Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If I could actually be heard over the shouting from the other side, it would be rather pleasant. Infrastructure Australia was formally approved by the cabinet on 21 January 2008. We have set aside $20 billion for an arms-length infrastructure program—not a slush fund but a carefully planned and managed investment in the future of this country. About a month later, Sir Rod Eddington was appointed to head Infrastructure Australia. A month after that, the parliament approved the establishment of Infrastructure Australia. In May, 11 members of Infrastructure Australia were appointed. In June, Mr Michael Deegan was appointed as Infrastructure Coordinator. That is an extraordinary achievement over six months—and Infrastructure Australia called for public submissions on 31 August. So, eight or nine months after the election, we have already profoundly changed the capacity of this nation to build for the future.

Similarly, Skills Australia was an incredibly important piece of work for us. It puts skills at the forefront. We will provide $1.17 billion over four years for a skills package. The first 20,000 training places were already available in April. Again, there is still an incredible amount of work to do in both of those areas, but work has been done very early, as we promised in the election campaign. Infrastructure and skills are two areas that the Reserve Bank—and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and every credible economist—has said over and over again are bottlenecks which are putting upward pressure on inflation. Again, the last government did nothing about it. In fact, quite late in the picture, they were still denying that there even was a skills crisis.

Another area on which we are moving in relation to the skills crisis is education. This is incredibly important not only because Australia is one of the lowest spenders on education as a percentage of GDP but also because retention rates have stagnated at 75 per cent for the last 10 years. That means one in four children in this country is not graduating from high school. After an unprecedented 16-year economic boom and 12 years of a Howard government that claimed to care for working families, one in four children of working families is not graduating from high school. That figure stagnated for the entire time of the Howard government. Kids who are now 16 were four years old when the Howard government came to power. Their entire education took place under the Howard government—and the retention rate had stagnated.

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