Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As many people have been saying, including Senator Conroy in his contributions, we are in truly exceptional times. The evidence is out there. There is nothing that can be hidden because of media coverage putting out information on all parts of the issue of the economy across the world. This is not just an issue that Australia is facing. We are looking at a global financial crisis. The really important thing is that this is not just something that we are just discussing around the table in this place. People in the community have now got information that clarifies just how deeply in debt and how deeply in crisis the world economy is. Amongst the people across this country there is deep concern.

So when we hear people from the opposition talking in terms of ‘manufactured hysteria’, that actually devalues the knowledge and the concerns that the people of Australia have, and it is real concern. What this government is planning to do—and it is a tough decision—is to put forward a package to respond to the needs of our community and to protect jobs. Indeed, I take Senator Coonan’s point about jobs, jobs, jobs and the need to protect those jobs and to boost the economy, because what we are talking about is our economy within the midst of the global economy. And, most importantly, there is a need to support Australian families and Australian citizens who are working through their own concerns about what is happening to their lives and to their economy. That is the fear and that is the challenge. Those are the issues that the government is putting forward a package to respond to.

It is not a matter of hiding the issues or pretending that any single way is going to provide the full answer, and nor is it a matter of finding some mystical silver bullet. It is actually a matter of carefully and with full intent putting forward a package that looks particularly at individual needs. We see in this process a number of packages that are looking at tax relief for individual taxpayers. It is a matter of looking at some immediate relief for those people, some of whom will be facing the loss of their jobs. We have seen over the last few months the beginning of job losses in our country as a result of international companies pulling back, our trading situation being affected by the international crisis and our resources markets not being able to be boosted because our trading partners are not taking what they used to. These are real situations.

So we are looking at immediate support to families. We are looking at support for families who are working now at getting their kids back to school. We are giving people an immediate payment for that. More importantly, the input of funding into infrastructure in our schools is something that is necessary. We will respond immediately to the jobs, jobs, jobs issue with effective construction planning and administrative work to do the large range of infrastructure projects in schools presented in this package. I know that schools right across my state—independent and government schools—are all looking at these packages and saying how they can best be used for them and their communities. For families with school-age children there is something real in this package that can be held on to and, most importantly, it will give people hope.

Time is much too short to look at the whole package because as we all know this is a large response to a large issue, but I want to make a note of my particular favour of the infrastructure program that deals with homelessness. We are bringing forward the kinds of plans that we talked about in this place quite recently concerning the real need for immediate infrastructure to address the homelessness issue across the country. The package looks at that and how we can once again use construction and our infrastructure needs and use a real stimulus to respond to a real issue. Again, this is not manufactured hysteria. These are real problems in our community and the package put before this place by the government needs support. It needs people to look at how we can work together rather than put up barriers and try to play games.