State Budget

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:23): Well, surprise, surprise, I also rise to speak about the budget. While we have the Minister for Sport and Rec here—

The Hon. C.L. Wingard interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HUGHES: I was about to start on a very positive note and acknowledge the $900,000 for Bennett Oval and Memorial Oval in Whyalla for needed work, but I will provide a bit of context. It is somewhat short of the $6 million commitment that Labor made to upgrade sport facilities in Whyalla for the much-needed sports hub, but I do not look a gift horse in the mouth, so I welcome the $900,000.

When it comes to the budget, that massive slugging of families in our state, there is $356 million worth of extra fines, fees and taxes, and a number of those are going to especially hit people in regional South Australia. When we look at that $356 million, we have to do so in the context of what is happening to state debt, going up from $13.5 billion to $23 billion. The Liberal government are smashing the debt ceiling, the responsible debt ceiling, that Labor had in place, so we are going to be paying that off for many years to come.

When it comes to my electorate, there are a number of very sneaky moves indeed. There was the outback tax, which formed part of the dump before the budget from the Treasurer. He announced a property tax for those people in the unincorporated areas of between $100 and $400. This came completely out of the blue. I have called it a very sneaky tax. I notice the budget papers talk about consultation in relation to that, so they have already decided that there will be a property tax and they have already decided what the parameters will be of that property tax before any consultation has taken place.

I will be the first person to admit that there needs to be additional funding for outback areas, for our unincorporated areas. When we were in government and we looked at a levy for some of those communities, only two communities went ahead with it because both those communities were amongst the larger communities in the outback areas, namely, Andamooka and Iron Knob, but we did that on the basis of a genuine and longstanding consultation process with those communities to raise a bit of extra money.

When it comes to the rest of the unincorporated areas, many of those communities are incredibly small. By the look of things, we are also going to hit pastoralists who do not live in communities and who will get little in the way of direct or indirect benefit. We should have consulted there first and determined what was needed in the outback areas and then determined what is the best way to fund it. Is it through a levy or should it be out of general revenue, given the vast differences and the differences between general local government elsewhere in the state and what happens in that vast area of our state?

One of the other really cruel things in this budget is the removal of registration concession for people in the unincorporated areas and for people in Roxby Downs, Coober Pedy and Kangaroo Island. For Coober Pedy, Roxby Downs and Kangaroo Island, that is a $2.7 million hit. I pulled out some of the figures on vehicle registration in Roxby Downs, looking at how many cars households have: 315 households have one car, 568 have two cars and 339 have three cars. They are all going to be hit, and they are going to be hit very significantly. A business in Roxby Downs was saying that it is going to cost them an extra $20,000 a year.

The reason Labor never touched that concession was that we recognised the extreme difficulties people in the outback face when it comes to transport, in terms of both fuel cost and the distances they travel. They are already seriously disadvantaged. You cannot hop on a bus and you cannot hop on a train, so this is a real slug to people in the outback.