Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I was asked about cost-benefit analysis approaches to the government’s stimulus package and, in particular, the Building the Education Revolution initiative. I will tell you, Mr Speaker, and I will tell the Leader of the Opposition the cost-benefit analysis approach that was taken. It was this: we received advice from the Secretary of Treasury and other Treasury officials that a huge storm was about to hit the Australian economy and that it was necessary to get money into the Australian economy—inject it into the Australian economy in a variety of ways as quickly as possible to sustain hundreds of thousand of jobs and thousands of businesses—and that the best way of undertaking this was a staged process which involved, firstly, payments to individuals through the tax system and the family payment system, which would get money moving into households very quickly; secondly, money that could be moved quickly into maintenance, into infrastructure, into building things and into sustaining the construction sector and, thirdly, longer term infrastructure projects that would build Australia for the future.

We understand that the other side is now back in the zone where they do not believe the global financial crisis or the global recession are real. They have waxed and waned, they have gone in and out of the twilight zone, they have been off there with the zombies, they have been all over the place and they are now back in the zone where they have discovered that it never happened—that it did not exist. The member for Sturt has pronounced it dead; it did not happen; it is all over today. The truth is that the cost-benefit analysis for the Australian people was this: without rapid action on the part of this government through injecting large sums of money into the Australian economy, into construction, into retail, into tourism and into all of the activities of the Australian economy we would be facing unemployment much higher than we do today. We would be facing thousands of businesses, particularly small businesses, that would be bankrupt. That was the basis on which that decision was taken, along with all of the other stimulus decisions. This government stands proudly by those decisions and we point out that virtually every other serious commentator and participant in this debate says we were right and you were wrong.

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