Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

When the pandemic hit not just Australia but the globe 12 months ago, we were going into uncharted waters. A lot has happened over the last 12 months with the stimulus spending the government's done. It is quite interesting how things have evolved and how things have been different in different countries and certainly different regions of the country. I am pleasantly surprised that one of the major issues facing my community and many communities in regions around the country is we don't have enough workers. I see the member for Mallee and I know this is an issue for her as well. There are many small businesses in my community—hospitality, retail, tradies, the ag sector—that just can't get enough workers into our region. That is a pleasant surprise. As I said, at the start of the pandemic, we didn't know how this would roll out.

I speak to a lot of my regional colleagues. I can't talk as confidently about cities, but the biggest issue we have at the moment in a lot of regions is our workforce and the fact that we need more workers. Part of it has been that there's been an unprecedented flood—I don't think it is just in Australia but around the world—of people leaving cities and going to regional areas. We desperately need more workers across all sectors because more people have moved there and an increased demand has been seen in housing prices and rentals. People have been flowing to regional areas and there has been unprecedented demand. Deloitte said three or four weeks ago that, both on the health front and the economic front, there is no better place to be in the world right now than Australia. It is because we have done well on the health front, so the pandemic has affected us less than other countries around the world. The shutdowns and what have you have been less in Australia than in other countries. That has flowed through and meant that the economic front and jobs front have been more secure here in Australia than elsewhere.

On the economic front, the government have done an unprecedented stimulus spend. We did that unashamedly. Around the whole country for that first five or six weeks, around the month of April, there were many businesses forced to shut down. People could not go to work, through no fault of their own. That was when we did a lot of stimulus spending—the JobKeeper plan—and a lot of other things. On every statistic since then—we had a lot of forecasts from the Treasury and RBA—we should be celebrating because of the Australian public adhering to social distancing and hand hygiene and everything else we asked. Because the Australian public has done so well, every economic forecast or health forecast that we had back then we have bettered. The unemployment rate never rose to the levels that were forecast. The growth in employment, the growth in consumer confidence and the growth in everything that you want have actually been better than we've forecast, and that is all down to the wonderful effort of the Australian public. But it hasn't happened by accident. This has not happened by mistake. It has happened because of the parameters that we have set as a government. I know there were statistics spoken about back in the budget. You'll never hear a lot of this from the other side, but eight out of 10 jobs are in the private sector, so everything we had in the budget was to help them. Those opposite often aren't happy with tax cuts. A tax cut is a wage increase. A tax cut is more money in your pocket. A tax cut is the same as a wage increase. We have cut taxes to millions of Australians, and you know what? That's a wage increase. Tax cuts are a wage increase.

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