Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

They really should stay and listen to this, Mr Deputy Speaker. They might learn something! He's certainly the first Treasurer since the Second World War who has been given an opportunity to rack up eye-watering debt and deficit with very little criticism from the opposition parties, the business community or, indeed, the community more generally.

I also said at the National Press Club, 'Let's hope that the debt he has raised on behalf of the Australian community is money well spent in our economy.' Now, I also said on that occasion that it will be some time before we know the answer to that question, before we know whether the way the money was spent maximises economic stimulus, maximises job retention and creation, and maximises our opportunity to give a helping help to those who are most adversely affected. I fear today that we might not have to wait as long as I thought we might. I think we can all already see signs of cracks appearing in the budget strategy. Economic commentators everywhere are talking about the economic inefficiency of the spend. For example, I think it was Ross Gittins who said investment in social housing would have given more stimulus, alongside a long-lasting impact on our infrastructure and, indeed, on some of our poorer communities.

We can see that the precipitous withdrawal of JobKeeper was probably unwise. I suspect the government has left the opportunity open to address that. Let's hope it does, because it's very clear that the economy hasn't yet sunk to its lowest depths, that things will get worse, and people will need ongoing assistance. I'm very disappointed in the decision to allow only those 35 years of age and under to benefit from the so-called JobMaker scheme. It makes no sense to me. We know, because commentators have reacted and responded to this constraint by analysing who have been most hurt, that the reality is that those who have been most hurt are our older Australians, many of whom are still of working age. It makes no sense to target only those under 35 years of age. This is an issue that the government really needs to revisit and consider.

Economic commentators and social commentators also expressed concern that the government hasn't adequately addressed the issues in aged care in all of our communities. I doubt there's a member of this place that doesn't have issues in aged care in the community. We have wonderful aged-care providers. Quality aged-care providers still dominate the sector. Unfortunately, there are a few for-profit providers who haven't lived up to the expectations. But none of them can perform without the resourcing they need from government.

I'm old enough to hark back to the good old days when the state governments ran nursing homes full of nurses and other health professionals, cleaning staff and all the people you need to make a nursing home a hygienic place, a professionally-run place and a place which can serve both the medical and social needs of residents. It's a big black mark on our society that we have allowed those standards to decline over time in the name of fiscal constraint. Moreover, it's a great shame that we didn't take this opportunity, in this pandemic and this economic crisis, to address that. I say to the Prime Minister and the Treasurer: it is not too late.

This was my 25th budget—though, I'm reluctant to say that because it might suggest that I'm a little bit older than I look. Of course, every budget is different. Every budget night I have sat through has been an interesting budget night but there's basically a similar process and there are similar outcomes in terms of their political environment. I was here for all of the John Howard era. Of course, John Howard benefited from the hard-won reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments and, save for a shaky period during the early part of their term, which was the Asian financial crisis, John Howard and Peter Costello had a pretty easy ride. The global economy was strong. They had rivers of income into the government coffers. They were able to deliver tax cuts, for example, as a consequence and bank some money away for rainy days. So they had it pretty easy. The next budget delivered outside the bounds of normality, as I might describe it, was the 2009 budget, where a Labor government, of course, was dealing with all the consequences of the global financial crisis.

In my view, budgets—now more than ever—are not much of a statement of a government policy. They are certainly a statement of government intention in terms of the revenue it intends to raise and the money it intends to spend. The budget remain a very, very important document and budget night remains an important occasion. Both of those things send important signals to the market and provide a level of transparency to the market and our communities collectively.

As hard as Prime Ministers and Treasurers and indeed the media try, budget nights aren't the time when the government's political narrative for the year and the years ahead are set. Long gone are the days when the 'Cigs are up! Beer's up!' headline was raised the day after the budget, in the days before the indexation of excise. All the big issues now tend to happen outside the budget cycle. Of course, the budget itself is pre-empted by enormous leaks ahead of the big occasion, and both the markets and the community know well in advance where the government is heading. I'd like to talk about that political narrative and the way in which it happens outside of the budget process—although arguably the 2014 budget was an exception to the rule because the aggressive fiscal brutality that marked it had a long-lasting impact, and it was, in my view, probably the beginning of the end of the Abbott government.

The big three enduring divisive political disrupters in my more than 24 years were, in my view, the arrival of asylum seekers by boat, the former Labor government's climate change policies, and the Howard government's Work Choices legislation. Each of those had immediate but also enduring impacts. Of course, there were plenty of other big events and policies along the way, but none had the enduring and divisive impacts of the three I've identified. Work Choices might be the less obvious of the three in terms of its enduring effect, but John Howard's overreach has been a lasting break on the anti-worker obsessions of the Liberal and National parties.

The arrival of the MV Tampa in August 2001 was an invitation to the Howard government to harness and unleash a latent xenophobia in our communities and in some pockets of our nation a level of racism that left me shocked and disillusioned. I feel no ill will towards any citizen who left me feeling disappointed at that time or, indeed, in later times, but I do remain angry that an Australian government was prepared and willing, in the earliest days of the 21st century, when we should have been more enlightened, to deploy the politics of fear and to work so hard to divide our communities for its own political gain.

Tampa is not so enduring in and of itself, but the demons that the government's response unleashed are, and they impact on the dynamic of this place still—every day. It gave a voice to a darker side of our society, and it has worked more than once in political terms for the Liberal and National parties. The dog whistle is now embedded in the modus operandi of the coalition parties, and it manifests itself in range of political and policy strategies to this day. The contemporary example, of course, is the Morrison government's approach to our relationship with China, our largest and most important trading partner, where it is putting its quest for domestic and political advantage ahead of the national interest.

Of the three big disruptors, climate change trumps them all. History will treat badly all those who have sought political advantage by exploiting the opportunity created by those who have taken seriously our responsibility to act on climate change. By the way, I count John Howard amongst the political victims. His belated 2007 commitment to an emissions trading scheme was seen for what it was: a belated, last-ditch effort to right the wrong. But the electorate saw through it. Tony Abbott made a carbon tax scare campaign the centrepiece of his 2013 election strategy—successfully so, sadly. He was so successful that he was able to claim a mandate to repeal the Gillard government's Clean Energy Act 2011. That was one of the most irresponsible actions I've seen in this parliament. I think Tony Abbott could have been much better than that. If the Gillard government's architecture had still been in place, the carbon price would be very low and our economy would be operating at the same strength it would have been without it. Our jobs situation would be the same, but our carbon emissions would be lower. As to the GST, no-one would even know it was there.

John Howard introduced the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target probably more than two decades ago. It was, if you like, our first carbon tax—modest, but it was our first constraint on carbon in the market. Two decades on, we are still without a market mechanism designed to put downward pressure on greenhouse gas emissions. We should reflect on that: two decades on from when John Howard first put a market based mechanism in place, we are still without one, and our carbon growth is basically flatlining. In other words, it's going nowhere near meeting the obligations we gave ourselves when Malcolm Turnbull signed the Paris Agreement.

The current Prime Minister thinks he can fulfil our commitments to Paris without a market based mechanism. He certainly hasn't always thought that, because the government certainly had a few goes—three goes, in fact. There was the Clean Energy Target and so on in recent years, but he now says he can make it. I hope he can. Like the budget, it won't be the most economically efficient way of getting there, but, if he can get there, that would be a good thing. My problem is he's not on par to getting there. In this place, we need to put the politics of carbon and climate change behind us and work together to do our bit and meet our responsibilities with the commitments we made at Paris. We need to do our bit as a small player and make our contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Of course, we need to do it in a responsible and sensible way, but we'll only do it successfully if we put the politics behind us, work together to deliver what both the local community and the international community expects of us.

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