Page 539 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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seeking to stave off, to the extent that we can, job cuts. At the end of the day it is about jobs, and jobs are about families and family security and maintaining a quality of life for all Australians. In the contributions by the Liberal Party today there was no expression of concern about jobs or the implications of job losses for working men and women throughout Australia.
The package that the commonwealth put together last week was crafted by the commonwealth Treasury. It was crafted with a view to maintaining stability, security and confidence in the Australian economy and, at the end of the day, saving jobs. Today the Leader of the Opposition made no mention of jobs. There was no suggestion that the Leader of the Opposition cares two hoots about the prospect of unemployment in Australia doubling.
Over the last 18 months we have seen the disdain of the Leader of the Opposition for working families, most particularly young working families who will be impacted by job losses which are being experienced throughout the world and which we will all experience here. The Leader of the Opposition says, “Unemployment will double. It will go from this to that.” But they are statistics. There is no acknowledgement and no sensitivity to the fact that when we talk about a doubling of unemployment we are talking about thousands of families, tens of thousands of families, hundreds of thousands of families.
Mr Barr: He has got to put an application in to the neo-Liberal club, you see.
MR STANHOPE: Yes, that is exactly right. We are talking about an expectation that within 12 months hundreds of thousands of Australians currently in employment will not be in employment. We talk about that as a minimum. It is not a laughing matter. It is a matter that requires urgent action. It is a matter that requires the sort of urgent, unconstrained action that the commonwealth government, with its mandate to govern for all Australians in this period of crisis—
Mr Seselja: Unconstrained absolute power.
MR STANHOPE: Once again we have this cynical sneering by the Leader of the Opposition. He says, “They are just jobs. They are just working families. We do not really care for them.” “They probably do not even vote for us” is the view of the Leader of the Liberal Party. “We are not particularly worried about those hundreds and thousands of young families that will be without a wage within a year. It is not our constituency. We have never shown any concern for them in the past. Why should we start now?”
We have to focus on the fact that from the outset the Liberal Party chose not to support the stimulus package or the commonwealth’s leadership in relation to this matter because their federal leader took a political position of opposition to it. But, interestingly, being a little more parochial and actually looking locally, the question is: why did the ACT branch of the Liberal Party decide to oppose it? Which part of the package is it that they oppose? Are we concerned about $80 million being provided by the commonwealth to the non-government school sector? Is that what they are concerned about?
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