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

I hope the Treasurer is okay. In normal times, today would be budget day. Those opposite had already printed the mugs, they'd already filmed the ads, they'd already rehearsed the slogans. But the economy was already weaker than they wanted us to believe. Even before the fires, even before this coronavirus, wages and living standards were already stagnant, work was already too precarious and too insecure for too many people for too long, growth was already below average and investment was weak. And then the coronavirus broke out.

So now we gather, in very different circumstances, to deal with a diabolical pandemic with devastating economic consequences: long lines at Centrelink; the prospect of double-digit unemployment, a fifth of hours worked and a 10th of economic output vanishing in a matter of weeks; synchronised carnage in the global economy, the worst in 90 years; and a long shadow and a patchy recovery. Yet all we got today was a cut and paste of what the government has already said and what Australians already knew. If only the Treasurer had coughed up some detail or a plan. This was a missed opportunity for the government to bring people into its confidence about where things are going and what the government intends to do about it—not just to remind us of all of the sacrifices that the Australian people are making but to remind us of why those sacrifices matter, what people can look forward to on the other side, and why we can do better as a nation than to snap back to all of the economic weakness and ideological obsession which governed the years leading up to now.

I'm reminded of the late Denis Healey, who once said, 'I don't come from the Treasury; I come from the battlefront,' because we come to Canberra today from the economic battlefront, from the suburbs where the jobs are being lost and the people need a plan, where people are terrified of being left out and left behind. Let me give you just one example. On Monday night I was at home in Logan City. The kids had gone to sleep at last and I was answering emails. Up popped a note from a mum. She wanted to share with me her son's story. This young man is a ground worker at one of our international airports. This is part of what she wrote to me about her son: 'Since the federal government's shutdown of almost all aviation operations over the last couple of months, his company has had no choice but to stand him down. They did so under the understanding that they could collect JobKeeper payments for their employees so they didn't join the Centrelink queues. Now my son has been told to join Centrelink queues, knowing that his job and thousands of his co-workers' jobs are in jeopardy because of a loophole excluding dnata from the scheme.

To my understanding, the JobKeeper payments were put in place to help workers stay employed in this unknown time. Yet my son and thousands of his co-workers are now to be left helpless and abandoned by the Australian government. As his mother and a fellow citizen of this country, I can't understand why some citizens are looked after and others are being forgotten, and made to feel unimportant like this. I beg you to fight on his behalf, so he is not put in this position—please. Please help him keep his job.'

This side of the House says to that mum that Labor will fight on his behalf, and for many who are caught in this situation. Our principle during this crisis has been to be constructive, supportive and responsible—to put the people before the politics. We do recognise that this isn't business as usual in the economy, and that it can't be business as usual in here as well. When the government has adopted a good idea, we've all said so. When they rejected our amendments to the JobKeeper legislation we didn't hold up that legislation. But bipartisanship doesn't mean parliamentary groupthink or empty acquiescence. Being constructive doesn't mean being silent. Acting responsibly doesn't mean meekly following along. That might be the Labor Party the government wants, but it's not the opposition that the nation needs.

It's not the opposition that the workers at dnata and their families, and hundreds of thousands of other workers, need either. We have a responsibility as the party of working people to stand up for all of the wage earners of Australia—permanent and casual. We have a duty, as the architects of the Fair Work Act, to protect the rights and conditions of every worker. We have obligations as the party of the social safety net to help ensure that it is stitched strongly enough to respond to crises like this one. We have the ability, as the party who ensured that the Australian economy actually grew during the last global recession to make our voices heard, and, as the party of the future, to think ahead.

A thoughtful and constructive opposition has great value. After all, it was Labor that who called for the wage subsidies in the first place, just as we made constructive suggestions about unemployment benefits, the partner income test, mutual obligation, supporting students, relief from evictions, child care, telehealth, charities, access to broadband and the aviation sector. Just as we cautioned against the government's risky and rushed plan for early access to superannuation, and just as we warned about the faults in the design of the JobKeeper scheme. It gives us no joy whatsoever to say that the super scheme is a mess and that wage subsidies are a very good idea being very badly implemented.

The Treasurer has just conceded again today that the Morrison government has undershot its own JobKeeper enrolment targets by hundreds of thousands of Australian workers. This is a stunning admission of failure. This is not a saving to be celebrated; it is hundreds of thousands more breadwinners heading off to Centrelink instead. It made obvious what we already suspected: that this Treasurer and this government are fumbling the implementation of this crucial program. Too many Australians are left out and left behind—some accidentally, but many deliberately.

In recent weeks, thousands of businesses have expressed confusion about their eligibility, they're uncertain about their obligations to their employees and they have struggled to access vital bridging finance, made necessary by the scheme's design and its late rollout. Many of them have given up as a consequence. That's why, when unemployment spikes even higher than necessary, this Treasurer's fingerprints will be all over it. The fewer people he signs up to JobKeeper now, the longer the unemployment queues will be and the harder the recovery. The jobless will pay the highest price, but the whole community will suffer as a consequence. We know from the bitter experience of previous recessions just how hard it is for people who lose their jobs in times like these to find another one down the track, and many of them are excluded from the labour market for far too long. There is human wreckage and wasted lives, and sometimes that cascades down the generations. This needs to be avoided at all costs. We can agree that this crisis has brought out some of the best in our country. There is a spirit of cooperation—an adaptability that we will need to build on. We do acknowledge the hard calls that all governments have had to make as they try to support an economy at the same time as they shut most of it down. We don't pretend that this government has got everything wrong—they haven't—but nor should they pretend that they've got everything exactly right.

Last Friday, the Prime Minister gave one of those long press conferences in the prime ministerial courtyard. He said that the last few months have done two things: they've given us a reminder of some things and they've given us a lesson on some other things. That's true enough, I guess. But we need to be clear: this side of the House didn't need to be reminded how important public health is—of course it is. We didn't need to be reminded that every job matters—we've believed that all along as well—or that Australians at their best can focus on something bigger than just ourselves. That's what being Australian is all about. Those opposite might need reminding of all of this, but these are things that Labor has never forgotten. So what have the people really been reminded of during this crisis? Well, we've been reminded of this: the Australian economy wasn't strong enough before and it wasn't working well enough for ordinary Australians. Maybe the long tail years of the long growth decades really did obscure this truth, but it's very plain to us all now. Thankfully, we're not America. Thankfully, we're not Spain or Italy. But, thankfully, that's not the standard that we set for ourselves. Thankfully, we can aspire to something much, much better.

How did we get to this point in 2020 where, after a generation of growth, our economic cupboard is so bare and our defences are so thin? The short story is this: seven years, three Treasurers and one big gamble. They punted that ordinary Australians could keep calm and carry the economy while a Liberal government in Canberra could get away with indulging their usual ideological obsessions. They bet that ordinary people would just keep working, spending, saving, raising kids, settling in Australia and starting and growing business while they kept undermining super, attacking trade unions, cutting penalty rates, cutting essential services and redistributing wealth in the wrong direction.

When Mr Hockey became Treasurer, the Australian economy was strengthening. When he handed it over to Mr Morrison, the Australian economy was weaker but still relatively resilient. By the time Mr Morrison handed it over to Mr Frydenberg, the Australian economy was fragile indeed. They were three different Liberal Treasurers, but they all took the same risk. They all took the risk that the economy would take care of itself while they took care of their mates in marginal seats.

So by the end of last year what did we have? We had slowing quarterly growth, below-trend annual growth and an economy growing barely faster than population. We had: record high underemployment, an unemployment rate higher than the US, UK or New Zealand and almost two million Australians looking for work or more work; the worst run of wages growth on record, missing almost every budget and midyear update forecast; multifactor productivity declining for the first time in eight years and annual labour productivity negative for the first time on record; business investment in decline and at its lowest level since the nineties recession; the private domestic economy going backwards; record household debt; the slowest annual consumption growth since the GFC; childcare costs up more than 30 per cent; and a budget already heaving with a debt that had more than doubled already under those opposite.

Don't forget that the record deficits forecast by Deloitte this week wouldn't be the first, second or third deficits recorded by this government but the seventh, eighth and ninth.

These are the facts that the Treasurer failed to mention in his ministerial statement. So this is not just about the last seven weeks; this is also about the last seven years.

To understand where we're going, we do need to understand where we've been. Be clear: the pandemic may have arrived without warning but weakness in the economy certainly did not. The Reserve Bank had already downgraded Australia's growth forecasts three times. The IMF had already downgraded Australia's forecast by more than global growth, by four times as much as the other advanced economies. The OECD had also slashed its expectations for Australian growth before the crisis by twice as much as the G20 economies as a whole.

Be clear about this, too: when our country woke up on New Year's Day 2020, we had a literal burning platform for change. No summer has ever shown more that what Australia needs is leaders who listen and have empathy and compassion, governments which cooperate, scientists who are heard, businesses that invest and workers who have the skills that they need to turn aspiration into opportunity. But our summer of ashes couldn't teach the Liberals what modern Australia's economy needs, and it looks like our autumn of isolation and anxiety hasn't either. If there is a plan from those opposite, it risks being the same approach that got us into this mess in the first place. Going by the statement that we just heard, they intend to double-down on trickle down.

Just last Friday, the Prime Minister in his courtyard read out a focus group report about how every Australian matters. On the same day we learned that his plan for super, his smash-and-grab raid on the future, has been hacked and compromised in predictable and predicted ways, that making Australians spend their retirement savings now has left the door open for fraudsters to rob ordinary people. He talks about 'Team Australia', but what he really wants is a team separated into two separate dressing rooms: one where a few make all the decisions and one filled with the rest, the players who have to take all the wickets and score all the runs.

They say that we are all in this together, but not if you work at dnata, not if you're a casual worker moving from one company to another and not if you work in hospitality or entertainment or at councils or universities or as a relief teacher in our schools. They say every job matters, but they don't think every job is a keeper. 'We are all in this together' is more than a matter of saying, 'We are all at risk from this coronavirus,' or 'We all have a responsibility to follow the rules.' We are and we do. As the Labor leader pointed out yesterday, 'we are all in this together' is also about what happens next. It's about the Australia we want to live in when life is normal again.

But, unfortunately, instead of the vision that the Labor leader displayed yesterday, we get budget day without a budget. Delaying a budget is forgivable, but delaying a plan is not. The Treasurer had a big opportunity today and he missed it. When Australians wanted a policy program or a detailed economic outlook, all he gave them was a speech cobbled together from old press releases. But when the IMF, the Reserve Bank and the private sector forecasters have released expectations for the economy, the Treasurer has no excuse whatsoever. In the past week alone, the Reserve Bank and Deloitte Access Economics have provided detailed economic and budget forecasts that span several years. The Reserve Bank went even further than usual to describe three potential scenarios, giving definition to the uncertainty which confronts us all. And we should expect no less from the government. Dribbling out a number here or there to one newspaper or another is no substitute for the sort of information that Australians had a right to expect from the Treasurer today.

At a time of acute uncertainty, clarity around the government's expectations and assumptions is more important than ever, because decisions made in the coming weeks, months and beyond will have life-altering consequences for many Australians. We're not out of the woods when the restrictions ease. The government's economic choices will remain as crucial as they were during the worst days of this crisis, and every Australian needs them to get it right.

This is where 'snapback' comes into it. We all want the economy to recover as quickly as possible and for people to go back to work as soon as it's safe—but hoping for the best is not a strategy, especially when the Reserve Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Deloitte Access Economics all expect higher unemployment for longer. Every informed commentator expects that the recovery will be patchy and long and that different industries will come back slower than others, yet we get this commentary from the Prime Minister about snapback. The Treasurer couldn't have been clearer about it when he told Paul Kelly this:

The Prime Minister was very strong on how there would be a snap back. They were his words. The economy would 'snap back' and we wanted the economy to bounce back stronger.

Now we read today that the government want to walk away from the language of snapback at the same time as they contemplate pulling some of this welcome support out of the economy. This is not actually about the slogans the Prime Minister abandons; it's about the workers he abandons if he withdraws this support too soon or without factoring in the long tail of this recovery.

Australia needs an economic plan, a plan for when the economy doesn't snapback on the Prime Minister's political timetable, a plan that doesn't withdraw support from the economy too early or too suddenly in a way that cruels the recovery, a plan that doesn't just learn the lessons of 2009 but 2014 as well, a plan that doesn't ask the most vulnerable people to pay the heaviest price for the money that's been borrowed here. Australia needs a plan for jobs and wages and living standards, for investment and productivity and for cleaner and cheaper energy, a plan that deals with the most pressing aspects of this crisis while we plan for the new Australia which comes after. We got none of that today from the Treasurer. We've seen none of that from this government. We didn't get a budget. We didn't get a plan. We got a mug. Australians have sacrificed so much to combat this virus. They've work together and they've stayed apart, but all they got today for their efforts was a speech from the Treasurer. If they are to get through this crisis and get back to work, they need and deserve much better than that.

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