Mr ADAMS (9:31 PM) —It is a pleasure to speak on these appropriation bills. Once again we are discussing the ways in which our tax dollar is being spent—how it is to be allocated, the costs involved with introducing a regressive tax such as the GST, the costs of putting this tax onto the Olympic tickets and the costs of implementing all this government's policy without appearing to do anything. Our economy is staggering, our wealth system is being obliterated and social security is being watered down to such an extent that we are almost putting people onto the streets to beg. Education funding now promotes the elite and forgets those in the state system. Where is this supposedly family-friendly government?

Education is the means by which we secure a certain type of future for the nation. Now we are educating the elite and forgetting about the other 70 per cent of the population, who have just as much right to a decent education. The state education building program has been blasted. The existing buildings across the country need more than $1.5 billion spent on them to bring schools up to a standard that is adequate but still far behind those private schools. The money for those supposed goals that the minister keeps talking about—literacy and numeracy—is being wasted on managers and bean counters rather than being spent on additional teachers to ensure that children get proper access to education or to innovative programs to help those that are struggling. It is a sad time. It has been said time and time again that the environment in which we live and work throughout our life cycle sets the health risks, learning and behaviour for the individual and the family.

One of the reasons we are having problems with our young people today is that the living environment has been well and truly twisted. Just take the recent spate of television programs. Shows like Survivor, Greed, The Weakest Link and The Mole all exploit the weaknesses of humans—their greed, their vulnerability and their need to be liked. These sorts of programs are just the pits. It is the worst of our American cousins' desire to humiliate people. I suppose the Australian culture adopts them because of our apparent need to knock down the tall poppies, but what does it tell our youngsters? It tells them that, in order to survive, you have to be mean, selfish, greedy and streetwise. I do not think that really personifies the Australian personality.

Historically, we are very much team players. We enjoy our families, we want to look after our mates, money does not mean everything and it is the quality of life that matters. I do not believe these American programs do anything towards improving our lifestyle here or in assisting our children to get a better grasp of what life is all about. Television is a part of our culture and it is important that it develops the good things about our culture. Indeed, there must be comment on the issues but it should ensure that there is some fairness about the reporting on the development of themes. That is why I believe the Australian Broadcasting Commission is so important. Aunty plays a big role in education, and its quality and independence are crucial for a decent and thinking society. Cutting the funds and taking away the independence of such bodies as the ABC has an overall impact on the quality of the environment in which our children grow.

It was the ABC who re-alerted me to a very good and interesting set of ideas being expressed by Dr Fraser Mustard. I met Dr Mustard in Canberra a couple of years ago. Dr Mustard is a Canadian who is the head of the early years task force in Ontario. I do not think that he is a hot mustard—I think he is just an ordinary Dr Mustard. He explained recently on the HealthReport on 6 November 2000 that health went along with human development and that it is the early development of the brain that is crucial to the ongoing wellbeing of humans. He said that a very sensitive period of brain development is the first three to six years of life, which means that the early years usually become important in terms of overall equity and health in the population, not just for the physical and mental health problems later on but also in terms of functional literacy and mathematical skills. He went on to describe one of his studies in Ontario. From that, he came up with some measures of how well or badly children were achieving. The measures considered were verbal skills at the age of four and five, which are predictors of subsequent literacy and which he also said were pointers towards juvenile delinquency.

I must put in here my own theory about those who at a very young age watch television. When they get exposed to such things as SouthPark and other adult cartoons, it must have some serious effect on young children's mental ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Mustard goes on to say that it was not so much income that was significant in his studies but parenting. He said, however, that good parenting can be influenced by the environment in which the parents live. If they are struggling economically and have come from a generation of parents who have also struggled, the pressures become enormous. Those pressures may be because of a lack of finance or work, violence in the family or a lack of help at a crucial time—that crucial time being between when a child is born and when it starts school.

Dr Mustard talked about establishing a kind of birthing centre where both parents would receive training as they began the process of being a parent. This is something that Australia was looking at before the funds fell out of health care. That part of education is now virtually ignored by the present government. It is an area that I believe is sadly lacking in attention. It is no good pouring funds into schools or even into private institutions if you have not first dealt with the early development of a child. In fact, perhaps we should start before the parent becomes a parent. Maybe there should be courses in parenting and what it means to bring up a child—both the joys and the pitfalls.

We need to look at improving the opportunities for families to ensure that children have the best start in life, that there are resources made available to develop programs that will ensure children have an equal chance at full and varied education to cope with the changes going on so rapidly in their world. Another pet theory of mine is that children are not exposed to scientific theories early enough. Work in the curriculum of early learning could allow for more science to be part of our environment. Children are growing up with 30-second grabs of science on the news and no understanding of the way nature works. I do not believe that this government has bothered to consider these sorts of options. It talks about being pro-family, but what exactly does that mean? It is cutting all the government programs that have helped families in the past.

There does not appear to be any direction or any vision anymore. The government is not leading; it is merely reacting. We are not starting to look at what the future should hold for Australia. It is a bit like those opposite trying to plug in a computer in this room. Here we are in a new century, celebrating 100 years of Federation, and instead of looking forward we have our sights firmly on the past. The major commentators of the day have not been concentrating on the future either. Everybody is so tied up in the present, the fortunes of the economy, the government and a few individuals, there seems to the very little discussion of what we should be looking forward to in the future.

There are so many issues that we should be taking a lead on—whether it is improving health care, real health care or just the treatment of illness. We should be getting into preventative health: looking to see if we can bring down the costs of health care by keeping people more healthy. Likewise, education: we should not just be dealing with some ancient theory of compulsory years between five and 16 but the whole of life learning process between birth and when we leave this world. We need a government that has a vision. We need ministers who are prepared to run the gauntlet, to fight for the rights of Australians to have the quality of life that we all aspire to. We need some of our leaders to dream a bit. Okay, we might not be able to achieve it all, but even if we move a bit down towards community aspirations, surely that is better than doing nothing.

No wonder the electorate are jaded; no wonder they are cynical. They are saying that this government is not listening. `It is not caring how government policy affects us,' they say. We have seen this with petrol prices and the backflip, we have seen it with the BAS statements and today we are seeing it with this ridiculous situation of the two per cent clawback on pensioners' incomes. Running a responsible budget is important. But running a government surplus just in case is a nonsense and makes people uneasy about their taxes—where their taxes are going and what they are going to be used for. They have no control of them whatsoever.

All this is evident from the sale of government assets—such as part of Telstra and a whole pile of other government agencies—and a lot of the work that is now being outsourced, which the consumer has very little control over. In our own state of Tasmania we have suffered from such action. Our population is shrinking because of services to our state that have moved out. Headquarters of banks and insurance companies have gone, and so have many branches, particularly in country areas. Services including pensions and other benefits, health, family courts, and communications—and the list continues to increase—have all disappeared. Services have been ripped out of Launceston and, with community pressure, partly put back in.

It is left to the local communities, of course, to pick up the pieces. These communities, as in your electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker, have been picking up, and they are keeping the ideas flowing. These people are holding their communities together, and the government should be listening to them. Some of these people have a vision for the future. In Tasmania, they have worked hard to survive, and they are now asking the big questions in their communities: how to deliver services with less in the way of funds, how to make life work, whether to keep our small hospitals, how to provide vocational training for young people and how to help others to develop employment out of new ideas.

Quality of life is certainly what people expect, and that is not measured in financial terms. A better measure would be happiness—if we could in some way measure that. There has been work done on the degree of happiness, particularly in young people, and it is this measure that is used to see how satisfied or otherwise a young person is with his or her life. Work on suicide in young people has developed this measure. It is about a young person's lack of happiness with their relationships, with their families, with their possessions or with their ability to achieve, to get a job and to keep up with their peers. That plays a role in this terrible situation.

There are other issues. As I mentioned earlier, there are cuts to the ABC. The ABC is a part of Australia. It helps develop a culture for Australia. It has played this role. It has been cut and is continuing to stagger along without being given the resources that it needs to become efficient in new technologies, like the digital technologies. Regarding the situation in regional Australia and the argument put forward by the member for Batman, we know that the Howard government went to the people in 1996 with a platform on regional development. As soon as they were elected, they abolished the Office of Regional Development. It went down from something like 260 people to five—enough people to write the correspondence for the minister and that was all. Of course, that is now what is being reaped by the National Party in regional Australia. There has been no development of regional policy by the government, and they have tacked stuff on as they have run into difficulties.

We had the Treasurer arguing that one way to lift regional Australia was for people in regional Australia to take a lower wage. He said that regional Australia could survive, that South Australia could cut wages by 20, 30 or maybe 50 per cent and that they could attract development and economic activity. That is a pretty poor way to treat regional Australia, but that was a proposition put forward by the Treasurer. Of course, many other services in regional Australia have been cut back and withdrawn.

In Canberra this week we had the Rural Health Conference, with people from the health service delivery area in regional Australia coming to look at better ways of delivering those services, to look at their problems and to work through some of their problems. I had the opportunity of meeting some of them today. They certainly give you some enthusiasm for the way they go about their business. We now have an organised lobby group within this area to help develop and increase opportunities in Australia.

Also today we talked about the cutbacks made by this government to pensioners and its clawback of two per cent of the four per cent CPI increase for pensioners. While this government increases its funding to private schools, while it refuses to tax people who can set up family trusts to get the advantage of paying less tax than other people do even though they have a bigger income, it can claw back from the pensioners of Australia and from other benefit recipients two per cent of a four per cent cost of living increase. That means very bad leadership.

I understand that leadership is a bigger issue in the coalition parties as well. I understand that the Abbott and Costello team could be talking about a Melbourne-Sydney set-up and that the Prime Minister is starting to get worried about his numbers in the party room. I do not know how the honourable member on the other side of the committee will seek to protect her evolution into junior minister status by cutting a deal with one or the other when the numbers start to fall. It will be interesting to see how she reacts.

Mrs Gallus —I find that absolutely offensive and I raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. There is a standard of behaviour in this chamber of making the sorts of comments in Mr Adams's statement, but I do not find it acceptable in the parliament for someone to say they believe the member opposite is going to `cut a deal' to protect her status. I cannot see why we have to have those sorts of slurs in this committee, I really don't. If we want to have a slanging match across the floor, go ahead, but I suspect the Deputy Speaker would rather sit over a committee that did not have a slanging match going ahead all the time.

Mrs Gallus —And you are a big buffoon who has not got a clue about what is going on.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Quick)—Order!

Mr Adams —You are a nasty silly little woman.

Mrs Gallus —You are a nasty big fat man—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The parliamentary secretary has made her point—

Mrs Gallus —And you don't know a thing except to start a slanging match!

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! I warn the parliamentary secretary. She has made her point. The honourable member for Lyons' time has expired.