Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can see from Senator Davey's remarks, and you could certainly see from Senator Cormann's performance today in question time, what the government's plan really is for the Australian economy. They can't wait to get to snapback, when millions of Australian workers and hundreds of thousands of Australian firms will be forced off JobKeeper, with millions of people off to Centrelink, onto the unemployment queues. They're not going to tell the people of Australia about it until after the Eden-Monaro by-election. It's their secret plan to put off hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. Millions of Australians right now are looking for work or are underemployed, but the main game for this lot is always all about the slogans, never about the substance. It's always about the marketing, never about the delivery. What they are all about is keeping it all on the down-low, getting their way through the winter break, getting their way through the Eden-Monaro by-election, without telling the people of Eden-Monaro what they are really going to do. We know what they are really going to do, because they have made it very, very clear.

The millions of workers who are on JobKeeper will be pushed across to Centrelink, left to the mercy of the market. All of the rhetoric, all of the carry-on, all of the smugness from the Leader of the Government in the Senate, the Minister for Finance, cannot obscure the truth of their secret plan for jobs in Eden-Monaro, their secret plan for jobs in Australia, which is that they are going to leave the Australian economy to the market forces; they are going to leave ordinary Australians who've been relying on the JobKeeper scheme to Centrelink, to the unemployment queues, and we will see from this government more economic failure, more policy failure and more policy stagnation.

Question agreed to.