Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can see why Christopher Pyne sent Mr James Stevens here as the member for Sturt. We do miss Christopher Pyne every time he gets up. What the Prime Minister has done to my home state of Victoria and our biggest state of New South Wales can never be forgiven or forgotten, as the Prime Minister's desperately hoping. The lockdowns are on him, the fake who sits over there in the Prime Minister's chair. He let this disease into our country before our population was vaccinated, because he failed to build quarantine. That's the hard truth of it. His failure to manage COVID-19 is not just a health crisis—or, now, a mental health crisis—engulfing the eastern seaboard; it's an economic disaster. Australia's economy is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars every day and billions of dollars every week. Now tens of billions of dollars of extra debt has been added to the debt that the next generation will have to repay. That is paying economic support that we would not have had to pay if this bloke had done his two jobs. The economy is now held hostage, frankly. Families are being kept apart across the country, people are out of work and small businesses are failing from a lack of support, because the Prime Minister failed to do his two jobs: build quarantine and get enough vaccines.

Today, we learned the government is trumpeting, 'We have economic growth at 0.7 per cent.' They think that's a good result! Have a look at the United Kingdom, which is properly vaccinated. They have growth of four per cent. We've got fewer jobs, lower pay, higher debt and now the risk of another recession. The government's failures have diminished the hard-won gains and the sacrifice made by millions of Australians, including those in my home state of Victoria. Last year Australians did their bit, but their government has let them down and failed them. Now we have the gaslighting champion of the world. The Prime Minister's going for that title. He's telling us he's for freedom. Move over, freedom boy over there; we've now got freedom daddy coming at you. He's hoping that Australians will forget that he's the reason they're in lockdown. He's the reason we're facing the risk of another recession. As has been said, it's like getting the arsonist who lit the fire to come and try to put out the fire.

Even before the pandemic Australia's economy was weak. The government's also hoping that Australians just forget this. In the eight years that this government has been in office, real wages have been lower than when they were elected. Australian workers are taking home less pay in real terms than eight years ago when this mob were elected. Real wages fell by 0.7 per cent between 2013 and 2019, before the pandemic even hit. The Prime Minister can't blame COVID for this. This is the result of his failed economic management. Economic productivity has declined after eight years of the Liberals. Household debt is up. Housing affordability is stuffed. We have the third-highest household debt in the world. A housing bubble is emerging, it seems. Inequality is worse. We have a trillion dollars of Liberal debt now, with nothing much to show for it. They've spent $100 billion of new money in this budget and they spent $100 billion of new money last year in the last budget, yet their projections are that real wages will continue to go backwards.

They are not managing the economy in the interests of small business or ordinary workers. But we could ask: who is actually benefiting? The answer's pretty clear. It's big, profitable companies. From the biggest rip-off in the history of Australian public administration, $13 billion of JobKeeper was wasted. It was paid to firms whose revenues were rising. The wage subsidy is good. It was Labor's idea. It was to save jobs, not to pay executive bonuses or increase profits for big companies. As Peter Strong, the former CEO of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, said, it's pretty close to theft. The government has turned the Australian Treasury into a giant ATM where big business back up the truck—probably in the dead of night with the Treasurer there—shovel the cash into the back of the truck and drive off. It's like a money-laundering scam, because this is not money the government had in the bank; this is money that they're borrowing—billions every week—for the next generation to repay. Meanwhile, they're paying it to businesses now to increase their profits and pay executive bonuses. Big business couldn't believe it, could they? They thought they'd won the lottery. They thought, 'Who would be so stupid and so incompetent as to pay us to increase our profits and not create jobs?' The Morrison government. That's the answer.

As I said, it is the biggest single rip-off in the history of Australia. It's no wonder the government is desperate to keep the list of companies who got JobKeeper a secret. Citizens in every other country know who got the wage subsidies, but not in Australia. I wonder how many of them donated to the Liberal Party? That's a topic yet to be explored.

See this speech in context