Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My attack will be based on the chaotic budget narrative, but I will say one thing about the narrative in the MPI debate. The government speakers have all been singularly consistent in forgetting about the global financial crisis. There was a collective amnesia during this period. We know where their leader was during the infamous stimulus vote, after a healthy dinner upstairs—he was asleep. Well, that is the most charitable view of where he was. He was asleep. Where were these guys for the last six years? The whole GFC passed them by. So we have seen collective amnesia between 2007 and 2013, and now we have got a chaotic budget narrative as the replacement.

We have seen the Prime Minister have more backflips than an Olympic gymnast. We have seen Mr Abbott have more positions on the budget then there are in the Kama Sutra. We had a budget emergency, then the budget bushfire, then 'Don't worry; we've passed 99 per cent of the budget, so don't worry about anything.' It is all: 'Nothing to look at.' Then we have had the 'feral' Senate, risking civilisation, although the government have been a bit dubious about who are the ferals in the Senate, depending on whose vote they need. In the last few weeks, we have had the farce of the Intergenerational report, a document that was jury-rigged out of the Treasurer's office, a document that Treasury officials ran a million miles from. But it gave the Prime Minister a prop, a prop that he hid behind like his Real Solutions pamphlet during the campaign—his shield: 'Don't touch me; read what's in this document.' But in the end he stuffed that up, as he did with Real Solutions. I will proudly read his full quote—I have been accused of misquoting—from the press conference on Wednesday, 18 March 2015:

… but a ratio of debt to GDP at about 50 or 60 per cent is a pretty good result looking around the world …

That is the full quote. This is a gentleman who said that a debt to GDP ratio of 10 per cent was a budget emergency—but 50 to 60 per cent is a pretty good result! That is the ridiculous position we have got from the Prime Minister.

We have also seen the cabinet leaking like a sieve. We have seen the worst shadow Treasurer in history, now the Minister for Foreign Affairs, endorse an iron cartel. No wonder she got sacked. We had the member for New England's disastrous foray as shadow finance minister—and who can forget that?—when he mistook millions for billions. We remember. He was swiftly sacked, and I look forward to the member for Riverina replacing him at some point. I trust he will get his m's and b's right, so that will be good. We have had the eye-rolling by the foreign minister to roll a cabinet decision. We have had the Malcolm robocalls. We have had a circus instead of cabinet. Unfortunately, it is the Australian people who are paying the price for this.

What we need to recognise is that this is not just an echo chamber debate. This is not a debate that is just full of rhetoric. The concrete results of their failure to cement a budget strategy are paramount in the Australian community. We have seen confidence down, among both business and consumers. We have seen capital investment at a very low level. We have seen very sluggish economic growth. We have seen unemployment at a 12-year high. We have got a crisis of youth unemployment. We have got average hours worked in the economy falling. We have got the highest labour underutilisation rate since 1995, when we were coming out of the nineties recession. Perhaps most concerning of all, we have got the highest underemployment rate since records began. Since 1978, we have not had a period where there has been more underemployment, not even during the eighties recession or the nineties recession.

We are at risk of a huge jobs crisis because of the budget fiasco over there. Their budget is not helping the employment crisis; it is worsening it. That is a great tragedy. The impact in my area is being well and truly felt. In the Hunter region—which I am sure my colleague the member for Newcastle will talk about as well—we have got unemployment above 10 per cent for the first time in a long time. We have seen $220 million in cuts to Hunter and Central Coast hospitals. We have got 26,000 pensioners in my area under attack through the pension cuts—cuts that have already occurred, through the $1.4 billion concession cut. I have got uni students who are worried about the debt they face.

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