Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on behalf of my community and my home state about the Morrison government's eighth budget and Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022. This budget is deeply disappointing and deficient on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin, but I will begin with the eye-watering headline numbers: $100 billion in fresh spending and net debt forecast to rise to $1 trillion. Let's think for a moment about what $1 trillion actually is. That's $1,000 billion or $1 million million. It's a one with 12 zeros behind it. It's a staggering figure. Eight years ago, when the Liberals came to power, net debt stood at a relatively modest $175 billion. By early 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Liberals had overseen a surge in Australia's net debt to around $400 billion. Now we have a budget that is forecasting debt to continue rising to $1 trillion by 2024-25. This government is spending taxpayers' money with greater abandon than any government in our history.

If these numbers sound big, it's because they really are big, especially when analysed in the context of the size of the Australian economy. In 2013, when the Liberals took over government, net debt was equivalent to 13 per cent of Australia's gross domestic product. Under current projections, that figure will rise to about 41 per cent of GDP in just a few short years from now. And this is from the same Liberals who have the gall to declare that they're a party of fiscal responsibility. These are the same Liberals who shamelessly printed the Back in Black coffee mugs for their 2019 budget because it forecast an operating surplus—a surplus, of course, that was never going to be delivered and now will never be delivered. These are the same Liberals who have spent much of the past decade condemning Labor for the actions it took to protect our economy during the global financial crisis. Back then they demonised this means of spending as a debt and deficit disaster. Now the Treasurer says his $1 trillion in debt is sensible and manageable. We all know COVID has affected our economy—of course it has—but the hypocrisy of this Liberal-National coalition government is staggering and it's there for all to see in this latest budget.

The high level of government spending in this budget is so immense and yet it fails to be carefully targeted to ensure that as many Australians as possible can share in the benefits of the economic recovery. Unfortunately, that is just the case of this budget. What we have here is a budget of record deficit and massive borrowings yet hardly anything to show for it—no lasting social benefit, no long-term economic dividend for this nation, no vision to set Australia up for a sustainable recovery that will benefit future generations. Instead, we have a shameless political fix designed to get this government re-elected. After eight long years, there is nothing to show but a trillion dollars in debt.

The Liberals are pretending to care about the very issues they have deliberately ignored for the past eight long years. After disastrously neglecting the nation's broken aged-care system, the government is spending $17.7 billion on an aged-care package that doesn't even clear waiting lists or do the right thing by workers in the sector. After overseeing record increases in childcare fees for families, the government is now spending $1.7 billion on a plan that increases the complexity of the payment system and only provides extra support to one-quarter of the families that Labor's policy would do.

Another obvious problem with this budget is that the bevy of promises it contains is not worth the paper it's written on. Just look at last year's budget; the centrepiece of that document was the JobMaker scheme that promised 450,000 jobs. Instead it has created just 1,000 jobs, so that's a success rate of less than a quarter of one per cent. That's quite the KPI the government has set for itself—less than a quarter of one per cent success rate. We know this is a government that is all about the announcement but hopelessly inept at the delivery. We know only too well they're more interested in photo ops and marketing than actual substance.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of this extraordinarily bad budget is a complete failure to do anything about the wages of Australian workers. Under the Liberals, Australians have already endured eight years of flat wages. The fine print of this budget contains even worse news than that. It shows real wages will go backward over the next four years. That's right; the workers around this country who ensured our economy kept going during last year's COVID crisis, many of whom put their own health on the line, are being rewarded for their effort with a pay cut. This is from the same government that tried to cut workers' wages and conditions through their awful industrial relations bill. None of this is by accident. We know this for certain. The former Minister for Finance let the cat out of the bag a few years ago when he said low wages were 'a deliberate design feature' of the coalition economic policy. This is what Australian workers right around this country have to thank the Liberal-National coalition for: an economic policy that sets low wages as a deliberate design feature. That's a disgrace. It's no good for Australian workers and it's no good for the Australian economy.

Many government speakers on the appropriations bill are letting everyone know about the projects in their electorate. They can do that because the budget is yet another massive exercise in pork-barrelling that is leaving the people of Western Australia, and in particular the people of Brand, well behind. There is nothing in this budget for infrastructure projects in my electorate across the cities of Rockingham and Kwinana. There is nothing for the long-delayed Karnup train station which has been on the drawing board and planned for at least for 10 years and forms part of the McGowan Labor government's METRONET transport plan. The Karnup station is intended to service the residents of Baldivis, Secret Harbour, Golden Bay, Singleton and many others. It would take pressure off the Warnbro train station, which has been at capacity for years in its parking. The Liberals have refused to contribute one cent of federal funding to it. Instead the Morrison government decided to bankroll a train station and unplanned train station—an unplanned train station—at Lakelands as a favour to the member for Canning. This is just another example of blatant pork-barrelling and rorting that we see so often from the Liberals and shows no respect for the people of Brand.

Remember sports rorts? So many worthy sporting groups, including in my own electorate, missed out when the Prime Minister decided to hand out more than $100 million in taxpayer money to benefit Liberal electorates rather than those that actually deserved it. Remember safer seats rorts? That was when the Liberals were caught red-handed redirecting taxpayers' money into electorates the Prime Minister wanted to win at the 2019 election. In Rockingham, my home town, that meant the loss of $500,000 in funding for community safety that had already been allocated by experts for these projects. That money instead went to Liberal and marginal seats. I have repeatedly asked this government to help fund projects in Brand and I'll continue to advocate for my local community even if this Liberal government seems content to ignore them.

The people of the cities of Rockingham and Kwinana deserve a federal government that will support local employment and economic activity, but what we've seen and the track record proves is that the Liberals simply do not care about the people of Brand. They have not made an election commitment to the people of Brand since before 2016. It just proves that, when the Liberals come into government, they don't govern for the country; they govern only for their own, and that's shameful and disgusting. In fact, it's un-Australian.

It's obvious the Liberals don't care about the people of Brand. We have mounting evidence that they really don't care at all for the entire state of Western Australia. Look at last week's announcement from the Prime Minister that he will throw more than $2 billion to keep two east coast fuel refineries open. I honestly felt quite ill when I saw a photograph of the Prime Minister on the front page of the Australian Financial Review. There he was, all thumbs up and beaming for the cameras, standing alongside the workers of a Brisbane fuel refinery whose jobs he had saved. I'm grateful that those jobs were saved, but I want to contrast that with the Prime Minister's actions when BP announced last October that its Kwinana fuel refinery would shut down within months at a cost of more than 600 jobs. What did the Prime Minister do then? You can probably guess: he did absolutely nothing. Not a jot. He does not care about the livelihoods of those Kwinana workers and their families and he sure doesn't care about Western Australia's precarious fuel security.

We see his power. The member for Tangney, the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, has once again managed to squirrel away $1.2 billion for a road project that has been rejected not once but twice by the people of Western Australia. This government is willing to cling ideologically to rows 8 and 9. Why not help the BP workers that have now lost their jobs? Why not apply that $1.2 billion provision to the very real fuel security problem in Western Australia? Instead, you throw it at a road that's not going to exist and that never existed. It exists only in the member for Tangney's mind these days. It's been rejected by the people, but instead you keep that on your books for your own ideological nutcase ideas, and now it's all too late for the workers of the BP refinery in Kwinana. It's a stark reminder for me and for all Western Australians that we do not count in the government's political calculations.

We saw this last year when the government played politics with the pandemic. The Prime Minister and his former Attorney-General, of course, sided with Clive Palmer in a High Court challenge against Western Australia's border restrictions. This is Mr Palmer, the Queensland billionaire who has robbed workers of many of their entitlements and closed down the nickel refinery in Queensland. Of course the government and Palmer lost the case, but that didn't stop senior ministers in the Morrison government continuing to undermine the advice of Western Australia's Chief Health Officer and the actions of the McGowan government in keeping people safe.

The people of Western Australia will not forget that this government was fully prepared to put their health at risk to push an ideological goal. We still don't know what the Commonwealth's involvement in Mr Palmer's High Court challenge cost taxpayers; that figure is not contained in this year's budget. Whatever the cost, the whole affair was scandalous.

There is a number in the budget, however, that tells a similar story about the government's contempt for Western Australia. I mentioned it earlier. It's just incredible that the government can find that $1.2 billion for a road that isn't needed or wanted yet can't find a cent to help the workers of Kwinana and has refused to build a quarantine facility that is urgently needed to take the pressure off Perth's hotel quarantine system.

Of course, in April we all got a shock in WA—you would have too, Deputy Speaker Goodenough—when the Prime Minister actually visited WA for a few photo ops. He was shamed into making the flight across the Nullarbor after the media reported he hadn't been to WA in more than 18 months. To be fair to the PM, I fully understand why he's a bit nervous about showing his face in the western third, given the disgraceful way he has treated all Western Australians.

This month, of course, we had another surprise visitor to WA. The Minister for Resources, Water and Northern Australia, Keith Pitt, actually managed to head west for the first time since he was appointed to the role 15 months ago. That's right—it took the resources minister of the government of Australia 15 months to set foot in the Pilbara, the nation's most important resources export region, which is literally saving this nation's economy from the troubles and travails of the COVID-19 pandemic. The minister tried to blame the McGowan government's border policies for his sluggishness, ignoring the fact that many eastern state MPs, including, might I say, the Deputy Prime Minister, had managed to enter WA during this time. This is the kind of respect that the Prime Minister, the minister for resources and other Liberal government ministers have for Western Australia—that is, none at all.

There must be a better way for Australia than what is presented by this government. I believe that in this country we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to reinvent our economy, lift wages, invest in advanced manufacturing and in skills and training, provide affordable universal child care, fix our broken aged-care system, address the housing crisis and take advantage of the global shift to decarbonisation. As the Leader of the Australian Labor Party, Anthony Albanese, spelt out so well in his budget reply speech, this is all within our grasp. He announced that a Labor government would create a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to build social and affordable housing. This will create jobs, build homes and change lives and opportunities. Labor will invest $100 million to support 10,000 new energy apprenticeships. We will protect workers from exploitation and rip-offs by criminalising wage theft. Our Secure Australian Jobs Plan will deliver rights for gig economy workers through the Fair Work Commission. The plan will also tackle the gender pay gap by requiring companies with more than 250 employees to report publicly on this. We will make child care cheaper for 97 per cent of families in the system and remove the financial barriers that discourage women from working more hours. This is good for children; this is good for women; this is good for the economy. Labor will rebuild Australia's energy grid, using Australian expertise, steel and workers to deliver cheap, reliable and clean electricity. Our Power to the People policy will connect 100,000 homes to 400 community batteries around Australia, reducing power bills and emissions by making households less reliant on the electricity grid. And we will back the Uluru Statement from the Heart by providing a voice to parliament enshrined in the Constitution and a makarrata commission to examine our history since occupation and supervise a process of agreement-making with Australian governments.

This is a future I want for Australia, not one overseen by retrograde government with no ambition or imagination. Labor has a vision to fix Australia.

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