Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Last week, the Treasurer announced that, after three decades, Australia was in recession. Three decades since the groundbreaking reforms of the Hawke-Keating Labor government, which have given rise to the longest period of uninterrupted growth in this country, Australia is now going backwards. To put that in context, there are 6.3 million Australians alive today who were not born at the time Australia was last in recession. That's almost a quarter of the population.

This government doesn't own the global coronavirus pandemic, but it certainly does own the state of the economy as it stood when COVID-19 hit. It owns the fact that, for the first time in decades, labour productivity was going backwards. It owns the fact that we were experiencing record low wage growth in our economy. It owns the fact that since 2013, as a government, it has more than doubled public debt. This government also certainly owns the package of relief that it has put forward to get Australians through the global pandemic crisis. It owns the fact that the JobKeeper program was budgeted incorrectly, by $60 billion—the single biggest budgeting error since Federation. What that means is that, for a significant period of time, this government believed that it was going to spend $60 billion—the same amount that was spent during the entire stimulus of the global financial crisis—on precisely nothing. That's what it means to be $60 billion disconnected with reality. What it also means is that there are three million fewer workers who will get access to JobKeeper than this government has claimed. Today in the parliament we've got workers from dnata. When you consider that they're not eligible for JobKeeper because of the ownership of their particular company, and when you think about the thousands of people in universities and the million short-term casuals who are all ineligible for JobKeeper, it speaks to those Australians who are being left behind.

The government own the botched relief for the childcare sector, which also involves an absolutely broken promise, by removing childcare workers from JobKeeper next month. They own the ridiculous HomeBuilder stimulus package. In a sector of a million people, five out of six who have lost their jobs will get no benefit whatsoever from this stimulus package. So, be you a home builder, a childcare worker, a person in university, a short-term casual or somebody who is working at dnata—amongst a whole lot of other Australians—you have been left behind by the relief package that this government has put together. This government will certainly own the recovery after the COVID virus is over.

When I listen to the Prime Minister talk about his road to recovery and the importance of the skills and the VET sector, which is a sector that he has cut $3 billion from and where there are 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees; when I listen to the Prime Minister talk about the importance of manufacturing, when it was this government which goaded the car industry offshore; when I hear this government talking about the importance of harmonious industrial relations, but the only IR policy they've had for the last seven years is a full frontal attack on trade unions; and when I hear the Prime Minister say that each of these is a brick in the wall that he is building in terms of recovery, well, this is a Prime Minister who has spent the last seven years smashing that wall to the ground. What it means is that this is a government that has presided over seven lost years for our nation, because if he sees all of that as the agenda for the future—an agenda, I might say, that looks a lot like a Labor agenda—it is a long way from what has characterised the way this government has operated.

This government has been about an automated debt collection scheme from our most vulnerable, which is seeing $700 million being returned to more than 370,000 Australians. But nothing will compensate for the anguish and the torment—and so much worse—that has happened to those workers. This government owns a debt which is on an upward march to a trillion dollars. So, if Scott Morrison seeks to market himself as a leader of a pale imitation of a Labor government, let me tell you that at the next election voters in this country will get the opportunity to vote for a real one.

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