Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bass for her question. Of course today is the one-year anniversary of the election of the Rudd Labor government. This is a government that has spent that year delivering on its promises. We believe that it is very important to rebuild faith in government and to rebuild faith in government in circumstances where that faith had been undermined by the Liberal Party through its invention of core and non-core promises. We wanted to rebuild faith in government to show the Australian people that an elected government in this nation can deliver on what it promised, and that is exactly what we have been doing.

We ended a decade of climate change denial and inaction by doing precisely what we promised—ratifying the Kyoto protocol. That was done within days of the government being elected. We delivered what we promised by apologising to the stolen generations of Indigenous Australians, and we are working with Indigenous Australians to close the gap in key areas like health, education and, most importantly, life expectancy.

We ended the making of Australian workplace agreements, the most hated part of Work Choices. I note today—I think it is an interesting revelation 12 months from the election of the Rudd Labor government—that whilst the Leader of the Opposition says Work Choices is dead, despite being asked on three occasions whether that meant that the Liberal Party ruled out individual statutory employment agreements for the future, he refused to answer. So what we have learnt, one year after the election of the Rudd Labor government and one year after the defeat of the Liberal Party, is that if the Liberal Party were re-elected with the current Leader of the Opposition as leader then it would be back to statutory individual employment agreements, back to the rip-offs of penalty rates and overtime, back to 16- and 17-year-old kids being ripped off in their first job, because that is what the Leader of the Opposition believes in.

On the question of honouring our promises, we honoured our commitment to withdraw all Australian combat troops from Iraq. We have honoured our commitment to help working families with a $55 billion package of support for working families in the May budget, including tax cuts, an increase in the childcare tax rebate and our new education tax rebate. And of course we are continuing to deliver on our education revolution. We have trades training centres, with $90 million made available for trades training centres in high school. We have money in 896 schools for 116,820 computers and, despite claims to the contrary, our digital education revolution is rolling out as promised.

We have also achieved historic agreement with the states and territories for a single national school curriculum. We have created new places at universities for early childhood educators. There are new incentives to study maths and science. We are creating over a thousand new training places for nurses and providing incentives for thousands of nurses to return to work as nurses.

Twelve months ago no-one could have foreseen the global financial crisis and, in the face of it, the government has moved swiftly to protect the Australian economy and protect Australian jobs. We have guaranteed all depositors and all deposits and term funding in all Australian banks, building societies and credit unions for the next three years. We have injected $10.4 billion into the Australian economy to stimulate activity and to support those who are doing it tough. And, as I indicated, we are bringing forward infrastructure investment, and the government will have more to say about that in December.

While the government has achieved many of its objectives in its first year in office we do not underestimate the task ahead. There remains a considerable amount of work to do to keep delivering on our commitments—building long-term reform, strengthening our economy and protecting jobs—and we intend to do it.

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