Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

What an extraordinary performance from the Leader of the National Party. He made a number of extraordinary claims during that contribution. One, with regard to economic growth, was that you cannot get lower than 0.1 per cent. I say to the Leader of the National Party: have a look at what is occurring in industrialised countries overseas—in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Europe—and compare the impact of the global financial crisis. In one sentence he managed to accuse the government of spending too much but also to say we were not spending enough when it came to transport infrastructure. That is an extraordinary claim from someone who I guess is torn between whether he is in the Liberal Party or in the National Party now that he is a member of the Liberal National Party with his friend and close ideological colleague the member for Groom. The third thing that was extraordinary was that he opposed the government’s Economic Security Strategy when he spoke about pensioners, carers and veterans getting ‘guilt money’ this week. That is the way he described the government’s Economic Security Strategy.

He argued that the government has not delivered on its commitments, whereas we know that this government has been characterised by delivering on all the election commitments which saw us return to the government benches. We said we would ratify the Kyoto protocol. We did it. We said we would apologise to the stolen generation. We did it. We said we would abolish John Howard’s extreme workplace laws. We did it. We said we would withdraw all Australian combat troops from Iraq. We did it. We said we would remove discrimination against same-sex couples from a range of Commonwealth laws including superannuation, social security and taxation laws. We did it. We said we would embark on a nation-building agenda and establish Infrastructure Australia. We did it. And we have done it all in the context of a global financial crisis. We have done it all while also taking action to ensure that the economy can continue to grow.

At COAG just last Saturday, we announced a $15.1 billion package to help create 133,000 jobs, to stimulate the economy and to drive significant reform, particularly in education, health and housing. But this followed the $10.4 billion Economic Security Strategy that will be delivered in the coming weeks—something that the other side opposes. There was the $55 billion Working Families Support Package in the last budget, which included $46 billion of tax cuts, increased the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent and provided $2.4 billion in support to help older Australians and carers with household bills by giving them one-off payments. We introduced a 50 per cent education tax refund. We also have made sure that we have delivered economic growth by establishing a $6.2 billion plan to make the automotive industry more economically and environmentally sustainable. Here in Parliament House a couple of weeks ago we had the first meeting of the Australian Council of Local Government, where we delivered $300 million divided up not according to the way people vote but divided up fairly so that every council in Australia will receive a stimulus to their local economy and a stimulus to local jobs.

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