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

Liberal Party members love to talk on occasion of the forgotten people, echoing Menzies's famous phrase. I want to record a few words on who I think are the real forgotten people—the nearly 200,000 people in south-east Melbourne who have been overlooked and left behind by this government as it drifts pointlessly into its eighth year in power. For these people I represent the Morrison recession will be deeper, longer, harder, harsher and darker than it should be, because of the deliberate decisions of this Prime Minister and the government. They're obsessed with spinning and announcements. He loves announcing things. Every day there's a new announcement. Sometimes he is announcing things he had already announced but didn't actually do. But they're blinded by 40 years of failed conservative ideology, and we see it in this budget and in his behaviour during the pandemic. Because of the Prime Minister's failures and decisions, we didn't see a wage subsidy when it should have been put into place, and many tens of thousands of Australians lost their job who shouldn't have. We see criminal neglect of aged care and their pathetic efforts to blame everything on the Victorian government. No doubt there was a serious failure there in the quarantine, but it's criminal neglect when you ignore what the reports are telling you for months and you're responsible for aged care. There is no paid pandemic leave. There is waste and gaps with JobKeeper, which deliberately excludes public universities, childcare workers, who have been kicked off, casual workers, local government workers and people in the arts. There are people in my electorate, the most disadvantaged part of Melbourne, a city of five million people, who cannot get emergency relief. The government says, 'We gave $200 million to four big outfits.' Well, it doesn't land on the ground in the most disadvantaged suburbs. They're not there. You're telling people they have to catch a bus, in a pandemic, because you refuse to fund the little $2,000 vouchers for places like the Doveton Neighbourhood Learning Centre, a place where people can actually get to to get food.

Unbelievably, in the budget they're running up $1.7 trillion of gross debt, which still is not going to create the jobs that Australia needs. That is $1.7 trillion of gross debt and nothing to show for it. They are an incompetent bunch of bandits. By Christmas there will be another 160,000 Australians unemployed. Even they admit it. Even in their forecasts, unemployment won't return to where it was, even on their dodgy assumptions, for four years. There are 928,000 Australians over 35 years of age excluded now from the hiring subsidies under this mob. The people I represent look on with fear about what's coming down the pipe from this government. Unemployment benefits are going to be cut to $40 a day, pushing hundreds of thousands of Australians into abject poverty again. There are cuts to JobKeeper, with no plan for jobs or the recovery, just a fantasy that things will snap back if only we give out some tax cuts. They miss the other part of the equation: government has a role in creating jobs. They should be funding social housing, picking up Labor's policy on child care and getting women into the workforce, actually doing things to create jobs instead of cutting super, cutting wages and making things harder.