Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to provide a contribution to this debate. Don’t you love it? We enjoy sessions on a Thursday afternoon as the opposition grapple for a topic to put forward in their general business time. It seems that week after week they manage to bat up to us some of the best Dorothy Dixers that we get to deal with in this chamber. The contribution this afternoon from my colleague Senator Cameron provided evidence that we enjoy debating these topics, because they clearly highlight to us the difference between what we are doing as a reformist and can-do government that is going to take this country forward and build the infrastructure, knowledge and health reforms and what happened under the Howard government under which the country languished for 10 or 11 long years.

We are on broadcast this afternoon, which gave Senator Joyce the opportunity to get out there and have a mad, factually deficit rant and to filibuster. Do not worry about the facts when you are putting an argument in this place. If you can puff up and get red in the face—a bit like that big white marshmallow man in Ghostbustersyou can come in here, say whatever you like, rave on as much as you like and not let the facts get in the way.

If people were listening very carefully, they would have noticed that there was not new idea from Senator Joyce—not one new policy idea; not one suggestion about what they would do if they were in government. I had a look at the papers today. If The Nationals broke away from the Liberal Party’s mantra and apron strings, I am not sure that they would ever be in government. But that is what is happening on the other side of the chamber. Day after day, in newspaper article after newspaper article we read about how they cannot get on with each other. The coalition parties in this country cannot seem to line up and have any coherent discussion about policy development, and so there is no policy development—absolutely no policy development.

We saw that today here in this chamber when we discussed the renewable energy bill. We have seen today that they are in absolute disarray over there. The conservatives in this country are too busy fighting and worrying about who is going to lead them. ‘Will it be Mr Sixteen Per Cent or will it be Mr Twenty-Three Per Cent? Will it be Tony Abbott or Mr Hockey this week? Should we go with Mr Malcolm Turnbull? Is he going to get us through to the election? Let’s just put up with it anyway and afterwards we’ll go for a new leader and wipe the slate clean and start again.’ That is what they are all on about. They are all about self-preservation and are scrabbling around trying to find the magical leader who might be acceptable to people in this country as a future Prime Minister.

But each week we see that people have confidence in this government. That is blindingly evident in the way in which this government is received as it goes around the country. When we got into government, we did not anticipate—and nobody could have anticipated—the global economic conditions that we were going to inherit. The other side stood up earlier this year, particularly after we brought down our 2009-10 budget, denying that a global economic recession was happening. They denied that we ought to get on board and be part of an international solution and denied that in fact what we had done was taken sound advice from Treasury officials—who, by the way, would have been the same officials providing very similar advice to those opposite if the result of the last election had been different. What we did was decide to put forward a plan to buffer Australia from that international global crisis.

And we have done extremely well. Nearly 12 months on, the facts and figures are there for us to see. What we decided to do was to invest in this nation to build infrastructure to make up for the years of neglect under the previous coalition federal government. They may well come in here and boast that they were sitting a large chest of money that they had built up as a surplus. But when people look around, they say to me: ‘What about my school classrooms? What about the fact that there were waiting lists for elective surgery? What about the fact that the roads and the infrastructure in this country have not kept up with time? What about the fact that people are still on dial-up in some parts of this country rather than on ADSL?’

So, you can brag all you like about the surplus that you might have achieved, but I can tell that out there in voter land the ordinary, everyday Australian looked around and saw a chronic lack of attention being paid to infrastructure, health, education and telecommunications. There was clearly a feeling out there that this was a country that was not with the program, not getting on board and not keeping up with the demands of the 21st century. The Labor Party went to an election promising to offer reform to this country and people accepted that. We are a government that got elected on the basis of reform, of modernising, of bringing this country into the 21st century.

You can come in here and rave on as much as you like, with no facts and figures and no alternative policies. But until you get some alternative policies, the people listening to this on broadcast will still feel that there is no credibility in the arguments that you put together in this place week after week. They can see no alternative policies and no alternative answers. They cannot even see any cohesion on the other side of this chamber. We have invested in a nation-building infrastructure program. Week after week, we make announcements regarding roads, rail, ports, clean energy and reforming universities. We have given a fair go to pensioners and we have looked at a sustainable pension system, along with a sustainable payment for carers in the budget. We have made the hard choices that are necessary to chart a course back to surplus.

Let me spend a few minutes here getting some facts and figures into this debate this afternoon. People on the other side of the chamber probably do not think that that is relevant. I do. People who are listening ought to clearly understand how we found ourselves in this situation and what we are doing about it. This is the deepest global recession since the Great Depression. There will be people out there who clearly remember the Great Depression. There will be people out there who would say to us, ‘If we’re in a deep global recession and Australia is not feeling the impact of it as much as other countries, then the Rudd government is doing a good job.’ The world economy is expected to contract by 1½ per cent in 2009. Major trading partners are expected to contract by two per cent. This is a worse outcome than during the Asian financial crisis. This is not a little blip in the roadway of world economic management; this is a major crisis, and we have weathered the storm remarkably well. Eight of our top 10 trading partners are expected to contract in 2009 and advanced economies in deep recession will contract by 3¾ per cent in 2009.

Australia’s GDP will contract by half of one per cent in 2009-10. Recovery is expected to gather pace from early 2010. So we have been through the worst and we are hoping that by early next year we will be on the road to recovery, with growth forecast to be 2¼ per cent in 2010-11. Public investment is helping to fill some of the gap, growing at 25 per cent in 2009-10, which is the fastest pace on record.

We have always been honest about the unemployment rate, which is forecast to reach six per cent and 8¼ per cent by June next year. This implies that around 980,000 Australians will be unemployed by the June quarter in 2011. We have always said—and we have always prepared the Australian public for this—that in a global economic recession and a downturn such as this there will be job losses, but we have said we will work incredibly hard to minimise the losses and maximise the opportunities for people so that they do not feel the incredible brunt of what is happening on the international economic stage.

Our terms of trade will fall 13¼ per cent in 2009-10, taking around $35 billion out of the economy. That is a result of what is happening internationally. Nominal GDP will fall 1½ per cent in 2009-10. This is the biggest fall in the postwar era. Inflation will moderate to 1¾ per cent by the June quarter in 2009 and to 1½ per cent by the June quarter in 2011.

If we are going to have a debate about spending in this country, we should put it in the context of what is happening in the international arena. Australia, along with the rest of the world, has faced the most difficult global economic conditions since the Great Depression, as I said. In fact, 29 of the 30 OECD countries are in recession or have experienced negative growth since the onset of the global crisis. This includes eight of Australia’s top 10 trading partners. So what have we done about it?

That is the situation we find ourselves in and all we can get from the other side of the chamber is a rant and a rave about how we are spending too much—‘Don’t spend any money. Don’t try to stimulate the economy to get us out of this situation. Don’t try to ensure that people have cash and jobs and can get on with their lives.’ We as a government take responsibility to buffer the impact of this on people’s individual lives on a day-to-day basis. Their view is: ‘Just don’t spend so much.’ There is no alternative policy for what we might do, how we will manage this crisis and what we will do to save people’s jobs. There is nothing. There is just the rant: ‘Don’t do it.’ There is no alternative offered.

We as a government have decided that we will stand firm and take strong and decisive action to cushion Australia from the worst impacts of the global recession. The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the executive group clearly made that decision before Christmas of last year. They put in place a stimulus package that will ensure that this country is buffeted from the worst aspects of what is going on around the world.

We stepped in where the private sector is in retreat. We supported jobs and small business. We invested in the nation-building infrastructure that we need for tomorrow. We saw this as an opportunity not only to protect business, jobs and small business but to stimulate the economy and ensure that the infrastructure is there for the time when this country gets back on its feet. We need to get into the 21st century and be a modernised and responsive country.

The government is also using its economic stimulus strategy to build the infrastructure and skills that Australia needs for the recovery, our long-term productivity and growth. Building infrastructure and building skills go hand in hand. The people opposite me spent their whole time in government ripping dollars out of the education system. There was more than $800 million ripped out of the higher education sector. The VET sector was left languishing. They spent their whole time trying to plot—putting dots on a map of this country—where they would set up the exclusive Australian technical colleges, which to date have proven to be very disappointing in terms of their outcomes. Those on that side of the chamber were too busy with self-preservation. They were not stimulating the skills and the education sectors to develop the knowledge and skill base that trade and VET people need to undertake jobs and works. They did not provide input to businesses, provide infrastructure and provide the building competency that we need for the future.

The government has also put in place a fiscal consolidation strategy to return the budget to surplus once the global economy recovers. Recently the government welcomed the modest positive economic growth that was recorded in the first three months of 2009. This result means that Australia has not entered a technical recession. We have not done that. We had positive economic growth for the early months of this year—modest as it was. It is evidence that the government’s stimulus package is working.

Treasury analysis confirmed that, without the government’s cash stimulus payments, Australia would have entered a recession. There are many people listening to the broadcast this afternoon who do not need to be told that; they know it. They have experienced that. They have had the money in the stimulus payments. They can now see that the second and third tranches of the stimulus are being put into infrastructure around the country. It is going into schools, building houses, small businesses, and tradies and their skills knowledge. People have had the personal benefit and now there is that whole-of-country benefit, if you like. It is about stimulating the individual and businesses. At the end of the day schools will benefit, homes will benefit, first home owners will benefit and the homeless will benefit. We will benefit when the basic infrastructure that is needed in this country is built.

The global recession still has a long way to go, though. Growth will be slow and unemployment will rise. We cannot rule out the possibility of negative economic growth in the future. What we have done in the first half of the term of the Rudd Labor government is to start on a path to build a stronger Australia. As my colleague Senator Cameron outlined in his speech, we are on a path to build a fairer Australia, an Australia that is prepared for the challenges of the future. What we have done is to guarantee, for the first time in Australia’s history, an estimated $13 million in deposit holdings. We have delivered $77 billion in the nation building for recovery plan, a plan to stimulate the economy by supporting jobs today and investing in nation-building infrastructure for tomorrow.

We did that in three phases. The first phase was the short-term stimulus that was paid to people in late 2008. We made cash payments to pensioners, carers, veterans and families. That supported 1½ million Australians working in the retail sector. We trebled the first homeowners’ bonus to support the housing industry. In the second phase we looked at medium-term infrastructure. We began the biggest school modernisation program in the nation’s history—a stocktake of our schools, to see what was needed to fix them up, and to build classrooms, libraries and science laboratories so that the kids of today and tomorrow will have modern facilities to learn in. They will have modern school facilities to enjoy and to stimulate their hunger for an education. We are building 20,000 units and repairing 50,000 units of community housing. We have made local government infrastructure investments through the biggest ever national partnership with local government. Our third phase, long-term infrastructure, will start later this year. That is rail, roads and port infrastructure, including the first ever Commonwealth investment in urban rail. There will be large-scale building programs for hospitals, universities and TAFEs. We are also creating the National Broadband Network Co., which will invest $43 billion in the high-speed National Broadband Network that will deliver superfast broadband to 90 per cent of homes, schools and workplaces.

If that is not enough to keep us all busy, we have created a new Jobs and Training Compact. We have established a temporary investment allowance of 30 per cent until June 2009 and then 10 per cent and 50 per cent for general and small businesses respectively until December 2009. That will support their business investment decisions during this recession. We have invested in a new national car plan. We have developed a fiscal sustainability strategy. We have convened a Council of Australian Governments to implement a new national program of microeconomic reform, to produce a single regulatory environment for the Australian economy and to reduce the compliance burden for small business. We have created a new global role for Australia through the G20 summit. We have acted to protect our nation through the defence white paper. We have ensured that we have a new strategy for our Defence Force, particularly in Afghanistan. The defence white paper outlines what will prove to be the largest long-term investment in advanced naval capabilities since World War II.

This is a government that has not sat on its hands. The nation has faced the challenges of a global recession of immense proportions in the last 12 months and we have used our vision as a government. We have used the vision of the Prime Minister and his executive to ensure that the nation rides out this global economic crisis. We have buffered individual Australians and Australian businesses from the impact. We will ensure that the nation faces the challenges of the future. We have ideas, we have reform and we are getting on with the job—unlike my colleagues opposite, who simply want to laugh and filibuster and have no plans and no ideas. Never before in the history of this parliament has there been such a stark contrast.