Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

It has been a most interesting contribution to this MPI from the Leader of the National Party. We have had a tirade of, I think, 17 or 18 minutes against the government’s comprehensive plans to deal with the problems that we have outlined in the Home Insulation Program and about three minutes on health which I suggest gives us a very good idea of the opposition’s priorities when it comes to one of the most important reform agendas before us today.

As the Leader of the National Party knows full well, about this time yesterday afternoon the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency provided the House with a comprehensive ministerial statement of how he plans to deal with the problems in the Home Insulation Program. In his usual forensic fashion, he comprehensively went through all of the problems and was completely open and direct about the number of houses that will be inspected as a result.

Interestingly, just in the last couple of days I spoke to an installer in my area in northern Sydney—a legitimate operator; someone who has been in the business for about 10 years—who runs a company called Safe and Sound Insulation. He talked about some of the problems that he has had and it was encouraging to hear him say to me, ‘I want to be part of the solution.’ I have passed that information on to the minister’s office. This is what we intend to do: work with those legitimate players in the industry and deal with the problems in the Home Insulation Program.

I think that the Leader of the Nationals has kept us here on false pretences. What is the title of this matter of public importance? The title is:

The Government’s failure to properly manage its health and infrastructure programs.

Maybe this is accidental, but I think there is word missing from the title of this debate and it is ‘former’. I think it is as clear as day that when we talk about a ‘failure to properly manage health and infrastructure’, it is the former government that is inexplicably linked with abject failure to manage health and to manage infrastructure. You know, it is a failure we on this side of the House have to contend with every day in government. It is a failure that those opposite should reflect on. As I have said before, I think the members opposite should reflect long and hard on the sorry legacy of their 12 lazy years in government. While the bounty rolled in from the years of prosperity, members opposite sat lazily on this side, of course, and did not do the heavy lifting on infrastructure. I will come to that issue first.

I do think the Leader of the Nationals has a hide to bring up this debate today when job figures show our unemployment rate effectively holding steady at just over five per cent. The national rate of unemployment is 5.3 per cent, while many of our major trading partners struggle with an unemployment rate of 10 per cent. The United States has 9.7 per cent unemployment, the United Kingdom has 7.8 per cent and in many of the European countries—the Euro zone—it is 9.9 per cent. If we look at the figures for full-time work, today’s ABS figures show that full-time employment actually increased by 11,400 jobs. That is full-time employment. As the Deputy Prime Minister has pointed out, our steady result in the move to full-time employment shows something very important. On this side of the House we all give employers great credit. Employers around the country who worked with their staff and unions to keep people in jobs can now begin to raise the number of hours available to workers each week. This is what I hear across the country from employers. It has been an extraordinary collective effort by them. It just goes to show, on a day such as this, how out of touch the opposition are when they can come into the House today and try to make a lie of those figures by denying that the Rudd government has kept our economy growing by investing in infrastructure—and, foremost, it has kept Australians working through the global financial crisis.

There is not a shred of a premise for the Leader of the Opposition in this misguided, muddle-headed debate that he has brought on this afternoon when today’s job figures show the national unemployment rate is 5.3 per cent. That is positive news in relative terms, but of course we do not for a minute take for granted the more than 128,000 Australians who have become unemployed since the onset of the global financial crisis after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008, nor do we forget the total number of unemployed Australians still sits at just over 615,000.

As the Deputy Prime Minister has pointed out, there are still pockets of very high unemployment in Far North Queensland and in western Sydney. The government has many programs that are addressing problems in those areas and indeed in the other 20 priority areas where we have local employment coordinators working intensely with partners to ensure that there is a good employment plan and people are able to get access to training programs. The Rudd government continues to support jobs with stimulus and with priority employment programs in all of these areas. Indeed, when I crisscross the country and I talk to local government shires across the country, mayors, deputy mayors and councillors say to me just how vital the stimulus has been at every level. Whether it is the regional and local community infrastructure program, whether it is the $1 billion we have provided to every shire across the country, or whether it is the stimulus infrastructure funding we have provided to large- and medium-scale projects right across the country, the result is a continued endorsement by employers of the government strategy to provide stimulus to the Australian economy during the GFC—a strategy which is being gradually wound down as the economy improves and as jobs growth returns.

I have talked on this topic before when the Leader of the Nationals has led off in a debate. I do not think he gets infrastructure, because the last time he brought on one of these debates on infrastructure I reminded him of his own failure in his electorate of Wide Bay—specifically for those people travelling on sections of the Bruce Highway, a dangerous stretch of road if ever there was one, and the Leader of the Nationals of course studiously ignored this during his years in government.

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