Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is good to be able to rise tonight to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 5) 2008-2009 and Appropriation Bill (No. 6) 2008-2009. I would like to begin by talking about what is clearly the most important issue in this country at the moment, and that is jobs, jobs, jobs. I know that, within the electorate of Cowan, jobs are critical. It is all about personal and family economic security. You can talk about a lot of other issues within this great country at the moment, but ultimately it always comes down to the ability of parents, or carers of some kind, to put food on the table and to operate with certainty and security in their lives. So there is little doubt that the greatest priority in the country is jobs.

Looking at what has happened across this country, I would like to focus obviously on the electorate of Cowan. There are many suburbs within the 195 square kilometres of Cowan. When I drive and walk the streets of Cowan to speak to people, I see never-ending strings of houses in the new districts with the classic tradies’ and subbies’ vehicles parked out the front. These people depend on the economy for their livelihood.

It is very important that we have confidence in what is going on, confidence in the government. I will get to confidence in the government in due course—and I would like to talk about the great level of confidence that was held in the past government—but, before I do that, I would just like to report that there was some fabulous news yesterday morning. The Woolworths shopping centre at Carramar, in the north of the electorate of Cowan, was opened yesterday morning, with 120 local jobs for people in the Carramar, Tapping and Banksia Grove area.

I know that the government will try to suggest that somehow what happened in December relates to the 120 new jobs in the Carramar district. But, of course, a shopping centre within Carramar has been on the plans for the last 10 or 15 years. Woolworths had plans to establish there some years ago. What we have seen then is a delivery of a need in the local area. Certainly there is no great value in what has happened in the last year under the current government.

Let us look back a little at what happened over the previous 11½ years before the last federal election. As we know, somewhat differently from the current circumstances 2.2 million jobs were actually created and $96 billion of debt was repaid. So it is of little surprise that there was a great deal of confidence within the country, within Western Australia and within the electorate of Cowan in those days.

When I look back at what Cowan was like in the mid-1990s, I see that things have changed a lot. The northern suburbs of Perth east of Wanneroo Road—and I do not expect anyone here to know these areas—had a lot of market gardens and areas where there was field after field of horticulture. These were often owned by Italian families, who have such a rich and important history within the district of Wanneroo in the northern part of Cowan. As time moved on and people’s confidence improved towards the end of the 1990s, lots of these market gardeners sold their land and the developers moved in. We now have suburbs that did not really exist 10 or 15 years ago, including the suburbs of Madeley, Darch, Landsdale and, further north, Hocking, Pearsall, Sinagra, Ashby, Tapping, Carramar and even Banksia Grove. These suburbs to the east side of Wanneroo Road within the electorate of Cowan were not much more than market gardens 15 years ago. Yet, due to circumstance and a great degree of confidence, people felt that these were developments that needed to be made and that housing was needed to serve the population. I consider that to be a great legacy of the confidence built up under the previous government.

As I said, when you had jobs being created, confidence being injected into the community, zero government debt, savings being generated and a government that really knew what it was doing, people felt that it was the right time. First off, the market gardeners sold and moved further out, the developers came in and created the suburbs—the environment for our suburbs within Cowan—and finally people took the opportunity to buy into these great little suburbs. Now we find ourselves in the current circumstance.

I now turn to what the government calls the stimulus package and its centrepiece. I know that a lot has been made about the semantics of the ‘75,000 new jobs’—well, some on the other side have said ‘supported’ jobs. It is important to look back through some comments in Hansard so I can assist the House with what was actually said. I think that we can all have confidence that Hansard is an accurate reflection of that, otherwise the proofs would have been amended. I would like to draw upon my assistant, the member for Solomon in this case. In a speech on 10 November he talked about the so-called economic security package: He said:

It will help create up to 75,000 additional jobs over the coming year.

That is interesting. That does not sound too much like ‘supporting’ jobs; it sounds more like new jobs. But I guess, when we have another eight months to go, there might still be time for another 75,000 new jobs to be created. There does not seem to be much progress so far, but maybe there will be an acceleration in the future. It is worth clarifying whether the member for Solomon was alone on this. On 11 November the Minister for Finance and Deregulation said:

… this investment means that the Economic Security Strategy is expected to create about 75,000 additional jobs for Australians.

I am beginning to see a bit of a pattern here. But it is important to go on just in case those two members are mistaken. I go forward to 24 November, when in fact the Treasurer, in answering a question from the member for Leichhardt, said:

It is a very important strategy which will add between half and one per cent to GDP and create up to 75,000 jobs.

I guess even one job is ‘up to’ 75,000 jobs, but I think that the implication is pretty clear that there is an aiming mark here and it is clearly 75,000. I will move forward to see who else is involved with this, just in case the Treasurer got it wrong on that occasion. On 25 November, after a question from the member for Hasluck to the Treasurer, the Treasurer said:

Our strategy is expected to boost growth by one-half to one per cent and help to create up to 75,000 additional jobs.

I think everyone is working off the same script here—the script that they were given in any case.

On 27 November the member for Corio asked the Prime Minister a question, to which the Prime Minister replied:

As a rule of thumb, a $10 billion injection by government in the economy is capable of generating up to 75,000 jobs.

To me, that does not seem to be supporting; it seems like it is creating. I think that is a reasonable expectation from what we see in the documents. But we cannot leave 1 December out, when the member for Flynn asked a question of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister responded:

… the $10.4 billion package we announced in October which was capable of creating some 75,000 jobs …

It is all moving forward in the same direction, isn’t it, Mr Deputy Speaker? The Deputy Prime Minister, on 1 December, responded to a question by saying:

… the economic activity that it is obviously going to prime are worth 75,000 jobs.

Then, in a speech on 3 December, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government said:

At COAG just last Saturday, we announced a $15.1 billion package to help create 133,000 jobs …

That is something a little bit different, but I guess that is another 133,000 jobs that will be created. We look forward to maybe seeing that one day.

I will just go to 12 December where at a press conference the Prime Minister, in a media release, again said that 75,000 jobs were capable of being created through the Economic Security Strategy. I guess the point I am trying to make here is that the language that has been used by the government in this sitting of parliament, in 2009, has changed quite significantly. No-one over there ever mentions ‘creating’ anymore; it is all about ‘supporting’. Unfortunately, Hansard shows a different record of what is trying to be put across now. The government was most definitely putting out a ‘creation’ perspective towards the end of 2008 and the rhetoric has now changed.

In the last session of parliament, in the last week, in the last few days and also today we have had comments from government ministers where they have pointed a finger at us and said, ‘You supported the first economic handout, the first cash handout.’ That is true. When we were told that 75,000 jobs were going to be created—and I think I have shown that the government suggested that to us on many occasions—there was some reason to expect that the government would have gone through Treasury and done the modelling which suggested that the creation of the 75,000 jobs would actually happen. So, taking the government at face value, we gave them a shot.

Unfortunately, it now seems that we were misled about what the government said they were going to do and what they said would happen on many occasions last year. They have just dropped back a little bit on the rhetoric about that. Now it is all about supporting jobs rather than creating jobs.

I do not think the government has exactly created a whole lot of confidence. And, as I said before, this is about confidence. It is a time when the people of Australia need confidence. They need to be told what is good about this country and what is working. They do not need to be told things that sound good one week and will just be ditched at the right time in the future. This is certainly not the way to create confidence. As we are aware, the level of confidence in this country has been dropping for a long time. If you look at the Westpac business survey you will see that that was certainly the case towards the end of 2007 where confidence was dropping and it continued to drop.

I would like to refer to the $42 billion that the government has advanced in previous bills but which these appropriation bills refer to. As we all know, the opposition opposed it. The government will continue to say, ‘We had no alternative.’ The reason why the government say that there is no alternative is entirely incorrect. As the Leader of the Opposition has said again today, there are four main elements within the opposition’s alternative policy. First off, we began with tax cuts, which have been demonstrated to be more economically effective than one-off cash handouts. Then of course we also had, as the opposition leader said, a genuine incentive for investment in terms of doubling the rate of depreciation for investment in water and energy efficiency in the built environment. This is a measure that will have environmental benefits right now and will create jobs right now.

The opposition also support a well-planned and a well-prioritised investment in schools. We proposed $3 billion, which would be more effective, better targeted and capable of being delivered. I would just like to mention one of the schools within the electorate of Cowan. Under the former government’s Investing in Our Schools Program, $150,000 was provided to this school for the enclosure of the undercover area. Thanks to the contractor who was imposed upon the school by the former government in Western Australia, it took 12 months for them to even get a tender document provided or put out there. When the tender came in, the project was going to cost far more than $150,000, so of course the school had no capability to enclose that undercover area. So when we talk about trying to get so many buildings built by, I think, June 2010, I have some grave doubts as to whether the states will be able to deliver on that. I will move on to the fourth element of the—

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