Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to support the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2009-2010 and cognate bills, allow me to quote the words of William Shakespeare from the play Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

The 2009-10 budget, delivered by Treasurer Wayne Swan a little over two weeks ago, is a budget for its time. In part it forms the third element of the government’s ongoing response to the global financial crisis, the effects of which began to be felt here last October. There can be no argument that these are indeed economic circumstances unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. This is a budget which takes on the global recession head on. Members opposite would have us do nothing but sit patiently and wait while the recession ravages our country and our people. That appears to be their preferred strategy—or at least it appears to be their preferred strategy except when they are announcing intervention projects in their own electorates.

We all know what a success that approach was in the thirties. Our country and our people were, as Shakespeare said, ‘bound in shallows and in miseries’ for too many years. This time our government is determined to avoid those mistakes and those consequences. Members opposite should talk to Australians who as children remember the Great Depression or, if they are too young to have experienced it, whose parents instilled in them the perils a depression contains. There is nothing uplifting about living in tents; there is nothing dignified about the susso queues; there is nothing commendable about forced family separations; there is nothing splendid about scrounging for food, clothing and shoes. Yet this is the fate the coalition would wish upon the very people who expect them to act in their interests—the people of Australia.

Throughout the world, country after country have adopted the Australian strategy of stimulus packages that have and will boost the economy not only immediately but also in the short term, the mid term and the long term. The longer they have delayed, the bigger their packages have had to be. As early as July last year there were calls from long-time US political strategist Brent Budowsky for an emergency stimulus package in that country. It should be, he said, ‘no smaller than $100 billion and no later than 1 August or the economic crisis will worsen’. As it turned out, on 19 February this year, 6½ months later, President Obama signed a US $787 billion stimulus package into law in circumstances that were described as ‘racing to reverse the country’s economic spiral’. It is a sum significantly larger than the original recommendation.

Australia’s more timely interventions, in October to December 2008 and in February to May 2009, have helped to prevent Australia experiencing the same economic spiral. A lot has been written and said about how the global recession will affect Australia. Consistent amongst commentators is the opinion that, among developed nations, Australia is or was best placed to avoid the worst of the global financial crisis. That position carries with it the generally agreed advantage that, although the global recession will strike Australia, it will arrive later than for the rest of the world, it will bite less deeply and recovery will come sooner. There is no doubt that, through consumption, expenditure and infrastructure investment, driven by the government’s October 2008 Economic Security Strategy, the December 2008 nation-building package and the February 2009 Nation Building and Jobs Plan, this country will be cushioned even further. These earlier interventions and this budget, and in particular the $22 billion infrastructure centrepiece of this budget, build on the advantages that commentators agree exist.

I am happy to acknowledge that the former government is due some credit for those advantages, but, unlike members opposite, I also lay at the door of the former government the blame for one significant weakness: the debt position of the states. The states were forced to borrow to build infrastructure, because, despite having their hands on the levers during unprecedented times of plenty, the Howard-Costello government refused to provide sufficient funding to the states. That is clearly a Howard-Costello legacy. To my mind there are two signature non-achievements of the nearly 12 years of the Howard Costello government. Despite having obscene riches, courtesy of the mining boom, the Howard-Costello government made no provision for the end of the mining boom. Despite those same riches, they did nothing to provide for essential economic infrastructure, so necessary to ensure future economic prosperity.

Like the Menzies Liberal government, who believed in their day that our country rode on the sheep’s back when wool was £1 a pound, they did nothing to inoculate our economy against downturns such as the one we now encounter. Having developed a do-nothing habit in government it is no surprise that the course they advocate from opposition is the same do-nothing course. The coalition’s carping criticism of every element of the government’s strategy at a time when the community is calling for national unity in the face of the global recession and at a time when business and industry—which, they would have us believe, are best represented by them—are universally supportive of the government’s actions because they know them to be the right actions simply shows the coalition for what it is.

As Aaron Sorkin wrote in the popular movie The American President for his presidential candidate, Andrew Shepherd, ‘We have serious problems to solve and we need serious people to solve them.’ It can be truthfully said of the coalition parties in this place, just as he went on to say of his political opponent: ‘They are not the least bit interested in solving those serious problems. They are interested in two things and two things only’—making the community afraid and telling them the Rudd government is to blame. That strategy is not going to work this time because the Australian public is awake to the over-used coalition tactic of scare, blame and then claiming to have the solution. The budget reply speech by the Leader of the Opposition is a case in point.

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