Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the appropriation bills, and I also welcome the budget. For us as a nation, this budget is able to build on a position of strength. That is important as the world is still grappling with the impacts of the global recession. We avoided the global recession—the worst the world has seen—but not all of the fallout from it. There is no way we could escape some of the fallout, but we did not go into recession. People can say that was good luck, but it was not—it was good management. Luck can always feature in a lot of things, but basic good economic management and political management helped make sure that we did not go into recession when almost all other developed countries with advanced economies did not.

Norway would have been one country that did not go into recession. Norway has also gained its richness and wealth over the years from resources. They have been world leaders in the way they manage their resources. I have great familiarity with this—as members of the House know, I lived and worked in Timor-Leste for nearly four years, so the resources sector is not unknown to me, and big mining companies and how they operate are not unknown to me either—some of them have immersed themselves in the debate that is happening here. I have seen the way that they operate in countries around the world, and sometimes it is not a pretty site. The Treasurer said in his budget speech, and I agree:

A position of strength from which we will build a modern tax and retirement income system, invest in renewable energy, and deliver historic health and hospital reform.

He further said:

A position of strength from which we will build the skills base and capital stock we need for a new generation of prosperity.

I want to congratulate the Treasurer not only for the budget but for three budgets, the three successive budgets of the Rudd Labor government. I also want to say to him: credit where credit is due, because often in politics people do not get credit where it is due. The economics editor Tim Colebatch, writing in the Age on 1 June, in an article titled ‘The dirt on dodging the GFC’ said:

And the Rudd government’s stimulus measures put a floor under retail spending, housing and construction activity when it was most needed. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

We should give credit where credit is due. He said some other interesting things in this article and one of them was:

The recession was concentrated in manufacturing, where output fell 11 per cent: mining output fell just 1 per cent. Mining didn’t save us from recession. The impact of China’s stimulus certainly helped us recover, but only after the worst had passed.

The article goes to the heart of the issue of the stimulus and clearly articulates that the stimulus helped save us from recession, and it certainly did. We do not live in isolation. We are members of parliament, we have got electorates, businesses, local people, schools and local economies, and it is clear that stimulus has worked to help keep us out of recession.

We would have seen people in long unemployment queues. I can remember seeing them, and members in this House would remember seeing them, and the queues go on for a long time. Some people I know, who were unemployed years ago, found it nearly impossible to get back into employment, particularly older people, and older males especially. I have seen it when we had high youth unemployment—

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