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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 393 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 21 June 2022 by Ms M.J. Hammat

Parliament: 41 Session: 1

GST DISTRIBUTION

393. Ms M.J. HAMMAT to the Premier:

I refer to the McGowan Labor government's commitment to stand up for Western Australia and defend its fair share of GST revenue.

(1) Can the Premier update the house on the outcomes of last week's national cabinet meeting, which was attended by the Premier, and what those decisions will mean for Western Australia?

(2) Can the Premier also advise the house how Western Australia is supporting the rest of the country, including with higher GST revenue for other states?

Mr M. McGOWAN replied:

(1)–(2) I attended national cabinet with the new Prime Minister, and a range of new Premiers, actually, on Thursday and Friday of last week. There was a great spirit of cooperation at that meeting, I thought, in particular engendered by the Prime Minister. The commonwealth government has committed to extending the National Partnership Agreement on COVID-19 Response, at a cost of, I think, $760 million, through to 31 December this year, which is a good decision. Also, all the states explained to the commonwealth the pressures on our emergency departments, particularly the need to ensure that general practitioners are in proximity, and that there are measures to get people who should not be in hospitals, particularly aged-care and disability care patients, out of hospitals and into more appropriate accommodation, both to free up hospitals and for their sake, because people do not want to be in a hospital bed unless they absolutely need to be.

National cabinet also agreed to urgently address the skills shortage. I will be doing further work in that regard over the coming week or so. The PM announced that he would put more resources into visa processing, because we know that is a significant bottleneck for people coming into Australia, particularly Western Australia. I was able to point out to the assembled Premiers that the average price of a house in Western Australia is half that in Sydney—in fact, less than half that in Sydney. For the life of me, I do not understand how ordinary people live in Sydney—I do not—because it is so expensive, and the price of housing is so expensive. I pointed out that people can come to Western Australia and have a great life, buy a better house at half the price, and get a higher paying job. It sounds like a good deal to me.

It was all going well —

Several members interjected.

Mr M. McGOWAN: It was going very well. I sat next to the NSW Premier at the dinner. He is a nice fellow. I got on well with him. I spoke to him in the meetings. It was all good. But then NSW brought down its budget today. The NSW budget has a breakout box, in which it blames its woes on Western Australia.

Several members interjected.

Mr M. McGOWAN: The New South Wales government is now running a bizarre, illogical and contradictory set of arguments around the goods and services tax. It actually, extraordinarily, contradicts itself within two paragraphs. I thought it was just the role of the state opposition to do that, but apparently the New South Wales government has achieved it as well. The New South Wales government claims that Western Australia is exempt from contributing to national disaster recovery. This is despite the fact that in the Black Summer bushfires, 320 Western Australian firefighters and support officers directly helped with the response. The NSW government also failed to recognise that over the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, Western Australia provided a great deal of support to New South Wales. Members might recall that Western Australia also provided support to New South Wales with the floods. Of course that is what we would do as fellow Australians, but we would not expect that we would get attacked for it.

Members might also recall that last year, the NSW government was refusing to put in place measures to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak. That meant that the virus came to Western Australia. There were also, I think, two outbreaks in Victoria, which got away from it, all because of what the New South Wales government had failed to do during the outbreak in the middle of last year. What then happened was that the commonwealth had to spend billions of dollars to prop up NSW and then Victoria because of the outbreak that went from Sydney to Melbourne. The commonwealth government had to spend billions on that. Who pays for that? Let us imagine it might be the state that provides the most revenue per capita to the commonwealth, which is Western Australia. It was another direct transfer from Western Australia through to the commonwealth and, therefore, through to NSW. But what do we get? We get criticism in its budget that was handed down today.

The NSW government has also said, bizarrely, that its GST share will increase significantly over the next four years. This year, New South Wales will receive $23.3 billion, and Western Australia will receive $5.5 billion. In total, over the coming four years, NSW will receive $107 billion from the GST pot, and Western Australia will receive $26.3 billion. Even though I acknowledge that NSW has a bigger population than we do, its population share will be significantly higher than ours. Then, in a triple contradiction, the NSW government acknowledges that its share is actually going up because of Western Australia, but it complains about it at the same time! I would urge members to read that breakout box. It is an exercise in logical gymnastics so that New South Wales can somehow try to find a way of making Western Australia responsible for its government's own financial woes. All I would say to the NSW government is that it ought to look after its own finances and not seek to blame the people and the government of Western Australia for its own failings.