Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I'm back in the electorate, I'm quite concerned at the number of people who are getting quite depressed or even feeling some despair about the direction the country is going under this Morrison government. Their concerns range from a lack of action on climate change and a concern for the young children and what their lives might be like, to an apparent complete unwillingness by this government to seize any of the opportunities in the world that will see our country flourish, to the punitive behaviour when it comes to the most vulnerable people in our society. I want to talk a bit today about what I see when I come here, which is the extraordinary lack of leadership from the Morrison government. It's not just the Morrison government. Those opposite have been in government for seven years now. You can trace it back through Prime Minister Abbott, Prime Minister Turnbull and now Prime Minister Morrison's extraordinary lack of action on anything that would cause this country to grow or flourish.

In the old industrial management models, there was a theory about the way that a big industrial company grew and flourished and then eventually died as the capital assets came to the end of their life. When I come into this parliament and have watched this government over the last seven years, it's almost as if they have been following that path. In the early stages of these companies, you get what was known as a space cadet, who comes up with the idea, and then the operations people come in and make it all work. When it's working well, the administration phase comes in, where people make it more efficient, to get the last bit of profit out of it. Eventually, it becomes the cash cow that funds new activity.

In the modern world, companies need to reinvent themselves all the time, but this government is in this really old mode. What we've seen over the past seven years is a government not managing the country or managing the economy but sending in the administration teams, effectively to squeeze the last little bit out of it. You can see that through its targeting of people on unemployment benefits who might be on drugs and its drug testing of dole recipients; the cashless welfare cards; trying to cut the pension and talking about expanding the cashless welfare card right across pensions as well; and robodebts, sending out debt notices for debts that weren't owed. Whatever they can do that squeezes that last little bit of cash out of the most vulnerable people they will do. The other side of that is their making sure that they get what they need, that their supporters, their sponsors and they get what they need, taking what they can out of the economy and out of the government for themselves.

We come in here, week after week after week and we look at lists of bills that are at best administrative—they don't do anything that causes the country to grow. They are essentially bills that government departments have put together because they see something that wasn't quite right about something that was introduced a couple of years ago. They are small administrative bills, essentially put forward by government departments. We've seen them come in one after the other. Sometimes you can be in this House for a week and there are no speakers on the government side at all, because the bills are of no interest to them because they are simply administrative bills.

I can't recall in the past seven years of this shockingly do-nothing government any bills whatsoever that actually enabled, empowered or enriched our population, that caused our economy to grow and flourish or that put to work the extraordinary capacity of Australians to think. We are one of the great creative nations in the world. In every field where creativity matters we punch above our weight, and yet from this government there's nothing. There is nothing there. Even when they do say they are going to do something they take forever to do it. So the first point I want to make, really, is that this government is in the wrong phase for a country like Australia and the situation we're in. We're in a world filled with opportunities, and we have a government that thinks that the way things are is the way they should stay, and they will simply administer the government into the most efficient, punitive style they can.

When I was studying cross-cultural management, nearly 40 years ago, we studied a book written by a man named Sunzi. It was called The Art of War, or Bingfa. Back in those days it was largely unknown. I was very lucky to have a PhD guy who was studying that particular management text for his PhD, so I was really lucky. I spent a lot of time finding translations of it, because they were very hard to find. I had about six translations of Sunzi:The Art of War. It was a text that in those days was studied by every management school through China, Japan and most of Asia, but was largely unknown in the West. When the West did discover it they thought it was, essentially, machiavellian, but it actually isn't. The single management theory and strategic theory of Bingfa, which comes through over and over and over again, is that if you're really a good leader, if you're really a good general, no-one will have heard of you, because you will have prevented the war. If you're a really good doctor your patients don't get sick. If you're a really good manager the crisis does not occur. So if you're known for solving a crisis you are a bad leader, not a good one, because a good leader sees off the crisis before it takes place. I have lived with that theory and I look for that in my staff. We should look for that in our government, but this government is the opposite of that. This Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government does not act on anything until the crisis is so great that every single person in the country knows about it, and then they decide to make an announcement and maybe do something—but the announcement is usually greater than the action.

This is a government that never acts to stop a crisis until the crisis is so great that everybody knows about it. We saw that with the bushfires, even though every expert on climate change has told us this was coming—the Ross Garnaut report said that we'd be looking at exactly this by 2020. But this government, even when the fires were raging, did not act until the country was screaming for action.

That could be for one of two reasons. It could be that the spin merchants in the government have extended what we all know they do anyway, which is that, before you announce a solution, you make sure as many people as possible know about the problem. If you're going to announce a road in your electorate, you go out and tell everyone of this terrible problem so that when the announcement is made you get more credit for it. That's called spin. We know that happens, usually over a couple of months, and we can watch them do it. I say to anybody out there, if your member of parliament is getting up and saying, 'Look, this is terrible,' particularly if they're on the government side, then you can bet that in a few months they're going to come to you with an answer that has already been approved—probably through a rort or a program that hasn't been announced; who knows? But you can bet that's the case. So it could be that this government thinks, 'Let's wait till everybody knows about the crisis in aged care before we do anything about it. Let's wait till everybody knows that we've lost 180,000 apprentices in the last year. Let's wait till everybody knows before we act.'

But I don't think that is the case. And this is the other of the two reasons. I think this is a government that doesn't actually recognise the role of government and doesn't act early because it doesn't know how. You can go back, right through the Abbott years and the Turnbull years and now the Morrison years, and you can see it has happened time after time.

An absolute example of that is the home-care and aged-care situation at the moment. The government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a royal commission on aged care, and now we have story after story. One in two people in aged-care facilities are malnourished, literally starving. People are waiting three years for home-care packages. It's truly extraordinary. People in aged-care facilities are lying in urine and faeces. They're appalling stories that we've known about for ages. In fact, a lot of the breaches of regulations were well known to the regulator. These stories have been out there for at least the last seven years, for at least the entire term of this conservative government, yet it has not acted. Finally, they called a royal commission into aged care. The royal commission found the situation so appalling that they've released an interim report, which is rarely done, and the government is still waiting for the final outcome before it acts. If this story was headline news every night, they would be acting. But they're waiting. They're waiting until the crisis is so bad that they simply cannot ignore it anymore. It's truly astonishing.

It is the same for dental services in aged care—even on dental. Many older Australians are entitled to dental services in the public system, and we know that one in two have gum disease. One in two senior Australians have gum disease. One in five have no natural teeth. We know that, and yet older Australians are forced to wait months or years for public dental care. The government have cut public dental funding by hundreds of millions of dollars and they're going to axe it completely in July. How bad does this actually have to get before the government think they should act? Just how bad does it have to get?

You can see it with the royal commission into banking and financial services; it's the same story. We had to drag them kicking and screaming to that. Even though the stories of bad behaviour by banks were out there, and people knew, this government sat on its hands. In fact, we spent 600 days trying to convince Malcolm Turnbull to call for a royal commission into banking, and finally he did. The royal commission's damning report came out in February last year, 2019. There were 76 recommendations, but again the government hardly touched them. There are a few now that they are starting to work their way through, but there are none before the parliament. Again, how bad does it have to get before this government thinks it should lead?

Let's talk about recycling. The government have just discovered that technology might be the answer to climate change! It has been the answer for decades. It's been the answer for decades, yet we've seen cuts to the CSIRO, attempts to wind back the funding for ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, attempts to pull the funding out of innovation, and cuts to R&D. Now that everybody in the country finally knows, because of the bushfires, that climate change is real, the government are prepared to make a few announcements and take some minor actions—but only minor ones.

Now they've realised everybody cares about plastic in the ocean, they're finally prepared to talk about that. We are still waiting for what the actual action will be. But it has been a crisis for decades. Everybody in this country should have known that our recycling was an issue. Everybody should have known. In fact, China stopped importing our recyclables in 2018. There are 24 types of recyclable materials which China will no longer import. That was January 2018—two years ago. In 2019, COAG met and they made some pleasant announcements about things they might do—and, now, a year later, there's still nothing. It's as if they sit on the problem and ignore it until everybody knows about it and their hand is forced and then they try to take credit for acting on it. It is extraordinary.

These plastics and recyclable materials are commodities. They're actually inputs. The opportunities for Australia to use its ingenuity and imagination to build industries in this sector have been there for a decade or more; yet we've had a government that not only has not been doing anything but also has been actively undermining it by reducing funding for the very organisations and institutions that would drive change. We know that there are 9.2 jobs for every 10,000 tonnes recycled in Australia, compared to 2.8 for export. We know that; yet, when the crisis finally hit and when China withdrew—and we knew they were going to; we knew it wasn't going to last—two years ago, the government didn't think the problem was bad enough to act. What an extraordinary indictment on this government.

And we can talk about the economy. Finally, we've got a government that's talking about a stimulus package to respond to the coronavirus and the difficulties that small businesses are having. But the economy has been underperforming for six years or more. The economic indicators that are reported now for the Australian economy are all bad. They're all worse than they were when this government got elected. Economic growth has slowed since the election. Underemployment is high, with two million Australians looking for work or for more work. Weak wages growth has slowed even further. The Liberals are presiding over the worst wages growth on record, and wages are growing at one-fifth the pace of profits.

The Reserve Bank cut interest rates again yesterday. They're lower than they were in the global financial crisis, which was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And for most of the period of this government's term, over the last seven years, the global economy was growing—and we weren't. We were going backwards while the rest of the world actually grew. Household spending is growing at the slowest pace since the global financial crisis. Household debt is around record levels of disposable income, and consumer confidence is below average. Household living standards have declined under the Liberals, with real household median income lower than it was in 2013. Now, finally, the government has decided to do something—but there's no detail. (Time expired).

(Quorum formed)

See this speech in context