Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

This is our opportunity on this side here to speak about the appropriation bills and, of course, because of the long custom and tradition, we won't be holding up the appropriation bills but it does give colleagues the opportunity to address some of the real issues in the budget that was handed down from that dispatch box two weeks ago today. Deputy Speaker Gillespie, as you know, this is an eight-year-old government. It has handed down now eight budgets. By the time of the next election, it will be asking for 12 years, which is longer than Prime Minister Howard had in office.

One of the remarkable features of the budget that was handed down two weeks ago—the government's eighth budget—was that its primary purpose seemed to be to distract the Australian people from the failures of the first seven budgets. We saw, when it came to investment in mental health or investment in aged care or some of the other areas that have been crying out for this government to do something about for much of the last eight long years, the government finally came to the table with some investment in some of these areas.

If this government genuinely cared about some of the appropriations in this bill, if the government genuinely cared about aged care or child care or some of these other investments, they would have done something about them in the last eight years. In many instances—take skills and training, for example—the government has gone out of its way to make things worse. Even after some of these investments in skills and training, Australia still has 150,000 fewer apprentices than when the government came to office. If you think about aged care, some of the investment in aged care comes after the current Prime Minister, when he was Treasurer, putting out press releases claiming almost $2 billion in savings from the aged-care system, which has been part of the problem that the government now says they are uniquely placed to address.

So many of these problems that the government now says, for political reasons, they want to do something about are problems of their own making, messes of their own making and they now want the Australian people to think, having been the architect of eight years of under-investment in some of these key areas, that all of a sudden the same government, the same characters, can clean up that mess. I think that is an unreasonable request from the government.

The tragedy of this budget that was handed down two weeks ago is that after the Australian people rose to the occasion during COVID-19 this government fell back into its old habits. We see that in the way that taxpayer money is being used not to try and get good economic outcomes or good outcomes for real people and real communities like those that we represent in this place but instead to try and plug the government's political gaps. It is going back into the old habits of slush funds, waste, rorts and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. There were something like 21 different slush funds in the budget two Tuesdays ago—$9½ billion in decisions taken but not announced—to dole out on the eve of an election campaign. We know how this government goes about the wasting and the rorting of taxpayer money, because we've seen what's happened with sports rorts, with dodgy land deals, with community safety rorts and with a billion dollars spent on government advertising and all that money spent on marketing. This is how the government goes about managing and mismanaging taxpayers' money.

This was a budget of marketing and mismanagement and missed opportunities. It was a budget that delivered generational debt without a generational dividend. What it failed to recognise is that the recovery we are in now from the deepest recession in almost 100 years, while welcome, is a tribute not to the government but to the Australian people, who did the right thing by each other to limit the spread of this virus. So the recovery is underway, and that's a good thing, but it's patchy. It's patchy in predictable ways. In the labour market we saw last Thursday the jobs figures for April. There were 30,600 jobs lost in the month of April, the first full month after those opposite cut JobKeeper. There were 30,600 fewer jobs in April than in March. That shows just how patchy this recovery is. Almost two million people still can't find a job or enough hours to support their loved ones. So the recovery is patchy, but it's also hostage to the Prime Minister's incompetence when it comes to vaccinations and to quarantine. It says everything about this Prime Minister's unwillingness to take responsibility for things that are part of his job description—quarantine and vaccination rollout—in the budget. There was no new money for new facilities and nothing to fix the mess that the Prime Minister has made of the vaccination program. He flew into Queensland, into my home state, last week, supposedly to sell the budget. He said Toowoomba was a desert, which was news to farmers on some of the best agricultural land on the planet. He said that Toowoomba didn't have a health system or a hospital. He said that they didn't have a functioning airport. Toowoomba's got a functioning airport and a great hospital, and it sits amongst some of the best prime agricultural land not just in Australia but, I'm assuming, around the world. I think that general area speaks volumes. He's in such a rush to wash his hands of quarantine and also of vaccinations that he came in and said that about the proposal that has been made about the Toowoomba facility.

As I said earlier, this budget was designed to deal with political objectives and not economic objectives, with political problems, not economic challenges that have grown over the last eight years of economic mismanagement. If you don't want to take the word of this side of House about those failures, just look at the government's own numbers in their own budget. The forecasts in their own budget tell a stunning story—a stunning admission of failure—that, even after racking up a trillion dollars in debt and even after a hundred billion dollars in new spending two Tuesdays ago, the government's own budget still says growth will go back to below trend, business investment will go back to being weak and participation in the workforce will fall further, even after the implementation of the government's childcare package. It is a pretty damning indictment of a budget like this that, with money spraying around in all directions and all kinds of marketing and spin and all the rest of it, if you look at the numbers in the government's own budget, they say growth will go back to less than we need, participation will fall and business investment will be weak. All of these problems that we had in the economy even before COVID-19 are to return, despite all of this money that is spraying around.

I think where this is most damning and most stark is when it comes to wages. It beggars belief that the government can spend $100 billion and rack up $1 trillion in debt and, at the end of that, workers will have gone backwards, but that's what the government's own budget says will happen—a cut in real wages in the government's own budget. This is the thanks that the Australian people get for everything they've done to keep the wheels of the economy turning during this pandemic, to do the right thing by each other, to look out for each other and to look after each other. The government says that the thanks they get for that is a cut in their real wages, after eight years of penalty rate cuts and the government trying to make work less secure—not as an accidental outcome but as a deliberate design feature, as the former finance minister said of the government's economic policy agenda. The wages figures in here are a real reminder that, when the government say that their economic policy is succeeding, what they really mean is that deliberate design feature to keep wages screwed down so that ordinary working people don't get a slice of the action in this recovery. That's what they mean when they say that their plan is working.

Beyond wages, beyond the political fixes, beyond the waste and mismanagement, beyond the trillion dollars in debt, I think the other thing that's really noticeable about this budget is that there is a deficit of vision, a failure to understand the opportunity before this country, a failure to understand that the foundation that the Australian people have built together—to make sure that we can come out of this pandemic, that the economy can begin to recover and the labour market can begin to recover—requires the government to understand the gravity and the opportunity of this moment. They have failed to do that. We know that because so much of this budget is about plugging the holes over the next year or 18 months, trying to solve those political problems but failing to understand the moment, failing to understand that the country is crying out for a bit of vision, a bit of a long-term plan about how we make this economy stronger but also more inclusive and more sustainable so that ordinary working people get a slice of the action as the economy recovers, so that working people in this country aren't just talking about trying to get by, but we can help them to get ahead.

What is in this budget for the people of this country who want to get ahead? We've had two weeks now to go through it. We know about all the spending. We know about all the pork-barrelling. We know about all the political fixes. But still that question remains for the Australian people, and it's not an unreasonable question that they ask. What is this government's plan, not just to grow the economy but to grow the economy in the right way into the future as well? That deficit of vision and ambition is something that has characterised the last eight years of this government as well. The Australian people deserved much better than the budget that they got two Tuesdays ago. After all that they've been through, they deserve better than real wage cuts. They deserve better than that deficit of vision. They deserve better than all of those political fixes cobbled together. They deserve better than all that marketing, all that mismanagement and all those missed opportunities in the budget. I think one of the reasons why the Australian people have not gone out of their way to say how great this budget is, one of the reasons why we're not largely talking about it in public at the moment, is that the Australian people have become wary of a government that makes these big announcements and pats itself on the back and tells itself how good it is, but, at the end of the day, the delivery is lacking. That, I fear, is what we're going to see in the aftermath of this budget as well. I move the second reading amendment that has been circulated in my name:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House notes:

(1) the 2021 Budget includes nearly $100 billion in new spending and racks up one trillion dollars in debt, but still delivers a real wage cut for Australian workers;

(2) after eight long years of cuts to key services, increasing job insecurity, stagnant wages growth, weak business investment, weak productivity, waste and rorts, this Budget was designed to get through an election rather than outline a vision for Australia; and

(3) that the 2021 Budget is a missed opportunity to shape a better, stronger post-pandemic Australia where no one is held back and no one is left behind".

Obviously we're not going to hold up the appropriations bill, but we should see it not just in the light of just of the holes in the budget that was handed down two weeks ago but in the context of those eight years of missed opportunities, mismanagement, political fixes and all the rest of it.

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