Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

It is absolutely galling to stand in this chamber and suffer through the hypocrisy of the Liberals opposite talking about productivity in our economy. Australians are suffering from flat productivity—flat productivity that was flat for the whole decade they were in government. They never had a reason to speak about productivity while it was flat for the decade that they were in government. In fact, under the former Liberal government, productivity growth was the slowest in 60 years. They oversaw an economy with the slowest productivity growth in more than half a century. Now they come rushing in here to attack various members of the executive, to make ludicrous claims about who's briefed who or who's chatted to who has some detrimental impact on the government's policy around economic growth and productivity investment. The reality is that we know there is a lot of work to be done. When the Liberals attack our economy and our supply chains and degrade our labour market over a decade, it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to repair. The budget measures that we've put in place, and they have been referred to by others in the chambers, are the first steps to working through that decade of neglect and degradation overseen by the Liberals.

We all agree that our economy needs productivity growth. It's a key driver of living-standard improvement across any economy. But we differ in our views about what that productivity improvement looks like and how it might be achieved. What we understand, about the Liberal Party's views on productivity growth, is that it is not at all real productivity growth. It's false. It's fake productivity growth. The only plan the Liberals ever have, to deliver this fake productivity growth, is by smashing the pay, the wages, of working Australians. They're never looking for efficiencies in productivity. They're never looking to grow the overall pie. They simply play tricks around industrial relations. They like to move the money out of the worker's pocket and put it into the profit margins of the businesses they seek to represent through this advocacy.

That's why we saw a decade of negative real wage growth under the Liberals as well. Not only did we see flat productivity for a decade but, even with their penny-pinching from workers, we saw a decade of negative real wage growth. But it wasn't an accident that Australians' wages went backwards for the last 10 years under the Liberals. As incompetent economic managers—as the modern Liberal Party are, and they make that clear on a daily basis for us—we know because they told us. They said that negative real wage growth was a deliberate design feature of their economy. They were their words: 'deliberate design feature'.

The former Liberal government's approach to workers in our country was to actively pay them less and less, in order to keep that government's poorly designed economy afloat. And Australians are suffering for that now. Our supply chain issues have come home to roost. By that, I'm speaking about the decade of degradation in our supply chains. We can go as far back as the Liberals closing the car industry to understand their ideological position on making things here in Australia. We've seen the war in Ukraine, the hangover from COVID and the effect on our ability to get the goods and services that we need in the international market at fair and reasonable prices.

The combination of rising prices through inflation and, of course, low wages growth over the last decade has meant that Australians are more under the pump in their household budgets than they have ever been before. We need only look at words the former Liberal government espoused themselves. This was a deliberate design feature of their economy. Our economy does need productivity, but the productivity gains must not be at the expense of one side or the other, workers or business; they must benefit our economy overall.

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