Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

) ( ): COVID-19 has thrown the world into turmoil, and I accept that. It has disrupted normal life right across the world. It's exposed weaknesses in countries and in societies throughout the world, including here in Australia. It's also caused widespread divisions and differences of opinion as to what is the most effective response to COVID-19. The immediate priority for most governments of course has been to keep people safe, to provide the health services that they need and to minimise the economic and job losses that have occurred.

COVID-19 has also become a test of government competency. Governments have choices about the decisions they make and choices that reveal their ideology, their priorities and ultimately their competencies. Those choices will of course determine how long and how severe the COVID-19 fallout will be and, importantly, how quickly the recovery will be. And that is a matter that the Morrison government will have to contend with at the next election, because the recession we're currently in is very much dependent on the policies of this government and how well it manages the situation that we are in. In doing that, the budget was about choices—all are budgets are—and the 2020-21 budget of the Morrison government sets out its priorities for the coming years and its COVID-19 recovery response. It's a shallow, short-sighted response and very poorly thought through, with no evidence base behind many of the policies and announcements that were made and with no long-term economic or social strategy. It's more like a marketing budget framed for the next federal election, and, whilst the Prime Minister denies that it will be in the second half of next year, we'll have to wait and see about that. It's a budget with a lot of electoral sweeteners, with billions being spent but with no long-term economic structural reform, no reset of economic direction and no new foundations for Australia's future. The only legacy of the Morrison government's 2020-21 budget will be a massive debt, indeed, the worst in Australia's history for years to come.

The government's own budget figures are very clear: a $213.7 billion deficit this year, $703 billion of net debt this financial year growing to $966 billion at the end of the forward estimates and gross debt, currently at $800 billion, is expected to hit $1.7 trillion by the end of the decade. Yet, with all that debt, 928,000 people aged over 35 years who are currently unemployed will be worse off because they've been excluded from the government's job subsidies programs. They will find it even more difficult getting back into the workforce when they have to compete with people that will be subsidised ahead of them.

In this budget, there is nothing for an aged-care sector that is currently in crisis—nothing of substance. I notice that there are some additional aged-care packages. They fall very far short of what is needed to reduce the waiting lists for those packages. We have no national energy security strategy in this budget. Again, that's something that Australians have been calling out for for years. There is no healthcare reform for a sector severely under strain. There is continued uncertainty about both the JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs, which this government and members opposite continuously laud. None of those people who are on either of those programs know what the future holds for them, and, indeed, for those on JobSeeker, it is just over two months away and their supplementary payment will cease, bringing them back to the $40 a day Newstart allowance that they will be expected to live on.

It's a budget that does very little for a struggling housing construction sector, and we know, even from the budget's own figures, that that sector, which would traditionally rely on population growth, now has the additional challenge of a population in this country that is not likely to grow in the immediate future. We have a university sector, heavily reliant on overseas students, where some 260,000 employees equally face a very uncertain future because we don't know when overseas travel will resume. And we have a budget, that everyone on this side of the House have continuously reminded the government of, that completely ignores climate change. I accept that for many people right now climate change might not be at the forefront of their mind. But, in reality, for governments it should be because it's an issue that will affect the future of our country and indeed the whole planet. We cannot just continuously push it aside because there are other supposedly more pressing issues to deal with. Yes, those pressing issues are there, but to suggest that you can't deal with both again reflects on government competency.

Perhaps the most demoralising aspect of the Morrison government's 2020-21 budget is that it offers no hope to the one million Australians who are currently unemployed and the up to 2½ million who are possibly underemployed. In my own electorate there are 10,234 people who are presently on JobSeeker payments. That's almost twice the 5,695 who were in that position in December of last year. The figure has effectively doubled. Some 1,196 people are currently receiving youth allowance, which again is almost double the figure of 636 at the end of last year. What future is there for those people when not only have the numbers doubled but the opportunities have shrunk? They've shrunk to a point where I have no doubt that the future will indeed be bleak for many of those people. It will be even more bleak when perhaps JobKeeper ends in the early part of next year.

I now want to turn to the decimated travel and tourism industry of this country. My understanding is that the sector overall employs about a million people across the country. It has been perhaps the hardest hit of all the different sectors, and for many of the tourism operators or the people in the travel industry sector there may never, ever be a recovery for them. I was recently contacted by a local Makin travel agent, Connie Dziwoki, who owns and runs Genesis Travel and Cruise at Ridgehaven in my electorate. Connie has been in business for over four decades—pretty much all her life—working in the travel industry. Up until the beginning of this year she employed 3½ people. The interstate and international border closures have ruined her business. Connie now has no idea what the future holds for her, and, despite industry lobbying, the Morrison government's federal budget provides no business security for Connie or the 40,000 travel industry employees across Australia. The loss carry-back provisions announced in the budget are of no benefit to Connie or indeed any of the other 1,300 sole traders who operate a travel business or who operate one under a family or unit trust or a partnership. My understanding is that they will not benefit from the loss carry-back provisions at all. So what does the future hold for those like Connie? At 63, she's very unlikely to easily find another job, particularly when her expertise and experience is in one industry sector alone, and one that is not likely to rebound very quickly in any event. She had a business that was worth money. It is now worth absolutely nothing. She has nothing to onsell that she previously had that might have enabled her to set herself up for her retirement years.

The Morrison government's budget has not only failed Connie; it has failed so many others in a similar situation to hers, and it has left them behind. Members opposite quite rightly come in and talk about the success stories of the Morrison government, but I never hear them talking about those who have been left behind, who I'm sure have contacted their offices, just as they contact the offices of opposition members of parliament.

For my home state of South Australia, the Morrison government's budget is indeed a disappointment. Despite the efforts of South Australian coalition members to try and put a positive spin on the budget, it does very little indeed for South Australia. The demise of manufacturing over the past five years has hit South Australia particularly hard. South Australia was a state that in the late sixties and early seventies relied on manufacturing to the point that around 30 per cent of the economy depended on manufacturing, as did about 30 per cent of employment. Those figures have dropped, just as the national figures have, to around five or six per cent today.

The provocation of GMH by this government in this parliament in December 2013, prompting GMH to shut down its Elizabeth car making plant, was a massive blow to South Australia. Business confidence in that state has fallen away ever since that day, and you can track it. It's pretty clear. Population growth has now stagnated in the state. The housing sector, as a result, has also stagnated. In fact, last year I think we had 11 or 12 or maybe even 13 housing construction companies go into liquidation. In the last couple of years we've had iconic brands like Coca-Cola shut down their manufacturing plant in Adelaide. And only last week West End brewery announced that in a couple of years it would no longer continue to manufacture in South Australia. Again, it's not just the direct numbers of employees that these brands have; it's also the flow-on they have when they close down, and there's a psychological impact on the state when iconic national brands close their doors. Then, today, I read that BHP's $3.7 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam mine has also been abandoned. That was lauded as the possible savour of South Australia in the years ahead, and $3.7 billion of expansion would have been a terrific injection into the state. That has now been abandoned.

It goes further than that. What is the Morrison government's response to what is happening in South Australia? When we look at infrastructure funding, despite the spin about the figures, the reality is that by 2023 South Australia will get less than four per cent of national infrastructure funding, which is far less than it would be entitled to based on population or road length in the state. When we look at the full-cycle docking of submarines, there's been no decision about where that's going to take place. There's no certainty for the people down at Osborne as to whether they'll have jobs in the future or not. And, when we look at the new submarines that were supposed to be built in South Australia, with 90 plus per cent of jobs created being in South Australia according to the former member for Sturt in this place, we now know there is no commitment to a minimum Australian local content of jobs on those submarine builds. So we have a massive $90 billion, or thereabouts, expenditure for a product about which we have no idea how many jobs it will create in Australia, let alone in South Australia, which is very much dependent on all of that.

The Morrison government has failed South Australia time and time again, and it has done so again in this budget. Compare and contrast that with the response from Labor leader Anthony Albanese in terms of the budget response. The budget response from Anthony Albanese was not a comprehensive list of issues that will be taken to the next election, as I'm sure members opposite would appreciate, but it certainly addressed some of the key issues the Australian people have been calling out for: a major reform of childcare, the rebuilding of the national energy grid, the revival of Australian manufacturing—a real policy that also invests in Australian skills—an Australian centre for disease control and a social housing strategy. Each one of those isn't simply just throwing a few dollars at some industry sector, trying to keep people happy for a few moments; they're about setting a new direction for the country. They're about building a new economy and providing certainty for the long-term future of this country. That is the kind of response we should have but didn't get from the Morrison government.

COVID-19 was the perfect opportunity, given the way the whole world has changed, to reset the direction of this country. It was an opportunity for the government, given that it literally had a free hand to spend whatever money it wanted—and it has spent that money but not very wisely—to set some new policies and new directions and, indeed, prepare Australia for the years to come in a way that provided confidence to the people of this country and kept Australia competitive with the rest of the world. It was an opportunity to invest in nation-building initiatives and a vision and a strategy for Australia's future. But this government failed to do that. Labor's response, I believe, has at least set us in the right direction.

See this speech in context