Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McGauran is back as deputy whip, this time for the Liberal Party. He used to be here for the National Party. I cannot resist saying that Senator McGauran made the right decision: he switched—because he realised just how futile it was representing the National Party. They are really the doormats of the coalition. Again, the budget has reflected that. Sadly, the poor old National Party can do very little for the bush and regional Australia. Senator McGauran is certainly very perceptive; I congratulate him on the jump he has made.

Some measures in the budget reflect the national policy agenda that Labor have been setting and which has been outlined by our leader, Kevin Rudd. The 2007 federal budget fails to address long-term challenges for Australia’s future, including the urgent need to revive our flagging productivity, investment in an education revolution, delivering a national high-speed broadband network and decisive action to deal with the economic cost of climate change and the national water crisis.

As I indicated, we have had some debate about productivity. The future test is important because Australia does need an education revolution to boost productivity. That is the key to our economic prosperity. The education revolution must not only address the Liberal government’s failure to invest in universities; it must also deal with the government’s continuing failure to invest in early childhood education, school education and vocational education and training. Even after this budget, national investment in education will have declined from two per cent of gross domestic product in 1995-96 to 1.6 per cent of gross domestic product in 2007-08. Far from lifting productivity, the 2007 federal budget papers indicate that Australia’s productivity growth will decline from the end of the next financial year.

Very briefly we had an exchange with Senator Minchin. He clearly had not read the budget papers yesterday. He clearly could not find the productivity figures. They are there. You have to calculate them, so perhaps the Treasurer’s attempts not to publish a line of productivity figures threw Senator Minchin, the Minister for Finance and Administration, for a moment. If you look at the economic parameters, it is possible to work out productivity figures. I know Treasury listen into these debates; perhaps in the next budget they will consider actually publishing the calculations. Productivity is one of the keys to maintaining economic growth, prosperity and wealth creation in this country. If we look at the figures in last year’s budget papers, productivity was forecast to increase by about 2½ per cent. What has been delivered in 2006-07? Zero—a big fat zero in terms of productivity for this current financial year.