Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I know. Exactly. The only 'achievement', and I am using quotation marks, in a whole year of being Prime Minister—this man who desperately wanted the job, who angled for it, who manoeuvred, who manipulated, who stabbed people in the back and did whatever he needed to get this position, and he has had it for a year—was the NBN. We have moved from 30th to 60th in the world in terms of internet speed in the last year, and it is now twice as expensive and it will not be delivered anywhere near on time. If that is the achievement of this gentleman while he been Prime Minister, heaven help us if he gets another three years in the job.

The phrase that the Prime Minister uses a lot and used today—and we hear it over and over again—is 'jobs and growth'. In spite of having no achievements for the last year, apart from the NBN, and in spite of being a government that had their fingers on the pause button for three years in the 44th Parliament, they keep repeating over and over again 'jobs and growth' as if just repeating the words will cause it to happen. You say, 'What's your strategy?' 'Jobs and growth.' 'What are you trying to achieve?' 'Jobs and growth.' That is fair enough because one should try and achieve jobs and growth, but usually if you are in government you actually have to do something, have a policy, have a strategy which generates those jobs and that growth. The strategy you should not have is the one we saw in the last term, and which we are starting to see again now, which is to assume you can cut the things that cause growth and then wait for the growth so that you can fund the things that cause growth again—so you cut all of the things that cause growth in order to have growth. It makes no sense at all.

Let us look at the things that this government has cut, because there are a lot of them—in fact, virtually every element of an economy that causes growth has been cut. There is the NBN for a start. It has cost more money, but it is not the infrastructure that we need to grow this economy in this decade, let alone in 2030 and 2050—and it should be. An investment of that magnitude should be an investment in infrastructure that will last us 80 to 100 years. Under Labor's plan it would have been. The government has ripped the guts out of the most essential infrastructure that will grow our economy. It is gone.

They cut $30 billion out of education and they are ripping the guts out of funding for universities. How extraordinary. How are we supposed to have the knowledge workers of the future if you cut the guts out of education? They cut the guts out of science—they did not even have a science minister initially; at least we have one now—and even with the small amounts of money the government is now so proudly putting back into the CSIRO, hundreds of staff have left that organisation. They cut support for renewables. When they abolished the price on carbon, they pretty much drove Australia's move towards a clean economy into reverse. There were incredible reductions in the amount of investment into renewables. Renewables is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world and we, as a nation, walked away from it. We had incredible support for coal, now a sector in decline, but none for renewables. We have a government that cancelled most of the infrastructure in our major cities. All of the infrastructure that assisted our cities to be more productive is gone—some of it is coming back, but most of it has gone.

The approach that this government has of trying to generate jobs and growth by cutting the very things that generate growth is bizarre to say the least. You can see already, after three years of this government, the effect their strategies are having on the community—on families, workers and small business. You can see the effect it is starting to have. 'Jobs' and 'growth' are just two words until you consider which jobs and which growth: where is the growth, who benefits from that growth and where are the jobs. If you look at Australia at the moment from that prism, rather than just the mantra of 'jobs and growth', you will see that there are many, many areas where a considerable amount of work has to be done. Two-thirds of Australia's annual growth, for example, comes from the contribution of net exports and we all know that a significant part of that is still mining—that is a good thing. But the mining sector only employs about two per cent of total employment. So if that sector is going well, it is good for government coffers and it is good for big business profits. But in terms of jobs coming out of that sector—not a great deal. Private investment is incredibly important if you want to stimulate jobs and growth, but we have just seen the largest decline in private investment in 16 years. This is not a good sign for jobs and growth. The words 'jobs and growth' are not enough. What is the government doing about it? Well, they are repeating the words a lot.

Consumption growth halved in the June quarter. It is hard to see where the jobs and growth are going to come from if that is actually happening. From the local business perspective, having customers who are prepared to spend their money—customers who feel confident, who are out there buying the services of local businesses—is one of the most important things you can have, and yet consumption growth halved in the June quarter. There is no doubt whatsoever that ordinary Australians are well and truly feeling the pinch because living standards have fallen two per cent since the Liberals came to office. This is devastating for local families. And while the government are creating jobs—220,000 jobs created in the past year; a reasonable number of jobs—what are those jobs? Only 30,000 of them are full time. Only 30,000 of those 220,000 jobs are full time, while nine out of 10 of those jobs were part time.

I understand the argument that has been put by the other side that a lot of people want part-time jobs—yes, a lot of people do—but a lot of other people want full-time work. They want some sense of security so that they can invest in their own futures, buy a house and consider where their children are going to go to school. They can make the decisions that families make and they can invest in their own futures. For business too, it is worthwhile understanding that full-time, secure work in your community is like ballast—it has its good and its bad—but if there are a large proportion of people in your community who have secure work and who feel secure, then they ease the effect of volatile markets. They stop spending later and they start spending earlier. They continue to buy because they feel safe. As the market moves around a little, full permanent employment is an incredibly important stabilising influence.

Underemployment is at near record levels. Jobs and growth? Great words, but the reality is that underemployment for women aged between 35 and 44 is more than double the rate for men of the same age and at record levels. The rate of working-age men who are not in the labour force—men who have given up looking for work altogether—is higher than it was during the global financial crisis. This is not a government that for ordinary families living out there in the suburbs is generating this jobs and growth success story. In fact, it is quite the contrary.

Australians who have become unemployed are taking much longer to find their next job than they did even in 2013. In fact, the average length of unemployment has increased by eight weeks. That is not a sign of this great jobs and growth mantra flowing down to average families. Over the next 12 months we are going to see the great achievement of the 44th Parliament: the closing of our car industry, one of the first achievements of the Hockey-Abbott partnership, goading our car manufacturers to leave the country, and they are. We will see anywhere between 28,000 and 40,000 jobs lost—good, high-skill jobs that provide the basis for a whole range of new manufacturing jobs, jobs that stimulate university study and build engineers and expertise across the full range of manufacturing, gone from our economy. They are jobs that we will not be able to replace.

So I say to the government: please let us know what your strategy is. Jobs and growth are two words. Unless you have strategies to achieve them, you will not and you are not.

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