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

Look, we all know that the shadow Treasurer is not a real-economics details guy. He never has been. He's a big picture kind of guy. He made his name that way. Who could forget when he walked in here and he'd been on the phone to his stockbroker or something. I think he'd been trying to check the price of spread. He meant interest spread, but, of course, they gave him the vegemite price! He didn't quite get it right. He misheard, he misremembered and he misreported it. He brought in the annual price and tried to claim to the Australian people that it was the monthly price. Of course, it was entirely incorrect and entirely misleading. Again, I think that sums up the quality of advice and contribution that the shadow Treasurer regularly makes in this place. I doubt he's a vegemite guy. He wouldn't have bought a jar of vegemite recently. I'm not sure exactly what the shadow Treasurer puts on his toast before he goes out for his game of polo or whatever it is he does on the weekends. It's probably a rich cod roe or something like that—

I think, Member for Groom. It would be something along those lines, I suspect.

There's absolutely no doubt—and those of us on this side of the House aren't in any doubt—that Australians are doing it very, very tough out there. The challenges in terms of cost of living are very real. Indeed, it's many of the electorates represented by those on this side of the House that feel that most acutely, including mine. My electorate has one of the highest rates of mortgage home ownership in the country, the fastest growing community with the greatest of infrastructure pressures and the biggest challenges in terms of jobs and job security. So we, on this side of the House, are acutely aware of those challenges. Every day we have a laser-like focus on facing and addressing those challenges and on supporting our communities and the Australian people to deal with those household economic challenges.

The data that was released by the OECD has been well and truly fudged by those opposite. I'm not accusing them of dishonesty but more of incompetency on this particular front. The information that was released by the OECD is about inflation-adjusted disposable income. The most important factor—the shadow Treasurer didn't mention this once—in calculating inflation-adjusted disposable income is wages. Wages are the most important factor when calculating any kind of household income.

Australians suffered a decade of the Liberals opposite pursuing an irresponsible and ideologically flawed approach to suppressing the wages of Australian workers. They haven't been dishonest about that either. They've been upfront. They were very clear that it was part of their economic plan to suppress the wages of Australian workers.

During the pandemic, we did see a rapid rise in this particular inflation-adjusted disposable income category. To answer the former speaker on why Australia is now seeing the greatest correction in that, it's because we did have a very large inflation-adjusted disposable income growth through COVID because of JobKeeper. But at the same time that we were seeing JobKeeper rolled out—and, indeed, a whole bunch of large corporations and large businesses in Australia enjoyed government support at taxpayer cost—we saw those same businesses retrenching and sacking workers. Qantas sacked 1,700 workers illegally. They then fought those workers all the way through the courts. The Supreme Court found it was illegal. Qantas then took it to appeal in the Supreme Court. The decision was upheld on appeal. They then took it to the High Court. The High Court found that Qantas had acted illegally.

What we have now is an economy that has been left booby trapped by those opposite. We have a trillion dollars of Liberal debt. We had a decade of deliberate wage suppression. They smashed our supply chains and they've left our manufacturing sector in ruins. Our government is getting on with the task of addressing these issues. We have wages moving and we will rebuild our manufacturing sectors and supply chains accordingly.

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