Mr NUGENT (8:56 PM) —I think I need to pick up a couple of points that were mentioned by the previous speaker, the member for Batman (Mr Martin Ferguson), before I go to what I had planned to speak about. The first thing that I would say to the honourable member for Batman is that his statement that the government is giving its preferences to Pauline Hanson is simply not true. That sort of outrageous statement has to be challenged, and it has to be put on the record that it is not true. The government has not made any such statement. In fact, many members in this House—including me and I believe the gentleman at the table, the member for Berowra (Mr Ruddock)—have made it abundantly clear that that will not happen. So let us make it quite clear that the government has made no statement that it is going to give its preferences to One Nation. The government has made no such statement, and the member for Batman knows that what he said is not true.

The second point I want to make about the member for Batman's contribution is that, as the opposition spokesman for employment, he spent a large part of his time talking about unemployment figures, quoting figures, playing with figures and so on. Unemployment is a very serious issue and we can play with the figures all day, but there are a number of key figures that the member for Batman needs to understand, and I will use my electorate as a good example.

My electorate is an outer eastern suburban electorate in Melbourne and in 1983, when the ALP came to power, the local unemployment rate was 1.4 per cent. When the ALP left government, the unemployment rate was about nine per cent. That was the result of 13 years of Labor government. Obviously, we all understand that the vagaries of economics, the influence of world economies and so on mean that the rate is going to vary under any government over a period of time. But if at the end of 13 years we have an unemployment increase of that size, then that sends a very clear message to my electorate.

What this government has done is turn around a super tanker—the national economy is clearly a super tanker—and it is not easy to do that. You cannot turn it around in five minutes but, in a little over two years, we have brought the national unemployment rate down to under eight per cent and the trend is downwards. It seems to me that they are key figures that we need to put into perspective.

I want to try to address in the brief time I have got this evening a couple of issues. I want to talk about the impact of the budget on my electorate and, if I have time, I want to talk about a particular area of interest, overseas aid. My electorate in outer eastern Melbourne is a typical middle-Australia electorate. It is overwhelmingly young. Twenty-five years ago it was all fields and orchards. It has now been built out. We have a huge number of mortgage payers. Until recently, I had the most number of mortgage payers in any electorate in the country. It is filled with young families, blue-collar workers, semi-skilled white-collar workers, not the captains of industry and not particularly people with a high tertiary education—nevertheless, it has a lot of people in wholesale and retail. It is really typical middle-Australia.

This budget has been the third of a series of good budgets for electorates such as mine. Of course there has been some pain. We inherited a huge debt from the previous government. Clearly, to put any household or any national economy on the right track you need to stop bleeding to death every year in terms of debt. That is something we have had to do. Of course that has caused some pain. We regret that, but it is necessary. We have also done a number of very good things partly due to our economic management and partly because of international economic factors, but very largely due to our sound economic management.

Interest rates have come down spectacularly. When I was elected in 1990 by winning the seat from the Labor Party, interest rates in my electorate were 17 per cent. They are now under seven per cent. A large part of that is due to the good economic management of this country. Inflation is under control. That is good for pensioners and that is good for the average family so that their household bills do not go up day by day.

As I said before, unemployment is trending down. Unemployment in my electorate is now 6.4 per cent compared with well over eight per cent when we came to government. So the runs are on the board. As we have heard, we have a surplus in the federal budget for the first time in many years. That is good basic housekeeping that is not achieved without some pain, but it is necessary, because you cannot go on running up a debt year after year as the previous government did.

We have also delivered other things. We promised before we got elected that we would deliver tax cuts to families, and they were delivered on time and in full. I would remind the honourable gentleman who spoke before me that that is in sharp contrast with the promises made by the previous Prime Minister who promised before the 1993 election the l-a-w tax cuts, which never happened. Worse than the fact that they did not happen is that, when the Labor government got returned after 1993, not only did we not get the l-a-w tax cuts for families but also all the wholesale sale taxes went up and went up and went up. So there was an extra tax slug. This government has not increased the tax take at all. There have also been a number of other things in terms of the gold card for veterans and so on and so forth. We have turned around the disastrous financial situation which we inherited and we have started to put together a sound basis for the future.

There is more to be done. One of the things that the opposition has said is, `Why don't you spend some of your surplus out of this budget?' What we know from history is that throwing money at problems does not always work. We saw the previous government throw money at job programs and all sorts of other things and tax more and spend more, but it was not effective in terms of dealing with unemployment. It was not effective in terms of cranking up the economy. It was not effective in terms of boosting our exports. Just throwing money at the problem is not the answer. Given the Asian problem, which is an external factor and a reality that we have to deal with, we need to be prudent. We need to have some money in the bank.

Of course we have more to do. We know that we need to sort out the tax system. We know that the tax package will come before the next election. That will be a replacement tax package for what is there now with no extra tax, with more equity across the board and where the low paid will be well looked after. The reality of life is that when we introduce that tax package the detail will be on the table. That is in marked contrast to everything we have heard from the opposition in recent weeks. We hear a few general good intentions but we do not hear how it is going to happen. The member for Batman said that the Labor Party will aim for a rate of five per cent unemployment but of course gave absolutely no detail—absolutely no detail—of how that would be achieved.

There are things that we will be talking about in the next few weeks. Obviously there are further things we want to do in health. We have already talked about privatising more of Telstra so that we can clear more of the federal government debt so that we have a smaller interest bill so that we, recurrent year after year, can provide the services and the goods to the electorate that they need and deserve.

In the brief time I have available to me I want to say something about a particular area of interest. Although that wide economic question is most important, there are particular areas that I would like to have the chance to talk about. One is the subject of overseas aid. It is interesting that governments of both persuasions over the years have cut the aid budget. This year for the first time for a long time we have seen an increase in the overseas aid budget. This country is going to spend $1.48 billion in aid during the next 12 months. That is a $50 million increase. It is not a huge amount, but at least it is a move in the right direction, and it is a move in the right direction for the first time in many years.

We are spending some 0.27 per cent of GNP on overseas development aid compared with the average of aid giving countries of 0.25 per cent. We are slightly ahead of the game, but it is not as good as the average that both this government and the previous government set of 0.7 per cent. We rank ninth out of 21 of the OECD aid givers. I think it is a creditable performance, but I would certainly be urging the government to spend more. There are some 1.3 billion people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day. A wealthy country like Australia has a responsibility to spend more on overseas aid.

We focus on health, education, infrastructure, agriculture, rural development and governance. We do it bilaterally, we do it through regional arrangements and we do it through multilateral arrangements. We do it through disaster relief. We spend about a quarter of our aid in PNG, but we also help in many other parts of the world. This is an area where I would be pleased to see the government, as we continue to deliver those healthy budgets in future years, take advantage of having got back in the black by increasing our aid budget.

I see that I am out of time. I will leave the House with this thought: we are back in the black. We are back on track, but we are not complacent. We know what we have to do. We have a very clear plan as to how to get there, which is in stark contrast to the opposition.