Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be able to speak to the first Labor budget delivered in this House in 13 years. It is very much a Labor budget—a budget that supports working families, a budget that recognises the essential role that government plays in building for the future, a budget that does not shy away from difficult issues of climate change, a budget that tackles the relationships between state and federal layers of government and a budget that puts in place the building blocks for our future prosperity. And we do need to build. We needed to build several years ago, but there can be no doubt that it is now an urgent matter.

It is ironic that after 17 years of unprecedented boom time we have to begin a building phase; after 17 years of boom we face an extraordinary backlog in skills, in schools, in hospitals, in community facilities, in child care, in roads, in public transport, in water and in the environment, both urban and rural. In fact wherever I look in my electorate I find a backlog of work. In the majority of cases we have seen state-federal relations used as an excuse for a lack of action.

When it comes to working families, who have no doubt been doing it tough for several years, we have not even seen excuses from the previous government; instead, we have seen denial—denial that there was a crisis in housing affordability, denial that interest rates were causing a problem, denial that there was anything that could be done at all on petrol or grocery prices—

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