Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications and Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

After eight long years of the coalition government, Australians would be entitled to look back and ask, 'What was the point of that?' This budget sets Australia on course for $1 trillion in Commonwealth debt—$1 trillion of Liberal debt—but for all that spending what will we have to show? This budget spent plenty of money on the Morrison government's political problems, but go out into the street, grab a random passer-by and ask them what they have gotten—what the nation has gotten—out of that trillion dollars of Liberal debt, and they'll come up blank.

When Labor was in power during the global financial crisis, the Rudd government invested in stimulus to support the economy through an external shock, but it did so in a way that left a lasting legacy. It left a legacy of upgraded fibre-to-the-home broadband infrastructure. It left a legacy of city-shaping transport infrastructure projects, like the regional rail link project in my electorate of Gellibrand—new train stations and new train lines easing the commute of my constituents. It left a legacy of investment in school infrastructure. Despite the confected nonsense of those opposite and their conservative media enablers, even today you can go to any school in Australia, ask them about Building the Education Revolution, paid by the Rudd government, and they'll proudly show you the new school building, multipurpose room or classrooms that were built with this funding. We made those investments because we had a vision for Australia's future—a vision for a better education system, a vision for how to improve our major cities, a vision for how government could provide the infrastructure needed to create new growth opportunities for the Australian economy. But, 10 years after this budget, you won't be able to point to any enduring legacy from the trillion dollars of Liberal debt in this budget.

A budget should set out a government's vision for the future of a country, but what we see in the Morrison government is a government that has no plan for the future of the nation, just a short-term plan to get itself re-elected. Where there should be a vision for the nation, at the top of this government all there is is a media strategy developed by a marketing guy. Take what is seemingly the only investment flagged in the budget for my electorate in Melbourne's west. While the Morrison government's prebudget media drop spruiked a multibillion dollar investment in the Western Interstate Freight Terminal in Truganina on the front page of the HeraldSun, the budget papers revealed zero dollars for this project in each of the four years of the forward estimates. It was just more smirk and mirrors. And that's all that will be left at the end of the Morrison government: an archive of quickly forgotten media announcements and news clippings. Even today, looking back through the three years of the Morrison government's media announcements, it's like sifting through a childhood toy box filled with ephemeral marketing fads, like Tazos or Pogs or Beanie Babies. Morrison government media announcements are triumphs of marketing over substance. There's a new three-word slogan every other week, a new dress-up opportunity at a photo op, a new gimmick that's forgotten before it comes time to deliver. Nothing this Prime Minister does is meant to last. All he's interested in doing is catching the public's attention with something new long enough for a new fad to be developed to take its place. He has to do this because he's not a real leader. There's no 'there' there with him; there's no substance. He doesn't have the skills or capability to actually deliver anything, so he has to keep changing the subject. He's like a travelling snake oil salesman, pulling up stumps and moving on to the next town before people realise that the miracle tonic is actually bunk, or like the guy on the beach in Bali selling 'genuine' Rolexes at a knockdown price and promising that he'll send the warranty in the mail when you get home from your holiday.

Just look at the Prime Minister's performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. He's gotten all the big calls wrong and been on every side of every issue in the process. Let's do what the Prime Minister hates the most and check the record. When the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off and lockdowns and health restrictions threatened millions of jobs, Labor called for wage subsidies to support Australian businesses and workers, to save jobs. The Prime Minister called this 'a dangerous idea' and opposed it—for a fortnight, until the queues formed in front of Centrelink and he was forced to work up another slogan.

The Prime Minister then told Eddie McGuire and Triple M radio: 'We've just got to understand that we've got to live with the virus. The idea that you just shut down everything and put all the borders up, that is no way to live with this. It is not sustainable.' Twelve months later, in this budget, the Treasurer told the House, 'You've just got to understand that suppressing the virus, not living with it, is the key to the government's economic strategy.' It was full backflip. In this Triple M interview last year, the Prime Minister bagged the states for closing borders and for implementing health measures to protect Australian lives. But today the Prime Minister has a new talking point and is bragging about the number of lives saved in Australia relative to other countries.

In that Triple M interview of months ago, he said: 'Eddie, I can't stress it enough. The COVIDSafe app, that's how you live with the virus.' The COVIDSafe app—do you remember that? That's a blast from the past. Years in the future someone will come across an old phone, switch it on and see the COVIDSafe app and get a nostalgia hit—'Oh, yes. I remember that, but I don't really remember what the point of it was. I don't know remember when I stopped using it. But I remember it was a thing that was around for five minutes.' The COVIDSafe app was the Prime Minister's favourite gimmick for a few months in 2020. He spruiked it on 70 separate occasions. He told Australians that it would be our 'sunscreen' against COVID-19, that it would be our 'ticket out of restrictions'. Of course, like everything this Prime Minister announces, he bungled the delivery and now he barely mentions it. I don't think he's ever mentioned it in the last six months. The COVIDSafe app identified just 17 unique close contacts during the height of the pandemic. Despite the Prime Minister's marketing puffery, it comprehensively failed Victorians and failed to prevent a second lockdown.

This week we heard that, in total, the app has identified 567 unique close contacts, on a bit of a different statistical definition, out of 30,000 cases. I've spoken to doctors who have worked on the frontlines of our hospitals in Victoria treating COVID patients who never registered a contact on the COVIDSafe app. You could see the Prime Minister's priorities for the COVIDSafe app before it even launched—$5.8 million to develop and $7 million to sell it to the public. After all that, it is worth about as much to Australians as a shoebox full of pogs, except you wouldn't have to keep paying ongoing $100,000 per month hosting bills for the privilege of owning a shoebox full of pogs.

When it comes to things that actually would have protected Australians from COVID-19—vaccines—the Prime Minister's hype-over-substance MO prevailed yet again. The Prime Minister really thought that he was on to a good thing with the marketing for the vaccine rollout. He thought he was going to ride this all the way through to the next election. You know this because he even put the Liberal Party logo on their vaccine announcement. Even the COVIDSafe app didn't get that kind of treatment. But when the questions started to arise about how many different vaccine supply contracts the government had secured in those critical weeks of August 2020 the Prime Minister didn't reply on the substance; he replied by upping the rhetoric. He foolishly and mendaciously told the Australian public that we were at the front of the queue for vaccines. Of course, we weren't even close to being at the front of the queue, and Victorians are now paying the price. We are 101st in the world for percentage of people vaccinated, just behind Uzbekistan. New Zealand is 77th, the UK is 10th and the US is seventh. President Biden announced today that 50 per cent of Americans are fully vaccinated. As of today, less than two per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated.

The Morrison government haven't been able to keep up with their own rollout targets. Originally they said we were going to be fully vaccinated by October. There should have been around 14 million people vaccinated under that target by now. But they bungled that and they realised they couldn't do it, so they moved the goalposts in March. They were going to have six million vaccinations administered by earlier this month, but they couldn't even manage that and they have had to move the goalposts again and now it's around 12 million by October. We're at just 3.8 million now. On current trends, we'll have just four million vaccinated by October. Again, we're being left behind by the Morrison government. Most recently, we have seen him strike upon vaccine passports. On the weekend, they were the Prime Minister's hot new thing, but by Monday they were definitely not. The idea got a bit too difficult and it became time for him to move on once again.

After eight long years of coalition government, after $1 trillion of Liberal debt, we are now in the shadows of another federal election. At this federal election, those opposite will be asking the Australian public to put them in power potentially for 12 years, longer than the Howard government. Yet this Prime Minister still does not have an agenda. He still doesn't have a vision or a plan for the nation. So he's put on his marketing cap once again, assembled the focus groups and got the consultants in to find the political issue that he can take to the next election. What have they landed on? Beating the drums of war with China. It gives me no pleasure to say that such a serious issue is being used in this way. But there is no issue that is too serious not to be exploited for base, short-term politics by this Prime Minister. There is no national interest that he will not subvert for his own domestic political interest.

There are big issues at stake for Australia in its relationship with China. It's something that I, myself, as a member of parliament—and I know many of my colleagues in this place—spend a lot of time thinking very seriously about and working through. The relationship has become far more complex and consequential as China itself has changed under the leadership of President Xi. Both our national sovereignty and the equal dignity of a million Australian citizens of Chinese ancestry are challenged by this new environment. The stakes could not be higher. In this context, our strategic policy and our economic policy demand a steady hand. They require our leaders to eschew short-term political interests and to focus on the long-term national interest. But this Prime Minister is too small for that. He's willing to take the most serious issue imaginable and weaponise it for partisan advantage in the most volatile of environments—an election campaign. Playing with fire does not begin to describe the irresponsibility. No previous Prime Minister would have subverted the national interest in favour of their own short-term political interests on an issue of this gravity.

Of course, this Prime Minister is so lacking in substance that he can't even do this competently. He shows no interest in seeking to understand the issues in our relationship with China or the history that underpins it. Indeed, early on in his leadership, he described our relationship to China as being one of a customer and a supplier. What a trivial farce. More recently, he incorrectly claimed Beijing's preference regarding Taiwan, 'one country, two systems', as Australia's. He then doubled down and covered up this mistake, this basic, fundamental mistake, with dissembling when he was called out on it, not by the Labor Party but by the foreign policy establishment, by geostrategic experts, by people who take this issue seriously. He talks up the Quad with the United States, Japan and India as the most important development for Australia's security in 70 years and then he trashes our relationship with India by threatening Australians seeking to return home from the COVID calamity in that country with jail terms. What are people in India supposed to make of that?

There are long-term challenges facing our nation that will matter after this pandemic is finished. Our leaders should be rising to meet them. Our focus should be on the long-term national interest, on the kind of nation that we want to live in after the pandemic, on the kind of nation that we want to build for after the pandemic. Automation threatens our existing manufacturing industries. Climate change threatens the future of our agricultural and tourism sectors. We need leaders who will meet these challenges. Yet, at every turn, the Prime Minister bungles the important decisions in pursuit of short-term political opportunity. He has no solutions, just marketing slogans and political strategies.

Australians have been magnificent during this pandemic. Indeed, Victorians are being called on to be magnificent once again as we speak in this chamber. And they rally. They get tested, they get vaccinated and they socially distance. They sacrifice for each other so that we get through this challenge together. Australians' efforts and sacrifices deserve a government with a vision for the future of the nation that is worthy of these efforts and sacrifices. They deserve a government that's on their side. In the budget reply this year, they saw one—an Albanese opposition that puts climate change and building a new jobs industry, through our response to climate change, at the heart of government; an Albanese government that recognises the housing crisis facing our nation, all the way through from people fleeing domestic violence to people suffering homelessness, to young families trying to get onto the housing ladder, and that responds through government leadership; an Albanese government that's on the side of Australians. That's what the Australian public is entitled to after the COVID-19 pandemic. That's what will be a question at the next federal election, and that's the choice that those of us on this side of the chamber will be offering to Australians when they go to the ballot box sometime in the next six months.

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