Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Prime Minister, Senator Evans. Could the minister please outline to the Senate the key achievements of the Rudd Labor government in the last 12 months, in particular how it has assisted families?

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Lundy for the question. Unfortunately, time does not allow me to do justice to the question—because of the very long list of achievements—but I do want to focus on the plight of families. I think they understood that, when the Rudd Labor government came to office, it was confronted with very high inflation. The legacy of the Howard-Costello era was very high inflation, and that was putting enormous pressure on families in terms of the cost-of-living pressures. That is why in our first budget we made the centrepiece of the budget tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners. We focused not on the high-income earners, as the previous government had done, but on working families and low- and middle-income earners. We gave large tax cuts to assist those families to deal with those economic pressures. We also introduced a 50 per cent tax refund for families for key educational expenses—for laptops, stationery and school textbooks. That tax refund was a very important measure to assist families in educating their children.

What we also did in that budget was to provide for a very large surplus so that we could ensure that, if times turned tough, we could help protect Australians from the worst excesses of any downturn in economic conditions. That is why, with the economic security package, we are able to assist families and pensioners by providing payments to them—which will be paid next month—which will go a long way to supporting those families, supporting those pensioners and helping stimulate the Australian economy. (Time expired)

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. In addition, could the minister please outline to the Senate the key achievements of the Rudd Labor government over the last 12 months, in particular its response to the challenge of climate change?

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The difference between the Rudd Labor government and the former government is that, in addition to focusing on the economic needs of families and the Australian people, we are also prepared to tackle those broader global challenges like climate change. What we have done is to go about providing a comprehensive response to climate change. On coming to government we immediately ratified the Kyoto protocol and signed Australia up to that international action to tackle climate change. We tackled the problem on the Australian front by producing the white paper process which has allowed us to design a carbon pollution reduction scheme that will look to reducing Australia’s carbon pollution, to helping build a cleaner, greener environment and to growing environmentally sensitive industries. (Time expired)

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a further supplementary question. I ask that the minister outline to the Senate the key achievements of the Rudd Labor government over the last 12 months, this time in the particular area of infrastructure and training.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Some of the things we first confronted on coming to government were the capacity constraints on the economy and the absolute failure of the previous government to invest in skills and training. Failure to invest in infrastructure had left our economy constrained and our potential for growth constrained. By establishing Infrastructure Australia, the Building Australia Fund, trade training centres in schools and 700,000 new training places, we have focused on building the Australian economy, reducing those terrible constraints on the capacity of the economy—positive, nation-building actions that will ensure that our kids have a better future because they will have higher skills, have higher wages and have an economy that is growing, because we have invested in those nation-building projects that were ignored under the former Howard government.