Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am really pleased for the opportunity to participate in the matter of public importance today because it gives me a chance to reflect on what we have seen in the last, shall we say, eventful fortnight in politics. I think I speak for most Australians when I say that those of us on this side of the House did not believe that this government could get any more hapless, but then we got to August and the switch was flicked to craven, incompetent and, frankly, at times pretty damn weird. We hear a lot during MPIs and question time that the dynamic feels a little jovial, but I have to say it does not reflect the real attitude of people on this side of the House to what is happening in politics today. The truth is that we are worried—very worried—because what we see on the other side of the chamber is a government that has completely lost its way. Having lost its way, it has become consumed with things that are essentially meaningless to the lives of ordinary Australians. We have seen these things that the government obsesses over from day to day while real, serious issues are affecting the lives of Australians out there in the community.

Let me run through some of the examples. One of them is this awful leaking that we have seen from the cabinet over previous days. We have the Prime Minister coming out, as he does, all bluster, saying that he is going to crack down on people who leaked from cabinet, and then what do we see? Half an hour later what happens in cabinet gets leaked again. Day after day we are seeing the lines that get sent around from the Prime Minister's office leaked out into the broader community, and all they are doing is just eating themselves up. But what is probably even more worrying than all this is the fact that, all the while that they consume themselves with these problems, the government have no agenda. We saw it earlier with the leaked cabinet document. Basically, the cabinet met to talk about a few matters that were not really that important. There was no substantive policy on the cabinet agenda, and then the last note on the cabinet agenda was that the next meeting of cabinet was to be cancelled. We do see that down here in the House because we are scratching around a bit looking for legislation that we can talk about, when all of the things that are really critical to what is happening in this country at the moment are not getting debated and discussed in this parliament.

I do not want to gloss over one of the most awful and disappointing things we have seen in the last two weeks, and that is the scurrilous attempt to shut down the debate about equal marriage that should be happening today in this parliament. We have seen the Prime Minister, who is meant to be the statesman and to be showing leadership to this country, using his power as the leader of this country to try to stymie debate in his party room and to stack the party room so that the people of Australia do not get the debate that millions of them want to see in this chamber. The reason this is so worrying to us as Labor people is not that we really care what sorts of fights the people on the other side have between themselves but that there are fundamental problems facing this country that are not getting the attention that they deserve.

The critical problem facing this country today is unemployment. There are 800,000 Australians who are unemployed in this country today. That is an absolutely staggering figure and any government worth its salt would spend every minute of every day trying to work out what to do with these people and how to get them back into work. Yet what do we see? They just fight amongst themselves. That is not the end of the employment problems that we have in this country. One million Australians are underemployed and another 800,000 Australians are getting the disability support pension. All these problems are dramatically more difficult to solve than when we had the global financial crisis, when global conditions were so much more challenging.

We can never, ever forget when we face an employment issue in Australia the terrible plight of young people who are unemployed. We know that when young people spend significant time out of work they bear scars of that for their entire working lives. We look at these people when they are 40 years old and, if they spent significant periods unemployed in their youth, they are getting paid significantly less and have a much patchier employment record for the rest of their lives. It is a scourge on this country to have so many young people unemployed. Many of the people in this chamber would represent electorates where 20 per cent of young people are out of work. I feel this very acutely. When I talk to youth organisations, they tell me there are young people in their services who believe that they will never get a job.

What we have on the other side is a government that is consumed with its own particular controversies, and it is just not good enough for this country. It is not good enough.

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