Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take the interjection: are they a real party? Ask them. They are not sure. That is the bottom line. The opposition come in here and talk about this situation as if it were just a political game, as if there were no losers in this game. The sad reality is the losers in this game are ordinary Australians. They are ordinary people relying on their government, their elected officials, to assist in a time when every other economy and every other country in the world is doing something right now. If we do not do something right now, we will follow the same circumstances that are happening in those other economies—in America, in Great Britain, in Europe and in parts of Asia, in Japan and so on.

What is our strategy? What are we doing? As a government, what have we decided is the right course of action? The question would have to be: have we just decided this on a whim on our own, or have we consulted? These are serious questions. What are the circumstances? I will deal with those. We do have a plan, we do have a strategy, and it is quite clear. We are in the second phase of that strategy. The first one was the pre-Christmas $10 billion stimulus package. It came hot on the heels of probably the most direct need at that very critical time, that Christmas retail period, to protect jobs. How do you protect jobs? You make sure you put a stimulus right into people’s back pockets and that you do it through families and you do it through pensioners, and that is exactly what we did.

Funnily enough, the opposition opposed this, but at the same time were calling for a massive increase in pensions. So which one was it? This is the hard thing for them to sell. On the one hand they oppose it, and on the other hand they support it. It is pretty hard to get a sense of what direction the opposition are heading in. It does make it really clear that there isn’t one, that the Leader of the Opposition is looking for an opportunity. In the end, that is all it is: it is self-interest, and opportunism. It is, ‘Where is my next opportunity?’ It is not, ‘What is the national interest?’ It is not, ‘Is this package in the best interests of Australians, even if it’s not a perfect package?’ No government ever creates a perfect set of packages when trying to deliver something, but at least this one met to a T and met absolutely what the IMF was saying was critically necessary in Australia. The IMF said that.

Who else supported us in this? We have heard some people say that it must be those leftist communists in ACCI or in the Business Council of Australia, those old Labor Party hacks that are working there. They ticked it off and they thought it was absolutely spot-on. Perhaps it was just the unions, all of them, that said, ‘We need to do this to protect jobs.’ Of course, what would unions know about jobs and workers and protecting jobs! Or perhaps it was just Treasury that supported this package and said, ‘This needs to be done now; you can’t wait and see,’ because, if there was a strategy that you could articulate about the opposition, it would be the wait-and-see strategy. They are the exact words of the former shadow Treasurer. I understand the Treasury portfolio is a technical and very complex portfolio—

See this speech in context