Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1) recognises the failure of the Western Australian and Australian governments to manage the Western Australian economy;

(2) notes that under the Western Australian and Australian governments in Western Australia:

(a) unemployment reached its highest rate in 13 years at 6.4 per cent, with 59,000 more Western Australians out of work since the Liberal Party formed government in Western Australia;

(b) business investment dropped 12.7 per cent over the year to June 2015;

(c) state final demand fell by 3.6 per cent in the year to June 2015;

(d) the state’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s;

(e) business and consumer confidence are at record low levels;

(f) state net debt has blown out from $3.6 billion in 2008 when the Liberal Party formed government in Western Australia to $30 billion in 2015; and

(g) cost of living increased sharply by 54.3 per cent; and

(3) condemns the:

(a) Australian Government for:

(i) cutting $3.1 billion from Western Australian schools and $5.8 billion from hospitals over 10 years; and

(ii) removing the level playing field from Western Australia in the manufacture of offshore patrol vessels; and

(b) Western Australian and Australian governments for squandering the mining boom and failing to diversify the Western Australian economy and create a jobs and growth plan for the future

Western Australia has really been bringing home the bacon for the national economy over the past decade, but now WA really does need some very serious attention. Unfortunately, it is quite clear that Prime Minister Abbott and the coalition government basically take Western Australia for granted. They see it as a blue state and, as such, we simply are not getting the focus and the attention that we need to deal with the serious economic issues that we are now facing. Indeed, such is the Prime Minister's distorted sense of himself that he seemed to believe that the mere fact of his election would create an economic miracle. He told Western Australians just before the election:

I know, you know, that there’s not much wrong in this state. I know, you know, that there’s quite a bit wrong with our country right now but there’s almost nothing, my friends, wrong with our country that a change of government wouldn’t be improved.

Clearly he had no concept of the headwinds that were already threatening the mining industry.

He did go on to say—and this is, I guess, one of the few election commitments that he has kept—that he would model his government on WA's Barnett government. He certainly has done that. Like WA, we have seen deficits skyrocketing, unemployment rising and dramatic declines in business confidence and business investment. Very critically, the unemployment rate in WA has increased from 4.6 per cent to 6.1 per cent since this government has been elected. So that is 25,000 more people unemployed in Western Australia. Indeed, most people in Western Australia believe that those figures are really underreporting the real impact of the economic downturn, with the reality of greater unemployment being masked by the fact that many people are still working through redundancy payments.

On economic growth, he promised that we were going to build a stronger economy, but in reality economic growth has declined to just over two per cent. Indeed, the state final demand in Western Australia, which excludes exports and therefore provides us with a clearer picture of the domestic economy, fell by 2.6 per cent in the year to June 2015.

We look at business and consumer confidence in Western Australia. Seventy-five per cent of businesses in the most recent CCI survey said that they expected that the economy would deteriorate in the coming year—that is 75 per cent. I guess that is matched by the Roy Morgan business confidence indicators that came out recently, which showed that there had been a plummeting from 136 points to just 102 points in August 2015. Consumers are also pessimistic. Fifty-six per cent of respondents to a CCI survey of consumer confidence predicted that the economy would worsen during the year.

We all accept that commodity prices are not within the control of government, but we do expect a government to have a bigger vision for our state than simply cutting the wages of baristas and taking steps that actually undermine the diversification of our economy. We look at what is happening with the renewable energy industry. WA has—or we had—a very vibrant renewable energy industry in solar, in wave, in wind and, indeed, in the development of battery technology. But since the Abbott government came in, over the space of 2014, we lost almost 1,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector as a direct result of Tony Abbott's systematic attacks on the renewable energy industry. I could go on and talk about the comments that have been made by renewable industry leaders across Western Australia about how this industry has been taken backwards by the negative policies and the uncertainty that was created around the Renewable Energy Target. (Time expired)

See this speech in context