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

I withdraw. Eight long years and no economic plan. If you're an ordinary working Australian and you look at economic policy, the things that matter to you are the ability to put a roof over your head—a house you can call home—a steady job that gives you the ability to pay your bills, hope that your kids will get a good education and set them up for good jobs in the future, hope that the government gets the big calls right and puts the interests of Australians ahead of their own political interests, and hope that the government is going to put the country's interest first. But instead of all of that, we've got a government that has racked up record deficits and record debt with nothing to show for it.

At the very time the Prime Minister was congratulating himself about how well the economy was going, just a few short weeks ago, real wages in this country actually went backwards by two per cent. The Prime Minister was saying the economy was going gangbusters, but ordinary Australians were finding it harder to pay for the things that they need on a daily and weekly basis. There's a housing crisis. Parents around the country today are wondering whether their kids will ever be able to afford a house, put a roof over their head and call it their home. We've had a boom in insecure work. One in five jobs are now so insecure that people find it almost impossible to get access to credit or to even dream of a day when they'll be able to get a mortgage to buy their own home. We've seen a crash in productivity. The trade deals that this mob brag about are not worth the ink they are written with. The very moment when it matters the most, the very moment when we think these trade deals should matter, they fall apart, and this government thinks it's a great idea to go and pick a fight with our biggest trade partners.

This is the mob that call themselves great economic managers. They are abject failures. They are looking after themselves and not the people of Australia. They've put $4 billion in the last budget away in secret slush funds so they can repeat the travesties that Australians have been horrified by over the last few months. The Leppington Triangle—this mob who say they are so good with money spent $30 million on a parcel of land you could have picked up for $3 million. Tell me again how good you are at managing money! The sports rorts and the 'pork and ride'. At the time when we're looking for infrastructure projects that are going to set us up for the future, this mob's idea of nation-building infrastructure is six car parks in the Treasurer's own electorate, most of which will never get built.

They have no plan for the future. A government that was interested in ensuring that we were going to get out of this pandemic and out of this economic crisis in better shape than we went into it would have a plan for the future. But this Prime Minister's just got a plan for the next election.

We've got a skills crisis in this country, and we've got a productivity crisis in this country. If you want to set yourselves up for the future, what will drive the future is going to be investment in skills, investment in ideas and ensuring that we've got the energy to drive industry. But this mob over here are afraid of new ideas and they're afraid of the causes of new ideas. There is no other explanation for a government that in the middle of a pandemic, when we should be rebuilding and retraining, rips the guts out of our university system and rips the guts out of our vocational education and training system. Instead of training our kids, instead of ensuring that we are using this crisis as an opportunity to build the capital and ensure that our kids have the skills for the future, their big plan is to hope for the day when we can open the borders up again and bring in skilled tradespeople from overseas. Australians want this government to train our own kids, to ensure that they are fit for the jobs that are going to get us out of this pandemic and not be relying on the lazy pathway, divesting in our universities and divesting in our vocational education and training. This mob have no plan for the future.

The core message that this mob are going to take to the next election is that things were going very well until the pandemic came along. The fact is that they weren't. They had doubled the debt before the pandemic, and they have tripled it now. We saw business investment falling off a cliff, wages at a 10-year low and productivity going backwards, and the simple fact of the matter is that they've got no plan to get us out of this mess. Their core message at the next election is going to be: 'Trust us. Things were going well before COVID, and they'll go well somehow, magically, after COVID'!

We've seen enough of this lot. You can't trust the bloke who started the fire to put it out. That is the simple fact of the matter. You can't trust the bloke who started the fire to put it out. He won't hold a hose, and he's got no plan for the future.

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