Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

First, with respect to matters regarding my own electorate, the amount of stimulus spending in my electorate relative to other nearby electorates varies in one respect only, and that is with respect to social housing. If you look at all of the items listed in stimulus measures in my electorate, you will see that, whether it is Building the Education Revolution or other areas of stimulus, broadly it is pretty much the same as in the equivalent electorates. There is only one difference; it is social housing. I wonder why that would be. Guess what—the answer is because that is where the social housing is. I have in my electorate the largest number of public tenants in Victoria. The number is, I understand, something like 2½ times the number in the next highest electorate.

It is unavoidable that, where you have a stimulus strategy that includes major measures to upgrade social housing, it is not going to be distributed evenly across all electorates, as, for example, the Building the Education Revolution funding is distributed evenly because the number of primary schools or primary schoolkids is going to be fairly similar across individual electorates.

The key answer to the shadow minister’s question is: were the stimulus to have been about upgrading yacht clubs then there probably would have been a disproportionate investment in his electorate, but, because the government made a decision to upgrade social housing, that meant that a disproportionate amount of that money was inevitably spent in my electorate.

Finally on this point I might indicate that the actual decisions with respect to the location of spending, the decisions about individual projects, were decisions in which I played no role. These were matters worked out with the Victorian government by the Minister for Housing, and these were decisions in which I had no role.

As someone representing an electorate that is not quite inner city but is not far therefrom, I would suggest to the shadow minister that the notion that the construction of additional housing of any kind, particularly higher density housing, in the inner city is the pathway to electoral popularity is a proposition that you will not find many serious political analysts able to support. Amongst other things, I find it amusing that people think that I regard this as a pathway to winning support in my electorate. In fact, I support it because it is the right thing to do for a large group of people who traditionally have been neglected and ignored by successive Liberal governments who have dramatically cut funding for social housing over the years and who have refused to invest in them. These are people who are on very low incomes, who are very disadvantaged and who we believe are entitled, along with everybody else, to reasonable living circumstances.

Secondly, I am asked why I made the statement that the opposition’s debt and deficit scare campaign is dead. Notwithstanding the campaign that we have had regarding tax reform from the opposition, there have been numerous questions in the last few weeks in question time about a variety of other subjects and I do not recall any questions about this particular subject. The evidence that your scare campaign is dead is actually out of your own mouths. The other evidence is that Australia’s debt level is projected to peak at around six per cent of GDP, in a world where other major countries have debt levels that are heading towards 80 per cent or 100 per cent of GDP. Any serious economist does not regard your campaign seriously and regards it as the complete joke that it is. That is why you have dropped off it completely. I have answered your question. I have answered why you have dropped your debt and deficit campaign—because even you realise it is totally idiotic. That is the answer to your question.

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