Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to a debate on a set of topics that are so crucially important to millions of Australians, particularly those who find themselves struggling to make ends meet due to the low wage growth and the rising cost of living under this government. This is a government with its head firmly in the sand. This is a government that has no plan for wages, no plan to tackle the cost of living, no plan for our faltering economy. This is a government that continues to sing its own praises and say, 'Everything is fine; everything's okay,' when, clearly, it is not. In fact, I think they've said, 'Everything is just fine,' so many times they're genuinely starting to believe it themselves. But nobody else believes them.

Today, the IMF added themselves to the long line of economists that are concerned about Australia's slow economic growth. Their substantial downgrade of Australian economic growth forecasts—the second downgrade for Australia this year—is a damning assessment of the Treasurer's claim that the government is implementing just the right economic policies for our country. Only on Monday we had Deloitte reporting that many of the problems and weaknesses we have in the Australian economy are homegrown problems. Even before that, the Reserve Bank was making similar points. In other words, our problems are the government's own doing. The IMF—amongst a host of other organisations, including state governments—have called on the government to provide fiscal stimulus urgently and immediately and invest in infrastructure to boost our economy. But, despite falling consumer confidence and growth that is expected to be slower than that of either Spain or Greece, we see no action from the government. We should not underestimate the importance of these forecasts. The IMF are ringing the alarm bells, and they are ringing them loudly. We should listen.

This government has presided over—and let's make sure we all hear this—the following record: the slowest economic growth since the financial crisis, declining living standards, household debt at record highs, 1.9 million Australians who are looking for work or more work, business investment that is the lowest since the 1990s, declining productivity, wages that are growing at one-sixth the pace of profits and a doubling of gross national debt. What a stellar record! Can the government really be proud of this? Can they really get away with telling us, 'Everything's okay, it's under control, we've got a plan'? It seems to me that wherever you look there are economic weaknesses that are not being dealt with, homegrown problems this government won't admit to and issues that are being ignored.

This is not good news for Australians who are desperate for a pay rise. People need to be respected for their hard work in their pay packets, and they need to earn enough to live, but annual wage growth has not topped 2½ per cent since before December 2014 and in the most recent figures was at only 2.3 per cent. This government has one of the worst records on wage growth from any government in our nation's history. Surely a core responsibility of any government is to make sure people have good, secure jobs with decent wages, yet this government has no apparent plans to get wages moving again.

Who will pay for their failures? It will be hardworking Australians—Australians who are increasingly feeling the pinch because, while their wages are flat, the cost of everything else just keeps going up. Cost of child care—up. Cost of housing—up. Cost of health care—up. Cost of education—up. Cost of food—up. Cost of energy—up. Cost of transport—up. Wage growth—flat. This is a recipe for a family's struggle to make ends meet.

Earlier this week, we saw the release of Foodbank's hunger report for 2019. It reported that more than one in five Australians, or 21 per cent, experienced food insecurity in the last 12 months. That's one in five Australians experiencing food insecurity in this country in the last 12 months. That includes over one million children. Can you imagine not having enough money to provide food for your children? That is what is happening in Australia today under this government. Telling her story for the report, a single mother from Perth said:

After I pay rent and electricity, I'm left with hardly any money to buy food. I've gone days with no food just so my son can eat.

Another woman shared her story from Victoria and said:

I hate that I can't cook proper meals and sit and eat with my child. She always asks why I'm not eating with her, but we don't always have enough for both of us to eat. I'd rather miss out, so she doesn't have to.

No-one should be in that situation in this country. It turns out that the most common reason for people going hungry in Australia is an unexpected bill or an unexpected expense that they just don't have the income to meet. This is what happens when your wage growth falls behind the cost of living—you end up just one pay cheque away from crisis.

In the last 12 months, there has been a 22 per cent increase in the number of people who are seeking food relief from charities. That is a huge increase, and it points directly at the growing cost-of-living crisis that this government has overseen. I would genuinely advise everyone in this chamber to spend some time this week, which is Anti-Poverty Week, sitting down and reading the Foodbank hunger report 2019. It is shocking. It's upsetting. It's inexcusable. It is these Australians that this government, with its lack of action on stagnant wage growth and on the rising cost of living, is letting down.

It's time that this government actually did some work. We need it to bring forward a real plan to deal with our faltering economy. Let's give the government some ideas, because they don't seem to have too many of their own. They could start by raising Newstart. They could bring forward their infrastructure investments. They could reverse the penalty rate cuts that impacted so many low-paid workers in this country. They could create good, secure jobs and, instead of attacking the role of the trade union movement in this country, they could support the role of unions in our society and in our economy in helping to generate and stimulate wage growth.

But this is a government that loves to give us all a lecture about just how well it is doing and what great economic managers it has. But its talking points just couldn't be further from the truth. What we know from all of the research and all of the reports that have just come out and from all of the conversations that we're having with people who are struggling around Australia is that people are in real trouble in our country today. Wages are going nowhere. We have the lowest wage growth on record. The economy is faltering—both the IMF and Deloitte have told us that this week—and this government just doesn't have a plan to sort it out.