David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

With the previous speaker, the member for Dawson, I can see Donald Trump has emerged in Australia!

I would like to start with a little history. It's 10 years to the day that there was an infamous, disgraceful rally outside this place. It was the most appalling misogyny on display and, given what's going on in this place over the last few weeks and months, it can't go unremarked. It's been 10 years to the day. You'd have thought this place would have learnt more. Here's hoping that it won't take another 10 years before the real change that's needed occurs.

I would like to start with some other history. A little more than a decade ago, the then Labor government needed to stimulate the Australian economy to keep the global recession at bay. One of the measures implemented was to provide every school in the country with a new building. As well as to provide a useful long-term asset for schools, it would keep tradies in jobs. That sounds familiar. The Building the Education Revolution program was supposed to cost $16 billion, but ended up costing $17.5 billion. 'A $1.5 billion major cost blow out' is how The Australian newspaper reported it. That blow out was big news for a long time. It was splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the nation. Columnists and talkback shock jocks said it was evidence Labor could not be trusted with money. Liberals lined up on TV shows to say the same thing.

Let's fast forward to 2020. The Liberal government needs to stimulate the Australian economy to keep a pandemic-induced recession at bay. One of the measures implemented is to provide eligible businesses with a temporary wage subsidy to keep on employees who might otherwise get sacked, causing mass unemployment. Businesses need to predict or prove a significant drop in sales to be eligible. JobKeeper cost $100 billion and it had Labor's support. In fact, it had Labor's support before it had the Prime Minister's support. To get the money out quickly, we voted for what was, admittedly, pretty rushed legislation. Speed was of the essence; the money had to get out. Critically, Labor gave the Treasurer the authority to amend the program and patch any loopholes as he saw fit without having to return to the parliament. That's important, as it soon emerged that some businesses were getting the wage subsidy despite not being in distress and, in fact, some were having their best year ever. For those companies, staff wages were being paid by taxpayers while the owners and the executives pocketed big profits, big dividends and big bonuses. It's not right. It's not how it's meant to work.

Income support in Australia has always been predicated on need. We make old aged pensioners, people with disabilities, the unemployed and young people meet stringent, unyielding criteria in order to qualify for benefits of less than $300 to $400 a week. Yet here were companies dining out on the taxpayer dollar to the tune of not millions but billions. Every cent of it was borrowed as part of the nation's ballooning debt. The Treasurer could have fixed this. He chose not to. He also chose to keep secret, from Australian taxpayers, the details of which companies received JobKeeper and how much. That's information that would have been helpful in identifying how much of JobKeeper has been misdirected.

Smarter people than me—the member for Fenner being one of them—estimates that of the $100 billion JobKeeper program, at least $10 billion and perhaps as much as $20 billion has gone to companies that did not need it. And there has hardly been a peep in the media. Remember, a $1.5 billion blowout of the BER, which provided buildings to every school in the country—which are still in daily use—was front-page news for months, while a $10 billion to $20 billion blowout of JobKeeper has gone relatively unremarked upon. That is 10 times the blowout and not even a tenth of the media coverage.

But it's not the expenditure that upsets me; it's the lost possibilities. If we take even the lower end of the scale—the $10 billion, rather than the $20 billion—what else could that amount of money have achieved if it had not gone into the pockets of those who demonstrably did not need it? That $10 billion could have built 40,000 affordable homes across the country; $10 billion could have provided one million pensioners with a $10,000 grant each, to make their kitchens and their bathrooms safer, or could have built 2,000 bridges across regional Australia. The better ways that $10 billion could have been used are countless. Instead, it's gone into the pockets of those who simply did not need it—and all with the blessing of the Treasurer and the Prime Minister. They head a government that threatens pensioners with prison for overclaiming Centrelink but they do nothing about trying to get this money back.

This scandalous waste of JobKeeper goes to the wider issue of the Liberals' startling economic incompetence. The MYEFO for 2020-21 forecasts a $197.7 billion deficit this financial year and $456 billion of cumulative deficits over the forwards. We have seen net debt triple this year, to $692 billion. In four years it will be $950 billion, and it will be well over a trillion dollars within a decade. Gross debt will be more than a trillion dollars within four years. These are huge numbers—absolutely huge. For context, the Liberals screamed blue murder about a $200 million debt under Labor's recession-busting measures, calling it a 'budget emergency' and a 'debt and deficit disaster'; they screamed economic Armageddon in the Murdoch tabloids. There was no free pass for Labor about saving the place from recession, but that's what they expect from us. The constant wall-to-wall criticism set a tone in the community that Labor could not be trusted with the economy. Funnily enough, the papers—predominantly the Murdoch papers—are silent now that debt and deficit under the Liberals is slated to be five times as high as it was under Labor. What was a 'disaster' under Labor is apparently manageable and appropriate when it's five times as high under the Liberals.

It's a disgraceful double standard. The Liberals have jealously guarded their reputation as the supposed better economic managers. It is a reputation that they never earned. It is a reputation that is completely false. It is Labor governments that have been the big economic game changers in this country, from Chifley's postwar reconstruction and Snowy Hydro to Whitlam's education revolution that paved the way for the Hawke-Keating microeconomic reforms of the 1980s—which continue to be directly responsible for 30 years of near-uninterrupted economic growth, broken only last year under a Liberal government. What has been the Liberals' big contributor to the nation's economy? They introduced the goods and services tax—a tax increase. That's their legacy. In fact, nothing tells the tale of the Liberals in government better than the fact that Holden started making cars in this country under a Labor government and were chased out of the country under a Liberal government, taking our components and manufacturing capabilities with them.

Under this Liberal government the Australian economy was struggling long before anyone had heard of coronavirus. In 2019 real wages in Australia were 0.7 per cent lower than when the Liberals came to office six years earlier; they've dropped. In 2019 Australia was in third-last place among 35 OECD countries for wages growth, well behind comparable economies like Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the US. But the Liberals are happy with this, because low wages for Australian workers are, as former finance minister Mathias Cormann admitted on TV, a deliberate feature of the Liberal's economic architecture. Lower wages means workers struggling to survive. That keeps them compliant and less likely to make demands for higher pay and better conditions. And it means businesses can spend less on wages and more on investing in their business so they can employ more workers on low wages. And, if there aren't enough workers in Australia willing to work for low wages, they'll just bring in more workers from overseas on short-term visas to do the job instead. We see the disgraceful example this week of Liberal MPs pushing to have short-term visa applicants displace Australians overseas trying to get home. That's what they're doing. They'd rather see workers coming from overseas on short-term visas than see Australians come home on the limited places that are available on aeroplanes. That's the Liberal vision for Australia: low wages.

As for productivity, that all-important indicator of the nation's economic strength, it's been steadily falling under the Liberals not just in real terms but also in comparison to other nations. In 2013 Australian workers' productivity was growing at 1.7 per cent per year, ranking us the 10th highest amongst OECD nations. After five years of a Liberal government, Australia in 2018 ranked 5th last in the OECD, with productivity going backwards in real terms by 0.3 per cent. On every measure that matters to Australian workers and their families—wages, wages growth, productivity, debt and deficit—Australia is weaker under the Liberals and stronger under Labor.

'Look at the falling unemployment,' they will cry over there. On this side of the House we will always welcome news that more people are joining the workforce, especially if they're in well-paid full-time jobs. But it's a little early to be popping the champagne and breaking out the cigars. The grim fact is that under this Liberal government two million Australians remain unemployed or underemployed, and their prospects are bleak. For those who do get a job, this government wants them to earn less and have fewer protections at work. For those who do not get a job, this government wants to strip back payments and support. Just this week, the government gutted its own industrial relations bill, taking out measures the government had put in to protect workers from wage theft. The government had acknowledged that wage theft was a problem by including those measures in the bill but then it decided it would rather allow employers to keep stealing workers' wages than take steps to crack down. It's unfathomable. You know there's a problem with wage theft. You choose to do nothing about it. Under the Liberals, we've had penalty rates cut, we've had flat wages, we've had no increase to superannuation after eight years and now we have the Liberals doing nothing about stopping dodgy employers from stealing their own workers' pay.

In the short time remaining, I'd like to speak briefly about housing. Australia is the third most unaffordable housing market within the OECD. For a generation of young Australians—and I see there are some young people up in the gallery—the great Australian dream is becoming the great Australian fantasy. House prices have risen faster, much faster than Australians' incomes. The Real Estate Institute of Tasmania is warning that affordability for many to own their own home is fast becoming a distant pipedream. Housing stress in Tasmania has reached an all-time high. Across the market, demand is outstripping supply. Properties are selling in an average of nine days. Buyers are purchasing sight unseen, and multiple buyers are throwing offers at the same house. Great news for sellers but terrible for buyers. Recent data shows that housing affordability in Tasmania declined in the December quarter, where the amount of income required to meet repayments increased by 2.2 percentage points, up to 31.1 per cent, in one quarter.

'

Sure, if your parents own property they can take out an equity loan and provide you with a deposit. But not every kid's parent has property. Not every kid's parent has the sort of equity required these days for a deposit, which can be $60,000 or more—even for a modest two-bedroom home. Since when did Australia become a country where kids had to rely on their parents' wealth to get ahead? It's getting harder and more expensive to buy a home unless you already have one, and it's also getting harder and more expensive to rent. The more expensive it is to rent, the harder it is to save for a deposit. Anyone living in a rental property today is going to find it next to impossible to buy tomorrow. On every indication this government is failing this country and failing the young people of this country, who are our future.

See this speech in context