Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Madam Speaker, I rise to make a contribution for the Greens on the passage of the Appropriation (Further Supplementary Appropriation for 2023-24) Bill 2024 and make the note at the outset that budgets in every form contain political choices and political priorities. They put the dollar value on the commitments of the government and the things that they see as the most valuable to deliver. While we may disagree on many of those priorities, we will not be obstructing the passage of this bill. I want to compliment the departmental and treasury staff who have pulled it together. It is critical to keep the services of government going in the interim until we get to September when we do have the full budget.
I want to make a few comments and put them on the record on behalf of the Greens, because there are certainly some things in here that do need to be highlighted, they do need to be pulled out of this budget and some attention given to them.
First in that vein, I want to talk about the so-called supercharged renewable energy dividend. What rhetoric and spin that is. I agree, Mr Willie. I would like to make the point that it is inappropriate to use this kind of hyperbole in a fact sheet for a bill. We are talking about the expenditure of $74 million from the public account, so let us not use silly marketing terminology, spin, or rhetoric like that in any of the supporting material, because it certainly does no honour to the document. To spell it out for members and anyone who is reading or listening, this is a credit issued to the energy accounts of households and small businesses of $250 and $300 respectively. So look, it is not a dividend. It has no particular relationship to renewable energy itself. And while it is a somewhat objective term, it is hard to make the case that it is supercharged in any kind of way. So let us call a spade a spade please. And when it comes to the serious matters of legislation and expenditure from the public account, let us just be straight down the line with how we describe these things, and not necessarily drag into it all of the election rhetoric and spin. The Greens’ position on this so-called dividend is that it is a poorly targeted mechanism to address the cost of living.
It was clearly a cynical vote, election promise, contrived in an attempt to buy votes during the last election. Now I want to be 100% clear, we need action on energy bills, and we also need action on the cost of living. But we need to have action that is targeted, that is targeted at the right people, and that is value for money. The issue at hand here is that a more targeted policy could have delivered twice the benefit to those who need it at more than half the cost. If the government was serious about cost of living relief for energy bill bills, they would be expanding concession programs and investing in energy efficiency for public housing, low income households. You know, that is where we can deliver genuine cost of living reform for Tasmanian people and particularly the Tasmanian people that need it most. You know, there are people, including probably most of us in this House who, let us face it, frankly, you know, on a salary of $140,000 plus, we do not need this kind of support in order to pay our household bills. We do not need it. There are people that could do with my share and therefore double this level of contribution to their relief. What we are seeing from this Government a one off payment, one off post-election commitment. Their plan for energy bill credit payments and a halving of the cost of public transport are short term half-baked measures.
Madam Deputy Speaker, the $74 million spent is a lot of money being spent on a paltry $250 or $300credits. Like I say, it will make a difference to some people, but many do not need it and we could make a bigger difference to the people that really do need it. For this sum, the Government could make public schools, TasTAFE and public transport all free statewide for a year with about $20 million to spare. So this is an extremely inefficient use of public funds from the party of self-proclaimed sensible economic and fiscal managers.
When it comes to the drought funding that the Treasurer mentioned in the second reading, I just want to make a couple of points as well. I certainly, and the Greens are certainly in favour of drought funding. As the son of a farmer and someone who still spends a fair bit of time on the land. I do concur, it is incredibly tough out there. We have had nearly no rain and virtually no rain in the autumn break and it is getting to the point now where it is almost too cold for growth anyway. Let us hope that rain comes, but it will not necessarily deliver immediate relief for farmers, so I want to make clear we do support these kind of payments for farmers.
But I just want to highlight what I guess I observed as incredibly cynical politicking during the election campaign, where drought and drought relief was effectively used as a political tool.t The Premier flew to King Island. I think it was first to announce drought relief. Flinders Island had to wait a couple of weeks until he could get a flight a couple of weeks later, then he announced drought relief for Flinders Island. I think it was a week or also later before he declared it for the whole state. It was so clearly needed for the whole state on day one. A declaration so clearly could have been made for relief and to give some confidence to struggling farmers. Some farmers that are not only struggling with the prices they are getting for their products and the amount of rain that is coming out of the sky, but this is causing serious impacts on their mental and other health and their relationships.
To have this kind of funding politicised and staged in election context based on the campaign plan that the Liberal Party had delivered, I think was truly cynical and really, really lamentable.
While we support these payments I wanted to make those points about how they were staged and how they were rolled out in an election context.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I also want to talk about the government’s grant funding commitments during the election campaign.
Madam Speaker. Some of those funding commitments from during the election campaign are actually contained in this supplementary appropriation. In 2022, the Integrity Commission released its second research paper in its series on ethical conduct and potential misconduct risks in Tasmanian parliamentary elections. This paper’s subject was grant commitments in election campaigns. This paper made clear the case against the Liberals’ pork‑barrelling approach to elections.
The Liberals’ practices do not meet good practice grant management principles. They do not have objectives, selection criteria and an application process. They are not publicly advertised or competitive. They do not identify decision‑makers and they do not involve a public record of how or why recipients were chosen.
We acknowledge that at least these grant commitments were identified in the associated papers, unlike Bracknell Hall and some other commitments in past years, but this report from the Integrity Commission made recommendations to introduce clear rules and guidelines with compliance mechanisms for grant commitments made during the election campaigns.
This fell on deaf ears with this government. This government insists it wants to be a government of integrity, but this is not a commitment anyone can take seriously. This government ignores integrity recommendations, from the Integrity Commission, itself that would require them to act with integrity.
We will support this budget bill, the supplementary appropriation bill. We leave you with those comments about some of the political failures with the construction of it, some of our views on how that money could be better spent and those issues regarding integrity and pork-barrelling in election context.
