Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator Ketter today relating to the economy.

The groundbreaking work that has been released today by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers shows very clearly that one in every five dollars of national income is produced by just 10 locations in the country out of some 2,214 nationally. Despite that, and despite Senator Ketter asking very clearly for Senator Brandis to respond to the fact that this demonstrates a definite inequality in our country and has led to a slowdown in economic growth in our country, Senator Brandis, as with many of the answers he gives in this place, instead tried to put his head in the sand and pretend everything is rosy. Everything is all right, despite all of the findings that have come out in this PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

Not only has PricewaterhouseCoopers identified that economic growth is coming from less than 0.5 per cent of our nation's landmass; on top of that, we have had the report of the Australian Council of Social Service today, which clearly shows that inequality in this country is higher than the OECD average, and particularly that it is higher in many of the regions. We know from this report that there are certain parts of this country where one-third of Australians are in recession.

Despite Senator Ketter asking Senator Brandis to address the very specific question which comes out of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, what we got from Senator Brandis was some diatribe about building approvals being higher and that we have the fastest economic growth rate. We know very clearly that our economic growth has slowed. Senator Brandis knows our economic growth has slowed. The annual growth rate in this country has in fact declined from some three per cent in the year to March last year to only 2.3 per cent now. We also know that Australian incomes are down—including, of course, the incomes of cleaners in this place. This government is cutting the wages of cleaners who clean our Parliament House offices. We know that business confidence is down, that consumer confidence is down and that wages growth has slumped, while unemployment is up.

Despite all of that and despite the findings of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Senator Brandis very clearly chose to put his head in the sand and pluck out a few positive stats that he found in his notes as a means of trying somehow to discredit the findings of this very important, groundbreaking report. Two important reports have been released, by PricewaterhouseCoopers and ACOSS, and both of them point to the same outcome, and that is a growing inequality in this country—a growing inequality that this government does not seem to want to do anything about.

Unlike the government, Labor have a plan to address growing inequality, because we believe in lifting people out of poverty and ensuring that we live in a society that is based on the principle of equality. That is why our leader, Bill Shorten, in his budget reply speech, promised to invest in nation-building infrastructure. We know if we invest in nation-building infrastructure, especially in our regions, in our cities, in those areas of disadvantage, those issues of economic decline can be addressed, those issues that the PricewaterhouseCoopers report and the ACOSS report specifically refer to. They are areas that are the biggest losers, such as Nanango in Queensland and the La Trobe Valley in Victoria, which ranked very badly in their report. We can help in their transition to a clean-energy future.

These are the kinds of forward-thinking ideas that a government should be looking at. It is these kinds of reports—the PricewaterhouseCoopers and ACOSS reports—that the government should be scrutinising, looking at in detail, and making policy recommendations to its cabinet to ensure it addresses it—that is if it believes in a country where everyone gets to share in the wealth and profits of it not just those few at the top who are identified in these reports. That is shameful of this government. (Time expired)