Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The more I look at this government's most recent budget the less I see. If you just listened to the words on the night, you might have had hope, but, when you dig down and look anywhere at the detail, you just find spin and no substance whatsoever. When JobKeeper disappears in March, I feel that in my community, and many like it, we will have quite a cliff, because, despite all of the announcements that were made by the Treasurer on budget night, there's very little to it. For example, the tax cuts are hailed as the driver of the economy. A person might receive between $20 and $50 a week in the tax cut. Great! But, at the moment in Parramatta, in my electorate, we have some 8½ thousand businesses that are paying their staff on JobKeeper and the 30,000-odd staff members will fall off the cliff at the end of March. It is replaced with a $20- to $50-a-week tax cut for those who have work. Our unemployment rate has gone up. Last year, it was 4.9 per cent, just before COVID-19, and it has gone up 250 per cent in the last six months, and it is continuing to grow. It is hard to see how taking people off JobKeeper and replacing it with a $20- to $50-a-week tax cut for those who have work will make a difference.

Then we have JobMaker. There is a lot of 'job' this and 'job' that. JobMaker was a huge announcement, with 450,000 jobs for people under the age of 35, except that, when you dig down and ask Treasury, they say, 'No; it won't be 450,000. Most of those will be jobs that already exist. There will only be 45,000 new jobs,' and that's not in one year but over a couple of years. I did the maths. That is 300 jobs per electorate over a couple of years. So they are taking 30,000-odd workers off JobKeeper, they're reducing JobSeeker down to $40 a day in December, and they're replacing it with 300 subsidised jobs for people under the age of 35. That's the reality when you dig through the spin. It's just unimaginable that this strategy would actually work.

This gives me an opportunity today to talk about some other areas where the government claims things that you think might be fabulous, until you look at them and see that they actually don't existent or they're a mere shadow—just an announcement with nothing underneath. I will talk now about women in the budget. We, the Labor opposition, have been very critical that this budget is not for women. Most of the industries that have been supported, because of the way it works, are male dominated industries. For the care economy, aged care, child care—all the places where women work and where you would expect a big investment because they have been shown to be under-resourced—there is nothing. When you criticise the government for it, they wave the announcement of the Women's economic security statement. What a great thing this would be: the Women's economic security statement. I googled the Women's economic security statement 2020. It says:

The 2020 Women's Economic Security Statement is building on initiatives in the Government's overarching JobMaker Plan for an economic recovery that creates jobs—

Then, do yourself a favour and google 'Women's Economic Security Statement 2018' and see what happens. Here it is:

That is why, in 2018, we released the inaugural Women’s Economic Security Statement with a focus on three key pillars—workforce participation, earning potential and economic independence.

Announced in 2018, it's the same thing—and then again in 2019, then again in 2019 and now in 2020. And, two years after it was first announced with great fanfare and a great announcement, they've spent zero. Nothing! It's just an announcement. It was an announcement in 2018 and nothing else—just spin with no substance. It was an announcement in 2019 twice, as spin with no substance, and now it's been announced in 2020 with no detail and we're supposed to believe it. So I would say to everybody out there: You just have to do look underneath the announcement to see whether there's anything there, and in many, many occasions there won't be anything there at all.

Let's look at another one: the NBN. Parramatta CBD, the second CBD in Sydney, is supposed to be this great city, and it actually is a great place to live, will not get the NBN until 2022. So every time the minister gets up and says, 'Woohoo, we finished it,' we, in Parramatta CBD, go, 'Hang on a second, we're not getting it for another two years. Are you kidding me?' Honestly, it is extraordinary.

Then, we hear an announcement that they're going to rebuild the bits that they built with that 50,000 kilometres of copper that they bought. They're going to rebuild that now with fibre because they think fibre is actually better than copper, and we go: 'Okay, are we going to get the old NBN and then get upgraded, or are we just going to get the new NBN? What's going on here?' We're not told; we just keep hearing these announcements.

Then, we had a fabulous announcement about job hubs—business hubs.

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