Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

There is an interesting concept with respect to what the shadow minister just interjected, about looking at the big picture. He should understand, with the portfolio that he has, that part of understanding the big picture in a country as diverse as ours is making sure that you tend to the local picture in every part of the nation. We have a whole group of local members of parliament on this side of the House who understand how to do that in their own areas and who understand the importance in their own areas of making sure that, because a primary school is a local project for a relatively small number of people, it is still part of the big picture.

When you are talking about investing in every school—it does not matter whether it is a primary school or a high school, a government school or a non-government school, in the private system or in the Catholic system—all throughout the country, you get the big-picture benefit. You get the benefits in education because of the upgraded facilities. You get the benefits in the actual process of building those facilities—the benefits in terms of what happens for local contractors and the construction industry and the challenges that they are currently facing in the context of the global financial crisis. You get extra benefits because those contractors do not just receive the money and leave the town; the money gets spent in the area. This generates real economic activity at a time when all the advice that is coming to the government says that we need to make sure that we are generating economic activity and that we should be doing this not just in major cities but also in every school throughout the nation and looking at those black spot programs and saying, ‘Now is the time to make the investment and start fixing those’, and to actually go to the situation of the level crossings. Members opposite would understand the frustration over years of delay on doing something about level crossings and the impact that that has. Once again, you have the impact on the jobs and the workers involved in doing the job and you have the spin-off industries with them then spending the money that they have earned in the local area, and you have the long-term infrastructure improvement of local roads. All that is part of the big picture.

The Leader of the Nationals made the complaint that not every farmer will receive the $950. That is true—it is not every farmer, but it is pretty close to 21,000 of the most needy. We are making sure that they get some extra money. In terms of the business expenses that they have on their farms it is certainly a modest amount of money, but the impact that it could then have on local towns is deeply significant. The shadow minister for agriculture knows that the towns where there are the most people on EC payments are the towns where not just farmers are suffering but also every contractor and every shopkeeper is suffering. People having that extra EC money helped to generate economic activity in areas that needed it desperately, before we had ever heard of the economic crisis. Those areas desperately needed help, economic activity and assistance long before the world went into recession. Our plan provides some more money to help generate long-term economic activity, and the money will not disappear from the economy the first time it is spent.

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