Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's the understatement of the century that 2020 has been a tough year, as we all know. We've all faced this massive health crisis that's frightening. It's uncertain and unpredictable, and what we have in front of us is the unknown. It's absolutely stopped us in our tracks. As the Leader of the Opposition said, we really do have a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild our economy and our country for the better, to launch a recovery that delivers a stronger, fairer and more secure future for all Australians. What Australia now needs is leadership and vision to help steer us through this crisis, and that's exactly what is missing from this Morrison government's budget. The budget fails. It's all about short-term politics instead of long-term vision. Let's face it: our economy wasn't doing that well before the coronavirus hit. We know that two-thirds of the debt was racked up prior to the coronavirus. We were already plagued by slow growth, flat wages, declining productivity and unemployment was on its way up. Business investment was slowing, debt was doubling and people were already being left behind, and this budget just makes a bad situation even worse.

The government wants to cut wage subsidies and unemployment benefits at a time when work is harder to come by, it's harder to get, and we can see that through the figures that come out on a quarterly basis. What Australia really needs now is leadership, but this Morrison government wants to rely solely on a business-led recovery. In fact, this budget is an experiment in subsidising businesses to create demand, and that was according to Michael Pascoe reporting in The New Daily.

We all want businesses to succeed of course. We all want our businesses to grow and do better and be able to employ people, and we all understand how vitally important they are for our economy. However, businesses cannot grow without the consumer being able to spend. It cannot succeed if people don't have enough money in their pockets and if they don't have enough to go out and buy products and to invest and to do a whole range of things. And of course, if they haven't got enough after they've paid for their essentials—as I'm being told by many of my pensioner constituents and young couples—then the economy won't grow. It won't grow, because if you give a millionaire an extra couple of hundred dollars it'll sit in that bank account—even if it's $100,000. If you give someone on a pension $10, they will go out and actually spend that $10 on something that they need, that they desperately have been putting off because they couldn't afford it. That money goes straight into the economy. We saw this during the economic stimulus packages that the other side criticised continuously, but the reality is that we put the money where it was needed—to families, where they needed to go out and buy an extra pair of shoes, or to pensioners, who needed a washing machine because their washing machine had broken down and they couldn't afford one—and that money went straight into the economy stimulating the economy. This is what's lacking from this government. They want to get the economy up and running, they want to grow jobs and they want to grow businesses, but you cannot do it without the consumer, without those people that desperately need products and goods to run a household, a family or a house who simply cannot afford it. We have to put money in those people's pockets so they can go out, spend that money and get the economy rolling again. It's not rocket science. Any economist will tell you that is the best way to stimulate the economy and grow jobs. A great example was our Building the Education Revolution in 2009, when the economic crisis was hitting very hard. We were being criticised every single day by the other side about building school halls. The reality is there are thousands of schools in Australia, and each school received a school hall. What did that do for the economy? I asked the question at every opening I went to: how many people did this construction site employ? The answer would come back from 60 or 70 to 200. Multiply that by around 30,000-odd schools around the country, and you can see how money went into the economy and how we actually stimulated the economy, prevented unemployment and, in fact, were the envy of the world during that economic crisis.

We need a plan to get things done and to stimulate the economy and, most importantly, give people certainty, because at the moment that is what's missing—that certainty. People do not know what the future holds for them. Governments are there to put that in place and give them confidence. For example, my constituents living in the western suburbs of my electorate will be facing about another 15 years of uncertainty and delays before the South Road Upgrade is completed. This was a promise by Mr Abbott in 2013 saying it would be completed by 2023. The then Prime Minister Tony Abbott pledged to upgrade the road within a decade, meaning that it would be completed in 2023. Documents leaked by members of the state Liberal Marshall government last week—often beggars belief why they would leak upon themselves!—show that the South Road upgrade may now not be completed until possibly 2035. In other words, they're not even going to look at starting for a number of years. Now is the time to start that infrastructure project. Now is the time to put the money into the economy. It's said that it will employ around 3,000 people from start to finish on that infrastructure project much-needed by my electorate. It is a bottleneck from Port Road through to the end of the Anzac Highway and further up in other electorates. Here we are in an economic crisis. We need to stimulate the economy. We need to put money into infrastructure projects, and here is a government that's holding back for whatever reason, and we won't see that upgrade completed for over a decade longer than originally planned. We need those 3,000 jobs I spoke about now, not in 15 years.

Social housing repair programs: we're losing jobs in construction and trade, and in this budget there is nothing to address this. A massive drop in the construction of new homes due to the COVID-19 crisis has put the jobs of hundreds of thousands of tradespeople at risk. For months now, we have been warning that the housing construction industry is headed towards a cliff, and we've repeatedly called on the Morrison government to put together a comprehensive housing stimulus plan.

See this speech in context