Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is the 20th budget that I have had the privilege of listening to in the time that I have been in this parliament. It is in every respect a Labor budget and, more importantly in my view, it is a budget for the times. The opposition can squeal as much as they want in relation to the question mark of the size of the deficit. The true situation is that the government had very little alternative to do other than what it has done if it was not to create havoc in the community. The government’s priorities in these difficult times are to protect jobs and to create jobs where it can. We saw the first instalment of those priorities at Christmas in the stimulus package of $10.3 billion, a lot of which was spent in the retail sector and reflected in subsequent figures.

We also saw some $42 billion allocated to a nation-building economic stimulus plan that has seen every school in the country benefit in a financial sense, in a job creation sense and in the sense of enhancing those local communities well into the future. In my electorate of Banks, for instance, as at 26 May 2009, as part of the Building the Education Revolution, 61 projects in 44 schools, amounting to $18,904,000, had been approved, with more to come. In the National School Pride Program there were 55 projects in 44 schools, amounting to $6,904,000. In Primary Schools for the 21st Century there were six projects in five schools, with funding in the order of $12 million. That is money for the local community, money for local schools.

Never in my 19 years in this place has my electorate received anywhere near that sort of money from governments of either a Labor or a conservative persuasion. If anything, my electorate suffered under the former government for 11½ years because funding of applications put in by the local community was denied on the basis that Bankstown was regarded by the former government as Keating territory. Frankly, Bankstown did not get its fair share of funding. Under the current arrangements of this government, every electorate in the country is receiving this funding because every electorate in this country needs this funding.

If you were to ask me if I preferred more people out of work and less of a deficit, I would say to you I would prefer a bigger deficit and more people in work. That is the priority of this government. What we know, based on Treasury advice and calculations, is that the budget is predicted to come into surplus in 2015-16, which is not a long time away, despite the cuteness of the opposition’s remarks about the temporary deficit—that it might be longer—and a whole range of other things. The truth is that the budget is structurally sound, and it is sound because of decisions made by the Hawke-Keating government and the former Howard government, which set us up in a situation where we can act the way we have acted in this budget to protect our communities.

I went through the former recession as a backbench member of a Labor government and it was not a pleasant thing to see elderly men, 50 to 55 years of age, unemployed and unable to find employment.

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