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

I thank the member for Solomon for his question. Of course the challenges this nation faces are great. We face, with the rest of the world, the challenge of tackling climate change. We face the issue of raising our rate of productivity growth. We know that this nation is languishing when it comes to productivity growth—and today’s productivity growth is tomorrow’s prosperity. We need to be investing in education. We need to be ensuring we have more productive workplaces. Not only is today’s productivity growth tomorrow’s prosperity, but of course the challenges for tomorrow’s prosperity are major with the ageing of the population and with the forecasted changes in the dependency ratio that that implies.

When the election was held in November 2007, the government went to the people with a practical program of action about these great challenges. In climate change, it included re-engaging with the rest of the world by ratifying Kyoto and introducing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme as well as measures to enhance the development of new technology—renewable technology and solar technology. We went to the Australian people to seek a mandate for our productivity-enhancing measures. Those measures include our education revolution—investing in education from the education of our youngest children through schools, through addressing the skills crisis and through our universities. Our productivity-lifting measures include our fair and balanced workplaces.

Since the government was elected, circumstances on global financial markets have caused anxiety right around the world. We know that those circumstances are reshaping the international economic landscape. We know that in the last very short period of time we have seen major measures that have caused huge problems in global financial markets. We have seen some of the world’s largest—

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