Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely. Why wouldn’t you want to act? What is the price of not acting? If we did not act, if there were no stimulus package, if there were not these 1,800 projects occurring in my electorate, your electorate and coalition members’ electorates, unemployment, rather than being predicted to be eight per cent, would probably be 10 per cent or 11 per cent, with all the hurt and harm that unemployment does. I would think all members should understand the harm and hurt of unemployment, but we certainly do on our side—and we want to minimise it. That is why we have taken these initiatives. I do not apologise for it. I am happy to go and explain what we are doing, why we are doing it and how my community will benefit. I think people out there understand it. The one thing they do understand, even if no coalition member mentions the word, is that we are living in the midst of a global world financial crisis of a dimension that we have not seen before.

Indeed, it was really interesting in question time when the Minister for Finance and Administration drew attention to his counterpart’s statement quoting Herbert Hoover—not Edgar Hoover; I nearly fell for the same mistake. What did he do in that depression? What did a lot of other countries do in that depression and recession? They made it worse. We had in Australia Sir Otto Niemeyer come from the Bank of England telling the state governments and telling the federal government: ‘You can’t have an expansionary budget. You’ve got to cut back on your public service. You’ve got to cut back on your expenditures. This will save you.’ Well, it did not. We all know it exacerbates it. No-one wants to exacerbate it. We certainly on this side of politics do not want to exacerbate it. As much as we can we want to cushion the pain we will suffer.

Maybe there are some on the coalition side that say, ‘The economy will be stronger if we have 11 per cent unemployed. It will be good for the economy. Labour will be cheaper. We will be able to in the longer term prosper better from that.’ That is a pretty heartless approach to unemployment and one that I reject totally.

I again want to make the point that we did take initiatives; we are being criticised for it; and today we have seen some of the results. We are not out of the woods but we have seen the results. What happened to our economy today? It grew by 0.4 per cent. It did not contract, like all those other economies around the world that are contracting significantly. We actually grew. We are not, if you like, in a recession. Let me finish on this point about what is happening worldwide in the same quarter: the United States had a contraction of 1.4 per cent; Japan, four per cent contraction; Germany, 3.8 per cent; France, contraction of 1.2 per cent; United Kingdom, 1.9 per cent; Italy, 2.4 per cent; and the OECD on average 2.1 per cent—they are all contractions. We have grown. And it is a good thing.

On a day when the coalition knew at 11.30 that the economy had grown and not gone into recession, they put on an MPI about the government’s finances—well, it surprised me. They obviously did not have a plan B. I give unqualified support for these appropriation bills, unqualified support for the budget and unqualified support for the extraordinary measures we have taken in the interests of small business, in the interests of our economy but, most especially, in the interests of people of Australia to try to cushion the effects in Australia of this horrific world global downturn.

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