Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are here to make decisions in the best interests of our country’s future. The member for Bendigo can be abusive all he likes and do the bullying, as his frontbench does every day, led by the leader of the government and others. I must say that the minister at the table, the member for Eden-Monaro, is not one of those who is involved in that sort of behaviour, but there are some on the front bench who act the goat and try and bully the other side into supporting their ill-thought-through plans. We will not do it. We will not be bullied. We will stand on our principles and do what is right for our country. That is what we plan to do and that is what I thought the Leader of the Opposition said so eloquently this morning in this place.

The interesting bit which is not in this package, although its name is the $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan, is that there is no focus on jobs. There is some vague reference to supporting jobs but there is actually no focus on it. A decent writer on economic matters and certainly no friend of the coalition over time—I think he was probably one of the more critical writers about the coalition’s budget strategies and economic strategies—is Mr Tim Colebatch, in the Age, who today wrote:

And the worst is what is not there at all. There is nothing to help the real victims of the recession: the 800,000 Australians whom Treasury expects to be unemployed by June next year.

Remember that Treasury’s estimates in recent years have not been all that good, so we can expect that is probably going to be a whole lot more than 800,000. That is Tim Colebatch, not a supporter of the coalition. We had the member for Bennelong mentioning her good personal friend Katie Lahey, at the Business Council of Australia, before, claiming that she supports it and so forth. Why wouldn’t she? Of course she would. It is a segmented package. There is no surprise that Katie Lahey, the friend of the member for Bennelong, is supporting it.

Two months after the first package had been allocated to the Australian people—the massive one-off payments—why would we be going back straightaway? You would think a government with some idea would be considering the evidence, looking at what has been shown by the first spend and seeing if the results were worthy of more one-off payments. It does not appear they have done so. The only flimsy evidence those on the other side will raise is that Westfield’s profits are up, which is interesting given that they are social democrats completely opposed to capitalism these days. But that was the claim yesterday. I, like the former Treasurer on Lateline last night, do not believe the purpose of people paying tax is to boost the profits of Westfield. I genuinely do not.

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