Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If this maintenance work is not done, the schools will deteriorate and the people who could be doing that work will be unemployed. I believe that this aspect of the stimulation package is particularly important because it is building the education revolution. It is not just providing computers and all the other things that are so important but concentrating on investing in our schools, our future and our children. Whilst investing in our schools, our future and our children, we are providing jobs within the construction industry—which has been very adversely affected in this downturn.

This $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan that we are currently debating downstairs and will be debating well into tomorrow, and which I will be speaking on, I think, at about 10 minutes to 4 o’clock in the morning, will provide insulation for 2.7 million homes—that is, free ceiling insulation. It will also upgrade buildings in every one of Australia’s 9,540 schools. It will build more than 20,000 new social and defence homes.

Under the previous government money was ripped out of housing, and social housing, public housing, declined enormously. In the Shortland electorate the waiting time for a public house is 13 years. Somebody who is in desperate need of housing has to wait 13 years! It is absolutely disgraceful. You put this together with the National Affordable Housing Strategy which invests money in the private sector—and I might add that there has recently been housing approved under that scheme in the Shortland electorate—and you have a real attempt by our government to address the housing shortage in this country. I might add also that in the Shortland electorate the vacancy rate within the rental market is 1.8 per cent and, when three per cent is presumed to be a crisis level, 1.8 per cent is untenable.

The package will invest money in housing and, at the same time, invest money in construction and in the future. Unlike the previous government, which missed every opportunity to prepare for the future; unlike the previous government, which thought that the mining boom would never end; unlike the previous government, which allowed the worst skills shortage in Australia’s history to eventuate; unlike the previous government, which just sat on its hands; the Rudd government is acting now for Australia’s future to ensure that we handle the global financial crisis much better than it would have been handled under the previous government and much better than most other countries in the world. (Time expired)

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