Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw. The Gillard government is about strengthening Australia. It is a government that is about the future and for the future. It is a government of positive ideas and it is working to rebuild Queensland and other areas affected by the floods. It is about providing opportunity for all Australians. It is not about supporting sectional interests but about governing for all Australians and providing opportunity for them to work and for all children to gain a quality education.

The Gillard government is about fighting climate change through placing a price on carbon and by investing in green industries, green technology and green initiatives. Why is that? That is because we are a party of positive ideas, we are a party for the future and we are a government that governs for all Australians, unlike the opposition, who have a goal of blocking, wrecking and spoiling just for the sake of opposing—no ideas, nothing positive—and getting their policies from the One Nation webpage.

I would like to concentrate a little on placing a price on carbon. The previous speaker did not quite tell the truth. The government have always said that we need to address climate change, and it has always been the contention of the government that the only way to do this is to place a price on carbon. The Prime Minister said it before the election and has said it since the election. The arguments put forward by the member for Tangney were quite spurious, particularly when he said that the majority of Australians support nuclear power. Obviously he has not been talking to the people I represent in this parliament.

The appropriation bills give us quite an insight into the direction in which the Gillard government is going. What the Gillard government does is act. It is providing finances to assist the areas affected by floods. It has introduced legislation to provide a levy that will support and help the people of Queensland. It has had that legislation passed through parliament, and that will benefit those people whose infrastructure and economy have all but been destroyed. This is a government that acts and works for the future. There has been quite an investment, through Centrelink, in helping people out with payments during the time of the floods, helping them get themselves back on their feet and helping them to survive during that really acute period.

Whilst I am talking about Centrelink, I would like to mention a program that Centrelink is undertaking. It appears in the budget papers. Charlestown Centrelink in Shortland electorate is one of the trial sites for this program, where job seekers, when they become unemployed, rather than being allowed to languish for a period of time, are being given intensive assistance early in the piece. There are group sessions where people prepare resumes, talk and look at ways to find jobs. The idea is to try and address the issue and help people to get a job quickly rather than be unemployed for a period of time before they can link into the Job Network providers. That is one of the initiatives. The Connecting People with Jobs Relocation Assistance Pilot Program is another program that is going to operate. Up to 4,000 places will be provided to help Australians relocate to Queensland to help up there.

Through this legislation the government provides AusAID with additional amounts of money. This will work to fund partnerships between the government and the non-government sector, and there is $20 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are something that most members of this parliament are committed to, and I have a particular interest in goals 4 and 5. I was lucky enough to see the way in which our Australian dollars are being spent through AusAID when I went with the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing to PNG and the Solomon Islands in 2009. I saw on the ground how money that came through our budget was being used to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The initiative that is included here should be supported by all members of the House. It provides vital funds to those countries that we assist.

I also notice in these budget papers that the government will be undertaking the first stage of an implementation study into a high-speed rail network. The Shortland electorate straddles the Central Coast and the Hunter, and the initial implementation studies for high-speed rail are taking place within that area. This will benefit the people that I represent in this parliament. The completion of the implementation studies will lead to the next stage of actually bringing about high-speed rail.

These papers also provide for an extension to the end of this year of the Active After-school Communities program, a program that I am particularly supportive of. The health and ageing committee had an inquiry into obesity, and the Active After-school Communities program was one of the standout programs that we visited. We need to put in place strategies to encourage children and ensure that they are more active as well as to ensure that they have a proper diet. The Active After-school Communities program covers both. The young people who are involved in the program are exercising rather than sitting in front of a TV, and all the food they eat during the period when they are there is healthy, nutritious and designed to create good eating habits.

Health is one of the issues that have always been very important to me. The health and hospital reforms that the Gillard government has announced will benefit enormously the people I represent in this parliament. We have already seen how the increase in the number of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals who are being trained will complement the workforce. Whilst the Howard government cut places for the training of doctors, the Rudd and Gillard governments have increased places for training. That is vitally important for the people I represent in this parliament, because we have a chronic shortage of doctors. But the situation is improving thanks to our health and hospital reforms. There is money going into hospitals and extra money being put into training specialists. In the electorate of Shortland, two places have been created in Belmont Hospital and a number of other places have been created at the Wyong Hospital and at the John Hunter Hospital, which is a major teaching hospital.

It is all about investing in the future and making sure that we have enough doctors and that our children can get an appropriate education. It is about improvement in the way that GEERS operates by the introduction of the fair entitlements guarantee, which provides workers of employers that enter into liquidation with their entitlements. It is a much better scheme than GEERS. The government is putting in excess of $450 million into that.

This week in parliament we have heard a lot about placing a price on carbon. The Leader of the Opposition has opposed that position, but I do not think that there is anyone in this parliament who would be surprised by that, given his record in the area of climate change: ‘It exists; it does not exist; I support an ETS; I do not support an ETS; placing a price on carbon is the way to go; no, it’s not.’ In the end, he just opposes for the sake of opposing. No matter what it is, you can guarantee that the Leader of the Opposition will be out their opposing it.

And where does Mr Abbott get his policy information? What is his source? The One Nation website. I visited the One Nation website once I started hearing that this was where he was getting his information from. Sure enough, there it was: information on the schools in Indonesia about which John Howard had the foresight to see that we needed to invest money in educating those young people who were at risk of poverty and radical Islamism through lack of education. It is only through programs like this that you can combat those things. But the Leader of the Opposition used as his source of information on this the One Nation website. What we need are appropriation bills like the ones that we have before us today: appropriation bills for the future that look forward, do not look back and are not about wrecking.

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