Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. How is the government delivering the right funding model and the right plan to help communities recover from recent natural disasters?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. The member who asked the question has an electorate very severely impacted upon by the recent floods. I had the opportunity to spend some time with him in his electorate. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to visit an evacuation centre overseen by Pastor Mark Edwards. I received a very nice email from that pastor about the visit and I want to take this opportunity to record my appreciation to him for the things that he did to assist frail, aged Australians and others during the days of intensity flooding, when people were not able to stay in their residential aged care facility.

The package I have outlined as Prime Minister is the right package for this nation. We are facing a national disaster. It is a national challenge and it is a national responsibility, so it is my judgment that we should work together and respond as a nation. This is a huge disaster. A quick run through the figures tells you that. We believe it requires at least $5.6 billion. It has knocked half a per cent off economic growth. We have responded with the biggest deployment of the ADF for a natural disaster since Cyclone Tracy. We could have taken the soft options and not worried about capacity constraints in the economy. We could have taken the soft option of not doing the right thing by the national economy. Instead, we have stepped up to the hard decision to bring the budget to surplus in 2012-13 because that is what our economy will require. When your economy is strong you pay as you go.

We have taken the hard decision to defer infrastructure because there are only so many skilled Australians that can be brought to the rebuilding task. It makes sense to take pressure off to deal with those capacity constraints—the hard decision of deferring a billion dollars in infrastructure. But that has been the right thing to do. And we have taken the hard decision to ask Australians to support their fellow Australians through a levy. That, also, is the right thing to do. Let me say to the House that when you look at the progressive design of this levy, almost half of the money raised by it will come from those Australians fortunate enough to earn over $200,000. Now that, I think, is an important statistic for the House to understand.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition that now is the time to put aside his petty politicking and to endorse this package. He has failed in the task of generating alternative savings and we have seen the splits in his political party as a result. Look at the words of the member for Mayo who has rejected the raiding of foreign aid and has indicated that a program important to our own domestic security has been cut—a position endorsed by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. Look at the words of the member for Hasluck who has said that within a budget there is some capacity, but we have to look at all the options and to take a hard line that is counter-productive to the process is problematic. They are wise words from the member for Hasluck and the Leader of the Opposition should listen to them. It is time that he stepped up and put the national interest before his narrow political interest. That is what Australians are looking to him to do.