Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Without the payments that this government has supplied, we would not be doing all we could to support the economy, because at the moment we will never lay down our arms in this battle against the global recession. Let us be clear: we are going to continue to support Australian families and continue to support Australian jobs. We stand ready to do whatever it takes to protect families and jobs—just like the Leader of the Opposition, who also accepts that we need a deficit and who also accepts that we need to borrow money and go into debt. That is the hypocrisy from those opposite. They continue to pretend that their policies are not about deficits and not about debt, when the Leader of the Opposition has quite clearly said they are. (Time expired)