Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Petrie for her question. As a Queensland representative in this parliament, she knows what it was like for the people of Queensland to live through the summer that they lived through. We know that the natural disasters that hit our nation were not just confined to Queensland, though Queensland was so badly affected. We were not the only nation on earth to suffer at that time. We remember what happened in Christchurch and, of course, we all remember the scale of the tragedy that hit Japan. All of these things had a pressing, tragic impact for individuals and their families and many people are still recovering, and they have also had an economic impact. When we look at today's national account figures, we see that economic impact very clearly. Our economy is set to grow by four per cent in 2011-12. The fundamentals of our economy are strong. We will create half a million new jobs by 2013. Our unemployment rate is set to fall to 4½ per cent. Of course, this comes on top of the creation of 750,000 jobs since 2007 when many economies around the world have been literally seeing millions of jobs lost.

Today's national account numbers do show a contraction due to the impact of the natural disasters that we have seen. The floods and the cyclones alone are estimated to have reduced growth by 1.7 percentage points over the March quarter. That is because those events had an impact on commodity exports—$5.3 billion dollars was wiped out from coal and iron ore. That is to do with flooding of mines and, obviously, flooding of supply routes. And there were other sections of the economy that were hit. But we should not lose sight of the strong performance in the rest of our economy that we see in today's figures. Consumption, dwelling investment and business investment all made positive contributions to growth in the early part of this year, and that is welcome indeed. Over 50,000 jobs were created in the March quarter and they are part of hundreds of thousands of more jobs to be created in the next few years. The terms of trade are at their highest levels in 140 years.

We are already seeing the economy coming back strongly as we recover from the floods. Mines that were flooded only a few months ago have now resumed production and that will drive a rebound in export earnings. Coal exports jumped 14 per cent in March after falling almost 30 per cent in February, so that shows you how quickly some mines were able to bring their economic production back on stream. And there is a massive pipeline of investment with the Bureau of Resource Economics estimating $430 billion planned for resource projects to come.

We have to keep rebuilding the Queensland economy. The government put in place a responsible package to fund the flood recovery. Unfortunately, those opposite when they tried to pass that test were unable to put a funding package together. The only funding package that the parliament has ever seen that has added up and worked is the one brought to it by the government. That funding package has enabled us to contribute a billion dollars already to support rebuilding efforts and a further billion dollars will be advanced by the end of the month, and $411 million has already been distributed to 53 local councils to help them get on with the job of rebuilding. There is much more to do but we are rebuilding and we will see, as a result, a rebound from the figures announced today through the national accounts.

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