Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

For those people listening to this debate today, you could be forgiven for thinking that we all exist in some parallel universe because the perspectives offered by members on the government benches and those on this side of the House could not be more different. That comes from a very different lived reality of the Australian people. Words are cheap.

So let's have a look at this government's track record, shall we, and what the state of the economy is right now. After six years of this Liberal government, despite continuing to blame Labor for absolutely everything—we tend to forget you actually have been in government for six years and we keep trying to remind you of that—the economy has slowed substantially. That is under your watch. This is not something Labor's dreaming up here. This isn't something that we're just sort of talking about over here. You've only got to look to the RBA, look to the IMF or look to any of your business advisory councils. All of them are saying the same thing: growth is so slow now; in fact, it's the slowest since the global financial crisis. The last time we had to endure a big economic shock, the Labor government at that time navigated us carefully through it. And how did we do that? We injected stimulus into the economy.

But this is a government that not only does it not accept that the economy is the slowest it's been since the global financial crisis; it doesn't accept that there is—we've heard figures just dreamt up on the other side that wages are growing. You go and tell that to the workers who we meet who are actually seeing their wages not just flatline, at times going backwards—absolutely going the wrong way. There are very few Australians who are going to be standing up cheering you on when you say things like, 'Wages are growing really well. The economy is tickety-boo. Everything is absolutely fine here.'

Last week was Anti-Poverty Week. We had a look at what that looks like in Australia. My colleagues before me spoke about massive underemployment in this country and the cobbling together of insecure part-time jobs to eke out an existence for your family to cover those ever-increasing costs of living expenses. Let's not forget your promise when you abolished the so-called carbon tax. Let's not forget your promise that electricity prices would be down that and people would get this $500 cash injection. What happened to that? I can tell you right now: nobody out there is talking about your tax cuts right now either. They're saying, 'We don't have enough money to pay the bills right now. Our wages are going out the back door. We can't get enough work in order to have a secure family existence here, and we are in a community where the structural inequalities are growing wider than ever before.'

Three million Australians are living below the poverty line. One in six children in Australia is in that category of living below the poverty line. I've got to tell you that nobody in my community thinks that is a good economic plan. This is a government that's got a lot of thought about political strategy, but not much when it comes to an economic plan for ensuring that everybody in our communities get to benefit and have some decent quality of life. What is that poverty playing out like in the community of Newcastle? It's the overstretching of community services like Nova for Women and Children. Nova is seeing more than 100 extra women aged over 55 now presenting at their service for assistance.

The Minister for Housing got up a little earlier and has just come back into the chamber. I'm glad he's here. I sat here for a moment thinking maybe he will articulate an injection of funds into the building of new affordable housing for Australia. God knows we need 750,000 of them. That's not an item on this government's books. That's not something you're thinking about. Yet, in addition to an increase to the Newstart rate, which a lot of people—in fact, everybody except the Morrison Government—now accept is one of the best things you could do right now to stimulate the Australian economy, the next best thing would be to build some houses. Build some social housing for Australian people to be housed in a safe place—

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