Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the honourable member for Kennedy’s apology; it was a bit distracting while I was trying to make my speech. The important thing is to understand that this budget is within the context of the government actually having to get out there into our communities and put activity on the ground to ensure that we get through as best as possible in these difficult times. I will tell you what would be the worst possible thing. The first range of interventions, stage 1, if you like, was the cash injection—the bonus payments which those opposite like to dismissively describe as the ‘cash splash’. There is nothing worse for a community when hard times hit than small businesses going to the wall and being unable to sell your house because there are no people out there with the money to buy. You walk around your community and what do you see? Boarded up shops, streets with ‘For Sale’ signs out for months on end, and the people react by saying that things are in crisis and withdrawing themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That sort of image and message means to people that they had better bunker down and not spend. Then you see more businesses go bust and more houses for sale that cannot be moved.

The injection of that cash money was critically important as the first stage of the government’s strategy during this difficult time. You only have to look at images of periods like the Great Depression. If you have a look at photos of the suburbs in my area from that time, that is exactly what you see—boarded up shops and boarded up ramshackle houses that people were not able to sell. That is exactly what our first injection of cash into the economy was about at that time.

The other thing that really infuriates me is that I think there is a huge slab of sexism in the criticism of cash bonuses. Whose jobs did the cash bonuses support? Retail and hospitality workers—by and large, women and young people. Are their jobs not as worthy of underpinning by the government as the tradespeople who are involved in the construction industry? Of course they are. But their jobs are dismissed by those opposite as a ‘cash splash’ and wasted money. I know in my area my local businesses tell me how important this measure has been. One manager of a retail store came out of his office when he heard I was in the shop to say to me, ‘Tell Kevin Rudd that made a real difference to me and I was able to keep staff on because of it’.

This particular budget sets up the nation-building infrastructure as the third arm of the government’s response. We had the first cash injection, and then the second was for quick, short-term building projects that you could roll out to get workers back into the workplace, as the private money was withdrawing from building, by getting the involvement of local tradespeople and all the associated workers around the trades. It was a case of doing something in the period that it takes you to plan and get established the larger projects. It is a flow-on effect through three stages. The third stage is the budget.

I want to put that context around it and make some reference to my own area. In my electorate there are some very important budget initiatives. The pension reform will be very welcomed in my area. We have an interesting population mix in my electorate; we have quite a good coverage of all the demographics. There are still 21,900 pensioners in my electorate who will benefit from the pension increases. This is the most significant reform of the pension system that I can remember. Perhaps to these pensioners my lifetime is not particularly impressive but I chatted to my grandfather, who is in his 90s, and it is the biggest increase he can remember. It is important to acknowledge how important it is not only to do the one-off payments and say ‘If we can afford this at the next budget will give you another one and we will assess it every year to see whether we can afford to give it to you’ but also to actually make some structural improvement to the pension system. That is very welcome.

The $43.8 million for the University of Wollongong is a tremendous initiative. This is to establish the Australian Institute of Innovative Materials. It is an arm of the university that will take their research and turn it into generic prototypes. It is important for Australia to be competitive in the elaborately transformed manufacturing sector. People say to me, coming from a manufacturing seat, that manufacturing is dying in Australia. I say to them, ‘Only if you let it.’ The reality is that manufacturing is growing but we will compete in the clever, problem solving, smart end of manufacturing, not in mass production. That is exactly what this investment at the university is about.

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