Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The problem for Australia at the moment is that we have a government with no plan for the future of jobs in this country. This has been a disgraceful week where the government has done everything but talk about jobs of the future. We saw the image of the Treasurer of Australia talking about the national account numbers yesterday and then declaring today, in a moment of hubris, that the worst is behind us and that this country is doing better than anywhere else in the world. The problem with his sunny optimism is that domestic income in this country is sluggish. Household savings ratios are down to a 6½-year low. Productivity is down. There are weaker earnings, wages are falling or are not increasing as much as in budget forecasts, and we have unemployment north of six per cent. This is a problem in this country. Instead of a high-skill, high-productivity, high-wage nation, we have the Liberal government of Australia leading us in the wrong direction.

The truth of the matter is that, since the budget was brought down on 12 May, the more and more we see of the budget, the more and more Australians are becoming worried about the future of this country. Their budget still relies upon the same old unfair cuts which marked their last budget. They are still relying upon massive cuts to the states—$80 billion to schools and hospitals—which will fatally undermine the ability of these states to deliver the outcomes that the states are expected to deliver to their citizens. We have seen the deficit of this nation double between two budgets and, when we asked the Prime Minister today in question time what he was doing about that, he had no answer. As usual with his answers in question time, they were masterfully irrelevant. Furthermore, we see this budget relying upon the lazy hand—the Prime Minister loves to talk about hands in pockets; we need to talk about the invisible hand of inflation in the pocket of every Australian—of bracket creep, pushing people into higher income brackets. That is the only way they fuel their budget. This is a country with a government with no plan for the future.

People know the real transition that is happening in this economy. We understand that, for the six years between 2006 and 2012, mining investment made a massive eight per cent of GDP. That has delivered some long-term benefits in terms of the volume of our exports in the future, but we are now returning to our 50-year mean in investment from mining and we need a replacement in our economy. The truth of the matter is that, for this country to have a plan for the jobs of the future, it needs to deal with the transition from the mining boom. What we need above all else in a transition from the mining boom is confidence. We need confidence that we have a Commonwealth government capable of leading us to the future. We have in fact a fourfold contraction in our economy in mining investment. That is like taking $100 billion out of the economic activity of Australia.

On budget night, Australians waited with some hope, I suspect, that the government would have a plan—and they had a plan of sorts. They had a plan that you could go to a second-hand car yard and to Harvey Norman and you will get a short-term stimulus to small business. I do find it funny talking about stimulus to those opposite. For years they tried to crucify Labor when we had to stimulate over the GFC. Last year, the government had swallowed the bible of Milton Friedman, and this year they seem to have swallowed the bible of John Maynard Keynes. The challenge, though, for Australians is that the government said one thing last year, telling Australians there was a debt and deficit crisis, and then this year they seem to be adopting some sort of mantle of economic Mahatma Gandhis to small business. We all know that their small-business package was basically a rip-off, a Bali knock-off, of what Labor was trying to do with small business. The Minister for Small Business is all about instant asset write-offs this year, but we know that last year and in the years before they repealed the instant asset write-off. Anyway, no matter how frustrated people are with the inconsistency of the government, we are prepared to support the small-business proposals. In fact, we had the ridiculous situation yesterday where the government voted against their own small-business package—remarkable.

The real issue is that Australians know that there is no path to surplus of any credibility with this government. It is a map which Burke and Wills could have used to find their way home, but it is not a map for the future.

Ms Butler interjecting—

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