Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Canning, Mr Don Randall, has been at every single one. Good on you, Don! He voted against them, but that does not matter. What an insult!

Getting back to the budget: as we have been clearly told, the government is returning the budget to surplus. In one breath, we have the Liberals, ably assisted by the Nationals, bagging us for spending money to create opportunity and employ­ment and telling us we are spending too much money. In the next breath, remem­bering that the government is going to deliver a surplus next year, they condemn us for not spending money. The sad thing is that, year in, year out, we have to go through this nonsense, this charade. We bring down budgets, year in, year out, and we have the same old argument. The other side of the political fence condemns every opportunity and every positive that is created by the government, but the social side actually congratulates the government, because this budget will share the benefits of the boom.

As everyone knows, I come from a mining state and I fully support the mining industry. I have never said anything else. But the sad part, Mr Deputy President, is that your colleagues from Western Australian are hypocritical. We know that in Western Australia there are two speeds. There is absolutely no doubt that we have a patchwork economy. We have an industry that is thriving—it is bubbling along—and that is employing a lot of Australians, not just Western Australians. We have industries that hang off the mining industry. If they are lucky enough to be servicing the mining industry or to be otherwise involved in the mining industry, they are doing well too. But the boom is a double-edged sword and there are many industries in Western Australia that really are suffering because of it. They are suffering because they are losing experienced people. They cannot compete with the wages that are being paid in the mining industry. We have industries, such as my old industry, in which trucking families have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on building companies but have trucks parked at the back of the yard against the fence, not because they are not paying the right money but because they cannot compete. Let us look at aged-care facilities. Who would cook in an aged-care facility for $30,000 a year when you could get $130,000 at a mine? (Time expired)