Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to start my contribution to this debate with a short lament for the disappearance of an old-fashioned concept. It is the importance of parliament—the importance of parliamentary debate and a democracy where the citizens of Australia can be assured their parliament is giving oversight to the legislation and the actions of the government of the day; that the government of the day is taking its responsibility to legislate and conduct parliamentary debates in good faith; and that, in the end, measures that are adopted have been through processes.

We are debating this bill right now only because the opposition moved a suspension of standing orders to bring it on. It's an extraordinary thing for an opposition to do, really. Why did we do it? Because we have a government that briefed out some media and dropped to the media stories—which, it would seem, were reported in some cases without any scrutiny as to whether the facts bore out the story—that the opposition were blocking this piece of legislation going through. What is even more insidious is that, my colleagues have told me, people have been contacting them and saying that the government was briefing out in their electorates, telling young people in their electorates they were going to be stopped from getting the JobMaker subsidy because their member was blocking the legislation. No such thing is true. In fact, this legislation wasn't listed for debate today. It was listed for debate tomorrow, if we got to it. We all know what a moving feast the daily bills list is. Even more galling was that the government should have been well aware that, even if this legislation passes the House today, which it will because the Labor Party is being constructive, not destructive, it can't pass the Senate until November, because the Senate is currently conducting estimates, and it is not sitting.

It's pretty easy to see why the Prime Minister and the government have a reputation for being all spin and no substance, for being very good at announcements and very bad at delivery—for being marketing, men predominantly. That's pretty much right, but there's a deeper point to all of this that should disturb all of us who have the privilege who serve in the parliament, let alone Australians, who need a functioning democracy. That point is that this is a government that appears to treat the privilege of governing this country and the responsibility of governing this country in a time of national and global crisis as if it is somehow a game, as if getting up stories that make the Labor Party look bad in the media is more important than devising legislation that is well crafted, is well written, is based on strong policy and has had the opportunity for the proper parliamentary processes of scrutiny to be engaged in. That is a corrosive attitude for democracy. That is a corrosive attitude for our communities' faith and trust in our parliamentary system and our democracy. It is no wonder that trust in politics and politicians has absolutely plummeted over the last two decades. It is no wonder that the green shoots of belief and trust in government and politics that we've seen during the COVID pandemic—because of the attitudes of most people about working together cooperatively and collaboratively to deliver for people in stress, which gave Australians a bit of confidence that, maybe, we politicians could do it—are browning on the ground today.

Let's hope that this is a lesson for the Prime Minister, his ministers and everyone else who sits on that side of the chamber that this is not a time for political games and spin. This is a serious time for making sure that unemployed Australians don't stay on the dole queue for the rest of their lives, for making sure that the young, unemployed people that this legislation, this wage subsidy, is supposed to help don't face an early adulthood of no jobs, of insecure jobs or of low-paid jobs and for making sure that the older Australians who we know had lost their jobs before the pandemic and the recession, in addition to the some 900,000 who have now lost their jobs, haven't seen the end of their working lives. We know that when you're over 50 and you lose your job it is so hard to get another one. At least, we all should know that. When I doorknocked before the 2016 election and last year's election, I couldn't go a single session of doorknocking without coming across someone who was 50 or older, usually a woman, occasionally a man, who would talk to me in despair about how they had been retrenched. They'd lost their job through no fault of their own and they couldn't find employment. One woman told me about how she started putting in resumes without her age on it and would get interviews—she hadn't got them before when her resume had her age on it—and then never get past the interview stage. This was not someone who wasn't qualified for the jobs she was applying for.

We in this country cannot let 2020 and all of its disasters and challenges mean that our younger generation might be the first generation in living memory, really, to face a future less positive than the future faced by their parents, and that our older Australians—and the closer some of us get to 50 the more we realise that 50 isn't that old!—face unemployment in what, for many, is the most productive part of their working lives, and then face a significant proportion of their retirement in an underfunded, underscrutinised, under-resourced, broken aged-care system. That is why this debate is important, why this legislation is important and why calling out the government for the way it has behaved today is important.

The wage subsidies that are in this legislation are of course supported because the intention is to help younger people get into work and help younger people who have lost their jobs get back into work. Wage subsidies are something Labor are very familiar with, having implemented many of our own in times of crisis when we've been in government, and of course wage subsidies more broadly are what Labor called for time and again earlier this year, before the government finally agreed to introduce them in the form of JobSeeker.

This so-called JobMaker wage subsidy is a measure that could be very successful, but it's our job here in the parliament not to assume it will be successful just because this government says it will be but to scrutinise it to make sure that it will be—because, unfortunately, this government has a history of employment policies that sound good in the announcement but don't deliver. We know that the previous attempt to help unemployed young people into work, called Youth Jobs PaTH, has been the opposite of success, and we know that the Restart program, which this Prime Minister has pointed to time and again as this government's so-called successful program to help older Australians into work, is also almost the opposite of success. It is not helping most older people get into work, and those it is helping get into work are often only in work for about three months. So it's really important that we make sure this legislation does what it says it will do.

It's also very important—harking back to where I started this speech, on the role of this parliament and democracy—that this legislation be looked at because it gives this Treasurer a blank cheque in deciding what to fund, what employment programs to go with, over the next two years. That's not how things should work in the Australian parliament. Before this year, there had been a creeping and now there's a galloping move to put more and more legislation into regulations, which means less scrutiny, which means that governments are making more and more decisions that citizens don't even know are being made, because regulations are done simply by tabling, rather than introducing a bill; having a parliamentary inquiry, allowing citizens to make submissions; and really scrutinising the legislation—not to mention the increasing habit of not putting out exposure bills for consultation. COVID is an exception; we understand why legislation was rushed during COVID.

So Labor isn't holding anything up. We are doing our job, and it is beyond high time that the citizens of Australia knew that their federal government was more focused on advertising itself than on doing its job.

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