Shadow Minister for Primary Industries & Water, Shadow Minister for Police & Emergency Services, Shadow Minister for Parks & Wildlife, Shadow Minister for Local Government

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24
Jun

Budget Reply Speech - June 2011

2011

Mr HIDDING (Lyons) - Madam Deputy Speaker, I think I am the last in the House before the Premier and Treasurer comes back to respond to the second reading debate. I rise not to restate the entire case because it has been very well done by this side of the House, including the last speaker who has laid out the various alternative priorities to the Tasmanian people. I congratulate Will Hodgman and his team, his entire office, and Peter Gutwein, his shadow treasurer, for a sensational job. This was not a pretty exercise at all. It was a gut-wrenching exercise when you saw the numbers rolling out in this State Budget, and we have laid out a case against the Budget that is the shameful proof of years of Labor mismanagement.

What it comes down to is year after year of poor executive management of the State's administration. It is as simple as this. If the Premier had said to his ministers, 'Do not overspend your budgets or you're in trouble and I'll replace you,' and if his ministers had said to their heads of agencies, 'Do not overspend your budgets or I'll replace you,' and if the heads of agencies had said to their program managers and all the managers in their departments, 'Do not overspend your budgets or I'll replace you,' on down the line, if everybody was accountable in the whole process we would not be in the mess that we are in now - no question.

You can talk about the global financial crisis all you like, you can talk about the post-stimulus environment we are in all you like, but the fact is we knew about all that. The Lehman Brothers banking scandal broke years ago. We knew about the post-stimulus problems that would occur in this State and they should have been planned for, but the only planning that was done was to continue to blow out budgets, and not by a little bit, but massive amounts, hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It is an extraordinary outcome. In a budget of $4 billion-odd you would over a period of years blow out by something in the order of $900 million through sheer mismanagement and lack of accountability, of people not demanding from people elsewhere in control that they actually commit to a budget.

So we have the shameful scenario that the Budget of the State of Tasmania, a developed State of a developed nation - we are not a country that has only been in existence for about 10 years that is battling with the concepts of public policy and financial administration - despite all the expertise and history that we have in this State of responsible government the Budget has become an advisory document rather than a tool that is a promise by the Government to stay within the parameters of the Budget. If the income gets less then you find savings along the way. You do not stand up here 12 months later and say, 'Whoops, we just blew $500 million of your money and we're not absolutely sure where we've blown it. We've just blown it.'

We have had this year after year, and Tasmanians who operate even the smallest household get this stuff. They have to, whether it is a young Tasmanian whose only asset is a car, they know about infrastructure investment, asset protection, insurance, management and budgeting, how much petrol they put in their car and whether they can use it and where they can go. They know about this stuff.

Mr Green - They know a load of rubbish when they hear it.

Mr HIDDING - Every Tasmanian family knows that when you protect your asset and you spend money on infrastructure that you have a little bit of growth in there, you go upwards, but no, here we are in this state. The money we are spending on infrastructure is less than the depreciation of our assets, so we are going backwards in the value of our assets because you are not spending money on that, and so on almost every criterion of a normal household budget overlaid on the administration of the State of Tasmania, fail with a capital 'F' is next to the public administration in this State.

Tasmanians get this. They might not have got it two or three years ago but they get it now, because what they see is the effect of all this. They are being told that we need to close 20 schools and they are being assessed for educational reasons. They are not being assessed for that at all. They are being assessed to save money, to somehow now fit within a framework because the Premier has said finally that she is going to adopt some principles of some financial rectitude. We are actually going to save some money somewhere, and so where has she looked? Twenty schools. Tasmanians know what this Budget is all about, and they ask us this: surely in your system you have accountability? Of course at the end of the day we do not. The accountability comes at the ballot box, and we have four-year terms, so Tasmanians are asking how long this is going to go on for. We tell them, 'As long as the Tasmanian Greens want to leave them there, as long as the Tasmanian Greens continue to enjoy what they are doing, and leave this Labor-Greens experiment to fizzle along in absolute paralysis'. Nothing in the Budget speech -

Ms O'Connor - We are committed to stability in government. Who are you to assume you speak for all Tasmanian people? Your supporters are begging for an election, because you dudded them last time by not having the guts to go into government.

Mr HIDDING - This is the problem we have. If we come in here and speak for Tasmanians, how dare we speak for those Tasmanians? What about -

Ms O'Connor - You think you speak for all Tasmanians.

Mr HIDDING - Yes, that is right. What do we hear from the Government in the speech by the Premier and Treasurer, and every other speaker on that side of the House including the Tasmanian Greens? What was a big feature of this? No vision. 'Vision' is a dirty word this year. We are not allowed to have any of that; we are looking backwards and patching holes now. No vision, none whatsoever. There was an opportunity to do so and from our point of view wrong priorities.

Ms O'Connor - But you supported every element of the Budget, Mr Hidding. You clearly did, apart from those bits you set aside in Mr Hodgman's contribution yesterday.

Mr HIDDING - We believe that we put an alternative vision for priorities.

On the accountability issue, that day will come and for many Tasmanians it cannot come soon enough, but that is a process that we live with in this State.

Mr Green - You didn't have enough guts to take it on yourselves.

Ms O'Connor - No, they didn't. They were too frightened of the Greens.

Mr HIDDING - This is the great defence from your side of the House.

Ms O'Connor - Rene, you would have picked up the phone.

Mr HIDDING - Guess what, the Deputy Premier wishes in many ways you had not had the guts as well because you find yourself over there in a circumstance every day. You do not have a bag of lollies over there; you have a bag of lemons. You are there biting into these lemons, pulling faces every day because it is a very bitter pill indeed for you sitting over there watching and presiding as a minister. You should resign as the minister responsible for forestry because you should be too embarrassed to stand by and watch your Government participate in setting up a roundtable process, knowing very well that the industry had to bring everything to the table and the other lot brought nothing, not a thing other than the votes of your Tasmanian Greens' colleagues. That is all they brought to the table. You set it up, you were behind the scenes, you had your hand up the backs of the individuals and then you pulled aside and said, 'It's nothing to do with us', as you watch the timber industry that you have stood behind all these years fizzle away to a circumstance now where poor people are demonstrating on the lawns of Parliament House in tears.

Ms O'Connor - Where is your vision for the timber industry?

Mr HIDDING - A 13-point plan.

Ms O'Connor - Yes, a 13-point plan, which is a complete denial of the market reality.

Mr HIDDING - There is a plan out there. You hate it but it is a 13-point plan.

Ms O'Connor - The industry hates it too, by the way. You don't have the support of the industry.

Mr HIDDING - That is our plan. Yours is a one-step plan - kill the industry.

Ms O'Connor - You know that's a load of rubbish. We support the Statement of Principles process, and that is about supporting the industry transition.

Mr HIDDING - Everything you say in this House, all your body language and the soothing words over there, change nothing. The Tasmanian Greens want to kill the forest industry in this State and they have gone a long way to achieving it by having their hands up the backs of the minister responsible for forestry.

We are in a situation where we have 20 schools that have been told to close - a spurious process. We spoke this morning about an Education minister who has documents that say 'assess the economic issues relating to this school closure'; the economic issue is that the Education department saves money. No assessment of what it might do to the Fingal Valley, Kempton, Westbury and those areas. It will rip the heart out of the community and people will move out. Tasmanians are first and foremost about their families and the wellbeing of their children and to hear from the parliamentary secretary for education today when he said that kids do not walk to school these days. Is that not lovely in the primary schools in Tasmania, that they should be placed in a position where kids go to school by bus? Every other State in Australia has primary schools where the kids are, four-year-old kids on buses for an hour to get to their kinder and prep classes. That is the policy of the Tasmanian Greens and it is complete nonsense. We will not put up with it and for that reason we have adopted the policy where there will be no school closures if there was a Hodgman Liberal majority government right now. But there is not, so we will keep working with those school communities in a gut-wrenching process where we have to stand before them and try to help them through this, fill out their forms knowing exactly what has been said in the House. It is not about education outcomes, is not about anything except saving money to pay back for the years of shocking overspending, spending like drunken sailors and now we have this unaccountable situation where nobody is prepared to put their hand up and say, 'We have not managed the budgets very well'. No language like that at all, it is all someone else's fault. These schools do not accept it, the communities do not and neither should they. I am very proud of the performance that our team has put up in this State Budget this year. Clearly the speech by the alternative premier of Tasmania and the alternative budget has been widely accepted as a document with vision, with purpose and addresses in a fair way the shocking situation in which we find ourselves. We will commit, as a team, to the Tasmanian people and continue to represent them strongly in this House and the most difficult job of all is holding this unaccountable lot to be accountable nonetheless.

Mr Green - Worst performance I've ever heard you put in, because you just don't believe - you don't even believe it yourself.

Mr HIDDING - Killing off the forestry industry, you should be ashamed of yourself.