Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

If you go through that list of five sets of measures last year, each of them has a specific timeline attached to the injection of funds. The COAG package—as the honourable member, if he were being honest about it, would know—involves funding agreements with the states over a four- to five-year spread, depending on the nature of the individual agreement concerned. He knows that, and he seeks to stand at the dispatch box and make a political point about the jobs impact now. He knows that to be untrue. He is just interested in making a retail political point in order to get himself a headline. The bottom line is that each of those measures has a different delivery point and the cumulative impact in terms of overall job creation will be seen over a course of time.

The alternative recommended by those opposite—if you listen carefully to everything, leaving aside the Turnbull three step, adequately described before by the minister for infrastructure—is to claim the idea as their own or initially support and then oppose. Leaving all that to one side, in substance they have opposed each of the measures we have put forward so far—each and every one of them. We have there an avalanche of negativity. The only proposal they have put forward is one about bringing forward generic tax cuts, and the intellectual consistency of that argument, against the point just made by the minister for finance about bringing a temporary deficit back into surplus over time, speaks starkly to everyone present. The whole point of a stimulus is for it to be temporary and targeted. That is what we have embraced. You recommend the reverse. Our strategy is clear. Yours lies in tatters.

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