Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Thank you, Mr President.
The Greens will not be opposing the Appropriation (Supplementary Appropriation for 2024-25) Bill 2025, but we certainly echo the concerns raised by other members in their contributions. We are only six months into the budget cycle after the delivery of the 2024-25 State Budget and we have a request here for $467.5 million dollars to come out of the public account to fund operating services. This is not about capital delivery, this is about just keeping the machinery of government going, which is why we need to see this bill through.
That is nearly half a billion dollars and through the lens of some of the discussions both Houses of Parliament have been having over the past couple of weeks, it is a very pertinent number. We have a government that is in such difficult financial circumstances and it is not just that the government is in difficult financial circumstances, the state of Tasmania therefore is in very difficult financial circumstances. That is proposing to sell the family jewels at the same time as it is spruiking stadium that Gil McLachlan in his time and the AFL demanded of us in return for the team that we have long earned. Now we are coming back in here and it is black and white, it is so obvious that the budget is dire.
We have a government flailing around trying to work out what to do about it. It is needing to borrow to fund operating services. My first question to the Leader of Government Business is can you confirm what amount of that money the $467.5 million dollars will be borrowings? It has had to be the practice of government in recent years to borrow to fund recurrent costs and operational services.
Is there $467.5 million sitting in the public account ready to be dispersed or will this supplementary appropriation be funded through borrowings? Once the supplementary appropriation is taken out of the public account, what will the balance be in the public account?
That is information that Treasury should have available to us so we understand the picture we are really looking at.
Other members have gone through some of the provisions in this supplementary appropriation that touch on nearly all government agencies. Clearly, the $345 million or so in extra supplementary appropriations for the Department of Health’s operating services are the largest element of this supplementary appropriation bill. In part that is because as a state with the highest level of chronic disease in the country, the oldest and fastest ageing population and with significant equity and poverty issues, particularly on urban fringe areas and in rural and regional areas, we are not investing nearly enough in health and wellbeing. It is something that governments pay lip service to, but do not pay money towards in any meaningful way. Partly that is because we live in four-year budget cycles and the whole frame through which a treasury or a government looks at its spending is through a four-year budget cycle. Having that cultural shift where you recognise that a sustained and substantial investment in health and wellbeing in preventative health in ensuring food security is an investment that has a significant return in terms of reducing the impact on our health system.
We cannot be also blind to the fact that right across the country and right across the world people, healthcare workers, healthcare professionals, allied health professionals have been leaving the profession. This has sharply up ticked during the pandemic. Now there may be many layers of reason for that. Some of it will be because as a society we decided to let an immune disabling virus loose on our populations and our healthcare workers are on the frontline of that massive public healthcare failure. I refer members to data available on healthcare worker numbers and shortages right across Europe and the UK. I refer members to data that is coming in from public health authorities showing an increase in cancers, heart attacks, strokes, all manner of chronic illnesses, childhood diabetes.
We have, as a society, and we are not all culpable in this, but we have watched an erosion of public health, an erosion of trust and authority of public health that has had significant consequential flow on throughout our health system. It is also impacting on our education system, teachers are leaving the profession. There is a reason we have a massive metro and public transport bus driver shortage around the country. There are shortages of critical workers across all sectors across the country and here in Tasmania. This is because we stupidly and blindly, in service of necro capitalism unleashed, without taking proper care of our most vulnerable and our children, a disabling virus and here is more on the way. Until we come to grips with the need to clean the air that we work and live in, make sure that our healthcare settings are safe for the workers in those settings and everyone who comes into contact with them, because there is one place you are more likely than almost anywhere else to catch a nasty disease, and that is in our public hospital system because infection prevention and control has dropped. We had that confirmed last year in estimates, when we quizzed the data on personal protective equipment. The expenditure on that throughout a pandemic has reduced to about one fifth of what it was four or five years ago when COVID started. We are going to keep having problems attracting and retaining healthcare workers, unless we get real about this. We are going to continue to have to rely on locums to the tune in this supplementary appropriation of $90 million and agency nurses of $100 million until we get real about protecting the workplaces of our healthcare workers. But every year the health budget blows out and it is something that government knows will happen.
It is an inevitability. I take on board the member for Rumney’s observation about the dishonesty implicit in a state budget that sets out a certain set of numbers and then there is always a supplementary appropriation that comes in afterwards. But if we are realistic about the politics here with any government, does not matter the colour, if in the first budget of the newly elected Rockliff minority government we had honesty about the state of the finances, the level of expenditure just for recurrent operational services that was required for the full financial year, let us be honest, the government – the Premier, the Treasurer – would have copped an absolute pasting for that.
They already copped a pasting for the Budget; they are getting a bit of a tap here. For governments and particularly one, which over 11 years has not shown a huge amount of courage in terms of speaking honestly to the Tasmanian people, faced with finances that are failing like ours, it is a political impossibility in some ways. I am not saying that to let them off the hook. I am just acknowledging the political reality we are in that leads to not being transparent and open, because you are fearful of the consequences of telling the truth.
Before calling the state election 13 months early last year, the Liberals in government would have had a very good idea of the state’s finances. Yet came out the other side of the election with about, according to Saul Eslake’s work, about $1.4 billion worth of promises. Now, if we lived in a slightly less combative parliamentary system there is a real opportunity here for some collective ownership of the state’s future. It was the member for Nelson yesterday who was talking about the great work undertaken during 2010 and 2014 on the potential for tax reform.
Tim Morris, our former member for Lyons, the then-member for Bass and former shadow treasurer, Peter Gutwein, was on that panel. I cannot quite remember who was the Labor member on the panel. An enormous amount of work in good spirit was undertaken to put forward proposals for potential savings and revenue generating that had a broad agreement across the parliament so, there would be a collective sense of ownership of any changes, for example, to the tax system.
Now, because we live in a four-year cycle, electoral cycle and budget cycle, all that wonderful work done on tax reform looked at stamp duty, land tax, payroll tax, it examined equity issues, all of that work as we got closer to the 2014 state election went into the yellow recycling bin ultimately. What a wasted opportunity. When you look at the state of the books and the enormous conundrums we are faced with as representatives of our communities, there is surely some space here for a different way of talking about the financial challenges of the state of Tasmania?
A smart premier who was really thinking things through would want there to be a collective sense of ownership and a collective response to dealing with the state’s finances. Perhaps respected economist Saul Eslake, when he hands down his work, will be looking to find some consensus ground, those elements of potential budget remediation measures that we can to a significant extent agree on. Mr Eslake has already reported to government on the state of the state’s finances as a result of the agreement the Premier made after the last state election and his work was ignored. I am not as cynical as some people, I generally try to see the best in people, but a cynic would say because Saul Eslake is so highly regarded in the community and something in economic terms of a Tasmanian treasure that he provides to government that respectability in the report he will deliver. He has always been frank and fearless, while being kind in his advice to governments or parliaments or his commentary on what are dry economic matters.
We did hear some information on the terms of reference yesterday, but I hope that in Mr Eslake’s examination of the state’s finances he does have a look at the glaring opportunity which he has raised before as something that the state could do better. That is how we how we levy corporations in order to make sure that the people of Tasmania are getting the return they deserve from corporations who make wealth from the wealth of the people of Tasmania.
In a state which has a health system needing to ask for an extra $340 million three months before the end of the financial year, an education system which we know has a terrific minister, but there are still children in public schools learning in terrapins that were built in the 1980s. We still have a housing crisis and a government fudging figures on the 10,000 homes. This was initially to be 10,000 new homes but are now just 10,000 new homes and we know that some of those homes are land. We have Tasmanians out there every day being hammered by the cost of living. We have a mass mortality event in our waters and the biggest biosecurity crisis in living memory, which will require government resources.
I am sure Biosecurity Tasmania and the EPA have been putting a lot of time and resources into this catastrophe since it started. Yet we have no apparent plan from government about how to generate revenue other than selling public assets for which they have no mandate or cutting the public sector, which delivers essential quality services to the people of Tasmania. The Greens have some ideas for government and I would like to put these on the record. On the numbers, in 2022 the mining industry made more profits than every single industry outside of finance combined. In the 12 months to May of 2023, the Tasmanian mining industry exported $2.8 billion worth of mineral products, 62 per cent of the state’s mercantile export value. That is according to the Tasmanian Minerals’ Paper. ‘In high demand amidst electrification shift; Ministry of Resources’ and despite $2.8 billion worth of our mineral wealth being exported from the state, the state only collected $56 million in mining royalties, which is under 2.2 per cent of Tasmania’s own source revenue. We do not even levy mining companies here to the national average.
If we did that, if we levied mining royalties as they should be, in the first year of operation we could take in an extra $44 million a year. It just creeps up ever so slightly along the forward Estimates. If we levied mining companies at the national average, we could raise $183 million over four years.
We have a gambling industry here that benefits a small handful of very wealthy people, the Farrell family among them, or the Federal Group. According to the Australian Financial Review BRW Rich List, the Farrells are estimated to be worth $745 million, with the patriarch of the family himself said to be worth $564 million. As we know, this extreme wealth has come out of the pockets of some of our poorest people, people who can least afford to lose money. It has been a consequence of many decades of a gambling monopoly for which the people of Tasmania received very little return.
The history tells us now – we know this – the licence fees and EGM tax rate for casinos were cut to make them comparable, I think, to a casino in Rockhampton or something. Whatever it was, the gambling industry here sure got a sweet, sweet deal. That comes at the expense of revenue for the people of Tasmania because we did not have a government with the courage to tax gambling, even to a reasonable extent. If we restored licence fees and the EGM tax rates for casinos to pre-2021 levels, we could raise $9 million a year and over four years raise $36 million.
Multinational salmon corporations drain the wealth out of our marine environment, have expanded around the state at the behest of the Liberals in government and Labor, who cheer them on endlessly. It is a completely unsustainable industry which has huge stocking level problems and has alienated enormous parts of our community at significant environmental cost. Since January this year, people who live along the southern beaches – particularly the beaches around the Huon, but now the beaches at the Tasman Peninsula because the mass mortality event has reached there – cannot swim on our own beaches.
This is for an industry which pays no company tax, is automating rapidly so it does not have to pay Tasmanians wages, gives the middle finger to regulators, and seeks carve‑outs from biosecurity plans like Tassal did for its Okehampton Bay operation. It is interesting that Piscirickettsia salmonis somehow made its way from Okehampton Bay down to the Channel sometime after Tassal got a carve‑out from the biosecurity plan for the salmon industry. They are not going to pay for that. They are not going to pay Huon for that. It was Huon that was ultimately, primarily, hardest hit. The people of Tasmania, again, will pay for that. The environment will pay for that. The marine ecosystem is paying dearly for that.
We have antibiotics through our waterways and our wild fish populations because of this toxic, polluting, leeching industry. This industry plays the politics here very well, and pays sweet bugger‑all for their leases. It gets a free ride to reactivate the zombie leases when they want to expand. They do want to expand – all around Storm Bay. They would expand all around the island, and we know we have a Premier that would let them. What is the benefit to the people of Tasmania of this industry?
We have some jobs in the industry. We have some 250 jobs, as I understand it, in Macquarie Harbour. We also pay, as I understand it – the former minister for the Environment might have these numbers off the top of his head – but I understand it is costing about $30 million a year to oxygenate Macquarie Harbour because we do not have a federal or state government with the guts to get those pens out of there.
We have an industry that is sending a species to extinction, that has both the major parties bending over backwards for it, and that has doubled in size over the last decade. Over 60 per cent of the value of all aquaculture in Australia is coming out of this little island’s inshore waters. In 2022 the gross value of the salmon production in Tasmania, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, was $1.1 billion. Despite exploiting a natural resource, and the significant cost to ecological systems and to community life, very little of this windfall gain comes back to the state. If the government established a 10 per cent royalty on the gross value of salmonoids grown in Tasmania waters, in the first year they could raise $95 million. It sits at about that level across the forward Estimates to $380 million over four years.
Now I can almost hear some Liberal members thinking, ‘Well, you would tax the salmon industry out of existence. You would tax the mining industry out of existence’. Well, no. What we have said about the mining industry is we expect you to pay the national average for your royalties. What we are saying to the salmon industry is that we recognise that you make billions of dollars out of leases in public waters and so we are going to charge you a 10 per cent royalty on the gross value of your salmonoids.
I would like to see salmon companies reimburse the state, Biosecurity Tasmania, and the Environment Protection Authority for the catastrophe that is unfolding in our waters right now. I will bet you no effort is made to recoup any of those costs. Let us face it, some of the damage that has been caused by the expansion of the salmon industry in Tasmanian waters will never be remediated.
I have told this story in here before. Rodney Dillon[okay], Aboriginal elder – if you ever get a chance to talk to him about it, get him to describe what it was like diving as a kid in the D’entrecasteau Channel and what it is like now after fish farms arrived. That is a loss of our common wealth.
If property developers know one thing, it is how to make big profits. Certainly in this state, they also know – some of them do anyway – that they have a government that will write them bespoke legislation. One of the best tricks is making money for nothing simply by rezoning land. Rezoning land can make a developer millions simply by changing what the land is allowed to be used for to something of higher value. Governments are making decisions on whether developers are allowed to rezone land to high‑value use. This comes with the opportunity for corruption at the local and state level particularly.
A rezoning tax as proposed by the Greens, in place in other jurisdictions, is a once‑off levy applied to the windfall gain enjoyed by property developers when they are allowed to change what the land they have purchased can be used for. To put this really simply, if an area of land is zoned from industrial to residential, obviously the value of that land increases enormously. It is not because the developer has invested any capital in the land itself. It is simply by virtue of the rezoning. That is a windfall gain. We should be taxing it. Why would we let developers make free money as a result of a rezoning decision? We should not do that.
There is a system in the ACT, a once‑off levy that ensures a government decision to award a developer a massive profit will also benefit the community. In the ACT, when a change in the allowable use of land results in an increase in valuation, the ACT government applies a 75 per cent once-off tax on that increase in value. That is a tax on windfall gains caused only by rezoning. We are not saying we tax people after they have done good stuff on the rezoned land, we are just acknowledging they did nothing to earn those windfall gains. That rezoning tax could earn $640 million over the forward Estimates, more than covering this supplementary appropriation bill.
In Vancouver, for example, they have an empty homes levy. We have Tasmanians who still cannot find a home to rent or buy. There are about 1000 homes around the island that are empty. They will be empty for a whole range of reasons, but some of them will be empty for no particularly good reason. There are around 470 empty homes in the Hobart area and 445 in Launceston. We have people sleeping on the streets. We have mums sleeping with their kids in cars. In other places, levies on empty homes are used to curtail this problem. In Vancouver, such a levy has reduced vacant homes by 36 per cent and raised $115 million for social housing. If we just put a 1 per cent levy on empty homes, we could raise $26 million over the forward Estimates.
That would cover some of the extra costs in the Tasmanian prison system caused by a totally stupid tough‑on‑crime approach, which is not only filling Risdon, it is filling Ashley Youth Detention Centre and our remand centres and bail houses with children. If government had the courage to simply put a 1 per cent levy on vacant properties, there would be an extra $26 million there, perhaps instead to invest in crime prevention, community safety and wellbeing, and diversion programs for young people.
I might just divert briefly at this point to talk about the government’s response to the commission of inquiry and some of the evidence that we have heard come before the parliamentary committee. We have a government here with two very distinct sides to its face on this issue. We have a government that said it is committed to implementing the recommendations of the commission of inquiry and has done a solid job ticking those boxes, although some of the reforms are far too far‑off in the never‑never. Over on the other side here, we have a Minister for Police, Fire and Emergency Management who has initiated things like Operation Raven, where they are just scooping up kids from around Launceston and incarcerating them. We are seeing more young people, about 96 per cent of young people who are in Ashley at any given time are in there on remand. They have not even been sentenced.
We are seeing a conflict and collision between the ambitions and the imperatives of the commission of inquiry and this stupid, un‑evidence‑based approach to children, young people, and youth justice which is undoing the work of the commission of inquiry and of those government agencies that are trying to give effect to that report.
We are in here with a supplementary appropriation bill which needs to give more money to Risdon, more money to Ashley – $1.6 million, of which apparently is for staff who have been suspended and still have not been laid off over historical allegations. We have a government that has to come back in here and beg for money because it is filling our jail, it is filling Ashley, and it is criminalising children and young people at an obscene rate.
Finally, on the racing industry: in 2015, we initiated an inquiry into the greyhound racing industry. I was the chair of that until I was sacked, when I called for a ban on greyhound racing. We found that the number of deaths in the industry was unacceptable, and likely to be higher than reported. We know every person in this place knows what a dog of an industry greyhound racing is and how unpopular it is. We also know that it is the taxpayer who pays for this cruelty. The subsidy to the racing industry in the last year alone was $37 million. That is a huge amount of money that could be going into public good rather than torturing animals.
In closing I wanted to go to a matter that came up in the briefing this morning and was raised by the honourable member for McIntyre. That is about the $10.5 million loan to Group 6 Metals Ltd, which we are now being asked to enable to be repaid because the proponent of the Dolphin Tungsten Mine project on King Island could not repay the loan or even the interest. The honourable member for McIntyre makes a fair point about why this company is having this special treatment. Is it because they are in the Premier’s electorate? That is a fair question to ask. That is a substantial bailout for an unproven company which has a lot of nice words and some nice pictures on its website, but to date has not been successful.
So, $10 million is procured through the Tasmanian Development Act that has come through a loan from TASCORP that goes to a mining company that cannot repay it. Remember, this $10 million here was already borrowed by entities owned by the state of Tasmania. Then the state of Tasmania pays itself back, really, even though the loan was to a company. Then it takes a share in a company which has faced, let us face it, very significant challenges. It is a highly unusual thing for a government to do to purchase equity, presumably on behalf of Tasmanians, in a company which has shown no evidence of being able to deliver. It is sort of emblematic in a way of this government, which invests quite a bit in what we would classify as corporate welfare and handouts to businesses, at the same time as they are telling us that they cannot afford to properly fund some of these services and that they will need to axe public sector jobs and sell off GBEs and state‑owned companies.
I am pretty sure Saul Eslake has got better things to do than watch the Legislative Council, but I certainly hope he has a look at the level of corporate welfare in successive Liberal budgets. There is some argument at some level for some businesses for start‑up funding, particularly for social enterprise ventures. If a business cannot make it within the first few years of attempted operation, it is not the job of taxpayers to give them a bailout and a lifeline. It is that old thing that happens all the time, where companies privatise the profits and socialise the losses. This is a perfect example of losses – inability to make money being socialised. It is disappointing.
There is a lot to talk about in the supplementary appropriation bill. I am sure we will have more interesting contributions from other honourable members, but it is disappointing to be coming back in to parliament year-on-year after state Budget has been handed down and deal with the inevitable supplementary appropriation bill. We get a really clear message out of this. The government has no pathway out of the red and into the black. It has locked itself into the bunker. It is threatening to sell the family silver. It is threatening to take the hatchet to public services.
I hope that what we will see from government once the penny starts to drop is the unpopularity of its plans and the difficulty it is going to have getting some of those plans through this parliament, that they are more open to an honest and respectful relationship with the Tasmanian people and with their colleagues in the other place and in here, because if we work together on the big issues, if we can find consensus on some of the tough stuff, then that is us doing our jobs. It does not mean we do not hold government to account and scrutinise their decision making, but there must be some things that we are able to agree on in order to take some of the pressure off the state’s finances. I would love us to have that conversation in an open and accepting way. I think it could make a real difference.
