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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
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Appropriation Bill 2017

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 22 June 2017.)

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (11:02): I indicate that I will be the lead speaker for the opposition on this bill. Let's stop mincing words. South Australia is in deep economic trouble and this budget offers no solution, because it will destroy more jobs and deter future investment in our state. This government continues to smash our economy with its wrecking ball of higher taxes and budget waste and mismanagement. Labor is ruining the future prospects of our children.

We have to restore confidence and we need to restore opportunity in our state. To do that, we must have lower taxes to encourage investment and job creation, much less red tape and unnecessary regulation, ensure government spending remains within budget, a growing private sector, an efficient public sector, higher productivity in our private and our public sectors, strong and sustained export growth right across South Australia, more investment in productive infrastructure and greater support for our regions.

All these measures and more are necessary if we are going to get the South Australian economy growing at an acceptable rate. A Liberal government's aim will be to lift South Australia's economic growth so that it is in line with the national rate.

Members interjecting:

Mr MARSHALL: They say that it is higher, but let's look at the facts. The economic growth rate in this state over the last five years while Jay Weatherill has been the Premier has averaged 1.4 per cent. That is less than half the national average rate, and it is just a fraction of the fast growth states in Australia. Jay Weatherill, Tom Koutsantonis and this entire Labor government have completely and utterly failed the people of South Australia.

When you turn 16 in life, most people start to accept responsibility. I see many students here in the gallery with us today. I have two children of my own and I know that when you turn 16 you become more mature. There is the onset of some wisdom as you anticipate the next phase of your life with greater energy and enthusiasm. Well, this is the 16th year and the 16th budget of this dysfunctional Labor government and there is no acceptance of responsibility by this government for the economic failures they have inflicted upon the people of South Australia.

There is no maturity for a solution, there is no wisdom about our future, no sense of energy or enthusiasm about what is next for South Australia, no reason given to the 16 year olds of today to believe they can get on in South Australia by staying here in this state. After 16 budgets in a row, South Australians are entitled to expect that Labor had grown up and learnt something, but the simple fact is that Labor has learnt nothing whatsoever.

In fact, the Premier, in particular, has learnt nothing because he has been the only member of every ministry that has framed those 16 failed Labor government budgets. His fingerprints, more than anyone else's, are all over what Labor has delivered for our state. As this budget confirms, in all that time Labor has not learnt a thing about how to grow our economy.

All Labor has left is to pick fake fights in the hope of hiding its own failures: fights with the businesses in South Australia that are trying their level best to grow employment and create opportunities for the next generation; fights with Canberra, which continues to provide more than half the money in our state budget; fights with the independent energy market operators who are doing whatever they can to deliver reliable power to South Australians when the government has failed them. I am all for the fight when it means that South Australia wins the fight that matters to it, but this government continues to lose the fight on the things that matter: growing our economy and growing jobs here in South Australia.

In this budget, our economy needed the stimulus of lower taxes to support investment and job creation. Instead, what do we get? Higher taxes, more deterrents for investment and fewer jobs created moving forward. The budget should be a time of reckoning, a reflection about the things that are going wrong and about what needs to be done to put them right, but this budget is nothing more than Labor spin; more arrogance, more delusion.

It was spun, as you would recall, Deputy Speaker, as a jobs budget, just like the one before and the one before that. At least this year there is an element of truth in the spin; this is about jobs, two jobs in particular, that of the Premier and that of the Treasurer of this state. The truth, of course, is that this is nothing like a jobs budget. This is unequivocally a tax budget. It raises almost $420 million in new taxes and increased government charges in real terms, when wages are not growing and household and business budgets remain under severe pressure because of our flagging economy.

Let me tell you about the dirty little secret that is contained within the pages of this Labor budget. Let me tell you why there is another massive Labor tax grab in this budget. The reason is on page 14 of Budget Paper 3. There, table 1.5 reveals that tax revenue over the forward estimates has been written down by a staggering $438 million since last year's budget. Tax revenue is declining because the economy, under Labor, is sliding. So what does Labor do? They do what they always do: they think the solution to any problem in our state is to increase taxes. Well, we know that this will only slow our economy and slow job creation even more.

This budget rips $370 million out of the banks and out of the pockets of businesses and the people of South Australia. As we know, Labor has form with playing with people's bank deposits and home loans. This is the same shameful Labor Party that bankrupted the people's bank, the State Bank. This is the same party that engaged in pre-election manipulation of the interest rates charged by the people's bank not once, not twice, but three separate times. That is the political culture the Premier and the Treasurer were raised in, so we should not be surprised about how they have gone about trying to impose the latest Labor tax.

This is a budget that tries to repair broken promises but then goes on to make many more, like creating jobs. You do not have to read far into the budget papers to learn this. One per cent jobs growth is what is promised in this budget. This is less than half that of Victoria. It is not even anywhere near that of Tasmania. Within a week, we have had the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies come out and say that, despite the fact that already the prediction is the lowest jobs growth rate in the entire nation, we are not even going to achieve that.

The independent umpire has said that this is certainly not a jobs budget. After the money this budget allocates to job creation, South Australia will continue to go backwards relative to the other states in Australia and compared with their own jobs forecast. There is no permanent solution offered to South Australia's jobs crisis. We should not be surprised, because it is the same Labor government that promised a staggering 100,000 jobs to the people of South Australia in the lead-up to the 2010 election. How much have they fallen short by? By 80 per cent. They have got nowhere near their own promised jobs creation—80,000 jobs short of what they promised the people of South Australia.

This is a government that has given us the highest priced electricity in the world, the least reliable grid in Australia, a child protection system that has continually failed the most vulnerable children in our society, a mental health service that has neglected and abused the elderly, while the ministers who repeatedly disown responsibility for their failures shamelessly take people on tours of buildings, cut ribbons and unveil monuments to themselves. Labor has been given too long—long enough to grow our economy, long enough to create jobs in this state, long enough to ensure that our families should not be continuing to struggle with the ever-increasing cost of living. It is now time for Labor to go.

It is time for South Australians to have a government delivering what they need and what they pay taxes to expect: health, education and other key services provided as efficiently as possible and, importantly, businesses given as much incentive to create jobs as possible. Governing well is as basic as that. When you are governing well, you do not need to spend the people's money trying to tell the people what you claim to be doing for them. But the day after the budget was delivered, our morning newspaper had three full-page advertisements, paid for by the people, with more on television and more again in the weekend press, and last week, and again this week, and again this morning. It promises them that we are investing for the future.

Do people really want to pay taxes to have lies told to them here in South Australia? The truth is that this budget will actually cost jobs; it will cost investment and it will not create them. Taxpayers meeting the bill for Labor propaganda is what we now have in South Australia. Under a Liberal government, this shameful behaviour will stop. In the interests of truth in advertising, the only advertisement that this government should take out is an apology to the people of South Australia for the sky-high energy costs, for our unreliable grid, failures to protect our children, failures to protect the elderly and, of course, the jobs crisis that they have now inflicted upon the people of South Australia. Labor is out of time. There is no future in repeating more of the 16 years of failure.

Let's consider for a moment Labor's performance over the last four budget cycles, not just the four years of the forward estimates or indeed for the last four years, because Labor habits never die. In particular is the habit of taking more and more of people's money—more and more taxes; less and less money in the pockets of ordinary South Australians. When Labor was elected in 2002, South Australia actually had low debt. The hard work of the Liberal Party had restored the financial position destroyed by the Labor's State Bank financial crisis. Labor also came to office with property values rising quickly, turbocharging state-based taxation revenue. It has received the continuing advantage of much more federal money through the allocation of GST revenues, but Labor has squandered its luck and failed all South Australians.

During Labor's 16 years, South Australia has fallen behind the rest of the nation. We have come well off the pace of growth on all major measures. If South Australia had retained the share of the national population that it had back in 2002, almost 180,000 more people would be living in this state. Of course, this is the reason why our demand is falling. We have not kept pace with the rest of the nation. At every single reporting period, we fall further and further behind.

In the last figures that were available to the people of this state, we saw a staggering 6,903 people in net migration to other states. This is a terrible, shameful indictment on the future that is being projected in this state after 16 failed years of Labor administration. This government has now abandoned its target of increasing our population to two million by 2027.

If we had retained our jobs share, about 100,000 more people would currently be employed in South Australia. In fact, that is the number that Labor themselves promised back in 2010 but, over the past two years alone, our rate of jobs growth has been only half the national jobs growth figure. There has been no growth in full-time private sector employment for seven years. For seven years, there has been no growth whatsoever in full-time employment in South Australia in the private sector.

We have 16.6 per cent of our labour force either underemployed or unemployed. That is 150,000 people in this state who are either unemployed or looking for more hours. We have the highest seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the nation, at 6.9 per cent. We have had the highest trend unemployment rate in this state for 30 consecutive months. The rate for 15 to 24 year olds is 17.2 per cent, which is again the highest in the nation. Almost one in five children in this state is out of work, and these are not just statistics. Behind them are countless individual stories of lost hope and lost opportunity for our state.

One reason why many more people are not in jobs is our lagging export performance in South Australia. If we had retained our share of the nation's merchandise exports from 2002, we would be exporting $9.6 billion more per year, and this of course would translate into tens and tens of thousands of additional jobs in this state. Over the last 12 months alone, our exports fell 5.2 per cent to just over $11 billion when the government themselves set an exports target this year—a guaranteed target this year—of $18 billion. It will hit only $11 billion.

At the time Labor came to office back in 2002, South Australia's economy was growing at an annual rate of 4.9 per cent. If we had continued at that rate, our gross state product would now have hit $150 billion per year. Where are we? We are at approximately $100 billion. Labor's target was to exceed the national economic growth rate to 2020—another comprehensive failure by this government. As I said previously, during this Premier's time in office we have only had economic growth of 1.4 per cent against a national average that is almost double.

If we had just kept pace with the national growth rate over this same time, our GSP would be $10 billion higher, which of course is 10 per cent when you are looking at a $100 billion GSP. As I emphasised at the beginning of my reply, a Liberal government will have a fundamentally different approach to restoring economic growth and creating investment and jobs in this state, and I will come to that slightly later in my address. What all this tells us is that Labor has failed to deliver on the basics, not only in helping to create jobs but in the management of the budget, which is fundamental to a confident, outward-looking, growing economy. The 2017 budget is just more of the same.

The government has been running fake budget surpluses since it decided, despite previous promises not to do so, to privatise the compulsory third-party insurance market. In the 2016-17 financial year, distributions from the Motor Accident Commission impacted the net operating balance to the tune of $297.8 million when the overall budget surplus was just $239 million. In other words, it turned a deficit into a surplus.

For the 2017-18 financial year, another $321.7 million is budgeted in dividends to a budget that is only going to be in surplus by $72 million. This is a structural deficit propped up only by the sale of government assets. Since Labor's election in 2002, it has increased the total tax take by a staggering 112 per cent. On the spending side of the budget, however, Labor has spent $6 billion above budget during its 16 years in office. Labor has kept spending within budget only twice in 16 years. I will return to the spending side of the budget in a few moments, but let's take another look at the revenue that the government is now receiving.

Total revenue is projected to grow in real terms across each year of the forward estimates. This includes, of course, payroll tax. Over the next four years, the budgeted payroll tax revenue is almost $5 billion. That is a $5 billion tax on jobs. Against that is a $200 million jobs fund—it is not much at all. The government tries to make a virtue of what it has done with payroll tax and payroll tax concessions, but reducing the rates and providing concessions is not cutting tax in the way the government wants the people of South Australia to believe. It is just more tinkering, just collecting a little less tax than the government otherwise would.

The very need to provide rebates and concessions confirms that this tax penalises job creation here in South Australia. The adjustments over the forward estimates to the payroll tax rate for small businesses amount to less than 1 per cent of revenue forgone from total budgeted payroll tax collections during the four years of the forward estimates. Pre-budget, the government also made much of its adjustments to the Job Accelerator Grants, suggesting it was putting a lot more into the whole scheme. What we find, however, is that these grants are not being extended beyond an increase for apprentices and trainees.

If the government had put as much thought into doing what it could to be effective for all businesses in South Australia as it has into its advertising campaign and the tinkering it has done, South Australia's future economic prospects would be much, much better. As well as real increases in tax revenue over the forward estimates, the government is also budgeting for 20 per cent more revenue from regulatory fees in this state. The majority of fees and charges will increase in real terms.

Revenue from TAFE increases by a staggering 27.8 per cent, from Metroticket sales by 13 per cent and from driver's licence fees by 28.5 per cent. The average annual water bill in South Australia is now $787 per year and another $429 for sewerage. During its 16 years in office, Labor has increased the average household water bill by 232 per cent. Labor has driven up the cost of living for all South Australians, refusing to exercise budget discipline in the way that all households have been forced to do because of the pain that has been inflicted upon them by this government.

This government has pretended to be at constant war with Canberra even though the federal government has continued to provide well over 50 per cent of the total budget revenue it receives, not to mention the thousands of jobs it will deliver to South Australia through the naval shipbuilding contracts. In 2017-18, Canberra's contribution to total state budget revenues will be a staggering 55 per cent. That is $10.5 billion. Over the forward estimates, this will increase by $700 million to $11.2 billion per year—so much for being short-changed by Canberra. This has been one more fake fight waged by this government, this increasingly desperate government, in the hope of concealing the ineptitude and mismanagement that they have inflicted upon South Australia.

It is now time to turn to one further example: the bank tax. With the juvenile glee of a shameless populist, the Treasurer attacked the banks. He wants to raid them as though he has an automatic entitlement to some of their customers' money. The bank liabilities to be taxed are the deposits made by hardworking mums and dads in South Australia. Even school savings, accounts of children, are not exempt from this, nor is the superannuation of grandparents trying to make ends meet in retirement. The Treasurer seems to think that he can put his hands in the pockets of anyone at any time he feels.

He tells us the impact of this tax will not hit bank customers, but nobody believes this Treasurer. Who would? He constantly parades as a man able to decide better than anyone else how the people's money is to be spent—by confiscating more and more of it in increasing taxes. Let's consider some simple truths this Treasurer simply does not understand. Tax is money earned by the people, earned by businesses and spent by governments. It is as simple as that. Accordingly, a good government does not raise any more tax than is necessary to provide the services people need, imposing discipline on itself to keep pressure off the cost of living and to encourage investment and job creation. It is as simple as that.

A bad government does not care how much money it raises through taxes, nor how much people's money it mismanages and wastes. It is as simple as that. Labor wants to impose this bank tax because it is being lazy—a hopeless manager of our budget for more than 16 years. It is as simple as that. This issue is not about the behaviour of businesses. This issue is not about the behaviour of the people of South Australia. This is about the behaviour of this tired government. The response to this proposal has been completely unprecedented. It cannot be ignored by anyone interested in protecting and preserving South Australia's reputation for fair and responsible government here in this state.

Unlike Labor, which did not even conduct any consultation with its own Economic Development Board and its own Investment Attraction agency, we have listened to the concerns of the people of this state: individuals, organisations, businesses. Labor simply has no mandate whatsoever for this measure. It breaches the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Reform of Commonwealth-State Financial Relations, signed in 1998. In return for GST revenue, South Australia agreed to stop applying a range taxes on financial institutions. This government has been a beneficiary ever since, through much of the massive increase in the GST distribution to this state. A future Liberal government will continue to honour that original agreement.

Since the announcement of this tax, it has become clearer by the day that it has consequences—very serious consequences—so adverse to South Australia that it should never, ever have been proposed. It threatens the conduct of orderly federal-state financial relations that benefits all South Australians. It threatens the deposit and home loan interest rates of all customers who bank here in South Australia. It threatens, of course, future investment in South Australia. It threatens job creation in South Australia, now and into the future. It threatens the loss of business here in our state.

Labor must be prevented from adding to the cost of home mortgages and business loans and to pressure on jobs. A big new tax is the last thing that the people of South Australia need. We must not threaten investment in South Australia at a time when we can least afford it. When many businesses are struggling to survive, let alone expand, we must protect South Australia's reputation in the eyes of the rest of Australia and, indeed, in the eyes of the rest of the world. This government prefers to trash that reputation because it has not been able to manage its own budget. You cannot on the one hand introduce a big new tax and on the other promise to create a lot more jobs.

I therefore confirm that we will move in this house for the deletion of this tax from the budget measures. If we are unsuccessful, we will support its removal in the upper house as well. I give this commitment today: a Liberal government will never behave in the way this government has over this tax. I assure investors that they will not be exposed to sudden major tax policy changes under a Liberal government. I assure all South Australians that taxes will be lower under a Liberal government. Our tax system has to be efficient and competitive to support economic growth and job creation. Our tax policies must be stable, not suddenly imposed. We need significant investment from business over the long term. We will not get that with short-sighted, short-term populist policies.

All taxes add to the cost of living in some way or another. Far from relieving that pressure, this budget of course increases it, not only with real rises in taxes and charges but with government spending that is also continuing to increase in real terms. There is $2 billion worth of new spending outlined in the 2017-18 budget to be introduced over the next four years. But Budget Paper 3 tells us on page 26 that there are no new savings measures in the 2017-18 budget to offset that higher spending. The government has ignored—again ignored—proper budget management because there is an election approaching here in South Australia.

In health, the government dishonestly advertises a $1.1 billion hospital works program. In fact, the budget itself shows new hospital capital projects will cost $844 million, not $1.1 billion, and about a quarter of this spending—almost $200 million—is required for blow-outs in Transforming Health budgets or attempts to deal with problems emerging from the toxic Transforming Health. Exposed and embarrassed by what Transforming Health has not delivered, the Premier now says that the process is at an end, but it has not ended. The Premier only says that in an attempt to hide the fact that Transforming Health has continued to be a massive failure for the people of South Australia.

Eight Transforming Health projects were announced in the 2015-16 budget and only two have been delivered; the other six are running a total of 2,460 days late and running tens and tens of millions of dollars over budget. The budget paper fails to reflect improvements in performance as a result of Transforming Health. For example, the proportion of urgent emergency department cases seen within the target of 10 minutes has gone backwards—between 2 and 8 per cent—in the three local health networks.

The real story in health under this government is that hospitals have been closed, hospitals will be closed and services for the people of South Australia will continue to be cut. There is constant anxiety about waiting lists and quality of treatment, with reforms in health care not delivering what the government has promised. This government does not understand that health is not just about infrastructure. It is fundamentally about care; it is fundamentally about people.

While the government's taxpayer funded advertising flashes figures about budget allocations for hospital and other infrastructure, the actual performance remains another matter altogether. This budget in fact confirms that since 2011 actual spending on infrastructure has fallen more than $1 billion short of the government's own financial projections. This is further evidence that the government, under this Premier, simply cannot manage its own budget.

The story is, of course, the same with the government's failed energy plan. When the Premier and Treasurer announced this plan, they said that their new gas-generated power station could be in place by this summer, but the budget papers show a completely different story just three months later. Sixty per cent of spending on the plan in 2017-18 will be for operating expenses, not building the promised power station. This means the facility will not be available before the summer and in fact will not be available until the summer after next at the very earliest, but the government hopes the public will not realise how much its energy plan is already slipping behind, despite the possibility of further interruptions to the power supply over next summer.

Despite previous promises to do so, the government has not given the full breakdown in its budget of how the energy policy is going to unfold, the timing of the major components or the cost of the major components of this energy strategy. However, we know that the operating cost projected in 2017-18 suggests that the backup diesel generators are going to cost far more than the government has been willing to admit.

Why will the government not come clean with the people of South Australia? Why will it not tell the people of South Australia how much its diesel-fired generators are going to cost the people of South Australia? The government had a perfect opportunity to keep the Alinta Northern power station open for the cost of $8 million per year: $3.5 million would come, of course, in payroll tax and mining royalties; the net cost would be $3.5 million. Because of ideology it said no. Now, of course, we are faced with the highest energy prices in the world and the least reliable grid.

While the budget was being announced to the house the federal Coalition government in Canberra was completing an historic agreement on education funding. That agreement means that before the ink on this budget was dry what it said about education funding was, of course, misleading. This government still argues that funds from the federal government should be compared with those promised by the Gillard government, but those funds were never budgeted, and they were never legislated prior to the 2013 federal election. In fact, the deal done between this government—this Premier—and the Gillard government was such a poor one that Gonski 2.0 will see increases in funding for South Australian schools at a more rapid rate than any other state, except for Western Australia.

A Liberal government will always seek to get the best outcomes in education for South Australia. Even from opposition, we have been able to push successfully for an improved outcome. As a result, the transition from our schools to reach the funding levels of the Schooling Resource Standard will be quicker than initially announced. A state Liberal government will also fund its part of the equation. We have previously supported increased state funding to meet that need and we will continue to do so into the future.

Most importantly, we need to spend that money where we will get the best outcomes for our children. This is where Labor has failed in South Australia. Our school students continue to do worse than their interstate counterparts when measured in the annual literacy and numeracy testing. Twenty years ago, we led the nation in educational standards and also did well by most international benchmarks. With policies such as our Literacy Guarantee, a Liberal government will ensure that South Australia, once again, has the best schools in Australia.

I now turn to the forgotten people of this budget. The government says with this budget Father Christmas came to the metropolitan area, but all the regions got was Scrooge. The people of our regions contribute over $25 billion to our gross state product and represent 29 per cent of South Australia's population. However, according to Budget Paper 3, page 109, this budget provides only $74 million of new operating initiatives for the regions over the next five years. That is less than 11 per cent of the budgeted spending on all new operating initiatives, about a third of what it should be for the regions based upon their share of the state's population.

There is no new funding for regional roads. There is no new funding for regional hospitals. The regions are getting less than 2 per cent of the annual capital spend on health. This budget has written down surpluses over the forward estimates by $926 million since the 2016-17 midyear review. However, the regions get next to nothing of this increased spending. Perhaps the government has given up on the member for Frome retaining his seat, because this outcome shows how utterly ineffective he has become in getting a fairer share of government funds for our regions. Gross regional product over recent years has grown at close to twice that of the entire state. As the backbone of our economy, the regions in South Australia deserve better. Only a Liberal government will ensure that this happens and becomes a reality.

At each election since 2002, Labor has promised it would do better for the people of South Australia. At the last election in 2014, the Premier walked around for a month with a plan in his hand saying it contained the answers for our future. It is increasingly evident that they were not the right answers, because Labor's performance has got even worse since he ambushed his predecessor. When a government of the same political persuasion has been in office for a long period, there is an increasing risk of attitudes and approaches becoming entrenched on both sides of politics.

As Liberals, since the last election in 2014, we have addressed this risk and done something about it, unlike the government. Fifteen months ago, I released '2036', a comprehensive plan identifying nine separate areas that we think that good state government in South Australia is based upon. We talk about our values and our reform agenda in each of these nine important areas—a vision for what South Australia can be, a vision for what South Australia should be under a good government. It is also a platform on which we have continued to build our specific policies for the next term of government.

The structure of the shadow ministry ensures that, should we have the honour of being elected at the next state election, there will be a much more intense focus on the issues that are of highest importance to our state. We do not need more ministers to do that, but we do need more effective ministers with a clear sense of purpose and direction, and most importantly, accountability. As Premier, rebuilding jobs and restoring pride in our state will have my undivided attention. There will be a minister and a government agency solely focused on supporting our exporters and encouraging investment into South Australia.

Similarly, we will have a minister exclusively responsible for energy and mining policy in this state, and importantly, a minister with the sole responsibility of cleaning up Labor's mess in terms of child protection. These are critical areas of differentiation with this government. Our health and education ministers will not be distracted by other portfolio responsibilities. The government currently has 52 ministerial portfolios. This just does not make sense. It is one outcome of being too long in office. Labor, for a long time, has lacked any focus. It has jumped from one crisis of its own creation to the next.

It has been our duty as an opposition to expose those failures, but we have been doing much more as an alternative government for South Australia. Already, we have announced more than 40 excellent policy initiatives. We have committed to reducing the emergency services levy, which costs all homes and all businesses in South Australia. We will introduce the capping of local government rate increases. We will pursue the Globe Link project to encourage more exports through faster, safer and more efficient rail, road and air links with existing and potential markets. We will also ensure much more effective overseas representation for South Australia to maximise support for our important exporters.

We will deregulate shop trading hours, because the government and unions should not stand in the way of consumer choice and the times that businesses want to open for their customers. We will introduce major reforms to our health system. Under Labor, head office administration has grown at four times the rate of the clinical staff on the front line of service delivery in our hospitals and health centres. Our reforms will give local communities and health professionals much more involvement in decisions affecting service delivery at the local level.

We will move year 7 to high school and establish four entrepreneurial specialist schools. We will give principals, parents and governing councils much more say in what happens at the local school level. We are committed to our literacy guarantee, because every child in South Australia must be given a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy: with that, everything else follows.

There is nothing more important to South Australia's future than having a government committed to economic policies and policy settings needed to arrest the current slide and restore prosperity and a hope for our future: only a Liberal government will deliver on that. We will bring to the task an unyielding focus on productivity and infrastructure. Lifting productivity and ensuring more productive infrastructure go to the heart of ensuring the economic transformation and creating the sustainable jobs that will provide work for next generations of South Australians.

From day one in government we will move on the most urgent issues affecting both productivity and infrastructure in this state. We will also embrace the best available advice from outside, as well as within, government to guide our long-term priorities. Nationally, the public sector accounts for a quarter of GDP. In South Australia the government employs about 100,000 people: it is our single largest employer—a big ship to steer in a new direction, but change course we must if our state is to sail into warmer waters. South Australia continues to trail the national average of labour productivity.

As foreshadowed in my '2036' plan, I will appoint a South Australian productivity commission. The commission will be an independent body to review economic and regulatory issues, and propose policy reforms to drive economic growth, lift productivity and improve living standards across South Australia. The commission will provide high-level advice on regulatory reform, removing red tape, improving government service delivery, improving the state's financial position.

In conducting its work, the commission will be tasked to make recommendations for increasing public and private sector productivity, increasing private sector employment and improving living standards through alleviating cost of living pressures. The commission will be a small statutory authority, staffed by experts in their field, who will draw on the resources and expertise of the public sector to assist them in their work. Its advice will be made available to the parliament and to the public.

If our economy is to become more productive, it is essential that we have a plan and a program for more efficient infrastructure in this state. Infrastructure is central to everything that good government does, whether it is growing our economy, getting our exports to market on time, building our schools, our hospitals, our roads, protecting our environment or enhancing cultural and sporting facilities. We must plan for the long term. To do this as effectively and efficiently as possible, we must make the most of the expertise South Australia has. We must better coordinate the efforts of the public and private sectors. This means the use of not only expertise within government but also in the wider community to guide and implement our infrastructure planning and ensure it is not derailed by short-term political considerations.

A Liberal government will establish Infrastructure South Australia as an independent body to develop a long-term state infrastructure strategy and ongoing infrastructure plans that prioritise major projects. The work of Infrastructure South Australia will be directed by a board of not more than five members. It will have an independent chairperson and up to two other people appointed in recognition of their industry experience. The board will determine the general policies and strategic direction of infrastructure in South Australia.

If the government makes any amendment to the strategies and plans of Infrastructure South Australia, the board will be able to advise the government that it does not agree with the amendment and make that advice public. This will ensure full transparency and accountability. At least in its early years, Infrastructure South Australia will also have a senior officer based in Canberra to ensure effective and ongoing liaison with federal departments and agencies and avoid delays in assessment of South Australian major project proposals.

My plans for a productivity commission and Infrastructure South Australia will embrace the public and private sectors because I believe in collaboration to get things done, in making the most of the expertise that we have here in our state, unlike the current government, which has a Premier and Treasurer who have spent most of the current term looking for fights with business. No government can have all the answers. No government by itself can deliver the growth and productivity gains required or the dynamism and innovation that our economy so desperately needs here in South Australia, nor should any government seek to impose such a heavy hand on the economy that there is serious risk of investment drying up because of political uncertainty.

I will relish this fight with Labor at the next election, a fight between a Liberal government, committed to doing as much as it can to support business growth so that we can create the jobs that South Australians are looking for, and Labor, which has only one way to govern—through higher taxes, which destroy jobs and destroy investment in our state.

After 16 years of Labor, South Australians are fearing the long-term consequences of rising and sustained unemployment. This is Labor's legacy to South Australia, a legacy that was entirely avoidable. The uncertainty and job insecurity are driving a pessimistic outlook for our entire state. There is a real fear that, as a state, we will not be able to rebuild our industry and our business base. This puts at risk hope for a future in South Australia for our children.

The Premier has tried to convince people that he has been powerless to withstand the economic forces working against his government and against the people of South Australia. He has tried to convince South Australians that Labor is not to blame. He acts like a victim at every single opportunity, refusing to take or accept any responsibility for his government's failures. South Australia needs a government that will take responsibility to lead our state to a better future, a future that empowers our people, gives hope and opportunity and rewards hard work and effort.

Labor's bits and pieces approach to job creation has failed us. Labor's targets change, Labor's priorities change, but the results are always the same. After three so-called jobs budgets, enough is enough. We need fundamental structural change to the state's economy to drive opportunity and investment and reward risk and effort. South Australia offers an enviable lifestyle, but South Australians know that if the economy does not lift more will be left with no choice but to leave our state, and this is the tragedy of 16 years of Labor.

Do we want to lose the best of this generation? Do we want to lose the best of the next generation? I am passionate about South Australia and I am passionate about the people of our state. This is a great state of opportunity, of skilled, clever thinkers and of creative, artistic and talented people. We are a state built on hard work, resilience and innovation. We need to have faith in our abilities to work together to achieve a better future, and we need a path to get there. We need new leadership and we need new direction here in South Australia.

Labor has had more than a fair go. It has been in the driving seat for 16 long years and we know exactly where that has delivered South Australia. Anybody who has owned a business or managed a team of people knows that the hardest thing that you will ever have to do is to lay off a member of your staff, but this is happening too often here in South Australia. The problem needs much more than Labor's constant excuses and Labor's constant bandaids. It is time to be honest about the challenges that face our state. We need to restore hope and trust in each other. We need to develop real solutions to get us back on a path of recovery.

This government is the problem. The solution lies in fighting for the future of South Australia's needs, which Labor has failed to deliver. The solution is a change of government. The solution is a Liberal government here in South Australia that will deliver lower taxes to encourage investment and job creation, much less red tape and overregulation, ensuring government spending remains within budget, a growing private sector, an efficient public sector, higher productivity in our public and our private sectors, strong and sustainable growth in our exports, more investment in productive infrastructure and greater support for our regions. These are the things that we must fight for. These are the things that only a Liberal government will deliver.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier) (11:50): What we have seen today is typically empty rhetoric from the Leader of the Opposition—45 or 50 minutes of contribution and not one new positive initiative outlined in his reply.

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Not one.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Not one. What we saw in the last 11 days was not an analysis of the South Australian budget but a pantomime played out within the Liberal party room. What we saw was the Leader of the Opposition doing what was orthodox and we expected him to do, and that was to support the state government's budget measures. He said he would do that, including specifically, when asked, that he would support the government's banking tax.

Of course, what happened in the period after that is that a full court campaign was waged upon him and the Liberal Party. It was funded by the banks through full page ads. It included a bodgie poll, which tried to create the impression that many South Australians did not support the bank tax, and inexorable pressure was placed on the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Party.

What essentially occurred during that period was that the true character of the Liberal Leader of the Opposition was revealed. The essential true character is one of weakness and, because the Leader of the Opposition has anxiety about his own weakness, during the course of this time as the pressure mounted on him he began to shift his position. His position shifted day to day as the pressure was ramped up on him personally.

In an attempt to strike out and create the impression of strength, he decided to shift his position and oppose the state government's central taxation measure, which supported many of the spending initiatives in the budget. It is important to reflect upon this because this goes to the heart of the way the Leader of the Opposition would govern if he were ever in the position of being Premier of South Australia. What it reveals is that a well-funded campaign using the mass media to place pressure on the Leader of the Opposition and ask questions about him personally could cause him to shift his position.

He knew what the principal position was. The principal position is that the government should have their budgets because, to have an orderly working system, governments should be able to promote their budgets, promote their programs and expect to have them pass the parliament. That is the orthodox position. It has been respected for hundreds of years and is the central element of a working parliamentary democracy, so why would you set that aside? Why would you set aside that basic principle in return for a cheap cheer that you thought you were going to get because there was some public pressure brought upon you. It lies in the Leader of the Opposition's anxieties about his own stature and his own willingness to stand up.

When he was asked on radio why he shifted his position when we had our little discussion on Friday, his first instinct was to actually not tell the truth. The first thing he said was that he denied shifting his position, but it was obvious on the face of the record. He said he would support this budget measure, but by that time, in his long journey to the complete capitulation we saw yesterday, he decided to open the door. Once having opened the door, of course the banks thought, 'We've got him. He's our man.' The banks now have their man in South Australia. In fact, I was a little harsh on the banks when I said that they closed 21 branches; in fact, they have opened a new one—the Liberal Party of South Australia.

The banks now have their man here in South Australia and he fell for it hook, line and sinker. This is the Leader of the Opposition who has been hiding from public view in the last five years. We saw what the strategy was in the lead-up to the last election. They thought that they were ahead by the length of the straight and that they would bundle him into the boot, try to drive across the border and reveal him at the other end and he would be the Premier. That was the strategy and it did not work.

Mr van Holst Pellekaan: Can we talk about the budget today?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: No, we know we are talking about character. I would be making a different speech if it was you because you have some character. Madam Deputy Speaker, I heard the Leader of the Opposition in silence and would ask for a similar courtesy.

Mr Marshall: We were making points relevant to the bill.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Well, I am making a point that is fundamental to the bill.

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: The point fundamental to the bill is that parliamentary democracy cannot be hijacked by large powerful interests. There could not be anything more fundamental than this chamber, this house—parliamentary democracy—people who are elected to come here and govern for the people of South Australia not being overborne in their will by a media campaign and large powerful interests.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: There could be nothing more fundamental to parliamentary democracy.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I am on my feet. The Premier is entitled to be heard in silence, as were the remarks of the leader. I do ask the house to observe the standing orders and give every courtesy to the member on his feet. Premier.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Why should we be surprised? The Leader of the Opposition has form in this regard. When we were campaigning against the closure of Holden's and running our More Than Cars campaign—and we have a little more information about this, courtesy of a new member of our front bench—there was an attempt to get the opposition to take a much stronger line in relation to defending the loss of the car industry in this state.

The Leader of the Opposition (shadow minister for manufacturing as he then was) refused to stand up and assertively campaign against the federal Liberal government's decision to close the car industry. We knew it was coming and we campaigned against it. It was a disastrous decision and it is central to many of the economic challenges that we are facing here in South Australia. Almost half the jobs have gone now in General Motors Holden, with half of the supply chain having gone—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —and we are now facing—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: I know the Leader of the Opposition has a glass jaw and that he compounds his crimes and adds to his weakness by not being prepared to listen to some honest criticism of him and his performance.

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: We are talking about why you are voting down, in breach of every parliamentary principle of respecting, a budget measure—and the reason you are doing that is that you lack character. You lack character and you are weak.

The Leader of the Opposition has demonstrated that he is in the pockets of the banks and that they will whistle him up whenever they want, and you can expect more of that in the future, just as we saw when he slipped on the T-shirt about More Than Cars and pretended to be with us and then snuck off a little way down and did a media conference suggesting that the commonwealth's $500 million cut was okay by him. This is the two-faced element of the Leader of the Opposition that demonstrates his essential character, that he is not fit to govern for the people of South Australia.

Then, of course, there are the federal health and education cuts—leaders around the nation, Liberal and Labor, standing up against the $80 billion cuts to health and education, led by South Australia. Where is the Leader of the Opposition? Nowhere. He is just making excuses, slinking around in the shadows and making excuses for his federal colleagues as they rip $80 billion out of school and hospital funding across the nation.

He asks why would we be looking at revenue measures to deal with the holes created by the federal Liberal government and has the temerity to suggest that we should not be asking the most profitable sector in the nation that does not pay a GST on financial services to make their fair share of contribution to those massive cuts that have been put in by the federal Liberal government. How dare you point the finger at us when you did not raise a finger when those cuts were being made by your federal Liberal colleagues.

Probably the most abject failure, which demonstrates the essential weakness and lack of character of the Leader of the Opposition, was when Senator Johnston snuck down to ASC, in the shadows of the federal election, when we were campaigning for a commitment for 12 new submarines at Techport. What did he do? Senator Johnston snuck down there with the Leader of the Opposition next to him and he said, 'Yep, 12 new subs here in South Australia built at ASC. No worries. I've got to get on my plane. See ya.'

That is what happened. He snuck into town. It was on the eve of the federal election. They wanted to clear that one off. He stood next to the Leader of the Opposition and actually made that commitment. The same bloke in the federal parliament, under pressure, said that the ASC could not be trusted to build a canoe and set the groundwork for that craven retreat, where they were going to build the submarines overseas, in Japan. I know for a fact that they were going to because I sat opposite the then prime minister and he told me as much to my face.

What do we hear from the Leader of the Opposition? What do we get from the Leader of the Opposition? Not some outrage that the bloke who had stood next to him had actually turned turtle and broken that promise. He just waved it through. He left all the heavy lifting to me, to the federal Labor Party and to a few other fellow travellers who got involved to actually fight the fight on behalf of the people of South Australia. That is the essential character—I know he cannot take his lumps—of the Leader of the Opposition.

He is prepared to actually have somebody lie to his face about promising submarines and, when they break that promise, he is not there to hold them to account. Why? He is afraid of his federal Liberal colleagues and the consequences that might actually be involved in speaking up.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: That's right. He takes his directions from the Black Hand. The Black Hand tells him what he can and cannot criticise the federal government about. Christopher Pyne put him in this job and Christopher Pyne will take him out of the job and give him his instructions in the meantime.

Of course, there is then the shameless chorus of those opposite, led by the Leader of the Opposition, when we suffered the calamity of the statewide blackout. What a disgrace that a state Liberal leader would stand up and join the federal Liberal government in seeking to damage and disparage this state because of a false claim about a blackout being caused by renewable energy. This is a claim that has been demonstrated as being false by AEMO, as being consistently and utterly discredited every time it has been made.

The Leader of the Opposition joins the chorus of abuse that is being directed at South Australia. He is not standing up for South Australia. He is not prepared to actually stand there and advocate and be proud of our leadership in relation to renewable energy; rather, he joins in with the coal lobby—

Mr Whetstone: We are not proud of your leadership. We are not proud of your government. You are a useless government, all of you.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Chaffey!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —that controls the federal caucus, and that then reaches back into South Australia and dictates to the Leader of the Opposition what he can and cannot say about this critical issue of energy policy. This is a man who has form about weakness in the face of pressure and the inability to stand up for South Australia.

If there is one thing that people around the world are asking for, it is authentic political leadership that stands up and represents citizens. This is the animating dynamic of modern international politics and you are seeing it all around the world. Why? Because people understand that there are large powerful forces that are coming to bear on them and their communities. They have lost faith in even their national governments, let alone their subnational governments, in being able to stand up against large international forces that are robbing them of their dignity and their control of their own communities.

That is what is going on internationally. That is what is going on in politics all around the world. What are people looking for? They are looking for somebody to stand up and be on their side. They are looking for somebody to take control of their future. They are looking for somebody to map out a way forward for them and their families, and it is a worrying time here in South Australia. The forces that are washing over us are significant.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: They are very significant. What we are seeing is a once in a generation—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members on my left, I will have to start calling you to order if you cannot observe the standing orders.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: What we are seeing is a once in a generation recalibration of our economy. What we are seeing is that the old Playford model is being unwound in a very powerful fashion, and on 21 October, it will come to a dramatic stage in its unwinding. That has been going on for some decades now, but a very substantial stage will be reached. The fact that, as of May 2017, South Australian total trend employment is 6,900 higher than a year ago, with 4,500 extra full-time jobs and 2,400 part-time jobs, is extraordinary in this environment.

With all of this change, all of this transformation, the washing out of almost half of our car industry—the single largest component of what traditionally was the single largest sector in our economy—for our manufacturing sector to actually still soak up all those jobs and create jobs on top of it is something that we should be proud of. Is it enough? Of course it is not enough, and that is why our budget is about jobs.

That is why it is about doubling down on those sectors of the economy that are growing, like the shipbuilding and the defence sector, the renewable energy sector, the tourism, food and wine sector, our health and biomedical research sector and our IT and advanced manufacturing sector. We are investing in jobs, together with the private sector, by using intelligently designed public policy, which will pick up the gaps where banks and other financial institutions are not prepared to invest. We are prepared to give grants and loans for businesses that are growing because we want them to grow even faster and because we understand the nature of the challenge.

We understand that this is an exciting time for those growing businesses but a deeply worrying and challenging time for those businesses that are in retreat. What we are seeking to do with this budget is to not only invest in those businesses but also give an opportunity for any business that wants to take on a new apprentice $15,000 to do so, so that we can ensure that those young people who are seeking to change their careers and retrain will have an opportunity to get these jobs in the growing sectors of the economy.

We are going to support them every step of the way, and in the course of it we are going to give the lowest payroll tax in the nation for small business. A $200 million jobs fund, a $15,000 Job Accelerator Grant for apprentices and the lowest payroll tax in the nation for small business—these are the positive plans that we are advancing to create jobs and opportunities in the South Australian economy. We are proud of budget and we commend it to the house for its support.

I want to say a word about the campaign that has been waged against us, which has been cravenly acquiesced to by the Leader of the Opposition. In 2015, as I mentioned, in the aftermath of the campaign that was launched by the federal Liberal government against all states and territories with the $80 billion, essentially, cut to health and education, we embarked on a national conversation about revenue. We were joined by premier Baird, an honest premier who acknowledged that the fundamental issue was a lack of revenue for the states in circumstances where cuts had been made by the federal government. So, we advanced an increase in the GST on banks. Banks are the only sector of the economy—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —which essentially does not pay taxation—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —so we have been deprived of the revenues which will assist us to actually make a contribution to our budget.

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: All we are doing in relation to this tax is taxing one-third of 1 per cent of the profits of the banks, in circumstances where they have been having a holiday since the year 2000 in relation to their GST liabilities. It is a modest tax that simply does what any sensible person putting together a budget would do, that is, work out what your imperatives are and find a way in which they can be funded, which is what we are doing.

Every single dollar of this tax will be paid out to small and medium-sized businesses to create jobs and opportunities in the South Australian economy. Those opposite, by actually privileging banks against ordinary South Australians, are now going to impose this budget pressure on ordinary everyday South Australians. In a choice between the banks or ordinary everyday South Australians, he chose the banks.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (12:10): This is my 16th budget, and the budget papers are a disappointment in their lack of detail. I remember that in my first budget papers there was an extraordinary amount of detail that you could get into and see exactly what was happening in South Australia. You could see where the money was going. You could see where the pain was and you could see where the pleasure was, but these budget papers do not give that detail. They continue to be a nightmare for the ordinary South Australian to look at.

Some states put out an extra budget paper. They put out a budget paper that allows people to interpret their budgets, but not this state, which is something I would like to see changed. This particular budget, the 16th budget by this state Labor government, really is not a budget for the future. It is a budget about the short-term future of the Labor government. It is not a budget for the future of this state.

Let's get to the elephant in the room straightaway, because people are talking about what the Independents are going to do with the bank tax. Let's talk about the banks for a minute. The banks are doing very, very nicely at the moment, and that is a good thing. Two of the sayings I always ran in my business were, 'Turnover is vanity; profit is sanity.' If you are making a profit, you are staying in business. You can build your business, you can employ people, you can take on extra people and you can expand your business. You can spend that money in other businesses.

The banks are doing very, very nicely. Let's have a look at the first half-year profit for the banks. The banks made $15.5 billion in the first half of the year. Each individual bank did exceptionally nicely. The Commonwealth Bank made $4.9 billion, ANZ made $3.4 billion, NAB made $3.2 billion and Westpac, which of course owns the Bank of South Australia, made $4.02 billion. They did very, very nicely.

Return on equity is something that we all in businesses look at. You want to get some return on your investment. It is a good thing that you are getting healthy returns on investment, and banks in Australia are doing exceptionally well. I think they rank second in the world on return on equity. The NAB is 14 per cent, Westpac is 14 per cent, ANZ is 12.5 per cent and CBA is 16 per cent. The banks are very, very powerful businesses and they are doing exceptionally well.

The problem is that with that power comes responsibility, and they are not acting in a responsible manner in the way they have addressed this state bank tax. They have all passed this tax on to the mums and dads. It is a disgrace that they are using the mums and dads and the businesses of this state as a human shield to protect their profits.

Yes, they have on one hand the duty to look after their shareholders, to protect their profits, to pay the dividends and to reinvest in Australia through all the various investments they have. That is a good thing, but they admit that they will pass this tax on to the businesses and the mums and dads of South Australia, and that is the reason that I cannot support it. The reason you cannot support a tax like this is that it is a retrogressive tax. It is back to the BAD tax, the FID tax, the pre-GST taxes. You cannot tax people this way.

I know the government and the Treasurer will say that they can protect South Australians from the banks, but they cannot. We know they cannot, and that is the whole problem with this tax. If the Treasurer could put this tax in another frame, where the mums and dads were not being put in jeopardy and businesses were not being put in jeopardy, you might want to take another look at it, but this tax is not a tax that South Australians should accept. It is not a tax that South Australians should be paying the penalty for, because they will pay the penalty.

Do not forget that the banks are backed by the federal government: $250,000 for every account. We did not engage in quantitative easing, we did not print money during the global financial crisis, but the banks were guaranteed by the government. They are still guaranteed by the government. Wouldn't that be a nice position to be in? The banks, their hypocrisy and their crocodile tears of saying, 'Well, this is a terrible tax. This is setting a terrible precedent.' That may be, but they are making incredible returns on their investment, and I think there is some need there to show a little bit of social conscience, not just the financial conscience they are showing.

I would like to remind the house of a huge issue in South Australia. I am glad the member for Giles is here today, because Arrium is a massive issue for South Australia. I know that the member for Giles is very concerned about this and is working very hard in his electorate over Arrium, because the future of Whyalla is at stake. Let us just look at what Robert Gottliebsen, an economic commentator, has said in The Australian about Arrium and about the goings on with the banks and Arrium. The people who are looking at buying out Arrium—and good on them, I hope it works and I hope it goes really well—are being backed by both federal and state governments, by taxpayers' money.

Look at what happened with Arrium when Arrium was going ahead and wanted to develop. Who backed Arrium then? The four banks backed Arrium then. They backed Arrium with unsecured loans, and when Arrium went down the tube they dropped $1 billion. The banks dropped $1 billion on Arrium. That was not good business, that was not smart business. But now the banks are looking at the taxpayers of Australia, the taxpayers of South Australia, to bail them out, and then they are expecting the state and federal governments to come and help Arrium—which we want to happen.

The banks cannot have it both ways. They cannot threaten the people of South Australia with increased levies, taxes, duties, fees and charges because of the so-called state bank tax and at the same time have their hands out to accept taxpayer funds to prop them up because of their mismanagement of their unsecured loans with Arrium. The banks are not being fair here, they are not being straight—and we know why people call the banks what they call them.

This is a terrible position for the state to be in in the first place. We should not have to be going down this path, looking at putting in retrogressive taxes, old taxes that we got rid of years ago. We should not be doing that. The state should be better than that. In my first budget in this place we had rivers of gold, rivers of GST coming into this state, but it was mismanaged and misspent. The Premier went on about parliamentary democracy, that this house should uphold parliamentary democracy. Well, we would like to, but have we ever seen any ministerial accountability? None at all, never.

I have been thrown out of this place twice because I was so disgusted about the lack of ministerial accountability. We are not seeing that now, we have not seen it in the past, and I doubt very much whether we will see it in the future. So, Premier, do not come in here telling us about parliamentary democracy when you are not willing to accept ministerial accountability. I understand the bank tax will be blocked in the upper house. It will be an interesting discussion with the Treasurer and with the Premier on how they going to manage that hole in their budget.

They created the mess and it is now up to them to fix it. They knew this was not going to work. A lot of people have said that the bank tax was just a convenient diversion away from Oakden, away from the new RAH, away from the increased prices and taxes people are paying in South Australia and—let us not forget—the highest electricity prices in the world. How could we get to that? How could we get to the highest electricity prices in the world? This is a country that is the largest exporter of natural gas in the world with massive coal reserves. How could we get to the stage where we have the highest electricity prices in the world?

There are a lot of questions and a lot of answers needed on this, because South Australian businesses cannot afford this. Just recently, we saw the example of a recycling company's power bill going from $80,000 to $180,000. I know people who are shutting down their air-conditioners, shutting down their heaters, because they cannot afford the power. I know that my constituents down in Jetty Road at Glenelg are really struggling with high rent and high overheads, and one of those high overheads is high power bills—the highest power prices in the world. The government should hang their head in shame. They cannot blame other people for their own inadequacies, their own ideology has brought us to this state.

Let's look at the budget itself in a bit more detail. We have spoken about Transforming Health a number of times in this place, and time and time again we have looked at the cost of health. I remember former minister John Hill saying in here that the health inflator was about 8 per cent, and then treasurer Kevin Foley said that, no, it was up about 12 per cent. The costs of running a health service are exceptionally high, but when you go and build the third most expensive building in the world down the road here, the world's most expensive hospital, that might be a desirable thing to do if you have the funds, but if you are committing the state to 30 years of interest payments on the building, it is going to create a massive black hole for the finances of this state. That is not good management.

The Liberal Party at the time had exceptionally good proposals to redevelop the old Royal Adelaide Hospital. I travelled to Singapore and England to look at redevelopments when I had the health portfolio. It was possible but, no, we went down this ideological road and we've got what we've got. I remember standing on a chair holding up a list of the outpatients departments at the old Royal Adelaide Hospital, asking the then minister, John Hill, whether we would have the outpatient departments at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital. He said, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.' Well, it is no, no, no, no, no. What we do have is going to be shunted all over the metropolitan area.

We have seen terrible toing and froing. We have seen the on-again, off-again redevelopment of our hospitals. We have seen an absolute debacle in the handling of the waiting to get in and waiting to get out issues in our hospitals. There is the issue of ramping. I recall the number of times I went down to the hospitals and did television interviews in 2009 and 2010. It is worse now. In 2008, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine put out a report saying that 1,200 Australians died as a direct result of delays in emergency departments. Our share was about 120—more than the road toll.

What are we seeing now? We are still seeing delays in our emergency departments. We are seeing them overflowing into the white zone on the government's own dashboards, which is 125 per cent capacity. You cannot allow these things to continue, yet this government is allowing them to continue and saying that it will all be right come September when they open the new doors down the road. Well, it will not be alright. I just rue the day that South Australians have to pay for the new hospital down the road and still not get any better services.

My son is a doctor working in the public health system, and I know how hard he works. I know how hard every nurse, every doctor, everybody employed in those hospitals works, but this government really has not been doing them any favours at all. It is a disgrace to see our health service in the state that it is now.

Emergency services is an area that everybody in this place knows I am passionate about, as a life member of the Country Fire Service. I look at the budgets and I see the pressures that the emergency service providers have been put under. The MFS, CFS, SES, just to speak of a few, are under more and more budgetary pressures. They cannot continue to deliver the services they are without being given the support they deserve here in South Australia.

There was one moment when I thought that we could perhaps support the bank tax, if the bank tax was going to be hypothecated to reinstate the emergency services remissions, put those remissions back. That was one time when I thought that perhaps if the government came up with that proposal, I could probably support the bank tax. There is still the problem of the banks passing on their fees and other South Australians paying again, one way or another. That is the problem the Premier has.

Only dead men and fools never change their minds, so it is not bad in this place to reconsider your position and change your mind. That is a genuine thing to do. If you are not doing that, you are not paying attention to what is going on around you and reconsidering the facts with. If the facts change, surely you need to change your opinion. Changing your mind in this place, Premier, is not a bad thing; it is a very good thing. It takes courage to stand up and change your position and justify that change. It takes courage to stand alone in this place as an Independent. That is what I am doing now and that is what I will continue to do in this place as long as I possibly can, as long as the people of Morphett want me.

The electorate of Morphett is a classic example of what we have in South Australia and what we can have in South Australia. I have one of the biggest industries in South Australia in my electorate of Morphett. We talk about Holden, we talk about mines and we talk about agriculture, but there is also the experience industry, which involves tourism, sport and recreation, performing and visual arts. Within walking distance of my office in Byron Street, Glenelg, I have 106 restaurants and cafes. Morphettville Racecourse is just up the road, and do not forget that horseracing in South Australia employs 2,500 people. They are full-time jobs, good jobs.

Couple that with the 1.3 million tourists who come down to the Bay every year plus the whole of the state's tourism industry. The experience industry is the biggest industry we have. People will come and experience South Australia. It is a wonderful place to have that experience in. If you provide good five-star experiences, they will pay five-star fees, and you can pay good wages, not just back of house, washing dishes wages. They will be really top wages for jobs that cannot go anywhere else. Those jobs cannot be exported anywhere.

Let's not be all doom and gloom at the demise of some of our other more traditional industries. It is terrible. We have to transition to a new economy and new jobs. Certainly, looking outside the sphere is something I am doing, making sure that South Australians have a future, my kids have a future and, more importantly, my grandchildren have a future, because that is what we are here for—to make sure we have long-term solutions to long-term problems.

When I became an Independent, the Labor Party became much more friendly to me, which was really nice. Actually, they were always nice to me, but they were a little bit more cooperative in wanting to know whether there were any particular issues I would have liked to have seen sorted out in my electorate. I put a few of them down on paper and sent them to the Treasurer as a wish list. 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,' my mother used to say. Unfortunately, I am still looking for that horse.

The electorate of Morphett is a wonderful electorate, but nearly 30 per cent of kids at Glenelg Primary School are on School Card. There are some serious issues down there still. Public transport, with the upgrade of the trams, is really great. The trams are much smoother and much quieter now for everybody down at the Bay, and that was done exceptionally well.

But one of the big problems we have down at the Bay, which I first saw as a newly elected member here in the middle of winter—we have seen the rains in the last couple of days, but we have not had much of a winter—is the flooding at Glenelg North where 200 homes were flooded. This is not life-threatening perhaps, but it is certainly life-changing for many, many people.

I know the government has been working on a flood prevention program down there. It is an approximately $9 million program but, with the cost to the insurance companies for the 200 homes that were flooded, it would have more than paid for itself, and it would stop that threat in the future. That did not happen, so I hope that the government can see its way forward either now or in the very near future to announce the flood mitigation program at Glenelg North. It is necessary and overdue. That $9 million is a significant amount of money but, in the long term, it is a very small amount to pay for people's protection and long-term futures.

We saw the BER all over the place in South Australia, and some schools that have now closed had BER spent on them. At Glenelg Primary School, the BER classrooms were more like transportables but, instead of being paling, they are now corrugated iron. They are not a really good improvement on the old prefabs we used to get when I was a kid at school, at Salisbury Primary School and Salisbury High School.

The problem we now have is that when they did the BER upgrade they forgot to look around and see that Glenelg Primary School has two storeys. There is no lift in Glenelg Primary School. It is not a huge cost to install a lift. In fact, the school, as I understand it, does not comply with the federal Disability Discrimination Act because there is no lift there. That was the other thing I asked for. It did not happen, and I am disappointed about that.

So, there are local issues for me to keep working on with the government, there are local issues for me to keep pressuring the Liberal opposition to include in their policies for the next election, and I certainly will not be giving up. As an Independent, I have some new-found freedom and a new-found voice. I am able to agree with much of what is going on on both sides, but there are so many issues where there is a need for huge improvement.

This budget is an area where I do not see a massive futureproofing of South Australia. I just see more debt, more deficits and higher taxes. It is a disappointment, and I would like to have been able to praise the budget for being better than it is. I know the Leader of the Opposition has put some things on the record today about what a Liberal government would do, and I am looking forward to seeing that come to fruition, but there is a long time between now and 17 March 2018. I look forward to doing everything I can for the people of Morphett.

Ms REDMOND (Heysen) (12:29): Can I say what a pleasure it is to follow the member for Morphett. We met as candidates a couple of years before the 2002 election, so, like the member for Morphett, this is my 16th budget. I have to say that each one has become increasingly depressing as this government has led this state into a worse and worse financial position over the entirety of those 16 years. What is more, there is simply no excuse for it because, at least up until the global financial crisis, this government was swimming in rivers of gold, yet they still could not manage their budget.

Every year, the budget would come down and every year, because they were receiving huge amounts of extra money by way of GST and huge amounts by way of stamp duty because we had a bit of a property boom going on, they were getting about half a billion dollars extra. Each year, not only did they not manage to stick to their budget but even with that buffer of half a billion dollars extra they did not manage to balance their budget. So, every year, we would find ourselves in a worse and worse economic situation.

As was pointed out by the leader, our economic growth is at less than 1.4 per cent under this Premier, and that is well less than the national average. I want to make the point that whenever this government talks about their level of growth they are always comparing their level of growth not with that of other states but with their own level of growth. If you have a level of growth of 1 per cent and you manage to increase it to 2 per cent, you can say that you have had a 100 per cent increase and that your rate of growth is therefore much higher than the other states.

The other states might have been tripping along on 3 per cent and more all along, and they might only grow to 3½ per cent so they cannot claim a 100 per cent increase in their rate of growth, but this government always does what is called 'tricky economics' in trying to make the public believe that we are going along swimmingly. The reality, of course, is that in this state we have been falling further and further behind over the whole 16 years because of the mismanagement by this government of its economy.

I put it to you that it largely comes down to a matter of philosophy. If I can just explain, my philosophy as a Liberal is that we have a fundamental responsibility to provide certain services, particularly to protect the most vulnerable and to help in areas that cannot really be done by the private sector. They include not only social services and looking after the vulnerable, whether that be the very young or the very elderly in our community or those with a disability, but also areas like the arts, about which I have a great passion, and areas like the environment.

They are things where there needs to be government input in order to maintain the services necessary to make this state continue as a very livable place. As a Liberal, I believe that, in order to fund those things that government needs to fund, we have to have a sustainable economy ticking along, keeping the taxes coming in at a reasonable rate, enabling us to fund all those things. I have known the Premier for a very long time—we used to work in the same firm, we were elected on the same day, entered this place on the same day and I was opposite him in my first shadow portfolio many years ago—and I know that he has what I would have to call a socialist approach to the world.

He believes that everything is better done by government. For instance, in the disability sector, when that was my shadow portfolio, I thought the basic fundamental principle should be to make sure that we got the best services out to people, but the Premier's view, as the minister at the time, was that everything is better done by government. Therefore, we will get rid of all these private sectors, all these NGOs, we will get rid of a whole lot of people who are specialists in providing services in particular areas, and we will do it via the government: a one-stop shop where everyone can get what they need.

The reality was that not only could the government not afford that—and it led to a massive increase in the size of the public sector—but it was not efficient at providing those things and it lacked expertise in particular areas. So, we saw the demise of many organisations that had been providing excellent services for many years, all in the name of government being able to deliver services better, which has simply proven not to be the case.

This government has failed across a range of areas, amazingly all connected to the Premier. For a long time, the Premier had the portfolios in the area of child protection, and look at what a disaster we have had in that area. This government should hang its head in shame at the way it has failed the people of this state, in particular the children of this state, in the area of child protection. The Premier clearly was not told by his chief of staff when an eight-year-old child was raped. The chief of staff decided not to tell the Premier about that. It is extraordinary to me that that would be the case. I cannot imagine why one would employ a chief of staff who would think that that was an idea. Nevertheless, the Premier tells us he was not told that that had occurred; he was not aware of it.

We have had other examples of abysmal failure in the area of child protection, but more recently the focus has been on our failure in the area of elder care. Elder care happens to be something about which I am particularly passionate. I have been looking at elder care, elder abuse and issues of ageing in our community since I was 12 years old. I began visiting a local state-run nursing home and visited it regularly right through my teen years. One of the first books I read was a French book called Sans Everything (Without Everything), and it was about how people lost not only their possessions but their dignity in elder care.

As the baby boomers come through, I think there are going to be massive questions. People are always amazed when I tell them that there are already over 4,000 people in this country over the age of 100. People are gobsmacked to think that we already have that many. Imagine all the letters the Queen had to sign. The demographers anticipate that by the time we baby boomers get there, by the year 2055, there will be 78,000 people over the age of 100. So, if you think that this is a problem now and it is not worth addressing, imagine what it is going to be like in another generation.

It reminds me that my philosophy is always that you need to be very kind to your grandchildren (we all are, anyway). They are the poor people who, in their 50s, are going to have us in our 100s not yet dying, and ill parents in their 70s and 80s, because we have overindulged them and they have diabetes, heart problems and so on. So, they are going to have the big issues to deal with. But I digress.

The amazing thing about this government is that they have propped up their budget, year upon year upon year, in various ways. The Leader of the Opposition mentioned, this morning, the Motor Accident Commission. I have spoken about that in this chamber before. The Motor Accident Commission had a fund. That fund consisted of the money that we paid to register our vehicles and create the fund that provided the basis for the insurance in case we were injured in a motor vehicle accident. That fund was very well run by a group of people, who I think were probably paid something, but were not paid exorbitant, high-level executive salaries. They managed that fund very well. It was there to accommodate any claims, particularly since the 1970s when we put a very strict lid on the amount that one could get for pain and suffering.

We had a very well-run fund and it had money in it. A few years ago, the government decided, 'Oh, there's money there. We’ll just lift $100 million out of that to prop up our budget.' Having done that successfully, they thought, 'Gee, that went well. Why don't we take the whole lot?' They could not take the whole lot because, of course, there are claims already on foot that have to be met by the fund, so what they said was, 'We'll close down the Motor Accident Commission and that fund and everyone can go off and get their insurance privately,' which may not be as easy as one would hope, or as reliable.

They were going to close down that fund so that they could have access to this pool of money, which was our money as the people of this state driving motor cars and paying, on a compulsory basis, to create the fund. So, they have stolen it from the people of the state. That is how they have first of all propped up their budget—well, not first of all, they did various other things, but that was a biggie. I anticipate that it will be something between $1 billion and $2 billion over a period of years, because they are going to deplete that fund of all the money that did not belong to them but made their budget look better.

More recently, of course, they decided they would sell the Lands Titles Office—the Lands Titles Office, Madam Deputy Speaker—of this state. In the corridor outside, there is a picture of Sir Robert Torrens painted by Andrew McCormack, a wonderful portrait artist whose son happened to own my house in Stirling—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Before you segue along.

Ms REDMOND: Before I segue back to Robert Torrens, who created this wonderful system. I will not go through the explanation, which I have given in this place before, about why what he proposed was such a revolutionary idea and so clever that it has been adopted in dozens of countries around the world as the basis for landholding. And what do we do? Instead of shouting from the rooftops about this wonderful system, originated in this state, our government decide to sell off the management of the company—the business of running it—and get some more money. Again, they are just doing it to prop up their budget.

As for Transforming Health, I have to say that health in this state has gone from bad to worse. It has always been more than a quarter of the budget, and I accept that the multiplier the member for Morphett spoke about is indeed higher than the normal CPI. Health costs are going up at an unbelievable rate. That said, this government, at its beginning, employed a chap by the name of John Menadue—I saw him on television just in the last day or so. He came over to this state and did a study about what the health system in this state needed. What he concluded was that we needed to focus on preventative health care and primary health care and specifically not spending lots of money on acute care hospitals.

So, what has this government done? This government, having had that report and having paid Mr Menadue, no doubt, a goodly fee to prepare it—and I am sure he did it with every diligence and every expectation that the government would listen to what he said—has done exactly the opposite. I do not know about your constituents, Madam Deputy Speaker, but certainly my constituents are not complaining about the state of the old Royal Adelaide Hospital, where we had state-of-the-art surgery, a state-of-the-art burns unit and all that sort of stuff, and fantastic doctors. What they complain about is that they contact their GP and they cannot get an appointment until two weeks hence, unless they are prepared to see someone they have never seen before or be on some sort of a queue, or unless they are at death's door, in which case the advice is generally to go to the emergency department.

Instead of focusing our efforts on those areas and providing more capacity for us to have more GPs out in our community—focusing on health care out in the community, on the provision of primary healthcare services and preventative services—this government has spent all this money on what, as again the member for Morphett mentioned, has been the third most expensive building in the world. It is not because of the cost of the actual build; it is because of the way it has been financed, and of course the financing of it is going to cost us $1.1 million every single day for 30 years.

That is just for the building, not for the provision of medical services or assistance or fantastic operating procedures or anything like that; it is for the building. That just beggars belief, that we could be in a situation of having to pay $1.1 million every single day for 30 years for this new hospital, which, again, as the member for Morphett mentioned, does not actually cover all the things that the current hospital does cover.

More importantly, this idea of Transforming Health is actually code for selling real estate. No doubt, Madam Deputy Speaker, you would remember that this government made a solemn promise that they were not going to sell, that they were not going to get rid of the Repat Hospital, and now they are going to do that. Not only are they going to do that, they are doing so in the face of 140,000 signatures of people in this state who are appalled, not just at the breach of the promise but at the fact that we had a Repat Hospital, which has been operating successfully for a long, long time and could have gone on operating, but this government chose instead to breach its promise and to get rid of it because they want to sell the land. That is the reality of it.

It is the same with Glenside. Their own appointment, Jonathan Phillips, who became the CEO of mental health in South Australia, said it is really important. He said that we are the only city that has a mental health facility this close and adjacent to the city with these lovely grounds which are important for the mental health of the people who are suffering from mental illness and require hospitalisation. He gave all sorts of reasons why it was important to maintain Glenside. What have we done? No, this government decided that they were going to get rid of that.

Now they are going to get rid of the old Royal Adelaide Hospital site, a particular bugbear of mine, as you may know, Madam Deputy Speaker. Not only are they going to re-use that land—and I agree that it has to be cleaned up and it has to be put to some purpose—but it is Parklands that belong to the people. How dare this government decide that they are going to sell it into private ownership. I think there are things that perhaps should not have been built on Parklands, but by and large, our Parklands have been used for public purposes.

I am not a purist when it comes to the Parklands. I am not one of those who say you should just have native vegetation around the ring of the city, and that is all, and that you should never build anything. I am all in favour of having ovals, museums, art galleries and all sorts of things in our public space. It is part of the public realm, and I have no objection to re-using that site for the public realm. But what this government has focused on is the financial return they can get from the sale of private residences on that land, in spite of the fact that legally my belief is that it is Parklands. I have looked into it in great detail, but I will not go on about that.

In the couple of minutes left to me I want to mention the bank levy, and I am careful not to call it a tax. You will notice in the budget they call it a bank levy for the specific reason that section 51 of the constitution under the relevant provision says that the taxation power belongs to the commonwealth. No doubt, Madam Deputy Speaker, you would remember that when the GST was introduced there was an agreement that the states would get rid of financial institutions duty and the bad tax as well.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am not that old.

Ms REDMOND: I beg your pardon, Madam Deputy Speaker. I remember you are younger than I by some amount of time.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ten months.

Ms REDMOND: I think I am now the grandmother of the parliament. I thought long and hard about this bank levy because I am very much a traditionalist. I move away from the constitutional conventions with great reluctance, but after very long and considered contemplation of this, I am absolutely in favour of attempting to block this provision. It seems to me that there are many reasons for blocking it, the most fundamental of which is that it is going to be a detriment generally to the people of this state.

This government can give no guarantee that it will not affect our sovereign risk. They can give no guarantee that people will not be penalised with their mortgages. They can give no guarantee that people who are shareholders—and I know many people who are Labor members who have shares in the banks, and they are pretty upset themselves with this government. I just cannot believe that the government has decided to go down this path, especially when we are only eight months from an election. This tax—sorry, this levy—is supposed to come to $370 million, so a quarter of it—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Over four years.

Ms REDMOND: In four years, and therefore over one year, it would only be about $95 million and over eight months, maybe $60 million, which is small change in this Treasurer's budget of $18 billion. I think they are kidding themselves if they think the other states are going to jump on board. Western Australia may also be amending and wishing to get on board, but the reality is that we will make ourselves less of an investment opportunity. It will kill jobs, it will kill opportunity in this state, and I wholeheartedly support the concept that we will reject this in its entirety.

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (12:49): It seems that I am only going to get halfway through my allotted time before we break, and I always hate that because it interferes with the flow of a brilliant speech. Reading this morning's Adelaide Advertiser, I am reminded of Samuel Johnson's statement that patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

We see that the Treasurer of the state has talked about his bank tax and the reasons for it. He is referring to the banks as 'the east coast big banks'. He says, 'And, put simply, this is a tax on five big east coast businesses.' The Treasurer should be a little bit more honest with himself—only a little bit more honest with himself—and he will understand why all the banks come from the east coast: because the Labor Party has a fantastic record in South Australia dealing with banks and in trying to extract dollars from banks.

The Labor Party in South Australia has always believed that the banking system was a soft touch, that there were heaps of money in the banks. 'That's where it's kept,' they say, 'so that's where we'll go to get some more'. They have had a fantastic record of getting money for the people of South Australia from the banks. I am certainly old enough to remember what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I am certainly old enough to remember very clearly—

Ms Redmond interjecting:

Mr WILLIAMS: —what the Labor Party did to the banks that lived here in South Australia, our own, as the member for Heysen has just said, the people's bank, the State Bank of South Australia. I remember very clearly what the Labor Party did to that because the Labor Party again was delusional about the way the real world works. The Labor Party believed then and still believes that the banks have lots and lots and lots of cash just sitting around not doing much and that we should be able to get our hands on it.

They took over the State Bank of South Australia, the people's bank—they took it over. I have always believed that that was an illegal move anyway, but they took it over and then said, 'We're going to drive this bank, and we're going to make those super profits that we have always been jealous of other people having. We're going to make those within government and we'll have all this money.' What happened? We lost, what was it, $5 billion? We virtually destroyed the state, and South Australia has not recovered from that.

If you look at the budget papers, and look at the assets held by the various states in this nation, per head of population you will find that South Australia is a very poor cousin only as a result of the collapse of the State Bank and this Labor Party messing with something it knows nothing about. This is the problem. We have a government in South Australia that does not understand what it is doing, and it has not understood what it has been doing for many, many years. Unfortunately, coupled with that, we have had an electoral system in South Australia that has enabled a dysfunctional and useless government to stay in power. Thankfully, I think that has come to an end.

I think we will fight an election next March on a set of electoral boundaries that will give the people of South Australia an opportunity to get rid of a government that they have been trying to get rid of at each of the last two elections. This Labor government has no mandate to do anything, least of all to get back into its old game of trying to rip cash out of the banks. The Treasurer, in his article this morning, made a couple of other comments, but I think his chief comment was that these are big businesses, resident in other states, east coast banks, and that they make super profits.

Notwithstanding the fact that his colleagues destroyed South Australia's bank and drove lots of decision-makers in the banking industry out of South Australia because it was a bad place to do business, he should ask himself: do South Australians have any interest in any of these banks at all? The vast majority of South Australians have a huge interest in the banking system. The vast majority of households have mortgages or investments or superannuation funds—huge relationships with the banking system. The Treasurer would have us believe that there are billions of dollars sloshing around under some banker's bed. What a nonsense!

One of the fundamentals of this nation and the building of this nation is that we have been short of capital and that we have had to rely on offshore investment in this nation. A lot of that is driven by and arranged through the big five banks that this Treasurer wants to bash and wants to rip money from. This nation is desperate for investment from outside our own economy because our own economy has not got to the point where it can generate enough capital to meet the needs of capital expenditure in this country. That is a fundamental fact of the Australian economy.

The banks are there to help get that cash flowing into this country and to help get it out to those people who want to invest and grow the economy of this country, a fundamental economic fact that the Treasurer just does not grasp. The reality is that these banks are not huge repositories of spare cash. They are not. If the Treasurer knew anything about running a business, he might have sat down with a number of bankers and worked out how he might be able to borrow some money to underpin some sort of business investment to create some economic activity.

Unfortunately, I do not think that too many people on that side of the house have firsthand experience of that sort of endeavour, and that is part of the problem. This lot have been in government for 16 years and what do they have to show for it? They still do not understand the basic economics of the way the state and the nation runs. If you look at any of the metrics published about the economic activity and the economic welfare of this state, certainly relative to all the other jurisdictions we have gone consistently backwards for 16 years. We have this Treasurer, this Premier and this cabinet trying to argue that South Australia needs more of them, notwithstanding that South Australia has been trying to get rid of them for at least the last two elections.

The people of South Australia understand a hell of a lot more than this Treasurer does about the way the business world works and what underpins jobs. We have a Treasurer who believes that you create jobs by taxing a business that is successful and giving money to a business that is relatively unsuccessful. He waves around a chequebook and says to businesses, 'I will give you $10,000 if you take on a new employee.' That is how he thinks you grow employment.

The way to grow employment is to set the business conditions so that people have the confidence to go out and talk to the banks, build a relationship with the banks and borrow some money with confidence that they can make a go of the business enterprise. They will employ people without somebody giving them $10,000 that has been taken from some competitor or some other business down the road that has been successful off its own bat. This is economics from la-la land.

All of us who are involved in the business world in this state are scratching our heads and asking, 'How can we continue to live under this regime where, if we are successful—and God help us if we make what this Treasurer would call a super profit—he is going to go into our back pocket and rip as much money out of us as he can to give to somebody else who would otherwise be unsuccessful?' I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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