Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Nothing illustrates the premise of the question better than that risible contribution from the member for Mackellar. This truly is a government without purpose. The member for Mackellar had five minutes to talk about the purpose, achievements and agenda of this government, and all he spent five minutes doing was saying, 'Labor, Labor, Labor.' It is absolutely tiresome. It's tiresome for me, I know it's tiresome for the gallery and it's tiresome for the people of Australia. They expect a government that is going to govern in their interests and stop talking about the opposition and start talking about a positive plan for the country.

We had the contribution from the member for Boothby where I think she was having a little game with herself, seeing how many times she could say the word 'positive'. She said, 'We have a positive plan.' What was the positive plan? I was sitting here waiting to hear what the positive plan was, and it never emerged. I think she said 'positive' about 10 times in that speech—I'm happy to be corrected—but she never once said what the positive plan was.

We are at nine weeks after the election. It is nine weeks after the election in which the Australian people gave the government members the benefit of the doubt and gave them another term. We accept that. That was the will of the Australian people. We're two weeks into the 46th Parliament and this is a government so bereft of any ideas that just the other night, in the second week of this parliament, it ran out of legislation in the Senate. It sent the Senate home early—lights off, click, dark night, everybody home. That's the story of this government.

It was certainly the story of this government in the 45th Parliament, where we had it running out of legislation and members racking off to the airport early—lazy, no work ethic, all spin and all politics. Those opposite and their backers on late-night pay TV like to parrot, for example, how good they are at managing the economy. That's what they hang everything on. If it's not fear and smear with national security, it's the strong economy and what great economic managers they are. Well, let's look at the facts. The fact is that, under the Liberals, net debt has more than doubled since Labor left office. Labor did leave a debt. We make no apology for that. We left a debt because we had to contend with the global financial crisis that smashed the world economy. Labor kept Australia on an even keel economically, and that cost money to do. Every world economist praised Labor's management of the economy at that time. Since 2013, there's been no global financial crisis and yet this government has more than doubled net debt in rosy economic times.

What else tells the story of the economic agenda of this government? Supposedly, according to the member for Mackellar and his colleagues, Labor was a shockingly bad economic manager. In 2013, when Labor left office, we were the eighth-fastest-growing economy in the world. Australia was the eighth-fastest-growing economy when we left those opposite the economy. What is it now? After six years of economic global sunshine, we're now the 20th fastest. After six years of Liberal government, we have gone down that scale.

Here are some other facts. Gross debt is at record highs under this government. Both kinds of debt are growing at a faster clip on the Liberals' watch than under the previous Labor government, and we had the global financial crisis to deal with. The state of the economy under the Liberals is concerning, with the slowest economic growth since the global financial crisis, the longest per capita recession since the 1982 recession, stagnant and flatlined wages that are eight times slower than profits, and corporate profits growing at eight times the rate of wages. The nexus is broken. The fairness trajectory is broken. Wages once kept pace with profits and that is now broken. Workers are doing the work and not getting a fair pay for it under this government. Rising underemployment, rising youth unemployment, slowing employment growth, five years of weak productivity growth, weak household spending, falling consumer confidence—the list of the failures of economic management from six years of a Liberal government goes on and on. And what do we have in this contribution from those opposite? There is not one word about their plans to tackle the economic mess under their government.

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