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.