Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the cost of the tax cuts that Australians deserve, at the cost of the fairness that we want to deliver in the tax system to Australian families, at the cost of Australians with a disability, who deserve that disability insurance scheme, at the cost of our health and hospital system, at the cost of acting on climate change and at the cost of our education system—all things that we have done in the national interest.

What would those opposite have done during the global financial crisis? Would they have just cut spending? There are terribly contradictory things out there in relation to their agenda. Would they have supported schools around the nation to create jobs? I think that was an incredibly smart thing to do. What we saw during Building the Education Revolution was projects of a scale that meant we could roll them out and create jobs quickly. Had we invested it in large infrastructure, we would not have been able to roll out and create those jobs as quickly. But what we have seen is 9,000 schools around the country benefiting from what was an economic calamity, and we created hundreds of thousands of jobs around the country. This government is committed to infrastructure in public transport, unlike those opposite. (Time expired)