Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

The numbers that we've received today have told us something that Australians knew. They knew because they could see it and they could feel it. They could see it in the shuttered shops. They could see it in the Centrelink queues snaking around the block. They could see it in the eyes of the person struggling to keep their business open at the local cafe they were used to visiting. And they could feel it in their own anxiety, in their worry about losing their job or losing hours at work, or feeling bad because, like us, they've got secure work and they feel terrible for the people they see—their friends and relatives, the people they went to school with—that don't have that same security. We didn't choose this pandemic. What we can do, though, is choose how we respond to it.

I think it's quite right—I think there is agreement across both sides of the chamber—that we need to do everything we can as a parliament to keep people healthy, to keep them safe and to keep them working. But what there's not agreement about is what measures to take. What do we do? What do we do to keep people working? What do we do to get the economy back on track? Over here we have a plan to get people back to work, to keep them in jobs and to make sure their wages and conditions are supporting their confidence to go out and keep spending and investing to create jobs for other people. On that side we've got two things happening: we've got announcements—sadly, too many of those have turned out to be empty rhetoric—and, even worse, we've actually got measures that make things worse now, not better.

We all know about the announcements. We've got JobKeeper, JobSeeker, HomeBuilder and JobMaker. JobKeeper we're now actually reducing. JobSeeker we're now reducing. JobMaker nobody really understands. As for HomeBuilder, yesterday the minister claimed it was supporting hundreds of thousands of tradies. Well, we know that not a dollar has actually gone out the door for HomeBuilder, so that's a pretty good effort, isn't it—supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs without a dollar spent! As for the small business loans, the Treasurer confessed yesterday that less than five per cent of those loans have actually made it to small businesses. So they are very big on announcement but really terrible at getting that support into the hands of the people who are desperate for it, who desperately need it and are relying on it to make ends meet, to pay the bills and to keep their businesses open. That's a serious problem.

But you know what's even worse? What is even worse is that there are things this government is choosing to do that are making things worse, not better—deliberate decisions that are taking money out of the hands of people who desperately need it to make ends meet. Cutting JobKeeper is one example. Another is cutting wages for people who are still employed. Wages were flatlining before COVID-19 hit the Australian economy. They've been falling since COVID-19 hit. What do the government want to do? They want to make it worse by changing the industrial relations environment so that people lose more out of their pay packets. We've seen Qantas. They're about to sack 2,500 people, not because the jobs aren't there but because they want to rehire a cheaper workforce. Do we hear the government objecting to that? Do we hear the government objecting to the fact that the Australia Post executives want to pay themselves a bonus while they ask their staff to deliver parcels as volunteers? The government are making it worse by preventing the indexation of the pension. They say they're going to fix that. They're waiting for a good time for a big announcement, are they? Have they not cut the ad yet? Is that the problem? Is that the delay—they haven't got the advertisement ready?

I want to finish on this one: universities. Why on God's earth would you make it harder and more expensive for people to get an education at a time when unemployment has gone through the roof? More than a million people are unemployed and another 400,000 are set to lose their jobs by Christmas, and this government chooses this time to make it harder and more expensive to get the education that would help you in this competitive jobs market. Why? (Time expired)

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