Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, Senator Fifield said, 'Even if you accept that there was a GFC.' Let me say to you that there was a GFC and most of the developed world is still suffering the consequences of it.

Let me just come back to BER building program for a minute. One would have thought that after the Liberal-National Party members voted against that building program, they would not turn up to the opening of the buildings. I did many openings in different areas in seats that were held by the Liberals or the Nationals and saw that the local National Party or Liberal Party member would turn up, stand up there for the photo and want to be part of it. They wanted to be part of saving their community. They wanted to be part of that spending program that supported local businesses, local industry, local jobs and saved jobs, so that money could be spent in local businesses supporting further jobs. They wanted to be associated with that but, of course, when it came time to put the money where their mouth was, they voted against it. It shows the hypocrisy of the Liberal-National Party when all they want to do is talk down the economy—when, as I have already pointed out, the economy is in the best shape of any in the developed world. We are the envy of the rest of the developed world, but all you want to do is trash talk the economy.

You talk about the $120 billion supposed black hole. That is another statement that reminds me of the John Howard statement that interest rates would always be lower under a Liberal Party than under a Labor Party government. It is just absolute nonsense. It is a fallacy. You have used numbers to manufacture this figure for your own political interests. Let us just look at the inputs you have put into that claim from the carbon price. You have used numbers from Frontier Economics, who happen to be a longstanding critic of the carbon pricing scheme. You have made assumptions on where the EU carbon price is right now and transferred that out into the future as if there is no movement. You have ignored the average EU carbon price over the last five years. You have ignored the fact that the EU is now considering policies to bolster the price. You have put the absolute worst-case scenario in those figures.

In terms of the dental care scheme, it is $4 billion for dental care and it is over six years, not the two years that you have put into your figures. Two years is quite different from six years, just in case you thought that was a minor discrepancy, Senator Williams. That is a significant distortion of the figures. But we also know that the program that that will replace will actually improve the long-term position of the budget as well because it brings dental care back to a sustainable level—again something that you have completely ignored.

You spoke about an NDS in schools. You incorrectly attributed the full cost to the Commonwealth where the states will bear some of the costs and you have also included a much faster transition that will cost significantly more than the assumptions made in the budget and the planning for these schemes. So again you have misled. You have cooked the books to get the result that you want to get. Then, of course, you base your figures on maintaining the Defence White Paper 2009 proposals, but ignore the fact that there is a new white paper coming for 2013. So even though you know there is going to be a different set of figures coming out of that, you have used figures that you know will not be relied upon.

This government is returning the budget to surplus on time as promised and ahead of every other single major advanced economy. We are seeing that, despite what even Senator Fifield conceded: that there has been $150 billion ripped out from government revenues due to global instability. We are very proud as a Labor government of what we have done to stimulate the economy. We are very proud that we have put jobs front and centre. We are incredibly proud that we have saved this economy from falling into the recession. We are incredibly proud that we have done that in the worst financial conditions the world has seen since the global financial crisis. The record of this government is incredibly strong in this respect.

Let us talk about those jobs for a minute. Jobs were front and centre and that is why we acted to support, in the face of the global financial crisis, measures that would support many hundreds of thousands of jobs. We have an exceptional jobs record, with this economy creating around 800,000 jobs since this government came to office while the rest of the world has lost millions. You only have to look at Europe and the United States today, where there are still millions of people unemployed as a direct result of the global financial crisis. Look at their result and look at our result: 800,000 jobs grown since this government came to office; millions of jobs lost in the rest of the developed world. We have an unemployment rate at 5.1 per cent, one of the lowest rates in the industrialised world and less than half of that in Europe.

But what is the Liberals response to that? We can probably just have a little look at what is happening in Queensland right now. Their response is to cut 14,000 public sector jobs. That is their response. There is no commitment to jobs from the Liberal-National Party, and that is a fact. Senator Nash talked about facts, and wanted to reinforce all of her claims as facts. Well the facts are there for everyone to see. If you elect a Liberal-National government, they will slash jobs. They do not care about working people, they do not care about the dignity of work, they do not care about the suffering that unemployment creates. And they certainly do not care about the communities and the small businesses that rely on those incomes for those businesses to grow and survive. They seem to forget that jobs are not just numbers; those wages are spent in local communities, supporting local jobs, supporting local small businesses. Those sorts of cuts destroy communities and provide enormous hardship.

We have also seen the government in Victoria, the Baillieu government, slash $300 million from the TAFE budget—sabotaging the educational future of regional and city kids—and we have not heard a peep out of the National Party about sabotaging regional kids' educational futures. It is an absolute disgrace, and the Australian public would be very well advised to look closely at what newly elected Liberal and National parties are doing with jobs, with education and with their own state economies, because that is what they will get if they actually elect a Liberal-National coalition when the next election comes around. I hope Australians will learn from those lessons, and I believe they will stick with this government.