Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence Industry, representing the Minister for Jobs and Innovation. Will the Minister update the House on action the coalition government is taking to generate more and better paid jobs for hardworking Australians? How does this compare to alternative approaches, which fail to stimulate jobs and growth?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Boothby for her question. This week the government has been absolutely getting on with the job of focusing, as a good government should, on the creation of jobs, stimulating investment and growing the economy, and we are getting the necessary measures passed through both houses of parliament to do so. This week we passed the Regional Investment Corporation Bill through both houses of the parliament. Today we passed the second tranche of the corporate tax changes through the House of Representatives, the balance of the reforms that we passed last year, which will now go to the Senate. We also passed the banking executive accountability regime bill, to ensure that banking executives are properly remunerated. In a social area that still impacts very much on the lives of Australians, we continued the pilot of the cashless debit card.

This government is focused on the things that the Australian public care about, and the first one of those is having a job. We've created 403,000 new jobs in the last 12 months—a record number. This week, we announced more jobs in defence industry in regional Victoria and regional New South Wales. We announced more jobs near Parkes, with the collection of the first links for the Inland Rail project, one of the great nation-building projects of Australia's history, promoted by the Deputy Prime Minister along with defence industry, making huge changes to the economies of regional Australia.

These issues, which we regard as critically important to a good government, the member for Lindsay regards as boring. Doesn't it really sum up where the Labor Party has sunk to, that what Hawke and Keating used to describe as the most important responsibility of a Labor government—providing jobs for working people—the member for Lindsay now describes as boring? She is only following the example of her leader, because he is making the transition for Labor from the party of Hawke and Keating, which knew they had to have economic credibility after the Whitlam fiasco, to the party of Guevara and Chavez yet again. That's where the Labor Party is taking you to win a by-election to defeat the Greens in Batman—which he still may not win. Batman is a safe Labor seat, and, to hang onto it, the Leader of the Opposition is taking you to the party of Chavez and Guevara rather than the party of Hawke and Keating. How sad for Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, who transformed the Labor Party, for the Leader of the Opposition to drag you back to the far left of Australian politics, where you began! The Australian people won't vote for you. (Time expired)