Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to have the opportunity to follow the member for Wright and to also recognise those in the House who have served. This matter of public importance is about one thing. It's about a Prime Minister and a government that is psychologically incapable of levelling with people about the real challenges in our society and in our economy.

During this horrific fire season, when the nation was crying out for leadership and when it was crying out for empathy and compassion and unity, this Prime Minister showed that he was either unwilling or unable to provide that for the Australian people. It's the same when it comes to the economy. When so many Australians are doing it tough—stagnant wages, record household debt, declining living standards, skyrocketing bills for child care and electricity and private health—when the nation is crying out for assistance from its government, for some kind of plan to get the economy going again, these clowns opposite just go missing in action. Their economic mismanagement is defined by three things: inaction, incompetence and ineptitude.

It's true that there is no shortage of challenges in our country at the moment. We do acknowledge that the coronavirus and the bushfire season will have an impact on our economy, but it's equally true, as the Reserve Bank has just pointed out, that our challenges in the economy are longstanding and are home grown as well. The sum total of the Treasurer's economic plan is to cross his fingers and hope that people forget that the economy was already weak before the fires hit and before people had even heard of the coronavirus impacting around the world.

He hopes that people won't remember that the last national accounts had a series of very weak numbers. He hopes that people will forget that the economy was already slowing, that the private domestic economy has gone backwards for two quarters, that consumption is at its slowest pace since the GFC and that business investment is the worst it's been since the early 1990s recession. He is desperate for people to forget that, in the most recent budget update, the government itself said growth would be slower, wages would be weaker and unemployment would be higher. That's what the government was saying about the economy that it has managed for three terms now, before the fires and before the virus hit. He spends all of his time pretending that anything that's going on in the economy is entirely out of his control, and he was at it again this morning on Fran Kelly's program on Radio National. He wants every Australian to think that things were going perfectly before, and then these matters that were out of his control hit and that's what's responsible for the economy being weak.

But we on this side of the House know better—all of us who spend time with real people in real communities. We are not turning our backs on them, not making them shake our hands, but really listening to them about their challenges with wages, living standards and bills, which people just can't seem to keep up with no matter how hard they work. People out there know what's going on. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister hope that, by not levelling with people, somehow people won't understand what's going on. But they do.

This Treasurer has proven himself serially unworthy of the very powerful office that he holds by spending all of his time obsessing about Labor and not levelling with people about the big challenges in the economy. He put out a long press release yesterday that didn't mention wages once. He is always talking about how they've got things bang on in the economy, but ordinary people are struggling because the economy is not delivering for ordinary working people. That's something we on this side of the House understand and want to change.

This economy has been growing for almost three decades now. We're very proud of that in the Labor Party, because Hawke and Keating created that remarkable run of success and Rudd and Swan protected it when it was in its greatest peril. We are very, very proud of that. The fact that that three decades of continuous economic growth, the envy of the world, is at risk today is not just because of the coronavirus or the horrific fire season; it is because of a government that doesn't have a plan to boost the economy. This economy is not growing fast enough to create the kinds of opportunities that the people we represent need and deserve in this society. It is long past time for this government to level with the Australian people about the challenges in the economy and actually do something about them.

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