Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm an economist by training and, from experience, I know all too well that, in this day and age, we're subjected to a blizzard of economic announcements. Every day there's some new statistic that we are bombarded with. But I also know all too well that it's so important to look behind all of these figures at what really matters. This government also knows all too well about the cacophony of economic announcements that are being put out constantly and it has have become the masters at cherry-picking all of these many statistics. Whether it's real GDP, nominal GDP, the participation rate or whatever it might be, this government has become masterful at cherry-picking and spinning all these numbers. What the government intentionally doesn't do is dig beneath the surface and ask which of these numbers really matter for people and which of these numbers really reflect what's going on in households in the communities that we represent.

When you look beneath the many statistics out there and ask what's going on at the household you see that, for many years, our economy has been going backwards. Let's look at a basic measure of what's going on at the household level—real household disposable income. This fell by one per cent in the quarter leading up to March 2020. That's pre-COVID. So, before COVID hit, before we had to deal with any of that, our economy was going backwards according to a measure that really matters for households: how much disposable income they have got to spend on the things that matter to them. Indeed, even more scary than that, even more appalling than that, is the fact that with this measure real household disposable income was 0.5 per cent lower in that quarter than it was in December 2011. That's almost a decade. This government, now well into its third term, over its many years of governing this country, has seen real household disposable income—not stalling—going backwards. This is the worst performance we have seen on this very important measure since the Great Depression. We are not talking about COVID. We're talking about year after year after year of going backwards on this measure. We're talking about year after year after year going backwards on real wages. The worst performance on real wages we've seen under this government since records were kept.

Let's not get caught up in all of the many, many statistics that this government can cite. Let's look at what's going on for real individuals and their wages. Let's look at what's going on for households, in terms of their disposable income. This government has failed. It's only population growth that's keeping many of our numbers at any respectable level. But, of course, population growth doesn't help a household. The fact that Australia is experiencing far faster population growth than other major OECD countries doesn't put food on the table. It doesn't lead to more dollars in your pocket. In fact, in per capita terms under this government's watch we had a major per capita recession in 2017-18. Again, well before COVID. And, of course, we've had a major one since COVID.

Once population growth is stripped away this government's performance is appalling. According to the International Monetary Fund between 2013 and 2019 Australia's aggregate GDP grew by 15.7 per cent, that ranked third among OECD countries. But once you strip away population growth our ranking falls considerably. Once you take population growth out we grew, in per person terms, by just a little over five per cent. We were third last amongst major OECD countries. That's what people feel in their pockets. That's what people feel in terms of their living standards. We were barely better than Italy. The country of my birth I might say, but not a country whose recent governments inspire great confidence in terms of economic management. When you look at it in per capita terms, which matters to real people and tells you about what's happening in their lives, during the course of this government's administration we rank barely better than Italy.

How do we fix this? Well, everybody agrees you only turn this around, you only see sustainable growth in wages and in household disposable income, if you fix productivity growth. Productivity growth under this government is low and it's falling. They haven't engaged in microeconomic reform. They haven't engaged in serious investment in infrastructure. They haven't improved business confidence to the point where they're undertaking R&D and investment. What we see is this government will spin numbers. They'll tell us all sorts of things about real GDP, nominal GDP, aggregate numbers of this and that but when it comes to what households are feeling, when it comes to measures that really matter—real wages and the real disposable income that households experience—things have been going backwards for a decade under this government and that's not good enough.

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