Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the late, great Gough Whitlam said, 'Only the impotent are pure.' I might remind my learned Greens scholars across the way of that. Nor have they ever governed, nor they ever will. Woe betide us all should they ever govern. One of the very learned political commentators pulled me aside after the budget lunch today and said: 'Meryl, you know you're doing pretty well when they're attacking you from both sides. It is the old pincer manoeuvre.' But I just have to say to those who have raised this matter of public importance today that they've sadly missed a great opportunity to really raise some of the matters that are of importance to the Australian people.

Yes, rightly, housing is probably among the top things at the moment. People don't want to be living in tents in parks, or in their cars with their children. This government is spending time and money, setting down good policy frameworks so that we will not only be helping those people as of the next financial year but into the next four years. We are saying that we will set a foundation, and not only for affordable housing—whatever that gobbledegook was then about not a dollar for public housing: it's just wrong. We are spending money on these things; we are assigning good trajectories for housing in Australia. That is one of the key fundamentals to anyone who is in poverty.

There's another thing that people in my electorate say to me. I do have areas of very, very high poverty within my electorate and also areas where people are not at such a disadvantage, but the people from the suburbs where they often struggle to make ends meet say to me is, 'You know, Meryl, some of these people in parliament have got so much money that they put up these ideas that none of us could ever afford.' So they actually get fiscal restraint. They get that we not only had to put forward a budget last night that deals with the here and now, with crippling inflation and the fact that the cost of living is very high for people, but had to be a responsible government.

I am exceptionally proud of the fact that Jim Chalmers delivered a surplus, the first surplus in 14 years. People on the opposite benches have been saying, 'A drover's dog could have delivered a surplus,' but, quite frankly, I think that if we listened to some of the policies and the suggestions that we're hearing in these speeches today, it would just be a dog's breakfast; the country couldn't run. They would run us into the ground so quickly that there would be trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt. How would we ever pay it back? Yes, it would be fabulous to spray money around willy-nilly and give everyone all the support under the sun, but we simply can't afford it. That is the reality, and that's the very sad thing. I feel that our friends in the Greens party seem to live in some sort of fiscal fantasy where we should be able to spray money around and give everyone everything. Well, we just can't. The poorest of the poor in Australia understand that, and they don't want us to do that, either.

They want us to be responsible. They want us to put in motion the manufacturing, the jobs and the technology of the future, so that their children might not have to do it as hard as they're doing it. That is one of the key principles of any intergenerational change. Every parent will say to anyone in a position of power, 'I just want my kids to be a bit better off than I was.'

That's what last night's budget was really about. It was about looking back over the last 10 years and asking: really, what has been achieved for our nation in terms of anything remotely financial or anything remotely environmental? I know that is a key tenet of what the Greens want. What has been achieved? Very little, sadly. So we have to go back to zero and say, 'Okay, firstly, what can we afford; secondly, how do we look to the medium and long term?' That's what we did last night. It was responsible and calibrated, and we are giving as much as we can to those who definitely need it. I'm particularly proud of how responsible we've been. 'Responsible'—that's the word that I'd ask you to take away from this budget and that I'd ask the Greens to think long and hard about.

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