Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on this MPI. I am going to start with the ‘push me, pull me’ animal which the member for Cook displayed. I got a bit confused. I thought it was a diagram of the National and Liberal parties’ position when it comes to climate change. Or perhaps it is a diagram of the Liberal and National parties’ position on the structural separation of Telstra. Or perhaps it is a diagram of the Liberal and National parties’ position on asylum seekers. I am not really sure. I thought it was a diagram of one of those, but it is not.

In this MPI debate, we are thinking about what the consequences would have been for both families and small businesses had the Liberal Party been elected at the last election. The consequences would have been huge—and not in a good way, but in a very bad way. More people would have been out of jobs, there would have been lower business and consumer confidence and more small businesses would have been facing difficulty. Why is that? It is because the Liberal Party and the National Party were completely against any economic stimulus. This is very disappointing because, while the rest of the world were moving towards stimulating their economies, the Liberal and National parties came to this parliament every day arguing against stimulus. We heard the member for Gippsland change his position on this just before. He said they were for some types of stimulus but not other types. But I remember clearly in this House that they voted against our stimulus package which helped small business, families and the Australian economy.

One of those small businesses is Quattro, in my electorate of Kingston, which is in the business of building houses. They were successful in tendering to build some social housing that was part of the economic stimulus package. They told me that things were looking very grim for them. In fact, they were looking at laying off some people because of the severe economic downturn. But, as a result of our economic stimulus package, they put more people on. That was good news not just for Quattro. In fact, they attended my Kingston working forum—

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