Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Fifield says it needs to be right, and that is true. Certainly government members believe that this package is right, because it has payments targeted to people who will be most assisted by payments at this time—people who have children at school and people on lower and middle incomes—so they will spend that money. That is the first, very quick and very direct stimulus that will be felt. Secondly, we have infrastructure and environmental packages that will be an immediate stimulus but also have effects well into the future, and these are in areas that the economy has been crying out for for some time, such as education and social housing.

I think it was Senator Abetz who took exception to the Rudd government having talked about reckless spending during the election campaign and then spending money in a $42 billion package, but again the opposition, perhaps wilfully, refuses to place enough emphasis on the adjective in ‘reckless spending’. The former government’s spending was reckless in a lot of instances because the money was spent on programs and packages that had no long-lasting effect on our economy or on our infrastructure. There was not enough spending on training. There was not enough spending on the kind of infrastructure that would improve our productivity and that would improve our education. So the Rudd government redresses that problem in this current stimulus package. That is the key difference between the reckless spending of the Howard government and the spending that the government is undertaking now.

I certainly commend the architects of this package for, in a short period, developing something that will not only provide that important stimulus for our economy and improve confidence in our economy but also result in long-term benefit to the Australian public. In particular, regarding the education package, many senators here would have been on school council committees or would have spent many hours attending school councils and would know how important these kinds of measures are. For many years I attended school councils and listened to them talk about the need for the improvements and upgrades to their schools that are addressed in this package.

Members of the opposition have talked about the debt that will have to be paid by the children and grandchildren of senators. The children and grandchildren of current senators will benefit extraordinarily by not having to raise funds or deal with these issues of maintenance and infrastructure that have plagued schools for the last 20 years at least. That will in itself be a very significant benefit for our children and grandchildren. The education and infrastructure improvements will release funds for even more curriculum development in schools. The Labor Party has been talking for the past 10 or 11 years about the crying need to improve education in this country. Compared to other countries in the world we have slipped behind in our spending on education at a time when we desperately need to introduce innovations in education and be a smart country. We all know that it often comes back to the critical building blocks, and one of those critical building blocks is the state of our school system. There we have the key.

Social housing and the environment are also critical areas of need in this country. This package will stimulate building activity in our country, but, as just part of our environmental package, it will also improve insulation in homes. What is the problem with this?