Senate debates

Thursday, 27 February 2020

Motions

Economy

5:19 pm

Photo of Catryna BilykCatryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak in today's general business debate on economic conditions. The Liberals like to paint themselves as the superior economic managers, but as we've heard from people on this side—from Senator Siewert and from Senator O'Neill earlier—they're not. It's a con that they've perpetrated on the people of Australia by pretending to be in surplus when they weren't, and I think the people of Australia are waking up to it. I think they understand that the claim that the government is managing everything so well is falling apart. I think the Australian people know that it's rubbish. We've got the economy floundering. The government's economic narrative just unravels day by day. Whenever you open a newspaper, you see something else about it.

The Prime Minister likes to say, 'That's just the Canberra-bubble talk,' and tries to dismiss it, but we all know that the disastrous state of the economy is hurting Australian households. It's hurting Australian people. It's hurting Australia's small and family businesses. It's hurting people who are looking for work—Australian jobseekers. We know also that the prices of essential services are going up. Wages are falling or stagnant. As a result, household living standards are going backwards.

Those on the other side are so good at trying to blame Labor for absolutely everything that they muck up. They are a third-term government. If they were one of my children trying to blame one of my other children for something that happened years ago, I would be having more than severe words with them. I would be telling them to grow up. That's what those on the other side need to do. They need to grow up and they need to take responsibility. They can't keep blaming Labor for their economic failures. They can't blame the bushfires and they can't blame the coronavirus, because, before the bushfires and before the coronavirus, the government were already presiding over a weak economy. Those on the other side have no plans except on how to rort the system. They have no plans to boost the economy, which, as we all know, is more than floundering; it's in decline. It's a disaster. It is just a disaster for anyone who, as Senator Siewert said, is on Newstart and even for families on average incomes. How are you expected to cope if the prices of all your essential services are going up and your wages aren't going up as well? I don't know. They think they're Einstein on that side, but, truly, a three- or four-year-old could do the maths and work out that they're just wrong.

They've got no plans at all. They have no plans for jobs and employment. We know that, when they talk about employment numbers going up, they're referring to people who are often doing just one hour of work a week. People have to work multiple jobs, when they can find multiple jobs, just to be able to afford the basics of life. There's not enough work out there. Unemployment's too high. There's no job creation on that side. Maybe there's a bit for their mates that they've managed to give money to through sports rorts, but other than that there's no plan at all. There's no plan for wage growth, and we know that they have no plan for climate change.

The government had a plan before the last election, but do you know what that plan was? That plan was to buy its way into government, to buy its way back into power by putting up a showman, by putting Mr Morrison out front, and by doling out money to the marginal electorates through the sports rorts. What really irks me about all of this is that they used taxpayers' money to do that. The taxpayers are not silly. Senator Hughes made a comment about how smart the Australian voters and taxpayers are. Yes, they are. I doubt that they are going to put up with this sort of thing for very much longer. What the government didn't have before the last election, and still doesn't have, was a plan to make the economy work for all Australians. It is probably working for some Australians but not for all Australians.

I mentioned the surplus, or the alleged surplus—I have to be a bit careful about my wording here, because we know there isn't a surplus. It was just alleged there was a surplus and, as we saw, there was a marketing strategy for their own fundraising around that alleged surplus, but there was never a surplus, and it was a bit of a magic show of moving money around a bit to try and get the surplus. But they did claim, on budget night last year, that a surplus had been achieved. To me, that's a bit like building a Lego model before you've got the pieces out of the box and saying that you've built the Lego model. It's just not on.

Mr Morrison and, of course, Mr Frydenberg are hoping that Australians will forget all of that—that they will forget that the economy has been deteriorating under their watch for the past six years, long before the bushfires and long before the coronavirus hit. I don't think that Australians will forget that. I think Australians know that the government didn't have a plan for the economy then, at the election time, and they still don't have a plan now.

Let me just talk about what Labor did, even though it was six or seven years ago—sorry, longer than that, I suppose. You have been there for—what is it?—seven years, seven long years. Under Labor, Australia became one of the two fastest-growing economies in the OECD, and we were the eighth-fastest-growing when the government changed hands in 2013. Under the Liberals, we've dropped to 20th—from eight to 20. The economy is even weaker now than it was when Labor was in government, even though we had to deal with the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. It was Labor's economic stimulus that saved Australia from recession during the global financial crisis, and we kept a quarter of a million Australians in work—a quarter of a million people who would have lost their jobs. So I find it really hypocritical of those opposite that they can't take responsibility for anything, let alone their economic failure, despite the criticism that they hurled at us. They can dish it out, of course—they're very good at dishing it out—but they can't take it. Whatever those opposite claim, let's be clear: our economic record stands on its own. But they've had six years to improve it—they're a third term government—and instead they've just made everything worse. We know that they cannot be trusted with the economy.

I just want to quickly, in the last couple of minutes I've got, have a little chat about some economic statistics and facts, just to reiterate my point. Economic growth, as we know, is at its lowest level since the global financial crisis. Productivity fell last financial year. The net debt has more than doubled, and gross debt has risen to over half a trillion dollars. Just have a think about that. When Mr Abbott was Prime Minister, he declared a debt and deficit disaster. Unemployment is high. There are almost two million Australians looking for work or for more work. As I said, there are people in Australia who are working maybe three jobs just to try and make ends meet—just to be able to feed their kids or get their kids their school uniforms or schoolbooks. They do not want to have holidays to Hawaii or anything; they're just trying to make ends meet. Labour productivity actually went backwards for the first time on record. Since Labor started talking about slow wage growth, it's actually slowed even further. So we've got the Morrison government presiding over the worst wages growth on record. That cannot be good for the economy. People need money to spend money. When you let wages stagnate, people cannot spend the money—let alone people on Newstart, who, as we've heard, don't have the money to spend anyway. They're struggling more than other people. They don't bank the money. People on low incomes or Newstart do not bank money. They spend just about every cent they get just trying to survive.

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