not. So, what is all this `hoo-ha' about `social cohesion'? I have yet to see any group amongst our migrants who do not share our values and do not support the basically Anglo-Celtic way of life and institutions of our society. While Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent support our institutions of parliamentary democracy, freedom of trade unions, freedom of the Press, respect for human life and freedom of the individual and so on, out of tradition, brought with them from the mother country, we, migrants of non-Anglo-Celtic background, respect those same institutions and traditions, not for sentimental reasons, but because they are good institutions and good traditions. I mention with pride that it was not a coincidence that I was the first and most vocal opponent in my Party and in this Parliament of the introduction of identity cards. It was not a coincidence; it was because I learnt from generations of Australians to respect the individual and the freedom of the individual. I strongly believe that, should those institutions and freedoms that I mentioned before be by any chance in jeopardy in future, migrants together with their fellow Australians will man the barricades to defend them-and so will our children, together with the children of fellow Australians, give their life in defence of our country should the need arise. So, let us not talk about who will or who will not fit into our society as, by such talk, we only introduce divisions into our nation, divisions that are imaginary and really do not exist, except in the minds of xenophobic eccentrics or racists. The Leader of the Opposition used the code word `social cohesion', implying that Asian migrants are not suitable for acceptance into our society. He and his supporters in the National Party may have their likes and dislikes of various groups of migrants, be they Asian or others; but that matters little in this debate. The central point is that if racist sentiments are given legitimacy by a major political party our reputation as a civilised nation will be damaged, not only overseas but also in our own eyes. The damage done by the Leader of the Opposition overseas as well as in Australia was well expressed in our Press. Let me quote from an article by Peter Cole-Adams in the Age of 6 August 1988: This is apparently not enough for Mr Howard. With his double talk about `social cohesion', he seems to be opening the way for a partial return to the days of the 1950's and 60's, when we restricted our migrant intakes to those countries whose people were assumed to be, racially and culturally, most easily assimilable into a predominantly Anglo-Celtic host community. If so, the international and internal implications will be considerable. Neighbouring nations will certainly notice, and be even more sceptical to our claims to be considered part of the Asian community . . . Internally, the Howard rhetoric and the foreshadowed Howard policies are likely to increase the social divisions that he says he deplores. I also quote from the editorial in the Australian of 12 August 1988: If (the Coalition) conducts a campaign which concentrates on Asians, it must expect that it will be seen as racist and will forfeit the support of all those who reject racial discrimination as a return to barbarism. Furthermore, the Leader of the Opposition's outburst not only is divisive as far as the general community is concerned but also has effectively created a deep division between the more decent elements in his own Party and the Tuckey-type opportunists, or do the Leader of the Opposition and his Party wish to return to the white Australia policy? Quite possibly. The latest news is that the Opposition now proposes to examine prospective migrants for the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, AIDS. What an insult! Has the Opposition any figures which would indicate that migrants are the carriers of this unfortunate disease? It would be so much more appropriate if it examined its former shadow Minister for Health for distemper. The Leader of the Opposition was basing his comments partly on the report of the FitzGerald Committee to Advise on Australia's Immigration Policies. He was implying that the FitzGerald report had something to say against Asian immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me quote from that part of the FitzGerald report that deals with Asian migration, page 66, which reads: Historically, Asian-born were among the earliest immigrants to Australia. Today, they mix extensively in the community as judged by inter-marriage, are a growing proportion of our intake, and come from countries with some of the fastest growing economies in the world. In the one place where Vietnamese, for example, are most heavily concentrated in Western Sydney, they still only represent some 6% of the population. The crime statistics of Asian-born are among the lowest of any group of overseas-born. This issue must be also addressed against the historical background in which the largest national groups of immigrants have been the least popular, and in which much of what is now said of Asians was once said of Italians and Greeks and Maltese, and once also of Irish. Surveys indicate that attitudes to Asian immigrants are in many respects more positive than to other European and non-European groups. . . . . . . . . . Australians have always expressed their reaction to newcomers irreverently and disparagingly, to the ``Pommie bastards'', ``Wogs'' and ``Dagoes'' who formed the successive waves of immigration, while welcoming the benefits they brought. The Committee's research suggests that anti-immigrant sentiments may have been more hostile and more boisterously expressed in earlier times than in the past decade. . . . . . . . . . Surveys show that most Australians believe that policy discrimination, directed at Asians or anyone else, is not acceptable. The real test is the test of social acceptance. Ten years of substantial immigration from Asia suggests very strongly that it is working. The commitment is apparent on both sides, and the harmony of outcomes is already evident. Government must not be complacent about this harmony, but work hard to ensure that it endures. Obviously, the Leader of the Opposition had never even read the FitzGerald report when he made his comments. The Leader of the Opposition's misguided comments and his misguided and ambiguous policies certainly do little to ensure the harmony of our nation. To the contrary, his comments and policies have the calculated effect of setting one Australian against another. Whilst previous conservative governments have been divisive and have done that, never before has any leader in our political arena attempted to set one Australian against another on the basis of the colour of skin or racial origin. I am sure that the Australian people will reject the attempt by the Leader of the Opposition to rekindle racist attitudes and intolerance in our society. I am also certain that they will condemn and reject those who wish to lend any respectability to racial prejudice and that they will reject the Leader of the Opposition for the same reason. Mr CONNOLLY(Bradfield)(8.53) —This debate is almost bizarre. It takes place in an environment in which a Budget was introduced in this chamber on 23 August. Here we are, on 27 September, still debating an event which has been described by members of the Government as their greatest budgetary achievement since 1983. Despite the noted cant of the Treasurer (Mr Keating) and the comments he has made overseas in the last 48 hours, it is perfectly clear that the Treasurer is now warning major trading nations of the serious risks of a slowdown in world economic activity, risks which obviously will impact upon the Australian economy. Yet this Budget was based upon the most optimistic scenario that the Treasurer found possible to paint. We have now experienced six Budgets under Labor. They have produced an Australian society that is more divided, more insecure, more cynical about the promises of politicians and more determined to seek answers to complex problems that are beyond the scope of our representative institutions than ever before. We must ask ourselves: Why is our society so divided under Labor, especially when the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) was elected on a platform of consensus? The reason we have this division is that the Government has deliberately set out to divide Australians. Over six Budgets it has established a society in which the very rich have become much richer and the average Australian family is fighting to be able to exist at all, and has watched its standard of living fall inexorably, year by year. The wealth of our country is in fewer and fewer hands than ever before. Mateship is no longer a term of pride and endearment. We forget that the word was part of our common heritage. It was indicative of the blood, sweat, toil and tears of our ancestors who opened up and built this nation. They did so by helping each other. This Labor Government has made Australia a more introverted and selfish society. This has occurred because Australian families are battling to survive today as never before. They see around them only too clearly the true fruits of Labor's mateship: big government, big business and big unions. These factors together have conspired to usurp the sovereignty of the people who, in return, have been offered by Labor a diet of Marie Antoinette's cake and little else, in the form of yet higher and higher taxes. In return they have seen introduced in this House a so-called social justice strategy. What a meaningless term! Are all Australians being treated equally by this Government? Obviously, they are not. Let us look at the realities of family life in Australia today. This Budget has given nothing to over 70 per cent of our families except higher sales taxes and yet another year of higher income taxes. By mid-1989 half of all Australian's 7.4 million taxpayers will be paying over 41c in the dollar in income tax-a record in our postwar history. But the Government says, `Don't worry. We promise you that next July, August, September or sometime you're going to get tax cuts'. We want to see whether those cuts will in any way compensate for the massive tax increases that the last six Budgets have imposed on the Australian people. For the 28 per cent of Australian families who qualify for the family assistance supplement (FAS) the increase falls well short of the Government's benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent of the married pension rate. The Prime Minister's pledge, made to the people last July at the time of the last election, was that by 1990 no child will be living in poverty. The Minister for Social Security (Mr Howe) has not refuted the Australian Council of Social Service's claim that because the increases will not come into effect until next June, they are illusory. For example, a family with a child aged under 13 would get a rise of 10c per week-how generous!-instead of $2, and for children aged over 13 the rise would amount to 70c per week. Surely, this is yet another example of the pea and thimble trick, Keating-style. Part of this is due to the Government's failure to index or increase family allowances. Since this social justice Labor Government came to power there has been a 30 per cent decline in the value of family allowances-that payment which reaches the vast majority of Australian families, and which was introduced by the previous coalition Government. The Government's rhetoric in the area of rent is interesting. It states: A major package of housing assistance for low income families renting privately . . . It will make a significant contribution to alleviating housing related poverty. That is what the Government said. Let us look at the reality. The Budget offered $5 extra, not this year, but in June 1989, and another $5 in June 1990. The result is that the average family in receipt of the FAS will get $25 in rent assistance in two years time. Those with three or more children will get $30 in two to three years time. The important point is that no suggestion was made that any of this would be subject to consumer price index increases. On current rates of inflation, therefore, that small increase will be approximately minus 7 per cent per year. Across the board increases in rent assistance via the FAS do little, if anything, to tackle the rent crises, largely in Sydney and Melbourne, which we are facing today. For families paying $290 per week, which is the average for a modest three-bedroom home in Sydney, and receiving $15 rent assistance, surely another $5 to $15 in June or July of 1989 or 1990 represents little more than a drop in the ocean. What is this Government doing to solve these fundamental rental problems which were exacerbated by its own ill-conceived changes on negative gearing, which reduced investment in rental accommodation over recent years, effectively raising rents to catastrophic levels? Of course, in addition, we have further increases in housing rates and interest rates on housing yet again. In the area of unemployment also, we are told by members of the Government that, in aggregate terms, the figures have fallen. We welcome that fact. But look at the detail of the policy. While we welcome the Government's commitment to reskilling and training, this year's Budget will help only 15 per cent of the total long term unemployed of 170,000. In reality, 25,000 extra places will be allocated through labour market programs which hardly equals the Government's rhetoric that `it will contribute to a substantial reduction in long term unemployment'. Rather, it raises false hopes with the unemployed being mere pawns in the Government's media games yet again. The need for action on the long term unemployed is well overdue, with the mean duration of unemployment now standing at 66 weeks compared with 33 weeks in May 1982. That is a 100 per cent increase in six Budgets. In addition, there has been an increase in the numbers of families with children suffering long term unemployment. In May 1982, it was 16.5 per cent. In May 1988 the number had nearly doubled, to 31 per cent, with unemployment stuck on approximately 7.8 per cent and not likely to fall below 7.25 per cent, according to the Government's own estimates. Therefore 10 people are unemployed for every vacant job. The creation of 25,000 training places is clearly but the tip of the jobless iceberg. Unfortunately, this Labor Government has again failed to deregulate the labour market to the extent that is necessary. It has failed to take on and to face the reality of the conservative attitudes adopted by trade unions to the need for change, which is the surest way to increase jobs for all. The Government has refused to introduce a community service for unemployment arrangements even though it has at last recognised the need to combine passive income support with enhanced labour market activity, something the coalition has been advocating for years. Regrettably, this Government has been slow to move in this area. In the area of sole parents, the Budget introduces in March 1989 what is euphemistically called the jobs, education and training (JET) program, with the fanfare that it would have a substantial impact on increasing work force participation by sole parent pensioners. In fact, the decision in the May statement last year to cut sole parent pensions for children aged 16 and over was lauded by the Government. It said that it would help sole parents enter the work force and break down the transition to work barriers. According to Department of Social Security estimates, the reality is that some 90 per cent of the 17,000 sole parents affected are on some form of benefit or pension today. An extra $2m was allocated then for training programs for those affected but Department of Employment, Education and Training Commonwealth Employment Service figures for September 1987 to June 1988 show that less than 6 per cent, or 1,000, of those affected have actually received any training at all, with a further 1.5 per cent going into the work force with the help of subsidised employment. The report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training entitled Getting to Work, which was tabled in May, reveals the shocking mismanagement of the Government's decision to cut sole parents' income support when their children turn 16. It reveals the inability of the Department of Social Security and the Department of Employment, Education and Training to work together in the interests of those affected. The report also exposes the Government's earlier decision in 1986 to review sole parents once every month for the first month and every three months thereafter to ensure eligibility and to provide counselling on how to gain employment. It sounded marvellous. In fact, it reveals that there was, and is, no counselling being provided whatsoever. Does the Government seriously ask sole parents to believe its rhetoric on JET which, even if it becomes a meaningful program, will help only 5 per cent of the total numbers who would be eligible if it met its target of 12,000 places by 1990-91? Let us move to the question of forgotten youth. Another great program with one of these marvellous name tags is New Start, which is targeted at the adult long term unemployed, that is, the over 21-year-olds. The 100,000 unemployed 16- to 20-year-olds have been left out and even the 23,000 who have been unemployed for over one year have been left out. There are no reforms of the youth homeless allowance which is widely regarded as a failure in meeting the needs of homeless youth. This is evidenced by requests for accommodation by 13,000 youths in New South Wales alone in the first six months of 1987 and the payment is reaching, on average, a mere 1,000 homeless youths across Australia. The claim of the Treasurer that this Budget brings home the bacon, to use his expression on that memorable night, has a hollow ring in the ears of those who have no home and no future in this society, even if they could afford the bacon. For those over the age of 54, the likelihood of employment is also less than encouraging. These is no access to labour market training programs for the 40,000 Australians who are unemployed and have been for 12 months or more. The $5 extra in rent assistance in June 1990 for a pensioner without children has been described as `long overdue and inadequate' by the Australian Council of the Ageing. It also said: Unless accommodation is secure, all other elements in the Budget are under pressure. It is perfectly clear that the record of this Government in social welfare, in its attempt to achieve a so-called social justice strategy, is a shambles and a disgrace to this society. Although this Government states that it has compassion and it is concerned, society has no reason whatsoever to look upon the future with anything other than contempt. Mr COHEN(Robertson)(9.07) —Mr Deputy Speaker-- Mr Tim Fischer —Speak from the heart, Barry. Mr COHEN —I always do. The Budget brought down by the Treasurer (Mr Keating) on 23 August was easily the most extraordinary one that I have seen during my 19 years in this Parliament. When we recall the horrendous situation this Government inherited in March 1983 when, on coming to office, it found that the prospective deficit was around $9.6 billion and when we see that, this financial year, the Treasurer has budgeted for a surplus of $5.6 billion, it is even more extraordinary. I suppose that the achievement is best summed up by quoting a few lines from the Treasurer's Budget Speech: . . . we are now systematically restructuring the economy, making Australia a much more dynamic place, more able to compete in the world. The evidence is there for all to see. This year our balance of payments deficit will be halved from its peak of just three years ago. Our foreign debt burden has already stabilised and begun to fall. Inflation is down. Real wage increases are in prospect. Our rate of job growth is unmatched in the Western world. Business investment is rising rapidly. On the export front, new manufacturing activities and tourism have blossomed. On the import side, Australian factories are now supplying a wide range of goods that we used to buy from overseas. In a little over 100 words, the Treasurer summed up both his and the Government's quite outstanding economic achievements. There is considerable personal satisfaction in three of those words, in particular the three that stated `tourism has blossomed'. When I first came into this House in 1969, I took a very serious interest in tourism. I took the time and trouble to read every speech made in this Parliament in the past 20 years. It was not a particularly edifying experience. Most speeches on the subject were motherhood statements in which the local member extolled the virtues of his electorate and wondered why governments were not spending millions of dollars to change his electorate into the tourist paradise of the South Pacific. The only significant action taken regarding tourism in that period-I am going back now into the 1960s-was the commissioning of the Harris Kerr Forster report in 1965 by the Menzies Government-a study into Australia's tourist potential. That was followed by more detailed studies into the Great Barrier Reef and the Ayers Rock and Mount Olga regions which ultimately resulted in the Yulara Village concept. Tourism in the early 1970s was one of those subjects that everyone gave lip service to but little more. I was one of the few who had a passionate belief in Australia's tourist potential and I spoke on the subject on many occasions. The then Leader of the Opposition, Gough Whitlam-I am going back to 1972-asked me to prepare policy recommendations for the 1972 policy speech. In 1976 I managed to convince Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to set up the House of Representatives Select Committee on Tourism which was announced in December of 1976. The work of that committee had a very profound effect on tourism in Australia when its recommendation that a 2 1/2 per cent depreciation allowance on new hotels was introduced by the Fraser Government. Those of us who saw the potential of tourism in those days were regarded by the majority of members with mild amusement. It was difficult for us to get the party executives on either side of the House to take it seriously. We argued then that it was not good enough for Australians to believe that they had a beautiful and fascinating country and that as a result millions would flock here. At the time, our accommodation by comparison with what was available in other major tourist countries was pretty ordinary. More importantly, we did not seem to realise that, fascinating as our heritage was, both natural and man-made heritage, our presentation of it was appalling. Rather than go into a long description of the inadequacies of our tourist attractions and infrastructure in the 1970s, it is easier just to point out the fantastic new facilities that have been provided over the past decade. Kakadu National Park, Uluru National Park, including Yulara Village, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, including the Great Barrier Reef Wonderland, did not even exist 10 years ago. Yet look at the extraordinary improvement in those regions in recent years. I like to think that the 4 1/2 years that I was Minister had more than a little to do with those improvements. There are many reasons for the sudden surge in tourism, including the drop in the value of the Australian dollar, the terrorist scares in Europe and the Middle East, the Australian film industry which has done so much to promote Australia overseas, and of course the excellent promotional campaign initiated by my colleague, the former Minister for Tourism, the honourable member for Parramatta (Mr John Brown), who has the good sense to be in Seoul at the moment. The Treasurer's long speech indicates that at long last the Government of Australia is taking the industry seriously. It recognises that it is not just a peripheral industry making a minor contribution to Australia's balance of payments but an industry that is a major factor in the Australian economy, its growth and its future. This is quite revolutionary, because in days gone by governments simply did not treat it seriously. The figures are so dramatic that we now find the Treasurer mentioning tourism in his opening remarks. That would never have happened five years ago, even three years ago. This year the anticipated number of tourists from overseas is 2.2 million and by 1995 the number is expected to rise to 4.5 million. I have some figures that indicate the number of jobs that have been created. In 1987 some 430,000 people were employed in the tourist industry. By 1990 that is expected to rise to 533,000 and by 1991 to 639,000. This is a huge industry which is employing a large number of Australians and particularly the sorts of young Australians and old Australians who have been unable to get work because they lack the high technological skills required for many of the new jobs that have been created in industry. We have to remember that it has not all happened by accident. The factors I mentioned earlier appear to have come together at just the right time. What we have to do is to recognise that to maintain, to increase and to meet the projected figures we cannot afford to sit back and hope it will happen. We must keep up the momentum. To do this the Government must ensure that the pattern of improvement over the past five or six years is maintained. It will not happen by itself. It will not happen just because we hope it will happen. I do not suggest for one moment that the Government is the only sector that should be responsible. Most of what needs to be done can be initiated by the private sector but there are things that only governments can do or where only governments can play a major role. For instance only governments can build the roads that are required for tourism, the airport terminals, the museums, the galleries, the national parks, the entertainment and the cultural centres. I will be dealing with that in greater detail later in this speech. The Federal Government has more than played its part in bringing our tourist infrastructure up to the equal of anything in the world. To their credit, so have State governments. No better example of this exists than the achievements of the recent New South Wales Labor Government: the Sydney Entertainment Centre, Chinatown, the Powerhouse Museum, Homebush Bay, the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Sydney Football Stadium and the much maligned Darling Harbour. One of the great eyesores of the Sydney inner city area has been revitalised with convention and exhibition centres, Chinese gardens, a national aquarium, and later next year something with which I as responsible Minister was involved in setting up-the National Maritime Museum-will open, giving Sydney one of the greatest tourist attractions in the world. Anyone who has any doubts about the success of Darling Harbour need only go there any day of the week and see the thousands of visitors enjoying themselves. As for the opposition to the monorail, I cannot recall any issue on which the opponents have been more out of sympathy with public opinion. My personal view is that it is fantastic. Sydney has been revitalised but so have many other cities. I am no admirer of the National Party in Queensland but I must pay tribute to the excellent revitalisation of the area near the World Expo site. With a new museum, art gallery and cultural centre, Brisbane is now decidedly a more attractive tourist destination than it was just a few years ago. The private sector has also taken up the challenge, and from one end of Australia to another exciting new resorts have sprung up, providing quality accommodation equal to anything in the world. Not all of them are my taste but taste is a very subjective thing. The Port Douglas resort, Yeppoon, Sanctuary Cove, Hamilton Island, the Fairmont resort at Leura, the proposed new Peppers on Sea at Terrigal in my electorate and near the electorate of the honourable member for Dobell (Mr Lee), the intelligent young man sitting here on my right, are all part of the exciting new developments that are occurring all over Australia. The private sector will build the hotels, the restaurants, the shops and provide many of the services that visitors expect and demand. Only governments can provide the infrastructure-the roads, the airports-and in most instances the national institutions that constitute such an important part of a nation's tourist attractions: its galleries, museums, theatres and cultural amenities. A lot of people in government fail to understand what it is that attracts people to a country, what they come here for in the first place and what ensures that they have a good time. We in Australia have quite rightly believed that our greatest attraction is our natural beauty: our outback, our flora and fauna and our beaches. To a degree, of course, that is correct but for a long time we failed to realise that international visitors would not put up with the poor quality of accommodation and presentation of our natural environment. That has largely been overcome, although much still remains to be done. Some first class examples of how we present our culture, our heritage and our environment are the Stockman's Hall of Fame at Longreach, the Great Barrier Reef Wonderland at Townsville and the new Powerhouse Museum at Darling Harbour. It is this interpretation for the visitors that enables them to enjoy what they are seeing and come away with a far better understanding and appreciation of Australia as a nation. Of course it achieves the same result for Australian visitors as well as those from overseas. It is in this area of interpretation that we are at last recognising how to make Australia understandably exciting and an education to everyone. That is why I now want to give the Government both a bouquet and a brickbat over this year's Budget. One of the proudest achievements of this Government and one for which I pay tribute, first of all, to Bob Hogg, the Australian Labor Party's National Secretary, and to the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) is the decision in October 1984 to establish the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). This is the institution whose responsibility it is to preserve and present to the world Australia's heritage of screen, radio and television. It is a relatively recent heritage, less than a century old, and it is only in recent years that as a nation we have started to realise how important it is to ensure that what we have, we hold. In a recent article in the Bulletin, I pointed out that 200 years from now Australians will be able to sit back and watch on television the fantastic spectacle on Sydney Harbour on Australia Day. I asked people to imagine what it would be like if we could have watched the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, an interview with Shakespeare, Drake or Napoleon, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of Waterloo or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, or just the life of ordinary people in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. I pointed out that this century is unique in that it is the only period in which true moving images and sound can be recorded for future generations. Unfortunately, until 1952, all film had been recorded on cellulose nitrate and after a period it simply disintegrates. The Archive has for years been watching hundreds of thousands of feet of our film heritage finishing up as dust. The budget and the staff of the NFSA were totally inadequate for the job of preserving the 10 million feet of film that the NFSA held in store. As a nation, we were watching our recorded film heritage disintegrate in front of our eyes. I congratulate the Government, the Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories (Senator Richardson) and the Chairman of the Archive, Mr Bob Scott, for having the commonsense to allocate an extra $2.2m for the preservation of this film. It ought to have been done some years ago but, to use the old cliche, `better late than never'. However, this excellent decision will have meaning only if the Archive is assured of continuity of funding. I find it difficult to believe that the Government does not intend to continue funding at approximately the same level for at least the next few years. It would be absurd to fund it for just one year. Equipment will have to be purchased and skilled staff found. Of course, it would be nonsensical to get the program up and running this year and abandon it next year. What is needed is a clear statement from the Minister that it is the intention of the Government to continue the program for a number of years at roughly the same level. Having said that, let me say how disappointed I am that the Government has not decided to proceed with the upgrading of the National Film and Sound Archive building. The excellent report by the Archive, Time on our Hands, which was presented to me as Minister in March 1985 highlighted the need for a new building to enable the Archive to present our heritage of moving images and recorded sound in an exciting way to the general public. What we have is a very good start, but it is a totally inadequate environment to develop an exciting display. When I was in London in 1986, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image, which at the time was under construction. Just a few nights ago I saw on television a short excerpt about the opening of this fascinating museum. It is obviously impossible to convey the exhilarating visual images of the new museum in a speech of this nature, but let me assure honourable members that it will set a new standard for museums around the world. We would do well to study the British experience. During the Estimates debate I will continue to point out that I am absolutely appalled by the Government's decision not to proceed with the National Museum of Australia. This is the brickbat that I referred to earlier. I think it is a damn disgrace. That it has occurred in 1988 does no credit to the Government. Time does not permit me to comment any further, but during the Estimates debate I will have a few things to say about the way what would have been, and will be, a great national institution has been pigeonholed for at least five years. I hope that by the time I speak during the Estimates debate this matter will have been reconsidered, because it is a shame and a disgrace that, of all years, it is 1988 in which we are abandoning the National Museum of Australia concept. Mr RUDDOCK(Dundas)(9.25) —The honourable member for Robertson (Mr Cohen) apologised for taking so much time. Given that the honourable member had so much to say, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that it may have been one of the last occasions on which he will be speaking. He offered some brickbats and bouquets. That, in a sense, takes him out of the class of many of his colleagues who seem to be very much of the ilk of offering largely self-congratulations to the Government on its effort in relation to the Budget that is now under discussion. I would be the last person to be a spoilsport in these matters, but I must say that I am not as sanguine as Government members about the Budget document. I am not convinced that it addresses the fundamental problems still faced by our economy. When this Labor Government came to office it ignored the opportunities that were before it to deal with the fundamental issues that were facing this nation and we are still at a point where, because of certain rather temporary respites in the international scene, the Government believes that decisions necessary for our long term future can be postponed. We saw it first and foremost when the Labor Government came to office and failed to take advantage of the breaking of the drought. Then the decisions taken by the Fraser Government on the wages front were largely abandoned. We now have a situation in which, in a sense, the Government has been able to increase taxation significantly as a result of the way that our taxation system is structured and we have seen some advances in the efforts towards balancing the Budget-not by cutting expenditure but by increasing taxation. That is used as the basis for arguing that our long term debt problems have been overcome. The debt problems have been addressed only as a consequence of the changes that have occurred to date in the taxation system. What we have seen in relation to this Budget is a rather slick presentation, particularly with respect to the debt situation. The slickness occurs in the way that the Treasurer (Mr Keating) has gone off with his chequebook and made certain repayments with respect to government debt-and he is doing so again this year-as if the fundamental problems had been overcome. The fundamental problems do not relate to the Government's Budget; they relate to the way that this nation trades. If one looks at the Budget Papers tabled by the Treasurer when the Budget was brought down, one will see that our balance on current account is still in a most parlous situation. According to the table on page 23 of the Budget Papers, each year from 1983-84 we have had a negative balance on current account. In fact, in 1983-84 it was $7.3 billion; in 1984-85, $11.1 billion; in 1985-86, $14.8 billion; in 1986-87, $13.2 billion; and in 1987-88, $11.9 billion. There has been a marginal reduction this year compared with last year, and the Budget Papers give the reason for that: there has been stronger than expected world economic activity stimulating export receipts, particularly through sharp increases in commodity prices. We know from experience of late that that can be a very temporary phenomenon. We also know that because we have not been balancing our books nationally-and I am not talking about the Government's Budget; I am talking in terms of our ability to sell goods and services abroad-we are making less money than we spend on buying goods and services from abroad. To put it in personal terms, this country is functioning in much the same way as an individual would function in the community, spending more money than he or she was prepared to earn by way of income. This nation is faced with exactly the same problem nationally that any individual would face in those circumstances. The Budget Papers reveal that situation as well. It is appropriate that people should look at the situation that we face. If we as individuals were spending more than we were earning, we would either sell off some of our capital assets or we would borrow additional money to be able to continue living. We find in the Budget Papers that we as a nation have continued to get 70 per cent of our net capital inflow as a result of borrowing. That is the predominant form of capital inflow, to make up for our losses on trade. We hear a great deal of comment about foreign investment in Australia. We hear in relation to my capital, Sydney, about Japanese investment, Asian investment, Hong Kong investment. Unless we obtain investment to make up for the loss on trade, we will not be able to balance the national books. If we want to address the problem of others investing in Australia-if we see that as a problem-the only way in which we are realistically going to do that is to bring about some fundamental changes in the way in which the Australian economy functions. It seems to me that the Government has clearly failed in this Budget to address those fundamental questions. The Opposition has endeavoured to give thought to these questions and has done so particularly in its industrial relations policy. In the area of wages and salaries it wants to see people rewarded for effort, rewarded for incentive, and not simply rewarded for increases in costs as a result of inflation. We want to see wage flexibility whereby those in this nation who are performing better are rewarded more effectively. In particular, there ought to be an awareness of the way in which there is a rigidity in our system which significantly disadvantages young people and our economy. I have before me a table which shows that in 1973, when the Whitlam Government first came to office, 1.7 per cent of all males were unemployed. That was the unemployment rate. For married females the rate was 3 per cent, and for all females it was 3.6 per cent. In 1975 for males it was 3.7 per cent. That was when the Fraser Government came to office. It was 5.8 per cent for married females and for all females it was 6.8 per cent. For this year the rate in relation to males is 6.7 per cent. For married females it is 5.3 per cent and for all females it is 7.9 per cent. Those figures reveal that more males in the work force are unemployed and that married women have been coming into the work force at a comparatively greater rate and taking up employment positions. These figures have resulted very much because married women are obtaining employment ahead of young people, particularly young males. Our wage system has a great deal to do with that particular difficulty which we face. There are one or two other aspects of the Budget that I would like to mention briefly tonight, in the time available to me. The principal issue of concern to me about Australia's Budgets in recent years has been the continuing decline of expenditure in real terms in Australia's overseas aid commitment. Under this Labor Government, in 1985-86 aid fell in real terms by minus 4.6 per cent. In 1986-87, it fell by minus 11.9 per cent. In 1987-88 it fell by minus 2.6 per cent. This year is the first year in which we have seen a very marginal increase. It is rather amazing to note when one reads the Budget Related Paper No. 4, Australia's Overseas Aid Program 1988-89, the extent to which this Government is self-congratulatory. The statement at the beginning of the document reads: Australia will provide $1093m as official development assistance in 1988-89. This will be an increase of 1.2% in real terms on expenditure in 1987-88. Mr Tim Fischer —How much to the black African front line states? Mr RUDDOCK —Of course the Government has made some changes to the priorities it has accorded aid expenditure. It has troubled me for some time that we have been looking beyond our own region. It is desirable for aid to be spent there, if we have any self-interest, rather than in other areas. The point I want to make in the context of this debate is that it is important to remember that old dictum that charity begins at home. I heard a useful addition to that and I would like to make it here in this context: charity may begin at home, but it does not end there. It is important in the context of our Budget discussions to work to overcome the significant difficulties we face as a nation, to accept the responsibilities that we have as a developed nation, and to accept, particularly in the aid area, the need to constructively and effectively contribute. One of the Government's most severe shortcomings in recent years has been the extent to which we have tried to overcome our own problems by punishing those in our own region and those in the world who are a lot worse off than ourselves. Mr TICKNER(Hughes)(9.38) —The occasion of the passage of the Appropriation Bills through the Parliament provides an opportunity for members of parliament, particularly back bench members of the Government, to rise on issues of concern. Sometimes those issues are of a local nature, sometimes they are of a regional or State nature, and sometimes they are of national significance. Most often they are matters of partisan concern. I propose to raise tonight some issues which I believe transcend party politics and some which, by their very nature, will affect future life on earth. As an advanced and relatively prosperous nation, Australia is well placed to play a key role in resolving some of the looming global environmental issues which I will refer to. I believe that to do that we need a bipartisan national commitment. I also believe that parliamentarians have a role to play in stimulating public debate and the support of the community so very necessary to sustain government action. I turn now to the issues. One of the consequences of the release of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) inhalants into the atmosphere through industrial usage and through personal usage of a variety of spray cans containing chemicals is that chlorine is released. This acts as a catalyst that speeds up the breakdown of ozone. This results in a lower level of ozone being produced in the upper atmosphere. This is no longer a matter of mere academic interest, because the crunch issue for human civilisation is that that ozone filters out much of the sun's ultraviolet radiation. As a result of that ozone depletion people will be increasingly exposed to higher levels of a potentially dangerous form of radiation. As the United Nations environment program has concluded, increased amounts of damaging ultraviolet radiation (UVB) on the earth's surface causes skin cancer and eye disease, slow plant growth, are lethal to marine algae and break down the chemical structure of paints and plastics. Currently between 10 and 30 per cent of the sun's UVB reaches the earth's surface. If ozone levels were to fall by 10 per cent, the amount of UVB reaching the earth's surface would increase by about 20 per cent. Worldwide some 100,000 people die every year from skin cancer and UVB is implicated in most cases. It is not an overstatement to say that horrendous implications would result if we allowed the continuing deterioration of the ozone layer. Fortunately, both in Australia and internationally, action is being taken on the issue. The US banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons in aerosols in 1978; the European Economic Community (EEC) has introduced its own regulations and some countries, such as Belgium and the Nordic countries, have, in effect, banned CFC production altogether. A convention for the protection of the ozone layer was adopted in Vienna in 1985 by 21 states and the EEC at a conference organised by the United Nations environment program. Australia has signed and ratified the convention. The convention further required protocols to be established to reduce the CFC problem and the Montreal Protocol was agreed to in September 1987. Australia has already signed that protocol. Those of us who take an interest in international affairs know how painfully slow it is to get coordinated international action and the fact that the convention and the protocols have been developed so relatively quickly is an indication of the gravity of the issue involved in the depletion of the ozone layer. The next step is to give effect within Australia to that treaty and I am pleased to note that on 12 July the Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories, Senator Richardson, announced that the Government had approved the drafting of legislation to give effect to that protocol. The legislation will place limitations on the supply in Australia of the substances and will also include provisions to ensure that all practical steps are taken to reduce emissions of harmful substances. That involves the use of CFCs in refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, the production of plastic foams in some aerosol sprays and as solvent and degreasing agents in dry-cleaning and the electronics industry, while halons are used for some fire protection purposes. As Senator Richardson said, Australia truly is at the forefront of international action on this issue and our controls will go well beyond those called for in the Montreal Protocol. I commend the Minister for what he has done. This is an important and prompt initiative and I believe it deserves-and I hope it will receive-the support of the Opposition. But I want to say that we can do even more. Firstly, we should take the initiative internationally to put more stringent restrictions in place than those imposed by the Montreal Protocol. Australia is a country which can be a positive and driving force for good in the world, far beyond our borders and far more significantly than our small population would warrant. We know that in the field of human rights protection and in relation to disarmament Australia has spearheaded some initiatives which have led the world. In the field of environmental protection we can do a lot more and take an equivalent lead. At this point I pay tribute to what the honourable member for Dunkley (Mr Chynoweth) has done. He, perhaps more than any other member, has spoken on this and related issues on many occasions in the Parliament. Mr Tim Fischer —What about the honourable member for La Trobe on Antarctica? Mr TICKNER —Indeed, as the honourable member interjects, there are other honourable members who lead on other issues and I do not wish to detract from them, but I believe the honourable member for Dunkley has made a very important contribution on this issue. A further proposal that I wish to make on this issue is to call on the Government to establish an effective monitoring system to measure the ozone levels in Australia. This could be done by setting up a network of Dobson spectrophotometers which would enable those measurements to be made. I believe that the expenditure would be a very worthwhile contribution of taxpayers' funds. I turn to another global environmental problem which demands a global solution and no one government can deliver that. That issue is, of course, the greenhouse effect. In essence the greenhouse effect is a predicted global warming of the earth expected to result in an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere. This increased level of certain gases allows sunlight to reach the earth's surface, but reduces the amount of infra-red radiation that escapes into space. The greenhouse effect has become more serious with the dramatic increase in the use of fossil fuel as a source of heat energy in the course of this century. This is one of the matters on which we must all reflect a lot more because things are happening so very quickly. Matters that were not even an issue on the political agenda in this country 10 years ago are now looming as critical issues. Perhaps I could relate a short story within my own experience. I had the opportunity, with the Speaker and a number of my colleagues and members of the Opposition, to participate in a parliamentary delegation to Poland in 1986. While we were in that country we went to Krakow, a very old city which has quite priceless buildings and memories of a bygone age. We found that there had been more damage caused to those buildings in the space of the last 20 years because of acid rain than there had been in the previous 1,000 years. It had been that dramatic. Those are the kinds of changes in the world that we are talking about which demand a coordinated global response. I return to the greenhouse effect. The accumulation in the atmosphere of those gases of which I spoke acts to trap heat in the lower atmosphere, thus warming the earth. The main gases, in addition to carbon dioxide, include CFCs, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. Scientists predict that the warming of the global climate in the next 50 years will so change the world's climate that it will cause a rise in the sea level by at least one metre due to thermal expansion of the oceans. It will also change rainfall patterns and result in more intense and widely distributed storms. Mr Barrie Pitlock of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) concluded last year that it was highly probable that over the next several decades climatic changes of unprecedented magnitude in human history would take place. The United Nations environment program has estimated that the build-up of gases is likely to increase the temperature of the earth's surface by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees celsius by the year 2030-hopefully in my lifetime and that of most honourable members here. Clearly that would be sufficient to have a major effect on the earth's climate as even during the last ice age the earth's temperature was only about 5 degrees cooler than it is now. If the changes occur as predicted, in the northern latitudes winters will be shorter and wetter and summers longer and drier. Subtropical regions might become even drier than they are now and tropical regions even wetter. The consequences for human civilisation would be absolutely extraordinary. These changes have an effect on agriculture and natural ecosystems. The United Nations environment program concludes that there is an urgent need for international action to minimise the future greenhouse warming and its social effects. The Government deserves to be commended for a whole range of environmental decisions taken in the course of its period in office, ranging from the historic decision to stop the flooding of the Franklin River and declaring of 98.5 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef as a marine park to the protection of endangered species and the establishment of a national rainforest program. The list goes on and on. But in relation to the greenhouse effect the record is not good. It is for that reason that I seek, in this debate, to give the Government a prod. It is the role of the back bench member to speak out on issues and to call for government action when it is warranted. That is my purpose here tonight. I am glad that the honourable member for Dunkley, whom I have already praised in the course of my remarks, is here to join me in that call. The state of play at the moment is this: there is no international coordinated action. In our own country, the Australian Environment Council, consisting of Commonwealth, State and Territory environment Ministers, has recognised climate change due to the greenhouse effect as being a major policy issue and has commenced a review of its potential impact. The Commonwealth Department of the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories is involved in the consideration of the issue at a national level and is contributing to discussions within the international arena. But I remind the Government that the Australian Labor Party national policy calls on the Government, `To urgently implement and maintain research into the greenhouse effect, providing support and incentives for scientific collaboration and study into the effectiveness of alternative policies and adjustments'. Regrettably, little action has been taken to give effect to this policy. In fact, I am informed that there have been cuts to Australia's major research body, the CSIRO, in this area. I am informed that the CSIRO has recently been refused additional funds for research into the greenhouse effect. I am confident that the Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories, Senator Richardson and the Minister for Science, Customs and Small Business (Mr Barry Jones) support increased funding in this area. I call on the Government to give effect to that Party policy. My time has run out, but let me say this by way of conclusion: the issues that I have raised are just two of the issues of tomorrow. They are the politics of tomorrow. To debate these issues in the national Parliament of Australia in 1988 is an aberration. In 10 years time the front bench of the Opposition and the government of the day will be dealing with these issues as major crisis issues. Let us not wait until then. Let us act now. Mr TIM FISCHER(Farrer)(9.53) —Tonight I would like to deal with the matters of taxation and repatriation in relation to the Budget before the House. But first I would like to turn to the speech made by the honourable member for Robertson (Mr Cohen). I point out that the last two Government speakers-the honourable member for Robertson and the honourable member for Hughes (Mr Tickner)-have grossly exceeded the 10-minute agreement in respect of this debate. But that aside, the honourable member for Robertson painted the picture that tourism was a golden industry in Australia today thanks largely to the efforts of the Federal Labor Government. Let us put that in perspective on three counts. Firstly, as my colleague the honourable member for Gilmore (Mr Sharp) has so successfully pointed out, the Labor Government has done nothing in relation to penalty rates in the tourist industry. It expects the product to turn on at 9 a.m. and turn off at 5 p.m., whereas the tourist industry needs great flexibility in its employment awards. It needs around the clock flexibility. It needs weekend trading and the ability to staff restaurants, hotels, motels and the like at all hours. The industry is being denied this flexibility by the Government. Secondly, it was a previous coalition government that proceeded with the World Heritage listing of the Willandra Lakes region, and the exciting Mungo National Park on the border of my electorate and the electorate of Riverina-Darling. Full credit for that goes to the government of the day. Thirdly-I am pleased to see the Minister for Telecommunications and Aviation Support (Mr Punch) at the table-this Government is contributing to one of the greatest areas of congestion in relation to the tourist industry: the gateway to Australia, Mascot international airport in Sydney. It is a horrifying signal to the tourist industry that the Minister at the table is now the Minister for Telecommunications and Aviation Support. What a signal to send to the tourist industry! This is the man who has led the battle to expand the curfews. This is the man who has restricted runway expansion at Mascot airport, which would have been a commonsense solution to the problems there. Now the Federal Labor Government has appointed as Minister for Aviation Support the greatest ever perpetrator of addition to the congestion at Mascot airport-the Minister at the table tonight. It will be interesting to find out who the Minister will be backing in the Kingsford-Smith preselection coming up very shortly, whether it will be Major Hoenig, who has some runs on the board in terms of his activity on these issues or whether it will be Laurie Brereton, the ex-silvertail from Macquarie Street. This is very relevant to the future of the tourist industry because it is relevant to boosting the future efficiency of the gateway to Australia, Mascot international airport. I turn to the matter of taxation. The Government has certainly broken all records on the taxation front as part of its out of touch, arrogant approach to the governance of our great country. It is worth putting on the record once again that the average income earner will need $56 a week by 1 July next just to restore his real income to the level it was when Labor came to power in March 1983. The Treasurer (Mr Keating) will collect $47.6 billion in taxation from individuals over the coming 12 months, which is $5.7 billion more than last year. The Treasurer clearly holds the crown as Australia's highest taxing Treasurer. He will add a new notch to that crown during this financial year. Many Australians will pay much more in tax because of bracket creep. The Treasurer will take the extra money for another 12 months and then give only some of it back under the so-called tax cuts, if they occur, in the middle of next year. Under Labor hard work in Australia is rewarded by extraordinarily high taxes. We had the Treasurer dancing around the international money circuit in Berlin overnight making grand gestures to the effect that he is single-handedly paying off the debt of this nation. He is doing so by degrees-and only by very small degrees-on the backs of Australian taxpayers who, in many cases, are being taxed out of existence. While dealing with this arrogant, out of touch Treasurer who cannot get off the capital city circuit, let me highlight to the House certain matters which are reasonable to raise because they deal with Federal Government expenditure. I do so only in passing, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a matter of public record that the Treasurer spent nil on charter aircraft last financial year, but $113,045 on official Commonwealth car costs. I do not begrudge him the latter-he has to get around the capital city circuit-but I do begrudge him the first item, the nil expenditure on charter aircraft. I object to that because it reflects the fact that the Treasurer never gets on a charter aircraft to come bush, to come out to the real Australia, to see what the real conditions are in places like Blackall and Longreach, which are still suffering drought after many years. They have not enjoyed the golden revival of the primary industries which is occurring elsewhere in Australia with the better seasonal conditions. The Treasurer never leaves the capital city circuit-the six major capital cities and the national capital. Sure, one does not run the economy from Bourke or Balranald or Buronga but, by God, it would help a great deal if the Treasurer would observe the situation of inland Australia, if he would take into account in his deliberations or, at the very least, be seen to be making an effort to get away from the capital city circuit to look at what is happening in the real Australia which contributes so much to the well-being and standard of living of all Australians through its export income. So I do very much object to the fact that the Treasurer spent nil dollars on charter aircraft last financial year, and I challenge him, or his office in his absence, to produce one diary entry from the last five years indicating that he has done an extensive day's activity in inland Australia or in places other than capital cities. That would be some edification for honourable members on both sides of the House. The Minister now at the table, the Minister for Land Transport and Shipping Support (Mr Robert Brown), does go up the Hunter Valley and beyond, but that is in sharp contrast to the Treasurer. I turn to repatriation and veterans' affairs. This is one area in the Budget in which the Government has backed down. The Budget was intact for less than four weeks before the Federal Cabinet had to meet hurriedly one night back here in Canberra to resolve a matter concerning the retrospective aspects of its income assessment package and its impact on age and service pensioners. They had to come scurrying back to Canberra for a special Cabinet meeting, due perhaps not to the rightness of their ultimate decision but to the priority of the Victorian election. Labor is rapidly losing support in the lead-up to the polling day next Saturday. Indeed, messages have been flowing in from people all over Victoria and elsewhere. The campaign by members of the Opposition front bench, including the shadow Minister for Social Security, the honourable member for Bradfield (Mr Connolly), has led to the Government backing down on the retrospective aspects as they pertained to income assessment testing for both age and service pensioners. I know that John Arnold in Mildura and many others have helped influence this outcome by their input to me and others, requesting a fair deal for veterans and a fair deal for our age and service pensioners. We have a complex situation in that in the Government's backdown, in its abolition of retrospectivity, it has actually created a series of other categories and complex cut-offs which time does not permit me to deal with tonight. The veterans, the age and service pensioners, are still being short changed by the details of the Government's proposals. As we are being broadcast, I suggest that veterans might like to write to my office at Parliament House here in Canberra. I will be happy to send them details in relation to this matter and details of the Liberal-National Party's veterans' affairs policy, which is all about a fair go for veterans. That policy was launched during the winter recess. It lays out a new initiative for an extreme disability adjustment, and did so weeks ahead of the Budget in line with the independent monitoring committee report. I am rather pleased that the extreme disability adjustment was subsequently picked up by this Government and will be the subject of Budget legislation later this year. So our policy was a catalyst at least for that aspect of the Budget. On the broader front, let me say that the Government has yet to come to any decision on the defence service home loans scheme. That scheme ought to be renamed the defence service caravan loans scheme, so greatly has the value of the loans been eroded over recent years. The Government has failed to make any increase. I must say that the Budget is a very big gamble in respect of the commodity-price equation which the Treasurer presented to this House just a few weeks ago. It is indeed a high risk Budget from an arrogant Government which is out of touch with the people of Australia, in particular the people of inland Australia. Ms JAKOBSEN(Cowan)(10.04) —It is a pleasure to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) and the Budget. It was also a pleasure to hear the contribution of the honourable member for Hughes (Mr Tickner) earlier on a matter of great concern to all Australians and to most people around the world. I start by reiterating that Australia is beginning to thrive again. No doubt that comment will not be heralded by the Opposition, but that is because the Opposition is very short-sighted on these matters. The sustained improvement under this Government can be seen in stark contrast to the continuing decline under the previous coalition Government. The Budget's philosophy, if one can call it that, was to pay off some debt, maintain reform, overcome inflation, and pave the way for affordable tax cuts and sustainable increases in real after-tax incomes. The $5.5 billion surplus follows last year's surplus of $2 billion and is a significant achievement for any government. It is an especially significant achievement for a Labor government which was struggling to overcome the debt problems it inherited from the previous coalition Government. Why do we need a surplus? We need it to boost business investment, to reduce import pressures, and to cut interest payments. The Treasurer (Mr Keating) has now paid off a substantial amount of the country's national debt. Opposition claims that this surplus was achieved through increased taxes are nonsense and have no foundation. Commonwealth revenues will fall relative to the economy in 1988-89 for the second successive year. The accord with the unions and the workers of Australia has contributed markedly to the improvement in the economy. It has helped to create more than a million new jobs, 85 per cent of which are in the private sector. Simultaneously, Australia's unemployment rate has dropped to 7 per cent, from 10.3 per cent when Labor came to office in 1983. Inflation is coming down. It was 11.5 per cent in 1983, and our target is 4.5 per cent for 1989. Business investment is rising. Moderate wage increases are in train and further tax cuts will be forthcoming next year. In 1988-89 Australia's balance of payments will be the lowest in nine years, and again that is a significant achievement. Notwithstanding all the other aspects of the Budget which deserve discussion in this place-and we have heard some discussion about them in the debate to date-employment, training and social security are the areas upon which I would like to concentrate. This Budget contains progressive policies, some of which I shall go through. The `New Start' program is of significant assistance to long term unemployed people between 21 and 54 years of age. It offers a range of assistance and incentives for these people to improve their employability. The Budget allocation of $114m over the next 3 1/2 years will assist in implementing this strategy, which is to be coordinated across departments. Another program, the jobs, education and training program, or JET, is designed to enable sole parent pensioners to become more economically independent by assisting them to enter the work force and lift themselves out of poverty. This is a particularly important initiative, given the difficulties that sole parents face in endeavouring to gain employment. The third aspect I would like to draw to the House's attention is the return to work allowance, or job entry payment, of $100 to assist with the costs of taking up employment, such as transport and clothing. This may not seem to be incredibly important to people who have a reasonable bank balance, but lack of money for clothes, et cetera, can be a significant disincentive and in fact a barrier to people who have been out of the work force for a long time, if indeed they have ever been in it. In the area of counselling services, provision has been made for 40,000 intensive interviews each year to permit Department of Social Security and Commonwealth Employment Service staff to personally counsel, assess and refer participants to help them obtain the most appropriate training and education and to identify suitable employment opportunities. This Budget has also made a significant provision for childcare. There is to be an increase of 30,000 places, of which 20,000 will be out of school care places. In regard to training, we will be doubling the places in labour market programs to 50,000. Information processing again may not seem to be an important aspect, but it is most important and there will be a joint Commonwealth Employment Service-Department of Social Security information package. Many people in this House will be aware that the lack of coordination of departmental activities can cause much distress and confusion to any beneficiary seeking assistance. The cooperation that has been exhibited recently by the departments concerned is admirable and I congratulate the Minister for Employment, Education and Training (Mr Dawkins), the Minister for Social Security (Mr Howe) and the Minister for Employment and Education Services (Mr Duncan) on their part in achieving cohesion in the important areas of service delivery, job training and assistance to unemployed people, other social security beneficiaries seeking employment and also low income working families. This type of cooperation has been called for by members of the public and members of this Parliament for some time. Indeed, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, of which I am a member, recently tabled a report called `Getting to Work', which highlighted the barriers confronting social security recipients attempting to enter or re-enter the work force. To the Government's great credit, many of its recommendations have been taken up in the Budget, even though the Government's official response has not yet been received. For instance, recommendation No. 1 of the report concerns an easing of the work test to include other relevant job search activities, such as part time and casual employment, training and education-an elementary recommendation, one would have thought, but one which has been a long time coming from all governments concerned in the process of trying to assist long term unemployed. This recommendation is taken up in the proposed `New Start' program, which is designed to assist long term unemployed people to improve their employability. It permits a wider range of vocationally relevant activity, such as short term courses, while on unemployment benefit and also the waiver of waiting periods when reclaiming benefits in certain circumstances. Recommendations 7 and 8 of `Getting to Work' highlight the need to increase access to counselling and indicate that the Department of Social Security counselling and reporting responsibilities should be expanded to include advice to social security recipients about suitable education, training and employment programs before recipients lose entitlement to pension or benefit. This is a matter which I know the honourable member for Moncrieff (Mrs Sullivan) has taken up at some length, and she is to be given credit for putting that in the report. Again, as part of the `New Start' program, 40,000 intensive interviews, as I mentioned earlier, will now be undertaken each year and the staff of the Department of Social Security and the Commonwealth Employment Service will provide personal counselling, assessment and referral for participants. Recommendation No. 17 of the report says that preparatory courses on the model of the `New opportunities for women' course should be developed as an introduction to training or employment. These are module courses which can precede any other training. `New Start' incorporates a doubling of places on labour market programs to 50,000, including a range of preparatory and vocational training opportunities, subsidised work experience and job search assistance to suit the needs of individual job seekers. I know that the Government views very seriously the need for a short course to introduce people to training where those people have not had training before. Recommendation No. 17 emphasises the need to provide a return to work allowance, paid as an advance, for social security recipients who have been out of the workplace for a long time. This also has been included in the Budget. The sum of $100 is a very necessary part of the Government's undertaking. Again, it may not seem much; but, as I have indicated, it is very important for people who have no money at all in the bank and who confront a financial barrier when seeking work and wish to be appropriately dressed, or at least to be able to get there on time by catching transport, or perhaps even by hiring a car on the first occasion. The social security review describes the prerequisites of a system to help people find work in the following way. The first prerequisite is that clear information be provided as to what is expected of the participants or beneficiaries. The second is that there be encouragement as well as penalty. The third looks to the provision of the necessary training resources and continuing information being made available. The fourth prerequisite is that the requirements are generally regarded as reasonable and achievable. Although administrative arrangements in the relevant departments have not always satisfied these criteria, measures contained in the Budget should go a long way towards improving that situation. To conclude, I remind the House that the Budget we are debating is one which carries a lot of good news-that is, that the economy is on the way back to prosperity, with inflation falling, real wage increases in the wings, business investment strong, rates of job growth robust and tax cuts for workers proposed from 1 July 1989. Specific items that are worth reiterating include `New Start' for jobless people; jobs, education and training for sole parents; 30,000 extra child care places; increases in Austudy and Abstudy; increases in family allowance supplement payments; and additional assistance for disabled veterans. The achievements in this Budget were made possible only by the continued success of the Government's economic strategy. That has been no small feat and was possible only because of the unity of purpose of our Party in government. I congratulate the Treasurer and commend the Bill to the House. Mr TUCKEY(O'Connor)(10.16) —The honourable member for Cowan (Ms Jakobsen) spent a large proportion of her speech talking about new job proposals. One would hope that those proposals have a better future than Priority One. It appears that so far the Government is not using most of the money to advertise the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke). Let us hope that some of the things the Government will do this time will be a little more successful than its previous attempts in that arena. If we were to use the words of the Treasurer (Mr Keating) in describing this Budget, we know that he would say that it is another of his economic miracles. I am fed up with the Treasurer's economic miracles. Every time he delivers one, I pay more taxation, as do my constituents and as do all Australians. I am a bit fed up with Bernie Fraser's errand boy loading up the Australian people with more and more tax under the guise of good economic management. It is not the way to run a government or the way to run a country. Everything that this Government has done in the way of economic management has meant more tax and generally higher interest rates to boot-and, until recently, much higher national debt. We see this most clearly on page 15 of Budget Paper No. 4, which gives an indication that is clearly and easily measured. The nation, its population and investment are growing; but, when one seeks to measure taxation per capita as shown by the table on page 15, one sees what a crushing burden tax is to ordinary Australians. In the column at the bottom of the page, one sees that the tax burden for ordinary Australians is $5,317.16 per capita-and that is arrived at by dividing all Australians into all taxes levied. Someone in a future debate will say that that includes company tax and that ordinary Australians do not pay company tax. Let me say that those people pay most of that tax. All of those who understand these things and who read the newspapers see companies declaring their after tax profits and after tax dividends. If they are providing consumer goods to the Australian community, the tax is part of the price. Whatever way one looks at it, by one means or another one sees that the average four-unit Australian family is contributing by way of taxation of one sort or another, whether in the form of sales tax, liquor excise or personal income tax, $21,268.64c per annum. I remember referring at one time to the cost of Medicare and saying that it was quite foolish for pensioners to say that they do not pay the Medicare levy because when pensioners buy a tin of pet food for their cat or dog they are contributing to the tax revenues through sales tax. I have made the point that even company taxes contribute to that burden-namely, $21,268.64c per family, which is the average tax burden in this Budget. More importantly, when we look at page 15 of Budget Paper No. 4 again, we find that the per capita tax collections for last year were $5,042.02. That amount is lower than the amount for this year by $275.14. So the bottom line for this miracle Budget is that each Australian man, woman and child, the total population of Australia, must find this year an additional $275 in tax to satisfy the Treasurer's demand for money to run the Government as he sees fit. To put it another way, the Budget Papers also tell us that wages will increase this year by an estimated 5.75 per cent, but pay as you earn tax collections will increase by 13.6 per cent. Of course, that is the effect of wage growth and the forcing of ordinary Australians into high marginal tax brackets, otherwise known as bracket creep. The Opposition has estimated that, in order to return to the sort of tax levels that the ordinary average weekly earning family paid before the day of the Hawke-Keating Administration, there needs to be a tax cut of $56 a week. The problem for Australians is that they are funding the Treasurer's economic miracle. The much trumpeted Budget surplus of $5.5 billion is exceeded by the increase in personal tax of $5.7 billion. So $200m more than the Budget surplus is being collected by way of personal income tax. The honourable member for Cowan told us that this surplus has nothing to do with taxation. The honourable member probably has to balance a family budget. Certainly, many of her constituents have to do so. Would it not be nice if one were running a family budget and could say to one's husband, `I'm sorry, I have a bit of extra spending that I want to do this week. It is no good your bringing home the usual $300 or $400. You must bring home $600 to balance with my intentions to spend and save. I want $100 to go into the savings bank and I will spend an extra $100. Husband, bring it home.'? That is not the way that it works in a family budget. It is not the way that it works in a small business budget. Those people's turnover is what they can get, and they cannot work economic miracles like the Treasurer does. They have to work within their budget. This Treasurer boasts of balancing budgets by increasing the turnover, by increasing the tax burden on ordinary Australians and, as a consequence, increasing their problems in balancing their budget at home. I put it to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that all housewives in Australia would like to be like the Treasurer. They probably would not want to be as forgetful as he is, but on the other hand they would certainly like to have the opportunity to be able to dictate, when they chose, the amount of money coming into their household. Anybody can budget under those circumstances. Another point is that we are now trumpeting about the repayment of debt. The other day the Treasurer gave back the Japanese $600m. He sold the Australian Embassy in Japan to get the money, but he made a big fuss about that. Now, of course, he has paid back another $800m and has made a big fuss about it. Tomorrow the trade figures will come out. They will show that while the Government has been doing that, the nation will be borrowing another $1,500m from the rest of the world to keep us afloat. The Budget Papers are clear. Last year, despite the Treasurer's $5.5 billion Government surplus, the nation went down the slammer, went into debt to the rest of the world, by another $11,500m, notwithstanding the magnificent effort of the rural sector to try to get Australia out of its problems again. For all the claims of politicians on both sides of the House, it is amazing that the economic fortunes of this nation and the ability of governments to raise taxes seem constantly to parallel the fortunes, good and bad, of the rural sector of Australia. In fact, we will be considerably more in debt. As I understand it, in the Budget it is predicted that we will borrow approximately another $12,000m from the world this year. Let me remind the House in that regard that the nation still borrowed what the Government predicted at the beginning of the last financial year, irrespective of the additional thousands of millions of dollars received from increased commodity prices, including wool prices. Mr Robert Brown —None of that is Government borrowing. Mr TUCKEY —The Government is not borrowing it; the Government is the cause of it being borrowed. If a government wants to take so much money from the Australian people and place it in the tax coffers, it is pretty obvious that people must borrow elsewhere. That is what they are doing. Government members are in charge of the economy. When it is going good, they want to take the credit. As soon as it goes the other way, they start to give me excuses. I want to touch on another matter that concerns me greatly-that is, some of the dissembling that occurs in the Budget Papers. On page 10 of the typescript of the Treasurer's Budget Speech-it concerns an area for which I recently had responsibility-in regard to health he said: The second major initiative is an expanded program of hospital funding involving expenditure of $3,000 million in 1988-89 and an additional $1,000 million in the next five years over and above previous arrangements. That is a clear suggestion that the Government was going to spend that extra money. Yet, when we look at the figures, we find that the Government is spending an additional $3m on health this year. It has gone in for some creative accounting. The creative accounting involves taking money from the general purpose funding for the States, which was known as `identified health grants'. Last year the figure was $1,783m which, when adjusted for inflation, gives us a figure of $1,913m. Of course, that figure has been included in the health budget, and the Government claims that that is some miraculous cure for the drastic and terrible hospital waiting lists which still exist throughout this country. There are 30,000 people on hospital waiting lists in Victoria at the moment. Page 69 of Budget Paper No. 1 refers to an additional $1,960m. When we take out $1,913m and adjust the figure for inflation, we find that the Commonwealth has actually allocated $3m less in real terms. Straight after the Budget was brought down the Minister for Community Services and Health (Dr Blewett) pointed out that he would spend $41m on a national program on better health. That is pretty encouraging, if that amount of money is to be spent. Of course, much of it would be spent on advertising. No doubt, the Minister would be featured in every advertisement. If he is not featured, the Prime Minister would be. I think the Minister might look a little healthier than the Prime Minister does, so they might use his face in the advertisements. The suggestion is that the Government in this financial year will spend $41m on a better health program. When we look at the Budget Papers we find that the Government is going to do nothing of the sort; it will spend $1m on its much vaunted better health program. It is a bit different from sending ex-members of parliament on trips. People from all over the world were invited to a World Health Organisation conference held in Adelaide. The Minister told the conference all about his better health program. When we look at the details in the Budget Papers, we find that he will spend $1m on it. That will be a great help, as is the $3m less that he will spend on trying to overcome the disastrous circumstances created by his policies in terms of hospital waiting lists. I could talk about the 53 drugs that the Minister is taking off the free list, to the great inconvenience and suffering of many Australians. I do not know how Labor Party backbenchers can possibly allow that to occur. Mr Deputy Speaker, I understand that there are time constraints. I have not talked about interest rates. Of course, they are disastrous, having regard to any international comparison. In closing, it is probably worthwhile to point out that in Australia the prime lending rate, as published in the Economist the other day, is 15.5 per cent; in Canada, 11.25 per cent; in France, 9.25 per cent; in West Germany, 6 per cent; in Japan, 3.38 per cent; in the United Kingdom, 13 per cent; and in the United States of America, 10 per cent. If that represents an economic miracle, I will be surprised. All the evidence shows that interest rates will be higher. People will again find it almost impossible to buy a family home. I do not agree that that is a measure of good government. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) -Order! It being 10.30 p.m., the debate is interrupted. I propose the question: That the House do now adjourn. Mr Robert Brown-I require that the question be put forthwith without debate. Question resolved in the negative. (Budget Debate) Debate resumed. Mr CHYNOWETH(Dunkley)(10.30) —This evening I rise just to say a few words in relation to Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 1988-89. First of all I would like to say a little about what was said by the honourable member for O'Connor (Mr Tuckey). He said that the Government owes billions in overseas debt. It is not the Government that owes billions. We owe a bit, that is correct, but in round figures, I think 60 per cent of all overseas debt is owed by the private sector. It is owed by the Bonds and the Elliotts of this world. Maybe Mr Elliott has borrowed a bit overseas to pay for his holiday shack in the south of France or wherever he goes. I am not quite certain what he borrows the money for but I am quite certain that the average person in Australia does not owe the amount of money that was mentioned by the honourable member for O'Connor. We do not owe it. The Bonds and the Elliotts and the overseas borrowers owe a large percentage. The other 40 per cent is broken up. I think about 20 per cent is owed by the State governments and the other 20 per cent is owed by the Federal Government. This evening I would like to speak about what is happening in the Victorian State election campaign that is under way. I would like to mention the great candidates that we have standing for the Mornington Peninsula. Jane Hill is standing for Frankston North. She has been a member of the Cain Labor Government and has done a great deal of work for the people of that electorate. I think the person who is standing against her for the Liberal Party of Australia is the person who stood against the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) some time ago. She does not even live in the electorate; she has just been shot down there to fill a spot for the Liberal Party. Mr Snow —To give them a bit of practice. Mr CHYNOWETH —Yes, to give the Liberals a bit of a run, to see how they go. They did not win at the last start so they might as well give it another go. Tony Moore is the candidate for Frankston South and I can assure the House that he will make a great member. If we could actually print this photograph of him in Hansard honourable members would be able to see what a great member he would be and what a clean, fresh-faced chap he is. I am quite certain that he will make an excellent member for Frankston South. Barry Smith will be the future member for Mornington. Since the last State election the demographics of the peninsula have changed completely. Many of the present Liberal members there will just be thrown straight out because the people are aware that they have done nothing. Only the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on the State scene and Labor Party candidates have achieved anything. So Barry Smith will definitely win Mornington. Of course, Rob Reilly is the candidate for Dromana and he will definitely win. Mr Snow —A very good candidate. Mr CHYNOWETH —Yes, he is excellent. Of course, Rob is the shire president for the Flinders Shire. This is the first time that an ALP person has ever been shire president of Flinders Shire, which is a very conservative area. When I was the member for Flinders I was never even invited down to the local council. I do not know why; it might have been my politics. I am quite certain that the council did not just overlook me. The other candidate, who is in the upper House, is Burwyn Davidson. He will be a great member for the Chelsea province. I am quite certain that he will make a great contribution to the next Cain Labor Government. Down our way there has been a lot of Federal and State cooperation. Just recently the Prime Minister and Premier John Cain announced that they were handing over Point Nepean to the people of Victoria. Mr Lamb —A top move. Mr CHYNOWETH —It is a top move, a great move. We have been trying to get that piece of land for the people of Victoria from the Commonwealth for many years. I can remember, when I was the member for Flinders back in 1984, giving a speech in which I said that it should be returned. It has taken a long time and we have finally done it. The Prime Minister handed over the title I think last Sunday week. I was there for the hand over. I mention the progress that Joan Kirner's Department has made there in putting a road through to the forts at the end of Point Nepean and the amount of infrastructure that is being put in-a tourist information centre and various walks for people to walk all around Point Nepean to have a look at it. Mr McGauran —It sounds as if they are destroying it. Mr CHYNOWETH —The honourable member for Gippsland has never been there. This land cannot be bought so the honourable member obviously has not been down there to see it. It was not up for sale. Mr McGauran —I would put a hotel there. Mr CHYNOWETH —The honourable member would put a hotel there. It would be as bad as the one in Lygon Street that he owns. Point Nepean is an excellent piece of land. I believe that it will be opened by about Christmas time this year and people from all over Australia will be able to travel down there. Access to it will be restricted so that there will not be any degradation of this very fragile part of Victoria. People will be able to go to the gate, pay a small fee, travel down to the point, and spend some time there looking at the gun emplacements in the forts that were built during the First World War and the Second World War. They will be able to see for themselves this part of Victoria which has been closed off for a couple of hundred years. There are two historic cannons down there which fired the first shots in both the First World War and the Second World War. They were handed over by the Commonwealth to the State and they will be on display. One other thing has been found which is quite fascinating. When the conservation and forest and lands people were clearing out some of the dugouts and fort emplacements down there they actually found the mechanism for a gun that used to fire off a shot and then disappear back into its bunker. This is unique, there are none of these left in the world. This was left over from the First World War. All of these things will be open to the public. They will be able to go there and visit this very beautiful area which, as I have said, has been handed over by the Commonwealth to the State. A lot of this work came about through the efforts of the honourable member for Reid (Mr Uren). I know that the honourable member for Robertson (Mr Cohen) went down there, as I took him, and also Senator Richardson. Many people have been down to look at that area and it has finally been given to the people of Victoria. One of the reasons that this was brought on so quickly was the strong representations that were made by Joan Kirner and Premier John Cain. We also have a unique piece of land in that area and the Federal and State governments have just announced that they will be purchasing the remaining pieces of this land which is called Greens Bush. This has been a controversial area for many years. Finally, the State and Federal governments have agreed to purchase this also for the people of Victoria. Our record in the environment and conservation area is unsurpassed by any previous government. Both the State Labor Government and the Federal Labor Government have done a great deal. These sorts of purchases and handovers that are happening in the environment and conservation area augur well for future cooperation between State and Federal governments on areas that should be the people's, that should be saved for future generations. I am certain that, with the retention of the Cain Labor Government next Saturday, they will be. Mr Snow —Smith for Dromana. Mr CHYNOWETH —We will not have Smith for Dromana; we will have Smith for Mornington. However, those candidates will all make excellent members. The State Government has done some excellent things in the area of social justice all over Victoria. I know that many thousands of people are listening to this debate tonight. Some of them are still making up their minds-not many, of course-as to who they are going to vote for on Saturday. They have a choice between Jeff Kennett and John Cain; that is what it boils down to. Mr Kent —There is no choice. Mr CHYNOWETH —I realise that there is not much of a choice but this is a democracy. We have given the people a choice. Who would the honourable member choose in that case? Mr Kent —John Cain, of course. Mr CHYNOWETH —John Cain. There is no opposition. Even members on the Opposition benches did not yell out `Jeff Kennett'. So it just shows their support for him. They had better get on the car phone to him and tell him what is going on here. There is no support for him. Even in today's Australian a bit of a survey was done and I think it shows that John Cain's popularity has gone up. It will continue to go up as people start to realise the differences between the two people. I noticed a couple of months ago that Kennett has started another strategy. The new strategy is, `Do not let him say anything and we will do all right'. His minders have been keeping him quiet for the past couple of months. He has made a few slip-ups when he has got out of their hands and things have gone wrong. They have made a few blues. The car phones were not working when the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Howard) arrived. Jeff was up in the country when John was down in Melbourne. Where were they? Why was there this animosity? Maybe John was remembering something that was said on the car phone or something like that; I do not know. Mr McGauran —I wish to raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is enough that we have to tolerate this unending drivel but when the honourable member refers to the Leader of the Opposition he is required under Standing Orders to address him in the proper form. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Rocher) —The honourable member for Dunkley will use the correct titles when he is referring to members of the House. Mr CHYNOWETH —There is a lot more to be told in relation to what is happening between Jeff Kennett and the Leader of the Opposition; however, that will probably come out in the next week or so. It will be interesting to see what happens after 1 October 1988. There is going to be some blood on the floor down in the Liberal Party rooms in Victoria; I can assure honourable members of that. Mr Lamb —It will be awash. Mr CHYNOWETH —It will be awash; yes, that is right. It is going to be very interesting and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people. However, as I said, the people of Victoria can make up their minds very soon and pick whoever they believe will be the best leader for Victoria. I might be a little biased but I can assure people that John Cain is definitely the best leader. One only has to look at what has happened in Victoria in relation to jobs. As Ministers have stated today, Victoria has had the best growth of the States in relation to jobs-and jobs are what it is all about. Getting people out of unemployment and into work gets them out of poverty traps and solves family problems. The Cain Labor Government has done this well and it will continue to do it well. I have a little indicator which shows me whether things are going well or whether they are not. It is in our local paper and it is called the employment section. When I was first elected in 1983 there were only about two pages of advertisements for jobs. Now there are about five or six pages. Industry is crying out for people in Victoria. All I can say to other people in Australia-in Queensland or Tasmania-who do not have a job because of their Government is that they should shift to Victoria, because we have got plenty of jobs there. I notice that just recently things have started dropping in New South Wales. People there should come to Victoria. We need people and we have places there to fit them into straightaway. We just cannot get enough people. The economy is expanding so rapidly. One only has to look at the skyline in Melbourne. There are cranes everywhere; there are buildings going up. When John Cain was first elected there was only one crane on the skyline and one building under construction-I think it was the Rialto. Now wherever one looks there is work, there is progress; and that has all come about because of the policies and the good government of the Cain Labor Government. I implore everyone in Victoria to think carefully about the choice between Jeff Kennett and John Cain, and I am quite certain that they will pick a winner if they pick the Premier of Victoria, John Cain, to vote for on Saturday. Mr PORTER(Barker)(10.43) —The issue I want to raise tonight is that of the aerodrome local ownership plan. For years governments, both Liberal and Labor, have argued that the only way to get a Commonwealth owned local airport upgraded is for the local government in the area to take over the running of the airport. The reason for the policy is that the local council can run the airport at lower cost than the Federal Government. The deal the Commonwealth offered was to ensure that at the time of the handover the standard of the airport and the facilities was upgraded to be sufficient for the foreseeable future use of the people in that area. The Mount Gambier community has long sought the upgrading of its airport terminal. The area is an expanding tourist destination with increasing interest in the Blue Lake, the timber industry, the caves, fishing, Coonawarra wines and many other features in the area. The local community, understandably proud of its area, wants to have as the gateway to the south-east an airport terminal which not only will provide a reasonable facility but also is in keeping with the high community standards it has fostered. The existing terminal is a World War II Nissen hut which is an abomination. I did manage, in the years of the Fraser Government, to get Peter Nixon to provide some money to put a roof over the baggage collection area at the airport terminal but otherwise governments, both Liberal and Labor, have always said no to a new terminal unless the community was willing to take over control of the airport. For many years the Mount Gambier District Council would not take on that proposal. Then, much to its credit, it said in the mid-1980s that it would discuss the options with the then Department of Aviation. After lengthy negotiations and more representations from me than I care to recall, on 26 November 1986 I received the following letter from the then Minister for Aviation, the honourable member for Shortland (Mr Peter Morris): Thank you for your letter of 8 October 1986 concerning the proposal from the Mount Gambier District Council to take over ownership of Mount Gambier Aerodrome under the Aerodrome Local Ownership Plan (ALOP). My Department has examined Council's proposal in detail and will be forwarding a report to me shortly. I am aware of the extended nature of Council's deliberations on local ownership of the aerodrome but I understand that the current proposal is a significant advance towards resolution of negotiations with my Department. Thank you for your interest in this matter. On 26 November 1986 the matter was shortly to be resolved, supposedly. Subsequently agreement was reached for a $1.9m upgrading of the airport and a transfer to local ownership. We were then told that we would have to wait until the 1987-88 Budget for funding. In order to ensure that Senator Walsh was aware of the urgency of the case I made representations to him on behalf of the south-east. In my letter to him I said: The issue has been a contentious one in the area and debate has continued for about ten years. That is the debate about local ownership. I continued: Now agreement has been reached it is essential that the Commonwealth provide the funds to ensure the matter is satisfactorily concluded. Failure to do so could mean the local community would ditch local ownership, favouring a continuation of total Commonwealth responsibility. I concluded: I . . . seek to impress on you the importance of concluding the local ownership agreement by providing the required funds. I was delighted to see that as a result of my representations and those of the district council we were rewarded in the 1987-88 Budget and that in the Budget Estimates there was the following statement is relation to the $7m Budget expenditure proposal: Provision has also been made for works associated with transfer of Mount Gambier and Onslow aerodromes where local authorities have agreed to accept transfer and for land acquisitions at Armidale for future F28 upgrading. In other words, the Government appeared to be willing to meet its commitment. The local council had agreed to take over the ownership of the airport and here was the Government allocating the funds and prepared to undertake the work. Not content to let the matter rest there, I continued to press the Department for a date on which work was to start. In September and October of 1987 I wrote to both the then Minister for Land Transport and Infrastructure Support, the honourable member for Makin (Mr Duncan), and Senator Gareth Evans, the Minister for Transport and Communications. Minister Duncan replied to me on 5 November 1987. He said: Thank you for your letters of 17 September 1987 and 14 October 1987 about the transfer of Mount Gambier Airport to the Aerodrome Local Ownership Plan. I note your support for the transfer proposal. This matter is currently under consideration- Remember that Minister Morris had told me earlier that the matter was under consideration, so it was still under consideration a year later. The letter went on: . . . and I will advise the Mount Gambier District Council of the outcome shortly. The then Minister for Land Transport and Infrastructure Support went on to say: I will endeavour to obtain a quick resolution of this matter. Thank you for writing on this important issue. It is now a year later and the Commonwealth Government has still to meet its part of the deal. The Government now says that funding is under review, but that has been the case for years. I have urged the Minister for Finance (Senator Walsh) to make a decision, but he has not done so. In 1986 the District Council of Mount Gambier believed that the Government was genuine when it negotiated a local ownership package which included the upgrading of the airstrip and terminal. The way that the Government has treated the district council subsequently is contemptible. The District Council of Mount Gambier entered into a deal with the Government, but for two years the Government has reneged on its side of the bargain. The south-east community wants an upgraded terminal. It has agreed with the Government to take on the extra responsibility of running the airport, but all it has received in exchange from the Hawke Government is a kick in the teeth. I could use much stronger language, but I an still negotiating with the Minister for Transport and Communications (Mr Willis) and hope he will intervene at this late stage and provide the promised funding. The time for reviews, interdepartmental committees and delays is over-no more procrastination. Mount Gambier deserves a better airport, and it deserves it now. A firm promise was made by this Government over a year ago, funds were allocated, the commitment was given, deals were done and negotiations entered into have been completed, but still no money has been forthcoming. The south-east community still waits for the Government to meet its commitment. The Government cannot claim that it does not have the money. It can find $46m for a farcical referendum campaign. Surely any decent government would find the money to meet its promise to the people of the south-east of South Australia to upgrade the airport. As I have said, I will constrain my language tonight in the hope that the Government will do the decent thing and at long last honour its commitment to fund the undertaking that it made two years ago to upgrade Mount Gambier airport. Mr CUNNINGHAM(McMillan)(10.53) —This evening we have heard many speakers debating Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 1988-89 and the Budget measures. We have heard many speakers move far and wide from the Budget debate and, of course, it is a very crucial week in the lead-up to the State election in Victoria. No doubt the Opposition is very keen to score points-as many as it can-in order to achieve a turnaround with respect to the position in Victoria. I think that the Government's record at Federal and State levels with respect to Budget measures is such that there is not much doubt that the people of Australia, no matter where one looks-in the rural sector, the job sector, the business sector, the small business sector and the banking sector-have only one thing to say: that this is the best government Australia has seen with respect to economic management since Federation in 1901. That fact is recognised by the business fraternity and by banking people. If one goes through the rural sector today, one will see the total reconstruction of all the marketing boards. Today one can travel anywhere in rural Australia and see smiles on the faces of the people because the economy has become so strong in that sector. The Budget and economic measures adopted by this Government, with the support of the State governments, are such that we have turned around the Australian economy. Of course, our Budget measures are only part of that ongoing process. A budget is one sector of the economy: where the Government looks at the money that it is raising. Of course, it also sets out how much the Government will spend with a view to creating a strong economy or whether it will be frivolous in what it is doing. I think at the moment this nation has certainly the best Prime Minister and the best Treasurer it has ever had, and which is in stark contrast to the situation opposite. A speech was made in the Senate tonight which brings me great concern, and it indicates that the Opposition will grasp at anything to win a seat in the Victorian election. Senator Alston raised matters with respect to the Latrobe Valley Migrant Resource Centre. He made some ridiculous statements and questioned my credibility as the Federal member and that of other people in the community who have worked very hard for that centre. I think it is appropriate during this debate that I go into some of the background with respect to what is occurring in this area and why the Liberal Party and people such as Senator Alston are so far off the mark. Firstly, the Migrant Resource Centre was established some four years ago with a grant of $60,000. I was instrumental in assisting to get the centre going at a time of Budget constraints. At that time I told the responsible Minister that we could get it going with $60,000 while other migrant resource centres were being established with grants of $90,000. I told him that it could be established on the basis that we had strong support in the area from many of the migrant groups, through local government and through other measures such as social security, and I told him that we could make do. The Migrant Resource Centre was established as a coordinating body to put some 54 ethnic communities into contact with the necessary community services. The centre has done a marvellous job in that period. It has had strong committees, good coordinators and good grants-in-aid people. They have all done a great job for the community. In fact, the honourable member for Gippsland (Mr McGauran) will be well aware of the work that has been done in this area because he has been an ex-officio member of the board. It seems strange that a small sector of the Liberal Party is now intent on tearing this Migrant Resource Centre to pieces. In giving a little bit of the history with respect to this matter I will go back over some of the events that have occurred since 1 August. A committee was established, according to normal processes, at an annual meeting last November and Connie Mavrofridis was appointed treasurer. At the same meeting a legitimate auditor was appointed-a Mr Murugiah who has his own accounting practice in Morwell. The Migrant Resource Centre then set about doing its normal work for the next 12 months. The treasurer attended the meetings, books were available and she had everything at her disposal to do her job. However, something started to go wrong in about August when the treasurer sent a letter to all members of the board. I received my letter as a member of the board, but strangely it was three weeks after everyone else. I do not know whether the member for Gippsland received a letter, but perhaps he did. The letter related to certain allegations, which were repeated in the Senate tonight by Senator Alston, in relation to travel and the running of the Migrant Resource Centre. To put honourable members in the picture as to how this issue has become a political football and how the Liberal Party has deliberately tried to use this issue to score political points, I point out that its supporters have moved right into the gutter as far as local politics are concerned. I believe that they have taken advantage of a lady who has some difficulty in understanding the democratic processes of an organisation, and have done so to the point where the matter has been raised in the Senate tonight. That was done for only one reason-to score political points. When the executive was first made aware of the letter, it called a meeting to enable the treasurer to attend and speak to the letter, but she failed to attend. There was then a normal monthly meeting at which time the matter was raised again but, as there were only five board members present-nine apologies were received-the Chairman decided that before the matter was made public there would be a discussion with the treasurer at executive level. Senator Alston has not raised any of this tonight. However, I am putting it on the record so that it will be put straight. Following that meeting, a special meeting of the board was called in order to deal with the matter so that members of the board, including the honourable member for Gippsland and me, could sit down and hear what these allegations were about. The first thing that went wrong was that, even though the meeting was called as a board meeting, the treasurer decided to put a notice in the paper telling the public to come along, which meant that when the board sat down there were 30-odd people there. That made it very difficult. After that the meeting was in uproar. The matter could not be resolved that night. There was a Liberal candidate there with legal representation. There was a National Party candidate there. People were playing party politics left, right and centre, bringing in the law, and calling points of order. It was a disgraceful performance. In fact, the honourable member for Gippsland, on record, asked the solicitors who was the senior counsel and who was the junior counsel. It turns out that the senior counsel was representing the Liberal candidate, Mr Olsen. He lied to the meeting and told people that he was representing the treasurer. The other solicitor, who said he was representing the treasurer, stepped aside like a little boy. The honourable member for Gippsland knows that it is on record that he asked at that meeting who was the senior counsel and who was the junior counsel. He was extremely concerned about it. He knows the workings of this migrant resource centre. He also knows that there is something terribly wrong with the approach of the Liberal Party in Morwell, whose candidate is so hopeless that he is prepared to destroy an organisation that was set up and has been working with the support of the total community. It has been doing a great job for those people. It is being destroyed because the treasurer, Connie Mavrofridis, has been used by a political party in a most disgraceful way. Tonight Senator Alston made ridiculous allegations in the Senate which he hopes will get a run in the newspapers tomorrow. Everything about the centre is open to the public. Last Monday and Tuesday it was gone through with a fine toothcomb. There is no problem regarding anything to do with the migrant resource centre. If the auditor's way of doing things is slightly different from the way another auditor does things, that is legitimate. There is nothing wrong with that. Senator Alston referred to the centre's travel expenses. For the first 2 1/2 years of the centre, the coordinator used his own car at his own expense to do the job. Because the migrant resource centre is better established now, he is in a position to be given compensation for the normal mileage that a person gets when doing a job of that nature. Somebody in the system has decided that there is political gain in citing figures from one year to the next because all of a sudden travel expenses have increased. What that person has been doing for the community has been ignored. It is disgraceful for the Liberal Party, which pretends that it supports the people of Morwell, to say that it supports the ethnic communities. I do not want to get heavily involved in this House in the immigration debate, as enough damage has been done. But I say to the Liberal Party in Morwell and I say to Senator Alston that there is nothing to be gained by any political party trying to tear the heart out of an organisation which is set up to coordinate the community, to bring our communities together. Our local government is involved and our communities are involved. The Maltese, the Italians, the Lebanese, the new arrivals from Thailand-they are all involved. The honourable member for Gippsland knows this. I expect him at least to have enough decency to say that what is occurring is pure political expediency. What has occurred really shows that the Liberal Party does not care about what happens in the community. It is there to score points. It is absolutely desperate to try to win a vote. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the honourable member for Kooyong (Mr Peacock), was in the area a week ago. He flew in and flew out. What did he say? He said, `Don't ask me anything local because I do not know anything about it. I am only here on a quick flying visit.' He did not know anything local at all. But I say to the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party here and now: have a good look at what Senator Alston is up to. Have a good look at the Liberal candidate in Morwell. See the sort of devious approach he is taking in relation to this and pull him into line because there is nothing worse than to see a political candidate who is naive and does not know his job, who is trying to tear to pieces one of the best community organisations we have. This organisation was not set up to add to the Government's work. It was established to coordinate and it is doing a fantastic job. We have to get this matter straightened out as soon as possible. All I can say to this House tonight is that Senator Alston is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what he is trying to do. He is doing the dirty work of people in the Liberal Party in the local Morwell area. It is time that they quit and faced up to their true responsibilities. They have no hope of winning the election next week and this sort of thing will not help them in the Morwell area. Debate (on motion by Mr Sharp) adjourned. Motion (by Mr Holding) proposed: That the House do now adjourn. Mr GRIFFITHS(Maribyrnong)(11.07) —I am in possession of a document, the like of which to my knowledge has not been a feature of political life in this country and I hope will not be such in the future. The document purports to name 19 current or former, or a mixture of both, employees of the Victorian Ministry for Tourism. The document also purports to establish, in my description, an index of political reliability in relation to those individuals. To limit the defamation of individual Victorian public servants, I will not use full names, but the following quotes will give honourable members the flavour of the gross defamation and abuse of political power involved in this issue. As I indicated, there are some 19 names: Peter B, described as `Active Liberal background-personal survival requires loyalty to government-No longer privy to policy matters'; Paul B, `Labor background-Regional tourism involvement only; David F, `Consultant-Self-opinionated-No loyalties whatever especially where colleagues concerned-personally unstable; Michael B, `Liberal supporter-Full of'-and I hope honourable members will forgive me-`Bullshit'; Rob M, `Claims to be Chief Adviser to D-Socially active-seeks personal recognition-jealous of others and very talkative-considered useful but likely to tell others'; Graeme W, `Personal friend of D-past association with Australian Democrats-Husband of X-might be open to business influence-enjoys active social life-social climber'; Brad W, `Regional Supremo-not overly intelligent but quite talkative and likely to be privy to policy-- Mr McGauran —You are reading from your notes. Mr GRIFFITHS —If the honourable member for Gippsland wishes, I will table the document and seek leave to incorporate it in Hansard. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! Is leave granted? Mr Peacock —No, we have not seen it. Mr GRIFFITHS —I have virtually been requested by the honourable member for Gippsland-- Mr McGauran —I want to look at it; it does not have to be tabled. Let us look at it. Mr GRIFFITHS —The honourable member may look at it as soon as I have completed my speech. In the Australian of 22 September senior Liberals confirmed to a journalist that `many shadow Ministers already had their own private lists of senior public servants they did not want to work with in government'. Jeff Kennett has refused to deny the existence of such lists. He would be foolish to do so because, on my understanding, legal proceedings will be commenced by at least one individual against members of the Liberal Party in relation to this document and in relation to other documents. To deny the existence of such lists where they do in fact exist would, in legal proceedings under oath, constitute perjury and raise the prospect of gaol terms for those involved. I am informed that Mr Roger Pescott, the relevant shadow Minister, is aware of this and similar documents. To that extent it is my belief-and, I believe, the view of the majority of decent Australians-that he is not fit to hold high political office. He should of course resign and, in the absence of that course of action, he should be sacked by Mr Kennett. The latter must provide a full and public apology to those public servants named and ensure the destruction of all similar documents in the possession of shadow Ministers and/or Liberal Party officials. This exercise in anonymous character assassination is clearly both illegal and morally reprehensible. Individual public servants' career prospects could be smashed by the poison pen of an anonymous Liberal Party official and the shadow Minister. Mr Tuckey —So it is anonymous. Mr GRIFFITHS —No, in fact the honourable member might get a surprise when he sees the document. I am conscious that I am putting this before the House of Representatives when I say that it comes from impeccable Liberal Party sources. It is in fact on Liberal Party of Australia, Victorian Division letterhead and indicates, under the heading of `Tourism' a whole range of alleged political allegiances. Honourable members opposite may treat this with disdain but they must all be aware that when legal proceedings are started in relation to this matter-as I expect they will be-that will engage certain people in subpoenaing relevant documentation. That will be of enormous embarrassment, and properly so, not only to the Opposition's shadow ministerial colleagues in Victoria who have failed to deny the fact that these documents exist, but also the whole of the Liberal Party. Most importantly, it is a gross abuse and an indication of the bullying aspirations of the Liberal Party in Victoria and it ought properly be condemned. Mr HALVERSON(Casey)(11.12) —The establishment and preservation of law and order is a fundamental requirement and therefore a vital and necessary component in any reasonable, decent and democratic society. If our system of law and order is threatened, our way of life is threatened and it is an unfortunate fact that in Australia in the 1980s it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the high standards of law and order that our citizens deserve. The vast majority of Australians are decent, honest, law abiding citizens. They are entitled to expect that their rights, their property and their personal safety and well-being will be protected by appropriate, fair and reasonable laws and that adequate means will be provided to ensure that these laws are upheld and enforced without fear or favour. The escalating crime rate bears frightening testimony to the fact that we are confronting a community problem of enormous proportions. It affects every one of us; we are all the victims. No wonder decent, ordinary people are not prepared to tolerate this deplorable situation any longer and are telling governments, both Federal and State, that enough is enough. Something can be done and must be done and we want it done now. Undoubtedly this is the reason why law and order is an important rallying cry in the context of the forthcoming Victorian State election. Law and order issues are receiving a high priority in the campaigning of the three major parties and if all the promises are fulfilled, Victoria will certainly be a better place in which to live. Whilst I have no doubt about the capacity and sincerity of my State Liberal colleagues when it comes to delivering the law and order goods, I have some grave misgivings about certain aspects of our political opponents' credibility in this regard. I believe the importance of the truism expressed by Jean Anouilh in Antigone when he said: Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law. I am convinced that the community generally shares this view. It is unquestionably the responsibility and obligation of the elected representatives of the people to uphold the law and whenever and wherever possible to help and cooperate with those whose duty it is to enforce the law. It would be intolerable for a member of parliament to knowingly obstruct the police in the performance of their duties or to hinder police investigations into serious allegations or suspected criminal offences. For example, what would happen if there had been a wild brawl at a hotel in the early hours of the morning and the police who were called to attend were attacked and suffered painful and serious injuries? Suppose their vehicle was damaged by kicking and the police radio stolen. When police reinforcements arrived they were informed that some of the people involved in the fracas had fled to a nearby house. When the police went to the house in an attempt to obtain more information and interview the people thought to be involved in the incident they had their entry to the premises physically blocked and were verbally threatened and harassed. What if, as a result of this obstruction, the police were unable to complete their inquiries and were still awaiting the opportunity to speak with the people who sought refuge in the house following the brawl? If such an incident occurred, people would be entitled to ask a few pertinent questions. For example, who were the people who wanted so desperately to avoid detection, and why did they run away if they had nothing to hide? What if the person who was so determined to keep the police at bay happened to be a State member of parliament, perhaps even a member of the Government, and used the fact to defy, to intimidate the police and frustrate their endeavours? Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! The honourable member for Casey might now be starting to step over the bounds of what is accepted as being the practice of the House. Mr HALVERSON —I cast no aspersions. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! I just say, therefore, to the honourable member for Casey that if he is now going to go past a `what if' scenario and into specifics-- Mr Peacock —Where were you when the Jack Herbert of the Labor Party was on his feet? Mr HALVERSON —And what if the same person had previously refused to cooperate with police-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! I just say to the honourable member for Casey that he is not allowed under the forms of the House to go past generalities into specifics. Mr Griffiths —On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker: I see that cretin from the North Shore who is making-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! Mr Griffiths —Mr Deputy Speaker, the honourable member for North Sydney said that I was the Jack Herbert of the Labor Party. I ask that that term be withdrawn. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for Maribyrnong does not have a point of order and it probably ill-becomes him to ask for a withdrawal in the terms that he has just used. The honourable member for Casey's time has expired. Mr Griffiths —Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a point of order. I insist on your adjudication. The Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party used terminology which he is aware I find highly offensive, and I insist that he withdraw. Mr Peacock —Mr Deputy Speaker, I referred to the honourable member for Maribyrnong as the Jack Herbert of the Victorian Labor Party. I am prepared, because of the Standing Orders, to withdraw the description, but it is accurate. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member knows that if one makes a withdrawal, the withdrawal should be made unequivocally. Mr Peacock —I withdraw. Mr MILTON(La Trobe)(11.19) —Next Saturday the Victorian people have an important choice to make. They have to decide whether to continue to support the Cain Labor Government, which during the past 6 1/2 years has given strength and vitality to the Victorian economy, or to support the tired old conservative policies of cutting back on public enterprise, cracking down on the unions and offering huge cuts in State charges, put forward by the Kennett-led Opposition in Victoria. Another item that is thrown in by the Opposition-and the honourable member for Casey (Mr Halverson) gave an indication of this-is the usual catchcry about the need for a stronger support for law and order, without indicating where the funding can be found to support increased numbers in the police force. Indeed, the amazing part about it is that members of the Opposition are not prepared to call for stronger control on the ownership of guns by the community. I would be interested to hear what the honourable member for Casey has to say about the control and ownership of guns. In 1982 the Cain Labor Government set in train a series of management reforms which has given new life to the Public Service and to public corporations in Victoria. However, let it not be said that I am biased in my view. I will quote an article by Kenneth Davidson published in the Age. So I am not just putting my own view. Kenneth Davidson says: Over the past seven years, electricity, gas and metropolitan water and public transport charges have been kept below the general inflation rate in contrast to the previous seven years of Liberal government, not because of administrative fiat or even luck, but because of a quiet revolution in public administration. In establishing basic financial controls over public enterprise, while allowing maximum autonomy consistent with ultimate accountability to State Parliament, Victoria has been ahead of every other State and Commonwealth. Victorians are reaping the dividend which Mr Cain promises will increase over the next four years. The article appeared on 22 September 1988. They are not my words. They are the words of a columnist with the Age. Another problem which Victorian electors have to face is the intervention of the two minority parties, that is, the Australian Democrats and the National Party of Australia. The Cain Labor Government has been willing to introduce a system of proportional representation for the Legislative Council, giving the Democrats an almost certain chance of gaining representation in the Parliament. The Liberals and the National Party, on the other hand, refuse to support the reforms and use their numbers to reject the proposals. All Democrat voters should note this contemptuous rejection of democratic reforms by the Liberal and National parties. There is also the certainty that if the Cain Labor Government were defeated we would have to face the prospect of a Liberal-National Party coalition government. The Liberals may pretend to be prepared to work with the National Party, but I can assure honourable members that it would be a very uneasy and unhappy alliance. Sir Henry Bolte once described the National Party as a political prostitute willing to hop into bed with any party prepared to pay its price-trying to trap a reluctant Liberal leader into an unsuitable political marriage. That is precisely the position of the present Leader of the National Party, Mr Peter Ross-Edwards. Again let me quote from the Davidson article: On Tuesday, the leader of the National Party, Mr Ross-Edwards, released the National's rural water policy, which said in part: `Finance for replacement of assets by borrowing . . . (but) charge against revenue only the expenses of operation, maintenance and administration . . . (and) ensure cost of service not include any equity payment to the Government or current cost depreciation'. In other words, the Nationals want the rest of the community to pay the full capital cost of irrigation projects, which would mean that irrigation farmers would only meet 59 per cent or less of the cost of their water. This blatant agrarian socialism flies in the face of the long-term interests of the farmers, as well as the public interest . . . This is the sort of thing we would have to put up with from a coalition government. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER(Mr Leo McLeay) —Order! The honourable member's time has expired. Dr WOOLDRIDGE(Chisholm)(11.24) —I would like to talk about the saga of Mrs K. Setches, the State member for Ringwood, Victoria, which the honourable member for Casey (Mr Halverson) raised. Mr Milton —Mr Deputy Speaker, on a point of order: I might warn you that the matter the Opposition is putting up is before a court of law in the State of Victoria. Mr Deputy Speaker, I think you should rule that Opposition members should not be allowed to raise these issues. It is quite obvious that the honourable member for Chisholm is referring to the speech made by the honourable member for Casey which you have already ruled was close to the mark. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for La Trobe has brought to my attention by way of a point of order his belief that the honourable member for Chisholm is going to embark on a matter which could be subject to the sub judice rule. If that is so, the honourable member for Chisholm should not canvass the matter. The honourable member for Chisholm should not canvass any matters that are before the courts or are awaiting adjudication by a court. Dr WOOLDRIDGE —Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. What if the same person had previously refused to cooperate with the police and parliamentary inquiries in the well publicised irregularities in a previous by-election and had even instructed members of staff, people whose salaries are paid for from the public purse-- Mr Kent —I raise a point of order. It is quite obvious that the honourable member for Chisholm is casting aspersions on the honourable member for Maranoa and he is not even in the chamber to reply. Mr Peacock —Maranoa? Mr Kent —Yes, the honourable member for Maranoa, because he was involved in a fracas with police. He kicked a policeman in the balls. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member -- Mr Kent —Yes, he did; he was charged for it. I do not think that that is a matter for the national Parliament to-- Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member will resume his seat and shall not, by taking a point of order, cast aspersions on another member of the House. The only way a person can do that is by way of a substantive motion. I take it that the honourable member for Chisholm was not going to refer to a member of this House. Dr WOOLDRIDGE —No, I was not; unlike the honourable member for Hotham. Mr Holding —Mr Deputy Speaker, the honourable member for Chisholm has made a series of unsupported allegations of a scandalous kind. He is a new member. It might be prudent, Mr Deputy Speaker, if you were to draw his attention to the fact that it is an improper use of the procedures of this House to make allegations without any substantiation, without any evidence, in order to pursue some kind of odd political point. That has been a matter of some comment in this Parliament. I suggest that, unless the honourable member has some evidence to support the allegations that he makes, he should not lower the standards of this House, which-giving him the benefit of the doubt-he may be innocently doing because he is a new member. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —I have drawn the attention of the honourable member for Chisholm to the fact that he should not raise in the House a matter that is before the courts because that would infringe against the sub judice rule. Dr WOOLDRIDGE —In their legitimate and reasonable efforts to find out the truth about such an important matter, what if a person who displayed such utter and obvious contempt for the law and members of the police force who in the course of their duty-- Mr Holding —On a point of order-- Mr Spender —You know what is happening. You and he are conspiring to take up the time of the House. It is as simple as that. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for North Sydney will cease interjecting. Mr Holding —Not only will the honourable member cease interjecting but also the point of order which I now raise is different from the one I wished to raise originally. The statement made by the honourable member opposite is a gross reflection on the Chair. He has suggested that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, are using the processes of the House to play out time for the advantage of the Government. That is a gross reflection on the Chair and he must withdraw it or be dealt with. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —The Minister will resume his seat. Earlier today the honourable member for North Sydney drew my attention to the fact that people should abide by the Standing Orders of this place. He would know-more than most, I would assume-that interjections of any sort are unruly and out of order. He has sat here this evening and interjected persistently. If he continues to do so I shall deal with him. The honourable member for Chisholm's time has expired. Mr KENT(Hotham)(11.29) —We have just witnessed the most frightened attempt to use the privilege of this House to blacken someone's character. Mr McGauran —You ought to talk. You have ruined a few careers. You are a hypocrite. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for Gippsland will cease interjecting. Mr KENT —The honourable member for Chisholm (Dr Wooldridge) really went into the sewer to try to throw mud on a decent, good member in Victoria. He did that because one of the best and effective members is the member for Ringwood. Honourable members opposite come in here at the time of a State election, when all sorts of transfers are coming up. You have not even wiped the lipstick off your mouth yet, you dirty man. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! Mr KENT —You have not even washed the lipstick off your mouth. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for Hotham will resume his seat. I have drawn the attention of the House on a number of occasions to the fact one should not offend the Standing Orders or the practices of the House by drawing into question matters that may be about to be adjudicated on by the courts. I think that the remarks of the honourable member for Hotham are out of order. Mr Milton —On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker: the honourable member for Gippsland called the honourable member for Hotham a hypocrite. I would ask that that remark be withdrawn. I consider it to be most offensive and it is not within the practices of the House. Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Unfortunately the honourable member for Gippsland is not here to apologise. Question resolved in the affirmative. House adjourned at 11.31 p.m. The following notices were given: Mr Smith to move- That this House: (1) recognises the importance of science and research to the future economic and social well-being of Australia; (2) acknowledges the contribution made to Australia's economic growth by the flagship of Australian science, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); and (3) notes the rapid decline in support for science, including the CSIRO, by the Government and accepts an urgency to address the appalling situation. Mr Beazley to move- That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the ordinary routine of business of Thursday, 29 September 1988 being as follows: 1. Presentation of petitions. 2. Presentation and consideration of reports from parliamentary committees and delegations. 3. Private Members' business (commencing no later than 11 a.m., debate concluding no later than 12.30 p.m.). 4. Questions without notice (at 2.30 p.m.). 5. Presentation of papers. 6. Ministerial statements, by leave. 7. Matter of public importance. 8. Notices and orders of the day. Mr Willis to present a Bill for an Act to amend the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 and the Broadcasting Act 1942, and for related purposes. Mr Willis to present a Bill for an Act to amend the Postal Services Act 1975 and to amend various other Acts in relation to the provision of postal services, and for related purposes. Mr Willis to present a Bill for an Act relating to the provision of certain equipment for Qantas Airways Limited. Mr Willis to present a Bill for an Act to amend the Telecommunications Act 1975 and to amend various other Acts in relation to the provision of telecommunications services, and for related purposes. Mr Willis to present a Bill for an Act to amend the Satellite Communications Act 1984, and for related purposes. Mr Peter Morris to present a Bill for an Act to amend the Loans Securities Act 1919. Mr Howe to present a Bill for an Act to amend the law relating to social security: (a) to make provision in relation to review of decisions; and (b) to establish the Social Security Appeals Tribunal and to make provision in relation to its constitution, powers and procedures; and for related matters. The following papers were deemed to have been presented on 27 September 1988: Australian Bureau of Statistics Act-Australian Bureau of Statistics-Proposals for collection of information-1988- No. 10-New topics to be included as supplements to the Labour Force Survey. No. 11-New topic to be included as a supplement to the Labour Force Survey: Superannuation. No. 12-Monthly collection of statistics on materials used in mining operations. Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court Act-Rules of Court-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 221. Australian Meat and Livestock Corporation Act-Order-1988-MS13/88-Carriage of meat by sea to Canada and the United States of America. Australian National University Act-Statute- No. 200-Academic Progress (Repeal and Transitional Provisions). No. 201-Enrolment, Courses and Degrees Amendment No. 24. Bounty and Subsidy Acts-Return for 1987-88, pursuant to the following Acts- Bounty (Agricultural Tractors and Equipment). Bounty (Bed Sheeting). Bounty (Berry Fruits). Bounty (Books) Act 1969. Bounty (Books) Act 1986. Bounty (Commercial Motor Vehicles). Bounty (Computers). Bounty (High Alloy Steel Products). Bounty (Injection-Moulding Equipment). Bounty (Metal Working Machine Tools). Bounty (Metal Working Machines and Robots). Bounty (Printed Fabrics). Bounty (Ship Repair). Bounty (Ships). Bounty (Steel Mill Products). Bounty (Textile Yarns). Fertilisers Subsidy. Nitrogenous Fertilizers Subsidy. Phosphate Fertilizers Subsidy. Subsidy (Cultivation Machines and Equipment). Subsidy (Grain Harvesters and Equipment). Broadcasting Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 225. Christmas Island Act-Ordinance-1988-No. 4-Casino Control. Civil Aviation Act-Civil Aviation Order Part 105-Amendments, dated- 21 September 1988. 22 September 1988. Copyright Act-Declarations (3) pursuant to paragraph 10a (1) (b), dated 1 September 1988. Defence Act- Determination under Section 52-1988-No. 1-Defence Force (Superannuation Interim Arrangement). Determinations-1988- No. 43-Travelling Allowance. No. 44-Travelling Allowance and other allowances. No. 45-Submarine Service Allowance and other allowances. No. 46-District Allowance and other allowances. No. 47-Travelling Allowance. No. 48-Long Service Leave. No. 49-District Allowance and Temporary Rental Allowance. No. 50-Overseas Living Allowance and other allowances. Nos 51 and 52-Travelling Allowance and other allowances. No. 53-Overseas Living Allowance and other allowances. Nos 54-Unpredictable Explosives Allowance and other allowances. Excise Act-Declaration pursuant to section 78b, dated 31 August 1988. Federal Court of Australia Act-Rules of Court-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 217. Fisheries Act-Notice No. 215. Judiciary Act-Rules of Court-Statutory Rules 1988, Nos. 218, 230. Land Acquisition Act-Land acquired for the purposes of- Aviation- Botany Bay, NSW. Cribb Island, Qld. Mascot, NSW. Australian Wool Corporation-Botany, NSW. Marriage Act-Regulation-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 223. Meat Inspection Act-Regulation-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 227. National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, Nos. 226, 232. Navigation Act-Navigation (Orders) Regulations-Orders-1988- No. 3-Marine, Part 3. No. 4-Marine, Part 6. No. 5-Marine, Part 9. No. 6-Marine, Part 2. Petroleum Retail Marketing Sites Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 222. Public Service Act- Determinations-Nos. 140, 146, 165, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 206. Regulation-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 224. Radiocommunications Act-Guidelines-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 228. Radiocommunications (Receiver Licence Tax) Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 219. Radiocommunications (Transmitter Licence Tax) Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, No. 220. Seat of Government (Administration) Act- Determination-1988-No. 13-Listing fees and charges for purposes of the Community and Health Service Ordinance. Ordinances-1988- No. 53-Taxation (Administration) (Amendment) (No. 3). No. 54-Taxation (Administration) (Amendment) (No. 4). No. 55-Stamp Duties and Taxes (Amend-ment). No. 56-Stamp Duties and Taxes (Amendment) (No. 2). No. 57-Electricity and Water (Amendment). No. 58-Architects (Amendment). No. 59-Health Professions Boards (Procedures) (Amendment). No. 60-Health Professions Board (Elections) (Amendment). No. 61-Nurses. No. 62-Nurses (Consequential Amendments). No. 63-Rates and Land Tax (Amendment). No. 64-Long Service Leave (Building and Construction Industry) (Amendment) (No. 3). No. 65-Schools Authority (Amendment) (No. 2). No. 66-Housing Assistance (Amendment). No. 67-Lakes (Amendment). No. 68-Traffic (Amendment). No. 69-Apprenticeship (Amendment). No. 70-Motor Traffic (Amendment) (No. 7). No. 71-Noise Control. No. 72-Casino Control. Regulation-1988-No. 16-Long Service Leave (Building and Construction Industry) (Ordinance). Superannuation Act-Regulations-Statutory Rules 1988, Nos. 229, 231. World Heritage Properties Conservation Act-Notice of consents given pursuant to section 9, dated 12 September 1988. Mr Smith asked Madam Speaker, upon notice, on 25 August 1988: (1) What was the cost of producing the Parliament Pack 2 education kit on federal Parliament for senior students. (2) How many kits were produced. Madam Speaker —The answer to the honourable member's question is as follows: (1) $735 000. This figure does not include costs associated with staff of the Departments of the Senate and the House of Representatives who worked on the project. (2) 10 000. Mr Campbell asked Madam Speaker, upon notice, on 23 August 1988: (1) How many photocopiers are available to Members in the areas in which their suites are located. (2) Will she ensure that there is a more equitable distribution of photocopiers throughout the House of Representatives so that Members do not have a long distance to go to a photocopier. Madam Speaker —The response to the honourable member's request is as follows: (1) There are six photocopiers for the exclusive use of Members located within the House of Representatives office wing. In addition to this equipment, the Department of the House of Representatives maintains a satellite photocopying/duplicating facility at the north western end of the ground floor. (2) The initial distribution of the photocopiers referred to in (1) above was determined by the availability of adequate power supplies and reflected the building occupancy program. During the first two sitting weeks, the appropriateness of the location of each copier was assessed. As a result of this assessment, three copiers have been relocated from the inner office wing to the outer wing. It is expected that this action will facilitate an overall improvement in the convenience photocopying service provided for Members. Mr Campbell asked Madam Speaker, upon notice, on 23 August 1988: Will she take steps to ensure that the Australian flag which was present in the old Chamber is also installed in the new Chamber. Madam Speaker —The response to the honourable member's request is as follows: Following his request and the raising in the House of the same matter by the honourable member for Parkes, I sought the views of the three Party Leaders in the House. All indicated that there was support for the display of the Australian flag in the House of Representatives Chamber. As a consequence of those responses, the Parliament House Construction Authority and the architects have been asked for urgent advice on the appropriate means of displaying the flag, or flags and the most suitable location within the Chamber. When this advice is available, I shall have the necessary action taken as soon as possible. I propose to make a statement to the House conveying this information in response to the honourable member for Parkes.