Page 745 - Week 02 - Thursday, 12 February 2009
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Mr Seselja: You have looked pretty silly.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stop the clock, please. I have stopped the clock because I want the members on this side of the house to allow Ms Gallagher to continue her presentation on this motion. If there is any more from this side at this particular moment, I am going to start warning people. I have asked you several times to stop interjections and you have ignored me. I will start warning people. I call Ms Gallagher. Can you start the clock again, please.
MS GALLAGHER: The package that is now before the federal parliament, before the Senate, is a good economic package for Australia. It is targeted, it is temporary and it is timely. We need to act now. I hope that the Senate passes the bill later this evening so that we can get this injection of cash flowing into our economy.
The alternative is most serious. The alternative of doing nothing, not responding or taking a great deal of time to resolve this package could have significant negative effects on the ACT economy and, more broadly, the Australian economy.
Six of our eight leading trading partners are in recession at the moment. Australia is just hanging on. This response from the federal government is to ensure that they are able to support 90,000 jobs across the country at a time when unemployment is expected to continue to rise over the next two years.
The most serious challenge facing our country at the moment, in the short term, is how we manage and respond to the global economic conditions which are now impacting heavily on Australia. We are responding with our own package here. It will be a local package. It will be targeted on areas where we believe it can assist the most. We look forward to the Assembly’s scrutiny of that package—and no doubt the opposition’s complaints about that package—when it is released. We will be doing that in the final sitting week in February.
I understand people’s need to ask questions. The need for concessions and the need for everybody to get a slice of the pie concern me in the sense of what the aim of the stimulus package is to be. I do not agree with Senator Xenophon’s need for money for the Murray-Darling Basin to come out of this; I wonder what the opposition’s views on that are.
This does not do everything. You cannot do everything in one package. Everybody has got other ideas. But it seeks to have a specific impact on the economy: it comes in at times when others are not investing, it seeks to boost consumer confidence, it seeks to inject cash into the economy and it seeks to have a temporary effect. That is what it seeks to do. It is not a normal budget.
These are not normal times. These are times for governments to act decisively, to respond to the current climate and to respond quickly. That is what we need to happen. That is what the people of Australia need to see happen and what the people of the ACT need to see happen. The alternative will have most significant consequences, across Australia and here locally. We need to support jobs and we need to support families. That is what this package seeks to do.
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