Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back in April, Prime Minister Turnbull told us that the nation was facing an issue so important, so serious and so dire that he had to throw normal electoral timetables out of the window. He stamped his feet because the Senate would not bow down and then questionably passed his regressive legislation to restore the draconian and fundamentally undemocratic Australian Building and Construction Commission. In the past three years, I have received tens of thousands of pieces of correspondence calling for change on hundreds of federal issues. But, in all this time, I have not received a single one from a constituent calling for the reinstatement of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. I am sure this experience would be the same in parliamentary offices around the country.

Despite this, Mr Turnbull told us that the issue was so pressing that the only option would be to drag the country to the first double dissolution election we have had in this country in more than three decades. But then the Prime Minister went on to spend the marathon eight-week election campaign barely mentioning the ABCC—a bill that, such a short time ago, was the most urgent issue facing the nation. Of course, we all know that there is a very good reason for this, and it is not just that most Australians would be hard pressed to say what the ABCC is, let alone baying for its return. The reality is that the ABCC was nothing but a smokescreen to cover up the Prime Minister's desperate attempt to out-run the falling party polls and his own plummeting personal ratings.

Knowing that Australians were wising up to the fact that his soothing progressive words are in direct opposition to the repressive, regressive agenda run by his government, Mr Turnbull decided to cut and run to a double-D. So, thinking of nothing but saving his own job, Mr Turnbull subjected the country to the longest election in more than half a century. The government went to the Australian people at the 2016 election with a threadbare policy agenda that was composed almost entirely of toxic policy strands from the former Abbott government.

Despite the Prime Minister's dulcet crooning about fairness, innovation, inclusion and the excitement of being a modern Australian, the vast bulk of his election policies were directly transplanted from the vicious and regressive 2014 Abbott budget. We had the Gonski backflip that would rip $29 billion from funding for our schools in 2018-19 and lock in an unfair funding model where disadvantaged young Australians will not get the support they need to achieve their full potential. We had university fee deregulation that would see $100,000 degrees become the norm and create a two-tier tertiary education system where only the wealthy could afford to go to university. Of course, who could forget the senseless GP tax that would discourage people from seeing the doctor and backload costs onto the already stressed and far more expensive hospital system? This is the agenda that was so roundly rejected by the Australian people that it led to the downfall of the Prime Minister that championed it, and yet Mr Turnbull saw fit to revive it almost unaltered in 2016.

This is a policy agenda that will slash health and education funding and key services while giving a multibillion dollar taxpayer funded gift to big business. It will hit the poor, sick and vulnerable while keeping the rivers of tax deductions flowing for the privileged and the wealthy. It will put the final nail in the coffin of a first-class national broadband network, leaving us with a second-rate offering built on the ageing and decrepit copper network. It will set off a divisive and expensive plebiscite on marriage equality that government members have no obligation to follow through on, and it will do absolutely nothing to address the excessive tax breaks for property investors that cost our national budget more than $10 billion a year. In doing so, the 2016 Liberal election platform lays bare the rank hypocrisy of the Prime Minister's promise to put fairness at the heart of government decisions.

Those opposite went to the people of Australia promising jobs and growth, but they put forward a policy platform that stood in direct opposition to this stated goal. While the Liberals continue to champion policies that hit the most vulnerable in our communities and reward the wealthy and privileged, they are swimming against the tide of international economic opinion. This is not about class war, which conservatives like to confect. It is not about them and us. It is about how fairness benefits us all—rich, poor and in between—and it is about a government that are actively seeking to entrench systems that rip resources away from those who cannot live without them and direct them to those who do not need them.

When the richest one per cent of Australians now hold more wealth than the bottom 60 per cent put together, it is clear that something is very wrong. The situation in the United States is even worse, with the 400 wealthiest people on the Forbes 100 list owning more than the poorest 150 million Americans. Shamefully, it is the American policies that contributed to this brutal inequality that those opposite consistently try to emulate. What economists know, and what they have been saying for quite a while now, is that it is precisely these sorts of policies that will hit jobs and growth. This is the great truth that those opposite are trying to hide as they peddle their disproven trickle-down economic theory that promises by giving your tax dollars to the wealthy and privileged you will somehow benefit.

In fact, inequality is one of the most pressing and urgent issues that governments must fight vigilantly—not foster, as those opposite are determined to do. This is not just a warm and fuzzy feel-good rhetoric that is about helping those who are down on their luck. It is as much about cold hard fiscal reality as it is about morality, and it is not just the progressive side of politics that know this. In fact, some of the most authoritative economic organisations in the world are now sounding the bell on the risk to growth if governments cling belligerently to those shameless neoliberal agendas. The Secretary-General of OECD said:

We have reached a tipping point. Inequality can no longer be treated as an afterthought. We need to focus the debate on how the benefits of growth are distributed. Our work on inclusive growth has clearly shown that there doesn't have to be a trade-off between growth and equality. On the contrary, the opening up of opportunity can spur stronger economic performance and improve living standards across the board!

Even the International Monetary Fund, an organisation not exactly known for its left political leanings, has warned that inequality poses a serious threat to growth. In fact, a recent IMF study estimated that a one percentage point increase in the income share of the top 20 per cent will drag down growth by 0.08 percentage points over five years, while a rise in the income share of the bottom 20 per cent actually boosts growth.

Last month, the Chifley Research Centre released some work on what this might mean for Australia. It found that if we continue as we are, inequality could hit our economy to the tune of more than $13 billion by 2019 and cost each Australian $500 a year in wages, not to mention the threats to social stability that come from a system that encourages and entrenches this growing unfairness. Yet those opposite line up policy after policy that serve to not only entrench but increase the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. Take their plan to give tax cuts to people earning over $180,000 a year, while ripping money away from jobseekers, leading to the absurd situation where a person earning a million dollars a year will be $16,175 a year better off, while those on benefits will be dragged further and further below the poverty line. Or look at was possibly the greatest Liberal con of the election—a $50 billion addition to the national debt in a cash splash for big business. Those opposite had the gall to go to the Australian people with a commitment to take $50 billion of our hard earned money and give it away to businesses earning up to a billion dollars a year. And, what is worse, they would fund this excessive cash splash by levying vicious cuts to health, education and key services.

Businesses do not create jobs just because they are making more money. Businesses do not create jobs just because they are paying less tax. They create jobs because they need more workers. This is not simply an outcome of their profits; it is an outcome of demand for their products. And there is greater demand for products when people have money to spend. But, under those opposite, we have seen the lowest wage growth in living memory and the middle class dwindling, while many companies make record profits. In fact, we have seen recently that the overwhelming pressure in today's competitive environment is not to create jobs but in fact to cut them in order to satisfy the relentless demand for continual increases to profits. Any CEO that created jobs that were not needed instead of returning profits to shareholders would quickly be shown the door.

You only need to look at the big banks, who, despite recording growth to their multibillion dollar profits year on year, have actively cut jobs. In fact, together the big banks have cut 4,200 jobs in the last year alone. Clearly profit alone does not equal job creation. Even the government's own Treasury modelling showed that the benefit of their plan would deliver a miniscule 0.1 per cent to annual growth—not only that but $11 billion of the money would almost immediately be gifted to the American tax department as a result of a tax treaty that requires companies to pay the difference between US tax rates and overseas tax rates to the Internal Revenue Service. And $7.4 billion would go straight to the big banks, who, as I mentioned, have a proven record of cutting jobs. Another big chunk would end up in the hands of foreign shareholders, thanks to our dividend imputation system.

The idea that handing $50 billion of precious public money over to businesses earning up to a billion dollars a year is somehow going to spark a jobs boom was clearly flawed from the beginning. The irony of these expensive tax cuts in the context of the reality that around a third of private and public companies already pay no tax at all has not escaped many Australians. Nor have people missed the rank hypocrisy of those opposite when they sagely talk about living within our means and the need to address our national financial situation while actively ripping $50 billion out of our national coffers. While we absolutely have to keep an eye on tax competitiveness, we should not be taking the axe to key government responsibilities and adding tens of billions of dollars to our national debt—although the fact that those opposite see no problem with this should come as no surprise, given they have presided over a doubling of the deficit and added $100 billion to the national debt in only their first term of power.

But there is something that can deliver the sustained, long-term growth that the Prime Minister is looking for, and that is investment in education. In fact, a survey of 31 economists by the Economic Society of Australia and Monash Business School has found almost two-thirds agreed with the statement:

Australia will receive a bigger economic growth dividend in the long-run by spending on education than offering an equivalent amount of money on a tax cut to business.

If the Prime Minister would just listen to the experts, this is exactly what he would be doing—just as Labor did. While those opposite were busy peddling a plan to hand over tens of billions of dollars of public money to big business, Labor was addressing the issues that Australians really care about. We put forward a comprehensive policy platform to address the concerns and meet the needs of all Australians, not just the powerful and the privileged, and we had a platform that put people first. We had a plan to properly fund our schools, hospitals and universities. We committed to protecting Medicare and ensuring that it is your Medicare card, not your credit card, that determines the quality of the health care you and your family receive. Only Labor had a plan to deliver real, long-term structural reform to reduce the deficit and generate real economic growth.

This is the very platform that the people of my home state of Tasmania chose when they said goodbye to every single sitting Liberal member of the House of Representatives. In turn, they welcomed three new Labor members of parliament: Justine Keay in Braddon, Brian Mitchell in Lyons and Ross Hart in Bass. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate these three intelligent, caring, committed people and welcome them to this place, where I know they will prove to be wonderful assets. They are thoroughly deserving of their positions, and I have no doubt that they will fight relentlessly for people in their communities and stand strongly against the ingrained tendency of those opposite to trash health, education and public services.

But it was not an easy fight and it certainly was not a level playing field. Labor's local candidates were never going to be able to compete with the massive war chests of the Liberals. We did not have a leader willing to drop a reported cool million dollars to secure his own job. We could not spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on multiple glossy mail-outs, an onslaught of robocalls and a slew of drive-in movie screen sized signs on every street corner. But we had something much more special. While the Liberals splashed the cash, Labor unapologetically focused on local people in local communities and the issues that mattered to them. While those opposite saturated the local papers with full-page, colour advertisements, we were busy reaching out to the community, one conversation at a time.

While they could afford to pay workers to man every polling booth, we were staffed by an army of dedicated volunteers, an army driven by a passion for Labor values and united by a vision of a more inclusive, fairer—