Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Member for Bennelong, I note your sincere commitment to better working relationships between members of parliament. I heard your 90-second speech today. I'm sorry I couldn't make your lunch. It is a good thing, and I know that you are genuinely committed to people treating each other with respect.

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (2020 Measures No. 4) Bill 2020. I will primarily speak to the second reading amendment. I'm very concerned about our economic recovery from COVID. I'm concerned about jobs for Australians, including people in my electorate of Dunkley. I am concerned about the effect of the collapse in investment in renewable energy in this country on the ongoing growth of the economy and the protection of the environment.

We know that renewable energy investment has fallen by 80 per cent since 2017. In August last year, the Clean Energy Council told us that $600 million was invested in large-scale renewable energy projects in the second quarter of that year, which was a drop of almost 50 per cent from the previous quarter. The Reserve Bank has put out analysis showing a peak of 23 per cent for the renewable energy investment target. It would appear that the government has been resting on its laurels, because that has been declining ever since. According to the CEC, there hadn't been a large-scale energy storage project commissioned for 12 months as at August last year. Members in the House might recall that Tilt Renewables told its shareholders in August last year that urgent reform was needed to manage the transition to clean energy—urgent reform. And not only have we not seen urgent reform; we haven't seen any reform. That is a disservice to the economy, to jobs and to the environment.

It's also the case that investment in the electricity transmission network has not kept pace with the deployment of wind and solar farms. Quoted in a Guardian Australia article in August last year, CEC chief executive Kane Thornton said: 'Investors don't have a clear view on what the federal government's long-term strategy and policies are—that's challenging.' I think Mr Thornton was pretty polite with that quote—'that's challenging'. It's devastating. 'Investors don't have a clear view on what the federal government's long-term strategy and policies are'—and we're talking about investment in renewable energy, we're talking about reducing the cost of electricity and we're talking about growing jobs and the economy.

If I've heard the Treasurer of Australia say 'growing jobs and growing the economy' once, I'm pretty sure I have heard him say it a hundred million times. It is supposed to be the priority of this government. It's what they talk about over and over and over again. But yet there is a problem in the ranks of the Liberal and National Parties that means that they appear to be incapable of accepting that growth in jobs and the economy will come from investment in the renewable energy sector and investment and upgrading of the transmission network to allow that to occur. What is the government's energy policy really? Is it coal? Is it nuclear? Is it gas? It's not the future, that's the one thing that's clear.

Before someone from the opposite parties yells at me about reliable energy, because of course reliable energy is important, I want to remind the House that AEMO's plan for what an optimal national energy market would look like to 2040 found that renewable energy could at times provide nearly 90 per cent of electricity by 2035 and that there would need to be major investment in new transmission lines.

In June of last year WWF-Australia did a review that suggested that economic stimulus programs that focused on clean energy would create three times as many jobs as new fossil fuel projects. So put aside what likes to be a screaming debate about fossil fuel projects and just focus on the fact that if we invest in renewable projects there will be three times as many jobs. Why wouldn't you do that? Even if you wanted to look at other sorts of projects, why wouldn't you also invest in renewable energy projects? Three times as many jobs, it's better for the environment and it helps the economy grow.

University of Sydney analysis says that up to 11,000 jobs could disappear from our renewable energy industry under this government's policies. It was pretty generous to say that they have policies. Under this government's policies up to 11,000 jobs could disappear from our renewable energy industry. That's 11,000 people. So when we hear the Treasurer and the government are talking about the wonderful investment that they've made to set Australia up for the recovery, we should be also remembering the absolute lack of investment in the future of energy, the renewable energy market, in this country and the disservice that it is doing to all of those students around the country who are going to be looking for jobs in the next 12 months, 24 months, five to 10 years. They've have been encouraged to go and study STEM. They are involved, active and understand the science about climate change. They want to not just have a job and an economy but also have a clean, healthy and sustainable planet to live in. If this government isn't going to do it for our generation then they really, really need to do it for the generations that are coming after us.

This issues in this bill before the House were the subject of a Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into franchising in Australia two years ago, which looked at some of the issues that this bill covers. As colleagues of mine already said, that inquiry heard from franchisees across Australia who had suffered from misconduct at the hands of parent companies. We know that franchising companies like 7-Eleven have at times profited from the misery of their franchisees and also from the underpayment and exploitation of employees. People that own and run franchises often work for incomes that are below minimum wage as they're trying to get their small business, their franchise, working, but profits flow up to parent companies. We know, from the work that was done in that inquiry, that stories of franchisees, like the retail food group that owns Brumby's, Gloria Jean's and Donut King, suffered unfair contract terms that gave enormous power to parent companies and shifted huge liabilities to franchisees. That joint committee parliamentary report made a range of recommendations, including to significantly increase penalties under the franchising code. It was to increase penalties so that they matched the significant penalties available for other corporate misconduct.

When this bill was introduced to parliament last year, it barely shifted the dial in terms of penalties. It barely shifted the dial. Labor was going to move amendments to match the bipartisan recommendations of the parliamentary joint committee, but now the government has decided that it accepts the findings of that inquiry. It distributed late amendments that increase the penalties available to the regulator. That's a good thing; it's always a good thing to accept your mistakes and fix them. I'm not sure if there's been an explanation as to why there's been that late acceptance that the bill was inadequate. Hopefully there are members on the other side that pushed the case that it was inadequate. Perhaps they were going to be brave enough to vote with Labor's amendments—who knows?—but I guess it is a case of better late than never.

What isn't better late than never, or won't be after Saturday, will be any late realisation from this government that it is taking away JobKeeper payments before the job is done. There have been signs of recovery in the economy, which is terrific, but it's not an even recovery across geographic locations, across industries or across businesses. Everyone in this place should know that, just from talking to the businesses and the workers in their electorate. I've got businesses in my electorate of Dunkley who are coming to me saying that they just don't know how they're going to survive after JobKeeper goes. This government promised in an announcement to the country that JobKeeper would go when the vaccine was rolled out. We don't have any hope of meeting four million vaccinations by the end of March, and there's a host of reasons for that. It's not going to happen, and yet JobKeeper is going to go.

There's almost 10,000 people—not numbers, people—in my electorate who are still on JobKeeper. About 3,200 businesses in my electorate still rely on JobKeeper. What's going to happen to them after Saturday? What's going to happen to the people that are going to be made redundant, much to the heartache of their bosses, particularly in small businesses where their staff are like their family. What's going to happen to those people who are going to be made redundant? Are they going to go not onto JobSeeker but on to Newstart, which is still not enough money to live on, let alone to support a family on or to go out and find a job on. It's not surprising that travel agents in my electorate contact me every day saying that yet another day has gone by and they don't know if they're getting any assistance and they can't survive. It was right and necessary to close the national borders to protect this country from the public health crisis of COVID.

But it's also right and proper to support the people whose life work has been decimated because those borders are closed—and they are still crying out for help every day—let alone the businesses that are contacting me to say that because of anomalies in the way JobKeeper was rolled out they fell through the cracks. They have received correspondence from government members saying, 'Yes, we rolled it out quickly, and, because of the way it was designed, not everyone's been supported.' Businesses are showing me those letters and saying, 'We have been struggling, and we are still struggling, and we are not getting the help we need.' The government can't just say, 'Job done; let's walk away,' because there is so much more work to be done for the small businesses that they purport to represent and for the people who work in them.

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