Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Just one. That is all we wanted to know, that it would not cut any jobs. She could not or would not answer the question. So we thought we would ask the Prime Minister to see whether he could do a little bit better, and he could not answer it, either. In fact, he gave a rather rambling answer—incoherent, even by his standards—in which he referred to the importance of redundancy payments. He seems to think that redundancy payments are a good substitute for a job.

The coalition believe that of course employees should be paid their entitlements. But we do not want people to be paid redundancy payments because they are losing their jobs; we want them to keep their jobs. We want them to be paid wages, bonuses and overtime in a growing economy. That is what we want. A nation full of recipients of redundancy payments is a nation that is heading down into a very grim place, and that seems to be where the Prime Minister is prepared to take us.

We have been accused by the Prime Minister of lacking a commitment to jobs. In an article I wrote in the Weekend Australian I described the Prime Minister as being ‘possessed with remarkable chutzpah’. ‘Chutzpah’ is a wonderful Yiddish word, which is best defined as the characteristic of a man who kills both his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the basis that he is an orphan. And the Prime Minister is right up there. In fact, a new definition of ‘chutzpah’ is a Prime Minister who accuses his opponents of not caring about jobs when those opponents, during their time in office, saw 2.2 million jobs created, saw unemployment at a 33-year low, inherited Labor unemployment of 8.4 per cent and, when they left office, had unemployment at 4.3 per cent. There is no government in our history that has created more jobs than the coalition did when they were in office over 11½ years.

The Prime Minister can lecture us on many things. We listen patiently, we suffer mightily with his tedious rantings and ravings, but the hypocrisy of his claims about unemployment are too much to bear. We are the party of jobs, we are the party with a track record of creating jobs. We have acted in government and now we seek to act in opposition to hold this government to account for the jobs it is not creating and the jobs it is imperilling.

The Fair Work Bill is being debated in the Senate today. This is the centrepiece of the government’s election platform, although there are substantial parts of it that go well beyond their election platform. This is what they are so proud of. And yet, at a time when Australians are losing their jobs and the government are asked to guarantee that it will not cost jobs, they cannot answer the question. The only reasonable conclusion is this: they know that their Fair Work Bill will cost jobs. They know that they are trading off rewards to their union sponsors on the one hand against Australians’ jobs on the other. They are paying for greater union power with the jobs of Australians.

They have had the opportunity today, twice, to demonstrate that that is not right and to contradict us, and they cannot do it. They cannot do it because they know that they have sold Australian workers out. Australian workers have been abandoned by a government that do not care about jobs. They do not care about keeping Australians in work. When the Prime Minister is asked about jobs and employment, all he can do is waffle on about redundancy payments. The longer he stays as Prime Minister, sadly, the more redundancy payments will be made in this country.

We stand for jobs. We stand for promoting jobs, and we have a plan. One of the Prime Minister’s great techniques is to say that anybody who disagrees with him has nothing to offer. Again and again—we have to put up with it every day in parliament—he says, ‘The opposition just want to sit there and do nothing,’ and he relates his plan, and then he says, ‘And the alternative is to do nothing.’ That is so dishonest. Even Kerry O’Brien took him to task about it. It was too much for Kerry O’Brien to stomach, and that is saying something. The reality is that we have proposed policies which will create jobs. There is an enormous amount of economic evidence, both from Australia and from overseas, including from key economists like Christina Romer, who sits at the very heart of President Obama’s economic policy, that permanent tax cuts provide a much greater stimulus to economic activity and jobs than do one-off cash handouts.

The government say that we supported the cash handout in December, and we did: we voted for it. But we did not say it would be an effective economic stimulus. We said we hoped they had got their advice right from Treasury; we hoped that it was going to work. We wished them well. We said we would see what it developed, what it produced, and we pointed in December, when the evidence came in from the United States, to the poor results from the cash handout in the US. We pointed to that and said: ‘Perhaps this will happen in Australia. Time will tell.’ Well, time did tell, and what it told was that, however meritorious the payments in December may have been as payments because they went to pensioners for whom we were arguing an increase in the single age pension and because they went to families, the fact is that they did not produce the effective economic stimulus that the government promised.

What is remarkable is that the ineffectiveness of those payments as an economic stimulus was almost identical to the experience in the United States. Eighty per cent of the money handed out in the middle of last year in the US was saved; only 20 per cent was spent. And, as Professor John Taylor, who the government describes as a free-market extremist, has demonstrated—and it is just the statistics speaking for themselves—it caused a big bump upwards in household income and a very modest increase in household consumption or expenditure. That is exactly what we saw in the national accounts last week: a big rise in household income, a big lift in household savings and a very modest increase in household consumption—exactly the same pattern. Whether people have different views, we certainly supported the payments on their merits as payments to people in need, but, whether those payments were meritorious or not as payments, the fact is that as an economic stimulus they failed.

Let us give the government some credit. We will cut them the slack they have never cut us—that is for sure. Let us say: ‘All right. You made a blue. It didn’t work out in December. You thought it was going to work out. The Treasury told you it would give a big economic lift. You relied on that and it didn’t work out.’ But then the question arises: why would you back up and make the same mistake again? That is the real issue. They spent $10 billion in December on a cash handout that produced no effective economic stimulus and that did not create one job. Again, we have said to the Prime Minister: ‘Tell us it created one job. Show us the job it created.’ He cannot answer that. So it created no jobs, and yet he backs up and does it again.

The Prime Minister is fond of plans. The shadow Treasurer today ran through a select number of the many plans. They all have a number of points. There are seven-point plans and nine-point plans and five-point plans. I can reveal today, now, a new three-point plan of the Prime Minister’s. The first point in his new three-point plan is that no economic hardship in Australia is ever the responsibility of Kevin Rudd. That is the first point in the plan. Everything is to be blamed on the global financial crisis. It does not matter what policies he enacts, and it does not matter how poorly managed his policies are; every adverse consequence in Australia is due to somebody else. Far from the buck stopping with him, he has tried to create himself as some sort of economic version of ‘Teflon Man’, on whom no responsibility can ever stick.

The second point in the Prime Minister’s new three-point plan is that history began in November 2007. I am surprised that he has not gone as far as Robespierre and tried to renumber the calendar so that we have BK, before Kevin, and AK, after Kevin. History began in November 2007 and therefore it follows that the relative strength of the Australian economy is due solely to the accession of the Rudd government and has nothing to do with the previous coalition government that paid off $96 billion of Labor debt, took the heavy burden of unfunded pension obligations off the shoulders of our children and grandchildren, ran big surpluses, put money at bank, reformed the financial system—nothing good today has got anything to do with the government that was there for the previous 11½ years.

The third point, the one I referred to a moment ago, is that there is no alternative to the Prime Minister’s plans on anything. If you do not agree with the Prime Minister then you support nothing. When he came up with his $42 billion plan, we proposed a measured response: tax cuts, demonstrated to be more economically effective than one-off cash handouts again and again, and most eloquently as seen in the national accounts; and a genuine incentive for investment in terms of doubling the rate of depreciation for investment in energy and water efficiency in the built environment. That is a measure that will not only have environmental benefits but will clearly create jobs in the here and now. That measure again has no counterpart on the government side. We support a well-planned, well-prioritised investment in schools instead of trying to spend $14½ billion dollars over 2½ years on primary school assembly halls and libraries, whether they want them or not. Even Michael Costa, the former New South Wales Labor Treasurer, had to concede it was impossible for the state governments to deliver that in a timely or efficient way. We propose to spend $3 billion—more effective, better targeted and capable of being delivered.

In addition to that, we recognise that the biggest employers are in small business. They are doing it the hardest. The Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy is sitting opposite me here and he said that the best proposal was to give small businesses a 30 per cent cut in depreciation if they buy new equipment. What happens if your cash flow is declining? What happens if you do not need any new equipment? A plainly superior measure is the one we proposed, which is to relieve small businesses for a period of two years of a portion of their superannuation guarantee contribution, to rebate it in fact at the expense of the Commonwealth, thereby putting more cash in their hands and thereby directly reducing the cost of employment.

So, whether it is on the basis of our record in government or whether it is on the basis of our policies proposed in opposition or the issues we are taking up with their Fair Work legislation in the Senate this week, we stand for jobs. Labor stand for unions, they stand for ideology, they are opposed to an economy which will have the vibrancy and the flexibility to create the jobs we need. (Time expired)

See this speech in context