Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services) Share this | Hansard source

We had some big challenges in the Australian economy, as the member for Cook may be interested to learn. How did we wake up today and find we had a shortage of skilled labour? Why was the Reserve Bank ignored 20 times when it said that there are real problems in capacity restraint? In the last five years, with the commodities boom, we have seen a five-fold increase in job vacancies. What was so difficult to work out? We had cut the conditions of apprentices; we actually discouraged people from going into that area.

There was another big change other than the skills shortage which appeared on the opposition’s watch—the environment, climate change. Unfortunately for the Australian economy and the Australian society, the opposition believe that climate change is an added extra on a Lexus motor vehicle. That is about as seriously as they took the issue.

Then we had their wasted agenda on industrial relations, which in fact has decreased productivity, not encouraged it. Then there is infrastructure—the failure to support the states to build the infrastructure we need. The prime achievement in infrastructure by the coalition in the last 11 years, because one would not want to be unfair to the tinkerers on the other side, was the Adelaide to Darwin railway. But that is it. After building that railway, it all got too hard: ‘We stopped and had a bovril, a bex and a bit of a lie down.’

As for the coalition’s record of tax reform and economic management, we see that the best economic management they had was previously given to them by Labor—the floating exchange rate, the national savings scheme. These are things which help enhance productivity. Interestingly, when I listen to the shadow Treasurer there seems to be a clear loss of memory about one specific event, which is the economic management of the coalition whilst they were in government. It is called lacuna amnesia. The difficulty for these lacuna amnesiacs opposite me is that the first time there were problems when the big issues came along—and the commodities boom has generated what growth we have had—we had a coalition which were skilled at missing the boat. They missed the boat on improving superannuation, they missed the boat on the skills shortage, they missed the boat on handling the environment and they missed the boat on infrastructure. I would not want these people to be my travel agents because we would all miss the boat.

On the one hand, the opposition want to stare mistily into the past and remember the glory of the Prime Minister’s years but, on the other hand, they want to play in the traffic and say, ‘That wasn’t really us.’ I always listen with interest to the current shadow Treasurer—and who knows where he’ll end up—and the difficulty that he has is that you can argue that you are a fresh face and you can argue that you support tax reform, but there is something called ‘your record’. You cannot disown the past. The problem for the opposition is that they have been tinkerers. We have seen an inability of the opposition to grasp the fundamentals of reform.

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