Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I always enjoy following the member for Fenner. He is always so erudite and so wise on the history of his party. It's just a shame that the future that Labor would offer us is a return to the 1940s. Maybe they want to reintroduce petrol rationing. Maybe they want to send the troops down the mines again. But when they think about the future they are always looking to the past. That is a good way to think about Labor's response to this budget because past performance is a good indicator of future performance, and Labor have a history of misreading budgets.

During the last budget the member for Rankin said:

Decisions taken by the Liberals in their budget mean that the … recession will be deeper and longer than necessary.

He went on to say:

Unemployment will be too high for too long in this country because the government is failing on jobs.

The member for Rankin could be no further from the truth on this budget than he was on the last one. The truth is what this budget is doing is setting Australia up, through the Morrison government's plan, to secure Australia's economic recovery with a very strong focus on jobs. I think our record on jobs underlies the fact that this budget is the best received budget in a generation, so those opposite, unfortunately, have very little to say.

The 5.6 percent unemployment rate that we now have is lower than when we came to government in 2013. Treasury said to us at the beginning of the COVID recession that unemployment could reach 15 per cent, or two million Australians out of work. Unemployment is even lower than when the COVID pandemic began. There is a record set of job ads—243,500 job ads. Over 12 months, there was a 245 per cent increase in the number of job ads, showing how buoyant the economy is and how many opportunities there are for people. More Australians in jobs means more taxpayers, it means more revenue for government, it means fewer people dependent on welfare and it means a lower deficit. JobKeeper, which has been described as a lifeline and a godsend by so many businesses in my electorate, kept 3.8 million people in work and JobSeeker helped 1.5 million people without work.

Labor talks about wages, but I think the important points to note here are that real wages to the December quarter were higher than when we came into office in 2013, and Treasury says that we need to get unemployment with a four in front of it until we can accelerate wages growth for the long term. So what do we as a government do to put more money in people's pockets, so citizens and workers have more money? Well, the first thing we are always committed to as Liberals and Nationals is tax cuts. Tax cuts are in our DNA. Why are they in our DNA? It's because we believe fundamentally that individuals can spend their own money better than the government can. Under the government's tax policies, there's $7.8 billion worth of personal income tax cuts for lower- and middle-income earners. Individuals will be $1,080 better off and couples will be $2,160 better off.

We are trying drive the unemployment rate lower, below five per cent. Treasury says that the initiatives we've put in this budget will help create 250,000 jobs. That's on top of the half a million we've created since the last budget last October and the million that we've created since the COVID recession began. How are we doing that? What do we do to create more jobs? We expand JobTrainer, with more than 450,000 places to upskill jobseekers, and 170,000 new apprenticeships and trainees with the 50 per cent wage subsidy that has been such a success. As I go around my electorate talking to people in the horticulture industry, in the automotive industry and in restaurants and so on, more people are putting on apprentices for the first time because of the significant wage subsidy that we've offered. There are the 5,000 additional places in higher education for short courses to help upskill people; the increases in mutual obligation that we've put in place to ensure that people who are offered jobs take the jobs that they're offered; the increases in child care for low- and middle-income earners to ensure that child care is more affordable for working people; the infrastructure plan that we have—$15 billion in infrastructure in every state and territory, which will increase jobs right across our economy; and the special arrangements for businesses to encourage them to take on more workers by giving them more of their own money through the extension of programs like the instant asset write-off. The Morrison government is successfully managing Australia's future, because we have a plan to secure Australia's economic recovery.

See this speech in context