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

There were two tests that the government was expected to meet when it set out its plan for the future in its budget speech a fortnight ago. The first was a plan for vaccination, because we all know there will be no recovery, whether it be economic or health, unless we get the vaccination rollout sorted. It's so far off track at the moment it's not funny. Before coming in here I tried to get myself enlisted for a vaccination—and this is not about me; it's just an example. I fit within the category, I'm eligible, but 25 June was the earliest I could get a vaccination. I live in a large regional centre. I can only imagine the struggle people have in accessing a vaccination urgently if they're living in regional or remote Australia or in a vulnerable community.

If you want an example of why this matters, Mr Deputy Speaker, look at what's going on in Victoria today. There is a heightened degree of anxiety and concern because of the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread from a quarantine facility, out of South Australia, into the Melbourne community. We hope and pray that it's contained, but the fear and apprehension that it may not be contained is having significant flow-on health and economic impacts. People will be reluctant to make holiday plans. People will be reluctant to make business plans. People will be reluctant to make restaurant bookings. Businesses will be reluctant to bring people together for important conversations. Families will be reluctant to get people together for family gatherings.

This underscores the importance of us getting the vaccine strategy right and it puts a spotlight on the abject failure of the Morrison government to use the budget speech, a speech which sets out the priorities for the next 12 months and beyond, to say: 'This is our target. This is our strategy.' An opportunity for clear communication to the Australian people was there for the taking, but the bloke who doesn't hold a hose also wasn't going to provide the people of Australia with a clear plan for how we get out of this horrible mess that we're in. It's not too late to turn this around, and shortly I will make some suggestions about how that can be done.

The other big missed opportunity in the budget was a clear economic plan for the future. When you listen to the Prime Minister, you get a sense of a bloke who thinks the best part of the journey is the part of the journey you can see through the rear-view mirror. All the good stuff that's gone on is the stuff that's behind us, and the vision for the future simply isn't there. You can see it in his language about a snapback or about returning to how great things were before the pandemic. Look, this is a great country. I'm a proud citizen of this country and a proud representative of my district and there's so much to love about Australia. But we're kidding ourselves if we say everything was perfect before March 2020, because it certainly wasn't. There were high levels of insecure work and casualisation. Wages were frozen in place for over a decade. Business investment was falling off a cliff. Productivity had been flat in this country for over five years, and there was nothing coming from the government to turn it around. We thought the Prime Minister's address to the nation a fortnight ago was going to draw a line in the sand and say, 'This is the way forward,' but instead we heard crickets. There was nothing there. It was a vision to get to the next election but not a vision for the people of Australia. It was a vision for the Prime Minister's political fortunes but not a vision for the future of the Australian people.

Thankfully, two days later we saw an alternative vision set out by Anthony Albanese—a vision for Australia built on building more things in Australia and rebuilding our manufacturing industry. We've set out a plan to rebuild train manufacturing in this country. It's crazy that we are ordering a whole heap of new rolling stock in this country but we're importing it from overseas when we have the skills here in Australia. But we see a lack of imagination and of a plan for pulling it together, and Anthony Albanese has said that he's going to deliver that plan and that imagination.

It's obviously not just about trains. It's about saying, 'Why can't be we build electric vehicles in this country?' It was Joe Hockey who chased the car industry offshore. We want to bring it back onshore. We want to ensure that this is a country that can build cars again. We have the know-how. We have the raw materials. Every single component that goes into the batteries that drive the cars of the future is dug out of the ground in Australia, but we export it out of the country in an unimproved form. We think we are so much better than that as a country. Let's have some vision. Let's have a plan. Let's have some energy. Let's build batteries and the cars that go around those batteries, because we are a smart nation if we are led by smart people with the vision to do that.

At the moment, if you pick up a newspaper in any town in the country on a Friday or a Sunday, you'll see stories about house prices going through the roof. On every Saturday afternoon through the country, there are young couples returning from housing auctions with their hearts broken and their dream of getting a home absolutely smashed, because they are seeing the prices demanded at those auctions rise to 10, 20, 30 or sometimes 100 per cent above the advertised indicative price. The smallest of hovels are selling for the most extraordinary amounts of money in our capital cities, and it's not confined to the capital cities. I was talking to a young man from my electorate a couple of days ago. The house that he made a bid on was sold for over $80,000 above the reserve price. He didn't have a hope.

So that's why Labor has a plan for housing and ensuring we get a roof over every head. We want to break the cycle of homelessness and the disadvantage that that creates, with 30,000 new houses, 10,000 of them reserved for frontline workers and families fleeing domestic violence. That's a vision for housing and a vision for the country, and there'll be more to come, because every single policy that this government has put out there has made the problem worse, not better. If some of the rebels and clowns on the government's back benches get their way, housing prices will double, pushing the price of housing even further beyond the reach of people attempting to get into the housing market.

Labor outlined a vision for apprentices. It is a tragedy that we have fewer apprentices enrolled in a course of training today than we did in 2013. If you're wondering why you can't get a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter out to do a home renovation or to fix the faulty taps or to sort out the lights, it's because we're not training them. If we aren't training them, we won't have enough electricians. We don't have enough tradespeople in this country. It means the prices are going through the roof for the simplest of projects, and it means we are denying young Australians who want to get a start the opportunity to do that. That's why we are focusing on our electrical and new energy apprenticeships. But it won't stop there. There'll be more because we believe in giving a young kid a start. Immigration has always been a part of the national vision in this country. One in four people in my electorate came from another country—a good cross-section of the Australian community—but, if we are saying that the solution to our skills crisis is to import skilled tradespeople from other countries instead of training them here ourselves, we are falling so far short of what we can do as a country and we are denying young Australians their opportunity to get a start in a great career or a great business and make a great future for themselves. We can be so much better, and we have a plan to make that happen.

I want to take the opportunity to say a few things about some local issues that we were hoping would attract funding within the budget and didn't. We were told that this budget was going to be a women's budget, and I was excited about that, frankly. I didn't care whether it was a Labor budget or a Liberal budget—a women's budget that was going to fix some of the endemic issues facing women struggling in my community. Fantastic! I was eager to hear of funding being granted to a project that has obtained bipartisan support at the state level and at the federal level. I'm talking, of course, about the Illawarra Women's Health Centre and a proposal for a trauma recovery centre for women and girls and families fleeing domestic violence in the Illawarra. It's an Illawarra led initiative of national significance because it will provide a pilot and it will test a model that can be rolled out throughout the country. It simply must be funded. The numbers speak for themselves. The New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research showed that, in the five years to December 2020, there was a 15 per cent increase in reported sexual assaults and a 7.7 per cent increase in other sexual offences in the Wollongong region. This is the reported number; of course, we know that so much of this, tragically, goes unreported. We want to stop this; we want to nip this in the bud. We want to ensure that we are not adding to those statistics, but it would be negligent of us and reckless of us if we thought for a moment that the problem was going to go away overnight. Hospitalisations due to domestic violence have risen by 30 per cent in the last decade. Right now a woman is hospitalised ever two hours in Australia.

The problem is that the services just aren't there, and the Commonwealth has a role to play in this. Did you know that, in the budget that was supposed to be a women's budget, the government has set up a system where it's a lot easier to get the funds for a building. So you can fund a building through a Commonwealth government program, but you can't open that building because there are no funds available for the staff. What is the point of a building if nobody works in it? So we are calling upon the Morrison government to listen to their own side, listen to our side, and listen to the experts. Yes, it's great that we are funding buildings, but we need the staff to operate those buildings, otherwise the lights will be left off. So we want to see the Commonwealth take up the offer. I have written to the Prime Minister, and I'm thankful that he responded to our correspondence. I have written to the Prime Minister and I said: 'I want to bring a delegation from the proponents from the Illawarra to speak to you so you can hear firsthand about their proposal, the problems that they're facing, the fact that buildings without staff is as good as doing nothing.' It's proposition for the Prime Minister to put his stamp on a proposal, which would be great for the Illawarra, but also great for the nation, setting a pilot and an example of how we deal with this terrible scourge of domestic violence by providing women, girls and their families with a pathway out of a desperate situation. Surely as a nation we're good enough to deal with this.

I have spoken at great length about the vaccine rollout. It's a complete and utter debacle. I want to say a few words about quarantine. I want to make this point: hotels aren't hospitals. Hotels aren't quarantine stations. It strikes me as quite strange that if you wanted to bring a cow or a horse or a dog or a cat into this country it would have to go into a Commonwealth controlled and operated quarantine centre. But if you're a person trying to enter or re-enter this country at the moment we put you up in a hotel and we think that's secure enough and that's good enough. Why do we keep treating livestock differently and in many respects better? The Commonwealth is taking greater responsibility for livestock than it is for people. It's extraordinary. The Prime Minister runs around and says, 'Not my responsibility. Get that hose away from me. Quarantine is not my responsibility.' Right now we are treating livestock with more care and responsibility. We think the biological threat presented by livestock is more important than the biological concerns, the health concerns and the public health concerns of people. It's extraordinary.

There is not one cent in this budget to turn this around and that is a diabolical situation, because it is naive of us to think that this is a problem that is going to go away in a few months time. It simply is not. All the health advice that is coming through is saying: 'We've got to get the vaccine rollout done. We got to get high proportions of the population sorted. We're going to have to get on top this quarantine thing and this vaccine rollout because this is probably not be the last round'. Whether it's a variant of COVID-19 or whether it's another mass health event, we have got to develop our competency of this. We have of the infrastructure and the capacity. This is not a one-off event. It's extraordinary that within this budget you can spend $100 billion of new spending—a trillion dollars worth of debt—but not one cent to fix a problem that is a Commonwealth responsibility. It's extraordinary that we have a situation where we're treating livestock better than we are people. It's untenable.

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