Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hasluck for her very important question, because the Nation Building and Jobs Plan announced today is very important to support jobs. Of course, the good news today is that this plan is backed by a further decision by the Reserve Bank board to reduce rates by a further 100 basis points. What we have is fiscal policy and monetary policy moving very strongly in the same direction. I also welcome the decision of the Westpac bank to pass that on in full, and I repeat what the Prime Minister said earlier: we do expect other banks to pass this rate cut on in a timely way. Because of the global financial crisis and the global recession that it has caused, we need fiscal policy and monetary policy working strongly together. And they are—they are working in tandem—and the Reserve Bank board have acknowledged that in their statement today. The challenge that we face is so serious that we do need all elements of policy, all elements of government, all regulators and everyone in the community working together to support jobs. This plan will support 90,000 jobs over two years.

I want to talk about a couple of elements of this plan, because the Leader of the Opposition, in his comments before, was simply all over the place. The first point of the plan is that we are going to spend $28.8 billion to build the schools and roads and homes and communities and to have the energy efficiency we all need for a future economy. These are measures which will make Australia a better place. But, most importantly—and this is the dual benefit we get from this sort of investment—it will create jobs directly. I was gobsmacked when the Leader of the Opposition was talking before about the building of schools. He was somehow unaware that that involved the private sector. I do not know where he has been for the last 20 or 30 years, but this program will support thousands of jobs in the building and construction sector of this country, not only across our capital cities but in just about every community in this great nation. That is why it deserves the support of those opposite. Why do we have a measure like this? It is because the global recession has produced a collapse in private business investment, so what we are moving to do is to put in place public investment. In so doing, we have the full support of the private sector in this country—but, apparently, not the Leader of the Opposition.

The second part of the package is a $12.7 billion boost to consumption so we can support jobs now. The Leader of the Opposition, that disciple of Milton Friedman, is out there with an argument that somehow, instead of making lump sum payments now, what we should have done was to bring forward the 1 July tax cuts. That is his argument. Is that correct? Is that what the opposition’s position is?

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