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

I rise today to speak in relation to the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022 and related bills and to provide my commentary in relation to the 2021-22 budget. We find ourselves in a situation where we have overcome some aspects of the worst of this terrible pandemic. We were in a situation last year where the pandemic was rife in parts of the country and where the economy was devastated in a way that it hadn't been since the Great Depression. Indeed, on some metrics, the economy was affected in ways even more severe than during the Great Depression.

What everybody agreed with last year is that we needed a bridge between that deep trough through to a post-pandemic world and that we needed to help individuals and businesses get through that period. So we, in a very constructive way, suggested JobKeeper, we suggested the JobSeeker supplement, and we implored financial institutions to provide individuals and small businesses with flexibility. And what we saw was that JobKeeper—which, as I mentioned, we suggested—and the JobSeeker supplement did help individuals get through the worst of that period. What we needed in this budget was for the recovery that followed that to be protected and preserved. The two KPIs that we needed the federal government to achieve out of this budget—this budget that was supposed to protect the recovery—were that we protect our borders and reduce the risks to our health and to our economy by accelerating the vaccine rollout. All of our public health experts and all of our economists say that we can, for a period of time, shut our borders and we can, for a period of time, provide a bridge, if you will, but we have to have a plan to get to a post-COVID world. The post-COVID world is one where we are vaccinated. The post-COVID world is one where we have effective border controls—not one where we have closed borders. What this government has failed to do in this budget is to provide any kind of vision or effective program for providing us as a nation, as a society and as an economy with a way in which we can move to a post-COVID world.

I want to talk about quarantine. Quarantine is one of the key responsibilities of the federal government in relation to protecting our people and protecting our economy. Let's go back to the Halton review. Recommendation 4 said that the federal government should consider options for new models of quarantine, with consideration by national cabinet. The Prime Minister has talked at great length about how effective national cabinet is, but, as the entity within national cabinet responsible for our international borders, where have the ideas been from the federal government for new models of quarantine? Recommendation 6 was that the Australian government should consider the establishment a national facility. What we see in this budget, where hundreds of billions of dollars are sprayed across every area of government activity, where a trillion dollars in debt is built up, is $500 million dedicated to an already announced expansion of Howard Springs. But, of course, what we don't see is anything actually delivered. There is an abject failure in this budget when it comes to quarantine. This is a government which spends tens and hundreds of billions of dollars on everything you can imagine, but on one of the absolute core KPIs of a federal government, it really gives us no confidence they've advanced at all. No increase in funding. No shovels in the ground. It's an abject failure. What we see today in Victoria are the risks that can arise as a result of that.

What about vaccination, the other of these two core KPIs of the national government? We rank somewhere around 110th in the world in vaccination rates. It is absolutely appalling that we rank at that level given the state of our public health system. We should be near the top. We have the funds and we have the experts, but it's now becoming clear that we didn't get timely deals with enough producers of vaccines, we didn't lay the groundwork and we didn't manage our risks. So what's happened is that perceived weaknesses in a particular vaccine have now created a huge blockage in our system and have also affected people's confidence in the rollout. This is a problem that is entirely generated by the government's lack of planning and lack of foresight in relation to risks that should have been entirely on the radar.

The vaccination rollout has been an unfortunate shambles. Experts are telling us that if we are to make the schedule that is an underlying assumption of this budget, which is that we essentially have the whole population vaccinated by the end of this year, we'll need to have 200,000 people being vaccinated a day. That's from Provocate. Yet yesterday in question time we had the health minister patting himself on the back because for one day we slightly edged over 100,000. On one day we were slightly over half the rate we need to be if we're to meet the budget's underlying assumptions. How much faith can we have in the assumptions underpinning this document?

We can look at this from a health perspective, obviously, at the massive health risks that a slow vaccination rollout poses to our people, our vulnerable people. I know, from talking to so many people in my community, how many elderly people in Fraser have been affected over the past year. But the economic impact is absolutely clear. Let's look at Richard Holden, one of our most prominent macroeconomists, who says that the economic cost of a slow vaccine rollout is in the order of tens of billions of dollars a year. Make no mistake: this recovery is being imperilled by the slowness of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, we only need to go to the government's own figures. Last year's budget—the 2020-21 budget—itself said that an early vaccine rollout from 1 July 2021 is worth $34 billion to the June quarter 2022. We've put this to the government on a number of times in question time: if their own budget papers last year said that an early rollout of the vaccine would produce such massive economic benefits, what are the economic costs of a slow vaccine rollout? We get no answers to that question, unsurprisingly. But it is absolutely clear from all of the economic commentators that the economic costs are massive.

There's also, of course, the fact that we are now going to be in an unnecessarily prolonged situation where our international borders are shut. This is leading to incredible stress and heartache for so many families separated from loved ones overseas. This is leading to incredible stress for so many thousands of Australians overseas right around the world who, of course, can't come home because of the lack of a quarantine system. But it also, again, has massive long-term consequences for our economy. Our international higher education system is being damaged by long-term disconnection between our system and international student markets.

Let's look at comments by Olivier Blanchard, who used to be the chief economist at the IMF. He said that border closures stop important interconnections between economies that are often difficult to measure but are extremely important. He talked about the fact that we can zoom between economies, but tacit knowledge is critically important to business connections, particularly when setting up new business connections. They need to be established face to face. As Blanchard says:

Can one put a number on these costs? … Not easily. Restrictions lasting a year or two might not have much effect. Longer-lasting impediments could, however, have a substantial effect on global value chains, trade, and overall efficiency.

The point is that this budget is coming after a period of recovery in our labour markets and our economy, but what this budget absolutely fails to do is bed down that recovery and protect that recovery from risk in two key areas of federal government responsibility. The Australian government is responsible for the borders and quarantine, and the Australian government is responsible for the key elements of our vaccine rollout that has slowed down so disastrously.

I want to talk about some of the government's spending. The government has spent a huge amount of money. We welcome additional spending in the many areas that have received additional funds. We welcome additional money in aged care, for example. What I would say, though, is that what we don't accept is that the spending that is occurring is dealing with the damning findings of the royal commission in a way that is going to address the needs of the residents of these facilities, most importantly, and also the workforce of these facilities. I alluded earlier to so many people in my electorate having experienced so much hardship under COVID. Of course, so much of that in Fraser and so much of it around our country was in aged-care facilities. It was failures in federal regulatory arrangements that were so critical to those aged-care facilities being overwhelmed.

What do we see from the government's additional spending? What we don't see is real reform. What we do see is an announcement. We see large numbers on a piece of paper. We see large numbers in documents, underpinned by assumptions that, as I alluded to earlier, one can only question. But we don't see significant reforms in governance, we don't see significant reforms in service delivery models and, very critically, we don't see significant workplace reforms. We don't see reforms in how much these critically important workers are going to be paid, trained or supported. We don't see changes that are going to help them have more secure working arrangements, which was so critical to the stress that those aged-care facilities were placed under early last year.

The Productivity Commission has advised that we will need 700,000 additional aged-care workers by 2050. This is actually an opportunity for us to imagine an economy of the future where there are hundreds of thousands of additional jobs—high-quality jobs, well-paid jobs, secure jobs. Of course, by providing the opportunities for so many jobs, we're going to be providing important high-quality services for people who need them in the aged-care sector. We don't see any kind of vision in this budget. We see some additional home-care packages, and we welcome additional home-care packages. But, again, I go to the royal commission, which said that we basically need to keep the waiting list clear in that area. What we have from this government is an ad hoc, piecemeal approach where each year we see an amount added to the amount the government's providing, but we don't see a holistic, systemic response that deals with this issue once and for all.

Finally, I want to talk about another systemic, major failure of this budget, which is that it spends so much and builds up so much debt, with deficits as far as the eye can see, deficits of $30 billion or $40 billion a year out to 2031. So it's a debt which is continuing to grow. But what do we get for it? What do families get for it? What we had before COVID was the worst real wages growth on record. What we had before COVID was real disposable household income declining. That's a remarkable set of circumstances in a country where, for so long, each generation has expected, and rightly, that their circumstances would be better than the generation before. Under this government, that is thrown on its head. But, after that period of failure by the government, they spent $1 trillion, and what do we get in the budget papers? We get more years of zero and negative real wages growth. What that reflects is not just years of hardship for households and workers but an absolute failure of vision, a failure of reform.

This budget was about bedding down an economic recovery which is attributable to the hard work, dedication and ingenuity of the Australian people. But this government, through this budget, puts it at risk because it fails on quarantine and it fails on vaccines. Because it doesn't embrace reform, because it spends money without reform, the Australian public is also going to be subject to years more under this government of falling real wages, falling disposable income and falling living standards.

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