Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is not often that you meet a bloke named Kevin and even rarer that you meet two in one place, but that is where I found myself a couple of weeks ago: between Kevin the Prime Minister from Queensland and Kevin the builder from Bankstown. Kev the builder from Bankstown told Kev the PM from Queensland what the government’s actions had meant for his business. Kev is in the building game. His family business, Co-Wyn, has been around since 1954. The government’s nation-building infrastructure plan means that Kev has a lot of work on at the moment. He employs 13 full-time staff, including two apprentices, at Co-Wyn and he is about to sign another one on. After the Prime Minister visited Co-Wyn, a young bloke saw the story on television, was interested in a job and rang Kev. He rifled through the Yellow Pages, found the business and gave him a call. Kev was so impressed by his initiative that he promised him a job at the end of the year when he finished school. That is the sort of bloke that Kevin is.

On every single job site he subcontracts a whole raft of different jobs to local tradespeople who do everything from clearing the site to wiring it up. I asked him for a list of the sorts of people who work on his job sites: demolition contractors, excavator operators, truck drivers, landscapers, concreters, concrete suppliers, form workers, timber suppliers, steel fixers, bricklayers, block layers, structural steel fabricators, carpenters, roofing contractors, window and door manufacturers, plasterers, joinery contractors, renderers, metal fabricators, fire safety contractors, signage companies, waterproofing contractors, ceramic tiling contractors, vinyl and carpet layers, painters, plumbers, electricians, refrigeration and air-conditioning mechanics, lift suppliers and installers, and industrial cleaners. A lot of people work there. On any given day, up to 50 subbies work, as Kev does, on a $3 million project to build halls for schools in the Catholic education system on the Central Coast. He tells me that over the life of the project he is employing between 300 and 400 workers.

I asked him about the 30 per cent rebate for small businesses. He knew all about it. He told me that he had recently bought an $80,000 bobcat with the money and bought two new cars for the business. I asked him a little bit more about the budget. He told me that two of his apprentices had just bought their first home with the first homeowners boost, supporting more jobs in the local community, in the car industry, in the bobcat industry and in the housing industry. It is a story that is being replicated all around the country. It is the story of this budget. It is a ‘Kev the builder’ budget.

We know from the Treasury modelling—and, if you look at Budget Paper No. 1, on pages 1-7, you will see—what life would be like for people like Kev if the government was not stimulating the economy and if it was not injecting money into the economy. Budget Paper No. 1 says that, if the government had not acted, there would be more people unemployed and the recession would be deeper. It says that, if the government had not acted, 210,000 more people would be an out of work in the next financial year and the recession would be deeper than in the United States. That is the consequence of not acting and it is a consequence that would be felt by people like Kev the builder and by people in my electorate of Blaxland. They are the sorts of people that would bear the brunt of this.

Blaxland has borne the brunt of 10 interest rate rises in a row—we were the mortgage stress capital of Australia for a long, long time. Now we are bearing the brunt of the global recession. I have got some horrifying statistics to provide to the House: in the last month 6,000 people lost their job in southwest Sydney—194 day. Unemployment is currently 8.6 per cent. It is up 3½ per cent in the last 12 months. That is twice as fast as the national average. We are, in many respects, the canary in the coalmine. It is a place where many people work in manufacturing, and so it has been hit hard by the downturn in trade and overseas demand. There is a big company in my electorate called Dane Automotive. They are in Yennora—

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