Senator O'BRIEN (7:17 PM) —I really will be interested to hear Senator Tierney come and tell us why he feels so embarrassed that his statements about the funding for very wealthy private schools that was going to lead to a fee reduction have misled parents who have found that the schools have all put their fees up. I think we will all be here tomorrow night to listen to that contribution. What I want talk about is how last week the Prime Minister went to a number of regional centres in New South Wales and Victoria—

Senator McGauran —Gippsland!

Senator O'BRIEN —You know where that is! I am very surprised; I thought Collins Street was your region, Senator McGauran. The Prime Minister's task was to attempt to recover the declining fortunes of his government in regional Australia, but he failed. In fact, his tour had the reverse effect for one basic reason—that is, the Prime Minister is not listening to what the Australian people, especially those living outside the major population centres of Sydney and Melbourne, are saying to him. Clearly, there is now outrage in regional Australia about the Prime Minister's refusal to meet his promise to the Australian people on the impact of the GST on fuel. At the last election Mr Howard told the Australian people, quite baldly, that the introduction of the GST would not increase the cost of petrol. But it did. Last week he almost seemed happy to see the February indexation increase, with the GST inflation spike locked in, slugging the regional motorists another 1.6c a litre. And he is happy to continue the administrative nightmare he has imposed on thousands of small businesses in regional Australia through the business activity statement.

The Prime Minister is not listening to the concerns of the Australian people. They are telling him that things are tough and getting tougher. They are saying that the government should give them some relief from the cost of petrol, which has reached prices of well over $1 a litre in many areas, but to that request Mr Howard says no. Mr Howard has transferred over $400 million, through this windfall fuel tax take, out of the pockets of Australian motorists and into government coffers. That is $400 million ripped out of the budgets of ordinary Australian households because of the Prime Minister's refusal to honour a promise on the impact of the GST. In fact, the Australian Automobile Association has calculated that the total windfall from fuel taxes to the government is $1.34 billion a year—that is, $1.34 billion more than was factored into the last budget.

Mr Howard's record on fuel tax is very impressive—and I say that ironically. He has presided over four increases in fuel tax over the last seven months. The first was on 1 July last year when he broke his promise on the GST; the second was the indexed increase in excise from 1 August; the third was the increase in prices flowing from the application of the 10 per cent GST to fuel prices increased by other factors, such as world prices and a depreciating dollar; and of course the fourth Howard induced increase in petrol tax cut in at the beginning of this month. But there is another important aspect to the Howard government fuel tax grab, and that is the widening gap between the fuel tax burden placed on country motorists compared with city people. Under Mr Howard people living in regional Australia are now paying more tax on their petrol than people living in Melbourne and Sydney because the GST is applied to the retail price of fuel. So much for the Nyngan declaration.

The Deputy Prime Minister argues that people in regional areas would lose road funding if the government honoured its GST fuel tax commitment. But his claim does not stand up to scrutiny, and that is not just my view but the view of the National Farmers Federation. They said, `Claims that abolishing the February excise increase could not be afforded are misleading. They ignored the windfall gain accruing to the government as a result of higher oil prices boosting resource rent tax revenue.' Many of the people who are complaining to me about Mr Howard's petrol tax and his stance on the business activity statement I would not consider to be Labor supporters in normal circumstances. But it seems to me that these are not normal times. Even diehard Liberal supporters are increasingly being ignored by Mr Howard.

In that context, I want to touch on another matter, and that is the matter of the ABC. At the end of last year I spoke in this place about significant cuts in both numbers and skills to the television production division within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the negative impacts on services to regional Australia. The minister, Senator Alston, responded in an orthodox, conservative fashion. He said that the government was not going to tell the ABC how to run its business. He said that the running of the ABC was a matter for the board and the managing director. Senator Alston accused the opposition of asking the government to engage in political interference with the national broadcaster. That was not the case then, and the minister knows it.

The only political interference in the effective operation of our national broadcaster came from this government in 1996. It was both swift and effective and was in the form of a cut of some $66 million to the ABC budget. That organisation—that is, the ABC—has never recovered. And I am sure Mr Howard, for one, still looks back with pride at the effects of his fiscal handiwork. My forecast that Mr Shier planned to cut 100 jobs from television production was not accurate; the real number was 105—that is, around 60 per cent of total staff numbers. Mr Shier's justification for these cuts is to bring salary expenditure into line with salary budgets. These salary budgets were set by the Prime Minister and his ministerial colleagues around the cabinet table when they were putting together the first Howard budget. In effect, that is who set those salary budgets. So Mr Shier is saying that the cuts to the jobs are justified because he has to meet a budget which has been set by this government.

Television production is not the only area of the ABC that faces significant financial pressure. According to reports in the Sydney Morning Herald, funding for the metropolitan and regional radio aspect of the ABC is also facing funding cuts. That paper recently reported that cuts to ABC radio would be between three and five per cent of their budget. That means that hundreds of thousands of dollars must be cut from local radio budgets throughout Australia by 30 June this year. According to the report, local radio managers emerged from a meeting with ABC accountants to discuss their budgets ashen faced. So like many other important issues in the bush, such as petrol and small business red tape, things are getting tougher for the ABC and those millions of people outside of major population centres that rely on it. May I say, for these circumstances the buck must stop with the Prime Minister.