Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. How is the government getting on with the job of implementing policies to support everyday Australians, and why is it important that we make the right choices for Australia's future?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her question and I thank her for her concern and representation of her local community. She understands that it is the obligation of government to work as hard as it can to give people in communities like hers the benefit of jobs and prosperity. That is why we have made the right choices to keep our economy strong. We made the right choices during the days of the global financial crisis to keep people in work. We have created 800,000 jobs, but we have also understood that there is nothing about the future that can be taken for granted. If we want to be a prosperous country in this changing world, if we want to be a prosperous country living as we do in this incredible region of change, we have to take the right decisions now to build that prosperity. The right decisions, now, include increasing the skills and capacities of the Australian people—there is nothing more important than investing in education and skills for the prosperity of the future. They include building our infrastructure—traditional infrastructure like roads, rail and ports—but also having broadband around the country because of the clear prosperity and productivity benefits of such broadband. The member for Greenway is in a very expert position to speak about that, given her experience before she came into the parliament. They include seizing a clean energy future and making sure that as our economy continues to grow we are cutting carbon pollution and that we decouple economic growth from creating more and more carbon pollution. It is about ensuring that we get each of these policies right in order to build prosperity.

Having done that, you can then keep investing strongly in the things that help people make a life and that help people in times of need—things like the National Disability Insurance Scheme and our record investments in health. We on this side of the House are determined to keep making the right choices to build a strong economy and not have reckless vandalism that destroys economic progress; build a budget surplus, not a $70 billion black hole which would require the slashing and burning of the services that families rely on; build future prosperity by recognising and acting on challenges like carbon pollution and a need for broadband, not denying that those challenges exist or trying to play a reckless, destructive fear campaign with them; and build Australia's education system and invest in Australian schools, not put schools around the nation on a hit list so you can cut back their funding.