Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

These are the jobs of the people who rely on us to see us through this global crisis. They are not your jobs and they are not our jobs; they are the jobs of the Australian people. They are the people who are relying on us to see it through. They are the people who are relying on us to say that the global recession is the worst in 75 years but we will see it through; we will do whatever it takes to stimulate the economy to ensure that we will protect jobs. And in a fleeting flicker of honesty this morning the shadow Treasurer admitted that the government’s actions have supported jobs.

There are more tough times to come. We are not through this. This is not the end of the global recession. Today’s figures are not a cause for celebration across the land, but they are an indication that we are getting through. They are an indication that we are seeing the worst of the global crisis and we are getting through better than anybody else. There are tougher times to come. We do unfortunately expect unemployment to rise more. But Australia is better positioned to get us through these tough times, with a government that is prepared to take action. We are better off with a government that is prepared to engage in a conversation with the Australian people about the challenges facing us. We are better off with a government that is prepared to say, ‘We need a deficit, and we do not apologise for protecting and supporting jobs.’ We are better off with a government that is prepared to take the tough decisions, rather than with the cheap opportunists who sit opposite, who have thrown away all the economic credibility that they would say they built up over 11 years—thrown it away in a cheap attempt to score political points in the face of the gravest economic crisis facing the nation.

The Australian people know that they are better off with a government of realists rather than a government of opportunists. Not only do the Australian people know it; every economic commentator knows it, to paraphrase the Leader of the Opposition. Every credible economist and economic writer in the country knows that the opposition’s argument is laid threadbare for all to see and that their credibility lies in tatters. For 12 months they have flailed around trying to find a coherent economic argument. For 12 months they have changed from position to position. They said, to start with, ‘We support the first economic stimulus package,’ and then they said, ‘Oh, it’s not working; we’re seeing unemployment go up, we’re seeing economic growth go down—we now oppose it.’ Then we had the second economic stimulus package and they said, ‘We don’t support that; we support tax cuts instead.’ The shadow Treasurer’s predecessor said, ‘We support broad and sweeping tax cuts which will reduce the deficit’—just before she got dumped as shadow Treasurer, unsurprisingly; but it is a view from which the current Treasurer has not dissociated himself. They actually support broad and sweeping tax cuts which would increase the deficit and increase debt. And now they have settled on the argument that the debt and deficit are too high. They have settled on the cheap argument that Australia is in too much debt—’We’ll ignore Australia’s debt levels compared to the rest of the world; we’ll ignore the size of the deficit compared to those of the rest of the world; we’ll ignore the fact that the government has brought down a deficit of less than five per cent of GDP when the average for advanced countries around the world is nine per cent—we’ll ignore all that; we’ll just run this cheap argument.’ In these difficult times the Australian people look not only to the government for leadership; they look to this parliament for leadership. What they see from our side is leadership. What they see from that side is cheap opportunism.

See this speech in context