Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In September 2015, when the current Prime Minister tore down the member for Warringah and installed himself as the leader of the government, he did so on the promise of 'economic leadership'. Those were heady days for the coalition. The moderates of the coalition were celebrating their newly-won freedom in the streets. The business community rejoiced at the prospect of an end to the chaos and economic mismanagement of the Abbott government. The media feted the arrival of a political colossus, a philosopher king, who would dominate the political stage with an assault of urbane, socratic monologues. It was almost like the Prime Minister was 10 foot tall and gold-plated. But barely 12 months on, it feels like we live in a different world. How would we describe the world in which we live to a traveller from that antique land? We might say:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is TURNBULL, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

For that is all that is left of the promise of the member for Wentworth's economic leadership. Like the Prime Minister's leadership, the economic plan has collapsed and only ruins remain.

We have discovered that Turnbull's leadership is like anti-matter—all public support for a position, any policy position, is obliterated on contact. Can you name a single issue that this Prime Minister has been able to change public opinion on? Certainly not his plans for a $50 billion tax cut to the biggest companies in Australia—a policy that was unpopular on announcement and became even more unpopular with every subsequent cut to Medicare, schools and hospitals. Of course, I am not sure even Tim Shaw could have sold a totally unfunded structural hit on the budget that would cost over $13 billion a year while also talking about 'fiscal repair' and protecting our AAA credit rating. It is like trying to sell a summer holiday to Antarctica—certainly beyond this Prime Minister's pedestrian political abilities. Yet this ruin is the PM's self-proclaimed 'greatest achievement' since becoming PM! It is as good as it gets. That is supposedly the plan for the 'growth' bit of the three-word slogan from the man who promised us no slogans.

The other third of the slogan—jobs—is just as dire. While the Prime Minister talks of jobs, there are now 50,000 less full-time jobs than there were at the end of last year. We have record under-employment. The participation rate is plummeting. The proportion of Australians either underemployed or unemployed is now higher than it was during the depths of the global financial crisis. And that is 30 per cent of the government's three-word economic policy slogan. He has nothing to say about wages growth in Australia being the lowest on record. He has nothing to say about rewarding the hard work of working- and middle-class Australian families.

The Prime Minister's inability to lead, either in the electorate or in the Parliament, has left him hostage to the lowest common denominator of existing opinion. As a result, he has been forced into regularly drinking the bathwater of his own backbench—the tepid, scungy policy run-off that lingers in the corners of the coalition party room. He has had to take dictation on superannuation policy from the Monkey Pod Generals and then suffer the indignity of having the member for Dawson come out and publicly mark his homework in a live, nationally broadcast press conference. I am not sure that is how the member for Wentworth imagined being Prime Minister in all those decades of coveting the job.

He was also given his marching orders by the party room on changes to negative gearing. While the Prime Minister talks about growth, he has nothing to say about the distortionary loopholes in our tax system that are channelling torrents of Australian capital into relatively unproductive property speculation and away from Australian businesses—the generators of growth—while also costing the budget more than $10 billion a year. The Murray inquiry in financial systems expressed high levels of concern that negative gearing and capital gains concessions are 'major tax distortions' that 'encourage leveraged and speculative investment'. The Grattan Institute have pointed out:

... the greater leverage encouraged by negative gearing arrangements also reduces the stability of the Australian financial system.

Labor believes in real economic growth that benefits all Australians, not just the lucky few at the top. We believe in budget repair that is fair. That means a tax policy that does not give a tax incentive to people buying their second, third, fourth or fifth investment property but gives a leg-up to Australians trying to buy their first home. Inclusive economic growth requires investment in infrastructure and investment in education and training—investments that allow everyone to participate in the Australian economy and thrive in the new economy that Australia moves into. We are up for the challenge of providing this economic leadership, even if the Prime Minister is not.

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