Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

And eloquently! After the debacle of last year’s $10 billion package, where it would seem very few of the promised 75,000 jobs have materialised, the government is now rather more modestly promising that the $42 billion will ‘support’ up to 90,000 jobs. We do not know what ‘support’ means. I am like Senator Boyce; I do not know what ‘support’ means, but presumably it does not mean to create or to maintain.

I go to a quick bit of arithmetic, Mr Acting Deputy President Hutchins, and I am not good at this so you may have to help me. That is 90,000 jobs at the cost of $42 billion, which comes out at $400,000 per job. And those are not new jobs, those are the supported jobs. At $400,000 a job, what a wonderful package! As Mr Costello said in the House yesterday about the government’s new policy to borrow and to splurge, we are reversing 10 years of hard work and we are doing it to support 90,000 jobs at more than $400,000 per job. What a fiasco! That is the Labor arithmetic, and it is not very pretty.

Rather than trying to remake capitalism, which Mr Rudd has tried to do with his sad little essay, he should perhaps do something to ameliorate the pain that ordinary Australians are feeling. I thought it was the job of governments in recessions to help those in pain, rather than to try to remake the economic system, which is Mr Rudd’s preoccupation.

Who are the principal people who should be benefiting from Mr Rudd’s concerns? The unemployed. They are the people at the bottom of the social heap. And what is Mr Rudd doing for the unemployed in this package? This is from a party that supposedly believes in social justice! The government is doing absolutely nothing for the unemployed. Do you know what? Within the next year there are going to be a lot more people who are unemployed. So perhaps the new social democracy that Mr Rudd talks about in this frightful little essay has nothing to do with social justice. The new social democracy is not about social justice at all. There is no concern for the unemployed at all. It is increasingly obscene.

Tim Colebatch wrote in today’s Age:

Those who need it are the poor people who bear the cost of the recession on behalf of the rest of us: workers who lose their jobs, apprentices laid off, youngsters who can’t even get into the labour market, and businesses and self-employed people who go broke. There is nothing in this package for them.

So much for new Labor! So much for a party trying to rediscover a new direction! So much for a sad, new social democrat who does not believe in social justice!

The worst thing, however—and my colleagues have spoken about this forcefully and with passion—is the tremendous cost to the economy for future generations. It is about sizing up debt for years and years to come, for our children and potentially our grandchildren. Others have spoken at length today about the government’s reckless policies that in just over a year have managed to turn a $22 billion surplus into a $20 billion budget deficit and have sent Australia back on the road to government debt. That is the problem. What is worse, judging by the legislation introduced by the government, is that we can expect it to get even worse.

What has the government done? It has given itself plenty of wriggle room. It is going to allow itself to borrow up to—