Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services, Health and Wellbeing) Share this | Hansard source

No, they broke their promise. There was $500 million put aside for the South Road, and the state government put in $430 million. That money has all gone to Northern Adelaide and to the Superpass. So the money is simply not there to fix this intersection, promised by Kevin Rudd and his transport spokesman, Martin Ferguson, at the last election. Nothing has happened. That, again, is an area where I call on the government to deliver on its election promise to fix the South Road-Sturt Road intersection.

There have been a number of other failures under this government. The Productivity Places Program is a prime example of the failure of this government in vocational education and training. It has been such an embarrassment to the Minister for Education that I am sure she enjoyed handballing responsibility off to the states. Skills training failures do not end there. Labor abolished the Australian Technical Colleges, which offered first-class training opportunities to young Australians whilst enabling them to complete their final years of school. They replaced this gold standard program with the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program. You might remember the promise: a trade training centre in every high school. But this was another promise they did not really mean to keep. For the 2,650 high schools in Australia, there are 13 Trade Training Centres opened. That is, 0.5 per cent of what the government promised they have now got open three years later—a complete failure.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Building the Education Revolution. This program perhaps best exemplifies the jump first, think later approach of the Rudd government. It sounded great in 2007. Let us have a look at the track record. How is it that a Catholic school can build a canteen for one-fifth of the cost of a public school? And, what’s more, the Catholic school’s canteen is useable.

This budget fails to provide for the long-term economic and financial security of Australians. The giant tax grab from the mining companies will see them searching for investment opportunities in other countries, resulting in billions of dollars in potential investment in Australia being lost. This is a government that is very good on spin but not so good on delivering, and very good on talking but not so good on acting. The real story is that this budget is a risk. It poses a major threat to existing and future mining ventures. It is nothing more than a desperate tax grab by a government that loves tax, that has lost control of spending and that is under-delivering like no government we have seen before.

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