Senator Ryan (Victoria—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education and Training) (16:41):
Developments today where the minister ensured that this important national infrastructure—NCRIS, as it is known—is going to continue for another year, after Labor left it unfunded, actually make a number of the pre-prepared speeches of those opposite rather irrelevant.
Underlying this, is a much more important issue. Underlying this, there is a truth that every dollar of public expenditure actually has to come from somewhere. It has to come from taxes or it has to come from borrowings. There is no magic money tree growing in the middle of Parliament House, despite what some may think, that ensures we can fund any and all projects that we desire. Indeed, there are many more worthy projects than any government ever has the resources to directly fund.
Every dollar has to come from either taxes or borrowings. Every dollar will eventually have to be covered by taxpayers. It either gets covered by taxpayers now, through paying tax on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis, or it gets paid by taxpayers in the future, with the additional burden of interest, which seems to have been the budgeting approach of the Greens. We know for a fact it was the budgeting approach of the previous government.
This is actually at the very core of this debate. Bert Kelly called it a trade-off. In modern budget parlance, it is referred to as an offset. In an era where we have a record deficit inherited from those opposite, in an era where the amount of money that is being borrowed not only to fund the operations of government but to actually pay the interest on previous handouts and waste and operations of government, we cannot simply keep adding to the public burden. We cannot continually say we will borrow more or, mythically, we will keep taxing more and more.
In a small business, if you want to invest in one part of your business, you are not going to have the money to invest in another part, or in some cases maybe you are not going to have the money to even take the family holiday. Every household knows that buying the new car might mean putting off the holiday. In more basic sacrifices, paying the school fees might mean you do not have as much discretionary income somewhere else. This basic concept is something that is utterly lost on those opposite. They offend the Australian people when they pretend that no sacrifice is necessary and that the money can come from anywhere they wish.
The ALP and the Greens like to pretend that no sacrifice is necessary to actually designate someone receiving public funds. In this sense, both of them are in a competition for the arrogant status vote, the idea of everything worthy must be undertaken by the public sector. There is some fantastic support for research and higher education in this country that comes from the non-government sector. Government plays a critical role, and I will speak about this government and the coalition’s record about that later on. This idea that everything that is worthy must be funded by the taxpayer, particularly when we are in an unsustainable deficit situation, does no service to the importance of the projects that they talk about.
The ALP and the Greens are competing in the championship of the politics of grievance or for the trophy for magic pudding economics! Both of them refuse to outline where the resources for important projects come from. The refusal of the ALP to provide ongoing funding for NCRIS illustrates the hollowness of their commitment and the hollowness of their words as they read out their speeches in this chamber. The truth is that expressions of commitment and support, without outlining the source of the revenue—where this will come from and how it will be paid for in the longer term—are meaningless. Labor’s commitment to this program, or lack of it, was shown when we came to office: there were less than two years of funding for NCRIS left in the budget. There were more than two years of NCRIS unfunded by those opposite. There were crocodile tears and magic-pudding economics. They could print a bumper sticker saying: ‘I care about researchers in Australia, I think research in Australia is critical, I think all of these institutions are critical; but when I was in office I did nothing to ensure they had ongoing funding.’ They did nothing whatsoever.
True commitment to important programs like NCRIS and proof that these are not crocodile tears would have been illustrated by different behaviour when they were in government, and everyone in the sector knows it.
There is a review going on of our national research infrastructure at the moment, which is one of the reasons this funding has been extended for one year. That review is universally supported by the research sector—universally supported. The problem we have, again, is dealing with difficult budget situations because no-one on the other side of the chamber is willing to outline how all these worthy national projects can be funded. We will hear about the mythical magic pudding of multinational tax avoidance. It is important to tackle, but it will not address the unsustainable budget deficit we inherited from those opposite. At its core it is about playing the politics of grievance and avoiding the difficult decisions necessary. Whether in a household, a small business, in a big business or in the public sector, ‘A dollar I spend here is not a dollar I can spend elsewhere.’ There is an opportunity cost to everything. There is a trade-off to everything.
The challenge we on this side of the chamber have is that we must clean up the mess left by those opposite. Today, part of the mess in our research infrastructure was addressed by the minister when he made the announcement to guarantee an extra year’s funding—a year of funding that, despite all the bleating from those opposite, was never provided for by them when they were in government.
I have visited some of the NCRIS facilities. They are fantastic. Every Australian knows about the high quality of the Australian research sector. While not trained in it, I did do a bit of work with people in health and medical research, and they are genuinely world leading. But they know that those opposite had a chance to fund this infrastructure on an ongoing basis. They know that the program was started by the Howard government. They know that those opposite did not do anything to make it a permanent program, nothing whatsoever. I am half-tempted to get all the great minds of NCRIS—the mathematicians, the biologists, those who use the fancy electron microscopes that I have seen but would never know how to use—to try and figure out if they can find the goose that lays the golden egg that those opposite seem to think we have locked somewhere in this building that can continually keep producing the resources we need to pay off our debt, to pay the interest bill and to fund worthy national programs!
You do not care about worthy national programs if you do not make the budget sustainable. You do not care about research and you do not care about our scientific infrastructure if you put the budget in a position where research is unfunded and the budget is unsustainable. Today the government addressed yet another mess left by Labor. Labor’s words, as well as those of the Greens, are nothing but crocodile tears, given their performance in government, when they hatched all their secret deals.
(ENDS)