Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

That is how it has been done and how it has been designed. The shadow minister just interjected. I want every builder in the country to know what he just said: ‘We’re crowding them out.’ That is what he said. He is pretending there is no spare capacity in Australia’s construction industry. This is unbelievable. How out of touch are this mob? How out of touch is their housing minister, who is in here pretending there is no spare capacity in the Australian construction industry? How out of touch can they all be? They simply do not walk in the same shopping aisles as the average Australian.

We understand that there is a need to continue to provide some support because there is spare capacity in the Australian economy and because unemployment will continue to rise. We understand that many people out there, although employed, are working far fewer hours than they would like to work. In fact, all of those reduced hours add up to something like 200,000 full-time jobs, over and above the increase in unemployment that has occurred in this country that the Acting Prime Minister was talking about earlier. So there is still substantial spare capacity in the Australian economy, which is why it does require support. But it is also why, as the private sector growth returns, the monetary policy response from the Reserve Bank will be wound down, as indeed our fiscal stimulus was designed to be wound down. But the opposition want to continue a fiction which no-one else in Australia believes. It demonstrates just how incompetent and how unfit for government they are that they could walk into this House and claim that interest rates could stay at 50-year lows forever and pretend that they are not four per cent below the peak that they were only a short time ago—which has of course been of enormous benefit to an enormous number of people in this community.

What we have to do is sensibly manage the recovery, and that is what we are doing. That is why we designed the economic stimulus, the fiscal stimulus, the way we did: to support Australian families, to support employment and to support vulnerable sectors of the economy until private demand returned. The Acting Prime Minister before referred to the fact that the outlook internationally is uncertain, so in the middle of this we have to be very careful in the way in which we manage the recovery, in the way in which we withdraw our stimulus and in the way in which we continue to support the economy. The livelihoods of tens of thousands of families and businesses depend upon it. It is a pity that those opposite do not realise that.

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