Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I draw the Leader of the Opposition’s attention to comments I made in a press conference just before question time, which I will repeat here for his benefit. That is that, on the question of supporting jobs through fiscal stimulus, obviously that means that jobs can be created through direct government investment. It also means that it helps retain jobs which currently exist in the private sector. The second part of the honourable member’s question goes to the impact of the Economic Security Strategy. That strategy, as you know, was announced in October; the payments were delivered in December. In terms of an early response to the questions raised by the Leader of the Opposition for which the data is obviously nowhere near complete, we have an Australian company which is able to provide comparable data for the period. Westfield today released figures which show that spending in the month of December 2008 was up 2.5 per cent from the previous year.

If spending is up in retail, I would have thought that small businesses employing people in retail may be benefited by that. Or the alternative is that those opposite think that somehow there is the dead hand of socialism out there doing everything. Or is it the same logic as the Leader of the Opposition was arguing before that, if we invest in infrastructure and schools, some government monolith descends and builds all those schools and houses? It is the private sector—in retail, in construction—that actually does these jobs. That is why we are spending; that is why we are investing. We are supporting the private economy in order to fill the gap which has been left by the withdrawal of private sector activity.

To return to the point of contrast which those opposite, I think, find difficult, it is this: Westfield, an Australian supermarket chain, which operates globally in terms of shopping centres around the world, has produced figures today which demonstrate that spending in the month of December was up 2.5 per cent from the previous year. This is in contrast to their overseas sales, which were down by 14 per cent in the US and seven per cent in New Zealand. This is a clear contrast, and if those opposite deride and scoff at the role which private sector retail plays in providing employment in Australia it shows how far out of touch they have become.

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