Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The government are so sensitive that, the moment that you suggest that there might be something better to do with the money than give it to big corporations who might be wage thieves and who might be making a profit already—the government are so sensitive and have such a glass jaw—that they jump up. We are talking about what is wrong with this bill, and what is wrong with this bill is that it is shovelling billions of dollars into the pockets of big corporations and asking for nothing in return. Instead, that money could be used to create jobs and help tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis, if we had the guts to invest that money in building public housing and expanding free education and putting it into aged care and having free child care in this country. That is the way to get young people into work. That is the way to give young people some hope in the future. Instead, this government just kicks it off into the long grass and says, 'We'll write out a cheque for McDonald's and Hungry Jack's' and anyone else who wants to come forward—any other big corporation that might be donating to the Liberal and Labor parties come election time: 'Here, let us write you a big cheque to part pay some of your wages bill, even though you might be making some of the biggest profits you've ever made in your life.' When you dare to call them to account, what do they do? They jump up to the dispatch box and say, 'No, you can't talk about this and you can't talk about that, because that is not relevant.' What a narrow level of understanding from this government about how to recover from an economic crisis.

History tells us one thing, and that is that, if government cuts areas like universities and childcare and the public sector during a crisis, it takes longer to recover from a recession. We should be directly investing to create jobs and to lift wages. In the last budget, the government basically baked in a decade of low wages growth. It wants six per cent unemployment, and then it'll start cutting again. Six per cent means two million people in this country either without a job or without enough hours of work, and the government says, 'That's a fine target—once we reach that, we're going to cut even more.' This kind of approach to the recession is going to make the recession last longer, and it is going to hit young people and women the hardest. What would be a better approach? A better approach instead would be direct government investment, because when you directly invest in free education and free health care and in manufacturing and building public housing, you create jobs and you meet community needs. But instead this government, because of its narrow ideological blinkers and because it takes money from the very same big corporations that are causing the problem that we're in at the moment, can see no other solution than to write blank cheques back to those corporations, and that is what this bill is about.

This bill, like so much of the government's budget, which contains $99 billion in subsidies to big corporations, is payback to the big corporates who donate to this government and donate to the opposition. Now we get bills like this instead of direct government investment, which is what we should be doing. We are in an economic crisis, and we face a lost generation of young people if we don't have the guts to invest directly in nation-building, planet-saving projects that are going to provide a job guarantee for young people. We need not subsidies to big corporations but large-scale, nation-building, planet-saving projects where every young person in this country is guaranteed a job working on them, if they want one. That's what would help get us out of recession. Instead, the government by its own admission in the budget papers is locking in and choosing a high-unemployment future.

As many commentators have said, much of the government's spending is based on borrowing. We've got a choice. What are we going to do? Are we going to borrow to give tax cuts to people earning over a million dollars, as the government with Labor support wants to do, or are we going to borrow to invest directly in public services that will give people jobs and meet needs? That is what young people in this country want, a government that's got the guts to stand up to the big corporations and invest to tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis, not the slush fund for wage thieves and already profitable companies that this bill could well be.

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