Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has completely lost the plot, and so has the Treasurer. It's wages, wages, wages. He's telling Australians that the economy is roaring back, but at the same time his blueprint for economic recovery has got real wage cuts within it. There can be no economic recovery built on wage cuts for ordinary Australians, but this is what this Prime Minister and this Treasurer are trying to ask Australians to believe. His blueprint for economic recovery is leaving ordinary Australians behind. Prices are up, and wages are down. This is an eight-year pattern under this government. The only thing that is different under this government is that, for the last seven budgets, they've predicted wages would go up, but they never did. The difference under this one is there's a bit of honesty in the budget papers. They say that wages are going to go down and stay down, and that's their economic recipe under this government. If that was all there was, you'd have enough to worry about, but, on top of that, workers earning less than $90,000 a year are going to get a tax increase. They're going to get a tax hike next July. They won't tell you this, but workers earning less than $90,000 a year are being promised a tax hike from next July. That's the truth. High-paid workers get a tax cut; low-paid workers get a tax increase. That's the recipe under this government. It tells you everything. There are JobKeeper subsidies going to businesses that are handing out big dividends and bonuses to big executives—$10 billion worth of JobKeeper subsidies going to their mates at the same time that they're sending 'please explain' robodebt letters to people who owe a few dollars under Centrelink payments.

We've heard a lot said about housing under this government, and I'm pleased to join them on this debate. Over the last 20 years, home prices have gone up by over 150 per cent. Wages have not kept up. In fact, home prices have gone up more than five times wages over the last 20 years. Over the course of the pandemic, prices have actually gone galloping ahead. If you look at the return on a house in Sydney today, you see it actually returns more than the average worker makes in Sydney today. The shorthand is that you can't afford to live in Sydney, yet these guys are telling you that they are the party of homeownership. If they were the party of homeownership, they'd make it easier for workers to get into the housing market by providing a wage rise. Under this government, house prices are going through the roof and wages are going through the floor. They are making it harder, not easier, for Australians to get into the housing market.

Over in Treasury and over on the backbench, they're all scratching their heads and saying, 'What are we going to do to get wages moving again?' We've got an answer to that. It was invented a long time ago. It was called unions. They were part of the solution during the pandemic. The government went to the unions during the pandemic and said, 'We need your help to sort out some of these conditions so that we can keep business viable,' but, when we're talking about the recovery, they slam the door in the face of the unions. If they wanted a plan for wage rises, they'd be sitting down and talking to the unions, not slamming the doors in their face.

Under the Liberal Party, wage restraint and wage cuts are a design feature. Under the Labor Party, working with the unions, working with workers and working with employees is what we do. That's in our DNA. It ensures that, as the economy recovers, ordinary workers and households get a wage increase and share in the recovery. Under the Liberals, the design feature of a recovery is prices going up and wages going down except for some of them. Wages go down and prices go up. No worker is going to share in the recovery, and that is the design feature of this budget. It is there in black and white in their budget papers: prices go up, wages go down and there is no plan for workers to share in the recovery.

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